THE Socialist Movement has suffered from the fact that most of its thinking and writing has been done for it by men and women who belong to “professional” groups. We contend, and with truth, that we are workers: no miner or ploughboy has ever worked harder or more productively than Karl Marx or Sidney and Beatrice Webb. No reasonable being questions our sincerity; for few of us have anything tangible to gain from the changes we advocate. But we lack most of the experiences that make the outlook of the manual worker. Few of us have lived for long on the borderline of subsistence: none of us have been denied access to the intellectual heritage of mankind none of us have felt the insult of an inferior status in society: something of all this we can conceive if we possess imagination. But how many of us ever grasp the significance of the chief formative experience through which in this country every worker in a well-organized trade must pass? We can know the life of a Trade Union only from the outside. Some of us belong, as I do, to a professional Trade Union: a few conscious of the nature of their calling have become honorary gas workers. These substitutes can give us nothing of the reality. We do not know from our own daily lives what it means to a young worker to enter this disciplined army. We have never had to tighten our belts through a prolonged and doubtful strike. If we ever succeed in understanding the instinctive loyalty bred in a great union with a long tradition, we achieve it only as rare men sometimes manage to understand a woman’s life. Without this experience it is difficult for the “intellectual” to grasp the meaning of the word “class”. He readily assents to the ideal of a class-less society. But does he ever realize the dynamic possibilities of “class” in the unequal society of to-day? To feel “class”, to know it as a force in history, one must have stood in a queue at a paydesk, or better still in a strike picket, over against an employer with the police and the courts ranged behind him.
The lack of this experience makes us from the start “outsiders” in the Labour Movement. We have, none the less, much to contribute. We are usually more articulate with voice and pen than the manual workers; we are more at home in the world of theory, and some of us are by training organizers. We fling ourselves with ardour into the political life of the Party, for in this field we know how to use our tools. The result has been, I suspect, in this country and in others, a steady over-emphasis on the political aspects of the Socialist Movement. We who write, with few exceptions, its books, pamphlets, and newspapers, have no knowledge at first hand of the basic organization of the working-class. The reader may reply that our deficiencies are amply compensated by the numerous Trade Union leaders who sit on all the Party’s benches in Parliament, including the front bench. I am not sure that this is so. Among these Trade Union leaders there are and have been many able men of strong character. Theirs, however, is usually a practical ability. They are organizers and negotiators. It is a rare chance if they combine with these gifts an interest in theory, or the sceptical habit of mind that questions current assumptions and accepted tendencies.
The result is that the whole process of reaching Socialism is conceived among us in political terms. A capitalist government, administering the present industrial system, must be peaceably replaced, or as the minority would say, violently overthrown, by a political party that will supply an alternative government. From this formula, it may be that there is no escape. But in our more detailed strategy have we ever perceived the part that Trade Unions should play? The Russians when they made their social revolution based it and the whole permanent structure of their power on an improvised strike committee—for in origin that is what the Soviets were. In 1905, and again in 1917, when quasi-political strikes first shook and then overthrew Tsardom, the militant organization of the active mass of the workers in St. Petersburg and Moscow was an almost spontaneous gathering of delegates from the factories and later from the disaffected regiments. It came together naturally, without theory, an inevitable conclusion from the logic of events. Because it led and acted, and won the trust of the masses, it gathered round itself the legend, the aureole of victory that the Duma lacked. To it the instinctive loyalty of the workers responded.
There is a lesson here which we in this country have not sufficiently considered. It is gross stupidity to argue that what succeeded, in wholly different conditions, in Russia will succeed here. History and a widely different economic structure mock such reasoning. But in this instance the argument from history tells the other way. Ours is by far the older and more glorious Trade Union organization. It had been gathering to itself the hereditary loyalty of the workers for a century before the Labour Party existed. From its ranks the martyrs came. Round it gathered all the memories of an heroic struggle. If you would know which social unit, Party or Union, arouses in the worker’s mind the stronger emotion of loyalty and militancy, carry your question to a mining village in Durham or Northumberland, where sons follow their father’s trade. The Party makes an appeal to the head, but the Union with its stained and venerable banners touches every nerve in a worker’s body, as the thought of the clan once did in the feudal Highlands. The appeal is weaker, no doubt, in trades less stoutly organized than mining is or was and the mobility of labour in the overgrown town can sap it. But it is, none the less, an emotional force that we have neglected. The art of politics is, I take it, mainly a skill in mobilizing, round the appropriate social units, the strongest human emotions. These are vague and general considerations what do they mean in the concrete? They may conduct us, first of all, to some survey of the Trade Union structure itself. Is the organization that has grown up historically, whether we look at branch, trade, or industry, the best, not merely for the daily struggle, but for the ultimate effort, the conquest of power? Can we get on a “shop” basis an organization incomparably more flexible, more militant, more adaptable to a political purpose than is usual today? Again, are the Unions, all of them or most of them, doing all that they are best fitted to do for the political education and organization of their members? What part might they have to play—by recruiting special constables for example—if ever a Socialist Government has to defend democratic order against a fascist threat? Is there a place for the general strike in a Socialist strategy, and if so, under what conditions? What changes in union structure may be necessary as we enter the phase of regulated industry, and where does the line of division fall between the militant organization that the industrial struggle demands, and the more specious forms of the corporative state? What transformation of spirit, function, and structure will a Trade Union undergo, when within a socialized industry the class-less society is realized? Finally, do we mean to build our system of representative government in the future socialist state on a functional or a territorial basis? These are not questions of theory. They will answer themselves in one sense or the other, according to the part that Trade Unions actually play in our struggle for power.
An “outsider” can ask these questions. To answer them demands not merely a grasp of theory and history, but direct experience of union life in a manual trade. This it is that makes the value of J. T. Murphy’s book. He is as familiar as any of us with the history and the theory. But, in addition, he possesses the living experience that the “professional” worker lacks. He played a distinguished part, as leader and pioneer, in the most interesting development of our time within Trade Unionism—the shop steward movement of the stormy war years. He has also the advantage of familiarity with Russian experience. I met him first, as it happens, in Moscow towards the end of the civil war, in 1920. He has answered in the following chapters the questions that I have just raised, and on the whole, I think, convincingly. A set of dogmatic answers would be useless. The merit of this study is that it reasons candidly from intimate experience.
Next: I. Introduction