THIS is not a history of Trade Unions. Were it intended to be such it would of necessity have to follow the course taken by Mr. and Mrs. Sidney and Beatrice Webb in their historic work The History of Trade Unionism. My plan is much less ambitious. It is to examine in an introductory way certain outstanding features of the history of Trade Unions in order to focus attention on their future.
This question is a debatable one. There are those who think that the unions have no future and regard them as declining institutions which Fascism will finally abolish. There are others who believe that there will be a growing integration of the unions and the State and a division of function between the State, the employers’ organizations, and the Trade Unions. There are yet others who contemplate an economic and social change so profound that it will radically change the structure, character, and purpose of the unions which will become industrial bodies controlling the productive processes within a socialist system.
It is the author’s conviction that mankind is travelling towards Socialism and, however it may come, the Trade Unions must be transformed to fulfil new functions. What these functions will be we shall discuss at length especially in view of the conflicting theories as to the meaning of “Workers’ Control of Industry”.
There are few to-day who will deny that modern capitalist industry with its automatic machine processes has a deadening effect upon the great mass of the workers and that the new body of technicians are a doubtful quantity in their political affiliations because of the uncertainty of their future. Can man become the master of the machine and organize the productive and distributive processes so that work becomes something other than an unending repetition or drudgery? Can the future of the technician be so secured and his daily life so organized that his creative powers find outlet as an integral part of a common purpose thus encouraging his full development without jeopardizing the position of his fellows in society? Upon the answer to these questions much depends, including the future of the Trade Unions.
The history of the Trade Unions spreads into three centuries. They were born in the latter part of the eighteenth century. They grew throughout the nineteenth century from illegality to legality. Everyone admits the extraordinary part they have played in the history of this country and in the great social upheavals of this century.
There are also three great distinctive periods in the history of the unions. The Industrial Revolution of the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first third of the nineteenth century was the stormy generator of the Trade Unions. The revolution in the methods of production shattered the old domestic economy, completely transformed industry and agriculture, and created entirely new relations between the workers and the State, which from Elizabethan times had regulated the conditions of the workers in its typical feudalistic way. The impact of the new forces made such regulations incongruous and, whilst the masses were, historically speaking, driven forward, they carried with them all the traditions of the old economic regime. They smashed the machines and demanded state intervention and regulation of their conditions. They longed for the return of the past that could no longer be. The stage was set for the triumph of laisser-faire and the minimum of intervention in the affairs of industry.
The impossibility of the return to the past soon produced its reaction in the minds of the masses. They turned from the conservatism of their initial protests against the great changes in industry to become the visionary fighters for an entirely new system of society in which would be eliminated the social inequalities of the existing order and scope and power be given in co-operative industry to the toilers. What was a kind of civil war raged. The State had long since dropped what regulative role it had displayed. Now it ranged itself openly on the side of the rising capitalist class and stood over the masses as the new taskmaster of the employers in factory, mill, and mine.
It was in this period that Robert Owen talked of the “New Society coming like a thief in the night”, but workers like James Morrison would have none of the method of Owen who preached the transformation of society by rational appeals to the employers and workers alike to combine. Morrison wanted a Parliament in which all would be organized on the basis of trades, but he was convinced that the change would come only through the class war, which he saw around him, being carried to its logical conclusion. This was, of course, a complete change from the outlook of the machine smashers. The fight to return to the past was replaced by the Utopian socialist vision of the to-morrows.
The State, in the hands of the ruling class, was used as a terrific weapon of class warfare in defence of laisser-faire in industry in place of the old Elizabethan protective laws regulating wages, etc. This change is all important to those who desire to appreciate the significance of the age. Three-quarters of a century had to pass before the State again pursued the policy of “interference” in the administration of industry. These years constitute the hey-day of laisser-faire and the governing class only tardily granted concessions when pressed by mass actions by the workers.
This period witnessed a complete change in the outlook of the workers. After the first revolutionary struggle for Utopia, they adapted themselves to capitalism, eschewed revolutionary actions. They had little whatever to do with revolutionary theory and built their organizations with a view to their becoming an integral part of the existing system. This was the period of prosperous developing capitalism, and, despite the crises which occurred with regular frequency, so complete was the adaptation of the workers to the system that for more than fifty years the capitalists succeeded in maintaining such control over the thoughts and ideas of the workers in the Trade Unions that they kept back the formation of the Labour Party which is the political reflex of the Trade Unions.
