Labour parties

["Steve Painter and Rose McCann" <spainter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A review of the discussion on labour parties, and an investigation of the
sociology of labour parties and trade unions in English-speaking countries
with labour parties, from the standpoint of trying to arrive at the best
tactics required to build a class-struggle left wing
By Bob Gould
Part 1a.

One of the paradoxes of British labour movement development, is that you
have to note that unions like the amalgamated engineers and the electrical
trades were the quintessential unions of workers who formed part of the
"labour aristocracy".  Yet for most of the 20th century those two unions
were centres of communist and socialist activity, and both unions were led
for many years by socialists and communists, whose successful industrial
agitations increased the wages and conditions of those workers, often ahead
of the rest of the working class. The very success of socialists and
communists in these tradesmen's unions won great gains for the union members
and even to some extent increased their "aristocratic" status.

That situation brings us right to the heart of the industrial aspect of the
question of reform and revolution. Socialists, by definition, have to be the
best agitators for improvements, but the improvements achieved sometimes
slow down development towards the socialist revolution.

That's one of the paradoxes of Marxist and socialist agitation, and one that
's never easily resolved. In Australia, many trade unions that were centres
of successful socialist, communist and Marxist agitation also formed part of
a certain "labour aristocracy" for most of the 20th century, even up to
today.

I have discussed the industrial impact of the very large and influential
communist party in struggles in the labour movement during the 20th century,
and also the impact of the much smaller but equally proletarian Trotskyist
movement on the successful struggle for improvements for the working class,
in my piece, The Communist Party in Australian Life, available on Ozleft
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/CPA.html

It's only necessary to quote the Amalgamated Engineering Union here,
building workers unions, miners and waterfront unions. These unions, often
the centres of superexploitation in the early 20th century, won enormous
gains under militant and socialist leadership, particularly after World War
II, up to the mid-1980s. Many of the more recent struggles have been in
defence of the gains of these so-called "labour aristocrats", of which the
most striking struggles in Australia have been to defending miners'
conditions against the levelling-down modernisation of capitalism, and the
partly successful, bitter class struggle of a couple of years ago, to defend
the perceived privileges (from the bourgeois point of view) of the wharfies
in the maritime union, against ferocious employers' efforts to level them
down.

The current struggles to defend the building workers in the CFMEU and the
Workers First-led metalworkers in Victoria also have that aspect. Another
current struggle with that obvious aspect is taking place now in the ports
of the west coast of the US.
It's worth noting that the ideologists of the bourgeoisie, through their
tabloid press, have their own version of a theory of "labour aristocracy" -
the "new class" theory. They work themselves up into a frenzy of hostility
towards the "privileges" of what they call the "new class" and sometimes
even the "labour aristocracy".

The theory of the "labour aristocracy", which had some limited application
in English-speaking countries in the past, is an archaic notion now, in
countries like Australia and Britain. What's left of the "labour
 aristocracy" after the demolition of a large part of manufacturing
industry, and the general change in the characteristics of the labour force,
meshes in with other strata in modern capitalist society. As Rose McCann
reminded us a month or so ago on this list, our Trotskyist-Cochranite
comrade, Harry Braverman, wrote the ground-breaking and still
extraordinarily useful book analysing the new stratifications in capitalism,
and the question of alienated labour, "Labour and Monopoly Capital", about
30 years ago. This book is still a primary guide to the social structure of
the new categories of work and workers generated by modern capitalist
development.

Phil Ferguson and Ben Courtice in their enthusiastic, "right-on" exchanges,
talk loosely about yuppies etc, and the middle class, etc, without in that
context recognising the fact that most of the people they are talking about
are, in objective class terms, workers, who however, accept the bourgeois
consciousness imposed on them by the ruling class and the media, and don't
regard themselves subjectively as workers.

This, also, is not an entirely new development. In most periods of
capitalism, working-class tories have been a significant phenomenon. In the
19th century in Britain, one of the biggest categories of employed labour
was house servants, who politically and socially were conservative. The new,
often atomised workforce in service industries, the computer industry, etc,
are objectively workers, despite the fact that bourgeois ideology dominates
them to some extent.

As some of these newer sectors become organised in trade unions, a certain
amount of working class consciousness begins to conflict with the ideology
of the bourgeoisie in the minds of these workers.

Phil Ferguson is inconsistent in the way he uses this situation to reinforce
his sectarian hostility to any limited reformist class consciousness,
associated with the phenomenon of Laborism. He and others like him, and the
DSP (instrumentally making use of his arguments), say in one piece of verbal
sleight of hand that 92 per cent of the employed population are, objectively
speaking, workers, and then they do a cute piece of arithmetic whereby they
point to the fact, as also from time to time, do the bourgeoisie, that only
about half of these workers usually vote Labor, and Ferguson manages, by a
couple of other entirely verbal statistical tricks, to reduce the number of
workers who vote Labour to a notional 30 per cent, and then throws in the
obligatory contemptuous statement, "what does it matter anyhow if 30 per
cent of workers vote Labour".

