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In the Cause of Labour: A History of British Trade Unionism
Von Rob Sewell
Buchaktionen
Mit Lesen beginnenLänge: 779 Seiten11 Stunden
- Herausgeber:
- Wellred
- Freigegeben:
- Feb 5, 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780463176191
- Format:
- Buch
Beschreibung
There are many narrative histories of the struggles of British workers. However, Rob Sewell's book is different.
This book is aimed especially at class-conscious workers who are seeking to escape from the ills of the capitalist system, that has embroiled the world in a quagmire of wars, poverty and suffering. This history of trade unions is particularly relevant at the present time. After a long period of stagnation, the fresh winds of the class struggle are beginning to blow.
Rob Sewell's book was written precisely with these new forces in mind.
The British labour movement is the oldest in the world. More than two hundred years ago, the pioneers of the movement created illegal revolutionary trade unions in the face of the most terrible violence and repression.
In the course of the nineteenth century they built trade unions of the downtrodden unskilled workers - those with "blistered hands and the unshorn chins," as Feargus O'Connor called them. Finally, they established a mass party of Labour based on the trade unions, breaking the monopoly of the Tories and Liberals. In the stormy years following the Russian Revolution they engaged in ferocious class battles, culminating in the General Strike of 1926.
Nor did the achievements of the British trade union movement cease with the Depression and the Second World War. The post-war upswing served to strengthen the working class and heal the scars of the inter-war period. By the time of the industrial tidal wave of the early 1970s, they drove a Tory government from power, after turning Edward Heath's anti-trade union laws into a dead letter. Later, the miners, the traditional vanguard of the British working class, waged an epic year-long struggle in 1984-85 against the juggernaut of Thatcherism. They could have succeeded, had the rightwing Labour and trade union leaders not abandoned them and left them isolated.
The book contains vital lessons and is essential reading for today's worker militants.
Informationen über das Buch
In the Cause of Labour: A History of British Trade Unionism
Von Rob Sewell
Länge: 779 Seiten11 Stunden
Beschreibung
There are many narrative histories of the struggles of British workers. However, Rob Sewell's book is different.
This book is aimed especially at class-conscious workers who are seeking to escape from the ills of the capitalist system, that has embroiled the world in a quagmire of wars, poverty and suffering. This history of trade unions is particularly relevant at the present time. After a long period of stagnation, the fresh winds of the class struggle are beginning to blow.
Rob Sewell's book was written precisely with these new forces in mind.
The British labour movement is the oldest in the world. More than two hundred years ago, the pioneers of the movement created illegal revolutionary trade unions in the face of the most terrible violence and repression.
In the course of the nineteenth century they built trade unions of the downtrodden unskilled workers - those with "blistered hands and the unshorn chins," as Feargus O'Connor called them. Finally, they established a mass party of Labour based on the trade unions, breaking the monopoly of the Tories and Liberals. In the stormy years following the Russian Revolution they engaged in ferocious class battles, culminating in the General Strike of 1926.
Nor did the achievements of the British trade union movement cease with the Depression and the Second World War. The post-war upswing served to strengthen the working class and heal the scars of the inter-war period. By the time of the industrial tidal wave of the early 1970s, they drove a Tory government from power, after turning Edward Heath's anti-trade union laws into a dead letter. Later, the miners, the traditional vanguard of the British working class, waged an epic year-long struggle in 1984-85 against the juggernaut of Thatcherism. They could have succeeded, had the rightwing Labour and trade union leaders not abandoned them and left them isolated.
The book contains vital lessons and is essential reading for today's worker militants.
- Herausgeber:
- Wellred
- Freigegeben:
- Feb 5, 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780463176191
- Format:
- Buch
Über den Autor
Bezogen auf In the Cause of Labour
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In the Cause of Labour - Rob Sewell
In the Cause of Labour – A History of British Trade Unionism
Rob Sewell
Copyright © Wellred Books
All rights reserved
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Wellred Books, Wellredbooks.net
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London
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books@wellredbooks.net
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Ebook produced by Martin Swayne. Smashwords edition, published February 2020.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. The Birth Pains
The Class Divide
Child Labour
2. Into the Abyss of Capitalism
Anti-union Terror
Unsung Herdes
Peterloo Massacre
3. Schools of War
Captain Swing
The Grand National
4. Breaking the yoke
The Newport Rising
The Plug Plot
The Demise
5. The Pompous Trades
New Model Unions
Marx and the First International
Impact in Britain
The Trade Union Congress
Vicious circle
6. From a Spark to a Blaze
From a Spark
New Unionism Under Attack
7. The First Giant Step
Mass Movements
Independent Representation
The Breakthrough
Victory Grayson
8. The Great Unrest
Strikes Spread
Rank and Fileism
9. War and Revolution
Voices Stifled
Revolutionary Objectives
Electrifying effect
General Election
10. On the Brink of Revolution
The Triple Alliance
Soviet Support
11. Black Friday
Lenin on Britain
Employers’ Offensive
The Political front
12. Bayonets don’t cut coal
The Minority Movement
Royal Comission
13. Nine Days That Shook The World
Scarcely a wheel turns
Unstoppable wave
Stand firm!
