THERE have been many words written and many disputations concerning the nature of the State. Some people confuse the term State with Society, and regard them as synonymous. Actually the State arose with the institution of private property and became the authority of propertied interests over society in the name of society.
Theoretically it is supposed to be impartial and to hold the balance between the conflicting interests of the propertied and non-propertied elements in society. Actually it governs society in the interests of property and can do no other. The moment a State comes into being which does otherwise it must be the instrument of a social revolution in opposition to private property, abolishing private property and therefore the basis of its own authority over society. The new basis of community or social ownership paves the way to the administration of things as distinct from the government of people in the interests of classes. Then, and then only, will it be possible to organize society according to social functions performed.
From the moment the Trade Unions came into existence they found themselves in opposition to the State. The Industrial Revolution, to which I have already referred as the generator of modern capitalism, changed the policy of the State. For more than a century of the development of mercantile capitalism, the State had carried on many of the old Elizabethan practices of regulating workmen’s conditions by legislation and agreements between the justices of the peace and the merchant guilds of the towns. The Industrial Revolution shattered these old practices just as it shattered the domestic economy of Feudalism. All stability of conditions vanished. The new inventions ploughed up the old conditions with machines.
The State did not rush to the rescue of the new proletariat. On the contrary it drove them into the factories and unleashed a terror such as had not been seen in the history of the country.
The workers did not understand the significance of the Industrial Revolution. They simply knew that some new force was battering down the old conditions, breaking up their homes, driving them into the factories, hounding them from place to place. They longed for the serenity of the order that had been destroyed, for old customs that had been their life. They saw in the machine an enemy. They began smashing the machines and appealing to the State to resume the old modes of settling differences.
The ruling classes viewed things differently. For them the old order had to go. Untold wealth lay before them in the new processes of production. They were alarmed also by the French Revolution and saw in every protest of the workers a conspiracy to overthrow the system. The King’s Speech of 1st December, 1793, claimed that a desperate conspiracy was afoot to destroy the constitution and uproot law and order. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in 1794. The Treasonable Practices Acts were put through Parliament, destroying the right of free speech, printing, and writing; the Seditious Meetings Acts empowered any magistrate to break up a public meeting; stamp duties were imposed to increase the price of papers; a censorship was imposed on the printers; the Combination Acts declared all Trade Unions illegal. Political Societies were suppressed. Savage prosecutions were undertaken against radicals. No one reading the history of this period could question for a single moment that the State was the organ of class domination.
From the earliest days of Trade Unions to the beginning of the twentieth century, throughout the revolutionary period of the first forty years of the nineteenth century and the whole period of triumphant industrial capitalism which followed, the Trade Unions and the Labour Movement in its entirety had to fight their way against the State. Indeed, it is important to observe that it is not until the dawn of the twentieth century and the failure of the Liberal Party, under the leadership of Asquith and Lloyd George, to stem the advance of the Labour Movement as an independent force that there is a profound change in the attitude of the ruling class parties through the State to the Labour Movement.
That this change coincides with the beginning of the general crisis of the whole world of capitalism is significant in the extreme and in the writer’s opinion has not been realized by the Labour Movement. The historians have been so obsessed with narrating events in chronological order and so adaptable to capitalism itself, that this most fateful landmark in the political history of Britain has received little attention. Where it has been noticed then that notice has usually been for entirely opposite reasons to those which I wish here to emphasize.
It is obvious that up to 1825 the State was used in what proved to be an unavailing effort to wipe out the Trade Unions entirely. Through the great efforts of Francis Plaice and Joseph Hume the Combination Laws directed against the Trade Unions were repealed in 1824. Caught, as it were, unawares, the Government spent another year trying to re-fetter the unions. From this time forward to the end of the century, government after government continued the struggle to shackle the Trade Unions.
Mr. Milne-Bailey, in his book Trade Unions and the State, says, concerning the legal position of the Trade Unions in the nineteenth century “The lack of uniformity and the uncertainty of the position illustrates clearly enough the fact that the State had not thought out its attitude to Trade Unionism. It had no clear idea as to the right relationship between Trade Unionism and the State, no underlying philosophy of the new industrial system and the function of the important institutions within it. The Trade Union Movement was equally devoid of such a philosophy.”
