The Communist Party and the trade union bureaucracy 1920-6

The centenary of the 1926 General Strike provides an occasion to re-examine the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB) stance towards the trade union bureaucracy, in particular the Trades Union Congress (TUC), at the time. The party’s stance, culminating in the adoption of the notoriously flawed slogan “All Power to the General Council!”, was skewed from early on.1 Within the Trotskyist tradition, this has conventionally been understood as resulting directly from the subordination of the party’s independent critical standpoint in favour of support for the Communist International (Comintern)-inspired Anglo-Russian (Trade Union) Committee, in which left-wing TUC leaders were involved.2 However, while the role of the Comintern was undoubtedly decisive, this article argues that the CPGB’s stance in 1926 can only be fully explained by analysing the interaction between external pressures by the Comintern with domestic objective and subjective factors that also influenced the way British revolutionaries—both before and after the CPGB was formed in 1920—grappled with the problem of how to understand and relate to trade union officialdom.

The focus of inquiry extends across the 16-year period from the onset of the “Labour Revolt” of 1910-14 to the General Strike of 1926. During this time, the revolutionary left made pioneering attempts to analyse the bureaucratic and conservative nature of union officialdom and devise the practical means by which it could be challenged. This review also highlights co-existing ideological and political limitations and weaknesses in the approach towards union officialdom evident within the pre-war syndicalist movement, wartime syndicalist-influenced shop stewards’ movement and then early 1920s CPGB, into which many leading militants of the earlier movements transitioned. Crucially, there was the absence of a coherent, consistent and fully developed Marxist theory of the contradictory character of trade unionism under capitalism and of the way in which union officials—whether left- or right-wing—were, by virtue of their distinct social role, subject to structural pressures towards compromise, restraint and betrayal, with important implications for revolutionary union strategy.

In the early 1920s, such weaknesses were compounded for the CPGB by domestic conditions that were complex, unfamiliar and less favourable than previously. Economic crisis, an employers’ offensive, a series of workers’ defeats, declining union membership and erosion of workplace organisation shifted power away from the shopfloor and towards the union bureaucracy. Even as industrial militancy revived from 1924 and a new layer of left-wing union leaders emerged, the CPGB’s strategic orientation on rebuilding independent rank-and-file strength and organisation was offset by hopes that effective leadership could be secured through reforming or capturing official union structures—above all the TUC General Council.

However, contrary to the interpretation advanced by James Hinton and Richard Hyman, which explains the CPGB’s evolving industrial policy primarily in terms of aspects of such “homegrown” factors, this article contends that the decisive determinant of the party’s opportunist trajectory in 1925-6 was the external political influence of the Comintern—read Russian—leadership in Moscow.3 Although early 1920s Comintern intervention undoubtedly helped to anchor the party’s revolutionary work in the unions, the simultaneous and sometimes ambiguous nature of its strategical and tactical directives compounded developing domestic tendencies for the CPGB to emphasise the need for centralised TUC leadership to lead workers’ struggles and to develop illusions in the TUC “lefts”. If in many respects such limitations during the first few years of the Comintern and CPGB were the mistakes of revolutionaries searching for new tactics in an unfamiliar field, a much more pivotal accommodation to union officialdom was to be spurred on by the emergence of a new party-state bureaucratic ruling group around Stalin in Russia, rooted in the isolation of the revolution and the search for bureaucratic allies abroad—expressed by the formation of the Anglo-Russian Committee between British and Russian union leaders to work for international unity. This was the critical factor in encouraging the CPGB to mute criticism of left TUC leaders and promote a dangerous reliance on the General Council in the lead up to the General Strike.

In re-examining the interaction between analytical weaknesses and domestic objective conditions alongside external international pressures, the article attempts to build on the work of authors within this journal’s tradition.4 In the process, it foregrounds hitherto neglected aspects, reveals fresh insights, critically challenges some existing interpretations and provides an understanding of the historical limitations of trade union officialdom—left- and right-wing—that remains of continuing contemporary relevance for today’s radical activists. The article is structured into five historical time periods: 1910-14, 1915-20, 1921-3, 1924-5 and 1925-6, before concluding with some general implications.

