30.11.1995

Failed approach

Dave Hulme reviews 'Socialists in the trade unions' by Alex Callinicos (Bookmarks, pp79)

MEMBERS of the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party were for many years known for their rank and fileism. Today the SWP works to build up its caucuses and will not work in a united front with other left groups.

For example, the SWP refused the approach from the Campaign for a Fighting and Democratic Unison to stand a single left candidate for the union’s general secretary against Rodney Bickerstaffe. Despite the disunity the two candidates together polled over 73,000 votes (23%).

In his book Socialists in the trade unions Alex Callinicos asserts that the SWP will have to build a network of activists around Socialist Worker before a rank and file movement can grow. In other words it must wait until the party has built a mass base in the unions. Ironically, this in turn depends on the spontaneous development of a widespread fightback from the shop stewards’ organisations.

This perspective is at odds with the history of his own organisation and the early history of the Communist International, which attempted to guide the CPGB in united front work for a minority movement in the unions. This leads Callinicos to distort these histories.

He is impressed with the work of the CPGB in its popular front period. He ignores the political aspects of this: what interests him is the CP’s building of a party network around rank and file papers.

The best definition of an independent rank and file movement is still the statement of the Clyde Workers’ Committee in November 1915 during the great labour unrest on the Clyde and elsewhere: “We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them.”

This was the tradition built on by the Bolsheviks in the Communist International during the first four congresses. The National Minority Movement was a tactic to cope with the ‘downturn’ at the end of the revolutionary wave of struggles following World War I.

No wonder Callinicos skates quickly over the period in the book. After all Tony Cliff’s downturn notion ruled out a national rank and file movement.

The Minority Movement was an attempt to stop the retreat by converting the minority in each industry into a revolutionary majority. It was a tactic to transform the unions into fighting organisations. But this was not simply a matter of networks of militants or generalising trade union demands in the manner of the IS/SWP. It was also a question of bringing Leninist politics into the unions.

The IS approach in the early 1970s was purely organisational. Revolutionary politics were kept to a minimum with mainly trade union demands. For instance, those raising the issue of racist immigration laws within the national rank and file movement were bureaucratically hounded. During the high tide of trade union militancy of 1968-74 the SWP was unable to challenge reformism or the political influence of the Labour Party.

Before Tony Cliff became a born again ‘Leninist’ in 1968 he had a perspective of transforming the spontaneous development of the shop stewards’ movement into an IS-led revolutionary movement. Building a democratic centralist party was dismissed as toy town Bolshevism. The spirit of this approach survived the turn to ‘Leninism’.

When a Labour government was re-elected in 1974 the militancy was undermined and demobilised by the influence of the new administration. The national rank and file movement disintegrated as the economic boom came to an end. This failure was not a natural stillbirth as Callinicos claims but the failure of the politics of Tony Cliff and the IS/SWP tradition.

Callinicos claims the Minority Movement simply looked to the top of the trade unions through electing and supporting leftwing trade union leaders. Certainly the CP was heavily criticised by the Third Congress of the CI, but an attempt was made to build a rank and file movement on a revolutionary fighting programme.

The general approach of the SWP is that the left leader is a lesser evil. So recently the SWP said vote for Bill Morris instead of Dromey in the TGWU. This one-sided stress on placing demands on ‘left’ trade union leaders results from the lack of an independent rank and file movement today.

Dave Hulme