Are we witnessing a resurgence of grassroots organising in britain?
Last month, the Bakers, Food, and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) announced their membership had voted to disaffiliate from the Labour Party. This is significant news. The close relationship between the mainstream of organised labour and the Labour Party has been a staple of british politics, and key to the power of the Labour Party since its inception in 1900 (even if Labour have sometimes been embarrassed about this fact). In their announcement, BFAWU pointed out that they were in fact one of the unions that was key in the formation of the Labour Party.
The decision by the party to not engage with a union that levied its poorly paid members in 1902 to build a party that would bring about real change to their lives, is the culmination of a failure to deliver those changes during our 119 year relationship.
This announcement is not an isolated incident. Earlier in September, Unite the Union’s new general secretary Sharon Graham said that workers should not rely on the Labour Party for better pay and conditions.[1]
We can’t keep hoping for the election of a Labour government to solve our members’ problems. Putting all our eggs in the Westminster basket will not deliver. When did the parliamentary Labour party win a collective bargaining agreement for workers at a workplace? We cannot have the political tail wagging Unite’s industrial dog any longer.
Taken together, these comments begin to indicate something of a shift in mood in the official organised labour movement. Even Blair’s committed neoliberalism was not enough to break the tie between britain’s main trade unions and the Party. That this relationship is fraying certainly indicates a decisive change for the Labour Party; Starmer’s acquiescence to the Tories, in an attempt to win over ‘middle England’, is costing him the basis of his institutional support. What it means for organised labour itself is less clear.
Here in Manchester, Unite is the union for the city’s Metrolink tram drivers, currently facing off against the council and the Metrolink’s private operators over pay and conditions. The combination of shoddy provision and increasingly eroding working conditions made public transport a frequent source of social struggle in the city - the ‘Better Buses’ campaign, appealing to Andy Burnham’s better nature, has won relative widespread support, and bus drivers (also represented by Unite) have also threatened and carried out strikes in the past year.
On the 12th of this month, the Fourth International published this report;
For the second time in as many weeks, the union Unite, under newly elected General Secretary Sharon Graham, has intervened to stop strike action by 300 Greater Manchester tram drivers and supervisors for a genuine pay rise against the private operator Keolis/Amey.
A one-day stoppage on the Metrolink tram service was planned for October 10, to be followed by 24-hour stoppages on October 15, 18 and 24. Unite suspended the scheduled October 10 strike on October 8, citing an improved offer it would put to a vote. The union has not publicly released details of the pay offer it is putting to its members.[2]
Graham publicly declares Unite’s intentions for greater militancy. But when Unite’s members attempt to express that militancy, they are overruled.
Anecdotally, when I worked at Greggs, even though BFAWU was our union, nobody I knew bothered with it. One factor in this was that a lot of my coworkers were very reactionary (though that is not necessarily an obstacle to trade union membership). But another was that the union tended to treat Greggs as one of the ‘good’ companies, and didn’t really bother to agitate or organise Greggs workers. In fact, mid pandemic, they used Greggs as a counterexample for agitation against other companies like McDonald’s and Wetherspoons, of ‘how to do it right’. It is slightly amusing now to see that BFAWU apparently cares so deeply about representing the interests of its members.
In 1944, the pan-African organiser George Padmore described the british trade union movement in an article it is worth quoting at length.
While genuine Socialists within the Labour Party may look upon it as the instrument for bringing about a fundamental transformation of the existing social order, the Trade Union leaders certainly have no such illusions. They have never really been converted to the Socialist objective, even though they have given lip-service to it. Their outlook is purely economic, and they have used their positions in the Labour Party to impose their aims. These aims have been to wring concessions from the ruling class, and they have come progressively to the point of view that if the capitalist class is to be in a position to accede their economic demands, that class must have their support whenever its position is threatened. The result has been that whenever British Capitalist-Imperialism is faced with a crisis, the Trade Union bosses have not utilised that crisis to forward the supposed Socialist aims of the Party, but rather they have joined forces with the capitalist class to resolve the crisis.
