Solidarity agitates for a workers’ government, meaning a government based on and accountable to working-class organisations, and serving working-class interests.
A bourgeois (capitalist) government may very well be run by “professional politicians”, who are not capitalists themselves. Education, lobbying, a web of personal ties, etc. are sufficient to keep the government on a capitalist track.
But no workers’ government is possible without extensive (though not necessarily perfect) workers’ democracy and workers’ solidarity. The working class can have power not through wealth or economic assets, or forces of traditional deference, but only by organisation and solidarity.
Union membership
The trade unions, the bedrock organisations of the working class, have about 6.25 million members in Britain. Unions affiliated to the TUC showed aggregate membership marginally up in 2022-3 to 5,205,882 in January 2023.
The recent (sadly slight) membership increases have been in unions with majority public sector memberships, suggesting a connection with the 2022-3 strike wave. That will have continued at least patchily in 2023. NEU, PCS, and BMA have reported increased rep coverage and a more active membership. In total unions have something like 200,000 workplace reps.
Union membership is down from 13 million in 1979, but unions are a force.
The Labour Party, to which many larger unions are affiliated, has 376,000 members at the latest count. It had 575,000 at its Corbyn-era peak in mid-2017 (probably its highest real figure ever, though quirks of compilation show higher nominal figures in the 1950s), and about 150,000 at its Blair-Brown low.
Total membership of churches (mosques, etc.) is about five million, and of the National Trust, 5.4 million. But National Trust membership is more like a supermarket loyalty card than participation in an effort at organised collective power, and church membership is by definition about deference to a “higher” power and its accredited representatives. Unions and the Labour Party have workplace and branch meetings, committees, conferences, campaigns, and so on.
So far, so good. But readers will know from experience about the huge weaknesses. Some of the “unions” in official statistics are really professional associations.
Everywhere, most of the members, most of the time, do not come to meetings. Even at the Corbyn peak, many Labour Party members had only electronic-message contact with the party. Union and Labour Party meetings are often small, irregular, and dull, and sometimes dominated by retired or older members. In practice, union and the Labour Party affairs may be dominated by paid full-time officials (and, in the Labour Party, councillors and MPs). Very many union members do not have workplace reps at all. Despite its strike campaign, the civil service workers’ union PCS has membership “density” at an all-time low, less than 50% in many pivotal areas.
Workers
The modern wage-working class has potential for much better. It is unique among the basic producing classes of history in generating permanent movements which usually, at least on some vague level, subscribe to the aim of changing society wholesale.
It sustains a more-or-less continuous level of struggle — often patchy, often low, but rarely zero — and the rules of effectiveness in that struggle, democracy and solidarity, are also the basis for the general working-class aspiration to change society.
It is concentrated in big workplaces and big cities, not scattered in villages. It is literate, able to communicate across whole countries and internationally rather than just in small localities, and educated to some level by the official bourgeois system for its own reasons; and has capacities for self-education.
However, we are also the basic exploited class. We live in a drenching downpour of capitalist ideology, pushing us to look to the best deals we can get as individuals in the marketplace. Many of us have been taught at school to consider ourselves ignorant “failures”. We often suffer economic insecurity and even poverty. We are tired after work (waged and domestic), and these days it is often difficult to exchange ideas with other workers within our workplaces.
The organic class struggle over wages and conditions is double-edged. It helps us organise, sharpens our sense of solidarity, makes us more assertive, but it can also sidetrack us into sectionalism, seeking advantage for one group of workers and leaving others in the lurch, or looking to immediate “consumer” benefits at the expense of general collective needs like environmental sustainability. All that tends to make most workers politically passive, most of the time. It generates a social layer of union officials and the like who act as, and adapt ideologically to the role of, “brokers” between workers and bosses. Such people are often paid more like managers than workers. Unison’s general secretary gets £184,000 in salary and benefits, PCS’s £113,000, the RCN’s £335,000. MPs are paid £87,000 a year, council leaders often around £50,000. Especially these days, the officials are often surrounded by a veritable social layer of NGO, think-tank, etc. people.
So democracy and solidarity in the labour movement are not givens. Even in times of high mobilisation, they are a struggle. In times of lower mobilisation, they always tend to shrivel.
It would be hopeless, except for one thing.
Revolutionaries
The working class generates more than just the broad labour movement (and, unfortunately, the bureaucratic layer which sprouts on top of it). It also generates a core of people who become inspired with a revolutionary worldview as young activists, and who stay active for the cause even in the downtimes.
“The emancipation of the proletariat is not a labour of small account and of little people; only those who can keep their hearts strong and their will as sharp as a sword when the general disillusionment is at its worst can be regarded as fighters for the working class or called a revolutionaries”, wrote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.
If those activists organise as a coherent collective — if they can function as “the memory of the working class” (Trotsky’s phrase), keeping the broad organisations alive in hard times, transmitting ideas generated at one high point of labour-movement life to another, refining and redeveloping the ideas into renewed analysis and strategy — and those are big “ifs” — then they can make a decisive difference.
In the 1920s big Communist Parties, transmitting and adapting ideas from the Russian workers’ revolution, were organised in many European countries, and in some they outstripped the time-serving reformist parties. Then Stalinism warped them.
The task of developing unwarped ideals of democracy and solidarity fell to the Trotskyists. But for decades Stalinist and social-democratic hostility meant we had to live almost “in exile”, pushed to the edges in labour movements, pushed into enclaves which breed fractiousness.
The Stalinist parties eventually collapsed, after 1989, but amidst a wave of neoliberal capitalist triumphalism which also drove the whole movement back.
We stood our ground. We learned the lessons. We educated ourselves on how and why “socialism” and “democracy” had been stolen as fake-names for tyranny.
We are active on four levels. First, studying the theories developed by activists before us, integrating that study with analysis of events around us, discussing, debating, as we do in this paper, in our pamphlets, and in our meetings and study groups.
Second, making those ideas and debates accessible to those around us, especially to young people — paper sales, literature stalls, public meetings.
Third, organising union activity in our workplaces, and campaign activity.
Fourth, perhaps decisively, and integrated with that organising work — intervening in the broad movement. Taking ideas into meetings and into activities, seeking debates, pushing proposals, making sure they are carried out, drawing in new activists as we do that.
Day to day, the work is often laborious and unspectacular. The gains are counted in a few papers sold here, a resolution passed there, a few more people convinced to attend a meeting or engaged in political conversation, a new recruit here or there to socialist activism. But the unspectacular work in quiet times lays the essential groundwork for the spectacular activity at high points.
We know from history that working-class struggle always erupts, again and again, even after long periods of quiet. The outcome of the eruptions will be swayed by the balance between the forces of redomestication (the bureaucrats, the pressures of ruling ideology) and the forces of expansion. And that balance will depend on just how diligent in study; how energetic; and how persevering in building at least a half-hearing around ourselves in their workplaces and their routine labour movement meetings; how assertive in intervention, our people have been.
Such are our acorns, such are our oaks.