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Historically, there have always been two strains within the British trade unions; the conservative,
deferential, friendly society tradition, and the unconquerable, fighting, revolutionary side'.
The future of the trade unions
In 1983, after Labour's second general election defeat in succession, Militant alone kept faith in the ability of the working class to fight. The June 1983 election was followed by the TUC Conference. There the Alistair Graham/Len Murray axis of 'New Realism' was in the ascendant, with talk of how objectively the power of the working class had been undermined, how the workers would not struggle and how, if they did, they would lose. The best that could be done, they said, was to throw aside talk of confrontation and, in effect, to go statesmanlike to the employers and government asking them to be 'fair'
The Tories answered this grovelling with GCHQ and the snatching away of trade union rights. The more these 'leaders' bent down at Thatcher's feet, the more she kicked them in the teeth. The most crushing answer came, though, from the miners with their magnificent year long strike. In the course of that strike Len Murray retired to read poetry and smell flowers, and, with a little help from Militant supporters, Alistair Graham soon followed.
'New Realism'
Now, following Labour's third consecutive election defeat, 'New Realism' is back in an even more degenerate form. The higher echelons of the trade union movement are gripped by a sense of utter helplessness. Their message to shop stewards, convenors, branch officials and other rank and file trade union members is: Nothing can be done.'
Fundamentally, the union leaders fail to grasp the irreconcilable gulf that exists between the classes in capitalist society. Marx explained 140 years ago that the class struggle is sometimes nakedly clear, while at other times-times of relative capitalist stability- it is more hidden. Class relations were softened in the period after the second world war during the protracted economic upswing. Then a material basis existed for the privileged, parasitic existence of the trade union bureaucracy. Capitalism was expanding, certain reforms could be granted to the working class. The union leaders imagined that it was their deft negotiating skills which secured all the reforms of those years. In reality, even at this time. reforms were secured by the pressure of ordinary workers, by trade union action
By Brian Ingham
or by the threat of action, often in the teeth of harsh repressive action by the union leaders.
Now we are in an entirely different epoch. The engine of world capitalism has been thrown into reverse. Rather than leading to some great new revival of British capitalism, the present weak boomlet is already proving to be ephemeral. Capitalism has pulled the rug from under the feet of the union leaders. Their 'realism' is totally removed from reality.
The 1987 TUC Congress revealed where trade union leaders can end up without perspectives, without theory, It was clear that the trade union leaders had absorbed lock, stock and barrel all the talk of the Tory press that the unions were 'marginalised'. Moreover, as the Labour Party Conference one month later again demonstrated, they had also swallowed wholesale the idea that Thatcher had found a formula for the rescue of British capitalism.
Marxist theory is absolutely indispensible for any union leader at any level who is striving to give adequate fighting leadership. In navigation, it the soundings are miscalculated, a pilot's chart can be dangerously wrong, leading the pilot to steer the ship into disaster. So it is in the unions for those leaders who are not armed with the chart of Marxist theory and perspectives. Without an understanding of the real problems that are developing for trade union members, it is impossible to point the correct way forward strategically or tactically. In the last few years they have stumbled from one disaster to another, one incorrect analysis has paved the way to set-backs which have then led to further wrong conclusions being drawn. In the process they have imperiled the material well-being of millions of ordinary union members.
In his writings on the unions in the 1930s, Trotsky brilliantly answered, in advance, these supposedly modern 'New Realists'. He explained that capitalist crisis absolutely exhausts any reforming role for the trade union leaders. They are faced ultimately with one of two alternatives: either to turn to the ideas of Marxism, to link together the day-to-day struggles with the need to change society, to try to raise the level of understanding of workers when they are in struggle, when they are
thinking, questioning, looking for a way forward. Or they can attempt to reconcile themselves with the existence of capitalism in decline, ending up as policemen of their own class. With the House of Lords, the courts, the press, they become another institution of capitalism, in fact a decisive institution, holding back the working class.
Attempts to moderate the movement, to find a middle road, are being made today by leaders in all the unions. Open business trade unionism is being practiced by the EETPU leaders and to some extent also by the leaders of the AEU. The EETPU leaders organised a strike breaking force at Wapping and, scandalously, got away scot free. Their punishment was a polite tap on the knuckles from the TUC leaders. They have also hawked around no-strike deals, attempting to make their tender for membership rights irresistible to employers. They have sold historic trade union rights sometimes even before one worker has entered the factory gate.
