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Workers' Liberty
the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class Workers Liberty Australia |
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Fine novels have been written with preposterous plots and many characters no better than cardboard. Charles Dickens' early works are obvious examples. Alexandra Richie's book on Berlin, Faust's Metropolis, is like that. Its "plot" is that Berliners have throughout history been more submissive, more pliant to outrageous authority, than those of other great cities. The revolution of 1848? The era of "Red Berlin", when from the late 19th century to 1933 the city had the world's greatest concentration of militant workers, organised and educated in Marxist politics? The East Berlin workers' rising against Stalinism in 1953? The revolution of 1989?
Richie describes all those, but only as cardboard characters (and the "Red Berlin" chapter is a travesty). She dismisses Berlin's radicals as "thugs" or fools, and its conservatives as submissive dolts, which naturally leaves her seeing little good.
Yet Richie also communicates an electric emotional ambivalence, simultaneous love and hate for the city. Conservative British reviewers, who themselves hesitate between applauding the rise of German capitalism and fearing the rise of German capitalism, have feted the book. For many more readers, Faust's Metropolis is made as gripping as a novel through all its 858 pages by the working-through of the ambivalence in dramatic narrative by a writer of great literary skill.
Richie's politics appear to be conventionally neo-liberal, maybe a touch "dovelike" on social issues (there's more real warmth in her indictments of Nazi racism and sexism, or East German dictatorship, than you would expect from a Tory), and a touch "hawkish" on world politics. The book suggests that she lived in Berlin, West and East, in the 1980s, as a student. She got into East Berlin because she was studying Bach's music. She met West Berlin's "alternative" culture and East Berlin's grey Stasi terror, and was there for the bringing-down of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. She heard people spinning the tale of "Berliner Unwille" - Berlin as an innately quick-witted, disrespectful, sharp-tongued city. She was, it seems, both fascinated and repelled, and has written a history of the city, back to the earliest Slavic settlements, to work that through.
Richie has put no effort into studying the ideas of the more radical fringe of West Berlin's "alternative" culture. Just one example: she describes the movement round Rudi Dutschke (a Marxist student leader murdered in 1968) as "slavishly following" the ideas of "the Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Karl Mannheim". Mannheim was not a political radical, nor part of the Marxist Frankfurt School, though he did work with them for a while. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote nothing directly political enough to be "followed", slavishly or otherwise, by any political activist. Although the Frankfurt School - Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas more than others - had some vogue in the late 1960s, neither Dutschke nor any other activist leader was ever really an adherent. Generally, Faust's Metropolis is very sloppy about factual details, quotations, sources and so on, especially for a book which originated as a D.Phil. thesis and carries 212 pages of footnotes.
However, there is a counterpoint of sympathy or attraction in Richie's account of the "alternative culture". Likewise, she uses Frederick Engels as her standard source of contemporary comments on Berlin in the second half of the 19th century (Max Weber for the same in a later period); though some of her quotes are hostile and grossly out of context, others are given in a way that suggests that Engels was a thinker worth attention.
West Berlin of the 1960s and after had many more "drop-outs", communes, and people living "alternative" lifestyles than other German cities. Why, I don't know: cheap rents, lots of empty buildings to squat in, disproportionate subsidies for the arts and universities (because West Germany and the USA wanted to keep West Berlin alive in its economic isolation) may all have been factors. In Berlin even more than in West Germany proper, the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 70s was Maoist-coloured. The Trotskyist groups have had their little strength further west, in Mannheim, Frankfurt, etc. After 1976, the Maoist current dispersed. Some went "right to become Greens.
