Do we need a rank and file movement?

Gerry Bates

One of the key lessons of history is that the ability of working class people to defend themselves successfully, to advance their interests, let alone to create a society based on their needs and the needs of the whole of humanity is blocked by, held back by, the official trade union leadership - what Marxists call the trade union bureaucracy. The revival of an effective socialist movement in Britain and internationally requires that we remove the bureaucracy as an obstacle.

There are certain ambiguous, potentially progressive elements in some of the things the bureaucracy do: for instance the unionisation drive that they plan to do on the basis of the recent legislation. But fundamentally they are a block. They are a caste, a privileged section of the class that sit on top of the class holding it back.

The working class does not need the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy needs the working class to give it a push up into the corridors of power, to the lifestyle of expensive cars, huge lunch accounts and silk ties, suits and the prospect of ending your life in the House of Lords while your industry's being privatised and people are living on peanuts.

The bureaucracy are the central, strategic obstacle facing the British working class. You can say, I say it bluntly, that a very large part of a revolution in a country like Britain or any of the other advanced capitalist countries is a revolution inside the working class, inside its organisations - the smashing and the breaking of the power of the bureaucracy so that the workers themselves run their own organisations and can turn them from defensive bodies that fight over wages and conditions into a fighting force contending for working class control in industry and the in the whole of society.

That is the basic Marxist critique of the trade union bureaucracy; that is also an explanation of why you need a broad-based trade union rank and file movement. Now, a rank and file movement is not just a collection of Marxists. The idea of a rank and file movement is that it's a united front in action in the trade unions.

In a workplace or an industry you might find one out of a thousand, or maybe just one out of ten thousand, people who might right now be prepared to sign up to an entire Marxist programme and an entire Marxist critique of capitalism, an understanding of Stalinism, an understanding of the place of democracy in the struggle for socialism. But in every workplace you will find dozens, not just one in a thousand but one in a hundred, maybe even one in ten, workers who think the union should fight back more effectively over wages, over hours, who think the union should be democratic, that it should be turned outwards, that it should be a fighting instrument for them.

Now, the idea of the rank and file movement is for the Marxists to organise not just themselves in the unions, but that much broader layer of class conscious working-class activists - and to turn them into a force, a mighty lever that can completely transform the unions, that can break the power of the bureaucracy, that won't just hold them to account, but will replace them. A movement that will operate around the old slogan of the Clyde workers' committee: "If the leadership won't lead, then the rank and file must."

In other words, a body which is capable of not just fighting for positions in the unions, not just fighting to transform the unions, but capable, if necessary, at a certain stage, of creating new, more democratic, more appropriate forms of working class organisation. Marxists and the tradition that we're from have not always said you must entirely restrict your industrial sphere of activity to the existing unions. We quite rightly supported things like the breakaway blue union on the docks in the '50s. Our comrades played a leading role in the building of the New Unions at the end of the last century, which in some parts took the form of creating new unions, and in other parts took the form of taking existing unions and filling their shells with life. We are not trade union loyalists, in the narrow sense. We are working class loyalists! At times you have to make a choice, and the fundamental choice is to be a working class loyalist.

Now, I also think the fight to build a unified rank and file movement across the unions can be of immense political importance given the stage that we are now in.

I mean the changes in the Labour Party. The Labour Party is no longer the centre of most working class people's political universe. It is transforming itself into something other than a workers' party, even though as a workers' party it existed within the system and never challenged it. Quite clearly it is changing itself into something else.

The subordination of the trade union leaders to that Labour Party, their willingness to accept any crumbs that it offers - and mostly they are crumbs - for them and not for their members is creating a particularly explosive conditions in the unions.

We are seeing things that are not supposed to have happened in the last year or two, for instance, the election of Dave Rix, a relatively unknown, relatively young train driver from Yorkshire, to replace Lew Adams, a TV personality you know, long time union leader and absolutely useless. In ASLEF, after the result, if you asked, no-one would admit to having voted for Lew Adams. A General Secretary completely disowned by his members. There's a vitally important election coming up in the National Union of Teachers this summer and a real possibility that the socialist Christine Blower, who's been involved with us in the United Campaign for the Repeal of the Anti-Trade Union Laws will beat Doug McAvoy. So, there are beginnings, there are instabilities. There is a huge gap between what the trade union leadership are prepared to demand of the Labour Government and fight the Labour Government on, and the expectations that people elected the Labour Government on. That creates something for socialists to act and work on.