What Mr. Bailey really means is that neither the ruling class nor the working class held his views concerning the relation of the unions to the State. For the ruling class of the last century proved by word and deed that they had very clear and definite ideas on this question. They regarded themselves as a ruling class and systematically and vigorously resisted every effort of the masses for the extension of the franchise. A veritable civil war had to be waged to secure the extension of the franchise in 1832. Eighty more years had to pass before the principal features of the Chartist programme of 1834 became law. The women of England had to wage the most violent struggle and be the victims of the most disgusting brutality before they won the vote.
The ruling class may have had a wrong philosophy from the point of view of Mr. Bailey—but they had a philosophy—of class domination in the interests of private property.
Nor was there any ambiguity in their view of the Trade Unions. They have regarded the unions consistently as the organs of a class enemy. The Combination Laws of 1799 greeted their inception. Twenty-five years of struggle had to take place before the Trade Unions were lawful. The whole history of the Trade Unions has been one long trail of economic and political victimization of Trade Unionists, the hampering of union development with fettering legislation. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, Peterloo and the crushing of the Chartist insurrectionaries, the Featherstone shootings, etc., all speak the language and philosophy of class war against the working class.
Up to 1871 the Trade Unions had no legal status although their existence was permissible. They had no property status. They could neither buy property nor sell it. They were subject to all the conspiracy laws. Even after the passing of the 1871 Trade Union Act the activities of the unions were strictly limited. The Master and Servants Act of 1879. had hardly arrived on the Statute book before the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed. The former legalized strikes. The latter made illegal all efforts to make a strike a success. It is only necessary to add to these the Osborne and Taff Vale Judgments and finally the Trade Union Act of 1927 to demonstrate completely that, with regard to the Trade Unions also, the class war philosophy of the capitalist class in relation to the working class has never been wanting in clarity of formulation or decisiveness in practice.
The Trade Union Act of 1927 limited the scope of strike action, prohibited sympathetic strikes outside the limits of an industry, made political strikes illegal, severed the Trade Unions connected with State departments from the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, and struck at the political activities of the unions by the imposition of the “contracting-in clause”, hoping thereby to cripple the funds of the Labour Party.
It is not an exaggeration to say that whatever concessions have been won by the workers’ organizations have been won through a century and a half of tremendous political and economic struggle.
It is also not true to say that “the Trade Union Movement was equally devoid of an underlying philosophy of the new industrial system and the functions of the important institutions within it”. In the first decades of Trade Unionism, revolutionary theories held sway, visualizing the rapid transformation of the industrial system into a co-operative commonwealth, in which the Trade Unions and Co-operative Societies would function as the administrative machinery of the new society.
After the collapse of the Chartist Movement in the ’forties of the last century, with the beginning of the years of expanding capitalist development, the Trade Unions were dominated by the Liberal philosophy of laisser faire.
Mr. and Mrs. Webb referring to the passing of the 1871 Act quote the old Trade Unionists as saying, “The less working men have to do with the law in any shape the better.” And that view was echoed by the Trades Union Congress of 1868 and the Trades Councils of Manchester and Birmingham in 1869.
The minority led by the famous “Junta” of the London Trades Council kept up a constant pressure for political changes and were responsible for the next big change in the law. The Employers’ and Workmen’s Act, 1874, changed matters considerably. The basis of collective bargaining was laid. This is seen in the memorial of official representatives of the Trade Unions to the Home Secretary in 1875. It says, “We do not seek to interfere with the free competition of the individual in the exercise of his craft in his own way; but we do reserve to ourselves the right either to work for, or to refuse to work for, an employer according to the circumstances of the case, just as the master has the right to discharge a workman or workmen; and we deny that the individual right is in any way interfered with when it is done in concert.”