The Betrayal
Next time
14. Never Again
Coal Crisis Report
15. Road to Wigan Pier
American Labour
Consequences of 1931
Popular Frontism
Witch-Hunt
16. Labour in the War
Integral Part
June 1941
17. Post War Dreams
Gradual Approach
National Debts
The Cold War
Cold War
18. Business (Unionism) as usual
The Blue Union
ETU Trial
Clause Four
19. In Place of Strife
Wage Restraint
Economic Difficulties
In Place of Strife
Discontent grows
Pilkington
20. Close the Gates!
State of emergency
1972 Miners’ Strike
Saltley Gate
21. The Road to Pentonville
Pentonville Five
Shrewsbury trial
22. The Turning Point
Ulster workers council
Paramilitary solutions
Wage Restraint
Winter of Discontent
23. Preparing the Class War
Premature confrontation
Flexible rostering
The Falklands War
Warrington dispute
24. The Enemy Within
Nottingham
The Ballot
The Orgreave
Dock strikes
Propaganda offensive
Action not words
25. Aftermath of Defeat
The Defeats
1987 General election
Driven out
26. Ignorance is Strength
Counter-revolution
Rover
Fruits of New Realism
27. Blairism and the Unions
General Ebb
The project
Coalition Government
Almighty row
28. The Class Divide Grows
Privatisation Disaster
Double-speak
29. Militancy is back!
The pendulum
Jackson’s defeat
General Council
30. Should the unions disaffiliate?
Keynesianism Abandoned
National Government
Justifiably angry
Accountability
Mass organisations
Words into deeds
31. Future of the Unions
Partnership
Transformation
Explosive situation
32. The New View of Society
Landmarks
Acknowledgements
Copyright page
Foreword
Cover
Table of Contents
Foreword
Jeremy Dear
As the press talks of a rebirth of militant trade unionism there could not be a more important time for this major work to be published. Trade union reps spend hours every day sorting out individual problems – from questions of wages to cases of discrimination, from redundancies to unfair dismissals and health and safety problems.
Poor management, under-investment, ageing technology, a lack of training and skills development all contribute to problems at work.
Yet those who study the history of our movement know that it is not bad bosses or the nature of individual industries or workplaces which are really at the root of the problems we face but the economic system itself that demands ever increasing levels of profit. Additional profit can be achieved by selling more or by reducing the costs of production. Since the market is finite more and more companies and nations seek to compete on the basis of the lowest possible cost of production – so wages are squeezed, jobs are lost, factories are closed, whole industries decimated and ultimately production is moved at the whim of international capital from country to country in search of the cheapest labour to exploit.
My own industry has seen remarkable changes in the past twenty years as ever more avaricious companies go in search of more and more profit. The length of the working week has increased, newspapers are bigger and more programmes are produced for broadcast yet the numbers working on them have decreased. Wages have fallen in relation to many other professions and ownership of the media is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Unions themselves have been under attack. When dozens of pieces of anti-trade union legislation were introduced under Thatcher newspaper employers in particular began ripping up agreements and removing unions rights to bargain. As a result casualisation swept the industry and terms and conditions suffered. Today there are trained, qualified journalists in London earning £14,000 a year in companies which make millions of pounds profit every year. Individuals doing the same job were earning more 20 years ago.
My industry is not unique. In manufacturing, in the service sector, in traditional and new industries there is a drive to get more work – and hence more profit – out of every worker. Speed-ups, new production methods and often just plain bullying are used to extract every last crumb.
In these circumstances is it is no surprise that virtually every union is reporting record levels of stress.
For those who seek to maximise profit there has always been an obstacle – trade union organisation. That’s why in the drive to increase profit at the expense of working people union organisation itself had to be attacked. Unions were seen a s a burden on business.
That’s why Thatcher brought in the new anti-trade union laws – to undermine the effectiveness of unions to be able to represent their members.
Yet as a society we have never been richer – but the wealth is increasingly being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
As a result of the onslaught on trade unionism – and the failure of the union leaderships to respond – many trade unions suffered falling membership and declining influence. But in the past few years we’ve seen a resurgence in the idea of collective action and in the belief in trade unions as organisations created to fight for workers interests.
These changes have begun to be reflected in many ways – more industrial action, more battles for trade union rights, the election of a succession of left wing trade union leaders and on the political front the election in 1997 of a Labour government.
Unions hoped that would signal a change in working lives. And whilst there have been some gains unions have welcomed the fundamental balance of power in the workplace has not shifted. The Labour government has been beholden to the interests of big business. Working people have become increasingly disillusioned with a continuation of Tory policies on privatisation, public services, pay and in particular the failure of Labour to remove the anti-trade union laws.
This timely book sets about identifying the processes that underpin the problems we face on a daily basis. It exposes the economic system that gave birth to trade unionism and the key episodes that shaped the British and international economic landscape. It does so through the history of the development of the trade union movement from its birth to the Tolpuddle Martyrs, New Unionism, Chartism to the bankrupt policies of partnership and the struggles of today.
It does not view episodes as isolated events shaped by great individuals but as part of a process of increasing exploitation. It provides the path from the battle against immediate problems to the tasks confronting trade unions today.
The rebirth of militant trade unionism – reflected in the election of series of new, more radical general secretaries, dubbed the awkward squad by the media – shows that more and more workers are drawing conclusions that they need to seek other means to protect their conditions. But recent events also show more than that. Developments on both the industrial and increasingly on the political front show workers are drawing broader conclusions and asking broader questions.
They are drawing the conclusion that fighting wage cuts or redundancies in just one company or just one industry or even in just one country is no longer enough. In order to secure lasting change they have to win political change. In order to win political change they have to have a political voice.
Unions in Britain formed the Labour Party as their political voice. Today’s Labour government is failing to speak up for the people who elected them. Unions are now beginning to demand more in return for their money and support and organising to reclaim Labour for policies which advance the cause of labour.
If we are to avoid the mistakes of the past we must learn the lessons of our history. Through that process we can arm ourselves with the policies and programme necessary to achieve change on both the industrial and political front. Without a fundamental understanding that our problems flow from the existence of an economic system that puts the needs of shareholders above those of the workers, the drive for profit above the satisfaction of need then our movement is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Rob Sewell’s book is not just another history of the trade union movement. It is a history rooted in a Marxist analysis of the struggles of working people in Britain. The struggle for better conditions at work, the struggle against exploitation and ultimately the struggle to transform the trade unions and labour movement in to a fighting force capable of changing society.
For all who are active in the movement today it is a vital weapon in our battle for a better world.
Introduction
Were history what it ought to be, an accurate literary reflex of the times with which it professes to deal
, wrote James Connolly, the great Irish trade union leader and Marxist, the pages of history would be almost entirely engrossed with a recital of the wrongs and struggles of the labouring people, constituting, as they have ever done, the vast mass of mankind.
