Courts, employers, and now the AMWU national leadership are mounting a triple offensive against Workers' First, the militant grouping which won the leadership of the AMWU in Victoria in 1998. The offensive highlights two tasks Ð immediate solidarity for Workers' First, now being taken up by local Defend Our Union Committees in a number of capital cities, and longer-term efforts to build militant rank and file groupings in other unions.
Unions are the main bedrock organisations of the working class. But generally their leaderships become bureaucratised. In Australia, since the years of the Accord between the unions and the 1983-1996 Labor government, we have that bureaucratisation in spades. Consistent working-class struggle is impossible without organisation. Working-class socialists therefore cannot dismiss or bypass the unions. Nor can we explain away their shortcomings as just a matter of their leaders' links with the ALP (which is the way the DSP and Green Left Weekly usually present things). To develop effective trade unionism; to rally the working class to fight for its own self-liberation; and, even more so, to root that revolutionary fight for self-liberation in on-the-ground workers' organising and struggle, rather than leaving it as a matter of words in the air, a central task for socialists is to help build rank and file organisations in workplaces and trade unions.
The aim of those rank and file organisations is to mobilise and give a voice to the rank and file in a way that bureaucratised, top-heavy official organisations cannot. They are not "oppositional" on principle, or for the sake of it. When official union leaders lead an effective struggle against the bosses, a serious rank and file organisation will support those leaders all the way. The rank and file organisation's enemy is not the official union leadership, but the bosses. The rank and file group is 100% for the union. It acts against the official leadership only when and to the extent that the official leadership thwarts or sabotages effective struggle against the employers.
Building rank and file organisations is the backbone of building a revolutionary party, at least in countries with large and more or less united trade union movements. It is the means by which the party gains a solid and reliable base in the working class, and it is the test of its ability to do that.
For that very reason, it is a difficult business. No solid rank and file grouping is likely to be built without a solid Marxist party or proto-party as its core. Rank and file groupings without that sort of political core do exist and have existed. Workers' First is an example. But those groupings have a very strong tendency to become closed circles of personal associates. They stand before the union membership as an alternative, more competent and honest leadership, but they are closed circles. They do not reach out to new activists. They may do excellent trade-union work for long periods, on a certain level, but they do not help to educate the trade union members in the ideas of working-class self-liberation, and in any sharp upheaval they tend to be sluggish and conservative. There are plenty of examples of this in the British trade union movement today, not to speak of many others in history, the most famous being the revolutionary-syndicalist left in France in the early decades of the 20th century. In fact, rank and file groupings first initiated and given their impulse by Marxist organisations have a tendency to mutate into the personal-circle mode if and when the initiating Marxist organisation loses its grip and dynamism; conversely, personal-circle trade-union groups have a tendency to mutate into syndicalist pseudo-parties, of a particularly elitist, shut-off and complacent sort.
Those problems are relevant to the tasks of beginning to build rank and file groupings.
Rank and file groups
To start a serious rank and file grouping we have to have at least five conditions.
1. There must be an initiating group of activists with at least some substantial base of common politics and common answers to the major challenges the union and the working class face. A Marxist organisation can provide that, if it has sufficient competent members in the area in question; otherwise, the initiative may come from a small group of people who develop a common approach in the course of union battles and build a larger circle round themselves. (Usually even in the second variant the initiators will have some political education or input from some more explicitly political or theoretical grouping).
2. Those activists must have sufficient knowledge and experience in the union to translate that common base of general ideas more or less reliably into specific answers to day-to-day issues in the union or workplace.
3. They must be well-known and respected enough in the union or workplace that a large minority, at least, of the members will listen to them and consider them as a serious alternative to the incumbent leadership.
4. They must have a political orientation that enables them, and indeed drives them, to reach out constantly to find and train new activists.
5. There has to be a sufficient level of confidence and activity in the broad union membership to "float" the group. Of course, a competent rank and file group has it as part of its role to raise the general level of confidence and activity in the membership; but even to start a proper group, in addition to the initiating nucleus, we need a certain minimum of broad confidence and activism.
To put it sharply: it is not so hard to set up and maintain something which has the formalities and trappings of a "revolutionary organisation" (without rank and file trade union work). It is much harder to develop a serious, ongoing rank and file trade union grouping without a coherent core provided by a Marxist organisation which has at least a minimum of dynamism and clarity. The building of rank-and-file groupings cannot be a shortcut to the development of a political revolutionary party.
If anything the contrary: building a political nucleus is the best route to building a solid rank-and-file grouping. However, once that political nucleus develops beyond the tiniest handful, if it is to avoid sterility, it must start work to build rank and file organisation in the unions. It cannot produce huge results instantly or at will; but if it does not at least make an effort, it condemns itself to marginality.
Rank and file union organisation should, therefore, be a prime concern of the Socialist Alliance. Can the Alliance do it? Can the argument be won within the Alliance about the importance of this work, and the need to turn the Alliance to it? That depends on politics. Immediately, in fact, it depends on whether we can build up the Workers' Liberty current in the Alliance sufficiently that it has enough weight to push the larger groups, ISO and DSP, in directions where they are reluctant to go, and to promote new thinking among their membership.
We should start with practical measures where we can. Where a small nucleus of activists exists in a union, but we do not have the other conditions for a lively rank and file group, then we should not wait for those conditions to develop spontaneously. The small nucleus can do a lot to speed their development. The best step is a regular bulletin or newsletter Ð aimed at the whole union, a particular sector, or even a particular workplace, as seems best. Aiming at a broader and more diffuse readership is not necessarily the optimum. It depends. By publishing such a bulletin the initial nucleus train themselves, start a process of educating the membership, give themselves a visible presence and thus a chance of drawing in new people.