The Undead Workers’ Movement

Can we still say that the cause of labour is the hope of the world and really mean it? So it seemed in Britain four years ago. As we went from a few hundred thousand days lost to strike action pre-pandemic to well clear of two million by the end of 2022, we were told that the trade union movement was being ‘reborn’. A militant, hyper-charismatic general secretary became a major figure in public life, like none other since Scargill. Suddenly there were three industrial correspondents in the media rather than one, and the strike wave, even as its strength waned on the ground, found promising political expression.

But this surge wasn’t the only deviation from the norm; there were others during the early 2020s that pointed in less promising directions. As well as sharpening industrial contradictions we saw the triumphant return of new-old reactionary tendencies. Economism and sectionalism combined, bolstered by the existing pathologies of defeat, and too often won the day. Before long, the movement’s momentum stalled. It reverted to its usual state — of impotence in the face of industrial disintegration and cratering membership figures.

Two particularly damaging episodes marked the reassertion of those tendencies. At Labour’s 2021 conference, the Starmer project sought to consolidate its control by locking the socialist left out of future party leadership contests. They succeeded, in no small part because their efforts coincided with closing time for Unite’s decade-long political strategy within Labour. To adopt a more serious and radical industrial approach need not have meant cutting back on political organisation and agitation, but here it did. Just short of twelve months later, the TUC’s annual congress voted narrowly — reliant on support from the historically right-wing teachers’ union — to ‘campaign for immediate increases in defence spending’. This came at the crest of Slava Ukraini fervour, in which state-mandated moralism became the spear-tip for a militarist revival in the unions.

In that moment, limiting trade union concerns to bread and butter issues (economism) and renewing vows with the Atlantic military-industrial complex in the name of jobs (sectionalism) ceded the political field to the Labour hard right. That licensed the complete marginalisation of the left: not only humiliated and locked out of the party’s structures, but gagged on matters of war and peace.

Ground Zero

This potted recent-history can be condensed, and universalised, as follows: the workers’ movement might be dead, but disfigured trade unions stumble on in its wake. Almost two decades ago, the writing collective Endnotes published its famous anti-celebration of this movement, which they saw as lost to time. From Marx on down, they wrote, radical hopes had been vested in capitalism’s production of conditions that made its transcendence possible. Proletarianisation was to create the collective worker, ‘trained, united, and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.’ But even before the destruction of industry, this revolutionary promise seemed to be eclipsed, as workers embarked instead on a mission to affirm their status — their identity, even — as workers, across differences of all kinds. Though this won them major progressive reforms, it came at the cost of entrenching the basic capital-labour relation. From the 1970s onward, more and more workers found themselves ‘standing outside the factory gates, looking in’, as the ruin of industry undermined the foundations of their project.

Now, workers’ struggles continue after the workers’ movement but they are often sectional rather than general. ‘Struggles of particular fractions of the class’, argues Endnotes, are ‘almost always defensive’, while struggles for the class as a whole have largely migrated outside the workplace. Workers may partake in them, but not as workers. While this diagnosis might seem impossibly deflating, such pessimism is probably a better political starting point than much of the false optimism currently on offer — like declaring political distance from the labour movement a virtue for the left because trade unionism is ‘increasingly a minority pursuit’, and settling on the Green Party’s urban coalition as a substitute, or writing off the unions tout court because of their involvement with the arms and fossil fuel industries, opting for voluntarism instead.

Post-Labourism

Of course, the most common dismissal of the labour movement — and indeed the most significant, given its organisational effects — is indirect, manifesting in the default disconnection of most socialists in Britain from the trade unions. While it is a commonplace to point out that the left is in a rut, it is rarer to think about how to reinstitutionalise its politics when the prerequisites for doing so are twentieth-century artefacts. The result is a prevailing attitude of having given up before having really begun, treating our post-associational condition as immovable. What’s needed instead is an ability to grasp a constitutive paradox of our times: that while the labour movement has suffered stinging and possibly fatal defeats, it remains unavoidably central to socialist politics, and represents the only plausible vector of its revival.

