Rank and File on the Move

[p004] Rank and File on the Move A very successful conference—Why the witch-hunt?—Campaign against shop crganizations—Those who do dominate millions—Leaders who will not lead— Officials help Tory cffensive—Question of bureaucratic privileges—Stalinist leaders join in—The duty cf Marxists—Militants and union branches—Trade union demo- cracy—Milestone in working-class history HE national industrial rank-and-file Conference called by the editorial board of The Newsletter at the Holborn Hall on November 16 was a great success. Such an assembly of militant, enthusiastic men and women, discussing the vital problems of the British working class in a way unknown among the leaders of the Labour movement, could noi fail to hearten and inspire revolutionary socialists. The belief of the editorial board of The Newsletter that such a venture was urgently needed in present conditions found ample justi- fication. The response was all the more remarkable in that a vicious witch-hunt against The Newsletter reached its climax just before the Conference met. Yet. despite the attempts by Fleet Street and by certain trade union Officials to destroy the Conference, over 500 pople met: and, amid the hostility, a note of real respect could be detected in the Press comments next day, ‘revelations’ about ‘Club men’, secret code names and sinister power-seekers, which brought anxious letters to the News Chronicle from menaced matrons in Gerrards Cross? There have been rank-and-file con- ferences before, some of them called by the Daily Worker, that have not attracted a tithe of the attention lavished on a gathering called by a small, unpretentious socialist weekly barely eighteen months old, with a circulation not yet in five figures? Clearly, the witch- hunt was due both to the nature of the Conference and to the circumstances in which it took place. Today the mest important aspect of the industrial and political scene is the employers’ offensive. The gravest danger for the British ruling class and its Tory government is the unleashing of the latent power of the working people of this country to meet that offensive and halt its hitherto steady progress. But the aim of the rank-and-file Con- ference was precisely that: to tap this power at its source, in the workshops, in the mines. on the docks, on the building sites, in transport, through the shop stewards” and other rank-and-file committees. As the offensive has gathered momentum the most vicious attacks have been reserved for such militant workshop organizations. And there is a very good reason for that. The real guardians of the concessions won in a period of full employment are the militant rank and file. They are responsible for W weve was the reason for the witch-hunt, for the a balance of class forces in industry in which the workers are stronger than before the war. The shop organizations have immediate and continuous links with the men and women on the job. They are more responsive to their wishes, and therefore more dangerous to our rulers, than are ‘responsible’ trade union leaders. The employers’ organizations and the government would dearly love to smash their power. Hence the venom and fury directed against a conference whose principal object was to Strengthen and consolidate their power. N fact the campaign against the Newsletter Conference [rcs a direct continuation of the campaign which has been directed against these committees in the past. The hair-raising stories in the News Chronicle called to mind the series of articles in the Economist last Feb- bruary on the activities of ‘spare-time officials—call them shop stewards or what you will’, declaring that they were a ‘cesspool of corruption’. A conference which sought to help build a powerful rank-and-file move- ment, which brought together militants in various indus- tries, which broke down their isolation and strengthened their confidence, which sought to aid the development of solidarity movements behind workers in struggle: such a conference was an inevitable target for the employers’ Press, R ROY NASH, who had the doubtful distinction M:« firing the first salvo in the Press barrage, told readers of the News Chronicle that the nine men of the Newsletter editorial board were dreaming of dominating the lives of millions of working men and women. In truth it was because it was seeking to inve:ve millions of working men and women to the fullest extent in the working out of their own destiny that The Newsletter came under attack. For it is the very opposite of ‘dreaming’ of dominating the lives of millions to seek all the time to bring to workers an awareness that the power to prevent a return to the hungary thirties is in their own hands. Of course Nash, had he wished, wculd not have had to look far to find small groups of people. in Britain today, who do not have to dream of dominating. but already do dominate, the lives of millions. The great monopolists and indus- 129