[1] But standard history treats the working class with contempt, derision, hatred and misrepresentation whenever it dares to throw off the yoke of political or social servitude.
The purpose of this history of British trade unionism is not only to recite the wrongs inflicted on working people, Shelley’s heroes of unwritten story
, or simply to describe their heroic struggles. It is an attempt to draw out the lessons of the events that helped shape the Labour movement, and made it what it is. I do not lay claim to a spurious impartiality, something that has never existed in the writing of history, and least of all the history of the class struggle. This is a book that sets out from the proposition that the interests of capital and labour are incompatible, and takes sides in the war between the classes.
However, taking sides in a struggle does not necessarily mean adopting an unscientific or subjective approach to history. Anyone who is interested in fighting for socialism and a fundamental transformation of society should also be interested in arriving at the most scientific and objective understanding of history, so that the present generation can learn the lessons from it and apply them to the present and future struggles of the working class.
This book is aimed especially at class-conscious workers who are seeking to escape from the ills of a capitalist system, which has embroiled the world in a quagmire of wars, poverty and suffering. A study of the history of trade unions is therefore particularly relevant at the present time. After a long period of stagnation, the fresh winds of the class struggle are beginning to blow. We see growing industrial militancy in many countries, heralding a fundamental change in the situation. In Britain there is ferment in the trade unions, characterised by a sharp turn to the left in one union after another. New forces are emerging in the trade union and Labour movement, which are beginning to challenge the dead hand of the old right-wing leaderships.
This book was written precisely with these new forces in mind. We hope it will serve to provide the new generation with a firm grasp of our real history – a history that was for so long buried beneath a mountain of lies and deceit. It is essential that we study our past, to prepare for the future. Serious battles lie ahead. In the class struggle, as in war, tactics and strategy are necessary. In order to work out the most likely march of events and prepare for the future battles, we must take the trouble to study the past.
Oldest in the world
The British organised Labour movement is the oldest in the world. More than two hundred years ago, the pioneers of the movement created illegal revolutionary trade unions in the face of the most terrible violence and repression. A little later they established the first workers’ party in history, the Chartist Association. Afterwards they participated in the founding of the First International, the International Working Mens’ Association, in which Karl Marx played a leading role.
In the course of the nineteenth century they built trade unions of the downtrodden unskilled workers – those with blistered hands and the unshorn chins,
as the Chartist Feargus O’Connor called them. Finally, they established a mass party of Labour based on the trade unions, breaking the monopoly of the Tories and Liberals. In the stormy years following the Russian Revolution they engaged in ferocious class battles, culminating in the General Strike of 1926.
Nor did the achievements of the British trade union movement cease with the Depression and the Second World War. The post-war upswing served to strengthen the working class and heal the scars of the inter-war period. By the time of the industrial tidal wave of the early 1970s, they drove a Tory government from power, after turning Edward Heath’s anti-trade union laws into a dead letter. Those years saw the massive demonstrations against the Industrial Relations Act – the biggest workers’ protests since the days of the Chartists. Later, the miners, the traditional vanguard of the British working class, waged an epic year-long struggle in 1984-85 against the juggernaut of Thatcherism. They could have succeeded, had the right-wing Labour and trade union leaders not abandoned them and left them isolated. But though it was defeated, the miners’ strike, which at times had the hallmarks of a semi-insurrection, showed the world the colossal potential that exists in the British working class. It would require a whole book to deal with the lessons of this strike alone.
The working class sometimes needs the whip of counter-revolution to push it into action, stated Marx. The period after Black Friday
in March 1921, for instance, right through to the 1926 General Strike constituted a series of defensive rearguard battles, which were of an extremely militant and even revolutionary character. On the other hand, the defeat in 1984-5 had a profound impact, set against the context of a boom and the lamentable role of the union leaders. The defeat of the miners, and later the dockers and print workers in the late 1980s, struck a serious blow against the trade unions.
Defeats must be paid for. It took a long time to recover from these setbacks. However, the low level of struggle in the subsequent period did not mean the end of class struggle, any more than the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of history. The working class needs to catch its breath and digest the lessons of the past before again being forced into struggle by the crisis of capitalism. But now the situation is changing for the better. There has been an upturn on the industrial front in Britain and internationally. There is also a reawakening in the ranks of the unions, heralding a dramatic swing to the Left.
Even this sketchy outline of the history of British Labour indicates the tremendously rich and varied experiences through which it has passed in the course of the last 200 years. Here we have every conceivable form of struggle: from the underground struggle against Pitt’s Combination Acts, through strikes and general strikes, beginning with William Benbow’s proposal for the Grand National Holiday
, the mass petition of the Chartists, the struggle for democratic demands (the right to vote), and even armed insurrection (the Newport Rising).
Unfortunately, many of these lessons of the past are unknown to the new generation, or known only in an incomplete and unsatisfactory form. The first aim of this book is to make the facts known. The second is to try to draw the necessary conclusions from them.
Two traditions
The British proletariat, the oldest, with the most traditions, is, in its thinking methods, most empirical, carries in its chest two souls, and turns, as it were, with two faces to historical events,
commented Trotsky.[2] On the one side, the British Labour and trade union movement has a revolutionary tradition, as can be seen already. But side by side with this there was another tendency. This was the conservative respectable
tradition, by which the ruling class sought to indoctrinate the working class with a servile spirit of deference and subservience to its betters
. They had some success in this, at least for a time, and with a certain layer of the working class. This reflected the dominant position of British imperialism, which allowed the ruling class to develop an aristocracy of labour
by granting concessions and privileges to the upper crust of the skilled working class. This was what produced the narrow, selfish, cautious outlook of craft unionism. …The most repulsive thing here,
stated Engels, writing from London on 7 December 1889, is the bourgeois ‘respectability’ which has grown deep into the bones of the workers.