The bureaucracy and the syndicalist challenge, 1910-14

Although Sidney and Beatrice Webb identified the emergence of a layer of full-time union officials in Britain in the late 19th century, it was during the early 20th century that a rapid expansion of this union bureaucracy took place.5 The growth in union membership, amalgamation between unions and increasing size of national unions increased the number of full-time officials from 600-700 in the 1890s to 3,000-4,000 by 1920. Centralised authority, professionalised national collective bargaining and growing participation in state conciliation structures fostered a leadership layer whose social perspectives and material interests increasingly diverged from—and were antagonistic to—those of the membership. Such full-time officials became increasingly reluctant to endorse strike action that threatened bargaining relationships or organisational stability and instead tended to encourage compromise and accommodation to employers. As a result, it was in this period that the notion of the rank and file came to be regularly counterposed to that of union officials or the union bureaucracy.6

Indeed, one of the most remarkable features of the labour militancy that swept Britain in 1910-14 was its unofficial character and hostility to the existing trade-union leadership. The perceived incorporation of full-time union officials within formalised collective bargaining and conciliation machinery led many activists to believe official union policies tended to become cautious and conservative, with the consolidation of unions’ bargaining strength taking precedence over radical shopfloor grievances.7

Yet, the principal pre-war Marxist organisations were handicapped in their response to union officialdom. The British Socialist Party (BSP) leadership, dominated by the conservatism of Henry Mayers Hyndman and the abstract propagandism of its Social Democratic Federation progenitor, were dismissive of trade union activity, opposed unofficial strikes and insisted workers direct their energies towards political action through parliamentary change. Even though dissident syndicalist-influenced members became industrially active and helped force the party leadership to amend its hostility, the party leadership tended to focus on winning support from official union leaders rather than grassroots militancy as a means of left advance. By contrast, the tiny but influential syndicalist-influenced Socialist Labour Party (SLP) had a serious industrial orientation and castigated the union bureaucracy. However, believing the power of officials was an insurmountable obstacle to converting existing unions to socialism from within, they absolved themselves of the problem of bureaucracy by unsuccessfully attempting to build their own separate revolutionary industrial union in direct competition with existing unions. It was a strategy of dual unionism, similar to that advocated by the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States, which in British conditions of historically deeply-rooted trade unionism simply isolated militants in a highly sectarian and ultimately unsuccessful fashion.8

In this context, the revolutionary message of Tom Mann’s Industrial Syndicalist Education League (ISEL), established in 1910, resonated strongly among militants frustrated by the conservatism of officials: it emphasised direct action that bypassed the negotiating machinery and perceived class collaboration of official leaders. As John Thomas Murphy, the Sheffield-based engineering union activist, later recalled: “To be ‘agin’ the officials was as much a part of the nature of the syndicalist-minded workers of that time as to be ‘agin the Government’ was a part of the nature of an Irishman”.9

A pioneering attempt was made from within the revolutionary syndicalist tradition to understand and critique the bureaucratic and conservative role of union officialdom. Believing existing unions could be transformed into militant class-wide organisations dedicated to overthrowing capitalism, they highlighted the existence of a conservative social stratum of full-time officials and fundamental conflict of interests between this bureaucracy and the rank and file; condemned the way in which union officials functioned as a brake on workers’ struggles; and drew attention to the collaborationist logic of formalised collective bargaining and connection between the officials’ acquisition of organisational assets and their adoption of conciliatory and bureaucratic policies.10

Yet, they also proposed practical measures that could offset the official stranglehold. These included democratisation of unions, decentralisation of union power and mass membership participation to pressurise existing leaders into adopting militant policies. They also advocated the transformation of existing craft unions (that grouped workers narrowly on the basis of a specific skill or trade) through a process of amalgamation towards new forms of industrial unionism (uniting all workers in an industry into a single union) to overcome the sectional animosities and conservatism of union officialdom. Many of these ideas were presented in The Miners’ Next Step pamphlet published by the Unofficial Reform Committee (URC) within the South Wales Miners Federation in 1912. Note that the URC also attempted to reform the union machine by standing their own militants for election to union executive office.11 Closely linked to (and eventually merging with) the syndicalist movement was a national unofficial Amalgamation Committee Movement, with individual Amalgamation Committees in specific industries, including engineering, building and transport.

The syndicalist approach had significant limitations. First, they were inclined to believe that incorporation and bureaucratisation were only contingent tendencies rather than inevitable enduring structural features of trade-union organisation under capitalism. This led to the assumption that a change in the organisational form of existing trade unions would itself produce an equivalent transformation in their content. Yet, despite their success in promoting the amalgamation of different railway workers’ unions into a single model industrial structure in 1913, executive power within the National Union of Railwaymen remained in the hands of full-time union officials who proved as willing to compromise with employers as their sectionalist predecessors. Likewise, for union leaders involved in tentative negotiations towards a Triple Alliance linking 1.5 million miners, transport and railway workers—which had been established under rank-and-file pressure in 1914 (although not tested in practice)—this was not seen as a means of co-ordinating fragmented struggles and promoting class unity through sympathetic strike action. It was even less seen as a revolutionary weapon to overthrow capitalism as syndicalists advocated, but merely as a tactical means of enhancing bargaining leverage to secure collective agreements without the need for strike action.12

