Debate 1: Socialism in the 21st century
Debate 2: The new anti-capitalism
Debate 4: Labour, the left, and the AWL
Debate 5: The workplaces and the unions
Note: text in bold is from amendments which replaced text in the original, or added to it.
The world has over 2.8 billion wage-workers today (2,806 million in 1997, according to the World Bank). Of those, about 550 million work in industry, and 850 million in services.
Of the 1.4 billion in agriculture, an increasing number work under more-or-less modern capitalist social relations, rather than in archaic or semi-feudal relations, but exact figures are unavailable. 40% of the population of the 'low and middle income' countries live in cities now, and 77% of the population of the 'high income' countries.
In the cities of the Third World, large and growing proportions of workers are 'informal' (in petty trade, repairs, transport, construction and contracted-out manufacturing). This work, as the International Labour Organisation notes, 'rarely involves a clear-cut employer-employee relationship: In Asia, the sector absorbs an average of 40 to 50% of the urban labour force, a proportion which rises to 65% in the poorer countries: In Africa, it is estimated the urban informal sector currently employs 61% of the urban labour force'.
Thus the wage-working class proper is surrounded by, and shades off at the edges into, a class, maybe equally large, of 'semi-proletarians'-people who scrape a living by varying combinations of petty trade, self-employment, theft, begging, domestic work and straightforward wage-work. But probably today, for the first time in history, the wage-workers and their periphery are a majority, or near a majority, of the population.
This is a tremendous shift. In Russia, at the time of the 1917 revolution, the wage-workers, both city and country, with their families, were only 17% of the population. Only 2% of the population lived in large cities. In Germany, the country which Marxists at that time cited as the epitome of high industrial development, fully 34% of the labour force were self-employed or working for their families. Of the agricultural workers (35% of the total), most still worked under feudal regulations (the Gesindeordnung, abolished only in 1918) which made them semi-serfs. Only 27% of the population lived in cities; only 11% in big cities (of over 300,000 people; all figures for 1910).
At the time Karl Marx published Capital vol 1, in 1867, the total employed in more-or-less modern capitalist industry in England and Wales (textiles, clothing, metalworking, mines, railways, gas, etc.) was just 1.7 million-17% or less of the population of working age. Other countries were far less industrially developed.
The increase of the wage-working class is not just one economic statistic among others. It has huge political and social implications. We sell our labour-power for a wage because other people, the capitalists, monopolise the means of production-large-scale means of production, which the individual worker cannot hope to own. Around those large-scale means of production, we are educated, trained and organised, and assembled in large numbers, primarily in cities. More and more these days, we move from job to job, the constant in our lives not being a particular trade or location but the social fact of being a wage-worker.
Built into the wage-bargain is constant conflict. How high or low will the wage be? Once having bought our labour-power, how much labour will the boss squeeze out of us? Against the boss, how far can we assert the priorities of our health, our nerves, and the human interests which we can pursue generally only outside the tyranny of work?
Wage-workers organise, in a way no other basic producing class ever has done. Today there are 164 million trade unionists world-wide (latest ILO figures, dated 1995). In 1869, two years after Marx published Capital, there were only 250,000 trade unionists in Britain, and hardly any in other countries.
Official statistics show a recent decline in trade union numbers. Part of that is real (a 16% drop in Western Europe, a 10% drop in Central and South America, and a 19% drop in Australia and New Zealand, in 1985-95). Part is artificial. The membership of trade unions in Eastern Europe and the USSR is sharply down, but now they are real (if weak) trade unions, where before they were police-state labour fronts.
In many key areas trade unionism is growing. In South Korea trade union membership grew 61% in 1985-95, in Taiwan 50%, in Thailand 77%, and in South Africa 127%. There are now 34 million trade unionists in Asia, not far short of the 41 million in Western Europe.
South Korean workers organised a tremendous general strike in January 1997. Their Confederation of Trade Unions finally won legal recognition from the government in November 1999. Workers played a central role in the overthrow of South Africa's apartheid (in 1993-4) and Indonesia's military dictatorship (in 1998). Increasing numbers of strikes and underground trade unions are challenging China's Stalinist state. Ecuador, Bolivia, Nigeria and many other countries saw mass political strikes in 1994-7.
Yet the growth of the working class as an organised force is not a linear process without reverses. Both the capitalists' constant quest for profits and the conscious actions of pro-business governments have destroyed or cowed traditionally well-organised and highly concentrated sectors of the working class, both in older industrial countries such as Britain and the US and in the former countries of the Stalinist bloc. The consequences of this can include: the destruction of previously stable and cohesive communities; whole generations without work; and a descent into crime, the drugs economy and individual self-betterment as the only 'solutions' on offer.
This is one factor in the recent decline in trade union numbers shown in official statistics. Part of that is real. The workers of the 'old' industrial countries do not dominate the world labour movement as they used to, but are far from a spent force. France's mass strikes in November-December 1995 involved more workers in positive activity (meetings, delegations to other workplaces to spread the action, demonstrations) than the famous general strike of May-June 1968.
Such class struggles have a society-changing logic both in countries where most workers would describe themselves as broadly 'socialist' or 'communist' (like France) and in those (like Indonesia or Korea) where the words 'socialist' and 'communist' convey only images of brutality and enforced uniformity. A large-scale class struggle inevitably raises the question of who owns and controls the social wealth, the means of production. It points towards a definite answer-that the means of production should be owned in common, and their use democratically planned for the common good rather than being governed by a destructive, greedy race to expand the already-gross wealth of rival profiteers.
In the year 2000, humanity has greater resources and possibilities to change the world for the better than ever before. To turn these possibilities into reality, it is necessary first for the working class to transform itself into a conscious force for that change. This faces both material and ideological obstacles. One thing that holds us back is the idea that progress is impossible and meaningless or alternatively that it has already reached its highest point.
The idea of capitalism as the height of progress was shattered first by World War One and the great slump of the 1930s, and is repeatedly discredited again and again in our days. The Asian-centred world economic crisis of 1997-9; the rapid increase in global economic inequality; the vast numbers of people still malnourished (800 million, and more every day); the fact that one child in three worldwide grows up in absolute poverty; the homeless and wretched in the oh-so-booming USA itself-all these mock pro-capitalist optimism.
In order to satisfy its constant appetite for profit, capitalism is becoming more and more wasteful-creating a stream of unnecessary and short-lived new commodities plugged by advertising-and more and more destructive of the environment. It is turning all areas of human endeavour, knowledge and social existence-including the very basis of life itself-into things to be bought and sold. Its self-proclaimed economic triumphs merely serve to create a growing sense of social and moral crisis in which global and national inequalities are more and more blatant, the maintenance of the status quo becomes more and more cynical and its claims to democracy more and more hollow.
While a growing section of youth is in revolt against this, even pro-market ideologues today accept that little 'progress', can be expected. This is as good as it gets! All the future can promise is more of the same.
Pro-capitalist triumphalism has had any revival at all only because of the ruin of its mainstream rivals-the Stalinist and social-democratic ideas of progress. But, among that majority who cannot accept the claims of capital, the common alternative conclusion is that all progress is a deceptive myth. The idea of reconstructing the world according to reason was just an illusion, pushed along by the intoxication of the first great spurt of science and technology in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In fact, they say, try to reconstruct the world according to reason, and you end up with Stalinism-or, at best, with a stultifying, stagnating 'nanny state'.
This thinking draws nourishment not only from obvious political facts but also from developments in science. David Hilbert, maybe the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, has his motto inscribed on his grave:
'We must know. We will know.' Since then some of the problems so confidently lined up for solution by Hilbert have been proved insoluble by other mathematicians. We will never know! We have to learn how to cope with not knowing! Quantum theory, chaos theory-some of the most talked-about developments of 20th century science are ones which indicate that in some fields we can only ever get broad, approximate understanding.
Despite this, capitalism has seen a vast growth in human knowledge, albeit one terribly distorted by the subjugation of its production to the needs of capital, war and the state. The development of knowledge does not lead humanity to a situation where every problem is solved and nothing further can be learnt. As new knowledge develops, it reveals problems, uncertainties, complications. This fact certainly does undermine Fabian, Stalinist, technocratic notions that the world can be made paradise if only the proper experts are allowed to plan everything.
But those notions are not the actual alternative to capitalism. The working-class socialist alternative is different. We do not base ourselves on any expert's claim to have the ideal blueprint for harmony and prosperity. We base ourselves on the 'planning' already accomplished. Co-operative, socialised production is not an ideal scheme invented by socialists. It is a reality developed by capitalism. With immense amounts of trial and error, and with cruel contradictions due to its subordination to capitalist private profit, it has nevertheless already brought great progress. We have a machinery of production which even today-without any planned reorganisation, without any drive to bring into useful jobs the 150 million or so people unemployed worldwide, and the hundreds of millions of others stuck in futile and unproductive jobs-could, just by an equalising redistribution of revenue, give everyone in the world the average living standard of a relatively well-off South European worker. The arithmetic is simple: divide global production by the number of households in the world. Everyone could have the basics-good food, a comfortable home, adequate clothing, education, health care-without having to deprive anyone else.
That is progress. So is the creation of a world working class, larger, more educated, richer in its variety and individuality but also more interlinked between its different segments, with a proven capacity to organise collectively. Our idea is that the collective and democratic organisation of that working class can direct the co-operative, socialised production already created better than can the competition of private profiteers.
In a world where that competition of private profiteers increasingly finds its decisive expression in the roller-coasters of financial markets-the 'casino economy'-that socialist proposition is more convincing than ever. The gap between actuality and the progress to be made by a concerted, conscious human redirection of our affairs is larger than ever.
The idea of progress has been discredited not because progress has failed, but because in recent decades both real and illusory social improvement has been brutally reversed. The advanced capitalist welfare states, the highest achievements of capitalist civilisation, are being systematically trashed.
Mass unemployment has become endemic in every capitalist country. Although income-per-head figures are still rising in most countries, there is some solid evidence that they are increasingly deceptive.
