Read just some of the major set-piece speeches by Graham Stevenson; 1994-2007
THE LIFE & WORK OF TOM MANN
& TRADE UNION ORGANISING TODAY’
The event at which this speech was given was organised by Coventry Trades Union Council; the aim was to promotedebate about how to achieve strong trade union organisation today through a re-kindling of an appreciation of Tom Mann's life and achievements in championing the workers' cause. The event was on Saturday, May 5th 2007 and was held at Coventry Transport Museum, in Hales Street from 10.30 am. - 2.30 pm.
There were displays of Tom Mann archive material and material about local Workers' Union organiser Alice Arnold) and union information and recruitment stalls.
Other speakers included Roger McKenzie - Secretary Midlands Region TUC and Mary Simpson - Secretary T&G Unite 5/767 branch. Chair was Coventry TUC President, Paul Shevlin (T&G-Unite Vehicle Building & Automotive Group). The text of Graham Stevenson’s lecture follows:
I'm delighted to speak about Tom Mann – who I first read about when I was aged 15, now't but a lad, here in Coventry. His combination of militancy and fervour for working class unity has always been an inspiration to me - even when I find myself disagreeing with people! But there are other connections.
When I first became active in the T&G in Birmingham some 37 years ago, it was something of a joke amongst the AEU members of my family in Coventry that that I was in a `busman's union'! Actually, the reason that BSA (where I worked) had a big T&G presence was that it was partly inherited from the Workers Union -which organised both skilled and semi-skilled workers in Birmingham, arising from Tom’s own vision. (There was even an ex-NUVB presence, due to skilled wood-turning.) And the Workers' Union has also featured quite a bit in some of the historical research I’ve done over the years, which I've now managed to publish on the web. So, for all these reasons your invitation is one which I quite warmed to.
But, aside from these personal dynamics, politically, both as a life-long Communist and also as an advocate of both the organising and fighting-back approaches that have become official T&G policy in the last four years, I feel Tom Mann’s own contribution is fundamentally relevant to today’s challenges. This is especially so this very week; the historic merger of the T&G and amicus to form Unite, is in many ways the culmination of Tom’s own ideas.
The basic life story of Tom Mann can be told straightforwardly. He was the grandson of a south Warwickshire craftsman, a radical shoemaker, who lived and died in the village of Woolston. Tom himself was born in Foleshill, then on the outskirts of Coventry, on 15th April, 1856. He had only three years of education, leaving school at the tender age of nine to work at a farm and then at the Victoria Colliery. As he wrote: “The air courses were only three feet high and wide, and my work was to take away the … (dirt) … crawling on all fours, (dragging) the box along … (to) …be emptied.”
A series of underground explosions closed the colliery and, when he was 14, his family moved to Birmingham, where he began a 7-year engineering apprenticeship. The church was helpful to him in gaining something of an education at this time, which left him with a warm attitude to individual churchmen but distaste for the hypocrisy of organised religion. More significantly, in the liberal atmosphere of the time, his first political insights were gained there.
After apprenticeship, he moved to London but a major recession dominated the decade and he had to work as a porter and a warehouse clerk. It took some time to find work in engineering but when he did, it was there that he was introduced to the ideas of William Morris and he became a wide reader, essentially educating himself further in the process.
In 1881, Tom joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, the ASE, and not long after was involved in his first strike. For three years he was at Thorneycrofts in Chiswick, working on torpedoes, as a highly skilled engineer. Tom found it ironic that his skill was now employed for war, as the Empire geared up to climb out of the slump by defending its markets against competitors. His grasp of this negativity, took him to the reform-minded but influential Fabian Society, as well as the Battersea branch of the Marxian Social Democratic Federation, the SDF. Only a man like Tom Mann could straddle both stools at the same time, out his grasp of the need for unity in action as the abiding need for the progressive movement.
It was Beatrice Webb who, back-handedly, complemented Tom Mann by noting how different he was from other labour leaders: “he is possessed with the idea of a 'church' - of a body of men all professing exactly the same creed and all working in exact uniformity to exactly the same end. (But, she thought) … this stumping the country, talking abstractions and raving emotions, is not good for a man's judgment …”!
Abstractions perhaps because Tom was a man with unexpectedly wide interests; a life-long interest in astronomy developed after he was invited to cut up a meteorite in the British Museum. This `Renaissance’-like, almost poly-mathematical talent might well have been responsible for what he is best remembered for - his innovative and strategic vision; his insight into new possibilities and a consequential passionate evocation of the interests of ordinary people that socialism pointed to.
Tom had become greatly interested in the struggle for the 8-hour day and wrote a pamphlet on this in 1886. This led to the formation of the Eight Hour League, a campaign to win support in the unions for a law on the eight-hour day. That year Tom Mann read “The Manifesto of the Communist Party”, the 1848 programme written by Marx and Engels, and declared himself won to their ideas from that moment for life. “I gladly accepted the name of Communist from the date of my first reading”, he was to later write.
Typically, he threw himself into the movement “with all the energy at my command”. The following year, he moved to Newcastle to become the SDF’s northern organiser, amongst other things managing Keir Hardie’s campaign to get elected as a working man’s candidate in Mid-Lanark. Returning to London he became a journalist for the “Labour Elector”. In this role, he exposed the dreadful conditions in what was later ICI’s (then Brunner Mond’s) salt mines and works in Northwich by taking a job as labourer under a false name.
During the 1889 dock strike for a tanner an hour and a four hour maximum work spell, Tom became the manager of funding and food distribution to strikers. This initially modest role quickly saw him emerge as one of the key leaders of the strike. Ben Tillett, the dockers’ leader from before the strike, was enormously impressed with him. Tillett wrote: “He combined the qualities of whirlwind and volcano.”
Tom Mann was virtually unique among the speakers of his generation in that he would never engage in personal abuse of anyone. Even his enemies respected his integrity. There was never anyone quite like him, said the SDF leader, Hyndman: his speeches were full of “fire, vehemence, passion, humour, drama and crashing excitement … Everything gave way before the tremendous torrents of oratory … He spoke with terrific rapidity, yet every word was as clear as a bell ... (his body) suiting … the action to the word, the word to the action.” Such a man, pouring out the ideology of socialism that was at the foundation of his confidence, to strikers and their families, mostly non-union and potential scabs, amidst his white water rafting style of persistent letters and appeals to Australian wharfies for solidarity funds, was the secret weapon of this conflagration.
Avoiding starvation of the 10,000 men and their families would settle whether this would be victory or defeat. A decisive turning point was when Australia’s trades unionists sent £30,000, perhaps worth ten million today, which helped the strike reach its fifth week and demoralised the employers into a settlement. It is all too easy to overuse the word `historic’ but, without question, this magnificent victory was a decisive turning point in British capitalism’s acceptance – for the next nine decades at least - that mass trades unionism was here to stay.
Tom Mann became the first President of the Dock, Wharf and Riverside Workers Union that now emerged; it would become one of two major unions, the United Vehicle Workers being the other, that would become the core of the Transport Workers Federation, which in turn would be at the heart of the Transport and General Workers Union from 1922. In effect, this was today’s Transport Sector of Unite, the section which I am proud to lead as an official.
This struggle now stimulated a trend towards organising the unorganised that became known as `new Unionism’, from the name of Tom’s pamphlet outlining the strategy. New unions were more interested in strike benefits than funeral benefits, in good administrative systems for struggle than in tightly crafted arbitration agreements and in socialist education than in charitable `good works and deeds’. In a single year, trade union membership tripled and many new unions came into being. It is worth noting, in passing, that Tom (along with Marx’s daughter, Eleanor) was crucially helpful to Will Thorne in forming the Gasworkers and General Labourers Union, the seeds of which would grow into today’s GMB.
New Unionism immediately grasped the international dynamic of capitalism and Tom urged the formation of an International Federation of Ship, Deck and River Workers. Soon this became the International Transport Workers Federation, of which he was the first President from 1893–1896. In the international trade union world, it is universally conceded that the ITF is now the most active and militant of the Global Union Federations. Serving as I do on the ITF’s Executive Board, it was inspiring to be present at our world congress last year in South Africa, where we reviewed the continued success of a Global Organising initiative, focusing on organising the unorganised in every major country in the world. This strategy began at a congress in the ITF’s centenary year; a memorable experience for me then was to tell the congress that launched this, as a Coventry kid, that we were at long last finalising Tom’s own vision for the Federation.
Then as now, May Day was a symbol of all this and it is no accident that it was Tom who moved the motion at the London Trades Council that began the movement in Britain to celebrate May Day every year. But, ever hungry for new pastures, from 1893–1896, Tom was the elected secretary of the new Independent Labour Party, the ILP, and stood, unsuccessfully, for Parliament three times. Phillip Snowden, later to become Labour’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer, knew him in these days. Tom was, Snowden said, “the most volcanic speaker I have known … kind-hearted and generous and tolerant. I never heard him speak an unkind word of anyone”. Well, Tom did not personally attack Snowden ever, but was understandably somewhat scathing at the attacks on working people that came from the proto-Blairite gang, including Snowden, that broke the 1931 Labour Government up to form a `National’ government.
Back before the turn of the century, this brief foray into parliamentary politics by Tom was subsumed by the excitement of forming yet another new union in 1897, the Workers Union. This was Tom’s own creation and the very epitome of the united society for all workers. The choice of name was in itself significant. As a revolutionary socialist, Tom saw the union as an organisation which would be “a Trade Union and a Political Organisation for advancing the true interests of Labour”; the terms of his vision were remarkably consistent with the stated aims of the new union, Unite.
The Workers Union secured a massive presence from its earliest days in the engineering industries of the Midlands. Sadly, after Tom moved on, the union swiftly bureaucratised but its conception – that of One Big Union was attractive beyond belief. In one massive leap, as favourable economic conditions emerged in the run up to the First World War, it quadrupled its size in the two years from 1912. But, whilst the war saw the skilled engineering unions radicalise, the Workers Union turned to the right.
By 1918, relations generally between the skilled and all-grades unions were so bad that the Workers Union would advise its members not to join a national engineering strike. The union eventually merged with the T&G in 1929, ironically financially broken by its adherence to union benevolent benefits, and it is the Workers Union membership - added to the original transport base that ultimately gave the T&G its general character, much improved, I have to say, by the addition of the Vehicle Builders in the 1970s.
The demise of the Workers Union prompts the thought that, if there is any one salient criticism of Tom it is that he was simply not cut out for bureaucracy! He now went through a slightly fallow period, resorting to keeping a pub. But this `enterprise’ became a sanctuary for a motley crew of political refugees and revolutionaries from all over the world. Tom simply couldn’t square the meagre earnings from his role as a roving socialist propagandist with this and looked for fresh pastures.
At the end of 1901, he emigrated to Australia, where he became an organiser for the Australian Labor Party. It did not take long for him to become critical. He thought the ALP showed “little disposition to travel in a Socialist direction … they … attach importance to getting “more trade” … They still look to Parliament as the chief, if not the sole, agency …” Of one of the first Labour Governments in the world, which held office for about six months or so, Tom thought “they dared not attempt anything out of the ordinary humdrum rut, and no one could have told that there was any difference, except by reading that different persons filled Cabinet positions.”
In 1910, he formed the Socialist Party of Victoria and was imprisoned for five weeks in Melbourne over a free-speech campaign, after socialist meetings and leaflets were banned. Then, having led a gigantic miners’ strike at Broken Hill, he was personally banned from speaking in New South Wales, so workers organised a “Tom Mann Train”, a secret transport passage for Tom across the borders of Australia’s states, so that he could tour the country speaking. Tom also, by the way, spent a year in New Zealand on organising drives.
Australian labour militancy was so powerful that the state proposed a cease-fire and offered a statutory base for industrial relations. The movement now pinned their faith to Arbitration Acts and Wages Boards but Tom was “compelled to definitely declare that such measures are a most serious impediment to working-class solidarity; a powerful agency for hypnotising the workers …” It was an industrial relations system that “… gives the capitalist judiciary complete control …. that places the lawyer … in front of the real industrial expert.”
