SOCIALIST UNITY

There is no doubt that the labour movement is much weaker today than it has been in generations. In December 2006 trade union membership stood at just 28.4% of the workforce, and this includes the membership of staff associations. What is more, the general level of class consciousness and trade union experience has sharply declined so that even when unions do recruit members they struggle to find workplace representatives.

In 2005, the Labour party received just 9,562,122 votes (35% compared to 49% in 1945) and socialist parties to the left of labour received merely around 120000 votes. The membership of the Labour Party has sharply declined, and in most parts of the country has atrophied – wards don’t meet and unions don’t send delegates. For the first time we are seeing unions disaffiliating, or threatening to disaffiliate.

It is arguable that the Labour Party as an institution is now no longer meaningfully part of the Labour movement, although it still relies on the votes of workers, and the funds from unions. In any event the party has lost 200000 members since 1997, and organisations to the left of labour barely exceed 10000 members, even if we include the Green Party

It is worth therefore asking whether this crisis in the Labour movement is related to structural changes in British capitalism, and changes in the working class.

This argument was famously raised by Eric Hobsbawn nearly thirty years ago, at a time then the movement was vastly stronger than it is today. The occasion was the annual Marx Memorial Lecture in 1978, and the resulting article “The Forward march of Labour Halted” was published in Marxism Today in September of that year. The full article can be read here (PDF), but I reproduce below an abridged version.

THE FORWARD MARCH OF LABOUR HALTED
by Eric Hobsbawm (September 1978)

The forward march of labour and the labour movement, which Marx predicted, appears to have come to a halt in this country about twenty-five to thirty years ago. Both the working class and the labour movement since then have been passing through a period of crisis, or adaptation to a new situation.

Most of us, engaged in day-today struggle, have not paid as much attention as we ought to this crisis, though we can hardly fail to be aware of some of its aspects.

A Working Class Majority
It was taken for granted in the 1870s that the great majority of the British people consisted of manual workers and their families. Britain was then peculiar and probably unique: in the enormous size and percentage of its manual working classes and in the relatively small size and percentage of its agricultural population. This had significant political consequences, which are still in some ways felt. Whereas in most other states at that period the introduction of a democratic voting system would still have left the manual workers in a minority, in Britain they would immediately constitute a majority.

So, from the point of view of the ruling classes, it was absolutely essential to gain or maintain the political support of an important section of the working class in one way or another. They could not hope to offset an independent class conscious party of the proletariat by mobilising the majority of peasants, petty craftsmen and shopkeepers, etc., whether with or against the working class. They had to come to terms with the fact of a working class .

Decline of Manual Occupations
What was understood by “manual workers” in the 1860s and 1870s is they got their hands dirty, and for most of the past century the manual workers in this broad definition have not grown but declined. In 1911 they included about 75 per cent of the population and in 1976 a little over half. This does not, of course, mean that the percentage of proletarians in the technical sense has gone down, i.e. of people who earn their living by selling their labour-power for wages, plus their dependents. On the contrary, in this sense proletarianisation has continued to increase. We cannot accurately measure the per-centage of “employers and proprietors” for the 19th century, but in 1911 it included less than 7 per cent of the occupied population and it has since gone down—after staying more or less stable until 1951—to something like 3.5 per cent in the middle 1960s. So we have, over this century, growing proletarianisation combined with the relative decline, within the wage-earning population, of the manual workers in the literal sense of the word.

A hundred years ago the sector of white-collar work in the widest sense employed only a tiny number of wage-earners. For instance, in 1871 “commercial occupations” as a whole occupied less than 200,000 out of about 12 millions, whereas by 1911 it already included about 900,000. By 1976 about 45 per cent of the occupied population could be classified as non-manual.

Here, then, is the first major development of the past hundred years.

Two Consequences
These characteristics of 19th century British production had two consequences. In the first place, growth of output was linked to an expansion in the workforce to an extent it is difficult to recall today. Thus between 1877 and 1914 the tonnage of coal produced in British pits just about doubled -and so did the number of coal-miners.

But in the second place, the relative backwardness of mechanisation by 20th century standards gave the British worker whose manual skill and experience was indispensable —and this included others besides apprenticed craftsmen—considerable strength in collective bargaining. British trade unionism was therefore already strong or potentially strong, even in industries in which, elsewhere, it was notoriously weak, as in cotton-mills.