Social improvement has not hit some mysterious natural limit. It has been reversed because the working class has suffered severe defeats. The advances that we had were not handed down by capitalist generosity. They were won by many years of working-class struggle. When the workers are defeated, as we were in Britain in the great watershed of the 1984-5 miners' strike, then we lose those gains.
The collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, in 1989-91, was not a defeat for the working class. It was progress, inasmuch as it opened up possibilities for the workers in those states to think, debate, and organise more or less freely. It also cleared ground for working-class politics elsewhere in the world, by demolishing and dumping the illusion that police-state planned economies constituted (albeit in an as-yet-unsatisfactory 'deformed' way) the actual progressive alternative to capitalism.
In the short term, however, the demolition of illusions was also a demolition of morale. The apparent alternative to capitalism is shown to be a fake? Then maybe no alternative is possible!
Some argue that the working class's defeats and setbacks have been inevitable, either because the working class is in decline or because capitalism has shown itself to have far more scope for further development than socialists previously thought and obviously still has further scope.
The working class is not in decline, but increasing world-wide. The conclusion that it is in decline can be reached only by defining 'working-class' only as blue-collar workers in a few traditional industries (mining, metalworking, and so on) and excluding white-collar or service workers. But why should we do that? The working class is the class of those who sell their labour-power to work under the command of capital, whatever they produce.
It disorients socialists if we believe (as some do) that world capitalism has been 'stuck' in its 'final crisis' of around 1921 continuously for the last 80 years, and all its development and expansion since then has been mere illusion and secondary detail. But the proper conclusion is not that the crisis of European capitalism in 1917-23 was not potentially final-it is very hard to give an explanation of the defeats of the revolutionary workers' movements of those years in Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary and other countries based on some intangible extra strength that the bourgeoisie derived from the fact their system would be able to have a new and unprecedented 'golden age' 25 years later, but easy enough to explain it from the mishaps and mistakes of the working-class left. We can explain, also, how the monstrous historical detour of Stalinism-though it was scarcely a manifestation of the vitality of capitalism!-disabled the working-class left for decades after that crisis.
Nor should we think that our task now is to wait for the real final crisis. There will be no definitive final crisis. Capitalism will not break down of its accord. It will have to be broken down. But it creates-is still creating and augmenting-the force that will break it down, the working class.
Production is increasingly socialised and cooperative. Claims that the giant capitalist enterprise is being made obsolete by a great flowering of small-scale capitalist enterprises and pure market mechanisms are false. As the US economist Bennet Harrison shows in his detailed study Lean and Mean, 'The emerging global economy remains dominated by concentrated, powerful business enterprises. Indeed, the more the economy is globalised, the more it is accessible only to companies with a global reach: Rather than dwindling away, concentrated economic power is changing its shape, as the big firms create all manner of networks, alliance, short and long-term financial and technology deals-with one another, with governments at all levels, and with legions of generally smaller firms who act as their suppliers and subcontractors'.
The consolidation of the world working class into a political force is, of course, far from automatic. It is a huge and difficult job. It requires both a renewed experience of struggle and ideological rearmament. In some countries with a young working class, this will start from a new workers' movement seeking to assert itself both in the workplace and politically. In countries with long-established and bureaucratically dominated labour movement structures, it will take the form of renovating the existing movements, making them responsive to working class needs and asserting those needs in the political arena. The rejuvenation of these movements will depend on their ability to organise and represent the needs of the unorganised and on their having a real, living democracy.
This does not mean that the working class will need to go through all the experiences of the last 100 years again. Both the involvement of workers in struggle and the role of Marxists as 'the memory of the class' mean that we are not starting from a clean slate. It does not mean going back to the pre-1914 'Marxist orthodoxy' of 'slow but steady'. It does not imply losing a sense of urgency. It requires revolutionaries to organise on 'Leninist' lines (coherently, on a sharp political basis). However, it does mean that we cannot leave it to inevitable forces of either capitalist development or crisis to do the job for us.
One chief difficulty is nationalism. Many writers argue that Marxist socialism has failed because it could only understand class conflicts, and thus was bewildered by the scope and size of national conflicts in the 20th century.
But one of the main distinctive points of Marxist socialism, historically, as against the many socialist schools of thought prior to it, was its close combination of the idea of socialism with that of democracy. Democracy, to Marx and Engels and the radical democrats of their day, obviously included the democratic rights of nations. As Engels put it:
'When [in the 1830s] the extreme politicians of the greater part of civilised Europe came into contact with each other, and attempted to mark out a kind of common programme, the liberation and unification of the oppressed and subdivided nations became a watchword common to all of them: There could, indeed, be no two opinions as to the right of every one of the great national subdivisions of Europe to dispose of itself, independently of its neighbours, in all internal matters, so long as it did not encroach upon the liberty of others. This right was, in fact, one of the fundamental conditions of the internal liberty of all.'
What has disarmed much of the socialist movement in the 20th century, when faced with nationalism, is not some doctrinally-inspired reluctance to recognise national facts, but the wholesale and opportunist submergence of socialism into nationalism practised by Stalinism, which has also infected the anti-Stalinist left. The USSR's bureaucracy saw that nationalist movements might be made allies if the bureaucracy could present itself as a reliable and potent counterweight to the Western states against which those movements rebelled. So, without scruple or conscience, again and again the bureaucrats directed Communist Parties to embrace not merely national rights, but nationalism, and not to recoil or complain at any chauvinist or revanchist excesses.
In place of a programme of consistent democracy was erected a picture of the world divided into 'good nations', oppressed and freedom-seeking, and 'bad nations'. Who was good, and who bad, varied of course with the shifts of USSR foreign policy.
On the national question, as on the question of 'final crisis', the socialist movement needs to reconstruct itself intellectually and purge the legacies of Stalinism.
And on democracy, too. The Stalinist movement spoke much of democracy. Stalin's 1936 constitution was 'the most democratic in the world'. The states he conquered in Eastern Europe were 'people's democracies'. The word 'democracy' was levered away from any definite content, and became a makeweight phrase for agitation.
The great capitalist classes are doing much the same thing today, in a different way. There are more of the forms of representative democracy in the world today than ever before. Not only the ex-Stalinist states of Eastern Europe, but also the ex-military dictatorships of Latin America, have multi-party elections and parliaments.
Yet in the most advanced capitalist country, the USA, which also has more voting than anywhere else, democracy is rotting apace. Fewer and fewer people bother to vote. Politics becomes more and more a game played by rich people with the media, with the mass of the people as bemused spectators of a raucous parade of trivialities, scandals, personality-projections and image-creating exercises which drive out real political information and debate.
Those same mass-media could be channels for spreading information and debate much wider than ever before. What makes them the opposite is the media monopolies' greed for safe, secure profits-made by cultivating the crassest, and thus most reliable, desires of their public-by disinformation and dumbing-down.
Democracy, progress, science-all these words carry a bitter taste with them as the century ends, because of the misuse of the words, and of the realities, by Stalinism and by capitalism. In the hands of their proper owners, the organised working class, those same words will be the keynotes for the future.
The far right continue to be a lurking, and rising, danger in Europe and elsewhere (Russia, the USA), as the recently formed coalition government in Austria shows. In the EU, the largest far-right groups are not fully-fledged fascist, in the sense that their activities remain largely electoral, and they do not have armed gangs of thugs roaming the streets as the Nazis did. Nevertheless, their links with more extremist neo-Nazis are often considerable, and their 'respectability' helps outright neo-Nazis to grow. And they are themselves dangerous, encouraging the growth, for example, of racism. Combatting them is vital for the left and the labour movement. In particular, the arguments against racism must be a priority for the left, including against legislation on asylum seekers, etc.
Reclaim The Streets, etc., are not the new revolutionary vanguard, no-one is suggesting that we drop our class perspective to chase after the environmental movement. However, large numbers of youth are becoming, to one degree or another, politicised by actions like the June 18 and November 30 protests against capitalism. The fact that we can now discuss ideas like the nature of capitalism, class, privatisation, globalisation, etc, with significant numbers of youth without them thinking we are just weird is hugely welcome.
The gains to be made from an orientation to this movement are modest-it is not a short cut to a mass party or the revolution but we should gain some influence and make some contacts and recruits. We should also learn some useful lessons about methods of organising youth and making political protests successful.
Some problems we have
1. There is not a 'movement', in the sense that there is not a coherent, permanent, organised force, that holds conferences, has organised structures and so forth that we can easily send delegates to, propose motions to, etc.
2. There is an exceptional spread of political attitudes among the people who get involved in these actions, from an eager willingness to buy the paper and discuss what we have to say about the world to an outright hostility to the Marxist left.
3. The 'green' movement has traditionally been a cross-class movement and as such has inevitably developed many reactionary conclusions alongside progressive ones. Obviously some of this hangs over into the 'new anti-capitalist movement'.
4. We do not have ready mass working-class activity to propose. If there was a big LPYS still, we could propose that these groups and individuals we meet get involved. Or if there was a big miners' strike on we could propose regular picket line and more general strike support work.
However:
1. In most big towns there will be some kind of activity or group of activists of this kind that we can approach, do some joint work with and try to meet political people through. Even if this is not readily possible, everyone can attend a demo or street party and do a sale/set up a stall.
2. Whilst some people, especially probably those most centrally involved, will be hostile to us, many others will be excited by what we have to say about how to get rid of capitalism and what socialism means.
3. We have managed to work in movements such as the student movement and the women's movement without losing sight of our class perspective and have found an audience for what we say.
4. There are still occasional strikes, and RTS, etc., seem very ready to support workers in struggle (eg, the dockers and tubeworkers). We do have a big influence in the student movement and many of the people getting involved in these protests are students. We have a youth publication that should be readily accessible for people involved in this sort of campaigning and that we should be able to organise people around.
Practical conclusions
1. Every branch should check out and send someone to meetings of local RTS-type groups.
2. Where we can, we should help organise street parties and other local protests. We should propose political speakers, inviting a striker, etc. We should set up a stall and sell Bolshy and our other publications. Think about how to relate to the event-maybe set up a stall with a few secondhand books alongside our literature, put out a few old/blow-up chairs, sell cheap coffee (not Nescafˇ), make the stall approachable to the people we expect to turn up. Propose the setting up of stalls in advance of the day, there is no point in unnecessarily getting up people's noses by looking like we are trying to nick their action.
