Brew Britannia ,by Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey-a review.

24 09 2014

Brew Britannia is the story of the regeneration of  brewing  beer in Britain. Whether it is craft or real ale it’s not so much about definitions or technicalities, but quality and taste. Despite the cynical commercial appeal to patriotism in the title of the book it’s also about how beer and brewing went cosmopolitan : American  and New Zealand hops,Belgian style beers,black IPA’s, wild yeast, and more . where did the cultural rebirth of choice and flavour begin?

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For  Boak and Bailey it begins not with the foundation of CAMRA , but with the beer from the wood men. These are a society of boozy eccentrics who stood apart from the widespread availability of poor quality keg beer in the 1960’s, and the awful steel cans which contained the tasteless fizzy stuff. The book also ends with Society for the Appreciation of Beer from the Wood who are still flying the Utopian flag for the wooden barrel. CAMRA are not seen as a flat earth society in the sense of the beer from the wood men. But our duo’s view of CAMRA’s achievements by the early 1980’s is put in  market terms: “cask conditioned beer was never again to be the everyday drink of the people, but CAMRA could claim to have saved it as a niche product.” (1)Some niche CAMRA might say.

Jessica and Ray think CAMRA should be proud of demonstrating that a market for beers with taste existed. But over the years most drinkers have been practically excluded from quality and choice by the domination of the market by huge companies.  During the  1970’s when CAMRA emerged it was the  big six brewers who monopolized the market : Ind Coope,Taylor Walker,Watney mann,Courage and Barclay,Bass Ratcliffe Gratton,and Whitbread and Scottish brewers. It was all about profit to the exclusion of taste and quality. For big business brewing it’s about what people are persuaded to accept via expensive advertising or  leaving the working class drinker with  Hobson’s choice.  Is CAMRA’s role simply to provide a business opportunity? When the good beer guide emerged it provided the opportunity for beer drinkers to enjoy the best beer then available.

The narrative  presents the origins of CAMRA  warts and all. Michael Hardman,Bill Walker,Graham Lees and Jim Makin conceived the idea of a campaign for some kind of good ale after experiencing some awful beer on a pub crawl in Chester on 20th of March 1971. But the founding idea remained vague. Lees had taken the initiative of issuing membership cards,but it was not until Lees and Hardman met up again for drinks in Chester in 1972 that the idea began to become reality. In the same year a drunken  organisational meeting took place in Nuneaton, at the Rose and Crown, and a committee was elected. The publicly organised campaign for real ale was on its way. Then at the 1973 AGM  things got really serious. Hardman and Lees were joined by a new leader,Christopher Hutt. Then there was the victorious publicity battle with Grotneys, and the ultimate tasteless fizz, red barrel. Watney’s red revolution was more a counter-revolution in brewing.Its reputation deserved to be trashed as CAMRA members spread the word.

Our authors describe the small  Independent Brewers Society( SIBA ) in the late 1980’s as oddballs for making proposals to the government to break the monopoly of the huge brewing companies over pubs. SIBA’s suggestions were part of the framing of legislation which became known as the Beer Orders.This limited the number of pubs that could be tied to the big brewers to 2,000 with a guest beer allowed. Jessica and Rays understanding of what took place is a condescending top down view. Their conclusion is  that “SIBA’s  position was either hopelessly  optimistic-based on a belief that the big brewers were bluffing in their threat to walk away from brewing or born of a downright anarchistic desire to destroy the system and then rebuild it in their own image.” (2) It’s a curious conclusion in the light of their narrative and does not do justice to SIBA or anarchists.

The beer orders legislation was botched : an unprincipled and sloppy compromise that pleased no one. Blame the government and the legislators. Yet Boak and Bailey’s view is that severing the tie’s between the big brewers and their pubs over the course of the next decade was a catastrophic rendering asunder of the symbiotic relationship between the pub and brewing industries. They resent SIBA success in lobbying government. Jessica and Ray regret that all the historical brewing tradition was put down the toilet. Think of Whitbread established in 1742 and Bass established-1777 : all that tradition gone. Jessica and Ray  assert that the real beneficiaries were not ordinary pub goers, but beer geeks who wanted flavour and novelty.  It’s a  patronising view of the ordinary drinker who when given significant choice of beers, as in Sheffield, abandon the mediocre  stuff.

Their attempt to draw a line between hard-nosed pub companies which emerged, and the old-established Beer industry is simply not credible from a rank and file drinkers point of view. It  misses the point of why CAMRA was born. It is also inconsistent with earlier points made in the book. The Brewing tradition was already been trampled over by the big brewers. The historic labels were so much hollow brands. It was all about the size of the profit. It was the logic of  market competition:  big brewer swallowing small brewers and their pubs. Many grass-roots drinkers wanted pubs free of the brewery ties so that all pubs could sell a range of beers in which taste and quality would be accessible to everyone. Instead, all kinds of complicated arrangements were put in place which circumvented the ‘anarchist’ dream of  as many beers as possible being freely available in the local pub or bar.

The guest beer rule and culture was established, even though it was  undermined by pub chain restrictions  of beer choice, and regional brewers providing their own guest beer. The worst aspects of the old monopoly such as the pubs in entire towns taken over by one brewery, such as Watney in Norwich,  was ended. Wetherspoons developed even further to bring guest real ales to most  High Streets. CAMRA had supported the pub tie for small family brewers in their proposals for the Beer Orders. CAMRA had worked with these small regional family brewers to combat the big six brewers at the high tide of cheap fizzy keg beers in the 1970’s. At the time these brewers and their pubs were a refuge for beer drinkers who could find nothing better.

Nevertheless,  CAMRA’s link with the regional family brewer probably became too comfortable. Some regional brewers tended to  brew boring  middle of the road beers. This left a vacuum for the tiny innovative brewer to provide beer for those looking for more taste and quality. In a sense CAMRA has always been a moderate campaign:   real ale however mediocre, and bland, is valued. The guiding principle was the definition of real ale as a living beer kept in its natural condition and not pasteurized, and dispensed from casks and barrels without the addition of extraneous CO2. Revealingly this definition was formulated after CAMRA got underway. This stress on real ale tended to obscure the issue of  good beer,even if it did highlight the poor quality of Keg beer from the big companies.

Having said that,  CAMRA instigated something of a cultural revolution to raise the issue of taste and quality up from some very low points.The lowest point was Red Barrel. According to Boak and Bailey, one of the brewers of this dire tasting beer admitted that it was brewed using a quantity of cheap unmalted raw barley broken down with added enzymes. This is what the logic of the free market concentration of brewers as massive beer factories had led. “By 1976 there were just 147 breweries in existence in the UK owned by 82 companies.”(3) John keeling a highly trained brewer explains the attitude of this industry towards flavour : the more interesting the taste of the beer the less interested the brewery would be in the beer. Beer was brewed for an imaginary average drinker who would not like too much twang or taste.  Did new world hops taste of Cat’s piss or Gooseberry?