Some went "left" to become "autonomists". "Autonomists", quasi-anarchists of the street-fighting type, exist in Italy and France too, but nowhere as vehemently as in Germany and especially Berlin. Considering themselves revolutionary but hostile to the existing labour movement and even to politics in general, they are destructive and a diversion for many young people who want to fight capitalism. Berlin is also a city of bureaucrats. It was the centre of the old Stalinist state of East Germany. The West German state had its own bureaucratism. It was built from above by the Anglo-American occupiers, anxious to keep control and to "recycle" everything workable they could retrieve from the Nazi regime. It rose above a population - including millions of German refugees expelled from Eastern Europe - shattered by war and Nazism, malnourished in the "Hunger Years" directly after 1945, and inclined to accept anything that kept them safe from the horrors of Stalinist rule as practised in East Germany. Its trade-union movement, in particular, was very bureaucratic. Now, as the expensively-reconstructed capital of reunited Germany, Berlin is invested with that Western bureaucratism too.
In the year 2000 Berlin thus presents an image corresponding somewhat to Richie's picture of its historic essence - a great weight of state power with, as its counterpoise, violent but ineffectual radicalism. But it has not always, or usually, been that way. It will not be that way in future.
"Teamsters and Turtles, united at last!" was one of the slogans on the great Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation, rejoicing in the new alliance between trade unions and environmental activists.
There are other pointers the same way, like the evolution of "Reclaim the Streets" from an anti-car, anti-road-building, civil-rights movement into an avowedly anti-capitalist campaign supporting trade union struggles like the London tubeworkers' against privatisation and the Liverpool dockers'.
Could it all come together into something more powerful than one-off demonstrations? Into a systematic campaign of working-class action which not only wins better wages and conditions, but also begins to gain workers' and community control over the running of society and industry?
The great precedent is the New South Wales Builders' Labourers' Federation in the early 1970s. Greg Mallory, who has recently completed a PhD study of the NSW BLF and of "workers' control" battles by waterside workers in the 1930s, introduced a discussion on that experience at a Brisbane Defend Our Unions Committee meeting on 8 May.
In the early 1970s the NSW BLF successfully used work bans on a whole range of issues outside the usual range of trade unionism. "Green bans" - union boycotts of work in particular areas - were used to help several local communities in Sydney block destructive commercial redevelopment of their districts. A dispute on a shopping-centre site at Wyong led to a debate about whether the union should demand that a hospital be built on the site instead, though in the end the workers went along with the shopping centre.
In two cases, union boycotts of work on university sites were used to force Macquarie University to stop victimising gay and lesbian students, Jeremy Fisher and Penny Short. This, remember, was action by a traditionally "macho" workforce in the not-so-enlightened 1970s. Another threatened BLF ban forced Sydney University to lift its veto on a women's studies course. The BLF campaigned for the right of women to work in the building industry. On some sites the BLF was able to "sack" foremen and insist on the labourers' right to elect their own.
The union also strove for maximum democracy, limiting officials' salaries to the same level as rank and file workers' and adopting a rule that limited tenure of any top union post to a short fixed period. Important in the informal underpinning of the democracy was the constant exchange of ideas, discussion, leaflets, pamphlets and newspapers in the Sydney city centre pubs where builders' labourers gathered after work.
The whole flowering was cut short abruptly in October 1975 when the Maoist federal leadership of the Builders' Labourers' Federation intervened in the New South Wales branch to evict the elected leadership and impose their own nominees. Most of the avowedly left-wing union leaderships sided with the federal BLF, and employers helped by refusing jobs to labourers who did not have federal BLF tickets. And after the "Kerr coup" of November 1975, in which the reforming Labor government was sacked by the Governor-General and replaced by a hard-edged Liberal regime, the whole of Australian politics swung to the right.
How did it all start? Not with a group of political enthusiasts coming along and summoning the labourers to follow them. A new left-wing leadership had won office in the NSW BLF in 1961 on straightforward wages-and-conditions issues. Under the old right-wing leadership, wages and conditions had been wretched. Bit by bit, in battle after battle, the new leadership helped labourers win decent wages, proper compensation for injuries, adequate washing and toilet facilities on sites, and better conditions generally.