An ideological union has come about between the leaders of Labour and Capital on the basis of Empire. This united-front between the Imperialists and Trade Union officials constitutes the historic basis of Reformism in the British Labour Movement. The process has not been sudden; it has been gradually taking place with the development and expansion of British Capitalism into its Imperialist stage. Engels commented upon this social phenomenon as far back at 1882 in a letter to Kautsky, when he wrote:
“You ask me what the English workers think of colonial policy? Exactly the same as they think about politics in general, the same as what the bourgeoisie think. There is no working-class party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers merrily devour with them the fruits of the British colonial monopoly and of the British monopoly of the world market.” While to Marx he wrote even earlier (1858): “The British working-class is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie. Of course, this is to a certain extent justifiable for a nation which is exploiting the whole world.”
This prophecy of Engels has been fulfilled to the letter. Today the British Labour Movement, thanks to the narrow outlook of the Trade Union leaders, stands as an expression of a bourgeois proletariat. And particularly on Foreign Policy and Imperial problems, the Trade Union and right-wing political Labour leaders have no definite programme of their own to set against that of the Tories.[4]
If we are now, in 2021, witnessing a break between the Labour Party and the labour aristocracy, that is not to say that the labour aristocracy have fundamentally changed course. It is the Labour Party that has changed course, as we have already noted, towards a form of perpetual acquiescence to the state as a party of cooperative dissent, rather than social-democratic opposition. As the long crisis of british imperialism continues, as marked by the 2009 financial crash and exasperated by Brexit and the pandemic, this is not satisfactory for even the majority of trade unionists, still committed to a social-democratic politics. But alongside this, there are other forms of struggle emerging that break from the classic trade union mould. In London, especially, unions like United Voices of the World and International Workers of Great Britain have won a series of striking victories for migrant workers in the so-called ‘gig economy’, allowing them to make a significant claim to represent the real militancy of the most vulnerable workers in britain today. (This is not to say these unions are not themselves also torn by contradictions, as all social phenomena are.) As the gulf widens between the real needs of workers, especially Black, migrant, and criminalised workers, and the reformist demands of the labour movement, the leadership of institutions like Unite and BFAWU risk being undercut by the militancy of both workers outside their control and even their own membership. Gestures towards ‘the grassroots’ are necessary for people like Graham to maintain at least the appearance of relevance. But they cannot concede actual control to ‘the grassroots’ because that might jeopardise their own positions, as high-salaried professionals with reputations to uphold. Terms like ‘grassroots’ are in fact playing a key role in obscuring the contradictions in britain generally, and the trade union movement specifically, between the labour aristocracy and those facing the brunt of capitalist violence, exploitation, and dispossession.[3]
This is not necessarily to say that these unions should be abandoned. The Labour Party is a participant in the state, in the governance of the state, and Starmer’s politics represent the final integration of the Party into that state. It depends only on the legitimacy of the state (and the violence of the police and the army that enforces it) for its own power. The trade unions, however, are more ambivalent institutions, torn in the way I describe above between leadership that tends towards collaboration with the bourgeoisie and their state, and the membership, which is itself full of conflicting interests. These conflicting interests contain other possibilities than mere concessions or class collaboration - discussing those possibilities would be a much larger project that this newsletter. But it is noteworthy that BFAWU’s disaffiliation was sparked by a conflict between its leadership and the Labour Party, but the actual vote to disaffiliate is an expression of the will of the membership.
Since Corbyn was ousted from the Labour Party, many Corbynites have been searching for a new political instrument to achieve the same project. They hope there may be other channels that could provide what the Labour Party could not, namely, in Padmore’s words, a resolution to the crisis of imperialism, rather than a movement for something else. It is recognised that the Labour Party has broken its promises - why they were believed, has yet to be widely addressed.
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[1] Some might suggest this itself was a revealing comment.
[2] I don’t have much info to confirm or deny the role of the ‘Socialist Equality Party’ in the dispute, as claimed for by this article. I have never heard of them before and generally distrust Trotskyite sects blowing their own trumpets online. But what do I know?
[3] Something similar might be said about the buzz right now around ‘community organising’. The limitations of ‘community’ as a key term for organising around should be clear to anyone who’s ever been part of a community they needed to escape. The twitter account ProlPo, started by poet Wendy Trevino but now in use by multiple people, has pointed out previously that:
it is not a given that every community is good or that community building is always good. fascists talk abt the importance of community & community building, too.
More could be said about the problems of ‘community’, but for my purposes here, it is enough to note simply that Marxist/Leninist critiques of ‘economism’ - the narrow pursuit of a particular social group’s short-term gains at the expense of the long terms liberation of oppressed peoples as such - may have important applications to demographics other than the industrial proletariat.