By Colin Waugh
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Sheila Cohen’s book Ramparts of Resistance consists of a section detailing union struggles in the UK and US from the late 1960s to 2006, and a theoretical section in which she argues as follows:
The power which movements of rank-and-file union activists had early on in this period has been lost. This has happened both because of moves by the employers and their political agents, and because of’ weaknesses on the workers’ side.
On the one hand. working class activists have lacked an adequate political consciousness and on the other, those sections of the intelligentsia who ally with workers’ movements have paid insufficient attention to day-to-day union struggles, focusing instead on — and thereby diverting activists towards — unproductive political projects. Sheila argues that this situation could be corrected through organisations like Labor Notes in the US, the former Trade Union News in the UK, and the Transitional Institute. Left wing intellectuals should concentrate on helping union activists build or organisations like these, because this would allow the latter to develop for themselves a level of consciousness that would carry them through periods when their class is on the defensive.
Some commentators on Sheila’s book have alleged that her own record is inconsistent with what she says others should do. I will focus here on whether what she says is right in itself. She is right to treat as central the question of working class power.
She is right to focus on how union activists’ consciousness is formed and on the relation between them and “intellectuals” — in the sense, for example, of left wing academics like herself. She is right that socialists must relate to workers’ day-to-day struggles.
Lastly, initiatives that link activists and struggles from different unions, even if only at the level of exchanging information, are as she says, crucial. To this extent then the book is on the right wavelength and everyone should read and think about it.
However Sheila ignores several issues which her own approach logically requires her to address.
First, by saying that “intellectuals” should make day-to-day workplace struggles virtually their exclusive focus, she ignores the problem that if activists fail to address the political dimensions of such struggles, they thereby automatically subject themselves to ruling-class politicians — as the history of the Labour Party here and the failure to develop a national labour party in the US show.
Secondly, although she discusses with insight changes in management techniques, Sheila takes almost no account of how, over the period she deals with, production itself — and hence the workforce and the working class as a whole — have been restructured also by objective factors such as technological change (for example the introduction of’ CNC machines or containerisation) and the movement of industrial capital to low wage economics. She writes as if the UK and US economies and their productive processes are organised in the same way now and must therefore presumably present the same opportunities for working class self-organisation — as in 1970.
This would imply that the difference between then and now must result mainly from management techniques on the one hand and/or from the failure of workers and intellectuals to think and act correctly on the other. But that is not a sustainable position.
For a start, Sheila herself shows that this failure was widespread from the beginning of the period studied. And further, the struggles she recounts themselves show that technological change has altered the balance of forces in favour of the employers and capitalist class and indeed is often itself driven by their attempts to crush specific groups of workers.
This hasn’t changed the economic relation on which capitalist society rests, namely the struggle between a class which owns the means of production and one which does not, but we cannot make gains in that struggle if we do not take account of changes in the circumstances under which we must conduct it.
Thirdly, when Sheila talks about workers she clearly envisages people who do routine, mainly manual jobs. She operates with a conceptual model in which there are these “workers” on the one hand and, on the other, left-wing sections of the intelligentsia. This ignores the fact that in present day society most members of the “intelligentsia” — for example, lecturers, teachers, healthcare professionals, legal personnel, civil servants. scientific and technical staff — live by exchanging their labour power for a wage — i.e. are themselves working class on any realistic definition. (She also leaves out of consideration the re-creation of a petty bourgeoisie.)
The result is that, although Sheila identifies flaws in workers’ consciousness which have helped the bosses to defeat strike struggles and documents the inability of shop stewards to overcome this, she offers no proposal about how this problem can be tackled.
This is so despite the fact that she discusses the key socialist text where this issue was most sharply posed, i.e. the section of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done where he quotes Karl Kautsky on the formation of socialist consciousness, and that her overall theoretical stance derives directly from the socialist who has, arguably, come closest to a way through this problem — Antonio Gramsci.
Kautsky argued that, left to themselves, workers could develop only trade union consciousness — i.e. the ability to organise collectively in pursuit of gains within the wages system — while socialist consciousness, i.e. the idea that the wages system could be replaced by collective ownership of and hence democratic control of the means of production, had to be brought to workers’ movements by intellectuals from outside. In What Is To Be Done Lenin cited Kautsky’s view with approval (although he did add a footnote, not mentioned by Sheila, pointing out that individual workers could themselves become socialist intellectuals).
Sheila says that this approach derived from Kautsky was simply wrong. But then this is at odds with her own — largely convincing — evidence that rank and file activists in strike after strike have not developed such a consciousness.
About 30 years after What is To Be Done , in an effort to make sense of the defeat of the Turin factory occupations in 1920 and the consequent fascist takeover, Gramsci contrasted the way in which, in his view, the working class movement needed to organize itself with what happened in the “popular universities” (i.e. organizations akin to the WEA or extramural university provision here). He argued as follows:
“these movements were worthy of attention and deserved study. They enjoyed a certain success in the sense that they demonstrated on the part of the ‘simple’ a genuine enthusiasm and a strong determination to attain a higher cultural level and a higher conception of the world. What was lacking, however, was any organic quality either of philosophical thought or of organisational stability and central cultural direction.
“One got the impression that it was all rather like the first contacts of’ English merchants and the negroes of Africa: trashy baubles handed out in exchange for nuggets of gold. In any case one could only have had cultural stability and an organic quality of thought if there had existed the same unity between the intellectuals and the simple as there should be between theory and practice.
“That is, if the intellectuals had been organically the intellectuals of those masses, and if they had worked out and made coherent the principles and the problems raised by the masses in their practical activity, thus constituting a cultural and social bloc. The question posed here was… is a philosophical movement properly so called when it is devoted to creating a specialised culture among restricted intellectual groups, or rather when, and only when, in the process of elaborating a form of thought superior to ‘common sense’ and coherent on a scientific plane, it never forgets to remain in contact with the ‘simple’ and indeed finds in this contact the source of the problems it sets out to study and to resolve?”
If this approach is right, it would be important for activists to put a lot of effort into developing a systematic approach to socialist education, based on the model sketched out by Gramsci in this and other parts of his Prison Notebooks. But although Ramparts of Resistance is in many ways a valuable attempt to apply Gramsci’s ideas to the situation today, Sheila seems not to recognize this priority.
• More debate about Ramparts of Resistance
www.workersliberty.org/node/8478