And always in the background stood the State as the dominant authority—over the workmen. It was on the basis of collective bargaining that the cumulative work of building the unions proceeded rapidly. But the State authorities were not befogged at all on the question of their relations to the unions. They knew what they wanted and why they wanted it. And, as a matter of fact, the material conditions for the presence of any other relationship than that which existed throughout this period up to the beginning of the twentieth century did not exist.
The Trade Unionists at this stage were saturated with the philosophy of Liberalism and neither wanted the State to interfere in industry nor the Trade Unions to have anything to do with the State.
On the other hand, there were other currents of thought in the Trade Unions though they were in a minority. These were the Marxists of the First Workingmen’s International, formed in 1864, to which a number of the English Unions were affiliated and the group of reformers concentrated in the London Trades Council in the ’sixties. Both waged the fight for independent political representation through the formation of an independent Labour Party. The Marxists held a definitely revolutionary philosophy, and have always held a systematic body of socialist opinion in relation to the State, its character and functions. The reformers of the “Junta” of the London Trades Council had a more limited philosophy and estimate of the situation. They favoured the democratization of the capitalist State, but did not get beyond the fight for independent Labour representation.
A further development of thought within the whole Labour Movement took place in the ’eighties with the formation of the Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation, etc., all of which held definite views concerning the State and its evolution. True they were in a minority, but they undoubtedly played an enormous part in preparing the Trade Unions for the next stage of their political evolution with the turn of the century.
From the collapse of Chartism in the ’forties to the end of the nineteenth century, the Trade Unions had lived through the period of prosperous and apparently ever-expanding capitalism. It was the hey-day of Liberalism and the Trade Unions reflected that philosophy. Its concrete expression is “collective bargaining” between the unions and the employers.
The turning point in the development of the relations between the classes was reflected in the struggle for the change in the legal status of the Trade Unions. Outstanding in this struggle was the Trades Dispute Act of 1906 and the Trades Union Act of 1913. The first arose out of the famous Taff Vale Judgment of 1901 which held the Trade Unions collectively responsible for the actions of individual members in disputes. The sequel to this judgment was a tremendous impetus to the political fight for the formation of the Labour Party. The second arose out of the Osborne Judgment which was a challenge to the unions concerning the use of their funds for political purposes. The Government gave way and reversed the Osborne Judgment in the Trades Union Act of 1913, providing a “contracting-out” clause for those who objected to paying the political levy after a ballot of the union members had proved favourable.
These two Acts mark the turning point from one stage to another in the history of the relations of the Trade Unions to the State. The Taff Vale decision gave fresh inspiration to the campaign for independent political representation of Labour; the Osborne Judgment was an attempt to put the brake on the political developments of Labour now well begun.
The first workers’ party arose in the early revolutionary period that gave rise to the Chartist Movement. The Chartist Movement itself was a great working-class political movement with a reform programme for the extension of the franchise, etc. This movement was divided between those who thought of the programme only as a means of assisting the development of a revolutionary crisis in which power could be seized and an entirely new kind of society established, and those who regarded the reforms as the next stage in the social and political evolution of the country.
With the defeat of the Chartist Movement in 1842 and the passing of the economic crisis into prosperous industrial capitalism Labour politics were almost completely submerged until the end of the century. The coming of the new crisis in capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century had the reverse effect. Independent Labour politics reappeared on the basis of a powerful mass Trade Union movement. This revolutionary fact, i.e. the appearance of a class as a conscious political force on the historical stage had two aspects. One was that it coincided with the change in economic relations of the powers internationally and a sharpening of class relations internally. The other was the new alignment of political forces.
Internationally the monopoly stage of capitalism had begun and the Great War loomed ahead, a fact which was recognized by every international labour conference. Internally the relations between the classes had become steadily more acute. Real wages were falling whilst the new attack upon the unions had awakened masses of workers to political consciousness. The beginning of the end of the Liberal Party had arrived.