Second, there was a suspicion of any leadership, whether from official or unofficial sources. Syndicalists advocated rank-and-file militancy to push officials to either respond by giving a lead to the action of workers or be replaced by more accountable leaders. Yet, the ISEL was propagandist in nature, only loosely organised, and did not encourage alternative rank-and-file organisation and leadership structures capable of coordinating struggles independently of officials. Meanwhile, the URC’s “ginger group” emphasis on reforming officialdom was criticised by some of its own activists because militants elected to the union executive “ceased to be revolutionary, except in words. In the matter of deeds, they are not to be distinguished from the openly reactionary majority on the [Executive Committee]”.13

Third, syndicalism’s practical subordination of political activity to the industrial struggle underlined the way it did not have a grasp of the importance of connecting industrial agitation with socialist politics. As a consequence, it limited its capacity to provide a consistent political alternative leadership to the reformist leaders of the trade unions (and the Labour Party).

All this being said, the syndicalist movement’s insistence on rank-and-file militancy, industrial unionism, hostility to bureaucratic restraint and emphasis on workers’ self-activity shaped the consciousness of a generation of militants. These experiences formed the essential precondition for the more developed practice and analysis of rank-and-file independence that emerged during the wartime shop stewards’ movement and ultimately fed into the formation of the Communist Party.

The wartime shop stewards’ movement, 1915-20

Even before the onset of the First World War in 1914, the organised syndicalist movement had effectively disintegrated following internal divisions over whether to continue with the strategy of working inside exiting unions (“boring from within”) or adopting the “dual unionist” approach of establishing a separate revolutionary union. However, during and after the war, important aspects of the syndicalist tradition survived, albeit in a more diffuse manifestation, among leading engineering shop stewards, many of whom had been involved in the pre-war Amalgamation Committee Movement. Although some of these industrial militants were members of the SLP or BSP, in their theoretical outlook and practical activity, they blended central elements of the syndicalist tradition with revolutionary socialist politics.

Wartime conditions—marked by state control, strike bans, declining living standards, military conscription and the co-option of union leaders—radicalised workers and prompted the revival of unofficial rank-and-file miners’ reform, railway “vigilance” and engineering Amalgamation Committees. In engineering, where munitions production conferred formidable workplace leverage, it became possible to transform the shop stewards’ fragmented forms of organisation in different workplaces into Workers’ Committees in several towns. They formed a national rank-and-file movement that organised strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers across the industry in defiance of both union officials and the state. This context enabled revolutionary leaders to build upon and significantly advance the pre-war syndicalist tradition.

In particular, shop stewards’ leaders increasingly doubted that union bureaucracy and sectionalism could be overcome through official union amalgamation. Instead, they advocated building industrial unionism from below through inclusive cross-union workshop organisation linked by local Workers’ Committees that were seen as the basis for a future broader national class-wide organisation. Although their vision remained the creation of a single revolutionary industrial union—departmentalised according to industry—it was to arise organically from rank-and-file action rather than through official union amalgamation or separate dual unionism.14

A major theoretical advance came with a more developed critique of union officialdom articulated by Murphy, national shop stewards’ leader, in his pamphlet The Workers’ Committee.15 This outlined the principle of independent rank-and-file organisation operating both inside and outside official structures. Although this rank-and-file approach arose from the immediate necessities of wartime conditions, it pointed to a solution to the theoretical problem of union bureaucracy that had confounded the pre-war syndicalist movement. The strategy marked a shift from “applying pressure” on officials to “acting independently” of them—supporting officials when they moved in the right direction but bypassing them when they did not.16

It was also an approach that differed from the pre-war syndicalist URC. Reflecting the practical achievements of the wartime engineering shop stewards’ movement, Murphy demonstrated the possibilities of independent rank-and-file organisation based in the workshops rather than union branches. Instead of attempting to reform union officialdom, stewards’ leaders concentrated on developing a rank-and-file movement capable of providing an alternative source of authority to the union bureaucracy and of fighting independently, if necessary.17

After the war, the full revolutionary implications of independent rank-and-file organisation came to be appreciated by some of the main shop stewards’ leaders, such as Murphy, Willie Gallacher, Tom Bell and Arthur MacManus. This was in the context of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and subsequent formation of the Comintern, combined with revolutionary turmoil throughout Europe including massive labour unrest in Britain. Aided by a reassessment of strategic political orientations within both the SLP and BSP, and promoted by their own wartime practice, they extended the concept of rank-and-file independence from the union bureaucracy to the idea of the revolutionary seizure of state power by the Workers’ Committees.18 The Workers’ Committees were now conceived as potential organs of dual power and embryonic “soviets”, the economic and political nucleus of a future workers’ state similar to that in Russia, able to supplant the unions. Although such revolutionary optimism was quickly undermined by workers’ retreats and the collapse of the stewards’ movement by 1920, it nevertheless represented a significant advance on earlier syndicalist conceptions.19

