FROM the foregoing brief analysis of outstanding features in the nature and history of the Trade Unions two questions stand out demanding answers. The first, what is to be the future relation of the Trade Unions to the State?; the second, what is to be the future role of the Trade Unions in relation to industry?
I propose to discuss the first question in this chapter, and the answer must, of course, be a qualified one. It depends upon the kind of State. In Britain we have what is known as the Democratic State. The history of the relations of the Trade Unions to the State in Britain reveals at one stage a struggle to supersede it with a form of proletarian State—the “House of Trade” of the revolutionaries of the ’forties. In another lengthy period, as from 1850 to 1900, the question was hardly raised except theoretically in socialist circles. In the third period, since marked by the development of the crisis of capitalism, there have been short alternating periods of collaboration and direct conflicts between the unions and the State with a continuous growth of political effort to change the composition of the Parliamentary government.
The periods of direct mass conflict produced new developments in workers’ organizations not seen hitherto. At the base of these developments were the Trade Unions. The War-time struggles produced the factory committees movement; the political challenge of the Labour Movement to the Government in 1920 on the question of war in Russia produced the “councils of action”; the General Strike of 1926 produced in many areas councils based on the Trades Councils which could be designated workers’ councils and which were armed with authority larger than that of strike committees though rising out of them.
Were these new phenomena soviets in embryo? Were they pointers to the way in which new organs of political authority arise out of direct class conflict? If that be so then the student of Trade Unionism will have to examine the question of the relation of the Trade Unions to the State in a new way, and it may be that the Trade Unions, as organizations arising from the class struggle and inseparable from it, will prove to be the begetters of a new form of workers’ State out of the conflict with the capitalist State. This will depend, however, entirely upon the form of the struggle between the classes and the way it is consummated in this country.
Since the General Strike of 1926 there is no doubt whatever about the trend of opinion in the working-class as to how they propose to make the change from the present system to Socialism. Despite all efforts of the Communist Party, and the Independent Labour Party, to split the Labour Movement, the workers have voted increasingly for the Labour Party. By-elections and municipal elections all demonstrate the flow of political opinion and that flow is behind the Labour Party. The tide is setting in towards a Parliamentary majority for the Labour Party.
Parallel with this political development has proceeded the class collaboration of the Trade Unions with the Government. The defeat of the General Strike and the Miners’ Lock-out with the subsequent fettering of the unions by the 1927 Trade Union Act constitute definite political reason for this course of development. But important economic factors have also played their part, not the least of which is the fall in prices tending to enhance the value of real wages and a period of trade improvement.
These latter facts have appeared to lend strength to a theory that the crisis through which we have been living for years is merely a passing crisis within capitalism as distinct from the crisis of capitalism. Indeed the argument goes further. We are informed that the leopard does after all change its spots and capitalism has changed its character. “In the past,” says Mr. Milne-Bailey, “the predominant feature of economic life has been the scarcity of goods necessary to the well-being or even the existence of mankind” (Trade Unions and the State, p. 323). “In fact,” he continues, “the whole economic mechanism has been dominated by the fact of the scarcity of economic goods, and only individuals or groups specially favoured by their institutional privilege or by a particular type of ability could transcend this evil. . . . The State was not ‘a public service State’ with positive functions” (p. 324).
This “passing of scarcity” theory is the sequel to the extraordinary development in recent years of the technical means of production. This development, we are told, demonstrates now that there is no need for poverty to exist in the world. But this is not a twentieth century discovery. To suggest that the great mass of the population of this country or any country where capitalism reigns have been poverty-stricken because of “scarcity” of a natural character will not bear two minutes’ examination. There have been famines which have swept great masses of population to their doom through some natural calamity but the great mass of poverty in the world is simply due to the robbery of the masses who have produced the goods, by those who have owned the goods and the means whereby they were produced. That may seem a crude mode of exposition of the economic facts, but it is nevertheless true.