No one has brought this point out with greater clarity than Mr. Lloyd George in his explanation of the significance of the Limehouse campaign. I have emphasized this elsewhere (Preparing for Power). I emphasize it again. Addressing the Liberals he said, “If a Liberal Government tackle the landlords, the brewers, and the peers, as they have faced the parsons and try to deliver the nation from the pernicious control of the confederacy of Monopolists, then the Independent Labour Party will call in vain upon the working men of Britain to desert Liberalism that is gallantly fighting to rid the land of the wrongs that have oppressed those who labour in it.” (Beer’s History of British Socialism, p. 349)
A whole series of measures followed immediately, measures which signified both the new political relations between the classes and the parties and the new beginning of the new relations between the unions and the State. The most important of these Acts were: The Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, the Trades Boards Act of 1909, the National Insurance Act of 1911, the Coal Mines Act of 1912.
Up to this time the Trade Unions and the Friendly Societies had been the only bodies providing for old age and unemployment insurance. The State now became the principal custodian of these matters. This is important in itself as signifying a new attitude of the ruling class to the growing working class. But more important, however, is the machinery created by the Unemployment Insurance Act and the Trades Boards Act. Through this machinery the new stage of collaboration of the State and the Trade Unions begins. The Trades Unions became part of the administrative machinery of State Insurance. The Trades Boards formed the first machinery of collaboration between the State, the Trade Unions, and the Employers. The Mines Act of 1912 enacted a State settlement of a large industrial dispute and the establishment of a legal minimum wage for miners.
These measures have been welcomed by many as the triumph of liberal ideas in the State, signifying the ascent of the Trade Unions to a new status, foreshadowing the greater democratization of the State. That these measures conceded considerable amelioration of the workers’ conditions cannot be disputed. But it is necessary to give a different estimate concerning the future democratization of the State. Appearances are often deceptive and none more so than political appearances. In my judgment these changes are symptomatic of the development of a crisis in which the whole fabric of the capitalist State would be challenged. The concessions do not represent a growing friendliness between the classes but a manœuvre of classes preparing for battle, however much the leaders on both sides deplore the idea of class warfare. The alarm expressed by Mr. Lloyd George concerning the oncoming labour masses gives the key to the whole situation. The economic concessions were intended to appease the workers. The political changes in the relation of the State to the unions were an effort to embrace the unions with the tentacles of the State apparatus in order to smother their class struggle activity.
The deeper the crisis became the greater was the need of the capitalist class to secure the collaboration of the workers to save the system. Only a few years had to pass before this was demonstrated completely. The War clinched the matter in its entirety. Within a few months of the outbreak of war in 1914 the Trade Unions were locked in the tight embrace of the State. Throughout the War the Trade Unions functioned practically as departments of State. Labour Party and Trade Union leaders entered the Cabinet. Every department of State directly responsible for the running of industry was invaded by Trade Union representatives. The Defence of the Realm Act, the Munitions Act, and all the attendant mechanism of tribunals, arbitration, and the like, held the unions in a tight grip. All the patriotic feeling roused by the War, the fears, and social aspirations of the millions of people enveloped them. They became organs of the State for the prosecution of the War.
But this was founded on contradictions inherent in the private ownership of the means of production. The machine of State had become larger. Its powers of repression had grown enormously. Yet an internal transformation was taking place, because of the class contradictions, which, sooner or later, was bound to break the collaborative mechanism that had been erected.
Unemployment was abolished and wage-slavery remained. Dilution of labour broke down the old traditions and customs, but it also drove all kinds of labour together, broadened and deepened the class struggle which soon broke through the restrictions, challenged the collaboration that had been established and burst into new forms of organized independent action, led by the shop stewards. War weariness played its part and then came the impact of revolution from Europe, the unleashing of the demands for the realization of the vast hopes that had been raised in the name of democracy.
Under the cover of the War and the new collaboration of the workers’ organizations with the State, there had been a great advance in organized strength and a big political awakening. The Insurance Act, in particular, played a role which was not intended by its authors. It helped to sweep the workers into the unions in a period when the absence of unemployment gave a consciousness of strength such as they had not experienced before. Hence, with the termination of war, it could hardly be a matter of surprise that a great deal of the collaborative machinery broke down. The Labour and Trade Union representatives were drawn out of the Cabinet, though a residue of officials were left in Government departments. There was an extension of the franchise. The unions were freed from direct State control.