[p005] LABOUR REVIEW trialists, the leading bankers, the generals and admirals, the top Civil Servants and leading Tories—there Nash can find the handful of people who take decisions affect- _ing the future employment and future living (and dying) conditions of millions of British people. Decisions on the H-bomb, its use and testing, on wars against the colonial peoples, on economic policy: these decisions are in their hands, and theirs alone. AID Fleet Street: If these Newsletter people have © thei way they will open up a period of industrial strife unprecedented in Britain. To be sure, there is every likelihood of great industrial and political battles in Britain in the not distant future. But the responsibility for these rests, not on Marxists, who seek to prepare the working class to face the attacks made on them, but on the ruling class and its government, which aim to resolve their economic problems at the workers’ ex- pense. And if the working class enters a period of long- drawn-out sacrifice, then no small measure of the blame will rest on the Right-wing leaders of the Labour move- ment, who refuse to mobilize the whole industrial and political might of that movement to resolve grave issues quickly and decisively. They are as much afraid of the fighting potentialities of their own troops as they are of the enemy’s attacks. HICH brings us to the trade union leaders’ W atizcks on the rank-and-file Conference. It was not to be expected that this event would pass without some denunciation from that direction. In general, the Right wing lives in mortal dread of un- leashing the might of the working class. ‘Never again,’ said Mr Crump, the railwaymen’s leader, after the 1926 General Strike. His words are echoed by every Right- wing leader today. As the London bus strike showed, the overriding desire of these men is to contain and limit struggles. Rather defeat than the extension of the struggle to create a force that can really challenge the domination of the capitalist class. Afraid to lead, afraid to develop a movement against the Tory attacks, they are also afraid that the reaction from the ranks will pass beyond their control. They peer nervously into an uncertain future of increasing unemployment and stormy class struggles, and they seek to isolate militant leaders before they forge too firm links with the working class. Since the employers have tightened the screws and are less willing to grant concessions in negotiation, these leaders have lost a certain freedom of manoeuvre. They seek to compensate for that by increasing their hold on the machine. It was no accident that the leaders of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers were in the van of the attempts to proscribe the rank- and-file Conference, even though this union used to be looked on as one of the more ‘progressive’. For in the AUBTW there has been a steady increase of the officials’ powers as against those of elected committees. The South Bank lock-out sharply exposed union leaders who talk of the Tory offensive but fail to fight it in deeds —or who actively aid it as did those leaders who so shamefully called on trade unionists to cross the South Bank picket lines. 130 December 1958 OT least among the reasons for the anger of Right- N sing leaders is that The Newsletter puts forward clear demands for the removal of the material base on which the trade union bureaucracy rests. Expresse in the Charter of Workers’ Demands adopted by the Conference were the simple, but vital, demands for modest wages for officials and the right of election and recall. By raising this question of bureaucratic privileges the militants at the Newsletter Conference served notice tnat the leadership they aim to build in the trade union mcvement is a leadership of an entirely new character, one militant in deeds as well as words, hostile to the privileges cf bureaucracy, determined to destrov those privileges and the practices by which bureaucracy per- petuates itself. MONG those who attacked the Conference were A the leaders of the Communist Party. In World News they assembled a choice selection of forgeries and distortions,! in the Daily Worker they engaged in some pretty miserable sniping at ‘the Trotskyist circus’. What contempt J. R. Campbell must have for the readers of his paper, and how low he must rate their intelligence. when he can write an article alleging a ‘strange united front’ between the leaders of the AUBTW and The Newsletter—just after the executive of that union had expelled Brian Behan! The leaders of the Communist Party were put in a painful dilemma by the Newsletter Conference. They themselves cannot conduct a thorough- going fight for a militant rank-and-file programme for the trade unions. Nor can they wage a campaign for trade union democracy, for the trade union officials who are Communist Party members have their own niche in the trade union bureaucracy. Their trade union policies are conducted with the aim of winning allies at the top, and activities among the rank and file are subcrdinated to that aim. For them the most important criterion of a leader is how he shapes un to resolu- tions on east-west trade, summit talks and delegations to the Soviet Union, rather than how he acts in relation to the workers he leads. Moreover the Communist Party leaders have a bureaucratic fear of rank-and-file movements which they cannot tightly control. Their problem was how to hold back the members of their party who genuinely felt the needs of the working ciass in face of the employers’ offensive and who were thus attracted by the Newsletter Conference. True to their Stalinist training, Campbell and his colleagues told their members that in reality The Newsletter was an agency of the employers. ‘The Left wing of the Economic League’ was the phrase used by one of their followers who spoke at the Conference. But attacks of this kind always boomerang these days, whatever was the case in the thirties; and serious militants in the ranks of the Communist Party are more and more disgusted with their leaders’ attitude. Many now see what Marxists have always emphasized: that whatever demagogy may appear from time to time in Communist Party propaganda, in deeds the leaders are incapable of developing a militant movement; rather do they adjust their activity to the pressure of the Right wing. 1 See The Newsletter Conference and the Communist Party, Two Attacks by Dennis Goodwin. with Replies by Peter Fryer. (A Newsletter Pamphlet, 4d.).