The working class of different countries has different traditions, reflecting the peculiarities of the historical development of each nation. When compared with the workers of southern Europe, who have a tradition of spontaneous uprisings, the British workers tend to be generally slower to move. But once they are on the move, they are unstoppable. This caused Frederick Engels to comment: The English working men are second to none in courage; they are quite restless as the French, but they fight differently… There is no power in the world which could for a day resist the British working class.
Trotsky recognised the revolutionary potential of the British working class in his book, Where is Britain Going? written in 1925, one year prior to the General Strike. This extremely relevant and modern book is required reading for every thinking worker. Trotsky explains the evolution and special traditions of the British working class as well as exposing the shallow outlook of its Fabian leaders, strikingly similar to that of Tony Blair and the right-wing Labour and trade union leaders of today.
The right wing represents all that is most negative in the traditions of British Labour – all which is servile, cowardly and ignorant. They constantly undermine the struggle for advancement under capitalism, never mind the fight to change society. The Blair government, with the enthusiastic endorsement of the right-wing trade union leaders, is carrying out a policy of counter-reforms that would do credit to any Tory administration.
Prime Minister Tony Blair proudly boasts that Britain has the least regulated economy with the lowest corporation tax and the most flexible (i.e. insecure and stressful) workplaces of any advanced capitalist country. Yet at this moment in time, British workers work longer hours than workers in Europe and the US. They have the least holidays. They have the least rights at work. Stress levels and job insecurity have gone through the roof. An estimated 6.7 million working days a year are being lost due to ill health caused by stress alone. One in four British workers does regular or occasional night work, the highest in Europe. Two-thirds of British manufacturing workers do shift-work – another European record. Only Britain and Italy have no statutory paid holidays. Despite two Labour governments, the majority are realising things are not getting better, but worse.
Before the war, Joe Cubbin started work on Liverpool docks as a casual labourer. I was 18 when I started work on the docks in 1936, as a casual dock worker. I had to go on the stand for work in the morning and the afternoon. The ship might be in for a week or a fortnight but I still had to go to be hired twice a day and I’d get left if the boss wanted a job for one of his ‘blue eyes’ who’d just finished a ship. There was no continuity. A lot of young lads like me got treated like shit.
[3]
Today, since the abolition of the Dock Labour Scheme, more than 85 per cent of UK ports employ casual labour in one form or other. The sacking of some 500 dockworkers in Liverpool in 1995 highlighted this throwback to the brutal conditions more than 60 years ago. To boost their profits and cut labour costs, bosses have got rid of permanent jobs and taken on casual labour in a return to the Good Old Days
.
Even at the most elementary level, democratic rights that were won over a hundred years ago have been eroded or abolished. The Tory anti-trade union laws, in the main shamefully retained by Blair, place so many restrictions on the right to strike that they are in breach of the International Labour Organisation conventions. Workers continue to be systematically victimised and blacklisted for their activities. Those militant trade union leaders and rank and file who dare to fight are threatened with legal action and slandered as the enemy within
, to quote the infamous phrase of Margaret Thatcher, or wreckers
, to quote Tony Blair.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the trade unions were outlawed. Government spies and agent provocateurs attempted to infiltrate and betray the movement. Today, two hundred years later, the British trade unions are still subjected to stringent anti-union laws. Government spies and agents – in the form of the security service MI5 – continue in their conspiracy to undermine subversive
militancy within our organisations, aided and abetted by right-wing trade union leaders.
What does all this show? That unless there is a fundamental change in society, all the gains made by the movement can only have a temporary, partial and incomplete character. The struggle of the working class to improve its lot under capitalism is like the labours of Sisyphus, described in ancient Greek mythology, who was condemned for all eternity to push a heavy boulder uphill, only to see it roll back again.
Need to change society
The trade unions are the basic organisations of the working class. But they are much more than that. They are the embryo of the future society within the old. Of course, since the workers’ organisations exist in capitalist society, they are subjected to alien class pressures. These pressures weigh heavily on the upper stratum and this often leads to degeneration. We are not dealing with an ideal norm, but with the mass organisations as they really exist in class society. The distortions that occur, especially in periods when the working class is not on the move, can produce a feeling that the unions cannot be changed. This is a serious mistake that is contradicted by the whole historical experience of the movement. Time and again the workers have moved to transform their organisations into organs and schools of solidarity, struggle and socialism, to use the phrase of Frederick Engels.
The history of the British trade unions does not constitute a straight line. On the contrary, it unfolds in an uneven fashion with various contradictory shifts in one direction or another. It is constantly characterised by the struggle between two traditions and two tendencies. A revolutionary one, reflecting the unconscious will of the working class to change society, and a subservient one, reflecting the pressures of the ruling class on the upper stratum, that then attempts to block the movement to change society and lead it instead like a lamb into safe
channels.
In normal
periods, the consciousness of the workers is affected by the dead weight of tradition and routine. In such times, most people are prepared to accept the leadership of the professionals
– bourgeois and reformist politicians, Members of Parliament, councillors and trade union leaders. But there are periods of crises and upheavals, when the working class is shaken out of the old apathy and begins to take action, demanding solutions, asking questions. Being close to the class, the unions reflect this changed mood very early on. We see this process in Britain at the present time. And what happens in the unions today will be expressed in the Labour Party tomorrow.
The nameless pioneers of Labour were inspired by a vision. They believed that the trade union and Labour movement would become a powerful weapon of social emancipation. This revolutionary aspiration was, and in many cases remains, enshrined in trade union rules and constitutions. We should cite a few examples:
One of the declared objects of the train drivers’ union, ASLEF, is to assist in the furtherance of the labour movement generally towards a socialist society.
The rulebook of the rail union RMT likewise pledges to work for the supercession of the capitalist system by a socialist order of society
. The constitution of the Fire Brigades Union states: To this end the FBU is part of the working class movement and, linking itself with the international trade union and labour movement, has as its ultimate aim the bringing about of the socialist system of society.