One of the things Workers' Liberty must argue for in the next period, and we would very much like to hear the views of comrades here from Socialist Outlook and from the rest of the left, is for the idea of a single, united, rank and file movement across the unions.

A rank and file movement that has one branch in every different union, that's democratic, that's based on the structures of the unions, that has an industrial programme, that focuses on the basic bread and butter issues of wages, of shorter hours, but also focuses on the question of democracy in the particular industry, of workers' control. A movement that focuses on the question of genuine union democracy, of trade union rights, of full employment of rebuilding the welfare state. That holds that up and judges the Labour Party and their union's relations with the Labour Party on that basis. Which is committed to reintroducing the basic ideas of socialism at the point of production. Because that's the decisive thing.

The hold of the bureaucracy is not just that of a machine. It is not only a bureaucratic machine on top of the working class. It also infects people's consciousness, their idea of what is possible.

So, for instance, one of the most militant sections of the class today is in the post office. Yet you have a leadership that says we can't have a shorter working week unless we self-finance it. Self-finance it? Postal workers create a million pounds worth of profit every day for the state, but the state still says a reduction in your working time and an increase in your wages has got to be self-financing. So we need a rank and file movement that starts to challenge those kinds of ideas, that will see bringing socialist ideas to the unions not as a question of injecting something alien from outside into the unions, but which draws out the class-struggle socialist logic of the demands and the aspirations of working class people.

I want to focus on the key thing. We should be supporting and building the United Campaign for the Repeal of the Anti-Trade Union Laws, in all the unions. That's a vitally important campaign, because it's a political standard of class interests, of effective trade unionism, by which to measure New Labour and measure the bureaucrats' subservience to New Labour. However, that campaign on its own will not be enough, without a cross trade union, industrial rank and file movement. We could look at the possibility of, say, a group of workers like the tube workers, or someone who is involved in the forefront of the struggle for working class rights against this Government. People who would have authority to try and pull together a meeting of lefts from different unions and stewards committees. The rest of the socialist left should be co-operating around such a project. The left is ghettoised and Balkanised. In the National Union of Teachers you have two rank and file groups; in the rail union, the RMT, you have a thing which used to be a rank and file movement but never dared call itself a rank and file movement. In the Communication Workers' Union you have people who are too frightened of their careers to form a rank and file movement sitting on top of a workforce which would love to have a rank and file movement and are in a certain sense already a rank and file movement.

You have all sorts of complex and difficult situations, but I think if we can get the left, the revolutionary left, to throw its weight behind a call for a rank and file movement we might be amazed at what we could do.

Essentially we need to put in the minds of other people on the left the idea of unity, of working class unity, of socialist unity around the idea of a new rank and file movement. The changes in the Labour Party make a lot of the old debates on the revolutionary left redundant. We need to re-examine where we are, our strategy and our tactics.

The simple fact of the matter is unless you create a framework for unity, we will just be talking about it in the vaguest sense. And the framework you have for unity is a battle to reclaim the unions. It is something that will make sense to everyone, something based on practical day-to-day activity. It would make the petit-bourgeois revolutionary left turn to the working class, which is the source of the power of the ideas of Marxism. That, I think, should be the basic perspective of the left, the revolutionary left, in the unions: single-minded focus on the idea of building a new socialist opposition in the unions, one rooted in the rank and file. I hope that comrades like Greg and organisations like Socialist Outlook, and other organisations like the Socialist Party and the SWP, with whom we've started to collaborate around ideas like a united left slate in the Euro-elections, can start to seriously discuss launching such a movement. I think it can be done, and, if we do do it, we can turn a lot of what are going to be sporadic little protests against New Labour into a mighty movement.

Greg Tucker

This was called a debate between us, and I must say that of the13 minutes you've just taken, it's hard to find in the first 10 anything to speak against. I think differences are just a question of nuance and how we do things, rather than whether we should do them. I don't want to cover too much of the same ground.