The beginning of the twentieth century marked the beginning of new tendencies. The age of modern imperialist rivalries and crises had really begun. Britain and Germany were rushing headlong to Armageddon. The real wages of the workers of England began to fall. The class struggle sharpened. The Trade Unions stepped into the political arena with their Labour Representation Committees. The break with the old parties of capitalism had begun. A few years’ rapid progress, culminating in the return of twenty-six Labour members to Parliament in 1906, called forth the great manœuvre of the Liberals led by Mr. Lloyd George in his famous Limehouse speeches. The speeches were followed by actions which signalled the beginnings of a new relationship of the State to the Trade Unions.
The State Insurance Act was the most important measure of the period. It was not merely a piece of social legislation conceding claims of a long standing character. It also changed the relation of the State to the Trade Unions. The unions were drawn closer to the State by the ingenious means of giving them a share in the administration of the State insurance funds.
At one stroke the State reappears in its role of the period prior to the Industrial Revolution. The Trade Boards for the regulation of conditions were a step in the same direction, though not so important, in that the apparatus of the unions was not so completely involved in collaboration with the State.
The State assumed a new importance to the unions. State Socialist ideas spread like wildfire. The demand for the nationalization of this and that industry became popular. The State was forced to interfere in industrial disputes partly as conciliator and regulator though always as the custodian of property interests. The questions of ownership and control became principal questions.
The question of the relation of the workers’ organization to the State had thus reappeared after a century in an entirely new setting. In the opening period of the Industrial Revolution the workers’ revolt against the machine and new forms and conditions of industry began by a pathetic desire to move backwards to a past that could not return. As soon as they recognized the impossibility of such an aim being realized, they, under the pressure of the crises following the Napoleonic wars, plunged into revolutionary struggles and set themselves revolutionary aims. Is the new relationship of the State to the workers’ organizations inaugurated in the dawn of the twentieth century but the harbinger of a new revolutionary period?
It may be argued that just as the crises following the Napoleonic wars were ultimately followed by a period of restoration and expansion so the War of the twentieth century, though followed by crises, will also be followed by prosperity and expansion. Such a reading of history will not bear examination.
Just as the new relation of forces between the workers and the State of the twentieth century differs from that of the beginning of the nineteenth century, in that the latter had to face the issue of a reversion to the past while the twentieth century issue is that of “ownership and control”, so also are the world economic relations different to-day from those of yesterday. After the Napoleonic wars there were hemispheres of economic development untapped. The possibilities of expansion were immeasurable. Modern capitalism had yet to spread its tentacles across the world.
The Trade Unions of the nineteenth century in the period of capitalist expansion could set funds aside to assist their members to emigrate and make hard and fast rules as to the number of apprentices to be employed in certain industries at one time. To-day emigration funds have not only vanished from the Trade Unions but no modern State would do other than make a laughing stock of itself were it to propound emigration as a cure for unemployment. There are no new hemispheres to be discovered and developed; on the contrary, the world is completely discovered and portioned out amongst the big powers. The relation of the forces of production to the market capacity of the world is now one of contrast. The productive powers have enormously increased. Vast quantities of goods remain unpurchased and a huge army of thirty million unemployed walk the streets of the industrialized countries whilst uncounted millions of desolated peasantry of India and China add their tragic lot to the world’s chaotic condition.
The Napoleonic wars were the product of the youth of capitalism in Europe. The World War of 1914-18 was the first great war of capitalism passed its zenith. It has not merely exhausted itself for a generation; its frontiers are shattered, and the new economy of Socialism has firmly established itself over a sixth part of the earth inhabited by 160,000,000 people. The Utopias of the early Trade Unionists of the nineteenth century, of Owen and Morrison and others, are replaced by a reality of achievement in which the Trade Unions play an entirely new part which can be examined and tested in the light of experience. Instead of a reconstruction of the old world, it would appear that the old world is passing and the new is already born.
Is, then, the modern relationship of the Trade Unions and the State in this country but a prelude to further changes more profound because more realistic and revolutionary? If there can be no new prosperous period for capitalism such as superseded the crises following the Napoleonic wars, must not the present compromising relations sooner or later end in the demand for a new order based on the principles already proved workable?
I am of the opinion that this is the case irrespective of the possible temporary victory of Fascism. For Fascism to triumph here would be a tragedy of immeasurable dimension, the restoration of the Dark Ages in twentieth century garb and blacker because of its modernity. But Fascism establishes no new principles of economy. It is a form of capitalism and not something which supersedes it. It establishes no new property relations. It aims only at putting the old ones in a strait-jacket.
