Constant Reader Master and Servant:

RECENT events have brought it home to the working-class movement that seamen are still subject to the same sort of regime which the whole class lay under before the repeal of the ‘master and servant’ laws in 1875. And there are signs (such as the editorial of The Guardian for August 12) that some people would like not to remove this historical anomaly but, on the contrary, to start extending the regime to other groups, such as the dockers, with a view eventually to putting the whole working class back where it was before 1875.

The essence of the matter is that the worker (the ‘servant’) should be liable, when he ‘breaks his contract’, not just to a civil action on the part of his employer (his “master’), but to prosecution by the state and punishment as a criminal. Here is an extract from the report of the case of a young coach-builder, James Mason, brought before the Wrexham magistrates for ‘deserting his employment.’ This was in 1864, during the American Civil War. The case was heard by the Mayor of Wrexham and a certain Captain McCoy (whether the latter was exArmy or ex-Navy is not known).

‘Defendant: I left under peculiar circumstances. shop has been blacked.

‘The Mayor: Then it is coming to that, is it? That a lot of working men, fellows like you, are to dictate to masters who shall work for them. That may do in France in time of a revolution. You have united yourself with an illegal society, therefore you must take the consequence. You seem to say that there was no contract. Were you paid your wages weekly?

‘Defendant: Yes.

‘The Mayor: Very well. That is a contract all the world over. If such a state of things as this is not to be stopped, I would no longer sit here as a magistrate. It is worse than the disunited States of America.

‘Captain McKoy: It is worse than slavery. It makes the servant master.’

And Mason was sent to jail for a month.

Campaign to change the law While the law was like this, real trade unionism and the right to strike could be effectively nullified by the courts. In the same year as Mason’s case, a campaign to change the law was initiated by the Glasgow Trades Council. They organized a national conference of the trade union movement (which some historians see as the beginning of the Trades Union Congress). Local committees to fight the ‘master and servant’ laws were set up all over the country, and the Glasgow trade unionists’ weekly The Sentinel acquired a national circulation as the organ of the campaign.

But it was 11 years before the workers succeeded in getting the law changed. The delay was due to their mistake in allowing themselves at first to be drawn into long drawn-out proceedings before a ‘Select Committee’ of Parliament, which merely played with them. Only when, in 1873, they changed their tactics and boycotted a ‘Royal Commission’ which was offered them, concentrating on demonstrations and other independent activities, did the government of the day begin to take them seriously; and in 1875 the law was changed.

‘It was the angry pressure of the trade unions which was decisive in pushing the reform through,’ writes Daphne Simon, from whose essay in ‘Democracy. and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Dona Torr’ (edited by John Saville, 1954), the above facts are taken.

(Continued on back page)

BEVAN AND BOURDET (continued from page 246) the moral is interesting. Seeking the reason for the failure of Bevanism he finds it in the ‘lack of a complete political doctrine, experts and studies’, which Bevan’s individualism aggravated, but did not create. Therefore, what the Left needs in Britain—and in France—is just three things: a complete doctrine which has to be drawn up by a team of experts and handed to the movement as a pep pill to energise it out of apathy. And, of course, Bourdet tells us, it now has the basis for such a revival in—“The New Left Review’!

It would be invidious to discuss whether Bourdet’s informants have not, shall we say, slightly over-rated their importance and their historical mission. Let us content ourselves with noting the fact and match Bourdet’s logic with our own.

If a complete new doctrine is needed and the effort to compile it ‘has scarcely begun’, what happens in the meantime? After all, it is all very well to know that a collective Marx is carefully piercing together its data in the coffee houses, but meanwhile life goes on. And a part of life is the struggle of the classes, the growth and disintegration of movements, all sorts of political and industrial hurly-burly teaching rough lessons not to be learnt in the text-books.

The respectful Bourdet Taking a look at Bourdet’s own policy is not encouraging. Obviously without the ‘complete doctrine’ he often goes astray. At every decisive turn Bourdet’s own policy has been wanting: at the time of the collapse of the Fourth Republic (‘defend the republic’), at the time of the Algiers insurrection (for de Gaulle against the ultras), constantly in relation to the Algerian war (negotiate, negotiate, negotiate—but don’t do anything which might be illegal). No wonder that some impatient spirits have inscribed Bourdet’s name high on the list of the ‘respectful Left’—respectful in their attitude to de Gaulle and to the rules of the political game as conducted in capitalist society. As a matter of fact, for all their talk about the ‘Establishment’ some of our ‘new Left’ friends are also_ conspicuously ‘respectful’ of the rules which it makes and the theories which it teaches. For proof one need only look at what they do and say.

They, like Bourdet, for all the big talk, have not sloughed off the kind of weakness to which Bevan was prone. They form coteries instead of making a bridge to the masses. They indulge in mutual self-praise and are scornful of the theoretical work already embodied in. the Marxist classics (‘dogmatism’). They are attracted by the accomplished fact and the big name. They seek short cuts around difficult stretches of the road to socialism. And so on. Unlike Bourdet their influence is as yet limited and their mistakes are mostly buried in the files of magazines. Bourdet’s are still potent: they continue to prevent many sincere young socialists from finding a way forward through a living movement rooted in the working class.

Council of Action

August 13 this year saw the 40th anniversary of the setting up of the Council of Action to prevent, by industrial action, a renewal of British armed intervention against Soviet Russia at the time of the Russo-Polish war of 1920.

This is often quoted as an example of how the working class of an imperialist country can stop even a war which the ruling class is fully determined upon, just by exercising pressure and without need for actual revolution. Not going into all the questions involved, and not wishing to reflect on anyone’s celebration of this anniversary, I nevertheless wonder whether the sequence of events in August, 1920, is always fully appreciated when the Councii of Actioi is discussed.

At the time the Council was set up, the Red Army was still advancing, and it seemed certain to both capitalists and workers everywhere that Warsaw would fall, the reactionary Polish state would collapse, Soviet troops would appear on the border of Silesia—and revolution would break out in Germany. It was a situation which might well be seen as a life-or-death challenge to the imperialist powers—go to war to save ‘White’ Poland, or you'll soon be finished yourselves. But on August 15 there occurred what Polish nationalists call ‘the miracle on the Vistula’, when their forces, helped by a French military mission (which included, I believe, a certain CapRALLY tain de Gaulle), threw back the Soviet advance and began a counter-offensive which soon compelled an armistice and then a treaty of peace establishing Poland’s frontier well to the east.

Once the Red Army’s advance had been checked it might well seem to some, at any rate, of the imperialist statesmen that armed intervention, with all its costs and risks, was no longer immediately necessary for the defence of capitalism in Europe. At all events, in considering why Britain did not go to war with Russia in the summer of 1920, one ought not to leave out of account either what happened in London on August 13, or what happened in front of Warsaw two days later, especially if one is going to draw far-reaching political conclusions.

This passes over, incidentally, the opinion of John Maclean (‘Russia’s Appeal to the British Workers’) that Lloyd George never meant to go to war with Russia at all, and only issued his ultimatum to please the French, at the same time giving Arthur Henderson the cue to threaten a general strike!

Some illuminating remarks on the war with Poland as seen from the Soviet side are among the many fine things in Trotsky’s ‘My Life’, originally published in 1930 and long out of print, which is now available once more, as a paper-back (Universal Library, Grosset and Dunlap, New York, 20s.).

BRIAN PEARCE.

roared their applause when Jimmy England, a local docker,