The cadre of post-Corbynism, such as it is, exists in a particularly extreme state of deinstitutionalisation. This is partly thanks to the weight of historical circumstances. But it is also self-imposed: the product of strategic choices, like flitting between quixotic electoral projects and micro-movements-within-movements rather than focusing on initiatives that might plausibly endure. And the unions, for all their diminishment and deep tissue scarring, are in one way all that has endured, the last mass institutions at the left’s disposal. Not counting the specks — a think-tank here, an entrepreneurial media business there — nothing else has stayed intact through the sugar-rushes and blind stampedes of the social media herd. Projects aimed at building strong socialist institutions should therefore take the labour movement as their point of departure. Not only for negative reasons, but for a range of positive strategic ones.

A couple are particular to Britain. Labourism has, not for nothing, become a byword for all that is bad, bureaucratic and politically stultifying. It has also been spread so thinly pejoratively as to have been emptied of meaning. In that haze, it is easy to lose sight of a structural advantage: the affiliation of unions to the party affords all of them, even the organisationally slightest, political significance wholly out of proportion to their residual industrial presence. Such proximity to Labour can be, and often has been, deeply compromising in both directions. But it remains a chink in the armour of the state, a kind of latent democratic vulnerability. Massively well-resourced workers’ institutions, which can still be taken over by workers themselves, hold major political sway. This means that determinations of the future of socialist politics in Britain, within or without Labour, will have to go through the unions rather than round them.

Then there is the question of resurgent economism and sectionalism. Were these tendencies unassailable, the post-labourist left might be validated. Yet there has, in the past eighteen months especially, been a positive change in the balance of forces within and among the major unions. Last year alone saw the RMT replace one generationally talented leader with another, Unison elect a socialist lay-member as its general secretary, and the TUC vote by a comfortable margin to overturn its support for militarism.

What explains such shifts? The Labour Party’s catastrophic trajectory over the past six years was enabled at every turn by the deference or disengagement of the country’s three biggest unions. This seems to have led to a realisation that political abdication is wholly self-destructive: by turning away from politics, the major workers’ organisations help to turn politics against workers — which undermines their power in the workplace. Then there is the Gaza genocide. Four years ago, increased arms spending was argued for in the unions as a means to ‘aid the Ukrainian people under brutal assault from Putin’s regime’. ‘Jobs for freedom!’ might have been the rallying cry. Today, given the irreperable evil inflicted upon the Palestinian people and the strength of the mass movement against it, the industrial argument for bombs has been robbed of its putative moral force. Jobs at what price?

Revival

Together, these developments offer a glimpse of a less siloed and fragmented landscape. They point towards the possibility of a British trade union movement capable of articulating and advancing the general interest: the first condition for a new workers’ politics. In its initial stages, that might look something like a renewal of the old project of affirming workers as workers. If the unions can no longer aspire to represent a universal revolutionary cause, they can nonetheless return to fighting for the whole class, rather than just a fraction of it.

There can be no pretence that a recomposed, post-industrial proletariat will ever exert social power close to that of its predecessor. Romanticism for the lost worlds which forged such power is in that respect good and proper. But the so-called new working class might still, as Gabriel Winant suggests, hold ‘potent political power’. In Britain, the unions best placed to revive the movement as a mass, totalising force are those that do not have to square a circle between a fractional industrial politics and a general workers’ politics. What is for nurses and postal workers is for everyone. Their demands for better pay and conditions cannot be separated from wider struggles against a political settlement in which our public institutions have been gutted for profit and left to rot.

Reanimating the left, then, should commence in and through the unions, using their outsize political heft to foster conditions in which workplace organising can once again drive a class offensive rather than being the permanent rearguard. Genuine industrial power will not be revived without a political project that first succeeds in clearing the way, and it is only through the few mass institutions that have survived capital’s onslaught that such a politics can be crafted. Socialists in need of a slogan to guide the overcoming of their hyperpolitical present could therefore do worse than: The workers’ movement is dead, long live the workers’ movement!