What a piece of rubbish this is in Marxian class terms. What is significant
about bourgeois workers parties, even the spectacularly deracinated one in
New Zealand, is that in most periods, including the current one, the section
of the working class that votes Labor, or is tied in with Laborism, usually
includes both the workers organised in trade unions and the most exploited
sections of the working class, welfare recipients, the unemployed,
proletarian ethnic groups such as new immigrants, and in the New Zealand
context Maori and Pacific Islanders, as well as slightly-left leaning
groupings among the "new social layers" drawn from tertiary-educated people,
often technologically trained, working in newer industrial environments.

I've demonstrated for NSW electoral politics in my recent piece, The People'
s Choice http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Peopleschoice.html, that
the intermediate strata vacillate between Labor and Liberal. In a surge to
Labor, the Labor vote goes up among the new social layers, and in a swing
against it goes down the social strata. In that sense I'd assert something
that will drive Ferguson, the DSP and others like them completely mad:
voting Labor, among the new social layers, rather than voting Tory,
represents a significant leap in class consciousness, from outright
identification with the bourgeoisie to a primitive reformist social or class
consciousness.

In modern conditions, voting Green, rather than conservative also involves a
limited progressive shift in consciousness, and to complicate things even
further, shifting from Labor to the Greens, as some people do, often
involves a slight shift to the left, within a vaguely reformist
consciousness.

>From these very current sociological considerations flow a number of the
reasons for Marxist groups to adopt a strategic united front strategy
towards Laborism and Greenism. In particular, to place an equals sign
between the so-called "two capitalist parties", Laborism and Toryism, and
then to concentrate your main fire tactically against Laborism (as the force
deceiving the workers worst) as the DSP and Ferguson do, is a hopeless and
bankrupt political perspective.

In the seminal discussion of these matters in 1921, Lenin tried to turn the
tactical orientation of the early communists away from "scolding scoundrels"
towards a strategic orientation to the British labour movement.

MODERN TRADE UNIONISM

In all the English-speaking countries, trade unionism declined dramatically
between about 1987 and 2000, although it has now stabilised in Australia and
Britain, and is rising slightly. In Australia a process of amalgamation has
produced more bureaucratic union structures. The number of shop stewards has
declined, and there has been a long period of very little strike action.

Nevertheless in the last few years the trade unions have recovered a bit,
they've been renewed by a younger group of functionaries and organisers who
are bit more leftist than their immediate predecessors, and there's a modest
rising arc of defensive struggles. It's curious to me, that at this moment
of significant trade union revival, extravagant discussions about the
"rotten" trade union bureaucracy are being advanced, particularly by the
DSP. This is singularly stupid. Socialist sects for 100 years have been
writing off the trade unions. Daniel De Leon wrote them off in the US after
being rebuffed in his activities in the IWW. Council communists have written
them off for most of the 20th century.

I suspect Phil Ferguson doesn't think must of the existing trade unions. I'd
be interested to hear his rounded views on them. The rump of the Healy
formation (with which I was once associated, the Socialist Equality Party),
now has a theoretical position that trade unionism from its inception was a
fraud and deception (see David North's pamphlet on trade unions). In Dave
North's universe the only slogan left for the proletariat is build the SEP,
as both a maximum and minimum slogan.

I was a bit blown away, so to speak, when former US SWP leader Caroline
Lund, long-time friend of the DSP, tentatively advanced the position, at a
session of the Asia-Pacific Solidarity Conference in Sydney last Easter,
that the old forms of trade unionism were bankrupt in the US, and that in
her industry, the car industry, workers voting for decertification of the
UAW in a car plant, had some progressive content because it might be
followed by the setting up of a new, independent union.

Lund also advanced the proposition that some workers in the airline industry
breaking away from the machinists' union (IAM) to join a separate, smaller
organisation of higher paid workers, might also have some progressive
content. I don't want to overstate this in relation to Caroline Lund, as she
is someone who went into industry during the US SWP's turn to industry, who
has hung on in a car plant, doggedly engaging in political activity and even
producing her own small industry bulletin. Her views warrant attention for
this reason, even if they're wrong, which in my view they are. I also got
the impression in the session that she was engaged in some intellectual
probing on the basis of her experiences, and that her propositions were work
in progress, so to speak. For all these reasons I don't want "verbal"
Caroline Lund and if she reads this post on Marxmail, I'd be grateful to her
if she would expand her views on the US trade union movement further, for
discussion.

Nevertheless, the fact that such ideas about trade unionism can be advanced
by people who are veterans of the Trotskyist movement, seems to me to have
some significance, particularly when it's associated in Australia with the
DSP's extravagant rhetoric about the "aristocracy of labour", thrown about
by the DSP as the substitute for a serious trade union policy.

To most proletarian socialists who have devoted much of their lives to
activities in the labour and trade union movements, having both a
revolutionary and a realistic strategic approach to trade unionism is of
vital importance. From that point of view, I belong to the school of thought
in which to write off the trade unions is political madness. Without serious
work in the trade union movement, no matter what its ups and downs, and no
matter what the contradictions of that work may be, to abdicate it is to
abdicate any prospect of mobilising the social forces necessary for the
socialist revolution. If socialists retreat from the labour movement, with
all its contradictions and ups and downs, what other major social force can
they base themselves on?