Having just returned from a study visit of Australian unions, on behalf of the T&G General Secretary, I can vouch for Tom’s caution. It seemed to work, whilst-so-ever the capitalist state was happy for the incorporation of unions, they had massive membership. But, after a New Labour-esque government abolished arbitration in 1992, the rationale for the captured union membership dissolved. Union density in Australia declined precipitously – halving density in a decade, the fastest rate (after New Zealand, which suffered the same fate) in the western world. Some 3,000 union organisers had to be made redundant.
The Australians returned to their history, rediscovered Tom Mann and proposed the organising model, later adopted by some American unions, notably the SEIU, and re-discovered by some in the T&G seven years ago or so. Some of us – Coventrians all – had never forgotten. It was Jack Jones who shifted the original Workers Union model into Coventry factories in the late 1930s and 1940s, evolving this into the notion of the shop stewards’ movement. I recall well his ironic comment to me the first time he heard the word “mapping” being bandied about T&G central office and my reply that it sounded to me like a common sense way of carrying out business, shop by shop, that any engineering worker instinctively understood.
One thing I will say, the Australians have performed wonders in adapting modern technology into making officer servicing more accountable, professional and more geared to the building of self-reliance in the workplace; Unite hasn’t even begun to address these questions.
Tom returned to England in 1910 to work for the Dockers’ Union. By this stage, he was espousing a new conception of `syndicalism’, which prized the strike weapon over the vote and he now created the Industrial Syndicalist Education League and its journal, the “Industrial Syndicalist”, which amongst other things, inspired the beginnings of a rank-and-file miners’ movement that would eventually make the miners a by-word for militancy and a railway vigilance movement that lay the basis for all-grades unionism that makes militancy a cultural part of RMT.
More personally, Tom was at the forefront of the 1911 transport workers strike in Liverpool, a mammoth and successful 72 day dispute. Gunboats were sent to the Mersey to pacify the natives and Tom was abused by the press as the “dictator of Liverpool”. He certainly commanded all transport - trams and lorries, docks and ferries and ships – even the Royal Mail could not leave unless he said it could.
Tom published a leaflet, the “Open Letter to British Soldiers”, urging them not to fire upon striking workers, which resulted in him receiving a six months sentence for sedition, commuted to seven weeks after massive public pressure. Even at this distance the power of the call is impossible to miss, and Tom knew very well its potency: "Thou shalt not kill," says the Bible … It doesn’t say, "unless you have a uniform on" … Don't disgrace your parents, your class, by being the willing tools … of the master class …. When we rise, you rise. When we fall, even by your bullets, you fall also.”
In the dying embers of peace-time before the First World War, Tom was called to South Africa to lead protests to prevent the deportation of trade union leaders. When he returned to Britain, he found that this was now a defining moment for socialists. As was the case throughout his life, Tom rose to the occasion – he was strongly opposed to Britain's prosecution of war and joined the British Socialist Party, a reformation of the SDF and some ILP elements. In 1917, like many in the workers’ movement, he was also enthusiastic about the revolutions in Russia.
He was now active in organising seafarers but in 1919, for the last two years before his official retirement at the age of 65, he was elected as the new general secretary of the AEU, a merger of eight unions including his own, the ASE.
Having joined the Communist Party, formed in 1920 out of the BSP and other, mainly ex-syndicalist elements, Tom spent the next two decades of his life touring Britain and the world as an agitator. He was not only a founding member of the Party; he was a member of its Central Committee for much of the rest of his life. In 1921, he met Lenin for discussions about the nature of the British labour movement. From 1924-29, Tom was chair of the National Minority Movement, a united front trade union formation dominated by the Communist Party. And he found time to be the Communist Party’s Parliamentary candidate in the East Nottingham constituency in the October 1924 General Election, which was a heavily Tory place. With little preparation, Tom grabbed a more than respectable 10% of the vote.
His role in the Communist Party, in its first two decades, is all too poorly understood by some. He was the avuncular exponent of a special brand of Communism, as part of the broad Labour Movement, that would lead to the Party being abused by enthusiasts of the more doctrinaire German Communist Party as being a “society of great friends”.
Tom had a particular belief that nurturing the talent of youth was a strategic asset. On being appointed the honorary president of the Young Communist League, the YCL, on its foundation, Tom reminded them that: "It is a quality of youth to be receptive, to be warm-hearted, to glow with enthusiasm. It is a characteristic of age to become opinionated, dictatorial...”
But Tom had also been the man who had seen the example of the Bryant and May matchgirls dispute in London’s east end, the very year before the docks strike, as the spark that lit the flame. The indominitable spirit of women, especially young women, was too powerful a resource for the movement to waste.
Now, this event also acknowledges the work of Alice Arnold, a full-time organiser for the Workers' Union in Coventry; just a few words about Alice in the context of Tom Mann and his role in sparking a new generation into militancy. Like the rest of her union, Alice had gone into the T&G but ended up being sacked by Bevin, ostensibly after refusing to move to Birmingham. A TUC survey in the early 1930s on the state of organisation amongst women workers reported that in Coventry there was "apathy... the removal of Miss Arnold has had some effect."
The politics behind this are instructive. The official trade union movement initially refused, in the late 1920s/early 1930s, to unionise the new light engineering industries; they said they were unorganisable. As a historian of women’s trades unionism has written: "it was the rank-and-file movement, not infrequently led by Communists, which led to the `capture’ of the new factories”.
Women's official structures of the unions had become part of the trade union establishment; there was a big gulf between them and working women. It was very much under Tom Mann’s guidance that the Communist Party singled out the `new management technique’ of the Bedaux system – a time and motion management approach, which was sweeping industry in Britain, as the main target for anti-capitalist resistance.
Elsewhere, it was in the textile industry that this struggle unfolded. In the Midlands, the mass walkout of 10,000 unorganised women in Lucas’s Birmingham factory showed the way. In May 1931, the TGWU acquired some members at Courtaulds in Coventry after a spontaneous show of action on wages. The Communist Party produced a broadsheet "The Working Woman" which linked up struggles in Wolverhampton and Coventry of the Courtaulds workers.
By 1935, when a group bonus scheme was introduced, the first major strike in the company’s history happened. In Coventry, 3,000 came out and, as a participant recalled decades later, Q "the TGWU was called in” …yes - by the management!. Eventually, the strike was Q “settled on terms more favourable to management". The T&G did not obtain recognition until after another strike in 1937 over a failure to give a wage rise. But it had been the autonomous organisation of women that had begun to shatter opposition. As one women recalled, "we did it ourselves".
Aside from quietly guiding work such as this, Tom became a kind of roving global revolutionary in his last years; for example, working in 1927 in China with workers in Shanghai and assisting the Swedish Communist Party in its major challenge in the 1938 municipal elections.
He was arguably the original disreputable old man, growing more unrespectable as he aged. In 1932, he was arrested and imprisoned in London during the National Hunger March. He got three months’ almost certainly just to stop him from leading unemployed workers to Downing Street.
After a speech he made in Belfast in October of that year, when Catholics and Protestants briefly united in struggle against the means test, he was sent to prison for sedition. Two years later he was acquitted for the same offence in a trial in Cardiff, after he and Harry Pollitt [the veteran leader of Britain’s Communists] were accused of sedition in Swansea. That year, he was deported from Canada.
He was deported from, or imprisoned in, more countries than anyone else in the progressive movement than I have ever been able to discern – France, Germany, Victoria, New South Wales, Canada, and Northern Ireland and so on. As Harry Pollitt wrote of Tom: “it was just because he would never “settle down” into respectability and safety, that he lived and died a pioneer.
He was of course far too old to participate in the Spanish Civil War but he was immensely proud that a unit of the International Brigade, the Tom Mann Centuria, was named in his honour. This affection for him was also shown when the Red Flag was flown on Melbourne Trades Hall for his 80th birthday in 1936; after all, he was the man who first planted the Red Flag in Australia.
Tom Mann died in Grassington, about 40 miles north of Leeds on 13th March, 1941. His death was mourned widely and marked throughout the world. Harry Pollitt made the main tribute to Tom, whom he called: “a giant towering incomparably over all his contemporaries in the many years in which he played a dominant role in the working class movement”.
There is not an industry in Britain that is not better organised as a result of the work of Tom Mann. Miners, seamen, dockers, engineers and unskilled workers of all kinds owe a debt of gratitude to Torn Mann that is little appreciated by the present generation. You always knew where Tom stood; for he welcomed the Russian Revolution as “the direct action of the sort he wanted to see everywhere” - against what he always called “The Boss Class”. At mass rallies, he would command the crowd to stand and to put up their hands if they agreed with what he had said; then, swiftly taking out his handkerchief, he would wave it and call “Three cheers for unity.” Today, we ought to shout at the top of our voices: “Three cheers for Tom Mann”!
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COMMUNIST PARTY EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE JANUARY 2007
There’s something very rotten in the state of Britain. Jobs, health, education and housing all display disorder; it’s a mess. Just look at what’s been happening. Battling back to work last week, many wondered once again about their miserable journey. In London, 15 million people travel by car in any one 24 hour period, twice as many as by public transport or by foot and I don’t really totally blame them.
Not when you consider that the 60% of rail fares which are set by private operators have increased by up to 7.3%, nearly three times the rate of inflation - the record appears to be 33%! Twenty years ago, we had five different types of fare, now we have the `choice’ of more than 70. It actually makes economic sense to buy two part-way tickets before you set off, matching the boundaries of different operators.
Completely ignoring the misery of packed commuter routes, a government spokesman said that it’s “a commercial decision for train operators”. No-one really believes that public transport privatisation works, not when we spend twice as much of our disposable income as anywhere in Europe on transport. But the government even feels it can get away with facing down civil servants for the temerity of demanding assurances on job security.
Some 280,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services Union have balloted for ongoing one day strikes from 31st January, as the government pursues a dogmatic policy of outsourcing. Let’s be clear, we’re not talking of the pin-stripe brigade nowadays. Over half of all civil servants get less than £20,000 a year, over a fifth get less than £15,000 and very many are on Minimum Wage; yet the private consultants advising on how to squeeze the workforce trouser over £2 1/2 billion a year.
Little wonder then that, outside of the metropolitan elite, there is little sympathy for Ruth Kelly in her latest pickle. The argument that she is not a hypocrite if she sends her child to a private school because he has special needs is informed by the notions of hard personal choices. But few electors will understand how a so-called Labour former education secretary is not two-faced. But then that’s capitalism for you - freedom of choice but absence of freedom to pay.
Every single parent of a child with special needs would like to have a spare £40,000 to hand. Almost a fifth of all children have `special educational needs’; about 60% are educated in mainstream schools, yet the number of special schools has fallen by 7% in the lifetime of this government. And it doesn’t stop there. Even the Children’s Commissioner has recently described services for three quarters of a million disabled children as `a national scandal’. Only one in 13 of their families get social service help; 55% live on the poverty line and 80% are ‘at breaking point’.
The government is to abandon its new Mental Health Bill in favour of amending existing laws to enable it to detain citizens with personality disorders for compulsory treatment even when no crime has been committed. Now personality disorder is defined as a “pervasive pattern of experience and behaviour that is abnormal thinking, mood, personal relations, and control of impulses ... when this is inflexible, maladaptive, and anti-social” - sounds like our society to me!
But it’s no joke. There are more mentally ill people on incapacity benefits than the total number of unemployed people on benefit. Stress is the highest cause of absence among office workers, with an estimated 12.8m working days lost in Britain in 2003-04. Arguably, the most concrete expression of what the early Marx called ‘alienation’ in modern society is not the soullessness of work but the soul-Iessness of life. Whilst the true nature of humanity is to value community, people in capitalist societies find their material life organised through commodities. Usefulness is totally separated from its market value; a deviation the later Marx calls “commodity fetishism”.
In homage to modern capitalism, illicit drug retailing operates through the model of infinite sub-contracting; by the fifth degree of removal from the source, adulterated narcotics result in harm to physical well-being. Yet, in today’s urban narcotic sub-culture it is cheaper to score heroin than cannabis. Heroin derivatives have become virtually the working class drug of choice. Its street price is now a third of what it was 30 years ago; an ‘introductory offer’ of a wrap costing £2 can be easily obtained in former working class industrial areas. The official policy of ‘harm reduction’, which relies on prescribing methadone, hasn’t solved anything; there are half a million addicts and those closest to the problem say legalisation is needed.
