14.03.2002

SA trade union fractions needed

By any reckoning this weekend's Socialist Alliance conference is a significant event. Over 1,000 union activists from a host of unions will gather on Saturday March 16 in the largest unofficial all-union conference for a quarter century. Concretely posing the question of the relationship between New Labour and the unions by focusing on the political fund, privatisation and job cuts has tapped into a rising mood of disaffection with Blair's rabidly anti-working class, pro-business programme. Expectation, but also a degree of impatience, is quite palpable. Not surprising when any sleazy capitalist gangster has more influence with Blair than the entire trade union movement. It is unfortunate that another union conference and a Communication Workers Union rally are scheduled on the same day. The Morning Star-backed Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions event looks as though it might have been a spoiler attempt. The LCDTU was asked by the SA to combine its conference with ours, but declined. The CWU rally was a hastily arranged affair and seems to have been designed by a limp leadership to fob off its own militants with a 'Well, we tried' excuse for inaction. Hopefully CWU activists will outperform the CWU bureaucrats and then come on to the SA conference. As significant as I think this conference is, we must be careful to avoid either being swept up in a tide of euphoria or of running too far ahead of the broad masses. A sober and calm analysis is essential. A recognition of what the current state of working class organisation is and how it got that way; an understanding of where it ought to go, how it is to get there and what role we must play. In other words we must have a strategy for advance. Having suffered a strategic defeat epitomised by the miners' Great Strike of 1984-85, but also involving defeats for dockers, printworkers, engineers, steelworkers and others, the mass of rank and file unionists remain atomised, apathetic, and loyalist (that is, by nature conservative). The oft-predicted crisis of expectations just did not happen. It is not happening now. Attendance at most union branches is extremely low. Many workplaces have difficulty filling branch positions and electing stewards. In many cases there is a divide between a layer of activists who keep the unions functioning and a silent, inactive membership. We have yet to reach the working class as a class. What is occurring is dissatisfaction with New Labour including within the union bureaucracy - not only leftwingers like Bob Crow, Mick Rix, Mark Serwatka, etc, but yesterday's 'new realists' such as John Edmonds and even John Monks himself have expressed doubts about the New Labour project. Added to this are a rash of spontaneous defensive struggles by workers now under threat from New Labour privatisation. This opens up opportunities to engage politically with already committed trade unionists. However, we must be careful to avoid substituting the easier task of engaging with leftwing office- holders for the much harder task of winning the rank and file - of educating, agitating and organising them. Winning resolutions and union positions whilst the great majority remains inert is to build on sand. We need to promote a theoretically well founded political process that actively involves the rank and file in favour of independent working class positions, and gives substance and backbone from the bottom up - ideas guide, the masses decide. Winning union positions (often through apathy), staging coups by this or that political cabal, getting resolutions through an almost inquorate branch or at a national conference (by delegates elected by small minorities) - all these can be reversed by rightwing counter-measures (always assisted by ruling class propaganda) unless we have mass active support. The crucial task is to build bottom-up democratic self-activity and militancy. It is to this task - promoting and leading the movement of the rank and file - that revolutionary socialists and union activists should devote their energy. A significant proportion of union members are so disenchanted with the whole political system that they do not pay the political levy - a trend engineered by Thatcher and enhanced by Blair. Substantial numbers of workers do not vote in elections. Those who do still pay the levy and who do vote stick with tradition - there is as yet no mass alternative party to Labour. In this situation frustrated and short-sighted calls to 'break the link' - disaffiliate from Labour - are mere empty exaltations. In many cases a flip from auto-Labourism to auto-anti-Labourism. A mechanical and easy substitute for a real political struggle - a struggle, on the one hand to show workers concretely that New Labour is a class enemy, and on the other to differentiate and win over the pro-working class forces that undoubtedly still exist within the Labour Party. Such a political struggle should also be conducted as the best defence against a re-invented Labour left wing designed to divert or contain rising rank and file militancy - a reflex reaction that we have seen so many times before. In present circumstances straightforward disaffiliation from above would most likely lead to further depoliticisation below. The FBU judged it right when by a slim majority it opted for the democratisation of its political fund to be put at the top of the agenda - the Socialist Alliance's Matt Wrack providing the correct formulation and tactical lead. The Socialist Alliance needs to help build a rank and file movement that insists on agreement by trade union-sponsored Labour MPs to a series of basic demands which are transparently in the interests of workers as a condition of further funding. This maintains a collectivist approach to independent working class politics - as distinct from a liberal pick'n'mix system advocated by George Monbiot and even Richie Venton in the Scottish Socialist Party, where funds could go to charities, the liberals, the local church and even the odd conservative or fascist. A collectivist, independent working class policy provides the means by which to win back workers to the necessity of voting for working class candidates and paying into a democratised political fund that aids them, not bosses. This active political engagement with Labour, together with offers to recommend voting for Labour candidates who will openly support union demands, can help isolate Blair and attract workers and activists to a fighting SA banner. As more workers come under attack and spontaneous struggles rise, we will have to confront the crippling effect of the anti-trade union laws. It is no longer correct in my view to refer to these laws as Tory anti-trade union laws - they are unquestionably now New Labour anti-trade union laws too. Again, it is through a democratic process that workers will learn concretely how these reactionary laws limit their ability to act, whilst giving employers a whole arsenal of weapons to delay, prevent or outlaw strike action. Not crude calls to simply defy the law - it is not our job to create martyrs - but building a mass movement to render these laws redundant. At the moment there is no programme drawn up for action after the March 16 conference. There is no plan for coordinating the work of our supporters. Firstly then, all SA union activists should be organised by the SA, so that we can intervene consistently and effectively on the basis of agreed goals. At the moment we have fragmentation - a host of separate political fractions and sectional papers galore. There is nothing wrong in principle with these SWP, AWL, Workers Power, etc, groups and publications - apart from their amateurishness and wastefulness - but we must aim in the future to act together, generalising and learning from the experience of others in order to develop unity in action across the unions. For the SA to organise collectively in this way would not only strengthen the alliance, but could also invigorate broad lefts, rank and file and other such formations outside the SA, as effectiveness and experience is acquired and a common approach developed. It is a hypocritical sect mentality that argues for sectional papers and fractions within the unions - but against the notion of the SA itself organising within and across all the unions and cohering and generalising all struggles through a Socialist Alliance paper. This is doubly important when we consider the current period. We have almost an entire generation with little or no experience of effective mass industrial action. Apart from a few sectors where strong trade union experience and tradition prevails (eg, rail and postal workers), we have either unions hit by the decline of particular industries or sectors new to such struggles. Even in the more or less intact sectors the low level of activity for many years has taken its toll. There is a wealth of experience possessed by comrades who lived through struggles in more combative times; there are the histories of great victories and terrible defeats - all of which contain lessons for us now. Yet we make the same old mistakes. We need to educate ourselves in the art of organising for battle. Having endured such a long period of relative working class inaction, the whole of the left is ill prepared for the tasks that confront us. Too often there is a tendency to act as mere supporters and cheerleaders, simply reacting to spontaneous developments. We need to adopt a more conscious, programmatic approach and begin to actively initiate and lead struggles. This March 16 conference opens up opportunities for us to begin to reorganise ourselves in order to do just that. Alan Stevens