The strategic view advanced by the DSP isn't quite the same as that of
Caroline Lund. The DSP pays a certain lip service to the notion that a
labour movement still exists, but by extravagant use of rhetoric, about the
trade union bureaucracy and the "labour aristocracy", applied crudely to
modern Australian conditions, what emerges is a very strange and rhetorical
kind of beast. Lip service is paid from time to time to building a
class-struggle left wing, and great literary interest is shown in some
militant developments in the Victorian trade unions, but on this is
superimposed the artificially constructed notion, drawn theoretically from
Lorimer's couple of fragments of Lenin, plucked out of context, of the "two
equivalent capitalist parties", Labor and Liberal, with the main immediate
task being the smashing of the grip of the Laborites on the working class
and trade union movement.

On the face of it, this is an incoherent and destructive perspective from a
proletarian socialist point of view. The question that immediately arises in
the minds of any Marxists with a different point of view, is how can the DSP
seriously advance this weird perspective and what motivation, force or
social pressure, can keep this perspective in place in a smallish socialist
grouping, which ostensibly has the aim of the socialist revolution?

The reality in Australia now, is that the overwhelming majority of the
members of the members of the organised groups of the far left are current
students or fairly recent ex-students. Sociologically speaking, the far left
is located in the grouping I have described as the "new social layers". The
most successful group on the far left, the DSP, has recruited, built and
sustained itself for at least the past 15 years, in particular, from the new
social layers. In terms of trade union implantation, the only significant
number of members of far left organisations is in the two public service
unions, and to a lesser extent in the national education union.

In previous posts, Ben Courtice and other DSP members, Jose Perez in the US
and Phil Ferguson have poured ridicule on my breakdown of the composition of
what you could reasonably call the left in Australia, particularly my rough
20,000 figure as to its size. Perez asserts that the DSP is correct in
excluding from its considerations all the elements in the orbit of Laborism,
because by his judgement they are pro-capitalist. The same rhetoric pervades
DSP-Courtice-Ferguson comment on this question.

Jose Perez says: "Gould objects to the a priori exclusion of the leftists or
socialists who are pro-capitalist from the project of developing the
Socialist Alliance into a stronger and more coherent organisation, because
that exclusion is grounded in these folks being adherents of the ALP. Which
brings up the question, what is the nature of the ALP?"

The problem with this approach is that in practice, by excluding all layers
in the traditional labour movement, it constructs the idea of a "left" that
is only located in the new social layers. From this point of view, when the
DSP occasionally still uses rhetoric about a "class-struggle left-wing",
they actually envisage a left wing composed of people like themselves,
sociologically speaking, with the odd blue-collar proletarian super-hero,
who is prepared to associate with their group. This is a farcical
perspective. It's a mental construction used to reinforce the practice of
the far left, which is firmly located in the new social layers, and it has
very little to do with a realistic strategy that includes any serious
attempt to intersect with the traditional labour movement and the organised
working class.

None of the foregoing is to meant to diminish the new problems for serious
socialists trying to work in the existing trade union movement, presented by
the undeniable increased bureaucratisation of the unions. But these are
concrete problems to be overcome, not ignored or wished away by a ludicrous
construction in which the bulk of those on the left who are active in the
traditional workers' movement, are excluded or excommunicated from the
 "left" by a kind of semantic sleight of hand.

It's easy to locate historically how this came about. Once the DSP got
going, as an organisation based on the Cannonist-Zinovievist form of
organisation with a "team leadership" in a relatively advanced, affluent,
capitalist country, the organisation becomes prey to the bright ideas and
organisational preoccupations, and even the organisational egotisms of the
leadership, which is a permanent caucus in the organisation, quickly and
carefully stomping on any other source of political perspectives that emerge
in the organisation, from the class struggle or the mass movement.

Changes of line and perspective, only come from within the leadership, in
those kinds of organisations once the Zinovievist internal regime is firmly
established. Those organisations also, in historical retrospect, have a
strong tendency to throw up a supreme leader, one person in whom authority,
power and leadership qualities tend to reside.

In the Australian context, the DSP eventually settled down into a homogenous
Zinovievist grouping with a verbal rhetoric about the labour movement and
the class struggle, relatively successful in building up its own apparatus,
but located sociologically totally outside the traditional labour movement.
In the real environment that the DSP operates, which is the environment of
leftist-moving non-labour-movement-oriented section of the new social
layers, the main organisational and physical competition comes from the
existence of the Greens.

The Greens are infinitely more successful in occupying the social space in
Australia that exists to the left of the Labor Party in the new social
layers, than the DSP. Nevertheless, there are enough crumbs around the
social movements of the new social layers for the DSP to recruit new members
and build its organisation.

It's interesting to observe that after toying with using similar exposure
rhetoric against the Greens as it uses against the Laborites, the DSP has
drawn rapidly back from that, because it is in real life much more reactive
to public opinion in the new social layers, Green environment, than it is to
issues and public opinion in the labour movement.

See part 2


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