In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was an enormous growth in the scale of strike activity surpassing even that of the 1910-14 period, with union membership undergoing a four-fold expansion. A notable feature of the militancy was the extent to which it took an official turn with some union leaders, riding the wave of struggle and political radicalisation (and impotence of the Labour Party), beginning to adopt quasi-syndicalist language of direct action and use of political general strikes to force parliament to respond to union demands.20 During this period, calls were also being made from below for the replacement of the ineffective TUC Parliamentary Committee by a General Council that, it was argued, could potentially become an organising centre for the trade union movement. The BSP’s newspaper, The Call, even put forward and attempted to popularise the demand for a “central executive…just as a general staff centrally directs a fighting army”.21 Moreover, many militants began to invest new hopes in a revived Triple Alliance as a powerful weapon that held out the prospect of coordinated class-wide strike action.

However, in 1919, amid widespread industrial unrest and an imminent national miners’ strike, Prime Minister Lloyd George skilfully neutralised any threat of generalised strike action. He argued that because the government would be unable to defeat such action, the Triple Alliance leaders would be obliged to either take on the functions of the state or withdraw and accept the authority of the state—at which point the Alliance leaders ignominiously recoiled.22 Significantly, while leading stewards recognised the revolutionary potential of mass strikes, it was a virtue of their political development that they approached the rhetoric of direct action during 1919-20 with caution. Murphy in particular articulated a more refined analysis of union officialdom than hitherto, arguing that institutionalised national collective bargaining, which required a specialised leadership role inclined towards compromise with employers and resistance to independent rank-and-file workers’ action, was embedded in the logic of accepting the parameters of capitalism. He presciently warned against the illusion that a TUC General Council could lead the revolution:

The call comes for a General Staff for the labour hosts [a General Council], and again the principal thought impressed is conservative and reactionary. The General Staff of officialdom is to be a dam to the surging tide of independent working-class aspirations and not a directing agency towards the overthrow of capitalism.23

Such an analysis pointed in the direction of an understanding that the only way to finally defeat the bureaucratic and collaborationist tendency of trade-unionism was to overthrow capitalism. Even if it is possible for workers to replace conservative officials with revolutionaries and to remould the structure of unions on industrial lines during a period of mass upheaval, the same tendency to bureaucracy and compromise with capital would rapidly assert itself until the revolution was accomplished.24 Alas, despite the advances made by shop stewards’ movement leaders, the full implications of their wartime practice and analysis with respect to union officialdom were not explicitly formulated, developed, or uniformly grasped, nor consolidated into a coherent, durable strategy.

Moreover, the legacy of syndicalism continued to weigh heavily on the stewards’ movement, such that it functioned as no more than a federation of autonomous local groups of militants, with a National Administrative Council that held no executive power and was opposed to any form of centralised leadership to coordinate resistance to government attacks. In addition, there was a continued subordination of politics to industrial struggle—exemplified by the refusal to publicly agitate against the war—and a lack of appreciation of the value of an organised revolutionary party (as with many pre-1917 socialists around the world) able to link industrial agitation with the political struggle against capitalism.25

Even so, the experience of the wartime shop stewards’ movement, as well as the impact of the Russian Revolution, formed the crucial bridge between syndicalism and the emergence of a new, industrially-orientated revolutionary socialist politics with the formation of the Communist Party.

Comintern ambiguities and domestic pressures, 1921-3

In 1919, Lenin and the Bolsheviks founded the Comintern with the aim of promoting international revolution by uniting radical socialist groups in different countries around the world into revolutionary Communist parties on the Russian model. Its intervention profoundly reshaped the British revolutionary left. Inspired by the October 1917 Revolution, a number of organisations—including the SLP, BSP and other smaller socialist groups—adopted Bolshevik principles combining industrial agitation with the need for a centralised and interventionist revolutionary party of the Bolshevik type. This culminated in the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in August 1920. By March 1921, the shop stewards’ movement had formally united with the party, subordinating its industrial work to the party leadership. As a result, the CPGB brought together pre-war syndicalists, wartime shop steward leaders, and militants rooted in unofficial amalgamation networks in different industries, including Mann, Murphy and many others. Indeed, of the eight members of the stewards’ National Administrative Council who had been elected in August 1917, six joined the CPGB by January 1921.26

However, despite its commitment to embedding all members in trade union activity, the CPGB also retained elements of its syndicalist, propagandist and sectarian heritage. The attempted fusion of Comintern perspectives with existing British revolutionary traditions in the conditions of the early 1920s was accompanied by persistent tensions over industrial strategy. Throughout 1921-4, two rival orientations co-existed uneasily within the party. One (influenced by some leading ex-SLP members) stressed the unreliability of officials, including left officials, and prioritised the need to foster independent rank-and-file struggle and organisation. The other (influenced by some leading ex-BSP members and ex-syndicalists) emphasised the need for centralised and coordinated leadership from the top of the union movement, combining grassroots pressure on existing leaders with attempts to capture official positions. The tension between these two contrasting, albeit simultaneously fluid and overlapping perspectives reflected a lack of theoretical clarity about the in-built structural and contradictory nature of trade union officialdom under capitalism to which even left-wing officials were subject. This weakness was to be exacerbated both by domestic conditions and by external pressures from Moscow.