A decade of class war opened such as had not been seen in the history of modern capitalism. In the first two years after the war the workers advanced to the attack. The capitalists retreated, granting big concessions in wages and hours of labour. Out of these first rounds of the conflict began a fresh stage in the development of State machinery, not for social peace, but for class war. The organized power of the workers had now reached its highest point and was growing rapidly. The Scottish forty hour strike, followed by the great railway strike of 1919, the threatened miners’ stoppage, the desperate playing for time by the setting up of the Sankey Commission in relation to the mining industry, the cotton strike of six hundred thousand cotton workers, told the world clearly that there could be no going back to pre-War times.
The association of the workers with the State organizations for the prosecution of the War now had its reaction upon the minds of the workers. Having witnessed what the State could do for war they now expected it to use the same kind of drastic power for the transformation of social conditions in peace.
The mass struggles of this period thus became immediately a series of gigantic conflicts of the workers against the State, as the custodian of the interests of the employers. The capitalists at once set on foot the organization of machinery for strike-breaking. It reached its most complete form in the organization of the O.M.S. (Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies). In 1920 the Government of the day—a coalition of Tories and Liberals—passed the Emergency Powers Act for the purpose of enabling the State to assume dictatorial powers at any moment against the workers. It may be that the adaptation of the State for “emergency” may sometime turn against its authors, but at this stage it is important to observe that no such idea entered their heads at the time of the passing of this legislation and at no time has it been used against anyone other than the workers in disputes.
The Defence of the Realm Act had established a dictatorship for the war-time phase of the crisis of the system. Immediately the war had ended the economic and social crisis assumed larger proportions and the passing of the Emergency Powers Act was the first act of strengthening the powers of the State for social conflict.
This is regarded by some people as the first step in the direction of Fascism. It is doubtful whether this is so, although shortly afterwards Fascist organizations did make their appearance. At that time, however, Fascism had developed no coherent philosophy or forms of organization. It would be more correct to say, therefore, that it represented a characteristically panic action on the part of the ruling class, foreshadowing the crystallization of a more desperate yet more coherent policy of Fascism, that marks a later stage of the crisis of the system.
During the years of the mass attacks of the workers (1919-1920) a deluge of “Reconstruction Schemes” descended on the country, under which the State was to play a more paternal democratic role than ever before. The purpose of these schemes was clear enough. Shaw ends one of his plays with the expression, “Keep on talking Jack”—this might be appropriately applied to all these schemes and commissions They had one purpose—to keep the Labour Movement talking until the waves of mass action had exhausted themselves and the hour for counter action had arrived.
The tide turned at the end of 1920 and early in 1921 the counter attack was launched. All capitalist enterprises were finally freed from the war-time State control in order that the system might become adapted to “peace” production. At the same time the State took a leading part in driving the workers into the surrender of many of the gains secured in the preceding years. This period culminated in the General Strike Of 1926, and the miners’ lock-out which preceded and followed it. The Emergency Powers Act came into operation along with the O.M.S.
The effect of this counter-offensive was far-reaching. The Trades Union Act of 1927 added new strength to the State against the workers. It deprived the Trade Unions of important powers. It split away the Trade Unions in the Civil Service from the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party. It struck at the political rights of the Trade Unions along the lines of the Osborne Judgment for the “contracting-out” clause of the 1913 Trade Union Act was repealed and replaced by a “contracting-in” clause, designed to break the political solidarity of the workers in the Trade Unions. Political strikes, i.e. strikes intended to coerce the State, were declared illegal. Sympathetic strikes of the workers of one industry with another were made illegal.
A comparison of the position of the relation of the Trade Unions to the State in 1914-18 with 1927 is illuminating. In the first period the Trade Unions were embraced by the State and given concessions in status and conditions, because British capitalism was challenged by rivals. From 1918-1927 the State, faced with an internal crisis, relentlessly fought the Trade Unions, stripped them of many economic gains, divided their forces, deprived them of powers, and fettered them with political restrictions.