In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s there was the development of brew pubs which began to offer an alternative to the big brewer. One of the  most influential was probably  Dave Wickett’s Fat Cat in Sheffield which kick started a process which led to Sheffield becoming a mecca for  good beer. In 1981 Dave bought a failed derelict pub and opened it as a genuine free house. Against the advice of a local brewer from Wards he insisted on hand-pumps and cask beer. It was difficult to find a supplier. Then Timothy Taylors of Keithly stepped in to supply Taylors Landlord which was then a very complex beer. Later Dave started brewing in back yard of the pub in Kelham Island an old steel city industrial area. The spin-off from this development was more brewers and then breweries such as Bradfield, Ossett and Abbydale .Dave also helped Thornbridge to set up their innovative brewery. Another Kelham Island brewery exile  Stuart Ross set up Magic Rock in Huddersfield, with Richard Burhouse.

Jessica and Ray give some prominence to David Bruce in London who in the late 1980’s was intelligent enough to see that two derelict unused building of some architectural interest,the Duke of York in Southwark and an old railway ticket office in Camberwell would make great drinking spaces. The first would be renamed the Goose and Firkin and the second was given the title of the Phoenix and Firkin. They do not criticise Bruce for charging premium prices or overcharging for his very basic brew pub beer. However, according to Jessica and Ray there was a  creative spin-off as brewers and brew kit was redistributed when Bruce sold up and sold out in the mid 1980’s and was left with a mere two million quid. It was not that Bruce did anything spectacular; he didn’t have to because the competition was so bad. Many South London Pubs in the area were soulless run down dreary places with little or no customer service skills.

The rise of the small breweries was intensified and amplified by the significant reduction in beer duty for the small brewer in 2002. Jessica and Ray inform us that following the introduction of the progressive beer duty between 2003 and 2005 more than a hundred new firms came into existence. These included what were to become some of the most dynamic and innovative Breweries such as Thornbridge and Brew dog.  The pioneers for innovation included John Gilbert and his Hop Back Summer Lightning, Saun Franlin’s Roosers Yankee,and Brendan Dobbin at the kings arms in Manchester experimenting with American hops. The main direction was towards paler beers and  American hops such as cascade.  At first Thornbridge produced the very uninspiring traditional style bitter Lord Marples, but then found their brewing mojo with the creation of Jaipur in July 2005. Brew Dog  had cask Punk IPA in 2006 and a flair for publicity.The young brewer Martin Dickie was involved in both ventures.

The explosion of micro- breweries included : Magic Rock, Mallinsons, Red Willow,Tiny Rebel,Black Jack ,Arbor, Kernal, Meantime, Wild Beer Company, Camden Town Brewery, Hardknott,and many more. There is a mixture of real ale and craft keg beers in this short list. No definition is entirely satisfactory,but hand craft keg beer is brewed using traditional methods sometimes without filtration and pasteurization, but with more flavour than the traditional poor quality keg product. As a leading member of Sheffield CAMRA put it to the reviewer in the brew dog bar in Sheffield : if you put shite in you get shite out. On the other hand if you put quality and taste in -there is a different outcome. Exactly.

The availability of the beers from these breweries to beer drinkers has been provided by such bars as Jamie Hawksworth’s Sheffield Tap. Jamie saw the opportunity to utilize two beautiful,  but long neglected Victorian tiled rooms, which were once the first class refreshment room and restaurant on  Sheffield train station. Over two hundred world bottled beers and a wide range of keg fonts and hand-pumps offer an uncompromising range of choice which excludes Carling, John Smiths and Guinness. Now a brewery has been added. There have been significant price hikes,particularly on bottled beer, since the empire building began in York, London, Leeds and elsewhere. Yet unlike David Bruce :  it’s  premium prices for premium beer.Again Dave Wickett was the trail blazer in Sheffield with the Devonshire Cat. When he was involved it offered about a hundred bottled beers from all over the world as well as a cask beers. Jessica and Ray point to the white Horse, Parsons Green,London, as a pub that  introduced a selection of bottled IPA’s as early as 1990.

Beer drinkers have never  had it so good. Yet Boak and Bailey end their book with a sense of paradox and pessimism. Everything appears to have changed. The 1970’s CAMRA aspiration of Adnam’s and Fuller’s beer on every high street has been surpassed with a dazzling range of innovative and experimental beer styles from all over the world.Yet in one sense everything remains the same. The rich and powerful brewers of bland lager still dominate the market. There is also a tendency for small brewers such as Brew dog to imitate the corporate top dogs. Will Brew dog’s craft keg become simply keg? The new Campaign For Really Good Beer could go the way of CAMRA with a corporate central office where no young or old radical firebrands can be found. And have we not reached the outer limits of innovation. Has the frontier of experimental beers been reached?

Adam Smith once wrote that the brewer, however small, puts beer on our table not out of pure respect for our taste in beer, but self-interest or profit. This has its own capitalist logic : concentration,and monopoly.  The free market is a myth. State intervention was always present.  State intervention has assisted our small brewing entrepreneurs to make money by brewing beers to meet our taste needs, but the state cannot be a solution for the worries of Boak and Bailey. A state-run industry would simply replicate the evils of the big brewers.  At the high tide of political militancy in the 1970’s CAMRA could only pose the alternative of  a CAMRA run pub chain. Not even a CAMRA cooperative enterprise was attempted. We could just simply enjoy the revitalisation of beer in Britain while we can. Then again,in his utopia, News from Nowhere,William Morris imagined local communes rotating jobs for people to provide things for the community. If every cook can govern,every drinker can brew. Now there’s a drunken thought.

Barry Biddulph

Notes

1 Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey, Brew Britannia. The strange Rebirth of British Beer, London, Aurum Press,2014,p.111

2 p.144

3 p.2


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Is a yes vote for an independent Scotland a revolutionary tactic ?

20 07 2014

Neil Davidson has recently advocated a tactical vote for Scottish independence on anti-war  grounds to weaken imperialism. (1) In his view,the Break up of Britain would make it more difficult for Westminster to help  American Imperialism . Yet whatever the form of independence, Steve James and Jordan Smith have pointed out the obvious : given the pro NATO position of the SNP,Washington will have two allies instead of one. (2) Alternatively another imperialist country could fill the power vacuum so that there would be no weakening of imperialism. The reality of any independent Scotland will probably result in more militarism as a former comrade of Davidson writes,”the SNP are committing a future  independent Scotland not only to remain in an imperialist alliance dominated by the US  ,but to potential foreign interventions in yet more countries”. (3) The other point is one made by Davidson himself back in 2007: inflating the role of Britain on the world stage makes its demise a matter of priority. (4) In any case,  the consequence of a yes vote will not be the break up of the British State.The programme of the SNP is independence lite. Key aspects of the British state apparatus such as the Monarch,the currency,and the Bank of England,  will be shared with England and Wales.

