25.09.1997

Unity against the bureaucrats

As thousands of workers march through Liverpool to show their solidarity with the sacked dockers, most trade union leaders stay away. But does that mean that militants should aim to form an alternative TUC?

At a Socialist Labour Party fringe meeting at this month’s Trade Union Congress, Arthur Scargill accused the TUC of failing to represent working class interests and floated the idea of a new trade union centre.

The notion of a split is an idle fantasy. If the NUM president has found it impossible to win trade union affiliates to ‘his’ SLP, he would soon discover that, compared to winning recruits for a new union body, it is a soft option. But, worse than that, the creation of a breakaway TUC is positively undesirable.

Every union activist knows that union-led militant action is the lowest for generations. They know that the ideas of ‘social partnership’ between workers and employers, between union leaders and the establishment, seem to have overwhelmed the trade union movement. Blair is riding high and the TUC is trailing behind. It does not even pretend to offer an independent working class voice.

However, whether we like it or not, the bureaucrats’ headlong rush to undisguised class collaboration actually reflects the working class’s own loss of self-identity. Although few workers have faith in their union leaders being able to deliver anything at all, many also believe that nothing can be achieved, whoever is leading. Our class has no political voice, let alone hegemonic consciousness.

Would an alternative, left version of the TUC be capable of transforming the situation, if it ever did see the light of day? Working class combativity throws up new leaders and those leaders in turn can help accelerate that combativity. But without class action and political intervention no union leadership could inspire workers towards decisive action.

A wave of class combativity would force existing bureaucrats to respond, however self-interestedly, and sweep away those who refused - whether they were to be found in John Monk’s TUC or Scargill’s alternative leftwing fantasy.

Trade union organisation should not be viewed in the same way as working class political organisation. The vanguard party of the working class - the Communist Party - must be self-selecting, gathering towards it the most dedicated, class conscious workers. But trade unions must be open to all workers, no matter how rightwing or reactionary they are or appear to be.

Revolutionaries must be with the masses. We must organise in the trade unions alongside the millions, not isolate ourselves from the most backward through setting up ‘pure’ but impotent shadow rumps. Just as we call for one union for every industry, so we demand the organisational unity of all trade unions in one TUC.

Through political organisation we aim to split the mass of workers away from the dead end of Labourism. But we need to win over workers where they spontaneously organise in existing unions, as well as those who are not organised at all.

The dockers need effective solidarity action. But that can never be produced by cutting ourselves off from the mass of workers who alone can deliver it.

Alan Fox