Pattern of Union Organisation
Thus, unlike many other countries, our unions are not a small number of giants each covering all workers within a specified industry. Instead we have the coexistence of craft unions and, a phenomenon peculiar on this scale to Britain, the great “general unions”.

Smaller unions have increasingly tended to amalgamate into bigger ones; but while these amalgamations could be seen, in the first half of the present century, as steps towards a sort of industrial unionism, in the past twenty years they have looked increasingly like the formation of new conglomerates of the “general union” type.

Conversely, the enormous potential strength of the “craftsman” type of worker continued to be felt in unionism, particularly in the great complex of metalworking, engineering and electrical industries which went on expanding as the old 19th century industries of mass employment, such as textiles, mining and transport, contracted. When mass unionism came to these industries in the 1930s and during the war, it was initially through the craftsmen.

These were the men who spread unionism into the motor industry; who kept the average engineering factory as a collection of separate craft unions, and, incidentally, who sent the women and the non-craftsmen to be organised by the T&GWU, which has thus become the majority union in the motor industry. And, incidentally, this persistence of multiple unionism in so many factories made rank-and- file inter-union co-ordination by such people as shop-stewards so formidable a force on the British industrial scene.

Historic Transformation
I have stressed these historic continuities. But they are combined with one major historic transformation.

A century ago the working class was deeply stratified, though this did not prevent it from seeing itself as a class. The very people who were the backbone of trade unionism, perhaps with the exception of the miners, were, and were seen as, a labour aristocracy which looked down on the mass of those whom it regarded as “mere labourers”. But industrial change first threatened, and then eroded this superiority from three directions. In the first place the rise of white-collar and professional employment—produced a new form of labour aristocracy which identified directly with the middle class. It is only since world war two—at least outside the public sector—that the white collar workers and professional workers have organised as a mass in trade unions.

In the second place modern technology increasingly created a stratum of professionals and technicians separately recruited from outside rather than promoted from those with workshop experience. So the gap between the labour aristocracy and the middle strata widened.

On the other hand modern technology and industrial organisation threatened the privileged position of the labour aristocrat, by increasingly turning him into, or replacing him by, the less skilled process worker operating specialised machines. Thus the labour aristocrats were not only forced further away from the middle strata, but closer to the other strata of the working class.

A Common Style of Proletarian Life
All this does not mean that the working class became a single homogeneous mass, although in many ways it was drawn more closely together, by a growing class consciousness, by political demands which united workers of all strata and sections, by a common life-style and pattern, and, for a minority, of labour and socialist ideology.

This common “style”, if I may so call it, of British proletarian life remained dominant until it began to be eroded in the 1950s. I am thinking not only of the rise of the socialist movement and the Labour Party as the mass party of British workers, the changes in trade unionism, the enormous and unbroken increase in the number of co-op members from half a million in 1880 to three million in 1914, but of non-political aspects of working class life; of the rise of football as a mass proletarian sport, of Blackpool as we still know it today, of the fish-and-chip shop, of the council flat or house, of the picture palace, of the palais de danse.

Changes in British Capitalism
At the same time the nature of British capitalism has changed profoundly, in four ways.

First, it has been transformed as a system of production by technology, mass production and the enormous concentration of the productive unit.

Second, the rise of monopoly capitalism with a massive public sector has created a huge sector of government and other public employees such as simply did not exist a century ago. Today something like 30 per cent of all people work in the public sector—as employees of government, local authorities, nationalised industries, etc., and the proportion is rising.

Third, it follows that the factors which determine the workers’ conditions are no longer, to any major extent, those of capitalist competition. The capitalist sector is no longer one dominated by the free market, since it is largely monopolised; and the public sector, both as an employer, as the provider of all manner of social services and payments, and as the manager of the economy, very largely determines them, or at least the limits within which they are fixed. Political and not profit decisions determine it.

And fourth, the actual standard of living of most workers has been revolutionised for the better. Several of these trends can be traced back to the period between Marx’s death and world war one, but the really dramatic transformation has occurred since 1939.

This has implied a number of changes within the working class, quite apart from the growing division between a manual working class which increasingly tended to vote for its class party and a white-collar stratum which, at least outside the public sector, was predominantly conservative,
until in the last twenty years or so it has also begun to organise itself on trade unionist lines, and—perhaps to a lesser extent—to turn politically leftwards. I shall mention some of them.

