Debate on shop floor crisis Leadership rank and file

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TONY Richards' articles (SO 125, 126) are a welcome contribution to an essential discussion of where we are going on the industrial front. l As Tony appears to be in substantial disagreement with my views, I would like to briefly reply to clarify some of the issues for SO readers.

This is particularly essential because Tony has misunderstood or misinterpreted many of my comments. Lack of space prohibits me from taking up all his, arguments, particularly those on the Labour Party.

Take as an example of Tony's approach his claim that I support "the hoary old SWP" attack on the "open the books" demand. In arguing that one of the problems we face today is the fact that many rank and file activists accept bourgeois explanations of the crisis including arguments about capitalist viability, 1 wrote:

"How many struggles have we seen aborted by the basic trade union idea the employers have shown us they can't pay? How many anti-redundancy fights have been impaled on the capitalist logic 'We are not making a profit, there is no alternative to closure.' "

Tony argues that since I use the word "show' rather than 'claim' this can only be read as "an acceptance of those figures and an implicit attack upon the 'open the books' demand."

The point is that this demand is intended to take workers beyond the enterprise and capitalist logic. As Tony points out it has not been successfully taken up.

Within the workers' prevailing consciousness employers are able to show that the cupboard is bare. My comments were simply a recognition that whatever we may desire workers in the main do not move beyond ideas of enterprise viability. They start and they finish there.

This is at the root of defeat after defeat.

The 'open the books' demand attempts to take workers beyond svictivir consciousness. Unless we accept where workers are now we cannot develop bridges to_take them further. Tony's attempts to assimilate me to the SWP are simply without foundation.

Just one more example. There is a similar misunderstanding about what I term "the bureauFor an indepeni dent inquiry into •the death of Colij Roach! • Roach Family -Support Commit ¡tee, 50 Rectory -Ra, London N16 John Mcllroy continues our discussion on cratisation of the shop steward movement.

This is an imprecise, short hand term. There has, for example, not been any such "movement' for nearly 60 years. It is often used to describe the way stewards compared with the '50s or '60s have become enmeshed in written procedures divorced from direct bargaining over cash and integrated more into union machinery.

Having made this clear and having criticised this process as weakening the rank and file, I then went on to make the very limited statement:

'The greater integration within the union has the potential of focussing a fight for control of the machines, a fight which is ever more necessary in the face of centralisation of capital and the role, of the state.".

This focus on the leadership of the unions is, of course, what has always distinguished us from the rank and filists.

Tony, however, eliminates my inverted commas, assumes a model of bureaucratization pure and simple in terms of full time officials (even though I specifically pointed out stewards were diotinmiched from. le latter "by the fact that they work in the plant and are subject to recall"") and blithely asserts an irrefutable truism, "we need revolutionaries not apparatchiks."

This kind of method makes fruitful discussion rather difficult. It is not helped by Tony's criticism of some of the examples I use to show that the rank and file are on the defensive.

The TGWU, Tony tells us, supported Alan Thornett in 1974. If they did it was like the rope supports the hanging man. As the Battle for Trotskyism, with which Tony is familiar, comments:

'The next day recognition as deputy convenor and shop steward was withdrawn from Thornett, the transport drivers struck in his defence, and the witchhunt began in earnest. For the next three weeks the transport section was under attack from the combined forces of BLMC, the TGWU bureaucracy at National, Regional and District level...

(My emphasis) p. 82 Events in the NUM have been dealt with in recent correspondence in SO and I will not take up any more space here. Suffice it to say that a framework which sees , Scargill's behaviour as 'thé very high point of leadership betrayal" killing • 'the 'strike wave stone dead" pays little attention to what actually occured.

But what is truly amazing in his treatment of these two examples is that Tony adopts and extends the argument I am putting and attempts to use it as a stick to beat me.

The reason I raised the examples of the NUM and of Alan Thornett was to precisely make the point that the circumstances were different in the '70s than today and that those very different circumstances mould workers' consciousness in different ways:

Because of this the miners took action in defiance of misleadership a decade ago but refused to support principled leadership over the last two ballots. All Tony does here is expand my argument. He does move in the right direction by looking at what was actually happening and its impact. on consciousness. He baulks, however, at the conclusions.

Tony also makes a meal of the fact that I don't mention the 1938 Transitional Programme. We certainly need a transitional politics and I did mention the need to bridge what is and what should be. But a formulation nearly 50 years old, whilst a useful starting point is in itself inadequate for today's tasks.

I could go on but I want to come to the most important difference between Tony and myself which centres around the concepts of "leadership" and "consciousness"

I had no intention of downgrading the importance of leadership. The point I was trying to make is this: leadership and consciousness are dialectically interrelated. Like Love and Marriage we cannot talk about one without the other.

Let us simplify. A revolutionary is elected convenor in a workplace. He or she will find that they are miles ahead of hundreds of their members. The task ahead will be to grapple with the backward ideas held by many in the ranks to educate his or her members in the context of an overall strategy which can take them forward.

That is what leadership is: the conquest of consciousness, grasping clearly and honestly the level of the membership, having a clear estimation of the balance of forces and the possi bilities battling for revolutionan understanding and action against the ruling class ideas and action not from the pulpit of the pub or canteen meeting, although that will be important, but centrally from the platform day to day struggle provides.

