On 12/6/2010 3:59 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> I just happened to re-read Stuart Hall's classic, "The Great Moving
> Right Show," written in 1979 during the early days of Thatcherism,
> yesterday. He writes of the use of "national interest" against the
> working class:
>> The expression of this representative relationship of class-to-party, in the present period, has depended decisively on the extensive set of bargains negotiated between Labour and the trade union representatives of the class. This "indissoluble link" is the practical basis for the claim to be the natural governing party of the crisis. This is the contract it delivers. But, once in government, social democracy is committed to finding solutions to the crisis which are capable of winning support from key sections of capital, since its solutions are framed within those limits. But this requires that the indissoluble link be used, not to advance but to discipline the class and organizations it represents. This is only possible if the link - class-to-party — is dismantled and if there can be substituted for it an alternative articulation: government-to-people. The rhetorics of "national interest", which is the principal ideological form in which a succession of defeats have been imposed on the working class by social democracy in power, are exactly the sites where this contradiction shows through—and is being constantly reworked. But government-to-people dissects the field of struggle differently from class-to-party. It sets Labour, at key moments of struggle—from the strikes of 1966 right through to the present 5 per cent norm—by definition "on the side of the nation" against "sectional interests", "irresponsible trade union power", etc.
I don't buy this at all. I think it's exactly the opposite of the truth. Is Hall saying the interests of the working class really were opposed to those of "the nation"? Or is he saying the contrast drawn between the two was spurious, in which case why did Thatcher succeed?
I think the real problem is that the trade unions in fact accepted, more or less, this distinction between "their" interests and "the nation's" interests. The results were disastrous. This essay argues that there was another way. I especially endorse the last sentence:
http://www.hegemonics.co.uk/docs/Incomes-Policy-Hegemony-1970s.pdf
The Wages of Militancy: Incomes Policy, Hegemony and the Decline of the British Left
David Purdy
Arguably, the most formidable domestic policy problem facing governments in post-war Europe was how to reconcile full employment with stable prices. Already in the 1940s, radical Keynesians such as Kalecki, Kaldor and Joan Robinson were warning that with prices set as a mark-up over unit costs, the achievement of full employment would founder unless some way were found to restrain the growth of money wages. The option of settling for less than full employment was judged unacceptable. It was impossible to predict the precise level of unemployment at which unfettered wage bargaining would yield an acceptable rate of wage and price inflation, but whatever this level turned out to be, it was certain to be too high. There was, therefore, a need for what in those days was unashamedly called a “wages policy”. (The more delicate term “incomes policy” was a later invention).
The alternative to some form of direct wage regulation was to have no rules whatsoever – a free-for-all – forcing or inviting governments to prosecute the war on inflation by other means – a classic deflationary purge, say, or measures to deregulate the labour market. This was the route taken by the Conservatives after 1979. Part of the case for an incomes policy was that, however unpalatable to proponents of free collective bargaining, it was the lesser evil. But from a socialist perspective, an even more compelling argument was that incomes policy offered a way out of the ghetto of economism. For in a context where trade unions were strong, no enduring policy could simply be imposed: governments had to negotiate with employers’ and workers’ representatives about what the rules should be, how they were to be enforced and what inducements might secure their legitimacy. Of course, tripartite policy bargaining in Britain was far less institutionalised and open than its counterparts elsewhere in Western Europe. Nevertheless, by the mid-twentieth century, what Middlemas (1979) calls the system of “corporate bias” had come to be taken for granted by Britain’s rulers as the normal way of doing things.
Most of the British left greeted the prospect of a negotiated incomes policy with ingrained hostility. But a minority of Gramscian Marxists saw it as an opportunity for the labour movement to bid for hegemony by offering to accept voluntary pay restraint in exchange for structural reforms aimed at democratising the economy: within the enterprise and workplace as well as at the macro-social level; in private companies as well as in the public sector; and with respect to major policy issues, not just matters of day-to-management. The question posed by this paper is why this strategy was not adopted in the 1960s and 1970s. Of course, this question is only interesting if one believes: (a) that such a strategy could have been pursued; and (b) that if it had been, things would have turned out better, not only for the left and the unions, but also for society as whole. For reasons of space, I do not provide a separate justification for these two propositions, but grounds for believing them pervade my argument.
[...]
The Labour left, which in the early 1970s gained control over the NEC, the party conference and party policy-making, never understood the causes and significance of recurrent inflation. Many on the left shared the eclectic “common-sense” view that inflation resulted from various contingent events that, somehow, just kept on happening. A more systematic, though no less erroneous idea was that inflation reflected the exercise of monopoly power and would be checked once a Labour government brought big business under control by extending public ownership and instituting planning agreements. But whatever its preferred explanation, the left was adamant that workers and trade unions played no part in generating or sustaining inflation and were not obliged to take any responsibility for controlling it. This disclaimer was repeated at every opportunity, both by intellectuals such as Stuart Holland and the members of the Cambridge Economic Policy Group, and by Tony Benn, the principal parliamentary leader of the left and a Cabinet Minister from 1974 to 1979, initially at Department of Industry, a key position for supporters of the AES. 2
The CPGB, whose industrial department was at the forefront of campaigns to defeat anti- trade union laws and destroy the Social Contract, insisted that incomes policy was an attempt to force the working class to pay for the “capitalist crisis”. In part, this militant rhetoric was intended for internal consumption: the party leadership was seeking to bolster its increasingly fragile hold over two distinct, though overlapping groups: its dwindling band of trade union activists and officials – the “industrial comrades”, as they were sometimes known – who were pretty much a law unto themselves; and the party’s vociferous pro-Soviet minority who demanded a return to “class politics” and harboured deep suspicions of the party’s incipient “reformism”. 3 But opposition to incomes policy was also intended to stiffen the backbone of the Labour left and discourage it from compromising with the right.