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Neil Davidson does not  accept that the future of an independent Scotland  depends on what the SNP wants or envisages. (5) He assumes Scottish nationalism has a proletarian content .He asserts that”most Scots who want independence do so for eminently social  and economic measures without any embrace of nationalist ideology”,(6) Nationalism is seen as some kind of neutral class void which could be filled with socialist content. The power of nationalist ideology is ignored. It’s almost as if the saltire signified nothing but the pressure of Scottish working class interests. The assumption is that pressure from the Scottish people will push the SNP left or a Scottish capitalist state will be more susceptible to pressure from below.  The anti-war movement might have failed to stop Westminster from going to war in Iraq, but at least the Scottish people will with have a chance to stop war by influencing their new state. Some fragmentation of the British state, even on a lesser evil capitalist basis, makes the yes vote worthwhile for Davidson.

Again back in 2007 Neil had a different view. Bourgeois nationalism in Scotland was powerful and flexible : “Everything looks national  if you look at it through national spectacles”.(7) Exactly.What he had in mind was the misinterpretation of a number of significant class issues in terms of nationalism. For instance, the poll tax in Scotland was not an example of national oppression. The poll tax was an attempt to shift the tax burden onto the British working class. It was not  confined to workers in Scotland. The associated nationalist illusion was that the Scottish people are more militant than workers in England and Wales. But while the poll tax non-payment campaign started in Scotland, the poll tax was finished off by the London riots. The militant core of the great miners strike 1984-5 was in Yorkshire  not Scotland. And we should remember how Scottish nationalist sentiments helped to  undermine  the miners strike 1984-5 by  keeping the  Ravenscraig Steel Works open by using scab -coal.

Another of Neil’s former comrades, Alex Callinicos, also wants to downplay the influence of nationalism and fudge it’s bourgeois character.  (8) He emphasises that  not all capitalists are Scottish Nationalists, some businesses are not comfortable with the aim of independence. For example, Standard life and RBS.  Callinicos simply describes how the introduction of the poll tax in Scotland prior to its introduction in the rest of the UK was seen as a national humiliation. He is tolerant of this nationalist view. This is because the rise of the SNP and the prospect of an independent Scotland are not seen as nationalism, but a reflection of something else. The Vote for the SNP is seen as  a vote for Social Democracy or a Welfare State . The anti-war movement in Scotland was ignored by Westminster, and therefore it is understandable that a anti-war, anti-imperialist movement in Scotland  will look to a more representative parliament in  a new Scottish state. However, there was no national oppression in the lack of response at Westminster to anti-war demonstrations : that’s just the way bourgeois parliaments work.

The views,of Davidson and Callinicos have been taken from left nationalism. The SWP even has its own nationalist demand : Scotland should have its own currency.  The statements of Standard life and the RBS Bank about relocating if there is a Yes Vote was part of an orchestrated scare campaign : it remains to be seen if they carry out these  threats.In any case, no class is fully united in historic changes of direction.  The SNP does have  enough capitalist support from billionaires like Brian Souter of Stage Coach for a viable independence movement. All the evidence indicates that Capitalists can live with an independent Scotland. One of the reasons is that the start-up costs of a new Capitalist State is seen as a way of slashing welfare measure as the new State faces up to economic realities. The economics of the SNP are Neo -Liberal, and cutting corporation tax and business rates is their nationalist aim. As Callinicos concedes, the low wage, low tax, economy of Ireland is still the model for Scottish independence. (9 )

In contrast, in 1999, Callinicos was keen  to highlight the dangers of nationalism. The Nationalists aim to carve out a new capitalist state would result in coming to terms with the system of capitalist states, and the dominant powers in that system. (10) For the SNP this means cooperating with the EU, NATO and international capitalist financial institutions. There is also the small matter of a high level of foreign ownership of the  gas and oil industry. This is why Scottish Nationalism is not  progressive. This is another way of saying the workers have no country. It was the German Social Democratic tradition which regarded workers representation in parliament as representing the  nation. British Labourism is another example.As Roman Rosdolsky put it: “the workers have no country because they have to think of the national bourgeois state machine as a machine of oppression directed against them”. (11)  This is why internationalism is not just an aspiration.  Davidson was aware of nationalist dangers  in 2000: “It is futile to imagine that merely setting up a Scottish Nation State will by itself remove the poison of racism and hostility towards cultures which are perceived to be different” . (12)

Davidson and Callinicos do not support independence for Scotland because it is an oppressed nation. It never has been oppressed as Davidson has amply demonstrated in his historical research.  They support secession as a general democratic political right. Nonetheless, echoing Rosa Luxemburg, Hillel Ticktin makes the point that  “the simple demand for the right of nations to self-determination cannot be fulfilled under capitalism except in a formal way.” (13) Look at the austerity policies superimposed on  sovereign established nations such as Greece and Ireland by European and international financial powers. Political independence for small nations has been hollowed out. Politics and economics are intermingled. Nor is there a general right to self-determination above class interests. Nationalism destroys or reduces class antagonism. Tactical unity with Scottish nationalists is a popular  front which undermines class independence. What do Davidson and Callinicos really stand for : welfare capitalism?

Unity with the bosses,however tactical and temporary are very much the politics of the old Stalinist CPGB. The CPGB in line with other Stalinist’s throughout Europe in the 1930’s adapted nationalist symbols and flags. (14) In  Scotland the CPGB sometimes wore tartan sashes and banners showing Wallace and Bruce, and carried the Saltire. Stalinist leaders of the NUM in Scotland scaled back picketing at Ravenscraig Steel Works to save Scottish industry.The yes campaign is very much nationalist in character in the popular front tradition.Tommy Sheridan’s nationalist Referendum Campaign has the same explicit Scottish Nationalist cultural references.  The Republican Independence Campaign have the left nationalist slogans such as : Britain is for the rich, Scotland could be ours.  These campaigns Paint Scottish nationalism red as if nationalism could be proletarian.

If Callinicos and Davidson are voting Yes with illusions,Sandy McBurney is voting No with illusions. (15) He rejects any parliamentary road to state socialism in Scotland.Instead, he puts his faith in the British Labour Movement which he  manages to conflate with every class struggle in Britain in the last two hundred years. Revolutionary Chartism is lumped together  with Labourism,the great unrest 1910-14, which circumvented trade union and Labour party leaders, with the modern  trade union bureaucracy  and so on.  While he is quick to say that the nationalist left take the SNP social democratic promises as good coin, he takes the occasional historic socialist rhetoric of the Trade union and Labour party leaders as good coin. He writes that we  should not write off the socialist potential of the British Labour movement.

In effect, this is a choice for a British parliamentary road to Socialism or the British State. The Trade Union bureaucracy  and the Labour Party, are the primary components of the British Labour Movement. They are committed to the British national interest and constitutionalism. The Labour Party was a party of nation not class from the outset. He paints Labourism red. Sandy is also nostalgic for the liberal and national collectivist spirit of 1945.  He asserts that to break up the historic unity of the British Working Class movement would weaken the fight back against austerity,but admits there has been no serious fight back. This is political incoherence. Davidson and Callinicos are surely correct that it’s not about bureaucratic unity across borders, but fighting solidarity from below. Although they are inconsistent. If borders are not a barrier to solidarity then why be against separate Scottish Trade unions?  The choice is the working class struggle from below not  a British or Scottish capitalist state :a boycott of both yes and no campaigns.