Indeed it may be said that the ruling class of this country here began the process of consciously directing the evolution of the democratic State into the Corporate State of Fascism. From this time onward, they have pursued a consistent policy of strengthening the powers of the State, depleting political democracy, and fettering the forces of labour. The fierce class struggle between 1918-1927 had been waged without any marked encroachments on the political rights of the workers, and with the exception of the “Emergency Powers Act”, without any great changes in the structure of the State.
The Trades Dispute Act of 1927 definitely ended this phase of British history. It put a stranglehold on strike action, struck at the Labour Party—the political machinery of the workers—and put the workers employed by the State in a political category of their own, half-way between that of the army and civilians, but under the domination of the State.
The country had not long to wait for the maturing of the policy. The economic crisis did not abate—on the contrary it became more acute. To the surprise of the Conservative Government, the 1929 election demonstrated that its attack on the funds of the Labour Party had been overcome, and had not proved effective enough to hold back the political development of that Party. The Labour Party formed the Government without having a majority over the Tories and Liberals. It dared neither to challenge capitalism nor to do other than function as a hidden coalition government; its public name being a “Minority Labour Government”. The catastrophic development of the economic crisis provided the ruling class with the opportunity to leap into the saddle of government by splitting the Labour Movement, under the banner of a “National Government” to “Save the Nation”.
How much the lack of political sense on the part of Messrs. MacDonald, Snowden, and Thomas was responsible it is difficult to say, but the fact remains that, although they called for the splitting of the Labour Party, they failed to take a single Labour organization with them, and were compelled to form a new body called National Labour. At the same time it was a terrific shock to the Labour Movement to lose three leaders of thirty years’ standing, at the moment of being plunged into a General Election. More significant, however, is the evidence of the strength and loyalty of the working-class, in standing so firmly against the shock.
The election had many features of Fascist thought and practice, such as panicky stunts, nationalism, a bastard flag-wagging patriotism, the rousing of ignorant fears. Promptly after the return of the National Government, composed of an overwhelming number of Tories, split Liberals, and a small Labour cotery around Mr. MacDonald, it launched a programme of economic nationalism, transformed the fiscal system of the country from free trade to tariffs and quotas, started a currency war, and developed an attack on the economic standards of the workers. Unemployment benefits were cut, standards of relief scaled down, wages and salaries were reduced.
But more significant still were the singular measures adopted which distinguished the Government’s new attacks from the old. Their singularity consists in the Government’s adoption of Fascist principles. Fascism, Mussolini defines as “disciplined Capitalism!” All appointments are from above. Nobody is elected. Everything is done by decree, whether it be the fixing of prices or the forming of a special corporation or the settling of a dispute. Planned capitalism is the theme. Government by decree is the method. Discipline in the interests of the existing system is the objective.
Mr. MacDonald speaking to the National Labour Committee on 6th November, 1933, put the matter thus:—
“The secret of the success of dictatorships is that they have somehow or other to make the soul of a nation alive. We may be shocked at what they are doing, but they have certainly awakened something in the hearts of their people which has given them a new vision and a new energy to pursue national affairs. In this country the three parties in cooperation are doing that, and our task must be to get the young men with imagination, hope, and vision behind us.” The similarity of words is well supported by deeds. For example, under the Abnormal Importations Act the Board of Trade can, by order, with the concurrence of the Treasury, apply the Act to further imports if they are satisfied (not Parliament) that it is necessary.
Then came the Horticultural Products Act of 1931, which empowers the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries to act in similar manner (without reference to Parliament). In 1932 the Import Duties Act set up another committee with similar powers. These have been followed by the notorious agricultural policy of Mr. Elliott which consists of a series of marketing committees fixing quotas, prices, subsidies, all on classic Fascist lines and openly declared to be such by Mr. Elliott himself.