The general level of life prior to the industrial revolution in this country, for example, may not have been high compared with the twentieth century, but the devastation in the condition of the masses wrought by the Industrial Revolution stands on record. A technological revolution took place at that time which called forth pæans of praise from the Macaulays, but “scarcity” spread itself at the base of the social pyramid whilst riches filled up the pockets of the private owners of the means of production at its apex. It is incontestable that had the technical revolution been carried forward on the basis of a socialist revolution, then there would “have been no scarcity”. The proof of this is outstandingly clear in this century in the Russian revolution. The industrial revolution in Russia has been carried through by Socialism and has swept unemployment before it, as with a mighty broom, while laying secure the foundation for comfort for all.
If further proof were needed then it is to be found in the fact that the greater the technological revolution of to-day, the greater become the social contrasts—the polarity of riches and poverty—the greater the army of unemployed. The economic mechanism has not been and is not animated by any “scarcity” theory. It has been, and is, dominated by private property relations which, the more science is applied to the technical side of production, increase the social contrasts—the poverty and the riches.
We have now reached that remarkable position in this country when “Ten per cent of the population, getting over £250 a year, obtain nearly half the national income; fifteen per cent, getting between £250-£159 a year, receive almost exactly equivalent in proportion to its numbers; while the great bulk of the people, seventy-five per cent of the population, with incomes ranging from £159-nil a year, receives less than two-fifths of the whole” (L. Benjamin, The Position of the Middle-Class Worker in the Transition to Socialism, p. 6).
The theory that we are just entering an epoch of abundance in which wealth can stream downwards to all the poverty-stricken homes of the world, to wash out its misery with abundance, without breaking with the claims of private property, is untenable.
Nor can the immediate “improvement” of trade be regarded as the beginning of a new phase of the organic development of the forces of production. This is not the place to give an exhaustive economic analysis, but I venture to assert that the upward trend of the curve of trade is the most “artificial” and calamitous in its significance of any since the war of 1914-18. It is the direct sequel to the development of “economic nationalism” expressing itself in tariffs, quotas, currency manipulation, etc., leading to the saturation of the home markets by “home producers” and more intense rivalry in international economic relations.
The saturation of the home market must of necessity stimulate and intensify international competition. This in turn must stimulate war preparations. The certainty of a new stage of the economic crisis arising from the same fundamental causes which produced the previous crisis is, therefore, clear for all to see if they but care to look. If war is held off, then a steep plunge in the world of commercial production stands not far ahead: if war intervenes, then we are face to face with the calamity of calamities.
The future of the Trade Unions in relation to the State consequently assumes a problematical character. Should the new stage of the economic crisis break the “boomlet” before the general election comes, there is no doubt whatever that a further impetus would be given to the political side of the Trade Unions and the possibility of the return of a Labour majority to the House of Commons would become almost a certainty. Such a possibility is not ruled out even if the election takes place before the break in the trade “boom” arrives.
Should there not be a Labour Government as the result of the next elections, there is little doubt that the government ensuing would be a short-lived government. From the day of its taking office its majority would be in jeopardy. The demands of the Labour Movement would increase. The pressure from outside would increase. The consciousness of ascendancy in the ranks of the working class would inevitably sharpen the pace towards change, and therefore sharpen the relations between the Labour Movement and the opposing parties. Unless some unconstitutional or extra-Parliamentary methods are adopted by the forces standing for the old order, or some new unexpected split takes place in the ranks of the Labour Movement, or war intervenes, it is safe to say that the historical stage is set for the coming of a Labour Government committed in broad declaration to Socialism.
Then will arrive the critical hour in the history of the Labour Movement. Will it advance to Socialism or temporize once more with some form of “Rooseveltian New Deal” as expressed in the Trade Union Congress resolution I have already quoted? If the latter, then an internal crisis in the whole movement will be inevitable and its fate will depend upon its ability to change its leaders from within in order to tackle the problems demanding a socialist solution. Failing that, the degeneration which befell the German Labour Movement will follow, with an equally disastrous sequel. A Party and a Movement which fails to advance decisively to the tasks which its whole preceding history has been preparing at the moment when life offers it the opportunity to act must crash. This was the fate of labour in Italy and in Germany.