3. Do sales of Bolshy and the environment pamphlet outside Further Education colleges.
4. Try to organise a joint meeting: RTS and Workers' Liberty/Bolshy, on Transport/Mumia/What's wrong with capitalism: whatever will get the best response. This will probably require doing some joint work, building a bit of mutual confidence and so on beforehand. It may also be useful to invite speakers from other organisations to help create a broader impression. We should not approach a meeting like this in a formulaic way as part of our rituals, but should plan well ahead, prepare properly and work bloody hard to ensure that we get the best results, flyposting, leafleting, calling and emailing each group's contacts, etc.
5. We should make sure that we have regular coverage of these sort of issues in our publications. In particular we should use Bolshy. We should attempt to sell it and to persuade people to volunteer to help us organise sales, write for it, build a local Bolshy group that would have a bit of independence from the AWL branch, be a bit looser, provide a means for meeting new young contacts who aren't involved in the CFE.
1. Group building
Agreed at last AGM: regularise public meetings, monthly; regularise the production of publications and public sales.
Results: we had a centralised drive from the office in the middle of 1999 to get every branch to organise monthly public meetings-with some success up until the Xmas period.
We will have published 20 issues of Action in the period AGM to AGM and eight issues of the magazine, including two double issues, and a double issue in book format (ie, 11 issues in total) in the same period. There have been 6 centrally organised paper sales weekends.
Conclusion: re-state the need for monthly public meetings in each area and weekly public sales in which every member takes part. Monitor this activity centrally.
2. Education
Agreed: to renew our drive; regular education at every level and area in the group.
Results: education is still patchy. There has been some local progress-one-to-one educationals and a few local schools. We began a useful Capital email course in January (which has approximately 50 participants); a two-day national Capital school was held in December. The problem has been that this work only tends to take place when Martin T is in the country.
Conclusion: remit organisation of education work to the National Committee [NC].
3. The paper
Agreed: promote the re-launch of the paper.
Results: the paper has been re-launched. In addition some work has been done-most recently we had 35 new subs from a flyer-to get in extra subs. We could do a lot more and make the paper a more effective organiser and political tool.
Conclusion: see below
4. Union work
Agreed: regularise and extend bulletin production and distribution; take the United Campaign out to union branches; encourage comrades to get (T&G) jobs in transport in addition to rail, post, tube, etc.
see TU documents
5. Welfare state work
Agreed: seek openings for broad campaigning
Results: launching an anti-privatisation campaign, currently being discussed by Executive Committee [EC]/NC.
Conclusion: the incoming EC/NC should continue to discuss the possibilities of launching an anti-privatisation campaign.
6. Students
Agreed: continue the basic work; look for new activists outside the structures of NUS; pursue European contacts.
Results: student recruitment has been slow in a difficult period. We took a coachload of students over to the Euro-march, Koln, May 1999; we've had a couple of people over from the German anti-fees campaign to speak.
7. Youth
Agreed: do Further Education sales; produce pamphlets on workers' government, how to save the planet, capitalism and class; produce Bolshy as long as it attracts readers and sellers.
Results: the workers' government pamphlet has been done; the environment pamphlet is being drafted (it will be available at the AGM), an author has been found to write the capitalism/class pamphlet, but it will take a few more months before it is produced.
6 issues of Bolshy have been produced. We will now begin to publish it monthly.
Conclusion: publish Bolshy monthly; set up a nationally organised Bolshy youth organisation/fraction.
8. Labour Party
Agreed: get better national co-ordination of the work.
Results: a LP fraction now exists; Cathy is co-ordinating the work nationally.
see LP document
9. Organisation
Agreed: continue our policy of lapsing inactive or semi-active members.
Conclusion: continue this policy.
10. Socialist candidates
see documents
Some outstanding matters
The last incoming NC instructed the EC to sort out five areas of weakness:
1. Paper sales organisation
2. Education
3. Industrial Committee
4. Intervention into the SSP
5. A drive on AWL recruits and public meetings
Results: some good progress has been made on points 3 and 4. An Industrial Committee has been set up (members: John B, Tom, Mark S and Alan) and does meet (minutes are sent out by email) and has improved the co-ordination of the work. We have begun to sort out our work in the SSP: a Tendency platform has been published in the magazine and in broadsheet form; the comrades have joined and begun the work; we have started a section on the WL web site; a comrade in London is involved in the London SSP support organisation. Some work has been done on 2 and 5. Regularity of public meetings, in most areas, has improved; it is not clear that we're doing much better on the organisation of contact work. Paper sales: the problem areas are: not enough central pressure and monitoring; too little organisation locally (checking, week by week, how many are sold, where, by who); very few subs are sold locally. The same problems, it is now clear, affect magazine sales (in fact this type of sale needs more attention than the paper).
Conclusion: the incoming EC should present a report to the NC reviewing 1, 2 and 5, adding magazine sales to point 1.
New Labour's mantra about creating a 'wealthy economy' is one of their few strategic goals. They talk of a 'trickle down effect' but the idea that everyone will benefit from 'good times for capitalists' has never been sustainable. Only the rich get richer. An economic upturn will benefit some workers-and this may bring some welcome wage militancy. Overall our class faces only the guiding principles of wage slavery-get modern, be part of the team, knuckle down, shut up. For the working poor, poor pensioners and the jobless, life is getting worse. The inequality that New Labour's policies perpetuate permeates every area of social existence, causing only new areas of misery.
The populist noise of the Blairites-about fighting crime, dealing with noisy neighbours and making education work-further shows their lack of real political direction. The fact that they will not be able to deliver on the rhetoric makes them vulnerable. Right now they are in a mess on the health service. Such weakness could yet destabilise the Labour Party.
The Blairites' attitude to the labour movement mirrors their attitude to society. They want to grind the working-class down and drive it out of politics.
Future constitutional changes to the Party will increase the grip of Blair's faction in the Party. The aim of the 21st Century Party consultation was to do just that, but the repercussions of the Livingstone affair could lead to a new battle over labour democracy which the leadership could lose.
The Blairites see the trade unions' role as one of smoothing this 'modern way'.
The Blairites are, however, a fairly narrow faction within the labour movement. The rank and file of the trade unions and the Labour Party are by no means uniformly for privatisation, institutionalised low wages and curfews on children. Many workers have little time for the policies of the New Labour regime. The majority of Londoners oppose tube privatisation. Working-class parents do not want their schools to be 'given away' to private business.
Many workers will not support Labour at the general election and the 'non-voting' public will grow. Other sections of our class, young people in particular, are profoundly alienated by the political system. A small but quite stroppy layer of young people and activists are unhappy about the inequalities and injustices of global capitalism.
The organised working class in the trade unions is the only force that could unite the potential opposition and impose working-class answers: a properly funded health service, an extension of democracy, action against global capitalism. But the working-class organisations need to be built and ideologically rearmed; the rank-and-file needs to be organised.
Working-class political representation has been set back substantially. This has been effected by the incremental gutting of Labour Party democracy. It remains further eclipsed while the union leaders back up the anti-working class policies of the government. What do we say, how do we organise, how can we put our politics into practice?
Marxists have worked within the Labour Party because:
• While an 'open valve' existed between the basic class organisations and Labour there was a potential for working-class demands to have influence-even when Labour was in government.
• We were free to fight for our ideas and thus could have an impact.
• We knew that we could not, at will, impose our political consciousness, our overall world-view, for the best hopes and aspirations or indeed illusions in our class. We could not say 'forget Labour, support the revolutionaries'.
The trade unions' constitutional political powers have been eclipsed but not, as we expected, smashed. Blair may be ready for a decisive strike on the trade union link, but right now he does not need to move. The union leaders use the link to smooth the path for Blair-in the Welsh leadership election for example. At other times they acquiesce to the attacks on the workers, their members. Moreover, they are doing everything in their power to stop union members pressing for real change. But a struggle for real change from below will occur in the future. The unions cannot be bypassed. It is the unions that will be the focus for our political efforts in the labour movement for some time in the future.
Scottish and Welsh devolution, and the London Mayor issue, have created the most serious Labour Party crisis since 1981. The possibility is raised of unions being pushed into confrontation with Blair, and of the New Labour leadership having to readjust in order to regain a grip on their electorate and the Labour ranks.
Whatever Livingstone decides to do, the issues of Labour democracy and the government's Tory policies will reverberate up and down the labour movement.
If Livingstone does stand, we should try and mobilise the broadest possible official trade union support for him, if appropriate under the heading of 'Stand down, Dobson!'.
The existence of the London Socialist Alliance slate will also make it possible to build a genuine, lively 'Socialist Campaign for Livingstone' through the LSA.
It is unlikely that the trade union bureaucracy will be able to hold the line for Dobson in the bulk of the London unions. We should adopt a high-risk strategy and be prepared to appeal to the ranks against any possible disciplinary action.
Aside from the individual votes for the Grass Roots Alliance NEC candidates and the ongoing battle around Livingstone, the organised left is extremely weak in the Labour Party. It is possible to make propaganda, organise campaigns, petitions and events among, within and for Labour Party members. It is possible, indeed it is becoming more urgent, to relate to the political structures of the unions. Indeed the chance of defeating the 21st Century Party initiative depends on getting major unions to oppose it actively.
The text in italics and square brackets was remitted to the incoming National Committee.
As this document is written, Livingstone looks set to stand independently. We should advocate that he stand, avoiding using the term ''as an independent', and put clearly the case for such a candidature to be based upon a platform of labour representation, raising the issues we have flagged up through our discussion on the workers' government, and on structured accountability to the workers' movement. If our efforts, and the efforts of those others on the left who agree with us, bear some fruit, then the Livingstone campaign can be a first significant step towards the formation of a Labour Representation Committee.
If, as seems more likely, the Livingstone campaign is run as a cross-class rainbow alliance, it will nevertheless provide us with an opportunity to expose Livingstone's opportunism and at the same time raise again the question of an LRC amongst significant layers of the labour movement left in London.