Now that day to day struggle, as Tony emphasises, will push the membership towards confrontation with.the employers and their leaders.

Moreover, I do accept - and this point must be stressed -that whilst the rank and file share the ideas of the bureaucracy • the different • material positions of the two groups means that the former, unlike the latter, have no vested interest in those ideas and that whilst formally the ranks may even at times be to the right of the bureaucracy their structural position ultimately propels them into confrontation with it.

Such confrontation provides the pre-conditions for development. It is necessary for workers to take up socialist positions but it is insufficient. We need conscious, political leadership to develop, extend and systematise the basic lessons learned.

We are Marxists not spontaneists. We know that the existing ideas of the rank and file are not magically dissolved by the heat of battle. Moreover, those ideas can often restrain the workers from giving battle at all.

The biggest struggles since the '20s have accompanied a deepening economic crisis without any qualitative increment to the forces of the revolutionary left and with the unions pushed onto the defensive.

Part of the explanation lies in the failure of Trotskyists to integrate leadership into an understanding of consciousness; Workers are not Pavlovian dogs who are reactionary, reformist or revolutionary in direct reaction to events.

Leadership also has to grapple with the ways in which the ruling class mould consciousness and the content of that moulding, the process by which they maintain control even as the material bases for that control are undercut.

The vast apparatus of thought contro! in the hands of the ruling class today is far more powerful than when Gramsci or Trotsky were alive. Look at the potentiality of cable technology in atomising the working class.

And, of course, consciousness is not just fluff on a stone. Capitalist ideas are a real social force.

They run deep. They are reproduced daily by the process of capitalist production and by capitalist institutions.

I repeat we cannot simply analyse the industrial struggle in terms of upturns or downturns in militancy.

Whilst we do have to see the other side the degree to which workers can move forward in struggle, we have to understand how at certain times the objective situation of which their consciousness is one part means that they will not be prepared to struggle even when leadership is offered.

In other words, our revolutionary who has been elected convenor will have to be prepared to accept many reverses from the membership despite textbook tactics.

Voluntarism, heroism will not be enough. This may be a function of the general lack of leadership but that is the terrain on which we have to struggle.

In the understanding that sometimes adequate leadership is not sufficient and not in wrong tactics at the top lies the basic roots of an explanation of what has happened in the mines in the last period.

On the other hand we also know that in certain periods workers will not accept misleadership. When the officials tell them to go back to work they won't. When the officials sit tight they will act themselves. They will kick over the traces.

That was the situation in the early '70s. Look at the fight over the Industrial Relations Act for example. The present period on the other hand is characterised by the inability of the rank and file to take struggles beyond the confines set by the leadership. Strikes keep coming but so does defeat.

Unless today we honestly explore why the rank and file acquiesce in the politics of the bureaucracy we cannot commence to recreate the situation where they reject those politics and behave like they did in 1972 not 1982.

Not only will revolutionaries in the unions often give leadership which is rejected. As they gain more important positions the constraints of the consciousness of the members and the limits of trade unionism in a non-revolutionary situation will mean that they will have to increasingly accept all sorts of compromises and make all sorts of retreats.

How you do it is, of course, Rebellion' Dobbs describes how the American Marxists in the 1930s fought against a strike to support a victimised comrade. It has to be subordinated to a recognition struggle.

The further up the ladder we go the greater the problems. But Fighter pamphlet 10p we will have to go up that ladder if we are to get anywhere. We know where we stand here against ultra left sectarians.

But we have to apply this understanding of the structural limits of trade unionism outside an overall upsurge to the way we criticise left reformist union leaders.

Obviously we have far more optimistic conceptions of what is possible than they do. In the end their stance reflects their bureaucratic position. At times there will be sell outs, pure and simple like ASLEF or the NHS. We have to criticise those responsible mercilessly.

But at other times left leaders will come up against real limits. We should not set up abstract ideal conceptions of what leadership should entail and criticise on that basis particularly when we have little or no base in the union or industry.

Conceptions of leadership divorced from the consciousness of the workers and the constraints of trade unionism collapse into voluntarism and impossibilism. They cut us off from the militants coming to Marxism.

Two final points. I think sometimes differences emerge because of different conceptions of the period we are in. I certainly do not believe that a General Strike or a pre-revolutionary situation are just around the corner.

We are in a Grand National, not a five furlong sprint. Revolutionary politics have no hold over even a significant minority. We need a strategy for the long haul.

Trotsky was correct when he stated "The mentality of the class is backward but the mentality is not such a substance as the factories, the mines, the railroads, but is more mobile and under the blows of the objective crisis the millions of unemployed, it can change rapidly.

It can. Generally after long preparation and as a pre-revolutionary situation looms. As yet it has not changed. We have to accept that.

But we need to have a far more detailed and well worked out analysis of what the different sections of the working class are thinking and doing if we are to learn from them. Both Tony and myself need to go beyond general formulations like 'the working class" and 'the rank and file" . What exactly do we mean by the rank and file? We are not nearly scientific enough.

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Socialist Organiser no. 133 May 26 1983 Page 14

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the industrial downturn, responding to Tony Richards articles in Socialist Organ iser nos 125-6

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