The introduction to the rules of the old Gas Workers Union, (now the GMB) contained the statement,
"… the interests of all workers are one, and a wrong done to any kind of Labour is wrong done to the whole of the working class and the Victory or defeat of any portion of the Army of Labour is a gain or loss to the whole of that Army, which by its organisation and union is marching steadily and irresistibly forward to its ultimate goal – the Emancipation of the working class. That Emancipation can only be brought about by the strenuous and united efforts of the working class itself.
WORKERS UNITE!"
This section was deleted from the rulebook in 1947 by right-wing bureaucrats, arguing that it was out of date, as they later argued in relation to Clause Four, which embodied the Labour Party’s socialist aims. In fact, what is out of date is not socialism, but the decrepit old line of class collaboration that has led the movement from one defeat to another. This fact is being grasped by ever-increasing numbers of trade unionists and Labour Party supporters. They have rejected the false policies of so-called New Realism
and New Labour
, which are neither new nor realistic, but reflect a very old tendency – the tendency of the right-wing leaders to capitulate to the pressures of big business and cease to represent the interests of the working class.
Fight to reclaim the movement
In Where is Britain Going? Trotsky explained that when the British workers were disappointed on the political front, they tended to swing onto the industrial front, and vice versa. This has been an important trait right up to the present-day. In Britain, where there is a single unified trade union organisation in the form of the TUC, and a single political workers’ party, the Labour Party, there has always been an inseparable organic link, an umbilical cord, between the industrial and political organisations of the working class. In fact, while on the continent the workers’ parties in most cases created the unions, uniquely in Britain, the trade unions created the Labour Party as their political voice. This fact has had a profound bearing on political and industrial developments for the last 100 years. And still continues to do so.
Recently, in a reaction against the intolerable policies of the Blair government, there has been a tendency in some unions to call for disaffiliation from the Labour Party. This is a serious mistake. What is required is not to leave the Labour Party – a move that would only assist Blair and the right wing – but on the contrary, to get the unions to move into the Labour Party and purge it of the right-wing careerists and replace them with men and women who are committed to fight for the interests of the working class.
The discredited policies of the right wing are now being challenged and defeated all along the line. The rank and file are fighting to transform the unions into genuine instruments for changing society, and they are beginning to reclaim the Labour Party. They will restore the socialist traditions of Clause Four in the period that opens up before us. Through their own experience millions of men and women will come to understand the need to overthrow capitalism and bring about a classless society, as the only way to achieve a decent life and prosperous future.
The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic…
Lenin wrote. At every step the workers come face to face with their main enemy – the capitalist class. In combat with this enemy, the worker becomes a socialist…
These are words of great wisdom. Despite everything, the working class has a deep instinctive desire to change society, though they may not always be aware of it. It arises out of the conditions of life and collective, social production. The methods of struggle of the proletariat reflect this reality – they are collective, democratic methods of struggle – the mass meeting, the strike, the picket line, mass demonstrations and general strikes.
Through the experience of collective struggle, the working class gradually raises itself to an understanding of the need to change society. It develops a sense of its own power and ability. One can see this in every strike. Marxists base themselves on this fact and strive to develop this tendency and bring it to the fullest expression. The role of Marxists in the trade unions is to make conscious the unconscious will of the working class to change society.
The working class has within its ranks a tremendous strength and resilience. Even when it suffers a terrible and crushing defeat, it recovers and again reasserts itself. It is like the Greek god Antaeus of ancient mythology, who when thrown to the ground, drew strength from his mother the earth. Whatever obstacles lay in its path, the objective conditions of life force it to continually struggle against the system of capitalist exploitation. Those who argue that the class struggle is out of date are obviously out of touch with the reality of Britain in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The employers’ offensive – a veritable counter-revolution on the shop floor – has gone on uninterrupted for some twenty years, with no serious opposition from the self-styled New Realist
union leaders. The conditions in work at the beginning of the new Millennium have been compared to the dark days when trade unions first came into existence. … Analysis of the last Workplace Industrial Relations Survey concluded that the conditions today resemble those which led to the growth of trade unionism in the last century,
stated the former general secretary of the TUC, John Monks.[4] In many ways, how little has changed in Britain.
But now it has provoked a reaction in the working class. After years of privatisation, temporary contracts, outsourcing, deskilling, multi-skilling, part-time work, zero-hour
contracts, casual work and other forms of lean production and labour flexibility, workers are saying loud and clear: enough is enough. The election of a string of left-wing general secretaries and officials in the British trade unions is symptomatic of a deep-seated frustration and anger within the union rank and file and the working class generally.
Isaac Newton explained long ago that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. What is true in mechanics is true also in politics. Over the last twenty years, the pendulum had swung far to the right. Now it is swinging back to the left. There maybe this or that delay, but the period of right-wing domination has run its course. The factors that gave rise to Blairism, and its mirror image in the trade unions, are now turning into their opposite.
The local government strike in July 2002, involving one million workers from three unions, was the first national strike of its kind in twenty years, involving manual and non-manual workers. It was the biggest ever strike by women workers in British history, and, according to Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, this is the biggest stoppage in the country since the General Strike. It involves everyone from manual workers to senior professionals.
[5] Firefighters, railway workers, postal workers and many others, have been engaged in a bitter struggle with the Blair government, which has once again thrust the issue of militancy to the fore. Without doubt, these events are a slap in the face for those middle-class sceptics like professor Eric Hobsbawn, who argued not so long ago that the working class was finished.
Marxism and the Labour Movement
Gradually, the mood in society is beginning to change. Opinion polls show that a growing number of people now regard themselves as working class
. In 1994, 51 per cent of those interviewed considered themselves working class. In 1997 the figure rose to 58 per cent, while in 2002 a staggering 68 per cent declared themselves working class and proud of it.
The new generation of workers and trade unionists will find themselves in very different conditions to the past.