The latest measure, of course, is the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1934. The most outstanding feature of the Act is its essentially Fascist character, not merely in that it has slashed the unemployed workers, and developed the abominable family “Means Test” principle, but by the establishment of the Unemployment Assistance Board it has struck a most powerful blow at the democratic rights of the people. The Board is appointed and not elected. Parliament has no control over it and its administration. Members of Parliament can no longer raise questions concerning its administration on behalf of their constituents. Nor can the local councils or councillors do anything in the matter. Public assistance now relates to all those who were on transitional benefit on 1st January, 1935, and who may claim it afterwards, and a large number of those previously under the Public Assistance Committee now come under the Unemployment Assistance Board. Courts of Referees and Appeal are not elected, but selected. The whole question of unemployment relief, therefore, comes under a dictatorship, and democracy on this question is frustrated. The workers are thus driven into mass protests as the only means of challenge to its administration, only to find that in anticipation the powers of suppression have been made more Fascist in character, the police having been made into a ruling class force with carefully selected officers trained in loyalty to their class.
In the light of these developments the tendencies in the Trade Unions assume a tremendous importance.
Between 1918 and 1927 the voice of those who advanced the theory of increasing democratization of the State was very faint. The polarity of the classes and the nakedness of the State dictatorship of capital was too obvious to need emphasizing. The Trade Unions were heavily defeated. All the aspirations of the workers for the control of industry so prominent in the first period were remembered but feebly.
Then, after the collapse of the General Strike, a further swift change took place in the policy of the State, the employers, and the Trade Unions. Direct mass action in the form of strikes was reduced to a minimum. Both Government leaders and employers, who a short time earlier had threatened to “crush the unions with all the powers of the State”, and who had actually called into action army, navy, and police against them, proposed collaboration with the defeated unions. The Trade Union leaders responded in the name of “industrial peace”. It was as if the State and the employers had succeeded in knocking into the heads of the Trade Unionists that their job was to subordinate their claims to the necessity of restoring the system and to forget their flirtations with Socialism. The latter was relegated to the confines of the Labour Party and the distant future.
The most recent Congress of the Trade Unions has not revealed any change from this outlook. Mr. Conley, the President of the Trades Union Congress, said during its proceedings in 1934:—
“We are not concerned with chimerical notions of ushering in a social millennium, but with organizing the wage-earners and using the power of our organization to secure for them positive, practical, and immediate benefits.”
There is no doubt as to where Socialism has been relegated in the minds of Mr. Conley and other leaders. It has become nothing more than an ideal without any relation to the “practical” things Trade Unions have to do to-day. It is said and truly said that a people without vision perish. This applies to Trade Unions also.
On the principles enunciated they proceeded to collaborate with the State and the employers immediately after the great defeat of 1926. In the forefront of the new method stood the Federation of British Industries, the Confederation of Employers’ organizations, and the Trades Union Congress. The first result of the new rapprochement was known as the Mond-Turner agreement. The essence of this agreement consists of setting out ways and means for the collaboration of employers and employed in securing the prosperity of British capitalist industry at home and abroad—how to improve trade, finance, taxation, coordination of social resources, trade facilities, etc. No highfalutin schemes for the gentlemen—just “practical, positive, immediate benefits” for the employer with hopes for the worker.
For example, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress along with the Federation of British Industries sent a memorandum to the Prime Minister, giving their views as to what policy should be adopted at the World Economic Conference. The principal features of the proposals include “cancellation of Inter-Governmental Debts”, a “regulated exchange governed by the level of wholesale prices”, “stabilization of price-levels after wholesale prices have been raised to a ‘suitable level’,” the planning of the economic system, “satisfactory arrangements for short and long term credits.”
Where the workers’ interests came in for consideration or what the project had to do with the fundamental aims of the Trade Unions as defined in the Trades Union Congress constitution it is difficult to discover. The Government invited the General Council to appoint two representatives to a panel of industrial advisers to the United Kingdom delegation. The General Council appointed Mr. Walkden and Mr. Citrine.
The close working of the unions with the State in this period has strengthened the impression in the minds of many Trade Union leaders in particular of the possibilities of a partnership of the Trade Unions with the capitalist State. This idea has been rationalized into a philosophy of functional allocation of responsibilities within the State.