As the NSW BLF leader Jack Mundey told Greg Mallory later: "If it wasn't for that civilising of the building industry in the campaigns of 1970 and 1971, well then I'm sure we wouldn't have had the luxury of the membership going along with us in what was considered by some as 'avant-garde', 'way-out' actions of supporting mainly middle-class people in environmental actions. I think that gave us the mandate to allow us to go into uncharted waters".
Also important, obviously, was the fact that the early 1970s were a boomtime in the building industry in Sydney, giving the workers more confidence. However, not every strong and militant union which has succeeded in "civilising" its industry then looks towards "avant-garde" actions or "uncharted waters". Far from it. The political spark is not automatic.
Mundey and some (though not all) of the other NSW BLF leaders were members of the Communist Party of Australia. In the early 1970s, the CPA was undertaking a brief but rather dramatic left turn. Although it never came near the revolutionary working-class anti-Stalinist politics of the "Third Camp", by the end of the 1960s it was certainly no longer pro-Stalinist. In 1970 a large chunk of the CPA's top trade-union officials split off to form the pro-Moscow Socialist Party of Australia (which has now readopted the name CPA). The SPAers condemned not only the majority's opposition to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but also its allegedly "ultra-left" policies in industry and in the movement against the Vietnam war. A pro-Chinese faction had already split away from the CPA in the mid-1960s (and it would, through its control of the federal BLF, be the nemesis of the NSW BLF in 1975).
Thus cut relatively loose, for a few years the CPA moved along with new left-wing currents then emerging in Australian politics with the Vietnam war, student protest, an industrial upsurge following the 1969 mass strikes which smashed the Penal Powers in the Clarrie O'Shea case, and the end (in 1972) of 23 years of stifling Menzies-Liberal rule. The leftism was, as Tom O'Lincoln points out in his history Into the Mainstream, "impressionistic and eclectic". It vanished very fast after November 1975. By 1983 CPA union leaders were among the main architects of the Accord which tied the unions to a neo-liberal Labor government; by 1984 the CPA was debating its own dissolution.
Nevertheless - or so it seems to me - the crucial fact is that for a few years there was a ferment of ideas, and a liberalism of regime, which allowed "rebels within the rebellion" like Jack Mundey and other BLs to sail to the "uncharted waters". The tragedy was that the authentic Marxist left was too weak then - especially in industries like building - to pull together something longer-lasting from that radicalisation.
Other people at the 8 May meeting disagreed with me on the importance of the developments in the CPA. The CPA never became really left-wing, they said; Mundey and the NSW BLF leaders never had much support from the rest of the CPA for their radicalism; and their ideas came more from the New Left than from the CPA.
All those points have some truth. But the CPA was different from the New Left because it had roots in the working class. It had ceased to be a revolutionary working-class party over 40 years before; nevertheless, it recruited and trained working-class radicals, put them in touch with each other, miseducated them but also prompted some of them to educate themselves. The NSW BLF's actions were not "spontaneous". They would not have been possible without the existence within the BLF of an active and articulate minority who had the democratic, socialist or Marxist intellectual "baggage" with which to "carry" such issues as workers' control, the priority of human environment over profit, women's rights, and gay and lesbian rights. Where did they acquire that "baggage"? Mostly through or around the CPA, I'll bet.
When the CPA was destabilised in the early 1970s, that did not transform it back into a revolutionary party, but it did open up spaces for some of the CPA's "assets" to be partially reappropriated. Only a democratic, self-educating, politically-impassioned party rooted in the working class could probably have made something more lasting of the short but inspiring heyday of the NSW BLF; even that short heyday would probably have been impossible without the temporary and approximate existence of a sort of quasi-party on the fringes of the CPA, facilitated by the CPA's destabilisation; only the building of a party, or some approach to it, within the working class, will make something solid out of the current flowering of "Teamsters and Turtles" solidarity.