It may be not too strong a point to say that capitalism ‘seriously harms you and those around you’ and is deserving of a warning from the Attorney General! One clear observation can be made — that the adulation by society of the free market is at the centre of it all and this will be defended by oligarchy with brute force if needs be.
The BNP, in its recent strategy analysis, thinks a base of 5% support can give it a chance at power “one step away from a crisis”. So, what are the chances of such a crisis? Desperately real, in fact. From its peak in mid2001 to its trough in late 2004, the US Dollar Index lost a staggering one third of its value in the world currency market. Non - American investors and central banks will have sustained massive investment losses in capital tied up in the US and they aren’t very happy!
Canary Wharf is delighted. Yet UK manufacturing output is lower now than it was when New Labour took power in May 1997. Output has grown 30% in the US and by 14.1% in France. Brown’s policies disadvantage UK manufacturing, whilst less than 3% of our exports go to the Far East and a focus on short-term returns restrains real investment. If the UK can only manage flat production figures in a period of reasonable global growth, what kind of scenario can we expect in a down-turning global economy?
Twenty years ago, Thatcher’s government presided over reforms that led to the pre-eminence of London as an international financial centre. This was fuelled by a big expansion in Britain of mainly US firms, lured by the handsome returns offered by privatisation. The result was that overseas companies bought up well over 80% of UK financial institutions. This also changed the ownership of most big industrial firms and utilities.
As this New Year began, almost in anticipation of a slump, capitalists are rushing to dump their money somewhere safe-ish. Share purchase trading has hit unprecedented heights. Indian, Brazilian, Japanese, Spanish as well as American firms are all drooling over British firms. Up for a roll of the dice on the Monopoly board are steelmaker Corus (£5.5 billion, please), the London Stock Exchange (£2bn that’ll set you back), Intercontinental hotels, the paint maker ICI and United Biscuits are up for grabs. Vodafone seeks a stake in the Indian telecom company Hutchison Essar, Ladbrokes are buying the largest on-line gambling holdings, based in Gibraltar, and private equity firms are swooping on Whitbread and Rank. Premier Food’s takeover of RHM will mean that Mr Kipling, Bisto and Hovis join with Quorn, Branston and Loyd Grossman. Japan Tobacco is gobbling up Gallagher’s fags and a Spanish company has coughed up £11 bn for Scottish Power. Que?
Five of the six dominant energy companies in the UK will be owned by foreigners. But the bad news about the massive loss of Britain’s manufacturing capacity is that faced with a slump, foreign-owned companies would inevitably shut down the subsidiaries furthest away from their home first. Whilst Britain’s economy pours away down the plug-hole, the City seems so caught up with its own success that it is totally unworried about ludicrously high salaries.
Over the past four years, the global economy has enjoyed a boom the likes of which it hasn’t seen since the early 1970s. In 2000-2, Bush and Blair’s wars helped avoid a slump by massively stimulating demand and releasing new capital flows. Now the World Bank says the “pace of expansion is already slowing and.... a weakening of housing markets in high-income countries ... could generate a much sharper downturn and even recession”.
Two giant quasi-government financial institutions covering more than half of the US mortgage market have not presented any formal report since 2004 and must ask for an exemption in order to remain listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The governor of the New York Federal Reserve, warned against risks of systemic crisis and Asian investors are fast running away from US Treasury Bonds.
Meanwhile, the UK Treasury’s rule for public sector borrowing requirement limits this to a mere 40% of gross domestic product; in the EU, the figure is 65% and, even in the US, 47%. PFI keeps new hospital and school development off the books but it also allows TNCs a crack at exploiting even further the low wage, low skill, deregulation-mad, flexible labour market economy of Britain.
The rich and the corporations they own or control are all but exempt from taxation policy. The super rich use Britain as their base for work and live in tax havens such as Monaco, the Channel Islands, jetting in and out of London at the beginning and end of each week. Not just football magnates but a supposedly ‘normal’ company like Cadbury Schweppes shifts profits to tax havens to avoid paying their share. In the last two years, the firm paid 19% worldwide on its £1.5 billion profits but a mere £3 million came into the UK Treasury from it. This is par for the course.
We’re not just talking of people like Richard Branson and Phillip Green of BHS; Russian, Arab and American billionaires have made London their base. Foreign tycoons can live here without paying a penny on their wealth stashed away in other lands. This washes into politics, for this is the meaning of cash-for-peerages and the like. The pretty rich also have acquired the morals of the spiv; legal tax exemption schemes are so effective that even the Auditor-General has refused to sign off the Revenue and Customs accounts for the fourth year in a row because of unacceptably high levels of mistakes and criminal activity. The sum of £1.7 billion lost, twice as much as previously predicted, has been mentioned and that’s even without considering the completely legal dodges.
Tax advisers can make National Insurance, income tax - and even inheritance tax - vanish. Accountants get themselves up to 40% tax relief on their own home loans - while the modest 10% tax relief available for the rest of us was abolished years ago. In an aching parallel with the ancient barter system, the modestly rich have been paid in antiques, carpets, gold, fine wines, diamonds... and even animal skins, all to avoid paying tax and national insurance.
In contrast, almost 30,000 people are likely to become insolvent in the first quarter of 2007 with some 10,000 tipped over the edge by Christmas spending. Soaring energy bills and increases in unemployment have pushed more people into financial trouble and Britons owe a third of all the debt in Europe.
The outrageous announcement that average house price for first-time buyers in the north of England and Scotland has exceeded £100,000 for the first time, pales beside the fact that the average in London is over a quarter of a million. This is almost double the level of five years ago. You need an income of £40,000 a year just to enter the property ladder in London but there are no signs of the Government committing to building extra social rented homes in the next Comprehensive Spending Review.
Shocking us out of our mortgage miseries, the horrific murders in Suffolk have seen a sea-change in public mood, as the young women victims were increasingly seen as real people. “Reclaim the night” marchers in lpswich were joined by support groups from across the UK, quite rightly insisting on the right of any woman to walk the streets of communities at night, unharmed. The murders stimulated a debate on public policy on prostitution. Given that more than half of prostitutes began as teenagers, the link between family crisis, poverty, prostitution and drug abuse is increasingly clearer. The news came, just before Christmas, that Blair personally blocked moves to decriminalise prostitution because he was concerned over ‘hostile headlines’. But we should note, from the experience in New Zealand, that ‘managed areas’, similar to those in mainland Europe, leave the sex industry still in the hands of capitalistic elements.
To the fundamentalists of capitalist morality, human life is seemingly sacrosanct from the moment of conception through to the last breath, whatever the pain and suffering involved. Our Anglo-American consumerist society can countenance the artificial freezing of disabled Ashley X in the US to be a permanent child of nine years but a storm greeted the ethical recommendation to British doctors by the Nuffield Council for Bio-Ethics that babies born before 23 weeks should not be resuscitated. Now New Labour looks set to bow to anti-abortion pressure to prevent the experimental fusing of human DNA with animal eggs, thus depriving people with Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease of hopes of a breakthrough.
To quote something written to me quite recently by a veteran Communist, one of the early pioneers of genetic conservation who long worked for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization: “for the capitalist system, if prolonging life creates ethical problems, the massive destruction of human life does not ... the sort of thinking that sees it normal to ASK for (millions) to conduct a murderous high-technology war, but needs to DEBATE the ethics of “the high cost of health care” is yet another milestone along the road leading to a total collapse of social values”.
This week, even the Iraqi Health Ministry admitted that the country’s yearly death count more than tripled between the start and end of 2006, at 23,000 people. The UN talks of 30,000; both estimates pale beside the October edition of the Lancet, which said that some 600,000 people had died violently, in all.
Whether intended as a diversion or a provocation, Saddam’s sudden and botched execution, the manner of which was rightly condemned -eventually even by Blair, is clearly linked to expectations of more of the same and worse. Iraq’s prime minister has declared that he wants out, underlining the US’s loss of control over events - just as George Bush announces his new strategy on the war. The Presidency is set to face a major conflict with the Democrat controlled Senate and House on a whole range of topics. Yet, in defiance of the conclusions of the Iraq Study Group, Bush is to send 20,000 more US troops to shore up Iraq’s police and army, which are more than a third under-strength.
The misery following invasion and civil unrest won’t end until imperialism quits Iraq. Look at the so-called success of Afghanistan. Its wheat crop has failed yet again and 2.5 million people now face starvation. The only success to report is that the expanding poppy trade now accounts for no less than one third of that country’s GDP.
Talk this week by Angela Merkel of Moscow’s “unacceptable” decision to temporarily close energy supplies to Germany and Poland, must be judged against the fact that the EU as a whole relies for about a quarter of its gas needs on Russia. Britain imports gas from the EU, so that its largely oil linked price rises affect us. 30 years ago, some two thirds of our energy needs came from coal and we know what happened to that. The next step is an integrated EU energy market.
Hope for lower energy prices in 2007 must seem a little unreal given that gas prices have risen by 71 per cent during Tony Blair’s tenure as prime minister. Power and the needs of the privatised energy market of the German state lie behind much of the drive towards a super-state, exemplified by the affair of the EU constitution.
The slight fly in the ointment is that, of the 25 EU states, only 16 have largely completed ratification. It now falls to the German presidency of the EU to propose where to take the constitution. Watch out for ringing declarations this March, when the EU celebrates its 50th birthday and then completion of a text by June. The aim is for a constitution to come in force before the 2009 European elections, in case the EU’s electorate swings heavily to the left.
The danger arises since millions of ordinary working people are thoroughly confused by the state of affairs where it makes sense for a politician to dissemble. All the more surprising that a junior minister admits he is powerless to control aviation companies and calls anti-union Ryanair the ‘irresponsible face of capitalism’; I’m not sure Blair hasn’t outdone him by blaming the electorate for wanting cheap holidays abroad. Cheap holidays in Britain might be quite a surprise for many. I sometimes think it would pay the NHS to provide convalescent holidays for the millions of overworked Britons! Does it make sense for billions to be spent on destruction but not health and welfare? Where supposedly scarce resources are squandered but there’s no money for schools and hospitals. Confusion abounds about the massive numbers of people moving around the globe and Europe to find decent lives. We must say to workers - don’t focus on the massive movement of labour but on the massive movement of capital. ‘Free’ labour matched to free capital amounts to a disordered society.
It seems that our ruling class no longer has a stake in our society; a society they neither care for nor like. Further reinforcing the cesspit that passes for ‘business’ in modern Britain, the prime minister has defended Lord Goldsmith’s decision to scrap the Serious Fraud Office’s long-running investigation into British arms dealer BAE Systems due to “security concerns”. Blair said he took “full responsibility” for the decision, so that’s all right then; we agree with him - he’s to blame.
Why can’t life be better for ordinary people? Because, it’s said, that it all costs and there’s not enough money to do all the things we’d like to do — and it sounds right to ordinary people because that’s exactly the experience they have. But there’s no problem with money; it’s just a question of who has it!
The world’s richest individuals have placed $11.5 trillion of assets in offshore havens. This figure is worth 10 times Britain’s GDP. Quite how much of this is in the hands of individuals based here is anyone’s guess, since the government doesn’t issue figures. The most recent numbers (from 2003) show British firms and individuals owning about £3.5 trillion worth of abroad, and abroad owning about £3.5 trillion worth of Britain.
In the five years since 2000, liquid assets owned by Britons increased by more than 50%. 135,000 people average £6.4m owned (this does not include a first or second home) and is on average 66% richer than they were five years ago. The super-rich - the thousand richest individuals in Britain - have seen their liquid assets increase by 79% in five years, to an average £70m each. 30% of the population owns no liquid assets at all and the next 30% probably only `own’ their home.
We don’t need mirages on the horizon to show us how to move forward out of this morass of corruption, greed and avarice. We only have to look to the new situation developing in Venezuela to learn the simple lesson. Chavez now proposes strengthening the state’s control over banking and oil production and he seeks constitutional reforms based on “popular power”. It is neo-Iiberalism that is the basis of the power of oligarchy; as Chavez calls it - “individualism and egotism”.