Mr. Milne-Bailey outlines it as follows:
“It is contemplated that in future there will be a great deal more emphasis than in the past upon the development of semi-autonomous functional groups within the State. It is thought that these groups, in the form of statutory associations or corporations, . . . will be responsible for the performance of functions within the field delimited for them. It is not contemplated that Parliament and the machinery of Government as a whole will be ‘functionalized’ or will cease to be representative of and responsible to the people voting as citizens. It is thought, however, that Parliament, modernized in certain ways to drop obsolete and troublesome procedure without losing any of its democratic features, will be surrounded with a network of consultative and advisory bodies, able to speak with expert knowledge of specific interests and functions. In the economic field, which will be very important but not the sole field in which this principle will operate, the National Economic Council, on which Trade Unionism will be strongly represented, will act in such capacity. In matters especially effecting Trade Union interests the General Council of the Trades Union Congress itself will be recognized as the authoritative body to advise on behalf of organized Labour, as individual unions will be on questions of particular concern to Labour in specific industries. As the area of interest and expert knowledge narrows, the more the specialized institutions will be the appropriate advisory bodies.
“The Trade Union organizations, then, will be neither agents of the State nor entirely outside bodies playing a critical and hostile role. They will remain autonomous institutions, within the general framework that has been described, but with functions that link them to the State in a consultative and constructive way.
“As the planning of the economic life proceeds ... the Trade Union movement will also assume new functions within industry. Each Public Corporation will secure the participation of organized Labour either by direct representation of the unions on the supreme controlling board or by some other mechanism of a similar kind, as desired by the unions concerned. In addition there will be a network of consultative bodies, works councils, and the like to which the unions will appoint members....
“It will be seen that the main principle underlying these suggestions is that where the interests of Labour are most directly and concretely affected, the unions will actively participate and that where general policies and the wider economic issues of Government are concerned, the Trade Union Movement will have a recognized consultative and advisory role. . . .” [1]
This outline of gradualism in excelsis proceeds upon the assumption that such a thing as economic antagonisms in capitalism are not fundamental but just irritating pin-pricks that can be made acceptable by a few cushions of consultation. There is apparently no such thing as a crisis of capitalism, but only maladjustments that can easily be remedied with the provision of more facilities for discussion. The differences between Socialism and capitalism are not fundamental but are due to the refusal on the part of irresponsible socialists and capitalists to see that Socialism and capitalism are really one and the same thing.
There is a great similarity in the scheme outlined by Mr. Bailey to that state of affairs which obtained during the War. But the outstanding difference between the position of the Trade Unions then and now lies in the fact that the State in war-time must dominate completely and the extraordinary economic conditions and market relations are totally different from those of peace-time. The War swallowed all that was produced. The unemployed were absorbed in industry or scattered on the battlefields. To-day there is no inexhaustible market swallowing the products of industry. There exists the fiercest competition between large scale capitalist enterprises, an economic crisis, and vast unemployment; weakened powers of resistance of the workers to economic pressure. Moreover, the Trade Unions are held in the grip of repressive legislation.
This is not the growth of political democracy and functional devolution. It constitutes the sharpening of class relations and the rapid approach of the critical hour when the Trade Unions and the whole Labour Movement have to see not only that there is a difference between Socialism and capitalism but also that they have to be prepared to use their power to achieve Socialism.
The relations of the Trade Unions to the State in the present period are thus full of contradictions. As organs of a class whose interests are opposed to those represented by the State, the Trade Unions are repeatedly thrust into conflict with it. The declared aims of Socialism coincide with that opposition and point to the need for a State power of the opposite political character to that of the present to fulfil its aims. At the same time the outlook and policy as expressed by Trade Union leaders and Congress decisions is that of attempting to rehabilitate the system to which they should be opposed and working with forces they are pledged to conquer.
And this is at a time when the outlines of the Corporate State of Fascism are becoming clearly defined in the policy of the ruling class.
1. Trade Unions and the State, pp. 378-9.
Next: V. Trade Unions and Strikes