On a world scale, the erratic rhythm of present-day developments with its episodic wars and crises is more akin to the epoch of decline in the inter-war period than to the upswing that followed 1945. The bourgeois are increasingly terrified that the present global slowdown will end in a deflationary spiral on the lines of 1929-39. Prices have been falling in Japan since 1995; in America and Germany the risk of deflation is greater that at any time since the 1930s
, states The Economist.[6]
The world crisis means that corporate profits are falling or stagnant. The bosses are therefore demanding wage restraint and deep cuts in the social wage
in order to bring about tax cuts for the rich. Millions of workers are faced with lay-offs, wage freezes, and attacks on their pensions. At the same time the bosses are awarding themselves huge salary increases and other lavish handouts. There is no money for houses, hospitals, schools and pensions, but there is always money for wars to seize Iraqi oil. In the present climate of economic crisis, every gain will have to be fought for. Every strike will be hard-fought and bitter. The mood of the class will harden and a new situation will open up inside the unions.
The working class needs powerful militant and democratic trade unions. But above all, we need to forge a leadership that will measure up to the tasks posed by history. The mighty revolutionary events across the globe will provide the working class with many opportunities. We have a responsibility on our shoulders to finish the job that generations before us began. In order to live up to that responsibility it is necessary to go beyond the limits of narrow trade unionism and pose the question of changing society. And in order to conduct a serious and consistent struggle to change society a scientific world outlook is necessary. Marxism provides such an outlook.
Marxism has always had a place in the history of the British working class. When the Labour Party in 1948 published a centenary edition of the Communist Manifesto, the foreword stated that the party acknowledges its indebtedness to Marx and Engels as two of the men who have been the inspiration of the whole working class movement.
[7]
Marx and Engels wrote for workers. Will Thorne, who became the leader of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers (the forerunner of today’s GMB) had begun work at the age of six and had no formal education. He was won to Marxism and learned to read Marx’s Capital and Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, as well as other books by Marx, Engels, Hyndman, Blatchford and Robert Owen. They helped me to understand the problems I was faced with
, states Thorne.[8] The same was true of James Larkin, the Irish trade union leader, who, when asked his education, replied he was brought up in the school of adversity.
He, as well as countless others too many to mention, was drawn to the classics of Marxism and the education and insight they gave him.
The advantage that Marxism has over all other trends in the Labour movement is its scientific method that allows men and women to penetrate the apparent surface calm of society and comprehend the underlying processes developing within its foundations, which at a certain point, burst through resulting in sudden changes. Armed with such a method, the class-conscious worker can distinguish more clearly the way forward.
I hope that the present book will stimulate those who read it to study not only the history of the workers’ movement in Britain and internationally, but also the great treasure-house of Marxist theory, which is the best and most comprehensive guide to action. As the young Marx wrote: Philosophers have interpreted the world in different ways. The point however is to change it.
A study of history is essential, but it is making history that counts.
The final words of this introduction I leave to the heroic Chartists, who were the first of our class to raise the banner of working class independence, and to whom we owe so much:
Never give up! It is wiser and better
Always to hope than once to despair;
Fling off the load of Doubt’s cankering fetter,
And break the dark spell of tyrannical care;
Never give up! Or the burden may sink you –
Providence kindly has mingled the cup,
And, in all trials or troubles, bethink you,
The watchword of life must be, Never Give up!
Northern Star, 22 February 1845
Notes
[1] James Connolly, Labour in Irish History, p.1, Dublin, 1971
[2] Leon Trotsky, Writings on Britain, p.61, London, 1974
[3] Quoted in Bill Hunter, They Knew Why They Fought, p.6, London, 1994
[4] Robert Taylor, The Future of the Trade Unions, p.xii, London, 1994
[5] Evening Standard, 17 July 2002
[6] The Economist, 17 May 2003
[7] The Communist Manifesto, p.6, London, 1948
[8] Will Thorn, My Life’s Battles, p.47, London, 1989
1. The Birth Pains
We make a nation of helots, and have no free citizens
, wrote Adam Ferguson in his description of England in 1765. The Industrial Revolution was the furnace in which this class of modern wage-slaves was forged. First to enter the road of capitalist development, Britain was thrust into the privileged position of the leading world power. For the next century and a half, the ruling class of these small islands maintained its world hegemony through its domination of the world market and its Empire. Thanks to this, the British bourgeoisie became the richest, strongest and most far-sighted ruling class in the world. From this position they exuded colossal confidence in their future mission, which they mapped out not in years, but in decades and centuries. Not for nothing
, noted Leon Trotsky, has it been said of the British imperialists that they do their thinking in terms of centuries and continents.
[1]
The British proletariat was created under the hammer blow of events. As this new oppressed class emerged from the womb of capitalism, it was accompanied by violent birth-pains that scarred its consciousness.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalist economic relations caused the wholesale destruction of the English peasantry and the break-up of the old guild system that had previously assured a certain degree of social stability. The overwhelming mass of peasantry was ruined by the Enclosure Acts introduced by the powerful landowners, and disappeared in a social revolution that created a proletariat ready for the service of the owners of capital, in agriculture and the new industries.
In the decade following 1717 there were only fifteen Acts of Enclosure, whilst in the two decades from 1797 to 1820, the period of the Napoleonic Wars, there were 1,727 of such Acts. These enclosures threw hundreds of thousands off the land, and created a wretched swarm of landless and propertyless men, women and children – a reserve army of wage-earners freed
completely from any connection with the soil – made ready for industrial exploitation.
The mass exodus from the villages into the towns, an essential ingredient in the development of capitalism, provided a plentiful supply of cheap labour-power for the new class of profit-seeking entrepreneurs. Under the incessant blows of capitalist development, the traditional relationship between masters and journeymen began to break down, as artisans lost their independence and were absorbed into the new class of proletarians.
As the contemporary Sir John Clapham wrote, this proletarianisation was a kind of hell into which peasants may fall if things are not bettered.