Barry Biddulph

Notes

1 Neil Davidson, For a Yes vote without illusions : on the Scottish independence referendum,in The Project: a Socialist Journal,  July 2014.

2 Steve Jame and Jordan Smith,Former Scottish Socialist Party leader promotes nationalism in referendum campaign,left network,  July 2014

3 Keir Mckechnie,Yes to independence-No to Nationalism,Irish Marxist Review, Vol 12, Number 8.

4 Neil Davidson,Socialists and Scottish independence,International Socialism Journal,Spring,2007,p.47

5 Neil Davidson, for  Yes vote.

6 Neil Davidson, for a Yes Vote.

7 Neil Davidson, Socialists and Scottish Independence ,International Socialism Journal Spring , 2007,p.40

8 Alex Callinicos, Towards the Break up of Britain,International Socialism 143,2014.

9 Alex Callinicos as above

10 Alex Callinicos, Marxism and the National Question,in Scotland : Class and Nation, edited by Chris Bambery Bookmarks, 1999,p.44

11 Roman Rosdolsky,The Workers and their Country,in  In Defence of Marxism number 2,p.56 (LTT Pamphlet)

12 Neil Davidson, The origins of Scottish Nationhood,Pluto Press, London ,2000,p.202

13 Hillel Ticktin, Marxism and the National Question, in Critique 36-7,p.21

14 Lenin’s Social democratic schema of  Bourgeois Democratic revolutions in oppressed countries subject to imperialism, and tactical support for nationalists, undermined the political and organised independence of the working class and carried the seeds of the popular front. It also contributed to serious defeats and destruction of communist movements. For example in China in the 1920’s. Why would Landlords and Capitalists tolerate communists in the factories and fields even in a temporary alliance. Callinicos has made the main point in his Marxism and the National Question. Lenin did not explain how support for the national Revolution or democratic demands related to the specific struggle for Socialism. It also wrongly associated the bourgeoisie with democracy following Kautsky. It simplified bourgeois revolutions. The Bourgeois revolution was often a top down affair led by reactionary forces on Bismark’s principle of if we have to have a revolution, let us carry it out in a conservative way, rather than suffer one from below. Davidson has shown how the Bourgeois Revolution in Scotland was a top down affair.

15 Sandy McBurney, For a No Vote without illusions on the Scottish independence referendum, on-line in The Project,A socialist Journal,July 2014. The birth of Labour party was not an attempt of the working class to make a parliamentary party accountable to the working class. It was set up by the trade union bureaucracy and separated economics from politics. The Labour party was a product of defeats for the class struggle and contributed to those defeats. Sandy’s invocation of the reverential blanket phrase, the British Labour Movement, serves to mystify and obscure the complexities of the class struggle in Britain.


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Nostalgia for the golden age of Labourism.

21 06 2014

Barry Biddulph review’s, The People. The rise and fall of the working class 1910-2010, Selina Todd, (John Murray,2014,£25.)

Salina Todd’s The People  is nostalgia for the spirit of 1945 :  when ” the working class became the people whose interests were synonymous with those of Britain itself”. (1)   Despite the academic research,this is  very old Labour  mythology : the people as the nation, united by Labour parliamentarians,  in the people’s war, and then the people’s peace.   It’s  patriotic nostalgia for the golden age of  Labourism and one nation welfare capitalism.(2) But her historical narrative of the  triumph of British Social Democracy, reveals a political incoherence :  the people’s  victory was not the triumph of the working class. The Attlee administration was not all it is cracked up to be.

 

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Salina Todd informs us that the Attlee government was an austerity government, which ultimately put the demands of employers first, and gave priority to the economic demands of post war capitalism, led by the American government. The  financial elite in the city of London was allowed to conduct business as usual, and  the  public and grammar school elites were allowed to retain their privileged position. Inefficient and failing businesses were nationalised, with massive compensation, and put firmly in the control  of the old managers and owners, who ran them on conventional business lines. Most wealth remained where it was prior to the war with the majority of the economy owned by capitalists.   But all this is played down as if it didn’t really matter.

The main thing for Salina Todd is to  give all the political credit for policies  of full employment and free access to health care and secondary education to the leaders of the  Labour party.  In Salina’s words ,”It was Labour who had ensured that the people’s war brought about a people’s peace of welfare and full employment”. (3) This is a myopic,labourite and nationalist view of post war history.The post war order of top down welfare states in western Europe to modernise and strengthen Capitalism, to keep out the threat of Socialism and Communism, was built up by American capital, military power, and the new deal liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt and Dean Acheson. As Keynes, who negotiated a huge American loan for the Labour government, said at the time : “our post war domestic policies are impossible without American assistance” (4)Full employment was generated by an upswing of capitalism created by the world-wide destruction of values, commodities, and the built environment during the war which made the adoption of Keynesian policies feasible.

For Salina Todd,  Ernest Bevin personifies the aspirations of the workers for a better life because in the second world war coalition cabinet he “saw the demand for factory workers as an opportunity to turn the working class into the people”.(5) This  suggests that   Bevin and Labour in government, were motivated by working class interests. Yet state intervention to regulate the capitalist economy was instrumental for Bevin: a  workforce united by a national purpose was a  more productive workforce. (6) This bourgeois liberal approach had dominated the ideas of the parliamentary Labour party from its inception. Ralph Miliband summed  up the post war continuation of this approach :”from the beginning the nationalization proposals of the government were designed to achieve the sole purpose of improving the efficiency of the British capitalist economy,not as the  beginning of its wholesale transformation.”(7) It was not about a neutral state driven by the working class,but the capitalist state “operating within market dominated structures and having no fundamentally different objectives than those of private capital”. (8)

Selina Todd glosses over the wider non working class interests served by state intervention. The welfare state proposals emerged from the liberal intelligentsia, and war-time coalition government committees, which included conservatives. “The main architects of the post war reforms were in fact the progressive liberal bourgeoisie who had become committed to Keynesianism and the interventionist state in the crisis of the 1930’s.”(9) Prominent liberals such as  Keynes and Beveridge wanted to save capitalism from above not construct an alternative from below. The Churchill led coalition government accepted  the Beveridge report, and  Correlli Barnett is clear that “Churchill even accepted that  there was a broadening field for state ownership and enterprise.” (10) It was  about the capitalist state taking responsibility for unprofitable sections of the economy at the public’s expense and creating a healthier and better educated workforce for a more competitive economy.