In its early years, the Comintern attempted to develop a genuinely revolutionary Marxist trade union policy that drew on the best experience of working-class movements in the West and the Bolshevik leaders’ theoretical insights. Unlike syndicalists, the Comintern did not regard trade unions as the primary vehicle for overthrowing capitalism; this role belonged to workers’ councils (or “soviets”) guided by a mass revolutionary socialist party. It insisted on the necessity of building such a party, composed of politically advanced workers who linked industrial struggles with political agitation and organisation, to influence and lead rank-and-file union militants. Although supporting industrial unionism, the Comintern cautioned against fetishising it, instead prioritising factory-based Communist cells as well as factory committees to counter the conservative tendencies of union bureaucracies and support spontaneous worker action.27

Yet, the Bolsheviks faced a strategic disadvantage when applying their ideas to Western trade unionism. Under tsarism, unions had been illegal or semi-legal, preventing the development of entrenched bureaucracies such as in Western Europe, and consequently, the Bolsheviks lacked a nuanced analysis of trade unionism’s contradictory character. Although the Second Comintern Congress in 1920 acknowledged that union bureaucracies were obstructing the transformation of workers’ struggles into a revolutionary offensive against capitalism, leading Bolsheviks tended to assume that Western unions, including in Britain with its extensive bureaucracy, could be turned into revolutionary instruments. They argued that pressure from below could either force union leaders to adopt militant policies or be driven out and replaced by Communists.28

Such an analysis underestimated the structural resilience of the trade union bureaucracy, and the distinctive conservative and stabilising role officials could play even in moments of profound crisis, as demonstrated during the factory occupations in Italy in 1919-20 and mass strikes at the outset of the German Revolution of 1918-23. Bolshevik leaders dismissed the objections of those who insisted that Western union bureaucracies were too embedded to be conquered from within. Willie Gallacher of the CPGB gave voice to this frustration, arguing at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920 that, after 25 years of activity, revolutionaries had never succeeded in transforming British unions; instead, union structures had corrupted militants who had become officials.29 British shop stewards’ leaders’ orientation on encouraging rank-and-file activity and organisation independently of union bureaucracy was lauded, but the Comintern’s approach still encouraged a strategy of capturing official positions as a shortcut to mass influence, implying that moderate and reactionary forces could be swiftly swept aside.

In 1921, in a bid to encourage revolutionary syndicalist movements in Europe and America into its fold, the Comintern decided to form a Red International of Trade Unions (RILU) based in Moscow as a rival to the reformist-dominated International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) based in Amsterdam. This reinforced the CPGB’s weaknesses. With the IFTU leadership discredited by its wartime abandonment of internationalism, the Comintern expected a revolutionary Europewide upsurge to weaken it further. Its RILU initiative, however, contained a fundamental contradiction. While advocating the need for Communists to work within existing unions and fight against the conservatism of the union bureaucracy (rather than splitting away to form revolutionary unions), it also promoted a new separate revolutionary trade union centre on an international level to which national unions were encouraged to affiliate. The expectation was that, in the short-term, unions could be won wholesale or substantial sections could split off in support of an official world mass union body committed to Communist politics. This led to the creation of a British Bureau of the RILU—funded by Moscow and headed by leading CPGB figures such as Harry Pollitt and Tom Mann—which, working as the chief industrial arm of the party over the next two to three years, sought to win national union support for the new Red International. It was a highly inconsistent strategy that proved confusing and had the effect of muddying the waters of the CPGB’s crucial task of encouraging rank-and-file activity and organisation, of keeping up a consistent challenge to the union bureaucracy while attempting to win official union support for RILU affiliation (on which it failed to win a single national union).30

Following the ebb of the revolutionary upsurge of 1917-20, the Comintern’s Third Congress in 1921 acknowledged that the revolutionary optimism on which its strategy had been founded had been undermined. It meant that the possibilities for Communist parties leading the masses directly into revolutionary trade unionism had altered. In the new situation, it was now argued, revolutionaries as a minority within unions could only win the support of a majority of the working class through their involvement in trade union struggles around partial demands. They had to win backing for these demands from workers influenced by reformist leaders so as to prove in practice the superiority of communist politics and challenge the grip of the reformist leaders.

