roderick cobley: the three whales of bolshevism

7/27/2019 Roderick Cobley: The Three Whales of Bolshevism

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The three whales of Bolshevism

Roderick Cobley

The militant slogans of the Bolsheviks after 1905 were colloquially known as the

three whales of Bolshevism. At Marxism this year Paul Le Blanc challengedcomrades to name three whales for 2013. Roderick Cobley from Walthamstow SWPputs forward his suggestions.

A strategy for the social movements must also aim for SWP comrades to be well-rooted inthem. This means not just intervening to air our politics and sell papers, but participate inbuilding the different campaigns so that we become trusted and seen as part of themovement rather than interlopers, as will no doubt be the instinctive reaction of many,coming as they will overwhelmingly from autonomist circles.

Paul Le Blanc, in his talk at Marxism, referred to three whales of Bolshevism, a notion thatcame out of an old Russian folk tale of the world being balanced on three whales. In LeBlancs talk, he stated that the Bolsheviks saw the whales in question as being threedemands for them to agitate and organise around: an eight hour day, land reform in favourof the peasants, and a constituent assembly.

This article argues that for the revolutionary left in Britain, there are similarly three whales the highly unionised public sector workers, the largely non-unionised private sector workers,and the social movements. Furthermore, I will suggest that the party has overbalanced itsstrategy too much towards the first of these at the expense of the latter two, and that thisraises a number of important questions.

Much of this article does little more than repeat what has been said elsewhere I make noclaims to be an original thinker! However, I do want to offer a perspective in particularconcerning the role of the social movements in Britain in comparison to other placesinternationally where there has been a high degree of struggle.

Orientating on the public sector

For the last two years, an orientation on the public sector, and specifically on thebureaucracy of the public sector trade unions, has been central to the SWPs strategy. Thereis no question that, at least initially, this turn by the party was the right one. It allowed us tohave substantial influence in pushing for a fight in 2011, leading to the huge protest on 26March, the joint strike by five unions on 30 June, and the magnificent show of strength on 30

November, thrown away by the trade union leadership just days later.

However, although that analysis was correct for that time, once the sell-out occurred therewas no real attempt to take stock and review our strategy in light of the changed situation.The leadership analysed that the root of the problem, at least in immediate terms, was due inpart to the nature of the trade union bureaucracy, which will seek to limit struggle for fear oflosing control, and the current lack of confidence among the rank and file to fight withoutsupport and approval from their leaders.

But rather than looking to reorient, the party merely continued with the existing strategy inthe hope that something would happen as Mike Gonzalez wrote in a recent article.

There was a denial of the fact that the strike wave and accompanying demonstrations,

although a result of pressure from below, were essentially bureaucratic in character and thuseasily turned off by the bureaucracy. And there was a continued insistence that a newupturn was round the corner, culminating in predictionsof a hot autumn in 2012 whichfailed to materialise.
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Unite the resistance

Central to the our strategy in the public sector has been Unite the Resistance, which wheninitially set up was portrayed as focusing on putting pressure on the bureaucracy by workingwith those sections of it that are more open to the idea of militant action. The idea behindthis was not as well explained as it could have been, but essentially sought to answer thequestion of how to get mass struggle against the cuts at a time when rank and fileorganisation remains weak. It was based on an analogy with the Minority Movement of the1920s but without any real attempt to discuss the possible pitfalls of this approach, bearing

in mind the problems identified by Chris Harman. How to avoid these problems has neverbeen discussed. Two years on, there has now been a turn towards making UtR a forum formilitants who do want to fight so they can network with each other to that end. This isundoubtedly a reasonable path to pursue, but again has been an adaptation in absence ofany more concerted analysis - or explanation.

As has been said elsewhere, there are possible problems arising from having a membershipthat is packed with public sector workers, many of whom are in elected positions of one sortor another. It has been notedthat the number of elected positions we hold is out of allproportion to our base inside the public sector unions. This creates a danger that the partysperspectives become skewed by this, and warning signs can be seen. One key example isthe dismissive attitude taken to the Pop-Up Union at Sussex University because they are not

within the unions established structures. Irrespective of the strengths and weaknesses ofthe approach behind the Pop-Up Union, such a response from the party indicates a possiblesliding to a position where putting pressure on the bureaucracy from the left becomes almostthe only game in town. The danger is we could find ourselves in the position of being aginger group within public sector trade unions rather than trying to build a rank and file thatcan take action independently.

There are also wider issues, to do with the way that the working class has been recomposedover the last thirty years, dominated as they have been by neoliberalism. Public sectorworkers are clearly part of the same world as the wider working class, and so the currentstate of play in the public sector has to be taken in context of the wider workforce, to whichwe now turn.