This is the backcloth to the agenda item that will follow debate over this report. In implementing the Party’s programme for growth and renewal, we do the most significant thing we can do when we relate our own experience to working people, as Communists, in the workplace and in communities. Our analysis makes sense; the need is to channel the confusion and uncertainty of working people into action. When we promote the Left-Wing programme, which can provide the basis for left unity to proceed to begin to fight back, against the plain injustice of a wealthy country that cannot provide a secure and prosperous future for the overwhelming majority of its citizens, then to that extent we lay the basis for that fight back.
APPENDICES: MISCELLANEOUS FACTS FOR COMMUNISTS.........
Migration - capital and labour
o A quarter of all global foreign direct investment went into the UK in 2005, half of the EU’s total.
o HSBC pay 24.5% tax on its profits worldwide but threatens to leave the UK over the £371m it pays to the Treasury. But this UK Corporation tax is a mere 13.7% of their tax bill; as a percentage of pre-tax profits it is around 3.3%. The engineering company, Tomkins, similarly pays 21.2% worldwide of its profits in tax, last year it paid £1 million tax in UK; Cable & Wireless - 17.4% - but not a penny of late to UK Treasury.
o npower and Powergen belong to the Germans, EDF Energy is owned by the French. Scottish Power and Scottish and Southern Energy will be Spanish, leaving Centrica, a gas retailer, as British.
o Corporation tax at 30% is the lowest of any major EU economy
o One popular UK tax avoidance device is the “employee benefit trust”, payable through a trust, often offshore that forwards regular doses of cash in the form of very long term, often interest-free always tax-free loans. “Lend and forget” schemes, they are called.
o Accountancy firms sell artificial “losses”, to set against clients’ incomes, with income apparently wiped out, there’s no income tax to pay, whilst paying cash into a private pension scheme, which can be used as capital for loans and the like, avoids tax.
o Only 18 months ago total net lending to individuals passed £1 trillion. Now the total is nudging £1.3 trillion and rising by Lim every four minutes. Little wonder that the number of people opting for individual voluntary arrangements (lVAs) to avoid formal bankruptcy will double within two years. The number of IVAs has exploded nine fold since 1998, whilst personal insolvencies are 63% up on the 2005 total.
o A third of the world’s major trans-national corporations have a British base
o Undoubtedly, population movement into the UK, since May 2004, has seen the largest single wave of migration in our history
o Even the most severe estimates suggest that only I % of the population is ‘non-compliant’ (i.e. without valid leave to remain in the
o UK)
o The overwhelming majority work in construction, agriculture, food processing, hospitality, cleaning and care.
o It is not due to immigration restrictions but because of the government’s obsession with a ‘flexible labour market’ with weak mechanisms for enforcing standards that problems of illicit working are not dealt with. Between 1998 and 2003 only nine single employers were prosecuted for illegally employing immigrants.
o A flexible labour market results in an insatiable demand for migrant workers at the low skill end of the labour market.
o Distributional impacts and social costs of 600,000 new entrants to the labour market cannot be discounted.
o Unlike in the UK, the number of labour inspectors in the Republic of Ireland has recently been tripled
Housing
• The UK needs to create around 4.5m new households over the next decade to cope with an expanding; new house building just can’t meet the demand. At the current rate of construction only be two million new homes will be built in ten years.
• Yet there are vast numbers of redundant houses, unused shops and offices that are crying out for renovation. We have amongst the oldest housing stock in Europe; over one quarter was built before 1914 and half before 1945. Some 6.3m homes in England are “non-decent” - almost 30% of the entire housing stock. To bring these alone up to a reasonable standard would cost around £46 billion. At the current rate of improvement it will take over 27 years to put right.
• And yet there is a huge backlog of homeless people waiting for a permanent home, 93,000 households of people are trapped in the nightmare of temporary accommodation - more than double the number in 1997.
• Some fifth of a million homeless children are having their health, education and future chances ruined by the lack of a safe, permanent home
Education
• One adult in five in this country is not functionally literate — measured at being less than the skills an eleven year old child should have - and far more people have problems with numeracy, perhaps as many as 60% of the population.
• A quarter of adults cannot calculate the change they should get from purchasing three items of grocery from a defined sum offered at the till.
• The percentage of adults with low literacy and low numeracy in Britain is two to three times as severe as Germany for example. This sad reflection on past decades of education policy is one of the reasons for relatively low productivity in our economy, and it cramps the lives of some eight million people.
Mental Health
• One in six of all people suffers from depression or chronic anxiety, which affects one in three of all families.
• Depression and anxiety are reported to account for 40% of people who are claming incapacity benefit and unable to work.
• Only a quarter of those who are ill are receiving any treatment — in most cases medication.
• Modern evidence-based psychological therapy is as effective as medication and is preferred by the majority of patients.
• In most areas, waiting lists are over nine months, if therapy is available at all.
• A course of therapy costs £750 and pays for itself in money saved on incapacity benefits and lost tax receipts.
• Nearly 30% of employees will have a mental health problem in any one year, the majority of which will be anxiety and depressive disorders
• 91m work days are lost every year due to mental ill-health
• Mental health problems now account for more incapacity benefit claims than back pain
• 200,000 children depend on a parent with severe and enduring mental health problems. Perhaps half of these children will themselves suffer related difficulties during their own adult lives as a consequence.
Capitalist crisis
• Marx argued that “capitalist production moves through certain periodical cycles. It moves through a state of quiescence, growing animation, prosperity, over trade, crisis and stagnation” (Value, Price and Profit, chapter XIII).
• He showed that capitalism’s drive towards expansion is not a straight upward line but goes in cycles. Whilst a general upward trend occurs this is dented by periods in which production fails.
• Whilst the ratio between the unpaid labour of the working class and the sum of capital investment and wages as capitalism progresses technically diminishes, impels a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Thus, the source of surplus value relatively declines. Countering this impels capitalism’s drive to intensify work, or lengthening the working day.
• Only when technical progress in capitalism and the proportionate increases is both rapid and huge, as has been the case in the past twenty years, will this tendency clearly contribute to crisis.
• The internationalisation of the mobility of the working class to replenish a reserve army of labour is also needed, especially if the family wage has been assaulted in the name of quality enabling millions of women workers to flow into the labour market.
• Utilising cheap labour markets for production and avoiding large stock-piles of commodities that no-one can buy which can lead to a crisis of overproduction has been achieved by the strategy of flexible specialization in production, coupled with computerized logistical distribution.
• Capitalism does not operate production for use but only when goods can be sold on a market with the expectation of profit But the operation of capitalism is not planned at the level of the whole economy only decided by the market; thousands of competing enterprises operating independently of social control. This anarchy of production explains why the system is beset by crises and depressions.
• Capitalism causes disproportionate investment patterns. It occurred in key industries in the consumer goods sector before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and it has recently occurred in a number of those enterprises and industries that expanded at a fast pace in the 1990s, particularly in micro-electronics and computing.
• The operation of crisis and depression is no aberration but an entirely necessary feature of capitalism; the only lasting solution to crises and depressions is production for use under socialism whereby production can be regulated without the invisible market.
Food distribution
• Apples, which with our perfect climate for them, we used to grow in abundance here, now travel 7,000 miles from Argentina.
• New potatoes travel well over 2,000 miles from Israel, or even the occupied territories, when we used to grow a rich variety here in the
UK.
• Why? 80% of food in the UK is bought in supermarkets, which buy in bulk and look for economies of scale, cheap labour and all year round supply.
• Fuel is comparatively cheap - the cost doesn’t reflect the impact on the environment, or the health problems it causes.
• 12% of the UK’s fuel consumption is used for food transportation and packaging
• Large scale production encourages monoculture, which uses more dangerous chemicals.
• Food poisoning costs £1bn a year.
• Diet-related diseases, such as coronary vascular disease, cost more than £l0bn a year.
• Obesity rises, yet retail planning makes it hard to walk or bike to the shops
• It is becoming ever more expensive to buy healthy foods rather items which are bad for us
• One in five children eat no fruit in a week and three in five eat no leafy green vegetables
• Under current policy, if people eat as much fruit and vegetables as the government says they should, this will merely lead to a rise in imports.
• Farming and food policy should give equal weight to both human and environmental health and...
• encourage diversity of foods and biodiversity in fields the food supply chain should decrease its reliance on non-renewable energy
• Food costs should more fully reflect their real costs of production and distribution
• Food supply chains should be as local and as short as possible
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COMMUNIST UNIVERSITY OF WALES - 2006
The formation of a mass workers’ party
The Labour Party's origins lie in the late 19th century search for democratic expression of the interests of working people, towards the end of the nineteenth century opinion consolidated towards the need to have a political and industrial wing of one movement after half a century of political consensus.
In 1885 Engels had written that “during the period of England's industrial monopoly the English working class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly' but they 'will lose that privileged position’. The forces that led to the First World War began at this time to erode Britain’s privileged trading position and hence the ability of its ruling class to make concessions to workers.
In 1887 a strike of Lanarkshire miners saw flagrant state brutality, the Liberal Party lost much support by its inaction and, the following year, Keir Hardie set up the Scottish Labour Party. Friedrich Engels was quick to spot the possibilities, for he argued that if a workers’ party with an independent class programme would “relegate to a back seat both the SDF and the Socialist League”, these of course being the Marxian parties then in existence.
But Marxism had been a valuable training ground for many of the mass trades unionism, New Unionism, of the 1880s. In 1889, the then SDF member, Will Thorne, organised a meeting of gas workers in East London to form a union that would truly fight for workers. The movement spread like wildfire, including dock workers, with tens of thousands organising and striking with the demand for an eight-hour day granted through parliamentary action as the focus.
This was a mass movement of unskilled workers, very many of whom were young women. In one year, the number of trade unionists more than doubled from around 860,000 in 1889 to around 2 million in 1890. In a comment that recalls the sudden recent rise of the `Awkward Squad’, Engels wrote: “The masses here are not yet socialist, but on the way towards it, and are already so far that they will not have any but socialist leaders”.
A dispute in Bradford, just before Christmas 1890, over a wage cut of 33% saw mostly unorganised textile workers strike for six months, eventually being forced back to work. The bosses were Liberals and this led to the formation of the Bradford Labour Union, which stood independent candidates. A mass appetite for a new political formation grew organically from a class conscious, fighting movement that saw winning in the workplace, a fighting back union with an organising ethos as the key objectives.
In 1893, Hardie’s Scottish Labour Party joined with others to form the Independent Labour Party, the ILP, founded in Bradford. This did not deem itself socialist as such, although its programme was anti-capitalist. A confused but class conscious formation, it was an ill-assorted bunch of assorted oddballs in alliance with a tribalised movement of angry urban working class in mostly northern mill towns. Six years later, the main railway union, the ASRS, initiated a call for the TUC to convene trade unions and socialist societies to form a body to sponsor Parliamentary candidates. Local Trades Councils up and down the country had, for some time, been doing just that in particular areas.
A special conference was held in London on February 27-28, 1900, attended by a broad spectrum of left-wing organisations and trade unions representing about one-third of the membership of the TUC. The SDF, after initially being involved, voted to withdraw at its 1901 conference from what was now called the Labour Represention Committee. This should not surprise us; for the SDF, Engels thought, sought to force Marxism “down the throats of the workers at once”. It was propagandist, sectarian and hostile to unions. Yet, oddly, many of the new breed of trade unions leaders had passed through its ranks and gained a taste for militancy.
Support for the LRC among the trade unions was massively boosted by the 1901 Taff Vale Railway case, which saw the ASRS ordered to pay £23,000 in commercial damages after a strike, a development that effectively made strikes all but impossible. It was a colossal, sum worth perhaps many millions in today’s terms.
For quite some time, many unions, especially the miners, were reluctant to break away from their long-term allegiance to the Liberals. Even when the LRC won 29 seats in the 1906 election, this was only because it was helped by a secret anti-Tory pact made in 1903 between Ramsay Macdonald and Liberal Chief Whip Herbert Gladstone that largely prevented the LRC and Liberals competing. It was only after the first meeting of the 29 MPs that group took the name, "The Labour Party" and this gives us the 100th anniversary of the PLP. But this `party’ did not have an individual membership until 1918 and continued to operate as a federation of affiliated bodies until then and to an extent afterwards.