[p006] ORIGINS OF SECTARIANISM NOTHER accusation against The Newsletter has been that it ‘interferes’ in industrial struggles from outside. Leaving aside the fact that The Newsletter draws most of its support from industrial militants, what other purpose has a socialist paper than to help workers in struggle against their employers? The spear- head of the employers’ offensive today is in industry. There is a crying need for a united strategy of resistance by the entire Labour movement. The Marxists who support The Newsletter not only had a right, but a positive duty—in view of the appalling failure of the official leaders of the Labour movement—to call a con- ference to discuss ways of meeting this offensive. Must Marxists wait until the workers are isolated and de- feated section by section before they reveal that the trade union leaders are not leading? If there is a danger that the outcome of the ruling-class offensive will be the smashing of workers’ organizations and the poverty and demoralization of working men and women, then Marxists must strive might and main to replace leaders who cannot fight by leaders who can and will organize a vigorous counter-offensive. ‘naturally’ within the industries concerned, says a ‘Left’ critic, one Robin Emmett, who attacks The Newsletter in the mid-November issue of Socialist Review. It must be built inside the trade union move- ment, and not outside, he says. Certainly the rank-and- file movement must develop within the trade union movement. Where else? Certainly a rank-and-file move- ment must be a movement representing bodies of trade unionists. The editorial board of The Newsletter never declared itself to be a rank-and-file movement, but simply the editorial board of a socialist newspaper seeking to do all in its power to help develop a move- ment for which there is a burning need. What this ‘Left’ critic means by ‘within the movement’, however, is ‘within the trade union branches’. ‘Absolutely nothing,’ he writes, ‘that cannot be done within the trade union branches will ever be achieved outside.’ Indeed? This critic shows a lamentable ignorance both of history and of the present needs of the working class. There is no doubt that the militants who attended the Newsletter Conference were some of the most active in their trade union branches. Militants always are, and correctly so. The trade union branches are of prime importance. Militants cannot neglect the general strengthening of branch organization and the fight for policy changes within the union machinery. But it was because that machinery was neither flexible enough nor responsive Bi: the rank-and-file movement must spring up enough to day-to-day needs that the shop stewards’ movement developed in the first place. And it developed unofficially, winning its official rights through its un- official activity. VERY form of organization, every leadership, K must justify itself in accordance with the needs of the working class. Those needs today are for tne solidarity of the whole movement with each section under attack, and for preparation not only for defence but also for a counter-offensive. Because of the nature of the trade union machinery, and because of the leaders’ attempts to keep the struggles isolated, militant activity in trade union branches must be linked with activity seeking to organize the base of the movement —rank-and-file committees, which feel the full weight of the employers’ offensive, through which the workers most directly express their will, and which in time go beyond the limits of a single industry. To turn the unions into organs of struggle playing their full part in the emancipation of the working class from capitalist exploitation—this is a higher law for serious trade unionists than confining their activity to the channels dug by the Right-wing leaders. Building the strength of the rank-and-file committees, binding them together in solidarity against the employers’ attack—this is part of the task of making the trade unions fighting organs of the working class. In fact a powerful rank-and-file movement will also bring fresh forces and a new spirit into the trade union branches and will dispel the apathy which is the Right wing’s greatest reserve. As the Charter of Workers’ Demands declares, solidarity action committees and similar rank-and-file bodies can power- fully assist the restoration of trade union democracy. a milestone in the post-war history of the working class. It would have been a success even if it had only brought a large body of militant men and women in industry together for the first time for many years, to exchange their experiences and pool their ideas. But much more than that was accomplished. The Charter of Workers’ Demands presents policies around which a serious and powerful movement can be developed. On November 16 a good part of the groundwork was laid on which can be built a leadership which will organize, educate, mobilize and lead in industrial and political struggle workers who seek socialist solutions to the problems of their class. Tin national industrial rank-and-file Conference was 131

[p007] LABOUR REVIEW December 1958