However, the adoption of this “united front” policy coincided with a period of disorganisation inside the newly-formed CPGB, eventually prompting the Comintern to summon its entire leadership to Moscow in June 1923. It was subjected to severe criticism for failing to intervene effectively in industrial disputes, root the party in the workplace and organise its trade union members on a systematic basis. Shortcomings of the British Bureau of the RILU were also enumerated, including too close an identification with the single issue of affiliation to the Red International, and a tendency to create overlapping machinery of propaganda and organisation within the party (British Bureau of RILU and CPGB Industrial Department) that hampered effective intervention. A Comintern Commission highlighted important aspects of the party’s loose branch structure and abstract propagandist, sectarian and anti-leadership traditions. It recommended the complete reorganisation (later termed “Bolshevisation”) of the floundering party, with the adoption of a strong central executive that would provide more directive leadership.31

Crucially, Moscow also insisted the CPGB should avoid organising only within its own narrow structures and instead set about the task of rallying all existing disparate left-wing currents within the unions into a supplementary organisation that could advance the “united front” and remedy the CPGB’s marginality. By the autumn of 1923, the party’s paper, Workers’ Weekly, argued the lack of direction shown by the TUC General Council proved the need for “a vigorous national left-wing movement to make an end to the existing bureaucratic stagnation”.32 Yet, while in many respects Moscow’s intervention went a long way towards correcting the weaknesses of the party and setting it onto the path of becoming more focused and interventionist, the launching of a National Minority Movement was not to take place until a year later (examined below). Meanwhile, there remained ambivalent perspectives within the party leadership about how to meet the challenge of trade union officialdom.

These developments unfolded amid highly adverse domestic conditions. First, in 1921-3, there was a deep economic crisis and employers’ offensive, with factory closures, mass unemployment, wage-cutting lockouts and victimisation of militants. Union membership collapsed from 8.3 million (1920) to 5.5 million (1925) along with a dramatic decline in the level of strike activity. In the process, the wartime Shop Stewards’ and Workers’ Committee Movement saw a rapid decline, dwindling into a rump of revolutionaries (and by June 1922 submerged into the British Bureau of RILU). Although there was by no means a rout of the working class movement, with a solid core of organised workers waiting for the return of more favourable conditions to resume a fighting stance, the immediate impact of the undermining of working-class industrial militancy and confidence was for power within unions to shift upwards towards officials.33

Inevitably, the change in the fighting strength of workers proved to be highly problematic for the CPGB’s strategic orientation on shopfloor power. Despite encouragement by the Comintern and RILU for the party to build and strengthen the power of factory committees, this was not achieved in more than a limited fashion. Conditions during the war had been advantageous to a militant shop stewards’ movement ignoring the officials and acting independently of them, but the new economic and industrial environment forced militants to shift the focus of industrial work from the shopfloor to the union branch, district committees, trades councils and the structure of unions generally as the main locus of opposition. Only the miners’ Unofficial Reform Committee survived as a functioning model of militant trade union activism with its “ginger group” approach. Overall, such developments contributed to the party’s emphasis on campaigning for a new type of official union leadership of the working-class movement by attempting to win union positions and gain influence among left officials.

Second, there was the Black Friday debacle of 15 April 1921, when Triple Alliance leaders of the railway and transport workers’ unions capitulated at the last moment from organising promised sympathetic strike action with the Miners’ Federation. They abandoned the miners and opened up a period of retreat for the working-class movement. Even though, in the immediately preceding period, the CPGB had conducted a campaign under the slogan “Watch Your Leaders!”, it had offered no concrete realistic strategy for rank-and-file activity in the event of betrayal. Moreover, the Third CPGB Congress in April 1921 simply reiterated the need for continued vigilance, albeit expelling its own discredited Triple Alliance left-wing transport workers’ leader and party member Robert Williams. The shock and scale of the betrayal prompted internal reassessment. Some, like the legendary Tom Mann, argued for replacing “bad” leaders with “good” ones through organisational reform and electoral efforts that looked towards concentrating on building strength at the top of the movement.34 Both the Russian-American Comintern emissary assigned to Britain, Mikhail Borodin, and Murphy rejected this approach as insufficient, suggesting reactionary leaders would have to be removed through encouraging the fighting power of the rank-and-file from the bottom up to fight the bureaucracy.35 However, with workers’ confidence and organisation undermined, an increased focus on changes in official union positions, and trying to replace right-wing union officials with left-wingers, appeared to be an important accompanying option to concentrating on trying to rebuild shopfloor organisation.