It was the 1909 Osborne judgement that first prevented unions from holding funds for political purposes. Labour gained another dozen or so seats in 1910 and wages for MPs were introduced by a Liberal government the following year, a move that enabled working men to enter Parliament. Two years later, the Osborne judgement was overturned in 1913. From here onwards, for much of the rest of the 20th century, unions became wedded to turning to Parliament to overturn judge-made law that inhibited their functions.
Support grew for Labour during the 1910-1914 period as a result of an unprecedented scale of strike action before the first world war and, despite Labour’s participation in the coalition war cabinet, the radicalisation that accompanied the aftermath of the war. It took from 1900 to 1924 for Labour to become a realistically electoral force and effectively supplant the Liberals. The key, as always, was how unions perceived events.
As for the radical left, the SDF went through a series of internal wrangles, which saw it change its name to the SDP, then a major element reconstituted itself as the British Socialist Party (BSP). In 1916, the BSP affiliated to the Labour Party and was to form the main basis for the newly formed Communist Party from 1920.
Lenin thought the question of affiliation to the Labour Party a “highly complex” matter because of its unique character. But he had no doubt that those who try to keep revolutionary purity independent of reformism “will inevitably fall into error”. For such an approach would be “merely a repetition of the mistake made by those French revolutionaries, who, in 1874, "repudiated all compromises and all intermediate stages”. Our task, he tells us, is to “apply the general and basic principles of communism to the specific relations between classes and parties, to the specific features in the objective development towards communism, which are different in each country and which we must be able to discover, study, and predict”.
The young Communist Party applied for affiliation but this was not only rejected, throughout the 1920s Communists were gradually edged out of the party. Attempts by the right began in earnest in the run up to the 1926 General Strike. The 1925 Liverpool Conference of the Labour Party confirmed a ban on Communists being individual members of the party, although they could still operate as delegates of affiliated trade unions. A National Left-Wing Movement (NLWM) was launched in December 1925, bringing together Communists and socialists in Labour, the ILP and the unions. Around a hundred constituency parties backed the campaign and as many as 1,500 Communists were still active in Labour in 1926. Even a year later, after the despondency following 1926, delegates from 54 constituency Labour Parties representing 150,000 members were at a NLWM conference. The Sunday Worker, a paper supporting the NLWM sold as many as a million copies and was massively influential.
This period was one in which the fight for hegemony within the British labour movement was heatedly contested. The 1920s began with Communists arguing fiercely over what strategic position to adopt as regards the Labour Party. The specific example of Britain was very much on Lenin’s mind as he contemplated these questions. In his `Left-wing Communism’, Lenin stressed that revolutionaries are not made powerful just by dedication and discipline, they should also seek mass support. Temper “alone” is not enough for hatred for the system doesn’t dismantle it. Voting for Labour is not a “betrayal of Communism”, not if it brings us closer to its voters. To do anything else just “scatters our forces”. Not much point in getting a few hundred votes here and there when you need millions to win. I may paraphrase into modern speak here but read what he says carefully and with historical insight and you’ll see he says, in effect; `sure, they’re all bloody war criminals. But anti-socialists seek accommodation with them, to strengthen the capitalist system; so, we need to tilt the balance our way a bit. This is where the oft-quoted phrase about supporting Henderson, the Labour leader note - not the party, like a rope supports a hanging man comes in.
Britain is Britain, and elsewhere is elsewhere, concludes Lenin. He’s a practical politician as well as a revolutionary, with his feet firmly on the ground. You’ve got to think about how to work in such a way that you take the struggle to a point where “the inevitable conflicts” mature. No one, he ends, can say what turn events will take. But it’s our duty to carry on preparatory work until an “immediate cause” rouses the people. Revolutionary politics is indeed a “difficult” business; but this is nothing compared to the task of revolution itself!
The most signal reason for us in Britain to support the continuance of a single labour movement party and to work for its reclamation is the fact that we have a single trade union centre. This single centre is relatively unique in the world, especially in its organic relationship with a parliamentary political party. Famously, Communists have rarely sought accommodation outside of the official trade union and labour movement. Much a-historical negative comment has been made of the period when Communists labelled Social Democrats as “Social Fascists”. It is difficult to grasp that there was once a time when the notion of a corporate state, whereby capitalism was defended by a strong central state machine, was something that united President Roosevelt and Chancellor Hitler. Social Democrats in Britain were stunningly afraid of mass struggle as the rush by the TUC General Council to end the 1926 General Strike testifies.
Yet, aside from the fact that Prussian Social Democrats were more comfortable with machine-gunning Communist demonstrations than they were with even expressing disapproval with those of the National Socialists, what was it that gave rise to the seeming fracture between Social Democracy and Communism before the heady days of the Spanish Civil War?
The theoretical underpinning of the left turn was provided by a new periodisation of the class struggle since 1917. The "first period" had been one of revolutionary upsurge following the October Revolution; the second had been characterised by a retreat under the slogan of the united front; the "third period", now opening, was one of a "renewed offensive", in which Europe "was obviously entering into the period of a new revolutionary upswing". If we continued in this vein we might see the United Front of the early 1930s, a kind of left-wing unity notion, as the fourth period. The fifth might be the Popular Front and Anti-Fascist periods, the sixth being the Cold War and today we are truly in the seventh hell, not heaven that’s for sure, of trans-national corporations and globalised open markets. This question of stages of forward and backward motion will later become important as we consider the future and not the past.
As this see-saw of the balance of global power between the working class and its allies and the capitalism has unfolded, Social Democracy has become increasingly compromised and marginalised in bourgeois liberal democracies. Whilst it is clear that New Labour represents something quite different than traditional right wing reformism, an ideological stance that jettisons class analysis is not new. The manifesto of the National Left Wing Movement of the 1920s concluded that the Labour Party was "no longer a working class party but a party representing all sections of the community".
The logic of that position led inevitably to the National Government of 1931-5, formed when the Labour cabinet split over unemployment benefit cuts. This event put in doubt the very future of the Labour Party. It was the trade union movement that rescued Labour in the 1930s and placed it in pole position to benefit after the war. The trade unions buttressed the right wing during the period of intense anti-communism of the late 1940s, early 1950s. Paradoxically, from the late 1950s, the unions pulled Labour to the left for a long time until they backed the dash for electability in the mid 1980s. Even the period of the 1974-79 Social Contract, under the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments, did not see calls for disaffiliation but a struggle to oppose policy. Once again, since 2000, the unions have appeared as a voluble helmsman for the Labour Party in seeking to steer away from the New Labour course.
Currently, the majority of large unions remain affiliated; unions such as the PCS, the NUJ and NUT are not affiliated and never have been. Only RMT has been disaffiliated for allowing its branches to affiliate to political parties other than Labour. 7 RMT branches in Scotland and the Scottish Regional Council have affiliated to the Scottish Socialist Party, while one branch has voted to affiliate to Forward Wales led by former-MP John Marek, now an AM; ten branches in England have affiliated to Respect.
In the case of the FBU, it disaffiliated from Labour in circumstances that hardly suggest a strategic plan. Only its London Region and a few branches have voted to support Respect, while the Scottish Region has even leant towards the SNP. Some, but few, formations in the Communications Workers Union have backed the SSP or Respect. This record underlines the fact that the overwhelming bulk of the unions are solidly set for the ‘reclaim’ Labour course, largely because they sense that ‘new’ Labour is a clique with few roots in the party. Indeed, the level of Labour Party membership and activity is so low that in fact the balance of power has shifted towards affiliated unions. Clearly, at best, any thoughts of a major realignment that links unions with a new left formation must be viewed as conjectural and at that only for the long-term, assuming little else changes.
In any case, the electoral system works against new formations, indeed the founding of the Labour Party was itself in the shadow of the Liberal Party; this was perhaps a key factor in allowing it to largely supplant that party and become a mass electoral force. It has also time and again revealed Labour’s greatest weakness, its denial of the importance of theory. Yet its greatest strength is an undoubted, if increasingly residual, mass loyalty amongst masses of people. The effect of this has been to sometimes force the party towards progressive positions, although the last decade has not permitted much of such impulses to show!
Historically, however, these factors make it difficult to categorise Labour. It has more than once been termed the “third capitalist party” – and who would argue that this is not now the case? But it has also been seen as a potential vehicle for radical social change. Invariably, which side of the pendulum swing Labour is at (and its firmly stuck to the right just now) has depended on the level of union confidence and militancy. Now we have looked back, what can we say about the journey to form a mass workers’ party by looking ahead? If we can’t speculate at a Communist University then what is the point of them!! And it might focus our minds on a more intriguing debate, namely whither Labour? Especially if we consider that if there were no mass party of labour in Britain we have would to create one. Is this to be done out of the ashes of the old, or by redirecting it, or by means of an entirely new formation? The answer will lie in the future of the workers’ movement itself.
There is currently some debate amongst professors of industrial relations as to what part of these cycles we are at. In Britain, our difficulty is that anti-union laws cloud the picture. The universal application of strike ballots has actually created a situation where employers and unions test the water and employers cave in if they feel a sufficiently strong indication that a strike will occur. Unions also reach for non-striking forms of industrial action and when they do, one day demonstrations of outrage can be highly effective. In the 1950s-70s, this was known as the unofficial walkout! Some struggles have faded because some sort of alternative exists, closures and lay-offs for example; workers in general judge their attitude on the basis of how good the package is. Young workers in marginal employment merely quit their jobs in individualised form of rebellion and look for another, when they collide with management or simply get fed up. None of these indications will feature in official records. But who is to say that a relative return to militancy has not already happened but is masked by other factors?
It is perhaps a commonplace that different generations endure or enjoy different fashions or trends. It is however often as difficult for one generation to grasp the sense of what was happening half a century or more ago as it is for us to fast forward in our imagination to the middle of the 21st century. But if we look at labour unrest over a longer period than we as individuals because of our relatively short life span, tend to, it is apparent that strike waves accompany long cycles of economic upswings and downswings and, really, it is no surprise that this should be so.
These cycles imply an ebb and flow pattern of workers’ power rather than a straight line rise or fall. Not so much forward march as undulating bob and weave! Over the last two centuries, capitalist countries have followed a rhythmic pattern of business cycles of boom and depression across approximately half a century. The implication seen by supporters of capitalism was that long wave forecasting by the State could enable the planning of correcting mechanisms to avoid the general crisis of capitalism. Beveridge, a Liberal proposer of the welfare state discovered half century cycles dating back to the year 1260! It was the very basis for the corporatism as a corrective against revolution of as diverse figures as Mussolini and Franklin Delano Roosevelt!
As anyone who has ever worked on a production line can testify workers become hypersensitive to the state of trade. They sense upswings and downswings and this is the genesis of spontaneity in industrial relations. Major strike waves can be discerned towards the end of cyclical economic upswings (1860-1875, 1910-1920 and 1968-1974) as workers sensing the imminent loss of power extract the last possible concessions at the highest peak of expansion. Minor strike waves (1889-1893 and 1935-1948) emerge as workers seek to protect and retain any gains achieved during the upswings. Of course, there are factors that impair or encourage the trends but, given these variables, the model appears to hold for almost all countries and almost all periods of time.
Long wave cycles have been linked to demographic variations, the birth rate is lower in recession and higher when the economy is stable. These fluctuations imply baby booms and age. The capital formation associated with even small population changes is very dramatic, for example the economic effect of migration can cause an enormous increase in demand for all capital stocks - housing, jobs, cars etc. that takes about 10 years to catch up on. Normally, at the start of adult life there is a process of domestic capital formation and at the end of working life there is the challenge of loss of employment and wages. It so happens that these two periods of higher expense and less production are about 50 years apart. In a period such as the depressed 1930s, the birth rate is much lower than at other times and the effect is then felt about 20 years later.