Whatever is economically unsound must sooner or later perish, especially sooner rather than later when it becomes a matter of life or death for the great majority of mankind. And that is the issue before the capitalist world to-day whether or not it has the Fascist form. Fascism has nowhere solved the economic problems of capitalism. On the contrary, each day that goes by shows more clearly than before that Fascism is nothing other than the characteristic form of a stage of capitalist decline deeper than we have yet reached in this country, a stage wherein capitalism can continue only on the basis of the most violent repression of all the social and political elements and organizations either opposed to capitalism or merely favouring the liberal regime of capitalism’s more prosperous period.
Yet it is the main body of this opposition to Fascism, namely the working class, upon which capitalism depends. To eliminate this class from capitalism is impossible. It is its life blood, the source of its profits and its power. Hence whatever the form of capitalism to-day, it is totally unable to remove the conditions which give rise to the Trade Unions and other forms of workers’ organizations, because those conditions are inseparable from its own existence. Therefore although Fascism may destroy the existing Trade Unions, the struggle to destroy Fascism which would follow must of necessity give rise to the reappearance of Trade Unions.
They arose in all their varying forms as the instruments or weapons of the propertyless class against the class owning the means of production. So long as this property relation exists and governs the productive process the organized struggle of the propertyless class against its exploitation cannot be eliminated.
The Trade Unions were the simplest and most elementary form of workers’ organizations. Their forms were intimately related to the particular “vocation” of the workers especially when the “vocations” were much more clearly defined and separated than they are to-day. But it was not the vocation which determined the existence of the unions but the property or class relations. Had the vocation been the determining element in the situation then there would have been weaving and spinning craft unions in the period of “domestic economy” which preceded the Industrial Revolution. These unions, however, appeared after the Industrial Revolution and not before. They appeared in the textile industries first because the new property relations characteristic of modern capitalism found their sharpest expression in these industries.
Again, the unions were in the first place largely local, because of the geographical distribution of the industries and the absence of rail transport. When inventions made easier the lines of communication between town and town, the way was paved towards national organizations.
Yet again when the struggles of the unions repeatedly merged into class action against both the employers and the State the unions massed themselves together locally into Trades Councils and nationally into great Federations and into the Trades Union Congress.
The first indications of a recognition of the relation of the Trade Unions to the productive process and the possibility of their having to assume responsibility for the control of industry in the form of a “Parliament of Trades” belongs, as we have seen, to the period of revolutionary crises following the Napoleonic wars. It is not until the new revolutionary period of the twentieth century arrives that the idea emerges again in varying degrees of sharpness and clarity.
By the year 1910, syndicalist ideas were rampant throughout the Trade Union Movement. The shop stewards of the war period forced the question of “workers’ control of industry” into the foreground of Trade Union thought and, by 1920, Mr. and Mrs. Webb modified their original attitude on the question and wrote “we ourselves look for the admission of nominees of the manual workers, as well as the technicians, upon the executive boards and committees, on terms of complete equality with other members in all publicly owned industries and services; not merely, or even mainly, for the sake of the advantages of the counsel and criticism that the newcomers may bring from new standpoints, but principally for the sake of both inspiring and satisfying the increasing sense of corporate self-consciousness and public spirit among all those employed in these enterprises.”
Thus the new revolutionary period has again thrown the question of property relations into the foreground of events. For the “control of industry” is inseparable from ownership. It arises as a demand from the resistance to exploitation and the attempts to modify it. It is not a far step from challenging particular conditions and terms of labour to the demand for the complete control of industry, especially when the competitive relations of capitalism intensify the exploitation of the workers at every stage of the productive process.
It must be remembered that the `tirade Unions are organizations of workers at work. All the issues focused by the Trade Unions are bound up with the question of the terms upon which the work has to be done in thousands of different occupations. These terms are essentially property questions, expressing themselves in struggles between opposing classes for the products of industry. The more they multiply and become general, the more the control of the terms of labour, such as wages, hours of labour, conditions of work, give rise to the demand for the “control of industry” by the workers themselves.
To raise the issue of self-government in industry by those engaged in it, i.e. the control of the most vital phases of human activity, is to raise the revolutionary issue of a complete change of ownership. For ownership and control go together. “He who owns the means whereby I live, owns me” said Shakespeare long ago; and it is just as true to-day. Ownership and control cannot be separated from each other. They who own industry control it. Hence the question of the “workers’ control of industry” and the coming of the classless society based upon community ownership are inseparable questions also. They are therefore revolutionary issues and the Trade Unions are so intimately connected with them that a study of them and their readiness for their future tasks is imperative.
Next: II. The Structure of the Trade Unions