We decided to get involved in the campaign to support Livingstone's selection as Mayoral candidate at our November NC meeting. Earlier in the year we had indicated (in Workers' Liberty 52 'Forum' section) that the campaign around Livingstone-at that time-was not sufficient reason to back him:
'We can support movements of working-class self-assertion, however limited, because the development and internal debate of the movement gives us a chance to promote our politics against the unreliable leaders. To support a mood of wishful thinking about Ken Livingstone as the coming champion of the left can only increase confusion.'
Although the movement around Livingstone has not to date developed into anything more substantial, it became clear that the question of political representation for the labour movement was being debated through the medium of the Labour Party's mayoral selection and to have abstained would have been to stand indifferent as the rank-and-file and the Blairite machine squared up to each other for the first time since the general election. It was also apparent that we had lost the argument that there ought to have been a viable left alternative on offer apart from Livingstone. His campaign has, despite all its limitations, become a genuine focus for workers and activists who opposed the Labour leadership's style, were unhappy about Tube privatisation and wanted an alternative to a hand-picked candidate in this important London election. As the campaign could be a major opportunity to force back the Blairites, it would have been wrong to abstain from the fight and not to try to intervene.
Should we have been quicker about getting involved? Yes. Our own legitimate concerns with his past record (which has had little resonance among his potential supporters outside the far left) led to us taking a narrow view of the possibilities of a Livingstone candidature and sitting on the fence until events had made this an untenable position.
Although the difficulties that we had with backing Livingstone (principally, his political fakery) have continued throughout the course of this campaign (where Livingstone has played the right faker), this in itself should not have stopped us from seeing the opportunities that the campaign generated. [If we had taken the decision to involve ourselves sooner, the Socialist Campaign for a Livingstone Victory could have played a role in securing Livingstone the Labour nomination. We now have the chance to develop it into an influential campaign for a genuinely labour movement-based independent candidature.
The vast media coverage and sizeable meetings across London have undoubtedly stirred up the labour movement and the Labour rank and file. However, the mood at the Livingstone support meetings has been quite passive. After years of political dumbing and dampening down in the party, it would have been very strange if the mood had been anything other than passive, quietist, not very ambitious. The meetings, thus far, have not amounted to a movement, but they are significant. No permanent campaign has coalesced and it will not do so under the sole direction of Livingstone, but will require the active guidance of our comrades and others on the left with our perspective. The Mayoral election and the GLA elections provide us with the best chance we are likely to see for some time to raise our conceptions of workers' representation in a concrete fashion. All our previous efforts have merely amounted to a propaganda campaign. Now, at last, we can argue for the practical implementation of our ideas, even if it is only in a small area.
We should be arguing now for the London trade unions to play a role in deciding where the campaign goes from here. Perhaps, to start with, it will have to be posed in terms of a 'Dobson Stand Down!' campaign, but it could quickly move on from there.
[Our policy of promoting the idea of the Socialist Campaign for a Livingstone Victory was the right approach.] Certainly, it did not alienate us from ordinary Labour members, however 'non-militant' they may have been. It was, unfortunately, at odds with the general approach of the rest of the left, who may have offered (private) sympathetic noises but were far busier striking false notes about the glory days of the GLC, calling the candidate 'Ken', etc. The situation has now moved into a new stage, and it may be that our ideas are received more openly by the left now. Certainly there are already the beginnings of a debate, and we should be actively intervening into them.
We need to relate to Livingstone objectively. The support he commands is based on the simple fact that he is the only prominent politician of his generation who defends bits of an elementary Labourite reformism. Whether we like it or not, he does speak for a very broad section of the politically conscious working class who want an alternative to New Labour's Tory policies.
Underestimating what Livingstone represents has meant that we have over-estimated the power of the Blairites. Yes, the Blair faction controls the commanding heights of the party, but events could very soon demonstrate the extent to which they are losing control over Labour's core supporters and a big proportion of party activists. We got a glimpse of this with Denis Canavan's success in standing for Scottish parliament. If Livingstone stands we are likely to see an even more spectacular revolt.
In this unstable situation the AWL must use every possible opportunity to put forward our programme. Standing independent working-class candidates is just one way in which we could do this. Taking campaigns into the labour movement is another, as is raising the issue of Labour Party democracy in a militant, active way in the unions, and linking it to the question of working-class representation.
For comrades in England and Wales, the Greater London Assembly elections probably provide the best opportunity we will get to experiment electorally. However, under no circumstances should this be used as an excuse not to investigate seriously and actively promote electoral challenges that are possible in other localities.
The choking off of the 'open valve' relationship between the unions and Labour must put the question of anti-Labour candidacies, protest candidacies and socialist candidacies in a new light for us.
The best thing the AWL can do for the labour movement of the future is to raise the profile of our politics. That is not to have a sectarian attitude to the labour movement-quite the opposite. We oppose New Labour's policies, we argue for the unions to oppose New Labour, we present a picture of what working-class political representation could mean, we describe real socialism: all of this understanding will be required by the working class in the near future. A limited strategy of standing in elections, while the opportunity for presenting working-class politics is so very limited through the Labour Party, can be a tool in raising the profile of these politics-our politics.
Elections are important events in political life. To forego all opportunity to make propaganda for independent working-class politics and for socialism during them does not make sense.
We recognise that the Blairites remain determined to manipulate the electoral process (eg, by high deposits and vote thresholds for keeping them, by the list system of PR and refusal of free postal facilities) precisely in order to prevent any challenge to New Labour from the left. In our electoral activity we should thus demand the right of those without large funds or existing party machines to a voice.
We mandate the incoming NC to organise a discussion over the coming six months on our position for and intervention into the forthcoming general election.
Of course, it is not only through standing independent candidates that we can intervene into an election, and even where we choose not to stand candidates comrades are expected to use the increased political awareness of election times to sell our publications, to increase door-to-door sales and to argue the need for independent working-class politics in order to produce candidates worth voting for.
Election campaigns only last a few weeks. They are not a substitute for permanent political campaigning inside and outside the Labour Party. It will be through such permanent campaigning on issues, such as the privatisation issue, that we can make the work of the AWL, as a whole, more coherent.
In the future we want substantial chunks of the labour movement to reassert their voice in politics and at election times in defiance of New Labour. Except for the opportunities presented in London, that is not yet a possibility.
For the medium term future, following the GLA elections, we should develop some general rules of thumb about the advisability of further electoral experiments. In elections, we try to organise the labour movement where we can and to unite the left in promoting the ideas of independent working class political representation. We raise our propaganda in the most fruitful way possible. This may mean standing as, or supporting, official Labour candidates, candidates of local labour movement based campaigns, candidates of a broad anti-cuts campaign or candidates of a united left slate. It may even mean in exceptional circumstances standing under our own banner, standing as the AWL, but that is not our starting point.
We do not present ourselves as a fully-fledged 'alternative to New Labour'-as much of the left still does-but we do argue, as we have always done, that the workers need a different kind of working-class party. We recognise that such a project is long-term and that it will involve splits in the labour movement as a whole including within the Labour Party. The propaganda produced in relation to the London elections can, of course, pursue this theme much more vigorously than our previous electoral candidates have been in a position to.
We further recognise that even the revolutionary left taken as a whole does not represent today a meaningful organisational challenge or alternative pole of attraction to New Labour. Accordingly, it remains true that we cannot impose our will over the existing political consciousness of our class by calling on it to 'join the socialists'.
Any future electoral initiatives should not be one-off sallies unconnected with our other work. On the contrary, their purpose is to make the politics implicit in all we do explicit in the electoral field. These electoral initiatives should be part of a consistent ongoing programme of work in the areas where we stand, with campaigning, coalition-building, workplace activity, paper sales, local bulletins, individual contact work, and educationals.
There's an obvious danger of scattering the AWL's efforts into a random splurge of small pockets of low-level bread and butter work in wards here and there, often in depressed inner-city areas which may concentrate the least confident sections of the working class. The Socialist Party gives some indication of this danger. We should guard against it. Nevertheless there is a general need for us to turn out beyond the narrow and often jaded circles of existing trade union, Labour and student activists to new people. The strategy of experimenting in election campaigns should be further reviewed in the light of the experience in London. In particular we should assess the success of our involvement in the LSA and Livingstone's campaign in bringing us into meaningful contact with new layers of activists.
The development of serious socialist candidates will be sporadic, in the first place confined to the large cities and towns where the left is organised. That further changes in the Labour Party do not, as yet, mean a change in its nature we restate that 'We vote Labour if, where and when it is the best form of working-class political representation available'. The option of abstention is tantamount to sectarianism on the national political stage implying conclusions about the nature of the Labour Party that we have not reached. The Labour Party, whilst it remains a bourgeois workers' party, will be superseded as a form of labour representation only as a result of our politics and activity, not moral judgements on the intentions of its leadership.
What may make independent working-class election candidates sectarian is not in essence them getting small votes, or carrying the name of this or that party rather than a broad alliance, or not personally being well-known activists in the area. Such things may be features of sectarian candidacies, and certainly they also involve practical issues of importance in deciding the where, when and how of candidacies. But they are not the political essence of the matter.
A candidacy may have a well-known candidate, fly a broad 'labour' banner, and get a sizeable vote, yet be sectarian (examples: Lesley Mahmoud of the Socialist Party, then Militant, in Walton in 1991, and, on a smaller scale, Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party in some recent contests). Another candidacy may have a not-very-well-known candidate, a politically distinctive banner, and a poor vote, yet not be sectarian. It may be ill-advised as a practical use of resources, but that is a different matter.
In general politics, what defines groups as sectarian is not essentially having small numbers, or being strident about their factional identity. Sectarian groups will tend to be small and strident, but the essence of the matter is politics. The same goes for candidacies.
Sectarian is a candidacy which means socialists wilfully counterposing themselves to the real, living processes in the labour movement. Where a broad, living labour movement has discussed and selected a candidate and a policy, and a socialist faction then stands a rival candidate saying: 'Ignore and boycott the broad labour movement processes, rally around us instead'-that's sectarian. What made Lesley Mahmoud's candidacy in Walton in 1991 sectarian was not any personal lack of repute in the area, or the banner ('Real Labour'), or the number of votes she got, but the fact that it was a keystone of the politics of the Militant/Socialist Party wilfully opting out of the Labour Party-long before Blair-on the perspective that self-proclamation would made them a mass party in the 'red '90s'.