The AEU
The AEU leaders have done their best to emulate the class collaboration deals of the EETPU. Bill Jordan, the president of the AEU, became the darling of the media at this year's TUC. He effectively said that it is not the employers who are the enemy, but Germany and Japan. In other words, British workers have to collaborate with their employers to smash the German and Japanese workers. New technology has opened up the possibility for a far shorter, far less intense working week. Jordan's response was to negotiate for a certain reduction in hours, but, in return, to help the engineering bosses to intensify exploitation, get rid of conditions which have been won over generations, and gain greatly enhanced flexibility, including flexibility over the number of hours worked at different times of the year. This agreement would have brought about a rapid deterioration in shop floor conditions and in the quality of life for engineering workers and their families.
'Is there no limit to the fall?' 'Are there no depths to which the trade union leaders will not sink?' In recent years these questions have been asked repeatedly by active workers within the unions. Engineering workers have recently given the answer. How far the union leaders go in their collaboration
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BETTER SERVICE
LESS EXCESS PROFIT
The NCU gives a glimpse or what is to come. layers, understand far more sharply the crucial at their annual conference.
with capitalist management depends entirely on the pressure they feel from below and whether this is sufficient to overcome the pressure from above of the capitalist class. It was the merciless pressure from below, involving many convenors and shop stewards formerly associated with the right, which forced the AEU leaders, at least for the moment, to abandon their efforts to conclude this deal.
At the 1987 TUC Congress the right displayed a complete smugness and arrogance. As Trotsky explained, they feel that they have got capitalist society behind them. They are lauded by the capitalists' press, slipped ready-made solutions. Every time they take one step against the working class they are praised to the skies. They think they know where they are going. Insulated from the daily uncertainties and worries of the mass of their members, cocooned in their own privileged world, they are hard and ruthless only when it comes to the struggle against the left, particularly the Marxists.
The left themselves swing from one position to another, responding at each stage to those class forces bearing down upon them most. With the situation in front of them today, the total formlessness of the left in the Labour movement is becoming more and more transparent. They launched a verbal assault on
Having deen Doter in patie, many Neu memoers, paniculary among the reading active role of leadership. As a result, John Golding, right, narrowly avolded being called on to resign
the right at this years TUC, but then ceded the ground to the right on one fundamental issue after another. There was a new panacea. If a fundamental problem existed, if there was an issue of principle on which there were irreconcilable differences, the answer was not 'resolve it' but, 'review it'.
Privatisation
On the no-strike deals of the EET- PU, Ron Todd spoke from the rostrum, saying that these deals were questions of principle, fundamental human rights were involved, it was not a question on the margins. But then he advocated shelving the issue to a review body, to come back to the General Council of the TUC. At the TUC Congress the pressures of ordinary trade union members are-to say the least- extremely remote, having been sieved first through different proceedural stages in the individual unions. However, Congress remains far closer to rank and file workers than the rarified inner sanctums of the General Council. The General Council has been undemocratically reconstructed to favour the right, it contains only a handful of lay members and it is removed from the public glare. Hammond is confident that on the General Council he will be exonerated.
The pressure bearing down on the trade union leaders is producing, as was seen at the TUC, deep antagonisms, including intense personal bitterness, between the left and the right. But, with honourable exceptions-and here, at the 1987 TUC, John Macreadie and Arthur Scargill stood out in bold relief-all the union leaders are travelling to the right. In local government, with videos and masses of special literature, NUPE, the GMB, and the TGWU all went to extraordinary lengths to convince their members to sign an agreement that, in reality, is no different from that which Jordan and Laird of the AEU hoped to sign. It involved a certain rise in pay. But it signed away enhanced payment for working weekends, etc. Some of these leaders have used left credentials in order to convince thousands of workers to conclude this deal.
Why? The unwritten idea behind this agreement is that at both national and local level the battle against privatisation is over. The union leaders hope that this deal will make local in-house tendering easier. The national agreement is an impediment to local deals. So, they 'safeguard' the national agreement while at the same time facilitating local in-house tenders with worse conditions. In other words, the national agreement can be broken within the agreement! Logic is made to do somer-
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