It is not my purpose here to project what would be likely to happen after such a calamity. though I believe that to fail in this way means that all the objective conditions for the rapid advance to Fascism will then have been created. Having sounded the warning note of what is latent in the development of the struggle between the social forces now contending over the body of a decaying system and stressed how disaster can be avoided, it is necessary to show what role the Trade Unions can perform on the basis of the victory of the forces of social progress.
The policy of, a socialist government in relation to foreign affairs, the House of Lords, etc., do not come within the scope of this book, although they have an important bearing upon the solving of the problems with which the Trade Unions will be directly concerned. Indeed, all questions which have a bearing upon the problem of attaining power and keeping it have a relationship to the question of the future of the unions. For example, if the defeated parties, representative of the vested interests which Socialism must attack, refuse to accept the will of the people as expressed in a Parliamentary majority and proceed to extra-Parliamentary forms of struggle as in the time of the Irish Home Rule struggle, then the Trade Unions may be called upon to play the role of allies of the Government, facing what is virtually civil war. The Parliamentary conquest of power by Socialism would then either be sealed by a victory over reaction complete and final, or itself be conquered by counter-revolutionary Fascism.
With this aspect of the situation also I do not propose to deal here, although it raises issues and problems which ought to be studied seriously. Here we will deal only with the problems of the unions on the basis of labour having achieved power constitutionally, and having been accepted as the Government which has to introduce Socialism.
From the standpoint of political relationships the Trade Unions and the Government should now be allies in the carrying through of a social revolution. Whilst the Government is not the State it has in its power to use the State providing the majority of the great staff of permanent officials of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Police, Law Courts, Civil Service, etc., in charge of the State machine accept the Government decisions and carry out its orders.
The land, the banks, the mills and mines, the whole machinery of industry are in the hands of private owners, whether dressed up in the garb of company directors, heads of combines, or any other attire. How will these become socialized and how will they be managed?
If the Government proceeds to take one industry at a time, or presuming that it begins its work by nationalizing the banks and spreads its socialization measures over a period of years, then it must be obvious that for this period, whatever it may be, the Trade Unions can only play the role of general political support to the Government and its traditional role of defender of wages, hours of labour, protector against accidents, purveyor of social insurance in those industries which are not socialized. This would be a dangerous period, especially if the Government, anxious for social peace, becomes as it did in 1929, the means of attacking the Trade Unions. The employers on the one hand pressed by difficulties of competition in a growing crisis of capitalist economy would demand wage reductions and other concessions, the Government, not prepared to socialize the industry immediately, would have to come down on the side of the employers. The complications of delay are surrounded with pitfalls that can be disastrous to Socialism.
An alternative has been proposed for the separation of economics from politics by the creation of a “House of Industry” composed of representatives of the Government, the capitalists, and the Trade Unions. Such an institution, which of necessity would have to control the economic life of the country, would be no solution of the questions before the country. It would, in fact, strip the Government of its power, or merely transfer its problems from the House of Commons to an outside body and make the problems more difficult of solution by the invasion of the representatives of contradictory interests.
There is a further alternative proposal, namely that of reconstructing the machinery of controlled capitalism of the War period as transitory machinery towards socialization. It is argued that what was done by the capitalists during the War in the interests of the capitalists can be done by a Labour Government in the interests of Socialism. There is a certain plausibility in this argument. It is certainly the logical application of the resolution of the Brighton Trades Union Congress. It avoids the direct attack on private property and appears to give many gains to the workers. But experience has already shown that a rising standard of life and the retention of private property are incompatible.
A prospective Labour Government appears, therefore, to have no means of avoiding or delaying the approach to the revolutionary issues their election implies. There is no lengthy breathing space between the time of getting power and having to face the problems of socialization. A Labour Government has to be socialist and face its tasks quickly and decisively. If not, then it produces an internal crisis in the Labour Movement which settles the issue in favour of decisive socialist action, or it perishes at the hands of anti-socialists, who will throughout this period have been anything but passive observers.
