28.09.2011

Hideous capitalist system

Mark Fischer on the hunger marches of the National Unemployed Workers Movement

The pledge taken by the first national hunger marchers in October 1922 captures the revolutionary temper of the movement:

“I, a member of the great army of the unemployed, being without work and compelled to suffer through no fault of my own, do hereby solemnly swear with all the strength and resolution of my being, to loyally abide by, and to carry out the instructions of, the National Unemployed Workers Committee Movement, with the deliberate intention of pressing forward claims of the unemployed, so that no man, woman or child suffers hunger or want this winter.

“Further, realising that only by the abolition of this hideous capitalist system can the horror of unemployment be removed from our midst, I here and now take upon myself a binding oath to never to cease from active strife against this system until capitalism is abolished and our country and all its resources truly belong to the people.”[1]

The NUWCM (after 1929, the National Unemployed Workers Movement) had been formed the year before this march, centrally by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the years to come, the movement was to become genuinely mass and impact significantly in the social history of Britain between the wars. Its highest-profile actions were the six hunger marches (1922, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1934 and 1936), although it is important to remember that the organisation undertook mountains of detailed local work, organising actions and protests, representing unemployed individuals in dealings with the local authorities and simply giving advice.

However, the hunger marches represented the movement’s militant politics vividly dramatised on the streets and, in particular, the 1932 action was momentous. Three thousand marchers organised in 18 disciplined contingents tramped from economic black spots such as the north of England and the south Wales valleys to present a million-strong petition to parliament demanding the immediate scrapping of the hated means test. The marchers had to fight their way across the country to London’s Hyde Park, constantly harassed by police attacks and agents provocateurs. The national government was intent on “battering the participants, whilst portraying them as criminals and communists financed by Moscow”. Tragically, the CPGB’s disastrous ‘social fascist’ line objectively aided this caricature - its crazed sectarianism against the official trade unions and Labour Party meant that it “was isolated even within the labour movement” - with inevitable consequences for the organisations closely associated with it, such as the NUWM.[2]

The marchers were greeted by 100,000 people when they reached Hyde Park on October 27 … and by a ferocious assault from the 70,000 police who had been mobilised to teach the protestors a lesson. Fifteen thousand of them were injured - 75 seriously - and the clashes continued for days.[1]

Of course, the rightist political evolution of the NUWM subsequently tracked that of the CPGB and the world movement of which it was a component. By the time of the last hunger march in 1936, the party’s popular frontist rapprochement with the rest of the workers’ movement enabled it to mobilise huge rank-and-file support for the action and bring together over 250,000 to greet the marchers when they arrived at Hyde Park in November. Political degeneration was becoming apparent, however. A Lancashire march leader commented: “… we have been welcomed by Unionist [ie, Tory] and Liberal mayors, and ministers of religion and all kinds and creeds have helped” - something that, even if confined to particular contingents of the 1936 national march, would have been simply unthinkable in the movement’s early years.[4]

Significantly, however, and despite the CPGB’s opportunist overtures, even this action received no official support from the trade union movement or the Labour Party leadership. In the minds of the bureaucracy, the whole question of the organisation of the unemployed was for ever tainted by those early years of the NUWM and its thoroughly unrespectable, militant and revolutionary agitation and mass impact. That is why, as a 2005 book on Jarrow notes, the prominence of leading communists in the movement was “a recurrent excuse for refusing to work with [it] or mobilise a mass campaign against unemployment”[5]

Notes

1. W Hannington Unemployed struggles London 1979, p81.

2. R Croucher We refuse to starve in silence: a history of the National Unemployed Workers Movement 1920-46 London 1987, p140.

3. See the laughably biased 1932 Reuters report at www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH2fWBCRC0g.

4. P Kingsford The hunger marches in Britain 1920-1940 London 1982, p212.

5. M Perry The Jarrow crusade: protest and legend Sunderland 2005, p41.