Ernest Bevin might have introduced better facilities for workers in the royal ordinance factories, and facilitated more trade union recognition in industry during the war ,as Salina Todd notes, but the aim was to make employees work harder  for the war effort. A view shared across the political spectrum. Ernest Bevin acknowledged that”the trade union movement has become part of the state”. (11)  The integration of leading trade union officials into the state apparatus often meant workers on the shop floor had two bosses.This class collaboration at a local factory level saw union officials and employers uniting in production committees.  The autobiography of an Oxford car worker, and left trade unionist, Arthur Exell, gives us a glimpse into life on the production line during the war. (12) As secretary of the joint works production committee his job was to enforce factory discipline on trade union members. The manager approached him for help about what he considered unacceptable behaviour and  absenteeism among young women in the factory. Arthur seems to have taken a similar point of view : the problem with ” these girls” was that they were fed up and kicking against the system. what could Arthur do ? They were not members of the union. So the manager gave him permission to take time off the production line to get them into the union. The plant became 100% union. But Arthur confessed he had to come down  a bit hard on those females. (13)

Salina Todd the historian does acknowledge that ” Bevin put productivity before civil liberty. He swiftly introduced order 1305 which made strikes illegal during the war”. (14) This anti working class legislation was kept in place by the Labour Government after the war. Shortly before the  election of the post war Labour Government Churchill organised  hundreds of troops on standby to break a strike on the Surrey docks in London. Attlee and Bevin had no hesitation in following Churchill’s lead and ordered the troops to give the employers a helping hand. Troops were used as a reserve army of labour to break strikes on “at least 14 occasions between July 1945 and October 1951. ”  (15) The strikers were obviously not seen in terms of the nation as the people, and strikes were always scandalous from a parliamentary point of view.  Dockers were angry about low pay,poor working conditions, and the insecurity of daily hire and fire by the employers. Union leaders put loyalty to a Labour government before the rank and file workers.

The Attlee government had a  bureaucratic top down  paternalistic connection  with the working class. There was no attempt to draw in working class participation in decision-making . Instead, there was confidence in experts of all kinds, and Whitehall civil servants in particular. Salina Todd states the obvious, “the Labour  front bench was not committed to establishing economic and political equality”,  (16)   The military,civil service, and juridical hierarchies remained intact as did elite grammar and public schools. All this could hardly improve opportunities for workers.There was continuing  deference to unelected hereditary lords and of course the unelected Monarch. Gerrymandering continued unchallenged in the orange state in Northern Ireland, and a Labour promise on Scotland’s  devolution was ditched. The great power status of the British state was continued at the expense of working class living standards at home and workers aspirations for an alternative to capitalism internationally.(Greece)  In his understated manner, James Hinton points to the “failure to make inroads into the subordinate position of women”  (17) War time nursery and crèche provision was ended,welfare measures often  assumed a male bread-winner, and there was no provision for birth control on the NHS.  And so on.

Salina Todd  presents an image of the Labour government of 1945 as a party that, unlike Thatcherism, was based on cooperation not competition and the free market.(18)  Yet as an  historian She knows all Labour governments have been based on competition and the market.  Neo- Liberalism did not originate with Thatcherism, but with the James Callaghan’s Labour government in 1976.  The first and second Labour governments of 1924 and 1929 supported conventional capitalist economics and the gold standard : Workers benefits and pay were cut in a desperate attempt to solve capitalism’s economic crisis. There was no support from Ramsay MacDonald for the miners fight against pay cuts in the General Strike in 1926.The mass unemployed marches in the 1930’s were organised without the leadership of the Labour party.  Salina’s narrative obscures old Labour responsibility for working class defeats in the interwar years. The slump is associated with the Tory party and the post war boom is identified with Labour . Hence, the election of a Labour government in 1945  is presented as the forward march of the working class as the people. There was cooperation with trade union leaders, but this was to freeze or cut workers wages in policies of wage restraint, as in the politics  of Harold Wilson’s Labour governments of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Tony Blair was not more  wealth and market friendly than previous Labour leaders. The requirements of administrating capitalism change over time.

Even in council house building the Attlee administration relied heavily on the market and refused to nationalize the land or disturb land ownership. Land to build was bought at market prices,money was borrowed at high interest rates from finance markets and, the houses and flats were often constructed by private contractors. This followed the  pro market policies of the first Labour government  in 1924 : John Wheatley, Labour’s Housing minister said : “I have left private enterprise exactly where I found it….as the protector of the small builder I am the defender of private enterprise”. (19) In 1945 as in 1924 private enterprise was the norm. Peter Malpass  provides the overall picture of housing provision in Britain : “the idea that the market could and should provide for most people, most of the time, has underpinned British housing policy since the start of the 20th century”. (20) There was an acute housing shortage for working people in 1945, but Labour built less housing in 1948 than 1938 and fell well short of their own house building target.  Council tenants were subject to petty rules based on a notion of respectability. Salina Todd reveals that Nye Bevan, the minister responsible for housing, instructed that larger houses should go to managers and middle class professionals. Universal provision ,in housing ,as elsewhere, was adopted to avoid challenging class inequality and  income redistribution. Many workers had to resort to squatting to meet their housing need.

Salina Todd ties the formation of the modern working class with the origin  of the parliamentary Labour party. According to Salina : “in 1900 the formation of the Labour party testified to the rising significance of the industrial workers as a political force”. (21) It certainly related to the rise of the trade union bureaucracy, and its modest and defensive attempt to have a parliamentary voice to moderate  anti-trade union legislation or pass legislation in the interests of trade unions. It was very much a Liberal voice . All the early Labour leaders, Keir  Hardie, Arthur Henderson, Phillip Snowden, and Ramsay MacDonald were liberals or were influenced by Fabian blue prints for class harmony and regulated capitalism. But, between 1910 and 1914, the mass of grass-roots workers in the unions defied their union bosses,conciliation procedure, and bypassed parliament in a serious of violent mass strikes which challenged the state and parliament. The Labour Representation Committee was rendered  irrelevant. George Dangerfield described the workers actions as a “movement which took on a revolutionary course and might have reached a revolutionary conclusion”. (if not for the war in 1914) (22) The L.R.C, and later the parliamentary Labour Party served to constitutionally separate politics from economics to blunt class struggle.

In 1985 Marcel Liebman  described the liberal collectivism of Labourism as a ghost : ” a nostalgia ridiculous and poignant for something which once existed and will never exist again”. (23) But it is a nostalgia that grips the mind of many of the left in Britain today in terms of conviction or tactics.  For decades there was a hope which was  rooted in the occasional radical rhetorical flourishes,and ambiguous phrases of  Labour politics, that the Labour Party embodied a promise of Socialist change. However, with the passing of each Labour government these tactical illusions, and expectations,  have dwindled along with the influence of the purveyors of these false hopes. Then the  expectations became more vague. Did Labour offer voters a promise of  some kind of change ? John Rees, considering the prospects of a Tony Blair government in 1997 was keen to silence the ultra left pessimists who thought the pro business agenda of new Labour would  make the struggle for socialism harder or just as hard as under Thatcher. For Rees it would be easier. Why? Because expectations are not just passive electoral stuff : “expectations are something very different if they begin to force demands for a change”. (24) There was, of course, no crisis of expectations following the election of Blair. Why call up the grey and oppressive spirit of 1945 when  life has moved on ?