If the New Labour machine has shut down the broad labour movement processes-to a large extent, anyway-and a socialist stands on the basis of offering local workers a chance which they would otherwise not have to vote for a candidate attuned to and responsive to their interests, that is not sectarian. If, in addition, the socialist candidate commits themselves to fighting for the trade unions to democratically enforce labour political representation, that is not sectarian. If the socialist candidate explains that they are standing to help blaze the way for a revived workers' party based on the trade unions-that is not sectarian. If the candidate strives to rally their supporters and voters to be active in the broad labour movement and to fight there for a revived workers' party based on the trade unions and with working-class policies, that is not sectarian.
However, a long-term perspective of transforming the labour movement and a correct political programme are no guarantee that a candidacy is not tactically misconceived or counterposed to the broader interests of the movement.
Such a candidacy is not sectarian even if the candidate has not much previous base and gets a low vote-whether through the protest vote being siphoned off by others, or just because of low political morale in the local working class. A low vote may be all that is possible at a particular stage. If large sections of the trade union movement were politically confident and assertive enough to promote broad-based working-class socialist candidates and get big votes for them, then we would be in a completely different situation-in the midst of a big battle in the Labour Party structures, or of the birth of a new workers' party. We have to be active in the reality as it is, not wait for it to become as we wish it to be.
Non-sectarian socialists will strive to build the broadest possible alliances around their candidacies, with other socialist factions, with trade unions and community organisations, etc. Nevertheless, we know that the only people the AWL can absolutely rely on to stand up for independent working-class politics are ourselves. If there were another group we could absolutely rely on, we would fuse with it. We still have a duty to promote our politics even if at some particular time no other group will ally with us. We must have the option of standing in our own name as the AWL. That may be inadvisable in practice, but it is not sectarian in principle.
A sectarian election campaign is one which takes into the electoral arena an overall policy which counterposes the self-proclamation of a faction to the real processes of the labour movement. At the present time, for example, it is one which says: 'Blair stands for 'modernisation'. We stand for socialism. Follow us and we'll see you right. We are the socialist alternative'.
Independent politics and organisation are not sectarian, but, on the contrary, essential for Marxists. If a Marxist faction pursuing non-sectarian but independent politics in the trade unions and the working class takes those politics into the electoral arena too, that is not sectarian. Whether it is well-advised as a practical use of resources may be open to debate, but that is a different question from sectarianism.
The Labour Party has suffered a qualitative decline in internal life and in the openness of the channels connecting it to the working class. That is our starting point for our whole consideration of the question of independent working-class election candidates standing against Labour. Not all life has vanished from the Labour Party. There are constituencies and council wards where it would be sectarian in the proper sense, as defined above, to stand against Labour. (Example: Islington North, if Jeremy Corbyn gets to stand again as Labour candidate.) We should seek out such areas of life and push there for working-class socialist Labour candidates to be adopted-and to run as independent local Labour candidates if barred by higher levels of the New Labour hierarchy. The evidence (for example, the widespread extreme weakness of reaction by Labour Parties to Labour councils pursuing sharply 'Tory' policies) suggests that these areas of life are very limited in number, and will remain very limited in number however zealous our activity.
We should investigate and agitate. What should not be an option is to continue with a passive support for Labour which combines not with any effective socialist intervention into Labour Party life but with a hope or desire that such an intervention would be possible if only more left-wingers would sign up for it. Electoral politics are important. We must find an active tactic for them.
The success or failure of an independent electoral campaign is measured in part, of course, by its ballot-box score, and by the number of recruits, close contacts, or literature sales it gets for us. There are also other considerations. Does it raise the idea of working-class political representation among substantial number of workers, give them the idea that they need not settle for Blair, and incite them to demand better? Does it draw some of them into the beginnings of political activity? Is it a constructive part of a longer-term programme of political action in the area? These are less easily quantifiable, but also important: politics is more than gate-receipts.
In terms of practical calculation, these considerations dictate a careful selection of areas to concentrate, where electoral efforts will be part of a continuing programme of political action; an appropriate balance, so that trade union work, campaigns, student work, and so on, do not suffer; and a systematic search for alliances, involving a continuous dialogue with other left factions.
However, to motivate electoral activity centrally on the possible gains for us as an organisation is sectarian in that it does put our own organisational position before that of the movement as a whole.
We try to make class centre stage in our political propaganda and interventions. We assert what our class needs in terms of individual policies and by way of an overall, general alternative-a workers' government. We explain how a workers' party would fight for working-class policies and interests. We should continue to explore ways of raising the idea of unions forming a Labour Representation Committee. The refusal of the trade union hierarchy to use what remains of the Labour/union link to press for internal Labour democracy and for their own unions' policies is at present vital to Blair's ability to hold back discontent within the party. In this context, we can no longer unconditionally defend the link against the growing mood for disaffiliation which is spreading among the trade union rank and file; nor, however, should we concede to that mood. We are for the radical destabilisation and shaking up of the trade union link.
In any union where we can influence events we should attempt to organise around the idea of the rank and file presenting an ultimatum to the union leadership: 'Fight for union policies and Labour democracy-or stop paying fees'. This could be popularised around the formula, 'No say, no pay'.
The basis of such an approach would be:
i. The right of unions and CLPs to change policy through conference resolutions and rule changes.
ii. The right of any individual Labour Party members to be selected as a candidate-no Millbank or Town Hall vetting.
iii. A new lay appeals court made up of the directly elected constituency reps on the NEC.
iv. An end to the MPs' veto-for a two-part electoral college with no MPs' section.
This democratic agenda must be fused with a political one which starts from the elementary demands of the trade union movement, eg:
i. Restore earnings link with pensions;
ii. £5 minimum wage;
iii. 35 hour week;
iv. New trade union rights Bill;
v. Tax the rich to rebuild services.
As part of this perspective we promote a series of specific and limited demands for democracy: in the labour movement; in relation to government, parliament and the state; in public services and industry. In other words, we present the matter of class and government in a more transitional form. In particular, we should look into launching a Charter for the 21st Century, on the themes of workers' rights, workers' control, workers' democracy, workers' representation and workers' government.
The key anti-working class policies of the government are the ones we should organise campaigns and initiatives around in the trade unions, among Labour members and as part of any electoral initiatives we are involved in.
These could be:
• the minimum wage and the huge and growing poverty in the UK;
• the privatisation programme, begun by the Tories, which has been stepped up in every area: housing benefit offices, social services, social housing, pensions, air traffic control, hospitals, schools, the Post Office, London Underground;
• defence of public services;
• union rights.
Potential clashes in the unions and between the unions and Labour will occur in the future. The union link will become an issue, hopefully long before Blair decides to introduce the state funding of political parties. However, in the short term, we should operate on the basis that the potential for us to campaign in Labour, in the cities where we are represented, is limited. Everywhere real membership involvement is in decline. If we organise rationally, nothing we do now will exclude the possibility of turning back to work in the Labour Party in the future. Fraction work means the following:
1. Continue to investigate local Labour Parties for signs of life, willingness of wards/groups of individuals, etc., to oppose 21st Century Party, back Ken Livingstone, do something about local cuts, etc.
2. That 'investigation' may continue because it requires following through initiatives on 21st Century Party and so on but we should also be able to collate 'results' by the end of March. By then we should have agreement on which Labour Parties should be regularly attended, by whom, and which individuals in the Party should be kept in touch with, in keeping with the criteria drawn up by the NC on standing in elections/working in the Labour Party.
3. To push for and build the anti-privatisation campaign of the Socialist Campaign Group Network which will involve motions on PFI and an event on the issue which we can build in the trade unions as well. This kind of initiative is something that we could use to draw in the contacts we have made during the Livingstone campaign.
4. The membership of the fraction should include someone from every branch even if no one from an AWL branch can/does attend Labour Party meetings (this is the case where Parties have been closed down), ie, this person attends fraction meetings.
5. The fraction should meet 2 or 3 times a year timed to co-incide with group events.
6. Maintaining the work is no big pressure on an AWL branch, it is right that it should be the specialised activity of individuals. We ensure that it fits around other activity, and is maintained alongside building up paper sales in particular wards and preparing for electoral activity.
7. Everywhere all AWL members who have not been specifically excluded should continue to hold Labour Party cards (even if they do not attend meetings), and we should ensure that we keep in touch with Labour leftists whom we know through previous Labour Party work, through unions or through campaigns, to monitor what's happening to the Labour Party and to be alert to any signs of life, and make every opportunity to draw Labour Party members into campaigns.
This is limited activity-it will involve one or two members in each branch on a regular basis. The work of the fraction could either be slightly augmented or slightly diminished in each area and by the time of the next AGM. However, we aim for stability. The idea is to maintain a presence, keep a finger in the pie, gather some intelligence and push the campaign against privatisation.
The top brass in the unions are opposed to any destabilisation of the relationship they have signed up to with the Government. Our job is to look for all kinds of revolt from below. The debacle around Livingstone provides us with a key opportunity to raise questions over the links with New Labour on our terms.
We should argue inside the trade unions for much more active involvement in deciding the basis upon which money is paid into the Labour Party's coffers. Since it is no longer possible for unions to amend the Party's constitution directly, now would possibly be a good point to begin raising inside the trade unions the demand that the Labour Party re-introduce the right of decision making on basic questions like policies and candidates for the membership of the Party and for the trade unions, and that the unions threaten to withhold funding for the party until their voice is restored. This could possibly be organised around the slogan 'No Say-No Pay'. This has the added bonus of providing a useful argument against the disaffiliation or withdrawal from politics-proposals that are becoming increasingly common inside some unions.
We should also be raising the following:
• Union-sponsored MPs should defend union policies. We could tie this to the relevant privatisation issues-PFI in the health service, for instance.