Third, the creation of the TUC General Council in 1921 generated growing illusions among many union militants that it could be transformed from being merely a co-ordinating body with no executive authority, into a centralised directing body. This could overcome the way fragmentation and sectionalism between individual unions was leading to industrial struggles being defeated and provide overall leadership to working-class struggles against the capitalist class as a whole.36 In this respect, it is significant that in September 1921, a manifesto signed by Gregorii Zinoviev and Solomon Lozovsky for the executives of the Comintern and RILU respectively, along with MacManus for the CPGB, sought to draw lessons from Black Friday. It argued:

The Trades Union Congress, to become an organisation capable of leading the working class in its struggle against Capitalism, must be reorganised. It must be not only a Trades Union Congress, but chiefly a Labour Congress. It must derive its authority directly from the rank and file, and so possess the power to elect the General Staff of Labour, to manoeuvre for position against the bourgeoisie and the Government, to move the army of Labour whatever and whenever necessary.37

The manifesto called for workers’ committees and local trades councils to act as the General Staff of Labour in the localities, with the Congress of the TUC made representative and responsible to the whole of the working class.

In the months that followed, the CPGB elaborated such an approach. It argued that to avoid the betrayals of the past, it would be necessary to broaden the basis of representation at TUC Congresses, with delegates elected by conferences of representatives from local union branches and committees, as well as from trades councils and unemployed committees that could act as local organising centres of the struggle. As Harry Pollitt explained, it was necessary to demand the General Council be given more power to take charge of the struggle “not because we have such great faith in it, but because the principle of centralised leadership is established, and the next step would be to improve it by changing the personnel of the General Council”.38 He added:

At the moment its present personnel may not be desirous of using that power, but the General Council must become the central fighting organ of the Trade Union Movement. To do this it will have to have power…to call out unions on strike in support of any union engaged in a struggle with the capitalists, and where necessary it must have the power to call a general strike.39

Ironically, even Murphy, who had poured scorn on the call for a “General Staff of Labour” in 1919, was now prepared to change his position in anticipation of change in personnel:

A General Council we must have which shall function as a general staff. There is no Union which can fight a winning battle on its own to-day. The massing of the Unions and submission to a central lead is essential. This can be obtained by investing the Trades Union Congress and the General Council with Executive Power over all Unions.40

In other words, the changed economic context curtailed scope for independent rank-and-file initiative, and industrial militancy, to a much greater degree, depended on official union leadership. This contributed to encouraging CPGB leaders’ illusions that the TUC—with more accountable and left-wing officials—could act as a “General Staff of Labour” to lead workers’ struggles. Moscow also provided some credence to such an approach.

If there had been a greater degree of theoretical clarity about the nature of the trade union bureaucracy, such as on the way in which—however “reconstituted”—trade union officialdom would still operate ultimately as the machinery for constraining workers’ struggles against capital, there might not have been quite the same pull within the party. Certainly, there remained people within the party who were still committed to the need for rank-and-file independence.

The shifting balance between the CPGB leaders’ orientation on rank-and-file initiative and official union leadership was to become more sharply delineated from 1924.

National Minority Movement, 1924-25

Significantly, from the end of 1923, with the onset of modest economic recovery and falling unemployment, there was to be renewed working-class industrial militancy reflected in an increasing level of strike activity across the country, notably among miners, that was more conducive to oppositional rank-and-file trade union activity. This revival was accompanied by the rise to prominence of a number of left union leaders, notably Alf Purcell (furniture workers), Alonzo Swales (engineering workers) and George Hicks (building workers), who had been syndicalist and socialist-influenced militants from the pre-war years onwards. All of them espoused radical aspirations (albeit mainly on international issues), were highly sympathetic to the gains made by the Russian Revolution, and were exerting an influence on the TUC General Council to which they were elected.

It was in this context that the National Minority Movement (NMM) was finally launched in August 1924, marking an important development in the CPGB’s industrial work. Despite the British Bureau of the RILU’s failure to secure any national union affiliation to the Red International, it had contributed to attempting to counteract the demoralisation inside the working-class movement with the “Back to the Unions: Stop the Retreat!” campaign, which served as a rallying centre for militant trade unionism. From 1923, it had stepped up its support for rank-and-file union groupings among engineers and railway and transport workers, as well as promoting the role of local trades councils. It had also promoted the establishment of a Miners’ Minority Movement, which in 1924, as the most deeply-rooted and influential of the opposition bodies, successfully secured the election of the pre-war syndicalist and brief CPGB member (July 1920-September 1921) Arthur James Cook to the position of MFGB general secretary.41

