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NEITHER MAGGIE NOR ARTHUR
The Labour Party and the TUC can only ditch Scargillism by carrying forward the accommodation between the classes to include positive responsibility for production being wielded substantially by the working class, (as in Germany under the system of co-determination whereby workers have 49% of the seats on company boards of directors). Only when the working class assume responsibility along with the bourgeoisie for production can the economy be got back on its feet.
But, the Labour Party and trade unions have resolutely refused to take more power from the bourgeoisie, to take a substantial part of the responsibility for production from them. They have disguised their abdication by saying that the economy is in such a bad state because of Thatcherism and the dismal "fact" that the working class is too weak to fight the lady. In fact, we have seen that historically the working class is stronger now than it has ever been. Labour politicians and union leaders have had to invent an elaborate web of half-truths and dissimulation, which is designed to show that Mrs. Thatcher is forcing the working class to their knees.
In reality, the working class have no intention of bending the knee to anyone ever again—including Maggie and Arthur. They are, at present, accepting Thatcher's economic policies because they can see that production has to be got going by someone, and there are, at present, only the managerial class to do the job. The trade union leaders and Labour Party activists have shown no inclination to take on this all-important task. There is an unholy alliance between left and right trade union leaders, who maintain that the economy should continue to be run by capitalists and that the trade unions’ place should be limited to opposition. In this, Arthur Scargill and Eric Hammond are in total agreement.
THE REFUSAL TO DEVELOP WORKING CLASS POWER
It should be remembered that Jack Jones tried to get the trade unions to take responsibility for production. He spent most of his time as General Secretary of the TGWU manoeuvring the Labour Party and TUC into accepting democracy. He was unsuccessful, however, and the chance presented by the Bullock Commission's Report on Industrial Democracy in 1977, of which Jones was a leading member, was lost. In 1977 also, it was an unholy alliance between Frank Chapple of the EETPU on the one hand, and Hugh Scanlon, the left-wing President of the AUEW and Ken Coates of the Institute for Workers' Control on the other, which sealed the fate of the Bullock Commission's recommendation for parity on company boards of worker and shareholder directors. Scanlon and Coates presented a somewhat diluted version of Scargillism: because we still had capitalism, unions would become corrupted by sitting on company boards, even when they had as much power as shareholders and when their members on the shopfloor could boot them out when they had misrepresented the rank-and-file!
Having refused to take the working class forward in pushing the wartime accommodation further to develop working class power and responsibility, it is small wonder that union leaders should need to disguise their records, nor that they should adopt the rhetoric of permanent class struggle and working class impotence to excuse their own miserable retreats. Their rhetoric may never be as extreme as Scargill's, but it is extreme enough to make it impossible for them to condemn Scargill since they are tarred with the same brush. They have no alternative policy which is capable of producing superior results to Scargill.
The EETPU leaders, who confine their ambitions to getting the most out of employers, get better results. They win concessions for their members when the workings of the economy allow concessions to be wrung from employers by the judicious application of union pressure. The EETPU leaders will eventually predominate inside the movement if the other side of trade unionism, the class leader side, is not got back on course, and quickly too. And it is only the workers' ability to run production which can produce jobs for unemployed miners and the rest of the unemployed workforce.
THE 1926 STRIKE
In May 1926, the leaders of the TUC, guided by Ernest Bevin, refused to involve the trade union movement in an indefinite strike on behalf of the miners. Bevin recognised that a compromise was necessary in this industrial dispute, in common with all industrial disputes. They had backed the miners with the might of the TUC in order to win the most favourable compromise possible, and when they judged that point had been reached, they called off the General Strike and expected the miners to go back to work.
The miners' union leaders in 1926 did not believe in compromise. The President, Herbert Smith, came from Yorkshire; he definitely had even Geoff Boycott beat on taciturnity and stubbornness. His most frequent negotiating phrase was "Nowt Doing". The Secretary, Arthur Cook, was an ex-Communist Party member from South Wales, who had been elected with the Communist Party's support and was very sensitive about his left flank. Between them, they dug the miners' union into such a hole that a drift back to work was the inevitable finish.
It took four months for the first significant drift back to start in 1926 because loyalty to trade union principles went very deep and then miners' families received no social security and had little savings on which to draw. It took ten years for the next generation of miners' union leaders to regain enough confidence (and to build up the confidence of their members) to hold a strike ballot in pursuit of a wage claim. And even then, the leaders had to make it very clear that an actual strike was the last thing in their minds; they were hopeful indeed that it would never have to come to that again. (It did not, and the coalowners made substantial wage concessions.) It took twelve years to get the breakaway union in South Wales and Notts to come back into the fold, and even then, miners' leaders had to accept George Spencer back as a union official, though he had been an important strike-breaker in Notts in 1926.
WHAT WE DO NOW
Ernest Bevin turned the TUC's stand for compromise in 1926 to good account. He was a key figure in the Mond-Turner talks with the most progressive capitalists in the CBI (who were led by Sir Alfred Mond, founder of ICI) and the TUC. These talks were the beginning of the accommodation between the two classes which was finally cemented in 1939-45. Far from repudiating industrial action, or even further general strikes, Ernest Bevin made it clear that he was always willing to lead strike action, when he felt it necessary. But the Mond-Turner talks were based on the premise that perpetual class war was damaging, and that it could only be averted by guaranteeing minimum standards for the working class on the one hand, and the acceptance of the need for industrial co-operation on the other.
It was the fact that trade union leaders learned from the events of 1926 which made the advances of the working class after that possible. It is now up to us to learn from the events of 1984 and make the further advance of the working class possible. Perpetual class struggle must be rejected. Arthur Scargill, its most earnest and able exponent, has shown that it can yield no results. The fight must be for industrial democracy, and the trade union movement must certainly be willing to use force, its whole force as a class, to gain that limited end. Gaining industrial democracy will mean a further surrender of power for the bourgeoisie, and under Thatcher, they will not willingly do so. (Had industrial democracy been fought for in the 1960's or even 1970's, it would have been a much easier task to win.)
Ernest Bevin refused to be demoralised by the General Strike. He turned its events to good account, pointing out that it showed that the British working class was able and willing to fight in a disciplined and orderly manner when it was led by men whom it trusted for a limited end. He used its example to threaten the bourgeoisie to grant necessary reforms. We must do the same in 1984, realising that if we do not, then the working class will continue to accept Thatcher's policies as their best guarantee of some kind of economic recovery.