• Calling on the union leadership to make a public call for, and approach other unions with a view to organising, a conference of the trade union movement, with delegates from all levels, to discuss the issue of the unions in politics, eg, fighting for the unions' policies, getting trade unionists into parliaments, assemblies, etc., how to spend political funds, relationship with the Labour Party, whether to stand trade union candidates.
• Opposing Blair's privatisations, fighting for our class. We should circulate the forthcoming CWU booklet on why unions should oppose the 21st Century Party.
• Get union branches/regional structures to organise discussions and debates on Labour/working-class representation and working-class policies in the run up to the GLA and council elections.
• Push where we can for the setting up of a permanent 'campaign', a Labour Representation Committee, which would promote accountable representation of workers in politics. The Livingstone campaign may be a possible springboard to establish this. Whether we can get sufficient backing to set up such a campaign remains to be seen. It does not preclude us arguing for the idea.
• The Industrial Committee should draw up guidelines for comrades in particular unions to discuss ways in which we can (a) argue that political funds can be targeted and (b) get more involved in the political structures.
• We continue to explain our overall policy with union activists along the lines discussed at last year's AGM.
Most branches have now had some discussion about the possibilities and these should be considered in the light of the 'criteria' which will soon be considered by the NC.
All things being equal this will be the main focus of practical election work for all AWL branches in the next year.
In general, election work should be seen as of secondary importance to the regular activity of the branch and should not be undertaken at the expense of regular trade union activity, or in such a way as to wildly distort the work of the branch long-term.
Inside London, Labour Party fraction members have a particularly important role to play in raising the demand from inside the Party for Dobson to stand down in favour of Livingstone. We should be pushing for a defiance of the Blair machine from as much of the London Party as we can hope to reach. Now, more than at any other time, we can hope to find Labour Party members who are prepared to take action against Blair.
The activity of Labour Party fraction members outside of London may be somewhat different and should at least mean having political arguments with Labour members about the record of the council/government and in the areas where there are left Labour MPs canvassing for those MPs. Where we are canvassing for independent candidates away from the Labour Parties in which they are involved (especially if it is in another town) then fraction members may safely be involved in the electoral work as well.
The response of the left to the genocidal attack on the Albanian people in Kosova served to make us understand, if we did not fully realise before, the irreplaceability of a group such as the AWL. We combat the residual Stalinism in the movement, we reassert the true traditions of our movement on the national question, we orientate to political situations with a proper respect for truth and rational debate.
Our dismay at the response of the left, particularly the SWP, and the collapse of the socialist unity over the Euro-elections, ensured that our drive to raise left unity receded somewhat in the last year. But we should not shy away from promoting revolutionary left unity in the long run. We do it because a more united left would impact more forcefully on the working class and its movement. This would be true even if we could not get agreement on, say, a broad policy for the labour movement such as the one we have argued for, and only had agreement on building a united campaign against privatisation, or on building an open and democratic trade union rank and file organisation.
We have seen a more united left around the electoral [sic]. The experience has been as mixed as we could have expected it to be-the saga of the CATP slate in London is one recent missed opportunity caused by narrow-minded factionalism. However in the Socialist Alliances we have broad agreements on policy issues. At the comparatively low level of anti-Blairism, it has appeared that the left is talking with one voice. We should not underestimate how welcome this is to many unaffiliated trade unionists. It can help to foster confidence. It will be an essential element in the future if workers are to found an alternative to New Labour's brand of political representation. And, finally, we should not underestimate the potential positive effect left unity has on working-class people, especially young people. We must continue to push for these alliances to 'reach out' to broader layers in the labour movement.
We nurture the 'low-level' unity, always promoting reasoned debate and the idea of the democratic, flexible revolutionary party. We work towards a higher level of 'left unity' and we are not scared to sponsor a whole range of ideological debates in this context of electoral collaboration.
We seek to give form and structure to any developing left regroupment. To this end we should contribute to the national and regional organisations of the Socialist Alliance. These can be the intermediate steps towards the creation of a LRC.
We must use these structures to invite trade unions and trade unionists into the formal work of realising the need for a new party of labour. History suggests that there will be a lag between the recognition of the need for labour representation by independent socialists and the Marxist left and the time it will take the trade unions to be won to such a view. Seeing no difference between the reactionary path of Blair and the conservatism of the trade union leadership can obscure this reality. The twin of sectarianism in politics is syndicalism in the unions.
The involvement of the unions in regenerating working-class political activity is our central goal not a secondary task to the development of an electoral machine. This has been a major weakness, to date, of the SSP.
Our general and concrete orientation-combining a policy for the broad labour movement with independent socialist propaganda and the struggle for left unity-is more or less unique on the left and it demands an increase in AWL profile. This is the only way to make new contacts-something that our branches continue to lack badly. The electoral initiatives make sense from all kinds of points of view, but even if they made sense only for the reason that they got our branches up, active, and meeting new people, it would almost be reason enough. AWL branches have made progress in some areas-we hold more public meetings for instance. But we have not properly implemented the last conference policy. Every branch could easily get a, say 80%, success rate on the following routines. And this way every branch can meet new people every week. These days it is, they say, necessary to kiss a lot more frogs before you find a prince. There are a lot of people interested in anti-capitalism, and a lot fewer willing to commit themselves to consistent activity. But we can only find the few by seeking to get talking to the many.
• A public meeting every month.
• A conscious effort to process contacts. Discuss contacts at branch meetings.
• Regularise public sales. Take magazines, petitions and leaflets for the next public meeting to the sale.
• Organise a regular FE sale with Bolshy and/or with the paper.
• Produce and distribute workplace bulletins along the lines proposed in the trade union document.
• Take magazines and papers to (a) work, (b) meetings.
Some comrades will never have the confidence to go out and to discuss political ideas with people on the doorstep without a little nervousness. But every comrade who has been through the minimum education programme of the AWL, and has read the Capital articles in the magazine, will be able to talk politically to the raw youth, disillusioned Labour supporters, disorientated leftists and angry trade unionists we will meet in the coming years. Branches must step up the AWL education drive. If it has fallen off, start by making it central to the branch meeting-using the magazine (especially the Capital articles which can never be discussed enough). And those who think of themselves as educated should take on the role of educators and thereby educate themselves some more!
Dave B's amendments to Section 3 also remitted the question of the SCLV to the NC for further discussion.
An amendment to Section 3, by Janine Booth, was also remitted:
i. Delete the two sentences:
If we had taken the decision to involve ourselves sooner the Socialist Campaign for a Livingstone Victory could have played a role in securing Livingstone the Labour nomination. We now have the chance to develop it into an influential campaign for a genuinely labour movement-based independent candidature.
ii. In last para:
Replace first sentence with: The political approach of the SCLV was right.
At end of para add: However the use of the banner SCLV, based on a 20-year-old in-joke was inappropriate. We should drop it before it creates any further barriers to our ideas being heard or to possibilities of working with others.
1. Amendment from Kate A to Section 5:
Add to end of paragraph 4:
'We anticipate therefore, that the bulk of any electoral work done this year will be concentrated in London.'
2. Amendment from Kate A to Section 11:
Delete line at beginning of second paragraph, 'All things being equal' and insert:
It should be stressed that the main focus of practical election work for all AWL branches in the next year will be the London elections. It would take a local situation of a very particular nature to warrant the diversion of our limited resources into another election campaign running simultaneously. Comrades from outside London should involve themselves and their contacts in the election campaign around the GLA, rather than expending their efforts in smaller scale electoral experiments locally. This does not imply that election work should be the main focus of out of London branch activity, or the only focus for the London branches.
3. Amendment from Bruce R to Section 5:
[Both these points - voted on separately, to delete final paragraph (which begins 'The development of serious socialist candidates will be sporadic') and will be added after third paragraph .]
If the erosion of the organic links between Labour and the working class forces us to consider standing against Labour, it must also be grounds to reconsider a call for a blanket Labour vote in those areas where no left candidate is standing. Our position should be based on an election-by-election analysis of the type of election (e.g. local, Euro, general, regional), whether any independently-minded candidates have been allowed to stand by the Millbank machine, the dominant political issues and the likely level of working class participation.
In the current situation, we recognise that our weakness may mean that there are situations where we have to reluctantly call on voters to abstain as there is no viable alternative. This should not be ruled out in principle.
4. Amendment from Kate A, add to Section 6
If the erosion of the organic links between Labour and the working class forces us to consider standing against Labour, and has already resulted in London in a potential independent candidate who commands the support of a large portion of the labour movement, it must also be grounds to reconsider a call for a blanket Labour vote elsewhere. Our position should be to raise in all elections the question of Labour representativesā accountability to the labour movement and therefore to demand that the labour movement question each official Labour candidate on their opinions, actions and political record. Electoral politics are important; we must find an active tactic for them.
5. Amendment from Kate A to Section 6. Delete all and insert
What may make independent working-class election candidates sectarian is not in essence them getting small votes, or carrying the name of this or that party rather than a broad alliance, or not personally being well-known activists in the area.
Such things may be features of sectarian candidacies, and certainly they also involve practical issues of importance in deciding the where, when and how of candidacies. But they are not the political essence of the matter.
A candidacy may have a well-known candidate, fly a broad 'labour' banner, and get a sizeable vote, yet be sectarian (examples: Lesley Mahmood of the Socialist Party, then Militant, in Walton in 1991, and, on a smaller scale, Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party in some recent contests). Another candidacy may have a not-very-well-known candidate, a politically distinctive banner, and a poor vote, yet not be sectarian. It may be ill-advised as a practical use of resources, but that is a different matter. In general politics, what defines groups as sectarian is not essentially having small numbers, or being strident about their factional identity.
Sectarian groups will tend to be small and strident, but the essence of the matter is politics. The same goes for candidacies. Sectarian is a candidacy which means socialists wilfully counterposing themselves to the real, living processes in the labour movement. Where a broad, living labour movement has discussed and selected a candidate and a policy, and a socialist faction then stands a rival candidate, saying: 'Ignore and boycott the broad labour movement processes, rally around us instead' -- that's sectarian. If a socialist faction stands a candidate having made no attempt to prompt any section of the labour movement into standing a socialist candidate on a working-class platform, then that too is sectarian - and an abrogation of the responsibility of a socialist group to offer leadership to the labour movement.