And, of course, nothing was bettered, as everything became worse. The coming of modern capitalism, accompanied by machine production, uprooted the old basis of rural life and ushered in a new shocking world of nature, red in tooth and claw
. For the toiling masses, it was an alien world, brutalised, and turned upside down, a world bled dry of all compassion.
The radical newspaper Black Dwarf described the awful plight of the new working class:
Locked up in factories eight stories high, he has no relaxation till the ponderous engine stops and then he goes home to get refreshed for the next day; no time for sweet association with his family; they are all alike fatigued and exhausted.
[2]
Marx wrote that capitalism came into being dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
[3] Crushed between hammer and anvil, the infant proletariat, only recently torn from its roots in the countryside, was hurled into the inhuman conditions of the factory system. Their original peasant outlook was ruthlessly burned out by their radically different collective experience at the point of production. From the very beginning, in a battle for survival, the working class was transformed from a passive exploited mass, into a class increasingly conscious of itself. In the words of Marx, the new proletariat was being changed from a class in-itself
into a class for-itself
. Collective consciousness, the hallmark of the proletariat as a class, was being shaped under the hammer blows of everyday life, in the factories, workshops and deep in the bowels of the earth.
The British working class was forced to organise for its own self-defence and self-preservation. Capital is a concentrated social power, while the workers own nothing but their individual labour power. Therefore, the agreement between worker and employer – Labour and Capital – can never be based on equal terms. Under the capitalist system the workers’ strength is continually undermined by competition among themselves. The capitalists deliberately promoted this competition between workers as a means of depressing wage levels and to tilt the balance of forces more in their favour. The only real power the proletariat possesses is its collective strength, and this can only be effectively expressed through combination and organisation. In that sense, the creation of trade unions was the first conscious step of collective organisation, and represented the birth of the organised labour movement. In the cotton districts, factory hands formed the nucleus of the Labour movement. With their newly found collective identity, they formed the vanguard of early trade unionism.
From the very beginning, the working class bore all the marks and scars of a slave class. However, compared to the old slavery, the worker seems to be free because he is not sold once and for all, but piecemeal by the hour, day or week. But he is still forced to sell himself, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class
, to quote Engels. Yet, deep in the very being of the working class, deep in its collective soul, was also being born the instinctive will to fight for its own social emancipation. The working class, given its social position in collective labour, is a revolutionary class. It is propelled by the very conditions of life to strive to put itself at the head of society, not to secure a privileged position for itself, but to carry through the abolition of all classes.
The Class Divide
The Industrial Revolution saw an explosion of the urban population, as landless peasants and Irish immigrants sought to escape their wretched existence by flooding into the towns and urban areas of England. Industrial centres such as Bristol, Hull, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford and Liverpool, expanded beyond all recognition, creating horrific over-crowding and insanitary conditions. The sixty years prior to the Reform Act of 1832 saw the population of England almost double in size. If you take the census figures for the years 1801, 1831, and 1851, for some towns of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, the pattern and pace of expansion is graphically illustrated:
The remorseless speed of change shocked contemporary observers. The towns now had large populations of men and women who had passed within a single generation from the life of the village to the life of the slum – from the occupations of the peasant to those of the urban worker. In scenes that beggar belief, overcrowded slums sprung up like mushrooms overnight, lacking sanitation, clean water and ventilation. Filthy open cesspits, the standard form of primitive sanitation, became a breeding ground for all kinds of diseases such as cholera and typhoid, resulting in periodic epidemics. The polluted rivers, coloured with chemicals and dyes, that ran through these industrial towns were used for both drinking water and sewage. Under these conditions, infant mortality was very high, although reaching adulthood was also a risky business. The average age at death for a labourer in Bolton was 18, in Manchester 17 and in Liverpool 15.
The seething cauldron of factory life sucked in labour from all quarters, above all from across the Irish Sea. In 1827, for four or five pennies, the Irish could cross the waters to Liverpool. Geographically close to Lancashire, a prime centre of the Industrial Revolution, Ireland was described by Engels as the mainspring of all the workers’ movements.
By 1841, the Irish population of Lancashire was around 133,000. Within a decade the county had swollen to 200,000 Irish. According to Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Irish emigration into Britain is an example of a less civilised population spreading themselves as a kind of substratum beneath a more civilised community.
[4]
In 1841 this substratum
composed a tenth of the population of Manchester, and a seventh of Liverpool. After the failure of the Irish potato crop in the Forties, this great flood of humanity became a deluge.
During the last two or three months,
wrote the registrar of a Manchester district, large numbers of the poor from Ireland have crowded themselves in this district, droves of them rambling about the streets seeking lodgings and no doubt being exposed to the severe and inclement weather. Many of the poor creatures have died from cold producing fevers and diseases.
In Liverpool there were thousands of hungry and naked Irish perishing in our streets,
and in South Wales they were described as bringing pestilence on their backs, famine in their stomachs.
[5]
The hungry Irish, desperate for food and work, were cynically used by employers to undermine wages and blackleg on strikes. However, as the Hammonds noted, the same employers regarded the Irish with trepidation, speaking of them in much the same manner as a Roman master spoke of the slaves from turbulent Sardinia. The Irish,
stated an employer, are more disposed to turn out, to make unreasonable demands, to take offence at slight cause and to enforce their demands by strikes or bad language.
A Catholic priest noted that Irish workers were much keener to be involved in trade unions. In fact, many union and radical leaders came from Irish stock, most notably John Doherty and Feargus O’Connor. Marx once commentated to the effect that the red blood of revolution flowed through Celtic veins.
Rapid changes in production forced large numbers of workers out of domestic industry into the newly constructed factories and mills. Cottage industry soon gave way to the factory system of large-scale production.
The great mass of people collected in Lancashire, Cheshire, and the western borders of Yorkshire were working in 1830, not for a multitude of small masters, but for a comparatively small number of large masters,
noted the Hammonds. The Industrial Revolution produced a new powerful rich class, the class of the capitalist manufacturer.