Trade unions decomposed

The majority of workers are in the private sector and the vast majority of them are non-unionised. I have personal experience of asking a young worker in a call centre if they wereinterested in joining a union and getting the response: Whats a union?

AsAlfredo Saad-Filho noted in his talk on Brazil at this years Marxism, this is representativeof the fact that during the neoliberal period the working classs traditional sources ofrepresentation and organisation (of which trade unions are arguably the single mostimportant) have been decomposed.

Recent work on this by Neil Davidsonand Julian Alfordis very useful in examining the

dynamics of this process. They vary from country to country, but in the UK, they can besummarised as combining the successful assaults on the fabric of social democracy, withchanges in the composition of the working class and the culture and structures of theworkplace. So the proportion of manual workers, a traditional bastion of trade unions, hasdeclined while non-unionised office work such as call centres has increased, and this hashappened alongside a cultural shift towards a more atomised, individualised workforce withthe right to manage re-imposed. Further, there has been a growth of a neoliberal culture,often described as being consumerist which has resulted in almost every aspect of ourlives becoming individualised and de-politicised. Examples can be seen in the way voting inelections is now often compared to shopping and how a business ontology has becomedominant which regards as impossible any attempt at organisation not done alongentrepreneurial lines.
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Trade unions have followed suit in this, shifting from workplace organisation to individualrepresentation at grievance or disciplinary hearings alongside providing discounts to localcommercial outlets. Clearly, this has also affected public sector unions, which are possiblymore in hock to bureaucracy and beset by an organisationally weak membership, than atany time previously.

However, despite this disarticulation of working class organisation outside the bastions of thepublic sector, some of the most militant actions by workers since the start of the crisis havebeen in the private sector. Among the most memorable are the electricians dispute in 2011-

12 and the occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight two yearsearlier, the latter in a non-unionised workplace. Im also aware of a local dispute in WalthamForest where workers at a local Gu pudding manufacturer, again non-unionised, organised astrike with no union presence at all and won gains.

A strategy for the private sector?

Clearly, then, the private sector remains to be won and this means that a strategy aimed atbuilding resistance in the private sector against job losses, falling wages etc, is vital. This issomething we should take seriously, at least as seriously as our work in the public sector, asthis is where the majority of workers are. Unfortunately, although no one would suggest that

the party is consciously dismissive of this aspect of our work, nothing like a proper strategyis in place. In a paper published a month or so ago, a group of comrades outlined some verybasic suggestions for practical action on the first of these. These included producing localindustrial leaflets, among others. In no way can these be seen as amounting to anything likea strategy, but they would be very useful if carried out across branches.

So what would a strategy look like? This article is far too brief and general to suggest one,but one recent article looking back at the 2011 riots points towards a potentially deep-rootedproblem concerning the credibility of the trade union movement itself, particularly amongstyounger workers. The article describes how a speaker from the far left arguing for youngpeople to support the trade union movement was booed by the overwhelmingly youngaudience at the premiere of the documentary Riots Reframed. The writer argues that:

With many young people increasingly finding themselves in privatised andprecarious work, the Left's focus on the trade union movement can at times bevery alienating to those in workplaces that are notoriously difficult to unionise...Itcan also appear to offer the same professional class of "politicians" that youngpeople have grown instinctively to distrust.

If there is any truth to this at all, then it raises a question mark over whether a traditionalfocus on the trade union movement is necessarily always the best starting point. Instead, weshould consider that right now the best starting point is to be to draw workers into otherforms of struggle and at this point the social movements become relevant to the picture.

Erupting social movementsIf we look at the wider world, we see a complex interaction between the labour movementsand social movements in every nation. In Egypt, a lengthy period of intense trade unionstruggle prefigured the revolution, with its epicentre in Tahrir Square, which in turn bolsteredthe strike wave so it was able to become a key factor in toppling Mubarak.

Elsewhere, dramatic explosions in the streets and squares forced the trade unionbureaucracy to respond. In both Turkey and Brazil, with varying degrees of effectivenessreflecting their strength on the ground, the trade unions called strikes following the eruptionof social uprisings. In the UK, the students movement and its militant action in November inattacking Millbank created a climate that drew the trade unions into the action. However, theshort-lived nature of the movement in all three cases meant that no prolonged period of

industrial action followed. In Turkey, the extreme weakness of the trade unions almostcertainly rules out them playing a substantive part in the current movement. Greece, on the
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other hand, saw an uprising in late 2008, which may have helped create the possibility forthe sustained mass struggles we have seen. However, the struggle appears to broadly beunder the control of the trade union bureaucracy, and no separate social movement isvisible, with mass protests for instance as a rule being held to accompany strike days.