What made Lesley Mahmood's candidacy in Walton in 1991 sectarian was not any personal lack of repute in the area, or the banner ('Real Labour'), or the number of votes she got, but the fact that she declared herself the heir to the title of 'labour movement representative' without any genuine basis. In fact Mahmood had stood inside the Labour Party, and lost the selection ö not, as with Livingstone, due to bureaucratic interference, but simply by losing the vote. It was a sectarian feature of the perspective of the Militant/Socialist Party that self-proclamation would made them a mass party, and therefore led to them wilfully opting out of the Labour Party, even before Blair.
If the New Labour machine has shut down the broad labour movement processes and a socialist stands, committing themselves to fighting for the trade unions to democratically enforce labour political representation, explaining that they are standing to help blaze the way for a revived workers' party based on the trade unions, arguing with their supporters and voters to be active in the broad labour movement and to fight there for a revived workers' party based on the trade unions and with working-class policies, and seeks to make themselves accountable to the labour movement through the election campaign and beyond - then that candidacy is not sectarian.
Such a candidacy is not sectarian even if the candidate has not much previous base and gets a low vote - whether through the protest vote being siphoned off by others, or just because of low political morale in the local working class. A low vote may be all that is possible at a particular stage. If large sections of the trade union movement were politically confident and assertive enough to promote broad-based working-class socialist candidates and get big votes for them, then we would be in a completely different situation - in the midst of a big battle in the Labour Party structures, or of the birth of a new workers' party. We have to be active in the reality as it is, not wait for it to become as we wish it to be.
A sectarian election campaign is one that goes into the electoral arena giving more weight to the self-promotion of a faction than to the needs of the labour movement. At the present time, for example, a sectarian approach to elections would mean standing candidates in areas where we are simply frustrated by the reluctance of the Labour movement to break decisively with Blair. It would also be sectarian to stand an AWL candidate without having made any serious attempt to put together a broader coalition and/or to encourage sections of the labour movement to stand a socialist candidate on a working-class platform. It is not enough that we simply declare on leaflets that we are for working-class political representation - we must strive to create candidatures that actually represent the working class, as far as that is possible in the current situation. However, where a section of the labour movement is seeking some political expression, but is thwarted bureaucratically, independent candidates can play a pivotal role in reasserting the right of the working class to political representation.
There may be other circumstances in which small-scale independent election campaigns can be useful to a revolutionary organisation. Sectarianism lies not in the nature of such campaigns per se, but can arise if we ascribe more than a minor significance to them. Electoral work can never be more than an interesting side-line unless it is directly linked to the development of genuine labour movement representation.
The Labour Party has suffered a qualitative decline in internal life and in the openness of the channels connecting it to the working class. That is our starting point for our whole consideration of the question of independent working-class election candidates standing against Labour. But not all life has vanished from the Labour Party. There are constituencies and council wards where it would be sectarian in the proper sense, as defined above, to stand against Labour. (Example: Islington North, if Jeremy Corbyn gets to stand again as Labour candidate). We should seek out such areas of life and push there for working-class socialist Labour candidates to be adopted - and to run as independent local Labour candidates if barred by higher levels of the New Labour hierarchy. The evidence (for example, the widespread extreme weakness of reaction by Labour Parties to Labour councils pursuing sharply 'Tory' policies) suggests that these areas of life are very limited in number, and will remain very limited in number however zealous our activity.
We should investigate and agitate. What is not an option is passive support for Labour. Passive support is that which combines not with any effective socialist intervention into Labour Party life but with a hope or desire that such an intervention would be possible if only more left-wingers would sign up for it.
In particular, in London, we should be raising starkly the fact that it was the MPs votes that ultimately fixed the Mayoral selection vote.
The decline in union membership did slow in 1998. However it was the 18th year of successive decline in membership, which was 40% below its peak in 1979. There has been a fall from 39% of all employees in 1989 to 30% in 1998. Union membership at 7.8 million is now at its lowest level since 1945. The decline in union density (percentage of workers in a union in each industry) also slowed in 1998 (34.1% in 1989 to 26.9% in 1998). The number of workplaces with a recognised union has also dropped, in workplaces with over 25 employees 48.9% recognised a union in 1993, by 1998 that had dropped to 43.5%.
The impact of this decline has not been even and the differential impact has had important results. Union density among employees in production industry has fallen from 45% in 1989 to 31% in 1998, and so is now at the same level as in service industries. In all manual jobs density has dropped 14% since 1989 to the same level as non-manual jobs. Union membership amongst those with higher education below a degree is the highest of any educational background, and professionals have the highest union density of any job. These changes in the shape of the movement are to a large extent due to the difference between the public sector and private sector.
The attacks on unionism in privatised industries may make this weakness in private sector unionism even worse as the privatised industries help to hold up the figures for the private sector. Another very worrying trend is the very low level of membership amongst young workers. In 1998 union density for those under 20 was only 4% and even for 20 to 29 year-olds it was only 20%. There also seems to be evidence that this is in fact a generation gap is set to run through the movement and not one that will be solved by this generation joining unions later on in life.
The evidence shows that this decline is not due to a change in the nature of work but is due to the balance of the class struggle. The l998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey reported that 53% of employees work in the largest 11% of workplaces and two thirds of the smallest workplaces are part of a larger organisation. On the causes for the decline in union density the authors said 'virtually none of the [fall in the level of union recognition] arose from the fact that the [new workplaces] were more likely to be in the private services sector and employ more part-timers... it was because new workplaces, controlling for sector and workforce composition were less likely to recognise unions than workplaces that had been shutdown. (Cully et al. p241. The 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey).
Decline in union membership is a common pattern across the world, driven by common factors including bosses' efforts to gear up to sharper international competition, lost political confidence in the ranks of labour and IMF and government austerity plans often including privatisation and cuts. Outside the ex-Stalinist states, where the figures are misleading due to the death or transformation of 'labour front' unions, the UK had one of the largest falls in union density worldwide in 1985-1995 at 27.7%.
Instructively, in some advanced countries where the unions collaborated with social-democratic 'pink Thatcherite' governments, the losses were even worse than in Britain where unions faced a head-on attack by Thatcherism. In Australia, union density fell 29.6% and in France 37.2%. Some countries, notably South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, have seen sizeable rises in union strength; some North European trade union movements have increased their already high union densities (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland.)
Perhaps most instructively for Britain, in 1999 the US unions recorded their largest increase in membership for 20 years (up 265,000 to 16.5 million - but still only 13.9% of the workforce) That has been done by a real (if limited) shift in orientation in the last four years the US unions have doubled the amount they have spent on organising. Increased class struggle has played a major role - the victory of the teamsters in the UPS strike may prove to have been a turning point for the US unions. The 40,000 strong union turn out at the Seattle demo is indicative of a new mood too.
This brief survey shows that far from the worst being over for union decline it may continue under the New Labour government if the unions fall into line behind a Blair.
In Britain the decline in union membership is the bitter fruit of the failure of the unions to fight. The only time since 1979 when union membership stopped falling was the period of the 1984-85 miners strike. Workers want unions that fight, not crap about partnership with their exploiter, the boss.
1998 saw the lowest number of hours lost through industrial action ever recorded in Britain. The class struggle remains at a very low level. This has allowed the leaders of the unions to go off into flights of fantasy about partnership being the key to rebuilding the movement. There are moves at the lower levels of some unions to take up the organising techniques of the better elements of the US and Australian union movements, but this remains on a small scale.
This, then, is the background to the unions' response to the most pro-capitalist and anti-working class Labour government in British history. The response of the union leadership has been a sickening display of occasional blasts of hot air preceded and followed with obsequies, forelock tugging to the government. The pathetic story of the minimal, sorry minimum wage has been topped by the farce of the Employment Relations Act. The union leaderships have swallowed it down, and kept smiling and saying thank you to the Blairites. The Employment Relations Act will only become active in the year 2000 but it may also unleash a battle within the unions as it gives bosses the option of signing sweetheart recognition deals with one union to lock out other unions. The AEEU has already done this at the Western Mail whose management wanted to bar members of the GPMU and NUJ from winning recognition. Under the Act this will be legally binding for at least 3 years regardless of the number of members in any of the unions. With the AEEU leadership preparing to swallow up MSF and championing partnership a battle for the most basic ideas of trade unionism is looming.
Union leaders are detached from union members. They have material privileges - big salaries, comfortable offices and lifestyles - and spend their time with managers, politicians and other union bureaucrats, rather than in the workplace or on the picket line. They deliberately demobilise struggle and close down any channels of democracy through which rank-and-file members could control their union. Rank-and-file struggle upsets rather than excites them. This is not just a matter of personality weakness, it is the nature of a union bureaucracy content with the comforts of office, and built around negotiating within capitalism rather than changing it. We are not syndicalists, while fighting to build rank and file organisations we also take the structures of the movement seriously. It remains our policy to stand for in elections for union positions. We aspire to give the unions a fighting leadership, and while recognising the pressures we grasp every opportunity to take positions in the unions based on rank and file support for class struggle politics, our accountability to workers and under direction of the AWL.
The left is in a poor position, the old CP broad lefts have continued to rot away both politically and in strength, they have either become indistinguishable from the leadership and in some cases one of its props, as in the TGWU, or they have so little fight as to be insignificant, as in the GPMU.
'Left wing leaders', for example Crow in the RMT, and G Martin in UNISON, have lacked the guts to take on the union leadership. This is a reflection of a real caution amongst many of the left who would rather follow an upswing in militancy than lead it. As Trotsky put it in the 1930's:
'Even amongst the workers who had at one time risen to the first ranks, there are not a few tiered and disillusioned ones. They will remain, at least for the next period as bystanders. When a programme or an organisation wears out the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalised by the youth who are free of responsibilities for the past... Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle, only these successes can return the best elements of the older generation to the road of revolution'.