Assuming, therefore, that the Labour Government becomes a socialist government proceeding promptly with the socialization of the banks, land, and industry, a number of outstanding questions remain to be answered. Will the Trade Unions become organs of the State? If not, what will be their relationship to it?
These questions were once discussed in Soviet Russia in the early days of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky put forward the proposal that the Trade Unions must become organs of the State. Lenin opposed the proposal and Lenin’s ideas carried the day. He argued that the Trade Unions must remain free, voluntary organizations defending the workers’ conditions and interests in a free alliance with the workers’ government. This was also a time of transition to Socialism when a considerable part of soviet economy was still capitalist, operating under the supervision of a workers’ State.
The essential difference between the two views has an important bearing on the future of society in all countries. Trotsky was obsessed with the idea of State power as a permanency and therefore sought to incorporate all the workers’ mass organizations within the State machine. Lenin, on the other hand, kept clearly before him the vision of a society of freely co-operating functional institutions and the “withering away of the State”. The Soviet State was regarded by him as a class weapon for the suppression of the capitalist elements of society. With the abolition of classes the necessity for a State power vanishes, for who is there then to be held down or suppressed? In Lenin’s view a socialist State has a double function to perform. It has, on the one hand, to overcome the opposition to Socialism and, at the same time, to develop the organs for the “administration of things”. The failure to appreciate these two functions of a socialist State had led to much confusion both in regard to the history and position of the Trade Unions in the Soviet Union and to the future of the State.
Mr. Milne-Bailey is a big offender in this matter. Like many others he does not recognize what is really the most remarkable transformation in the development of institutions yet witnessed in the history of mankind-a transformation which throws a flood of light upon the probable course of events in other countries. “Superficially,” says Mr. Bailey, “it might seem that Soviet Russia has solved the problem of Trade Unions’ conflicts with the State by establishing a powerful dictatorship which gives the unions a place, albeit a subordinate one, in the mechanism of government, and keeps them there, partly by propaganda and partly by sheer force.” The only evidence he offers to justify this summary of the situation is a series of quotations from resolutions defining the position of workshop committees and Trade Unions in relation to the control of industry at different stages in the history of the revolution. But not one tittle of evidence does he provide of the unions being held “by sheer force”. Why the same people who control the State should repress and use sheer force against themselves in the Trade Unions passes comprehension. One may not like the “dictatorship of the proletariat” but at least it is necessary to recognize that it is not directed against itself but against a class or classes that have been deprived of “their dictatorship”.
As for the evolution of the Soviet State and the Trade Unions, is that not to be expected? The real question is : What is the character of the changes since the beginning of the revolution until the present period and in what direction are they tending?
It must be recognized that the first problem of any revolution is the conquest of political power; the second, the consolidation and defence of that power; the third, to set the forces of production working on the principles of the new regime, however improvised and temporary the means; the fourth, the development of the institutions created by the revolution in accordance with the aims of the revolution. Many other things could be said about the requirements of the new order, but these will suffice to illustrate the changes under review.
The soviets or workers’ councils were in the first stage of the revolution little more than enlarged strike committees representative of the great masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers. When all political power passed into their hands they had not only to develop a new state apparatus, and defend the revolution against counter-revolution, they had also to make sure of their conquest of the factories, mills and mines, and the landed estates.
What other means were to hand other than workshop committees to “clear out the old gang” or assume responsibility where they had fled? This was a matter of necessity. But did any responsible body think that this was therefore the last word in the organization of “workers’ control of industry”? Whoever thought so and whoever takes such an improvisation as the criterion of “workers’ control industry” is simply a child in the school of politics.
But Mr. Bailey follows with a quotations which show, not as he endeavours to make out, that the workers have lost the control of industry, but that they have applied the functional principle to the development of their institutions. They have created trusts which are held responsible for one aspect of the control of industry, for example a metal trust, steel trust, textile trust, etc., which are held responsible for the management of the industries. But they are workers’ trusts, organs for particular phases of management and direction, the ordering of raw materials, the direction of the process of manufacture, the disposal of the products through other institutions. The trusts have replaced the capitalists in so far as the directive and managerial aspect of their functions are concerned, but they have not continued their exploiting function. This has been abolished. A workers’ trust, therefore, is not something over and above the workers but a workers’ institution for the administration of industry, an application of the functional principle in “the administration of things”.
