The Workers’ Liberty dayschools on “Marxists and the trade unions”, on Saturday 1 October were held simultaneously in Sheffield and London. Most of the schools’ time was given over to small workshop session. We started by considering why socialists should focus effort on workplaces and trade unions, rather than on other areas of activism which may be more easily accessible and sometimes more lively.
One reason is the potential power of strikes and other workplace action to shake society. But that’s not all.
We are not just looking for a powerful back-up force for some project devised and designed elsewhere. As Hal Draper put it in one of the texts we studied: “One way of looking at social sections... is [as] your ‘army’. . .That whole approach is completely alien to Marxism. . .
“For Marx and Marx alone the significance of working class socialism was not simply that you orient to this class because you can get the most out of them, but that it is this class which, when it gets into motion, shakes the foundations of capitalist society”.
We look to workplace and trade-union activism because our socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class, and the focal point where the working class develops its collective identity, organisation, and potential is in production, starting from the elemental struggle imposed on it by capitalism, for wages and conditions.
But, as Ivan Wels explained at the Sheffield school, we have to be active in the workplaces and trade unions not just as trade unionists. There is a constant pull in trade-union activity towards absorption in unrevolutionary routine. And when we come into a workplace where the trade union is scarcely visible — or meets once a year, many miles away — we must know how to avoid having our activity shrunk to the dimensions of the existing structures.
Part of the answer, for revolutionaries, is being active in other areas. The workplace struggle is not everything (the London school discussed was how the union movement should relate to other working class struggles, for instance community activists and women doing domestic labour). But knowing how to pursue the workplace struggle is central.
That is what the second round of workshop sessions looked at. Pete Allen emphasised the need to encourage self-respect among workers — the idea that we know our jobs better than the bosses, and should have control. He also emphasised the need to make sure that trade union reps do not become divorced from workplace concerns — as some, on extensive “facility time”, can easily do — and to fight for the right for workers to have time and space, in working hours, for meetings to discuss their concerns.
Winning that right is hard these days, and we also have to use to the maximum the opportunities that do exist in workplaces for collective discussion, usually at mealbreaks. Pete Radcliff described how, in the steelworks where he used to work, the critical move by which the bosses weakened union organisation was simply staggering meal breaks, so that there were never more than a few workers in the canteen at a time.
We have to start from talking and organising around workplace concerns, in the workplace — which can be done even when there is no formal union organisation at all — and then take those concerns into the union structure (if it exists) or build the union structure around them. At the same time, as socialists, we bring in our own ideas “from outside” — from the whole history of class struggles — and organising round those, too.
The final round of workshop sessions was more open-ended and “theoretical”, looking at the evidence and ideas presented by Beverly Silver in her recent book on “workers’ movements and globalisation since 1870”.
Why has union militancy dipped in the last twenty years? Which restructurings of capitalism have undercut worker militancy, and what contradictions do they contain which may in the longer term feed renewed worker militancy? Silver explains that “Fordism” was initially thought to make militant worker organisation more difficult — and for a long time it did. In time workers learnt too exploit its contradictions, and many big “Fordist” assembly plants became bastions of militant unionism.
Silver expects major struggles by the fast-expanding Chinese working class in coming years. Internationalism and international organisation are more important than ever. The challenge for socialists is to develop an approach which keeps a grip both on that global, world-historical perspective and on the most day-to-day workplace concerns.
The event was the first in a series of monthly schools which the AWL will be running. The second, on “Globalisation and imperialism”, will be run in London on 22 October and in Leeds on 29 October. For details and reading, see