Women Workers
First, the organised working class a hundred years ago was almost entirely masculine. Insofar as women worked for wages which was primarily before and after marriage, for in 1914 only about 10 per cent of married women were so employed, they were regarded as unskilled and treated as cheap labour. The largest by far— 44 per cent in 1881—in any case worked as servants. Even in 1911, when service had already begun to decline as an occupation, there were still a million and a half maids.

Since 1951 the number of married women technically described as “occupied” has gone up from about one-fifth to about half. This is a major change in the composition of the working class.

Immigration and the Working Class
Geographically, the working class a century ago was, in spite of all migration and mobility, a collection of localised communities. It is still locally rooted to a much greater extent than the middle classes, as anyone can tell as soon as a trade unionist from Birmingham or Gateshead,
not to mention Clydebank or Swansea, opens his or her mouth. But, on the whole, such local differences did not run counter to the sense of a single class consciousness, but were part of it.

Until the labour movement as a whole entered upon its present crisis, there was no significant mass base for nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, and until the mass immigration from the former empire after world war two one would have said that working-class racism was probably less significant in Britain than, say, in France—even allowing for anti-Irish, and from the early 1900s, some localised anti-Jewish feeling. If anything, it looked like being a declining force for three quarters of a century after 1878. Here is another significant and unwelcome development of the past quarter of a century.

Demarcation
Sectional differences between rival groups of the same level have a long history. They caused conflicts chiefly when groups tried to keep a monopoly of particular jobs for themselves against others, either because technical progress undermined their natural monopoly of long training and skill, or because in times of unemployment there was more pressure to fill a limited number of jobs.

As the old division of labour became technologically obsolescent, such rival or potentially competing groups of specialised workers have often tended to amalgamate—e.g. by the merger of the boilermakers, shipwrights and blacksmiths —but this kind of sectionalism is far from dead. Indeed it has increased inasmuch as modern industrial development cuts across trade sectionalism and makes it possible for different industries or groups of workers to carry out what are essentially the same or alternative processes. Thus in 1878 there could be no overlap between, say, compositors and journalists, but with modern technology which enables a journalist to type straight on to the press.

Containerisation produces potential and actual conflicts between dockers, lorry-drivers and railwaymen which simply did not and could not exist in 1878 or even much later.

Stratification
The third kind of sectionalism, stratification, was kept largely out of sight a hundred years ago, for two reasons. First, the favoured strata (such as the so-called labour aristocracy) were still rather successful at restricting entry to their trades or keeping themselves in a favoured position by being, on the whole, the only ones with access to effective organisation. In fact, there is little doubt that at that period unionism reinforced exclusiveness.

Only in the period of socialist leadership, at first very slowly, but more rapidly from the great labour unrest before world war one, did trade unions come to be factors for evening out rather than for increasing local, trade and grade differentials.

Second, a hundred years ago wages and conditions were still largely fixed by custom and convention, and only partly by pure market calculation. The bourgeoisie paid as little as they could, but even when they could afford to, thought there ought to be a ceiling above which workers’ wages should never rise, and they could think so because workers thought in terms of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

Now neither of these observations is any longer true. The old hierarchies have been undermined by technological change and differentials have been eroded, particularly by changes in wage-payment, which no longer give an automatic advantage to skill—e.g. payment by results, systematic overtime, and some of the effects of productivity bargaining. And (especially in the great boom period after world war two) the workers learned that the limit of their demands is a lot nearer the sky than most of them ever imagined, and the employers were willing to make concessions they would have regarded as unthinkable earlier.

A Growth of Sectionalism
Common working class interests probably prevaiiled in the first half of this century. But it would be a mistake to think that this has made the working class more homogeneous.

In fact it now often happens not only (as sometimes occurred even 100 years ago) that groups of workers strike, not minding the effect on the rest—e.g. skilled men on labourers—but that the strength of a group lies not in the amount of loss they can cause to the employer, but in the inconvience they can cause to the public, i.e. to other workers (e.g. by power blackouts or whatever). This is a natural consequence of a state-monopoly capitalist system in which the basic target of pressure is not the bank account of private employers but, directly or indirectly, the political will of the government.