Four main long waves are discernable across the lifetime of internationalised capitalism. The rise of the British trade union movement originates with the fight back against a period of rising prices following the Napoleonic wars. A radical turn to revolutionism, can be dated from the beginning and end of this long wave. Toward the end of this first wave, the establishment of national trade union bodies, even all class ones, arises, as does the first partially successful struggle for an extension of the franchise. The beginning of the second long wave sees the lifetime of Chartism; a plateau for a decade allows for an extension to the franchise and the introduction of new forms or bargaining (conciliation panels) and `new model’ unions to accompany this.
The current revolution of the Kondratieff Wave began after the global economy pulled out of a deflationary depression in the 1930s, prices began to accelerate until a `blow-off’ stage in 1980. (As South Wales can especially testify, Britain experienced two government inspired restructural recessions in the 1980s.) After a recession of 1990-1991, the global economy has been treading the secondary plateau. Disinflation became the buzz word but sure as night follows day, contraction will follow. During the 1990s, it was the Japanese economy that slid first, the stock market mini-crash of 1997 followed. If this continues, Europe and North America will fall into deflationary contraction, with these economies peaking in the next eight years before sliding downwards to a trough over the next thirty years.
This supposes that no great cataclysm arises, not a straightforward conclusion by any means. The theory that capitalism has found means to permanently resolve its crises seems more out of synchronisation with the reality than it ever did. The 21st century does not seem set to be the New American Century at all. Not if the regionalised new power blocs in Latin America, South Africa, India and China develop alliances that face the North Atlantic Alliance and if the Pacific Rim reconciles itself with the phenomena of China as seems increasingly likely. Having over-reached itself by exporting free market liberal capitalism to as much of the globe as it can, the American centred global capitalism of the late 20th century now faces serious challenge. By the middle of this century Britain is more likely to have returned to its pre-capitalist post of outrider to larger continental forces and none of this looks remotely comfortable for the elite of our nation.
Consensus politics in Britain has demoralised and alienated the mass of voters. Yet for the foreseeable future, perhaps the next five to ten years, the main focus will continue with the reclaim Labour project. After that, whether the specific formation that has currently been the worker’s party can remain so may be open to question. It is perhaps presumptious to predict how the workers’ movement will proceed in the future but I for one can see little to suggest that the focus of future generations will be to attempt to create a force that unites parliamentary representatives of working people and their extra parliamentary formations.
COMMUNIST UNIVERSITY OF SCOTLAND - 2006
The British Labour Movement and the Lessons of History:
A clearly observable pattern of swinging from industrial action to parliamentary action exists throughout the history of our labour movement. The key lesson from this variable pattern is the need for parliamentary representation to work hand-in-hand with extra-parliamentary action.
The failure of the 1832 Reform Act to bring any benefit to the working class contributed to the development of trade union struggle in the succeeding years, which was truncated by legal repression. Later in the decade, the Chartist movement fought against the harsh exploitation of early capitalism by putting forward demands exclusively in terms of parliamentary reform.
This movement, the first mass workers’ party in the world, according to Engels, was cast into two wings, the physical and the moral force elements, or revolutionary and evolutionary. The British labour movement has wrestled with this tension ever since.
The 1860s saw developing pressure from the unions for safety, contractual and trade union legislation, along with the further extension of the franchise, which was followed by significant social reforms. In 1868 the TUC was formed and its executive was known as the Parliamentary Committee. Whilst the 1869 Labour Representation League had the sole objective of promoting the registration of working men as voters and to secure the return of workers to Parliament; trades union MPs were little more than a wing of the Liberal Party.
It’s not often acknowledged that both Marx and Engels not only wrote about deep theoretical questions, as long-term `asylum seekers’ in Britain, they also observed and participated in our labour movement. Engels was able to see for himself the development of mass trades unionism in Britain late in the 19th century and learnt important lessons from this. Only a short while before he died, Engels wrote of the British unions that they were a “sleeping giant”, slow to rouse but powerfully ferocious when on the rampage. He had seen an early form of this half a century before in Manchester; workers could not attack the existing order of society at “any sorer point than this”. But even in 1844, he thought that: “Something more is needed than unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class.”
No-one admired the British trade union movement more than Engels. “As schools of war they are unexcelled”. The French, with their revolutionary tradition had it easy, for “what is death … in comparison with gradual starvation” in the massive and solid strikes of the British working class. Surely, he thought, a people that can endure so much “to bend one single bourgeoise will be able to break the power of the whole bourgeoisie”.
Marx posed the historical significance of trade union struggle sharply in his `The Poverty of Philosophy’. (The title of this work was a pun on a dreadful anarchistic thing called the `Philosophy of Poverty’!) Here the argument was that a rise in wages merely put up prices and strikes were a blind alley. But for Marx, while trades unionism could take on a political character in the “veritable civil war” for higher wages, the notion that it could just be hitched up to the revolutionary wagon was dismissed as naïve ultra-leftism.
On the other side of the spectrum, right-leaning theorists in Germany twisted Marx’s economic thinking and put forward the notion of the `iron law of wages’. In essence this suggested that workers could never improve their lot no matter what they did; only winning elections could help. (Sounds familiar!) Marx countered that capitalism did operate a physical minimum, which kept workers alive, but that a social element also existed that reflected the balance of power between capital and labour – strikes could make a difference, for a while at least. To make the most of this, we needed unions that were mass in character, not semi-political revolutionary organisations.
But, in `Value, Price and Profit’ Marx wrote that even if unions “work well as centres of resistance” they “fail generally by limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system”. In addition to their original tasks, trade unions needed to become “focal points for the organisation of the working class”, to rally around them even workers still outside of their ranks. Collective agreements won by unions from employers could “only be considered a truce” and whilst unions needed to act politically, Marx fought against piling unions and workers’ political parties into one heap. The aims might be the same but specific methods of working towards this needed to be recognised.
Some of this theoretical analysis touched the rising workers’ movement in Britain. In the first half of the 1880s, socialism began to take root. The best known of the early organisations was the Democratic Federation, founded in 1881. By 1884 it had adopted a socialist programme and become the Social Democratic Federation. In 1888, Keir Hardie stood unsuccessfully as an independent third-party candidate in a by-election in Mid-Lanark. His role in the eventually successful effort to establish an independent party appealing to working-class interests and with substantial trade union support was very considerable indeed but at the outset he did not proclaim a clear socialist message.
His Scottish Labour Party was not a major force and was eventually overtaken by the formation of the Independent Labour Party in January 1893 in Bradford. First and foremost this was to be a party independent of the Liberals and Conservatives. It included in its programme a range of demands of direct and immediate concern to workers, including an eight-hour day and the abolition of sweated and child labour. This was a historic step forward, albeit that the socialist message was vague and not a single national trade union was involved.
In 1899 both the Scottish TUC and the British TUC adopted resolutions calling for new efforts to secure an increased number of (small `L’) labour MPs. The TUC decision was passed by a far from unanimous vote of 546,000 to 434,000. The successful resolution called upon the cooperative, socialist, trade union and other workers' organisations to join in convening a special congress 'to devise ways and means for securing the return of an increased number of labour members to the next Parliament' and this became the Labour Representation Committee.
The decisive factor came not from debate on ideology but from the Taff Vale railway strike of 1900. The House of Lords held that the funds of the main railway union were liable for damages arising out of a strike of its members. The uncertainty impelled unions into demanding more say in parliament and, at the 1906 elections, no less than 30 labour members were elected and there were also 24 successful trade union candidates, who fought as Lib-Labs.
The 13 SDF, or otherwise outright socialist candidates, who fought independently were all defeated. The SDF withdrew from the LRC in August 1910 and thus isolated itself from a growing number of unions. Despite its sectarianism, the SDF helped to train many who played an outstanding part in the development of the labour movement.
Among the rank-and-file of the SDF there was a significant body of opinion at various times in favour of unity with the ILP. In 1911 the SDF's successor organisation, the Social Democratic Party, was joined by a breakaway group from the ILP and a number of independent socialists to form the British Socialist Party. After an internal faction fight against chauvinism, the Marxist BSP affiliated to the Labour Party in 1916. It was not until 1918 that the Labour Party finally formally asserted its socialist commitment. The Russian revolutions of 1917 had opened a new era in world history. But the Communist Party, partially formed from much of the BSP was denied the right to affiliate.
In October 1925, the Labour Party conference rejected the Communist Party's application for affiliation and confirmed that its members could neither represent their unions in Labour Party organisations or be individual members. This was a signal to the Tory government. A few days later it arrested 12 Communist leaders on a charge of "seditious conspiracy". Five were sentenced to a year in prison and the others to six months, to keep them out of the battle to come.
Far from being intimidated, the party's activities intensified. Its press circulation grew and new members were made. Above all, it worked to get the movement to prepare for the next round of struggle, warning again and again that the government was determined on a showdown with the miners when coal subsidies expired in May 1926. The employers were well-prepared for the contest, but the right-wing TUC general council made no plans. Rank-and-file pressure forced the decision for a general strike in support of the miners, locked-out for their refusal to submit to a wage cut. The nine days of the General Strike by more than three million workers uniting in tremendous class solidarity and initiative, in which Communists played an outstanding role, were among the most glorious in British working class history.
Well in advance, the Communist Party had initiated the call for Councils of Action. They were set up in many areas, representing the whole working class movement, organising picketing, co-ordinating activities, issuing publicity materials and in some cases controlling transport. The Party issued a strike sheet, the Workers Bulletin, reaching a circulation of 200,000. Over 1,000 Communists were arrested out of a total of some 2,500 arrests. One result of the party's contribution to the struggle was a big increase in its membership from 5,000 before the strike to 10,000 by September 1926.
But its influence was not great enough to prevent the betrayal by right-wing leaders, who called off the strike when it was strongest and closest to victory, without any concessions to the miners who battled on alone for a further seven months. Communists continued to fight for solidarity with the miners, campaigning for a levy on wages to give them financial support and for an embargo on the transport of coal. Whilst the titanic struggle came to a tragic end, it stimulated the demand for dispossession of the private coal owners of the mines, which finally became irresistible. It was Welsh Communist miners' leader Arthur Horner who wrote: "If there had been no '26, there would not have been such a tremendous feeling for nationalisation after the Second World War."
For the Communist Party, the lesson of the strike and its betrayal was the need to strengthen the unions, to step up the fight against collaboration, to work for a new leadership of the labour movement and to build and strengthen the Party itself. For the right-wing, the lesson was "never again." They had not wanted the strike, had been pushed into it and called it off as soon as possible; Communists now had to be removed. So, the Labour leadership set about a great purge of the Communists and the left in the Labour Party. This led to a reactive opposition from Communists, a left turn that some have in retrospect decried but which was unavoidable and actually led to a growth in Party membership.
Whilst it is clear that New Labour represents something quite different than traditional right wing reformism, an ideological stance in the party that jettisons class analysis is not new. The left-unity “National Left Wing Movement” began in June 1928 with the conclusion that the Labour Party was "no longer a working class party but a party representing all sections of the community". Communists now organised unemployed workers’ activity around Labour Exchanges, fought benefit cases on behalf of the jobless and mobilised for the great marches of the South Wales miners in 1927, the Scottish unemployed march in 1928 and the national Hunger Marches of 1929, 1930, 1932, and 1936, all predating the establishment admired Jarrow March of that latter year.
They also pioneered the campaign for colonial liberation at a time when a quarter of the world's population were living under British rule in a vast Empire. British Communists, sent to India to help build the trade unions, were jailed for conspiracy in the famous Meerut Trial of 1929-33. The young Will Paynter got four months in jail for his part in an anti-British Empire demonstration, and 20-year old John Gollan, later the party's general secretary, got six months for anti-militarist activities.
In 1931, when the bankers demanded a 10% cut in unemployment benefit, the Labour government split. Its leaders, MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas, went over to the Tories and Liberals to form a National Government, another betrayal which had a devastating effect on the Labour movement.
In the 1930s, British Communists’ leading role in building militant rank-and-file movements among engineering workers, railwaymen, miners and London bus crews, strengthened the party's industrial base, all described by Harry Pollitt in 1935 as "a revolution within the party". The fight against fascism and war became dominant and the Communist Party built mass opposition to Fascism. Its finest hour was in October 1936 when Mosley’s attempt to stage a march through East London, well-protected by masses of police, was crushed in the historic Battle of Cable Street. Right-wing advice was to ignore the fascists and keep away from anti-fascist activity. The Communist response, that retreat before fascist aggressiveness only increased its appetite, was proved again and again.