 

Notes.

1 Salina Todd,The people, the rise and fall of the working class 1910-2010,John Murray, 2014,p.1

2 Salina Todd’s tabloid politics can be seen from her comparison of the rise and fall of the working class with the rise and fall of Viv Nicholson. Viv was a pools winner who coined the phrase spend, spend, spend to describe what she wanted to do  and did which brought about her downfall back into poverty. Salina’s political views are often contradicted by her views as a historian.

3 As above,p.2. With the help of Marshall aid, and other financial assistance, a variety of political forces in western Europe  introduced welfare measures. Only a narrow British view could identify welfare measures solely with Labourism.

4 Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin,The Making of Global Capitalism,Verso,London,2012,p.77

5  As above, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, p.96. According to Leo and Sam, American financial assistance  was 15% of the combined gross domestic capital of France Italy and Britain,during the Marshall Plan period.

6 Ernest Bevin had been an authoritarian trade union leader who was not overly concerned with the wishes and participation of his union membership. He was not a  leader reflecting some kind of popular class struggle or directly expressing working class demands. His connection with the working class was indirect and bureaucratic. Salina Todd’s views him as some kind of hero which reveals her own old Labour politics. Although as an academic Oxford historian she does record his anti working class actions, which again undermines her nostalgic Labourism.

7 Ralph Miliband Parliamentary Socialism,Merlin London,p.288

8 Willie Thompson,The Long Death of British Labourism,  Pluto press, London,p.29

9 Norman Ginsburg,Class Capital and Social policy, Macmillan, London, 1979,p.9

10 Corelli Barnett,The audit of War, Papermac, London,1986,p.32

11 As above , Willie Thompson,p.24

12 Arthur Exell,The politics of the production line, History workshop journal 1981. Arthur was a member of the CPGB . His reward for helping managers run a section of the Cowley car plant in Oxford during the war was exclusion from the factory during the cold war. Although he was officially a Communist, he seems to have  been rather  moderate. If he was in a factory, he was there to work not voice socialist views. He had little sympathy for one of his comrades who had the he said had the gift of the gab,  and was sacked for his communist agitation.

13 As above Arthur Exell, p.55

14 Salina Todd,as above,p.124.

15 Steve Peak,Troops in Strikes,Cobham Trust, London 1984,p.83 There were 8,000 unofficial strikes between 1947 -1951. These strikes showed a significant degree of frustration and disillusionment with the Attlee government. It was difficult to take on the trade union leaders,the employers, and the government,especially in the period when strikes were illegal.  See also  more details in A. J Davies,To Build a New Jerusalem, Abacus, 1996

16  Salina Todd as above .p.152,

17 James Hinton,Labour and Socialism, Harvester Press,Brighton,1983, p.71

18 Salina Todd p.319

19 Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein, The Labour Party-A Marxist History, Bookmarks,London 1988,p.101

20 Peter Malpass,Housing and the Welfare state, Palgrave , London, 2005,p.209

21 As above , Salina Todd,p.15

22 George Dangerfield,The Strange Death of Liberal England, serif, London,1997, p.179.  This rebellious energy was in stark contrast to the early Labour leadership’s love of Royal garden parties and enjoying the company of the rich and famous. The parliamentary leaders were obsessed with respectability and trying to shake off propaganda about wild men in parliament. See also Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein,The Labour Party,a Marxist History,Bookmarks,London 1988. And Tom Nairn,The Anatomy of the Labour Party, in Revolution and Class Struggle, edited Robin Blackburn,Harvester press. Keir Hardie stood for a Labour party based on nation not class or socialist. Hence the name  Labour party,not Socialist party.

23 Marcel Liebman, Introduction to Socialist Register 1985,Social Democracy and After, p.21.

24 John Rees, The Class struggle under New Labour, International Socialism journal, summer 1997,p.10. At one level this was probably a cynical attempt to keep the SWP activists active and cheerful.At all levels it looked for activity in something that did not exist : a campaigning Social Democratic constituency. Lenin’s dubious category of the Labour party as a bourgeois workers party might have had some relevance for 19th century classical Social Democracy in Europe which created mass campaigning organisations. But in Britain the parliamentary Labour party was not part of any extra parliamentary mass struggle. Indeed it was an alternative to mass struggle it helped to defeat.  So there was no contradiction between a mass Socialist struggle and it’s pro- capitalist leaders. There was a separation of the political from the economic. Lenin’s critical support for Labourism simply resulted in accommodation to Social Democracy.


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Is Scotland an oppressed nation?

29 04 2014

Originally posted on Sráid Marx:

Scot2 scot1

‘Is the a Scottish Road to Socialism?’, edited by Gregor Gall, Scottish Left Review press, 2007.

‘Scotland’s Road to Socialism: Time to Choose’, edited by Gregor Gall, Scottish Left Review press, 2013.

I remember having a brief chat with a left nationalist who argued that, in the context of a reference to Ireland, that there are degrees of national oppression. And so undoubtedly there is. What is demonstrated by the Scottish independence debate is that the measure of it, if it even exists, is very small. We know this because there is no real demand for change.

What we have had are references to “bluff, bullying and bluster” by Alex Salmond over leaders of the Labour Party, Tories and Liberal Democrats, rejecting use of sterling by a new ‘independent’ state. But even here the essential nationalist case is not that Scotland is being told what it can and cannot do…

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the jab of tragedy, the righthook of farce

9 04 2014

Originally posted on the commune:

David Broder reviews First as tragedy, then as farce by Slavoj Zizek

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profane (Marx, Communist Manifesto)

As we reach the end of the ‘noughties’ this month, there is much scope for reflection on the events of the last decade. There remains a crisis of alternatives to capitalism, yet together with the current dark spectres of recession and ecological crisis, two events bookmarking the decade disrupted the ideology of ‘the End of History’. The September 11th terrorist atrocities in New York shattered the illusion of the invulnerable American military hegemon, while last October’s financial meltdown has fatally undermined the gospel of free-market economics. George W. Bush’s speeches on each occasion were the same, of course: ‘action’ was needed to defend ‘our way of life’. As Slavoj Zizek acerbically comments, this brings to mind Marx’s quip that “History always…

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2008 : The spectre of Karl Marx returned.

8 04 2014

Originally posted on the commune:

From the Commune, May 2009, a view presented at the outset of the Great Recession.

In January 2007, the Financial Times, declared that emerging market economies would continue to power ahead. Capitalism was triumphant. The ghost of Karl Marx had been laid to rest. But then just when the progress of the unfettered market appeared unstoppable it spectacularly crashed.  Some of the world’s biggest banks collapsed. The housing and credit bubble burst. In September 2008, Northern Rock in Britain and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the USA were rescued by governments with huge sums of tax payers money. The Bradford and Bingley building society was salvaged by the state and the Lehman Brothers financial empire fell to the ground. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the federal bank, in the USA, confessed that his free market confidence in the self-interest of bankers had been wrong. (1)

Bourgeois politicians were…

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The horror of the assembly line at Ford Dagenham.