[6]
This new bourgeoisie strove to assert its domination and concentrate all economic and political power into its hands. Great fortunes made from foreign trade were ploughed back into industry. In their search for greater profits, the British bourgeois rapidly developed the new productive forces of industry and technique. The real history of the period between 1688 and the middle of the eighteenth century was dominated by the capitalist accumulation of capital. In the 70 years up to 1840, the power of production in Britain increased by a remarkable twenty-seven times over.
Commerce which has enriched the citizens of England has helped to make them free…
observed Voltaire. Of course, this only referred to the upper classes. The working class lost any independence they might have once held, as old customs, traditions and family ties were shattered by capitalist industrialisation. In place of traditional customs, which even included a rest-day on Mondays (St Monday, as it was called), came the new brutal rigours, discipline and regime of factory exploitation. From the age of seven children in factories were forced to work twelve to fifteen hours a day, six days a week, at best in monotonous toil, at worst in a hell of human cruelty.
The workman was summoned by the factory bell; his daily life was arranged by factory hours; he worked under an overseer imposing a method and precision for which the overseer had in turn to answer to some higher authority; if he broke one of a long series of minute regulations he was fined, and behind all this scheme of supervision and control there loomed the great impersonal system,
wrote the Hammonds.[7]
The intensification of labour that accompanied the introduction of large-scale machinery strained the nerves and sinews of the working class to breaking point. They existed solely to work for the masters and the production of surplus value. They had no other purpose in life, but to become an appendage of the machine. The animal machine – breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering – is chained fast to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness
, stated James Kay in 1832.[8]
Work had lost all meaning compared to the past. The workers were alienated from the labour they were forced to perform, as well as from society. In England,
said Heinrich Heine, the machines are like men and men like machines.
With this strange new world
, bitter class hatred developed for the masters who mercilessly exploited them and their families.
This class antagonism was reflected in the tracts that circulated widely in radical circles. In one article we read the following dialogue:
People: What labour do you perform in the society?
Privileged Class: None: we are not made to labour.
People: How then have you acquired your wealth?
Privileged Class: By taking the pains to govern you.
People: To govern us! ... We toil, and you enjoy; we produce and you dissipate; wealth flows from us, and you absorb it. Privileged men, class distinct from the people, form a nation apart and govern yourselves.[9]
The bourgeoisie regarded the workers as little more than pack animals. At the mercy of the owners, they were reduced to so many hands
for the production of commodities. In the North East of England, in the coalmines of Lord Londonderry and Lord Durham, the miners laboured under conditions of virtual slavery. At the Felling coalmine near Gateshead in the North East of England, boys’ hours were from eighteen to twenty hours a day. They worked in inhuman conditions deep underground, in sweltering heat, from the age of seven until they were physically incapable of work, if they managed to survive at all. For the capitalists, labour power was plentiful and life was exceedingly cheap. The English working class became like the wretched refugees in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables who lived in the sewers of Paris.
It is too high wages that many of the criminal habits, so often ascribed to the character of a collier, may in part be ascribed...
states the haughty Rev. Thomas Gisborne. To economy, he is, in general, an utter stranger.
When he receives his wages, the collier and his family may be seen indulging themselves in the use of animal food three times a day.
[10]
The inventions of Stephenson, Arkwright, Crompton, and Hargreaves revolutionised the methods of work, and transformed the factory system. The age is running mad after inventions
, noted Dr. Johnson. All the business of the world is to be done in a new way: men are to be hanged in a new way…
In contrast to handlooms, the power-looms were massed together in huge buildings, and worked incessantly around the clock. This change was made possible by the introduction of gas lighting into the factories from 1805 onwards. Men, women and children were forced to adapt to the new rhythm of these machines. As stated, conditions in these factories – William Blake’s infamous Dark Satanic Mills – were abominable. The first volume of Capital by Karl Marx graphically describes these hellish establishments. In work, there were very few or meaningful legal restrictions on the exploitation of millions of workingmen, women and children. Nightshift, double-shifts, weekend work, and 24-hour working, seven days a week, which increased absolute surplus value to the absolute limit, were introduced with a vengeance. The thirst for profits by the masters was insatiable. In winter, very few workers saw the light of day. Women workers frequently gave birth on the workplace floor and returned to their job within days. Hungry families, like beasts of burden, were forced to endure excessive hours simply to survive. Human material was used up rapidly. Workmen were called old at forty years.
Talk of vassals! Talk of villains! Talk of serfs!
complained William Cobbett. Are there any of these, or did feudal times ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor creatures who, in the ‘enlightened’ north, are compelled to work fourteen hours a day, in a heat of eighty-four degrees, and who are liable to punishment for looking out at a window of the factory!
[11]
Exploited at work and robbed in the tommy
shops, workers were also under constant fear of being evicted from factory housing. The tommy shops, or truck system, were stores established by employers where workers were forced to buy their goods at extortionate prices and inferior quality – hence the phrase tommy-rot
. As a condition of employment men were compelled to spend much of their wages in these shops. Another variation was the employer-owned beer shops, where, on payday, wages were handed out on the stipulation that workers would spend a certain proportion on drink. In South Staffs, the practice of paying a set amount of wages in beer was known as buildas
. These were deliberate measures not only to swindle workers, but also to increase the domination of the owners over the lives of their hands. Many workers were in debt to these tommy shops, and in the words of the American mining song, owed their soul to the company store.
The colliers of the North East composed a special prayer:
Unto thy care and protection, O most unmerciful master, I commit myself this day. Preserve me from all fines, cheatery, deductions, either by weight or measure, or from anything contrary to the justice of my labour, by they grace assistants, enable me to receive my pay without any subtraction, division or reduction from its true and rightful amount…
[12]
These were the harsh methods employed to extract relative and absolute surplus value from the unpaid labour of the working class.
Machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labour,
stated Marx, "but, in the service of capital, lengthens them; in itself it lightens labour, but, when employed
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