The struggle in Spain became the focal point of the fight against fascism, and millions of people in Britain rallied in solidarity while the right-wing Labour leadership adopted a policy of 'non-intervention'. The Aid for Spain movement, in which Communists played a leading role, was organised on a national scale for sending medical supplies and food ships. Of the British Battalion of the International Brigade, composed of 1,500 volunteers, about half were Communists, as were half of the 533 who were killed.
The labour movement's official leadership rejected all Communist approaches for united action, and indeed intensified its anti-Communist campaign by banning Party members from being delegates to Trades Councils. Communist policy and leadership attracted many people who were deeply concerned about the drive to war. By 1939, Daily Worker circulation had grown to over 40,000 daily, with a weekend average of nearly 80,000. The party's membership reached nearly 18,000 just before the war. During the war, Communists led the fight for adequate air raid protection and led the building of a powerful shop stewards organisation and Party membership more than doubled. At the spring 1945 Labour Party conference, the Engineering Union sponsored the proposal to allow Communist affiliation, registering the closest vote ever recorded on such an issue, loosing only by vote of 1.3 million to 1.2 million.
A few weeks later, at the 1945 general election, a Labour government was swept into power by a landslide victory. The Communist Party’s 1945 congress noted that unless Labour changed its foreign policy, “which is simply the continuation of the imperialist line of the Tory Party and the reactionary monopoly capitalists there can be no fundamental social progress in Britain”.
Needless to say, Labour waged colonial wars in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, supported the US war in Korea, the French war in Vietnam and the Dutch war in Indonesia. It joined the NATO cold war drive, backed West German rearmament, turned Britain into a US bomber base and fought for its own nuclear weapons.
The consequence was chronic economic crisis, wage restraint, cuts in living standards and the social services that led to a Tory comeback at the 1951 general election and 13 years of Tory rule with prices, rents and profits rocketing amidst the ever-present menace of nuclear war. Communists influence in the labour movement helped play a decisive part in the intensive struggles of the late 60s and early 70s that released the Pentonville 5, supported the UCS work-in and waged the successful miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974. Out of the experience gained in these struggles came the development of a left alternative economic and political strategy.
Labour's 1973 programme reflected the mass struggles by urging 'a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of the working people'. But first the Wilson and then the Callaghan governments pursued a course which placed the burdens of resolving the chronic crisis of British capitalism on working people.
The Social Contract of 1974-1979 under Labour governments did not see calls for disaffiliation but a struggle to oppose policy. But ideological confusion about the nature of the labour movement, the role of the State and strategies for the future was by no mean confined to the Labour Party. Major theoretical ambiguity set in during this period even in the Communist Party. The term anti-monopoly alliance in the Party’s strategic programme was replaced by broad democratic alliance, on the assurance to congress by the executive committee that its main content was intended to be anti-monopoly. After that, revisionists in the Party increasingly presented its notion of alliances as a unity of single issue new social forces, which were said to have no basis in class society or class interests. The labour movement was treated as no more than just another movement, and not the leading force in struggle. Not surprisingly, Party membership began to crumble even before the fractious period of the 1980s saw it slide to destruction.
So, where are we now? The majority of large unions remain affiliated to Labour; unions such as the PCS, the NUJ and NUT are not affiliated and never have been. Only RMT has been disaffiliated for allowing its branches to affiliate to political parties other than Labour and FBU has voluntarily left, in circumstances that hardly suggest a strategic plan. The overwhelming bulk of the unions are solidly set for the ‘reclaim’ Labour course, largely because they sense that ‘new’ Labour is a clique with few roots in the party. Indeed, the level of Labour Party membership and activity is currently so low that in fact the balance of power has shifted towards affiliated unions. Clearly, at best, any thoughts of a major realignment that links unions with a new left formation must be viewed as conjectural and at that only for the long-term, assuming little else changes.
The electoral system works against new formations, indeed the founding of the Labour Party was itself in the shadow of the Liberal Party and we have our own version of the response to Taff Vale, the Trade Union Freedom Bill, on hundred years on. But Labour’s greatest weakness is undoubtedly its denial of the importance of theory, even if its greatest strength is mass, if rather strained, loyalty. Invariably, which side of the pendulum swing Labour is at has depended on the level of union confidence and militancy.
There is currently some debate amongst professors of industrial relations as to what part of these cycles we are currently at. In Britain, our difficulty is that anti-union laws cloud the picture. The universal application of strike ballots has actually created a situation where employers and unions test the water and employers cave in if they feel a sufficiently strong indication that a strike will occur. Unions also reach for non-striking forms of industrial action. Some struggles have faded because an alternative exists, closures and lay-offs for example; workers judge their attitude on the basis of how good the package is. None of these indications will feature in official records. But who is to say that a relative return to militancy has not already happened but is masked by other factors.
It may seem optimistic to ask how trade unionism can be harnessed to revolutionary ambitions. But it is how gains are won and losses conceded, and how the inter-mix is generally perceived, that determines whether unions can act in a political or revolutionary way. The gains or losses in themselves are perhaps in historical terms of limited significance. At root, the potential for change is intimately related to the requirement that organised workers translate their sectional consciousness into a collective consciousness. Organised workers, with or without trade union bureaucracies are quite capable of discovering (once again!) rank-and-file militancy. But revolutionaries cannot be satisfied with spontaneity.
Without socialist consciousness, workers inevitably end up "solving" their problems within the existing system, on the terms of the existing system. Revolutionaries have an obligation to contract into the mass movement, since the spontaneous struggle of the workers will not become class struggle unless it is channelled by an organisation of revolutionaries. Unions can indeed be "schools of war", as Engels had it. Our concern has to be how we start the school year, at a time when the trade union movement restricts itself to "realistic" struggle.
Industrial militancy is by no means a thing of the past, but ebbs and flows with the tide of boom and slump. Strike waves generally occur at the conjunction of such economic changes, either as workers strive to hang onto gains or struggle to achieve them. Only if unions can be won to act in tandem with a mass socialist movement can we contemplate progress to substantive demands of the movement. Hence, the question of how we can locate a renewed confidence of the left within the trade unions as an integral part of a reconstituted left in the political sphere assumes central importance.
Some questions for discussion, then:
Is the Labour Party simply a bourgeois party?
Should Communists be active in the Labour Party?
How should we attempt to build a bridge to the Labour left?
Should trade unionists pay the political levy?
How should political funds of union be used and controlled?
Should socialists fight for trade unions to disaffiliate from the Labour Party?
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2006 49TH CONGRESS CPB – SPEECH ON
BUILDING THE PARTY
AND MOVING THE REPORT OF THE COMMISSION ON PARTY ORGANISATION
The notion of a strategy for Party growth and development, which is at the heart of EC Resolution 3, came out of the report of the Commission on Party organisation, which at the outset I need to formally introduce. The written report is in the Congress documentation but you will readily appreciate that the main, self-evident weakness before us was the small size of the Party. But you should note that what really concerned us were two things:
• Firstly, the fact that the CPB is not a truly national organisation, given that there are vast swathes of Britain where there is not a single Communist within miles of each other.
• Secondly, the massive gender imbalance arising from the relatively low level of involvement of women in the Party when we consider their comparatively high level of involvement in the contemporary labour, peace and progressive movements
We started from the political assessment that the building of a stronger Communist Party is an essential pre-condition for wider advancement of our class; but also that the weakness in Communist Party membership is in contradiction to the positive nature of the growth in Party activity in the past few years. It follows from these considerations that both recruitment and organisation and issues of membership retention and involvement must become critical political concerns for the whole Party.
We punch well above our weight but few on the Left give recognition to this by joining us. The Party, its activists and leadership - whilst by no means a gerontocracy - is hardly the fountain of youth. Yet Communist iconography is more popular than ever amongst young people and the grip of cold war anti-communism that repelled many from us has long since melted.
Whilst our `unique selling proposition’ is one that is truly special to the international communist movement; Communists can be found in virtually every country in the globe. Whilst our ideological and political positions vary, a sense of commonality does unite us - more than is the case with any other single political tendency on the planet. Communist Parties are huge and growing in many eastern and southern countries. Some are parties close to us, bound by historical ties. Our South African comrades have doubled their Party’s size in a mere four years, our Cypriot comrades are now the largest party in their land and our Indian comrades have outstripped all records in recent electoral successes.
Communists are the most consistent and clearest opponents of war, racism and poverty; we are the proudest supporters of internationalism and are fearlessly courageous in the face of oppression, generally the first to sacrifice ourselves for others. And, unquestionably, there are tens of thousands of people in our own country who consider themselves a Communist of sorts but who do not hold a CPB membership card.
Yet, of the huge number of genuine expressions of interest in Communist Party membership received by the Centre, few are translated into membership. Many members hold a `disassociated relationship’ to Party structures, turn-over and retention is problematic, whilst the focus of Party work is to service existing structures.
We need to create outward-facing, fighting organisations that attract the attention of those seeking a dynamic, revolutionary alternative. It can be done! Yet we should not be hidebound by tradition as to what form of organisational structure is best. A magnificent leap forward in Party organisation and materials has already transformed our image. But we need more and better use of modern communications throughout the Party. We all need to be using e-mail and a range of interest networks should be built; we should better use DVDs, laptops, camcorders, our own website and those of others, texting and mobile phones.
Are all our meetings really necessary and is there another way to organise? Is the branch the sole possible focus and how are we to enliven them anyway? A chance for all members to be active has to be made. What is our development plan for each and every member, let alone Party organisation? Older comrades really should think about whether they should now at long last make space on committees and leadership roles for newer members. Let go. They won’t mess it up, you know. This is not 1984 and we are not the Communist Party of Great Britain. The events of those dark days are a matter of history to an increasing number of our members. History should provide lessons but we do not need to relive it blow for blow.
A more formal leadership role for Executive Committee members than merely attending its meetings is needed. We always have the finest political analysis but at times it seems that organisational questions are not considered to be political; yet organisation is the very stuff of politics.
The Party, across the whole country, in the nations, districts, branches, localities, workplaces, in its work in broad organisations, needs a clear and achievable plan for its own growth. Such a plan needs to recognise a number of key changes in society, changes that suggest a high priority for our identity as a part of the international communist movement. Above all, we need to note:
• The prominence of black and ethnic populations, especially in the major cities, which contrasts with the absence of the Party from this arena.
• The consequences of a shift from a core workforce to a `peripheral’ workforce, which implies challenges for our conception of the organised working class.
• The domination of trans-national corporations in an ever more connected internationalised economy, which has implications for the internationalisation of our industrial work.
• Recent advances of a more vigorous YCL and the open-mindedness of youth about Communism, which suggests possibilities for a systematic plan to rejuvenate the Party over time.
A Communist approach to Party growth will be based upon an outward-going strategy of realistic and measured outcomes. Whilst such an approach needs to strike a balance between central planning and devolved activity, we must recognise that we live in an open society, in a compact country with relatively good communications and that we are a tiny party. We may need an expanded central organisation `department’ and even roving recruitment teams. We may need to target specific localities for planned explosions of growth.
The most far-reaching previous Commission on Party organisation, some three quarters of a century ago, ushered in what is often termed `Bolshevisation’ into a Party that had roots as a federation of autonomous propagandist societies. It made us a Communist Party and a revisionist onslaught nearly brought that reality to an end. We are now at a new stage in our history.
This Commission focused on the same objective; and both the EC and now, during the amending process, Party organisations have largely followed its course. I, for one, am proud of our Party. I’m proud of those branches that have opted in the amending process to signal that they too call once and for all for a more rigorous Communist approach to organisation.
The sheer magnitude of the scale of the reverses sustained by British Communism in the last twenty years is simply not sufficiently understood outside the ranks of mainly veteran members of the Party. We have to be brutally honest to ourselves and those outside our ranks just how devastating these reverses have been and how weak we are. The enemy knows it, our friends do not; and we will not grow until we stop being embarrassed about ourselves.