Gerry's right, the starting point has to be the role of the trade union bureaucracy and its privileged position, and the role it plays in dampening down struggle and the role it is playing currently in terms of the Labour Government. We have to put building a new rank and file movement in that context. We have the the lowest level of strikes this century. We've got nearly all of this century behind us, I'm afraid, so it's a pretty awful situation. Last time I looked at the figures someone suggested to me that the RMT was probably responsible for over half of the official disputes last year: that shows how bloody awful everyone else certainly was. It is true to say that expectations in the Blair Government are not being met, but ideologically the question of social partnership is not being challenged. The TUC is not under any great pressure to move away from social partnership ideology. We do have glimmers of hope: people are beginning to respond to their expectations being broken against the rocks of the Labour Government. There is the beginnings of some left unity, particularly in the European elections. That's a fragile experiment, but worth working on. For the first time left wing political organisations are beginning to talk to each other and beginning to work some things through.

The experience of the trade union broad lefts is relevant to our discussion. There is a long, long history, over the last 30 or 40 years, of movements being built up. All have foundered for various reasons, more than anything else because in each case the political founding organisation decided it wanted to control the trade union organisation and to use the formation of a cross-union, cross-sectoral left organisations as an opportunity to make party-building gains. In each case that's the way it worked and why it foundered. Independents, let alone the rest of the left, weren't prepared to put their time and energy into just building someone else's party. We have to look at any initiatives to build a new cross-sectoral broad left from the angle of building trust between people. It can't be just some experiment to find ways of building a particular organisation. It must be something real, really about building a broad left.

The worst experience has been with the secret Broad Left formations - electoral pacts just there to get people elected. I'm in such a body at the moment. We're trying to find ways of broadening it out and going beyond just being an electoral pact. Electoralism on that basis leads to one thing: you end up supporting people already themselves part of the bureaucracy. They get themselves elected then turn out to be exactly the same as the bureaucrats they've replaced, without anybody being able to hold them to account. And that's the point about the secret Broad Left: there isn't any accounting at the end of the day. So the first thing that we have to say is that we have to have open left organisations, ones which concern themselves with class struggle, not with putting people into positions of power, one which uses people in positions of power to further trade union action of our class. They have to be clearly open and democratic - not just something that individuals can use as power blocs in their own struggles, empowering working class people. So, that's the first thing, to avoid electoralism.

The other side of it, of course, is that you have the other extreme - rank and file groups that decide not to bother with the bureaucracy, and have no impact at all on the bureaucracy. Rank and file groups like those which the SWP had in the '70s, which talk to nobody but themselves, don't challenge the bureaucracy at all, and in practice let them off the hook whenever they do anything wrong.

So, again, it's got to be a rank and file movement which is serious about it's tasks, one of which is to confront the bureaucracy and where necessary fight to remove them from power. As Gerry has said, we have to be conscious that we are not trade union loyalists. We are building something broader than that and, sometimes that does mean breaking from those trade unions, rather than just fighting to win them.

I do agree that we need to build existing campaigns, Reclaim Our Rights and other campaigns of that nature which already exist have been useful in terms of building trust between people, and have agendas which are useful in themselves. Building Reclaim Our Rights is an important task today. But we also need to advance discussion on the left about the politics of what's going on around us. One of the initiatives, for instance, which would be central at the moment, would be a trade union bulletin discussing the whole question of social partnership and the ideological positions being taken by the TUC. I think we should be pushing that forward. I agree that we need to build a new cross-sectoral trade union alliance, a new broad left formation. But we have to look at that in a serious way, not think we can just invent it tomorrow. We do need to be bold about initiatives, but can't run before we can walk. We are at a very early stage.

I do think there is a possibility, but we can't do it if we just think we can invent it straightaway. We have to be patient in terms of how we build it.

Socialist Outlook would agree to try and build a cross-sectoral alliance. The question is how do we work for that? We can't just invent that overnight. I'm not sure that any one particular union, or the left in any one particular union, is strong enough. Clearly events are everything, and if the struggle heats up in one particular union or another then that will give us opportunities. I don't think that's immediately posed inside the RMT today, but I do think we need to work at it as best we can.

To end, there are a lot of difficulties at the moment because of the grip the TUC has over the movement. There are signs of change - the elections in ASLEF and elsewhere show that things are beginning to break up. We've seen the bureaucracy's response to that with increasing witch-hunts - in the RMT, in MSF, in UNISON and in other unions. It won't be easy.

What I would be positive in saying is that we would welcome discussions with comrades in the AWL to work out how we start the process of building a cross-sectoral trade union alliance of the proper left. Build on the unity we've got now around the European Union election . Work on that and let's see if we can go forward!