18 03 2014

Barry Biddulph reviews Notoriously Militant,by Sheila Cohen,Merlin Press,2013.

This is the story of the TGWU 1/1107 Branch at the Ford Dagenham plant and how the workers on the shop floor experienced, and responded to the harsh working conditions inflicted on them by the Ford Motor Company.Sheila Cohen lets the workers speak for themselves about what they had to endure: “Imagine bending down to tie your shoe lace.Its a simple job. But imagine doing it once a minute ….during the period of a work shift. (1) The unending tedium of fixing the same nuts bolts and screws over and over again in a zombie like manner with damage to mind and body. Add to this pressure the unpaid and unpredictable lay offs, intrusive supervision and speed ups, particularly in the post war period, and you have the anger which sparks rank and file resistance.

mirafiori

Sheila Cohen argues in, Ramparts of Resistance ,that it is the raw material reality of exploitation on the factory floor which generates the objective possibilities of collective resistance. (2).This gives rise to what she describes as the two-faced nature of trade unionism as a movement of radical struggle from  below,rather than trade unionism as an official institution from above  in partnership with capital. But before we consider the limits and possibilities of trade unions, we will look at some aspects of her narrative of the militancy at the Ford Dagenham plant .

Ford Motor Company had forged a useful working relationship with the national officials of the trade unions in April 1944 in the Ford National Joint Negotiating Committee.(FNJNC). The TUC had helped Ford to keep out shop floor negotiating rights. The workers in the plant had a different approach.In 1946 they walked out and then occupied the plant to demand better pay and shop steward representation. The formal right to shop steward representation was won.  This left a battle for what they could and could not do. It was in the same year in the context of this Class struggle that the TGWU branch 1/1107 was established at the Dagenham factory.

In the decades that followed there was an explosion of unofficial inspired strikes and disputes at Fords Dagenham which were part of a wider grass-roots struggle which culminated in the high tide of militancy in the period 1968-1974. Although the Winter of discontent in 1979, triggered by a strike at Dagenham which smashed the governments 5% pay freeze, even topped this militancy. In 1960 there were seventy-nine walkouts at Dagenham with 100,000 hours lost; by1961 the number had risen to 184,000. Alan Thornett recollects a similar militant record in an Oxford car plant : the number of strikes at the Morris plant averaged around 300 a year from 1966-1968 culminating in 1969 with a record 624 strikes. (3) But not all these strikes ended in victory.

In 1962 there was a serious defeat at Ford Dagenham which left  17 workers on a company hit list outside the factory gate. The dispute originated in a shared outlook  between union officials,and the Ford labour relations director Lesley Blakeman. The feeling was that something had to be done about those militants who had shown disrespect to union and company procedures.  Les Kealey was sick of the trouble makers who got in the way of good relations with Ford management: a number of stewards had got into the habit of solving their own problems and order had to be restored. (4) The tactic employed was to link  wage increases to constitutional good behaviour. Further,Kealey and other national officials agreed that ” unions recognise the right of the company to exercise measures against employees who fail to comply with the conditions of their employment by taking unconstitutional action”.   (5) Days later, Bill Frances, the chair of the pain and trim shop(PTA)  which was at the core of 1107 TGWU branch, was sacked for holding a lunch time union meeting.

There was a walk out and then an overwhelming vote to stay out on strike. But a return to work was then engineered by Kealey and Blakeman. Kealey claimed that he had reached an agreement with Blakeman for a return to work for everyone without victimization. This assurance was put to the shop stewards who narrowly accepted the return the work proposal. The return to work became a carefully planned, management controlled ,phased return. The management would “decide how the shop would start again,when it would start and who would start it,no longer at the end of a wild cat strike would the men be automatically come back to their jobs” (6)  Most workers were eventually allowed back except for the 17 men who Ford management regarded as undesirable agitators. These leaders of rank and file resistance would not be allowed to return for the peace of mind of managers and national union officials .  Hours lost in strikes dropped from 184,000 in 1961 and 415,000 in 1962 to 3,400 in 1963. (7)

However, resistance resumed. In May 1968, women sawing machinists at Ford walked out on strike and into history. Their long outstanding and neglected claim for upgrading from semi skilled B grade to skilled C grade was  rejected by management. There was a four-week shutdown of the plant. The company was desperate for help. It turned to the Labour Government for assistance. Barbara Castle rushed in to rescue Ford. Over cups of tea with strike leaders Castle tried to get the women back to work with a promise of negotiations. When this failed she then met them for a second time, and persuaded the strike leaders to accept a deal  which appears to have been suggested by Blakeman following a visit to the AEU conference.The AEU and Reg Birch  had made the principle of equal pay for women the issue for the strike and given it official backing on that basis. They had not taken up the women’s demand for C grade, because this would have meant challenging the Ford Company wage structure. Claims for upgrading would have flooded in : many other workers jobs had been wrongly assessed. The compromise,accepted by the women as a basis to return to work,  was a 7% wage  increase which was 92% of the mens grade B rate,a step towards reducing differentials in pay.

Another notorious strike at Dagenham was the 1971 strike for wage parity with other car workers. This was the 9 week-long strike for parity not charity. The strike was brought to an abrupt end by  Jack Jones, leader of the TGWU, and Hugh Scanlon, head of the AEU. Jones and Scanlon,  negotiated a settlement with the government and the Ford motor company behind the backs of Dagenham shop stewards. The deal still left the Ford workforce as the lowest paid car workers. There was an increase of 9 pence an hour. Further increases of 5 pence an hour at the end of the year, and 5 pence an hour the following year. A few days prior to the sell out, Dagenham shop stewards had met Jones accidentally at Euston train station. They asked him about press reports of a backroom deal. He was deceitful saying :” I am not involved. It’s up to you lads-your running the strike”. (8) In effect the deal was imposed on Dagenham. Union Strike pay was stopped , no discussion was allowed, and a secret ballot adopted instead of the traditional show of hands at a factory meeting.

This sellout and others are not surprising. As Huw Beynon reminds us: “the trade unions are so rooted in the fabric of capitalist society that the sell out of the rank and file is bound to occur” (9)Marx had no experience of modern trade unionism or the  extent of trade union bureaucracy with its links to the state,and was  too optimistic in advocating the Unions adopt the slogan of abolition of the wages system. Nevertheless , he did identify their main fault: “they fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system” (10) Although the phase guerilla war exaggerates the feeble response to the employers of trade union officialdom today.The nature of trade Unions is located in negotiating or even accepting  the terms of exploitation not in superseding exploitation. In the words of Alex Callinicos : “confining the class struggle within the limits of capitalism presumes the interests of labour and capital can be reconciled”.(11)

Sheila does not really discuss the politics of those involved in the militancy at Dagenham in any detail so we have no understanding of what possibilities there were in going beyond workplace resistance to a wider challenge to Capitalism. Sheila view seems to be that collective action in itself is objectively  a step in a revolutionary direction. Sheila does argue elsewhere,” the need to go beyond the workplace through promoting a programme of broader political demands which would connect with existing not the desired level of consciousness among activists”. (12) This is undogmatic but politically vague. It is not a clear argument for  the politics of an alternative to the capitalist state. The problem with simply identifying something real with present consciousness is that the separation between politics and economics is reinforced, and revolutionary ideas are left at the factor gate and office door.

