To this a trade union representative can reply: in the course of the struggle for improving working conditions – and that after all is the aim of our organization – we require the support of the Labour Party, its press, and its MPs; but the party for which you vote (the Liberals or the Conservatives) in such circumstances always cracks down upon us, tries to compromise us, sows dissension in our midst or directly organizes strike-breakers; we have no need of those members who would organize as strike-breakers! Thus what appears from the standpoint of capitalist democracy to be freedom of the individual is shown from the standpoint of proletarian democracy to be freedom of political strike-breaking.
The ten per cent rebate which the bourgeoisie have gained is by no means an innocuous item. It means that one out of every ten members of a trade union is a political, in other words a class, opponent. Of course, some of these may be won over, but the rest can prove an invaluable weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat at a time of serious struggle. A further struggle against the breaches made in the walls of the unions by the 1913 Act is therefore inevitable.
Speaking generally, we Marxists hold that every honest, uncorrupted worker may be a member of his trade union, irrespective of political, religious or other convictions. We regard the trade unions on the one hand as militant economic organizations, and on the other hand as a school of political education. While we stand for permitting backward and non-class-conscious workers to join trade unions, we do so not from an abstract principle of freedom of opinion or freedom of conscience but from considerations of revolutionary expediency.
And these same considerations tell us that in Britain, where 90 per cent of industrially organized workers pay political levies – some consciously, others because they do not wish to violate the spirit of solidarity – and only 10 per cent decide to throw down an open challenge to the Labour Party, a systematic struggle must be carried on against this 10 per cent, to make them feel like renegades, and to secure the right of the trade unions to exclude them as strike-breakers.
After all if the citizen, taken in abstract, has the right to vote for any party then workers” organizations have the right not to allow into their midst citizens whose political behaviour is hostile to the interests of the working class. The struggle., of the trade unions to debar unorganized workers from the factory has long been known as a manifestation of “terrorism” by the workers – or in more modern terms, Bolshevism. In Britain these methods can and must be carried over into the Labour Party which has grown up as a direct extension of the trade unions.
The debate on the question of the political levies quoted above, which took place in the British parliament on 7th March this year (1925), holds quite exceptional, interest as a typical example of parliamentary democracy.
Only in Baldwin’s speech could tentative hints be heard as to the real dangers rooted in Britain’s class structure. The old relations have disappeared and today there are no longer any good old British enterprises with patriarchal customs – such as Mr. Baldwin himself ran in the days of his youth. Industry is concentrating and combining. Workers are uniting in trade unions and these organizations can present a danger to the state itself.
Baldwin was speaking about the employers” federations as well as the trade unions. It is quite self-evident that he sees the real danger to the democratic state only in the shape of the trade unions. What the so-called struggle against trusts amounts to, we know sufficiently well, from the example of America. Roosevelt’s noisy agitation against trusts proved to be a soap bubble.
Trusts both in his time and afterwards have become even stronger and the American government forms their executive organ to a far greater degree than the Labour Party forms the political organ of the trade unions.
Although in Britain trusts as a form of association do not play such a great role as in America, the capitalists do play no less a role. The danger of the trade unions is that they do put forward – for the moment, gropingly, indecisively and half-heartedly – the principle of a workers” government, which is impossible without a workers” state, as opposed to a capitalist government which can today exist only under the cover of a democracy.
Baldwin is wholly in agreement with the principle of “individual freedom” which lies at the basis of the prohibitive bill introduced by his parliamentary friends. He also considers the political levies to be a “moral evil”. But he does not want to upset the peace.
The struggle, once started, can have dire consequences: “we do not in any event wish to fire the first shot”. And Baldwin finishes: “O Lord, grant us peace in our time!’ Virtually the entire House welcomed this speech including many Labour MPs: the Prime Minister had, on his own admission, made a “gesture of peace”.
Thomas, the Labour MP who is always on the scene when a gesture of toadying requires to be made, rose to hail Baldwin’s speech and to remark on its truly human note; he declared that both sides would gain from a close intercourse between employers and workers; he quoted with pride the fact that quite a few left-wing workers in his own union refuse to pay the political levy in view of the fact that they had such a reactionary secretary as himself, Mr. Thomas.
The whole debate on the question in which the vital interests of the two conflicting classes intersect was conducted in this tone of conventions, reservations, official lies and purely British parliamentary cant.
The reservations of the Conservatives had a Machiavellian [3] character; the reservations of the labour Party stemmed from a contemptible cowardice. The front bench of the bourgeoisie resembles a tiger that retracts its claws and half closes its eyes with affection; the Labour leaders, like Thomas, resemble a beaten dog which droops its tail between its legs.
The insolvency of Britain’s economic situation is reflected most directly in the trade unions. On the day following the end of the war when in the heat of the moment it seemed that Great Britain was the unbounded sovereign of the world’s destinies, the working masses, aroused by the war, poured in their hundreds of thousands and millions into the trade unions.
The high point was reached in 1919: after that an ebb began. At the present time the number of members of trade union organizations has sharply dropped and continues to drop.
John Wheatley, a “left” member of MacDonald’s ministry, expressed himself at one of the March meetings in Glasgow to the effect that nowadays the trade unions are but a shadow of themselves and that they were equally unfit to fight or to conduct negotiations. Fred Bramley, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress spoke out in clear opposition to this estimation.
The polemic between these two, theoretically perhaps equally helpless adversaries, does present an eminent symptomatic interest. Fred Bramley referred to the fact that the political movement by being more “rewarding” that is to say, by opening up wider career possibilities, draws the most valuable officials away from the trade unions.
“On the other hand,” Bramley asks, “what would the party be without the political levies from the trade unions?’ Bramley does not in the end deny the decline in the economic power of the trade unions and explains it by reference to Britain’s economic position.
But we would seek in vain from the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress any indication of a way out of this impasse. His thinking does not go beyond the bounds of a hidden rivalry between the trade union apparatus and the party apparatus. Yet the problem does not lie here at all. At the root of the radicalization of the working class and consequently of the growth of the Labour Party too, there lie those same causes that have dealt cruel blows to the economic might of the trade unions. The one is doubtless developing at the expense of the other.
But it would be extremely shallow thinking to draw from this the conclusion that the role of the trade unions is played out. On the contrary these industrial alliances of the British working class still have a great future before them. It is just because there are no further prospects for the trade unions within the framework of capitalist society in Great Britain’s present situation that the industrial workers” unions are compelled to take the path of the socialist re-organization of the economy. The trade unions themselves when reconstructed accordingly become the main lever for the country’s economic transformation.
But the necessary prerequisite for this is the taking of power by the proletariat – not in the sense of the wretched vulgar farce of a MacDonald ministry but in a real, material revolutionary class sense. The whole apparatus of the state has to become an apparatus subordinated to the proletariat. The working class, as the only class with an interest in a socialist overturn, has to win the opportunity to dictate its will to society.
The whole administration and all the judges and public servants must be as deeply instilled with the socialist spirit of the proletariat as today’s public servants are instilled with the spirit of the bourgeoisie. Only the trade unions can provide this vital human personnel. It will be in the end the trade unions that will throw lip