The UK currently faces a situation where the level of industrial struggle is very low. Onegraph shows that only 250,000 days were lost in strikes in 2012, the second lowest onrecordafter 2005. This is hardly surprising if we accept the picture above of a largely de-unionised workforce, with both the structures and the attendant traditions of workplace

organisation having been broken down.

However, that does not mean that workers are acquiescent. In fact many workers, if theybecome politically active, are much more likely to do so in a social movement of some form.They predominantly take the form of community campaigns, such as the myriad anti-cutsgroups, the Anti-Bedroom Tax Federation, the campaigns to defend the NHS and thosefighting the far right. Most of these are rooted in local communities even if they are part ofnational campaigns. Aside from this, there are also other campaigns more closely relatedideologically to the social movements that exist in Europe, North America and elsewhere.Carrying a strong affiliation to autonomist tendencies, they include UK Uncut and the Occupymovement, and to a lesser extent Disabled People Against the Cuts which stands in a directaction tradition of disability activism.

Such movements are composed predominantly of working class people and have to agreater or lesser extent been supported by and built relationships with trade unions. This iseven the case with Occupy, who supported N30 and the sparks. Clearly, the possibilityexists for a revival of trade union affiliation among workers to be fostered through theirinvolvement in these campaigns. Unites Community branches are perhaps relevant here, inunionising the unemployed and it might be worth demanding the other unions follow suit.

Conversely, trade unionists need to be encouraged to get involved in these movements astrade unionists so they can imbibe the militant culture many of these movements have,making it easier to replicate this inside the trade union movement.

A strategy for the social movements must also aim for SWP comrades to be well-rooted inthem. This means not just intervening to air our politics and sell papers, but participate inbuilding the different campaigns so that we become trusted and seen as part of themovement rather than interlopers, as will no doubt be the instinctive reaction of many,coming as they will overwhelmingly from autonomist circles. We also need to be building forboth the 29 September demonstration outside the Tory conference but also, just asimportantly, for the 5 November day of action.

Fast Food Forward

There is no question that the public sector unions should remain a key focus for us, butcurrent events suggest they are unlikely to be the vanguard of new struggles due to thestrength of the bureaucracy. Therefore, instead of trying to artificially make them into the

vanguard by pump-priming through Unite the Resistance, a better focus might start withmaking the building of rank and file presences in workplaces key, as well as supportingwhatever struggles emerge, including innovative initiatives such as the Pop-Up Union. Unitethe Resistance can undoubtedly play an important role here.

We also need to make the social movements, ranging from Occupy to the Benefit Justicecampaign, as central to our activity as our work on the industrial front. Crucially, buildinglinks between social movements and rank and file trade unionists is key. It might be worthlooking at ways that social movements can be brought to the trade union struggle thoughby avoiding instances in the Global South where foreign NGOs have been taking on unionorganising and bringing their liberal aid politics into the equation.

In this context, current events in the US fast food industry are interesting. As of writing, therehas just been a nationwide strike by tens of thousands of fast food workers organisingthrough Fast Food Forward, part of the campaigning group New York Communities for
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Change. Although involving existing unions, and in particular the Service EmployeesInternational Union (SEIU), which has provided much of the funding, this campaign involvesmuch broader coalitions. It has also used very different techniques from traditional unionorganising, ones more akin to those of Occupy. The scale of their success thus far in termsof building and striking is noteworthy and possibly a harbinger of future developments in USactivism. An echo of this might be seen in the effect of the Blacklist Support Group. This wasorganised specifically as a single issue campaign against blacklisting in construction,involving the unions but not controlled by them. However, it helped generate impetus to the

sparks, who organise as part of Unite, and is now a motor for Unites attempt to getrecognition at Crossrail.

Linking the three whales

Whatever else, our participation in the Peoples Assembly, the leaders of which appear tosee both the NHS demo and the 5 November as central, is vital to a strategy around socialmovements. The broad range of this body means that the social movements are very likelyto gravitate there, as will the trade union leaders and rank and file activists, so we need to bethere too. Here we have to have an argument against this bodys leadership over theirtendency to whitewash the role of the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour Party.However, this should not be based only on arguing for more strikes although that is part of

it - but on a broader critique of the reformist leaders that starts with concrete demands ratherthan denunciation. Also, we need to work to ensure that as many of the wide range ofcampaigns and movements that are emerging, including Occupy and UK Uncut, both ofwhom took an unfortunately sectarian and ultra-left position, are involved in the movement.Such a broad-based and radical movement uniting socialists, trade unionists, communitycampaigners and the autonomist fringe, with its tendency for imagination and originality,could be a potential game changer in the way things develop in the months to come.
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roderick cobley: the three whales of bolshevism

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