Dave Rix's election to ASLEF Gen Sec has been the only real victory of the left in union elections, but Christine Blower's NUT showing was disappointing. The free fall of the Militant/Socialist Party has severely weekend them but they remain the main organised left force in the CWU (but only on the ex-NCU side, and even here they are hemmed-in by independent lefts and us) and in the PCS. They also remain a force in UNISON which is the only place outside of the NUT, where the SWP have a sizeable number of members. The left, especially the revolutionary left are still very weak in the main manual and private sector unions, the old CP influence is all but gone too. This makes it an urgent necessity that we focus on turning out the remaining activists to new layers in the unions and to the task of fighting to organise the unorganised. That means organising the workers in unions but with no fighting leadership, and of course, the millions of workers who remain outside unions. This requires us to campaign on the basic issues. We can not afford to spend all our time fighting other long standing left or not-so-left union activists, neither must we become the loyal dogs-body, carrying the local union structures on our own.
Campaigning, over basic issues, turning the unions out to recruit, will give us contact with fresh people who on the whole will not carry the scars of old battles. As we have seen young workers should be a key target. To do this we will have to find new ways to organise and talk to people who will often not have any experience of the movement. The poor state of the left gives us even less of an excuse to remain purely the best union activists relying on our union contacts to pick up contacts for the AWL. We must have a drive on 'talking socialism on the job' to our workmates most of whom may not be activists in the union but may well be interested in socialism.
The nature of the New Labour government has raised the need to fight for working class representation. This will be covered in the document on the unions and labour however raising the need for working class political representation will become more an more central to our union activity in the coming period. A very clear way of raising our ideas on this in the unions is the fight to scrap the anti-union laws and for positive rights for trade unionists.
Every dispute comes into conflict with, or has to find its way through, the labyrinth of the anti-union laws. The defeat of these laws is vital and will depend on wide-spread defiance combined with a powerful political campaign. Strike support work is the bread and butter of our general industrial activity, the fight against the anti-union laws is always a relevant and important link to our wider politics during any strike and on any picket line. We remain a key player in the national campaign, we also run the London region through which we have been able to run a highly successful lobby and 300 strong rally in parliament that involved many new contacts.
The Mayday demonstration was not a great success but neither was it a disgrace. It was disappointing that some AWL branches did not bother to mobilise for it and ignored group policy and priorities.
The campaign seems to have lost some of its pull, this is in part due to the SLP's officership but is also because the Employment Relations Act is done and dusted. Interestingly the union leaders who bust a gut to stop their unions challenging the weakness of 'Fairness at work' seem more laid back now they have delivered for Blair. Still the campaign remains an excellent tool for us, it is supported by 11 national unions, it remains a focus for us in the CWU and could be a uniting element in all our union work, it can be used to raise anti_partnership class struggle arguments and the issue of working class political representation we need to use it more. We must get more speakers out to union meetings and get the issue on to every union conference agenda. The Campaign should organise more campaigning action e.g. boycotts and protests against anti_union employers, stunts or demonstrations outside court hearings. Even small local events like this will involve trade unionists and others, and will make a refreshing change from the endless round of meetings, conferences and resolutions.
The Campaign should organise solidarity and a physical presence whenever workers (prepare for or) take strike action. This will help to expose the anti-union laws and to involve workers who may be confronting this issue for the first time. We should also actively seek out and encourage unofficial action and defiance of the laws - in a responsible fashion, and where a sufficient level of support and confidence exists amongst rank-and-file workers.
The news is not all bad, despite the decline in union influence and size the British trade unions are true mass organisation, with huge financial resources On the ground too unions have an impressive base, 75% of unionised workplaces have one or more rep or shop steward, 40% of all British workplaces. This has remained the same since 1990. This army of activists will in the right conditions and with some leadership be the core of a revival of class struggle. Thatcher did not destroy this core and Blair will not be able to either.
The class struggle is at a low ebb, but it is not dead, as Sir Ken Jackson found out to his cost when, after declaring the demise of the strike weapon, his own members on the Jubilee Tube works struck and won, despite the unions denouncing the strike.
Economic growth will increasingly tip the scales in workers favour in the labour market and will lead to more industrial action.
The ongoing attack on public sector workers has spurred both Wandsworth and Haringey UNISON branches to take well supported strike action. It can not be long before the patience of other local government and health workers runs out either over conditions or the continuing pressure down on pay.
Firefighters have defeated the attack on their hard-won national pay system through the threat of strike action.
The postal workers have continued to be a beacon of unofficial action, they have also through out major national deal which was the final part of a crap deal resulting from the 1987 national strike. With privatisation looming and no real progress on pay or hours the postal workers may well lead the first major strike challenge to New Labour.
The Ford walk outs over racism and the Critchley and Magnet strikes have shown that solidarity is still the backbone of the movement. The cowardice of union leaders who blame the laws. have prevented workers using industrial action in solidarity.
Call center staff who are also members of the CWU went on strike for the first time in late 1999 and won. While it would be foolish to see these signs of life as a full scale revival they may prove to be the first steps. It is our job to make the most of every opportunity and do all we can to be in the best shape possible for the revival whenever it comes.
Producing a workplace bulletin is a great way of promoting socialism to workers, and of putting across positive ideas for ways forward on issues facing people at work. Producing a bulletin ensures that we are continually explaining ourselves to ordinary workers.
We have long advocated rank-and-file organisation. We now need to go beyond simply advocating it, and start to fill in the detail of what this means, and then set about creating it. A rank-and-file organisation is not a group of lefty hacks meeting in a pub talking for hours about rule changes and never about strikes, talking to each other but never to workers. It may not even be a shop stewards committee if the shop stewards or reps are largely conservative, anti-political advocates with a cosy relationship with management. We should look at relevant examples, both historical (e.g. 1970s shop stewards movement) and contemporary (e.g. JLE Sparks). This should be the main theme of our next national industrial school/event.
A workplace bulletin is a lot more than just a leaflet put out by a union fraction. It can be an agitator, educator and organiser. A fraction/branch activity - contact work, intervening into workplace struggles and union issues, promoting AWL initiatives, political education - can all turn around the axis of the workplace bulletin. To do this effectively, the bulletin needs to: (a) cover both workplace issues and 'big ideas'; (b) be produced and distributed in a regular, organised fashion; and (c) involve activists and workers in producing it, who, in turn, bring us new ideas and perspectives we can learn from.
Our key perspectives should therefore remain:
- To build rank and file organisations within our unions and across the movement.
- To recruit workers to the AWL and organise a periphery of sympathisers.
- To win the unions to refounding working class political representation, and for a workers' government.
Our aims for the coming year should be:
- Organise at least one national AWL union event for comrades and contacts.
- To write for and sell Action, the paper should be central to all our industrial activity.
- Significantly increase the number of workplace bulletins we publish.
- To organise active fractions that meet regularly and organise the intervention of comrades in their workplaces, their local union structures and the unions national conferences. Every fraction should carry out an audit of contacts on a regular basis.
- To increase WL and AfS sales and subs in every fraction.
- To talk socialism on the job and recruit to the AWL from our unions and our workplaces.
- To have a profile for the AWL, broad union groups, and the United Campaign at every union conference.
- To put motions into every Union conference, Regional TUC and the TUC Congress on the anti-union laws.
Checklist of activities
Individual comrades
- Establish themselves in their workplace. (If the workplace is one where it is difficult to do significant union or political work, the comrade should talk to their branch and the secretariat about 'colonising' into a different workplace). Get themselves known as a competent worker, a politically knowledgeable person, and one who reliably stands up for workers' rights.
- Seek out people in the workplace interested in politics, and get talking to them about their ideas and about socialism. Seek to introduce them to our paper and magazine, to draw them into systematic discussions and activities, and to recruit them.
- Establish themselves in their union branches.
- Seek out people in the union branch interested in politics, and get talking to them about their ideas and about socialism.
- Seek to introduce them to our paper and magazine, to draw them into systematic discussions and activities, and to recruit them.
- Regularly put up motions in the union branch.
- Contest union positions.
- If they have any responsible position in the union branch, systematically to seek to open out the union branch to younger, newer members.
Branches
- Regularly discuss comrades' workplace and union activity. Actively support comrades in industrial disputes at their workplaces. Actively support other industrial disputes.
- Seek trade-unionist contacts; seek political discussions with them; regularly offer them campaigning activities (United Campaign, welfare state, etc.); offer them support in their industrial disputes.
- Regularly distribute an industrial bulletin in at least one local workplace: either a local edition of Postalworker, or another bulletin decided locally.
Fractions
- Elect an organiser who regularly contacts all members of the fraction to listen to news and ideas and offer advice.
- Circulate model motions.
- Meet regularly.
- Organise interventions at union conferences (motions and so on, and also AWL political interventions - literature sales, political contact work, etc)
- Maintain a list of contacts regularly communicated with by phone and e-mail. Regularly revise and 'weed' the list.
The EC and Industrial sub-committee
- Organise the AWL to support industrial disputes of national importance.
- Assist and supervise workplace-bulletin work.
- Assist and supervise fraction organisers.
- Organise national campaign activity (United Campaign, welfare state, etc.)
- Organise national schools and events.
- Monitor developments in the unions, and industrial coverage in the paper and magazine.
Addendum on Europe, by Clive B
The European capitalist class has developed a high degree of continental unity through the EU. But the revolutionary left and the labour movement as a whole has been weak, or bureaucratic, in matching this development.
Steps towards co-operation, joint action, discussion and unity both of the European trade union movement and the revolutionary left should be a major priority. The AWL has informal links with a few European tendencies, and has participated in events in Europe. We have also been quite good at following debates and activities on the European revolutionary left, especially in France. We should build on this.
1) Agitationally, the need for European joint action by trade unions and the revolutionary left should be an important plank of what we routinely say.
2) At the trade union level, a campaign for, eg, a EU-wide minimum wage would be a huge step forward. Joint activity by the revolutionary left to initiate it might be possible. (This is only an example: we should investigate possibilities).
3) We should investigate the possibilities for closer discussion and joint action by the European revolutionary left. For instance, there could be a web site which all tendencies across Europe can contribute to, informing each other of their activities, circulating discussion documents, etc. We probably could not meaningfully initiate such a thing, but we could raise it with other revolutionary groups in Europe.
4) We should encourage suggestions for any other ideas on this theme, from within the AWL, or the British, or the European left.