We need to make it abundantly clear to potential members that they should step in, for it will make them grow tall as well as bulking the Party up. For this is a Party that we can all be proud of; the maturity of our ideological and organisational unity has been a significant factor in maintaining what we have today. But our commitment from hereon to a strategy for growth can be the hallmark by which we will know the true quality of our revolutionary zeal.
Those amendments that call for more flexibility and creativity in applying ourselves to this task have captured the spirit of this resolution entirely. This resolution is all about utilising imaginative styles of work. Indeed, it’s time for us to make a few risky decisions, even to make a few mistakes in the course of innovating, refreshing and renewing our work.
But it is a salutary lesson that, in seeking to highlight our deep concern at the marginalisation of women in our Party, the original resolution neglected the even more difficult task of how we relate to minority and ethnic groups. Strangely, whilst the Communist Parties of many domiciled parties here in the UK are very strong in their homelands, we have failed to attain a wider reach in relevant communities and localities.
The amending observation on the need for a National Organiser is an interesting one and, personally I’m inclined to the notion. It will be interesting to hear views, although I’m sure comrades will understand why it should be for the new EC to consider the specifics of such a proposal. In a similar vein, the new EC will want to consider its own meeting arrangements but it is only right that we all begin to think carefully about whether our style of work is fit for purpose or purposely frightful.
Those who argue for local development plans make a valuable point, as do the calls for recognising the need to plan for the solidity, but excitement too I hope, of sound Marxist Education for new members.
The resolution, with its supportive amendments, represents the most effective analysis for building the Party for two decades and more. The newly amended version that we can all unite around will set many aims for the Party but it boils down to four key areas in a wide range of achievable but ambitious targets.
• Firstly, the building of a truly national Party with a leadership that fulfils its role under our constitution to closely monitor and control the work of all Party organisations in a national plan of regeneration. We should not dilute this need in any way; the absence of effective organisation, the denial of accountability and performance, simply makes us less effective Communists not nicer ones!
• Secondly, Congress will signal to the new EC that the gender imbalance in the Party is a major political issue for it to address; that there needs to be continuous improvement of our organisational work and a cadre development plan; with maximum support to the YCL in the context of a joint approach to growth.
• Thirdly, we want more! More of everything. More action, more presence. More and better Communist Universities, even more of a Party profile on demonstrations and similar events; with further priority for Communist Review and the Morning Star.
• The good work that does go on must be more widely publicised and we need a publishing plan for books, pamphlets, leaflets, stickers, posters, internet and e-mail facilities, T-shirts, etc., etc., and a collective to develop this.
This Congress must make abundantly clear to our allies that a stronger Communist Party, in terms of its membership, finance, organisation and sales of publications, would have a qualitatively powerful impact upon the struggle to win a significant turn to the left. As the resolution itself states: “In short - the building of a stronger Communist Party is an essential pre-condition for any advancement of left politics.”
Forward to a united, stronger and more audacious Communist Party of Britain! A growing and confident Communist Party, rooted in all the communities of our nations. Building a bigger, better and bolder Communist Party is our most important current political task, that’s the message this Congress needs to take away from today. I move.
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COMMUMIST PARTY POLITICAL STATEMENT – NOV 2004
Since the Party’s last EC meeting, events in Britain and the world seem to confirm an assessment that the current stage in state monopoly capitalism is a profoundly serious one.
We are, it seems a severely unwell nation! The very quality of life we have it as risk. Wherever we look, there are signs. Even soldiers, it seems. Lord Lloyd’s inquiry into Gulf War syndrome has brought the first good news for the 6,000 sufferers of this condition in the past 13 years. War does make you ill! But no matter, the use of depleted uranium continues.
It’s difficult to be curmudgeonly about the regular arrival of ceaseless new Government proposals on health. But all of these – on smoking, on school meals, on food labelling and so on - sit uneasily with wholesale surrender to lobbying by the vested interests of the big corporations. Being obsessed with denouncements of unhealthy life styles avoids the need to address the high price of foodstuffs, the monopolisation of distribution and the elimination of alternatives. Fat teenagers are surely made all the more likely when there are 52,000 16-24 years olds homeless or in make-shift accommodation.
Perhaps it’s the style of seeming to be busy about governing but actually doing nothing of substance that accounts for some of this? For all one’s aversion to the snobbery and cruelty of hunting with dogs, the irrelevance of the fox hunting saga might be yet another manifestion of this foible of electoralism. The latest Charlesgate furore is another sign of the Government seeming to mobilise class feeling without challenging capitalism.
It’s clear that evidence about the simple correlation between length of life span, where you life and what you do for a living is abundant. Yet tinkering with the NHS to provide the illusion of choice does not address these questions. Post code lotteries, reveal the absence of a social policy on health, an absence of workplace health provisions, of community health centre screening – for the estimated 1 million who have diabetes but do not know it, for example. Collective solutions that address the root cause of social inequalities or weaknesses are anthema to the Bairites.
Only in one year out for the last ten has there been no major rail accident. There have been several relating to level crossings recently. No major railway nation, in an area as built up as Britain, fails to segregate road and rail. As ever, it’s a case of profit before people.
The lobby of parliament by public sector workers in defence of their pensions is indicative of the continued significance of the issue of workplace related schemes. Even public sector schemes are now vulnerable to market based investment planning and this is related to the strategy of European capitalism, so clearly marked out in the Lisbon summit.
Whilst all of this amounts to a picture of neglect of social infrastucture and a decaying of the value of human needs, it is the state’s increasing reliance on authoritarian solutions that needs our immediate focus. Recent examples abound. Measures to prevent “economic sabotage” are justified on the grounds of preventing animal rights activists’ targeting the homes of directors of testing laboratories. Yet this could easily be widened, in the courts, to inhibit trade unionists and others engaged in anti-monopoly activity. The new law curbing the right to protest on the grounds that Brain Haw's long-standing peace protest is "visually unattractive" is more than a blow for one class’s version of aestheticism.
Both the continued failure to shift Blair and Bush's re-election signal more than an assault on progressive politics, these failures confirm the strengthening of reaction across the globe and the failure of liberal bourgeoise democracy to address the real needs of ordinary people.
Downing Street's vulnerability to popular concern over the safety of UK military was well illustrated when it tried to prevent relatives of soldiers who have died in Iraq from laying a wreath. The demand of bringing British troops home is the key to further anti-war action. This is a weak spot in the chain of capitalism and we need to strike as hard as we can at it.
Across the Atlantic, despite the death of more than 1,000 US soldiers and countless (and uncounted) Iraqis, the absence of weapons of mass destruction and Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration won the approval of a majority of the American people.
A nation drunk on the spoils of war applauds the aggression of those closest to it. Hardly a day goes by without more evidence of Israeli brutality, as with the savage onslaught against a refugee camp in the south of the Gaza strip, leaving 17 dead Palestinians, including many children, and another 84 injured.
This is no passing phase, a product of hanging chads. There is now an element of political polarisation even in the US, with the likelihood of the Christian fundamentalism of the so-called moral majority unravelling a 50-year settlement that has asserted the rights of women, blacks and, more recently, gays. Opposition to affirmative action, or abortion rights, could win out with a conservative takeover of all three branches of the American government. They say that if the US sneezes, the rest of the world goes down with flu.
Yet, contrary to the anti-historical announcement that the end of history is upon us… "No-one is forgotten. Nothing is forgotten," as a new memorial to the million-plus victims of the siege of Leningrad says.
The stance of the US offers prospects for its isolation. This is not a unipolar world, with one major power. Not only is there the potential for inter-imperialist rivalry, the other major power in the world is progressive public opinion, anti-imperialism. Just one example: Washington’s blockade of Cuba has, yet again, been condemned by the UN general assembly, now for the 13th successive year.
The rapidly rising powers of India and, above all, China raise very serious questions about the future of global politics. China’s economic growth rate is still at a staggering level. In the last couple of weeks, serious questions have been raised by a number of states on the future of the UN, an issue we have debated but perhaps will need to keep under review?
A certain consequence of Bush's re-election will pave the way to the arming of space. In the last couple of weeks, it has become clear that the US air force has, for the first time, adopted a doctrine of 'space superiority'. This means research into 'space-based interceptors' and a programme to site weapons in space capable of pre-emptive strikes against satellites. The plan is for up to six spacecraft in orbit. The 1967 outer space treaty, which outlaws the use of weapons in orbit, will be ignored.
The US is encouraging Britain to become involved. US interceptor missiles will be based at Fylingdales and the MOD has already sent experts to work on this to the US. In contrast, Jacques Chirac insists that the globe is more multi-polar than ever and expressed fresh doubts about the invasion of Iraq saying it had left "the world more dangerous".
Turning to domestic matters, it is a measure of how desperate the situation must be, to see the valiant attempts by many in the labour movement to maintain enthusiasm for Gordon Brown, probably the likely successor to Blair. His own pronouncements become more Blair-like every day. Forget the government solving the pensions crisis, he tells the National Association of Pension Funds. Then he denounced the European Commission’s proposals for a 35% increase in its budget. Then, he launched a campaign against proposals to axe Britain's EU rebate, which would cost the exchequer an extra £3.5bn a year.
One of the undertakings given by the government at the National Policy Forum at Warwick was that it would support domestic manufacturing sector. There’s precious little sign of it. French-owned Alstom announced that a thousand jobs will be lost from what used to be Metro-Cammell in Birmingham to Spain. In response, Brown played his EU card by announcing a Treasury inquiry into the French and Spanish practice of insisting on quotas for nationally produced goods and services, for example trains used on their national rail lines. The next step would be to ask the Commission to ban the practice. But this will be of little use to Britain if it has no domestic train making facility left. Where are the measures to safeguard British industry?
Isn’t all this no more than positioning by Brown to convince big business he is a safe bet? The orthodoxy of the Treasury is legendary. It also chimes perfectly with Brown’s politics. His recent fiscal handling has seen a cut back on planned spending on current infrastructure costs to meet his self-imposed `golden rule’ of matching current and capital expenditure with tax receipts; whilst borrowing is only allowed on long term infrastructure projects. It is also interesting to conjucture that the recent subtle distancing of Brown from aspects of the European project betrays more than a hint of an Atlanticist strategy.
After last month’s rise to £4.85 an hour, the CBI says that it wants the already meagre minimum wage frozen and increased only to just over £5 an hour in 2006. Such a rise would be well below the average rise in earnings, leaving the low paid to fall even further behind the national average.
It’s hard to decide whether to assign the stupidity of the business decisions of Royal Mail more to the aching desire of the logistics, mail and parcels transnationals to spread their tentacles across the developed world than to the widespread culture of arrogance and greed of Britain’s fat cats. Both are tangible evidence of the nature of contemporary capitalism.
Jaguar's chief executive has told the trade and industry select committee that the future viability of the firm, and all its 8,000 workers, was under threat unless the closure of Brown’s Lane goes ahead and that they will not heed the joint unions campaign to save 1,150 Jaguar jobs. The dramatic drop in demand for Jaguars in America, partly due to the strong pound, has supposedly prompted Ford to demand sweeping cuts.
As for the Tories they are in deep trouble. They are eight points behind Labour - the biggest gap since May 2003, when Duncan-Smith was leader. Michael Howard has achieved the distinction of becoming even more unpopular than Tony Blair in the country at large - and even less popular among Tory voters than the prime minister is among Labour supporters. Yet two-thirds of his party members cannot name a credible alternative. Howard admits to being frustrated because he faces a prime minister whose main feature is to "look and sound like a Tory". Well tell us something we don’t know!
The dominating theme of Tony Blair’s recent Mansion House speech is instructive: “We have a unique role to play,” he said. “Call it a bridge, a two lane motorway, a pivot or call it a damn high wire, which is how it often feels; our job is to keep our sights firmly on both sides of the Atlantic.” Perhaps it is as much our internationalist duty to do the same thing? The encouraging report given to the EC about our links with like-minded parties, indicating a broadening and deepening of our relationships must surely apply as significantly to our links with the CPUSA as it must of European Parties.
There can be not truck with the concept of `our imperialism’. In the way that the European TUC has contrasted the EU with the USA. There is no `better’ capitalism. The looming clouds of war have visited Europe in Yugoslavia. It is up to the progr