The contours of modern capitalism in Britain with the Labour Party and Parliament on the one hand, and trade unions on the other, was strengthened rather than weakened by the Trotskyist and Leninist  left during the period of mass militancy at Dagenham and elsewhere. The International Socialists (IS) Rank and filism was about more trade union militancy. Alex Callinicos articulates these politics when he writes: “experience shows that national rank and file movements can only be built on the initiative of revolutionary socialists . The actual programme of these movements may consist chiefly of straightforward trade union demands” (13)   The Socialist Labour League ,the forerunner of the Workers Revolutionary Party, was  very significant at the time ,but despite its hysterical revolutionary rhetoric it focused its demands on the Labour Party parliamentary left  as if there was a parliamentary road to socialism. It called for a vote for the Labour party at elections as if the party  could or would implement a revolutionary Socialist Programme.

This is where realistic politics are totally unrealistic. The tactical views of the SLL and other Trotskyist influenced militants originated in the false perspectives of the early Communist International for a workers government based on the capitalist state and the trade unions . The assumption was the traditional workers organisations and the capitalist state could be revolutionised. Despite Trotsky’s  accurate polemics against trade union and Labour leaders, he held the completely unhistorical and plain wrong view that “a revolutionary Labour Party resting on the trade unions will become in their turn a powerful instrument of recovery and resurgence” (14)  Whether it was the Great Unrest 1910-14, the General Strike or miners strikes 1926, and 1984-5, the Labour Party  was not transformed by a revolutionary dynamic.Looking to the Labour Party and the state was not a way to transform capitalism.

From Sheila’s account of the struggles on the factory floor at Dagenham we do know some of the sacked stewards were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain : Johnny McLaughlin , Bill Frances, and Kevin Halpin. But we do not have an indication of   the political role of the CPGB at Dagenham. In Huw Beynon’s study of the Ford Halewood plant, in the Liverpool area, he refers to the role of the Communist Party at Dagenham. The CPGB had a considerable number of members at the Dagenham plant, including senior stewards. Yet the CPGB “was reluctant to take a definite stand against the official union hierarchies. It had no committee based on the car industry until after 1965. (15) Johnnie Cross of the AEU, who was one of the 17 victimized workers in the defeated 1962 strike at Dagenham,  complained that the CPGB leadership was against wider rank and file links in the car industry at the time, in case it offended leading union officials.  He said that “the leading party members among the leadership of the stewards movement ducked down their little holes and stopped there” (15)

To return to Sheila’s story of the militant 1107 branch. The 1980’s into the 1990’s saw a lower level of struggle in the wider context of the surrender of the trade union bureaucracy to the anti union laws and the employers offensive. There was a rapidly growing feeling among the car workers at the plant “that the union cannot do anything about it”, and the grass-roots members were “not behind the union like they used to be”. (16) Job insecurity has a massive negative impact on confidence as well. In 1979 total employment at Dagenham was 28,583 ,by the end of  1985 it had fallen to 14,700″. (17) The Ford drive for flexibility, quality circles , and other forms of greater productivity increases were also impacting on workers independence from management. By 1985 job classifications had dropped from 550 to 52. The gap between stewards and the rank and file workers opened up.

Sheila’s title is based on a newspaper headline about the activities of the 1107 branch in this period of relative downturn. A radical leadership had  taken over the branch from an allegedly corrupt and right-wing leadership. But we do not have any explanation of why such a leadership could have arisen in such a militant branch. Nor do we have any critical assessment of the politics of the prominent members of the 1107 branch,(left Labour?)  and how this related to the world outside the shop floor.Steve Riley and Mick Gosling had taken a lead with others in tackling racism and sexism in the plant, but both were later forced out of the plant by management with the help of union officials.

Towards the end of the 1990’s the remaining workers at Dagenham were worried about the threat of plant closure. The closure was announced on 12th May 2000. Tony Woodley of the T&G ,one of a supposed awkward squad of trade union leaders, was full of strike rhetoric. The reality was there was no real urgency about strike ballots and no evidence of any trade union determination to fight the closure. The workers were kept in the dark. When a vote came no national union officials were to be seen at the plant meetings. The grass-roots workers were left with only one positive action : accept whatever redundancy money was available. Sheila comments that the drift towards closure was an example of “the pivot of union as an institution overcoming,for now,union as a movement” (18)

But for Sheila the workers will rise again as they have done in the past. So in terms of the trade unions “what makes the difference is a choice whether to seek to maximise what possibilities there are,or to remain gloomily preoccupied with the limitations and failures of the movement in a species of self-fulfilling prophesy” (19) But this comment does seem to assume trade union limitations and structures will not prevent a resurgence of workers struggles. Surely we need to take into account the failures of modern trade unionism, and not assume any fight back will go through traditional channels. As one of the militants of the 1107 branch said at the core of the resistance to Ford, the government, and trade union officialdom was the branch within the union branch. Stewards who represented workers from a number of trade unions had autonomy from the individual trade union.

What sheila’s vivid story of 1107 branch demonstrates is that workers did and can strive to transform a harsh capitalist environment. This kind of working class history does show there is a possibility that workers can unite  in the workplace, link up with local activists in the working class community, and become part of struggle against capital, the state and parliament

Notes

1 Sheila Cohen,Notoriously Militant,Merlin Press,2013,p.4

2 Sheila Cohen,Ramparts of Resistance,   Pluto Press,2006,p.13

3 Alan Thornett,From Militancy to Marxism, Left View Books, 1987 ,p.93.

4 Sheila Cohen,as above,p.75

5 Sheila Cohen,as above.p.74

6 Sheila Cohen,as above,p.77

7 Sheila Cohen,as above,p.77

8 Sheila Cohen,as above p.107

9 Huw Beynon, Working for Ford,EP Publishing 1979,p.301

10 Dave Stocking,Marxists and the Trade Unions,Workers Power pamphlet 1977,p.4

11 Sheila Cohen,The Ramparts of Resistance.p.170

11 Alex Callinicos, Socialists in the Trade Unions,Socialist Worker pamphlet,1995,p.

13 Alex Callinicos, as above,p.57

14 Leon Trotsky, Writings on Britain, vol2, New park Publications,1974,p.104

15 Huw Beynon as above, p.60

16 Sheila Cohen,Notoriously Militant,p.139

17 Sheila Cohen,as above,p.146

18 Sheila Cohen,as above,p.194

19 Sheila Cohen,Ramparts of Resistance,p.150


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