In the nature of things such sectional forms of struggle not only create potential friction between groups of workers, but risk weakening the hold of the labour movement as a whole.

The sense of class solidarity may be further weakened by the fact that the real income of a family may no longer actually depend on a worker’s own job alone, but even more on whether their wives or husbands also work and what sort of jobs they have, or on various other factors not directly determined by the union struggle. In short, though there are plenty of material and moral reasons for solidarity, there’s not much doubt that sectionalism is on the increase.

The Poor
There is one final division within the working class. It is between those who could take full advantage of the great economic and social improvements of the post-war era and those who couldn’t—those who would, a century ago, have been called “the poor”.

There are the people in persistently low-paid occupations virtually beyond the range of effective trade unions. There are the quarter of all households which get more than half their household income from social security.

It is the poor who are disproportionately worse off, and whom the established modes of labour organisations help least directly. A hundred years ago the labour movement recommended its forms of struggle and organisation to everybody—trade unions, co-ops, etc. But it was then not accessible to everybody, but only to favoured strata of workers. Let us ask ourselves whether there isn’t a similar complacency among some sections of the movement today.

Class Consciousness
Now how far does the development of class consciousness of the British working class reflect these trends? Let us take the most elementary index of it, trade unionism.

Now of course the composition of trade unionism has changed— there are a lot more women and white-collar workers—but the point I wish to note regretfully is that 35 per cent of the employed are not in any trade union, and that this percentage has not declined for thirty years. And also, that Britain, the home of mass trade unionism, has clearly fallen behind some other countries.

Declining Vote
If we look at the political expression of class consciousness, support for the Labour Party, the picture is even more troubling. The number and percentage of Labour voters grew without interruption (except for 1931) between 1900 and 1951 when it reached a peak of 14 millions or just under 49 per cent of all votes. After that it went down to 44 per cent in 1959 and 1964, rose again to just over 48 per cent in 1966 and then fell again.

There is no equally simple way of measuring the highest degree of class consciousness, namely socialist consciousness, but if we are to take the active membership of all socialist organisations as a very rough criterion—as distinct from trade union activism—then I also suspect that from
some time after the early 1950s there is a decline, perhaps broken in the late 1960s.

The Crisis—Not Inevitable
Marxists are not economic and social determinists, and this crisis of the working class and the socialist movement was not “inevitable”. We have already seen that the halt in the forward march began even before the dramatic changes of the “affluent society” and the great capitalist boom.

In the middle 1960s, there were signs of a real recovery of impetus and dynamism: the resumed growth of trade unions, not to mention the great labour struggles, the sharp rise in the Labour vote in 1966, the radicalisation of students, intellectuals and others in the late 1960s.

If we are to explain the stagnation or crisis, we have to look at the Labour Party and the labour movement itself. The workers, and growing strata outside the manual workers, were looking to it for a lead and a policy. They didn’t get it. They got the Wilson years—and many of them lost faith and hope in the mass party of the working people.

Economist Militancy
At the same time the trade union movement became more militant. And yet this was, with the exception of the great struggles of 1970-4, an almost entirely economist militancy; and a movement is not necessarily less economist and narrow minded because it is militant, or even led by the left. The periods of maximum strike activity since 1960—1970-2 and 1974—have been the ones when the percentage of pure wage strikes have been much the highest—over 90 per cent in 1971-2.

And, as I have tried to suggest earlier, straightforward economist trade union consciousness may at times actually set workers against each other rather than establish wider patterns of solidarity.

Forward March Faltered
We cannot rely on a simple form of historical determinism to restore the forward march of British labour which began to falter thirty years ago. There is no evidence that it will do so automatically.

On the other hand, as I have already stressed, there is no reason for automatic pessimism. Men, as Marx said (the German word means men and women), make their history in the circumstances that history has provided for them and within its limits—but it is they who make their history.

But if the labour and socialist movement is to recover its soul, its dynamism, and its historical initiative, we, as marxists, must do what Marx would certainly have done: to recognise the novel situation in which we find ourselves, to analyse it realistically and concretely, to analyse the reasons, historical and otherwise, for the failures as well as the successes of the labour movement, and to formulate not only what we would want to do, but what can be done. We should have done this even while we were waiting for British capitalism to enter its period of dramatic crisis. We cannot afford not to do it now that it has.