Mr. Bailey quotes the following: “In the U.S.S.R. a sharp distinction is made between the function of managing industry, and the function of organizing and defending the interests of the workers and employees in industry. The former function is in the hands of the national economic authorities of the trust and industry management, and the latter function is in the hands of the workers’ organizations and the Trade Unions.”
“Later,” he says, “the unions were made to take a still more subordinate part in the industrial mechanism. An order of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1929 laid it down that ‘the Trade Union organization while defending the economic and cultural interests of the workers, must collaborate energetically in increasing their output—they must not in any way interfere in the management or place obstacles in the way’. Workers were,” he adds, “by order of the Labour Commissariat, 21st May, 1931, forbidden to take part during working hours in the activities of soviets, Trade Unions, co-operatives, etc., or in any other duties not directly concerned with production. Thus, the unions were deprived of their positions of equality with all other organs of the State and became a subsidiary part of the state machinery” (Trade Unions and the State, p. 301).
It is difficult to understand what is meant by “equality with all other organs of the State”. Is it meant that there is no equality if there is differentiation of function. The trusts belong to the workers, the Trade Unions belong to the workers, the State belongs to the workers. The State is the central political authority initiating, developing new organs of administration, regulating those already developed, transforming society into a classless working community, and the custodians of the defence against the dangers from the world of capitalism. The organs of industrial, social and cultural administration now developing as co-ordinated self-governing institutions, are the permanent institutions for the “administration of things”. The State is the transitory temporary authority aiding the working community to advance along the lines of functional democracy, vanishing as the class enemies internally and externally disappear.
Naturally, just so long as the socialist government, even after it has established a classless society within its frontiers, has to face a hostile world of capitalism, all institutions, no matter with what aspect of economic and social life they deal, must be subordinate to the requirements of the State. Nothing is clearer than this fact in the history of the Soviet Union. Had the Soviet not had to face a fierce class war internally, a war of intervention by capitalist states, and a perpetual threat of further wars after the first interventions had been defeated, the rate of the rise of the standard of life of the peoples of the Soviet would have been far greater.
The external world in this respect has governed the internal life of the Soviet and the rule and power of the State. The war danger has governed both the rate and nature of the industrial transformation of the Soviet Union enormously. It is only necessary to remark that the £700,000,000 defence Budget of the current year could have been diverted to social development were it not for the threatening war from outside. This it is which gives the State in the transition period to world Socialism its preponderant importance and obscures the evolution of the means for “the administration of things” which proceeds under the guardianship of the socialist State.
It is this evolution of the permanent means of administration of the classless society which distinguishes the position and function of the socialist State and consequently the relations of the Trade Unions thereto, from the State of Fascism. In the latter, all institutions are organs of the capitalist State. The authoritative state is everything; permanently dominating all activities.
The corporations are co-operations of conflicting interests held in the grip of the State, permanent, supreme, the arbiter over all contradictions, the god of capitalist authority over a helot class of toilers.
A Labour Government in this country, intent on achieving Socialism, will, therefore, have before it the same fundamental problem that faced the Soviet Government, though in far more favourable conditions. Its tasks will consist of developing the institutions and organs of administration which belong permanently to the new order, and creating new institutions of administration. Its guiding principle will be that of functional administration on the basis of social ownership. On this basis and with the above principle in operation the Trade Unions will not be organs of the State but its allies.
The State will not be regarded as the permanent institution, but as the transitional authority destined to pass away with the coming of world Socialism. Its internal responsibility will be that of transforming Britain into a classless society.
In this society the Trade Unions have definite functions, not as fighting institutions against exploitation, but as administrative organs in the democratic self-government of industry. What this means in greater detail we will now consider.