The official party line was condemned as intellectually bankrupt and politically irresponsible by a small group of economists on the party’s economic advisory committee who advocated a “socialist” social contract in which pay restraint would be traded off against structural reforms aimed at democratising economic decision-making, in private firms as well as in the public sector. These views provoked widespread and often rancorous debate within the party. Students, feminists and other dissidents welcomed them as a creative example of how to conduct the war of position, which should be emulated in other areas of the party’s work. The leadership and its allies had no time for Gramsci and, conveniently forgetting their Lenin, contended that trade union struggle was the royal road to the awakening of socialist consciousness, the election of a “left government” and the capture of state power. Meanwhile, the CP’s enemies on the far left, who denounced the delusions of parliamentary socialism and were bitterly opposed to the party’s efforts to contest union elections under the banner of the “broad left”, nevertheless shared its enthusiasm for the old syndicalist idea that, sooner or later, if only the workers remained united, refused to be co-opted by the state and screwed up the tension to breaking point, the capitalist system would be brought down and a new age would dawn.
With certain exceptions, trade union leaders themselves were suspicious of the left and sympathetic to the Labour leadership, but they were cautious and conservative in their approach to policy and politics. They might respond to calls for voluntary wage restraint as an emergency measure, but were unlikely to support permanent participation in a social contract, socialist or otherwise, let alone follow the pioneering example of the Swedish LO which, having experienced an upsurge of inflation and a government- imposed wage freeze in the late 1940s, devised and campaigned for its own “solidaristic” (originally “socialist”) wages policy. Though it took several years for this policy to gain acceptance, by the early 1960s it had become an integral part of the Swedish model. No comparable initiatives were ever undertaken by the TUC. Even its most free-thinking General Secretary, George Woodcock – in his own words “an incomes policy man since 1939” (Taylor, 2000: 159) and a firm advocate of “industrial unionism” – believed that British trade unions would never move on pay, or anything else, unless subjected to external pressure. Indeed, it seems to have been this conviction that led this normally morose and taciturn leader, when shown an early draft of the White Paper, In Place of Strife, to welcome it as a way of galvanising reforms in trade union structure after his own efforts in this direction had failed. His successor, Vic Feather, who led the TUC campaign against the proposed “penal” legislation and played a key role in getting the government off the hook, was more genial, but less thoughtful and like many leaders facing potential schism, concentrated on holding the labour movement together rather than trying to resolve its underlying problems and charting a new course.
The only trade union leader who came anywhere near to measuring up to the needs of the hour was Jack Jones, General Secretary of the TGWU from 1969 to 1977. A tough, but idealistic Liverpudlian, Jones was a veteran of the International Brigade who, from 1939 to 1945, had served as TGWU district secretary in Coventry, a city at the heart of the British car and engineering industries, then producing munitions. In the 1950s and 1960s, he had gained a reputation as an apostle of shop-floor power and by the late 1960s had begun to advocate industrial democracy, which he envisaged in organic, bottom-up terms, starting with joint control between management and shop stewards over workplace issues such as effort standards, overtime working, hiring and firing and health and safety – a form of workers’ participation that already existed in many firms – and gradually building up to the representation of workers on company boards responsible for strategic issues such as product development, investment plans and the design of the labour process, (Taylor, 2000: 203-8).
[...]
In the mid-1970s, an inspiring, yet practical programme of this sort would have appealed to a wide cross section of British society, including – notably – revisionist social democrats and collectivist liberals, for it held out the prospect of controlling inflation and reducing inequality without threatening to destroy the capitalist system. It would also have opened up real opportunities for driving democracy into the heartlands of industry. Naturally, this would have generated new conflicts as business corporations sought to defend managerial prerogatives and resist changes in the hierarchy of control. But such is the nature of positional warfare in which victory is never “final” and nothing is guaranteed.
None of this could have happened unless the ground had been prepared beforehand. The CP would have had to pursue a completely different industrial strategy for the previous twenty years. Likewise, the shop stewards’ movement would have had to acquire the outlook and expertise required to make the most of advances in industrial democracy. The fact that these preconditions were not met goes a long way towards explaining why the British left is now an endangered political species and why people like me are reduced to thinking about what might have been. Nevertheless, I suggest, reasoned speculation about the possible “past” is a valid tool of social inquiry, every bit as valuable as the kind of thought-experiment about possible “futures” that has always been part of the socialist tradition. As someone said, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.