At the founding conference of the NMM, chaired by Mann, all the various individual unofficial groups of the previous years were brought together into a national unified movement around a coherent militant programme of action, which developed specific demands for each industry over wages and conditions, democratic union reform and industrial unionism. It quickly became a prominent national body that injected new life into many trade union branches and trades councils around a campaign to turn defensive struggles into an onslaught on employers and government, allowing the Communist Party to expand its working-class base in a number of sectors and areas. The NMM programme was set within the context of its primary stated aim: “to organise the working masses of Great Britain for the overthrow of capitalism…the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth”.42 Unlike the syndicalist tradition, the CPGB at its Sixth Congress in May 1924 insisted that “the opposition movements can only go forward under the leadership of a powerful Communist Party, which can unite its forces and carry through the struggle to its revolutionary goal”.43 In 1924-6, the National Minority Movement became the main vehicle of the party’s industrial politics, with the British Bureau of the RILU quietly disappearing within the new body which now became the Red International’s affiliate in Britain. Leading CPGB members were at the helm of the organising positions of the NMM’s main sections, as well as on its national secretariat (including Pollitt, Mann and Murphy).

The NMM reiterated the call for a strengthened TUC General Council with extensive powers. With the experience of Black Friday and break-up of the Triple Alliance in mind, it echoed the CPGB’s declared aim of securing rank-and-file control over the General Council to prevent it from becoming a reactionary restraint on the movement. To this end, it called for factory and pit committees that could contribute to the election of union delegates to Congress, along with restructured trades councils with direct representation, thereby creating an accountable General Staff.

Michael Woodhouse suggested that, in its industrial work at this time, the CPGB and NMM “did not operate with the idea of gingering the trade union leadership into militant action from below, but rather with the fundamental perspective of establishing rank-and-file control over the leadership through their day-to-day work among the rank-and-file and winning them to a revolutionary position”.44 It believed that out of the struggle for militancy, a new leadership could emerge from below in which revolutionaries would play a key role, able to unite the class regardless of the official leadership. It stressed it could not primarily win support for workers’ struggles by agreement with left-wing union officials but through building among the rank-and-file and developing sectoral MMs capable of fighting independently of officials. Indeed, the party press carried warnings of the unreliability of the TUC lefts and argued that an alliance with them could in no way provide a substitute for a strong NMM. As John Ross Campbell warned in the October 1924 issue of Communist Review:

It would be a suicidal policy…for the Communist Party and the Minority Movement to place too much reliance on what we have called the official left wing… It is the duty of the Party and the Minority Movement to criticise its weakness relentlessly and endeavour to change the muddled and incomplete left-wing viewpoint of the more progressive leaders into a revolutionary viewpoint. But the revolutionary workers must never forget that their main activity must be devoted to capturing the masses.45

Accordingly, Woodhouse suggested the CPGB approached the critical year of 1925, which saw the acceleration of industrial militancy and anticipation of the General Strike, in a “potentially strong theoretical and organisational position”.46 However, arguably such an assessment runs the risk of downplaying the impact of persistent analytical ambiguities (in part compounded by early Comintern and RILU policy) and problematic domestic conditions on the party. Moreover, its strategic orientation (largely derived from the BSP) had increasingly tended to tilt towards encouraging illusions that the task of creating a “good” TUC General Council leadership could be as (if not more) important as the more demanding job of building the strength of the rank and file.

The NMM, as Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein point out, was not a rebirth of the shop stewards’ movement. It grew rapidly, such that at its second annual conference in August 1925, it claimed representation for 750,000 workers (over three times its attendance the previous year). Yet, conference delegates were primarily from union branches, district committees and trades councils rather than directly from workshops or pits, somewhat limiting its capacity for organising independent rank-and-file action. Its annual conferences focused heavily on resolutions to be presented to TUC Congress and through the official apparatus of individual unions. Although the NMM referred to the need for shopfloor committees, its main policies tended to mitigate against such work. This was because it tended to function less as a fully-fledged rank-and-file movement attempting to encourage grassroots initiatives that retained strategic independence from officials, both left and right, than as a militant caucus focused on pressurising union bureaucrats, winning official positions and cultivating alliances with sympathetic left leaders to provide leadership on behalf of the rank and file.47 The tacit support given to the NMM by the new TUC General Council members Purcell, Swales and Hicks reinforced this process. Only analytical and political clarity about the nature of trade union bureaucracy in such a hybrid body could have avoided the pull towards channelling the rank and file into the arms of the officials. Such domestic CPGB and NMM developments were also affected by external influence from Moscow, which bolstered the CPGB’s growing illusions in the TUC lefts and its subsequent disastrous strategic errors in the run-up to the General Strike.

The road to the General Strike, 1925-6

Lenin’s death in January 1924 marked a turning point within the Russian Communist Party leadership, with the increasing rise to power of a bloc around Zinoviev, Stalin and Lew Kamenev engaged in a bitter conflict with Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition. The crushing defeat of the German Revolution in October 1923 convinced Stalin that Russia could not expect its salvation from imminent revolutions abroad and would therefore be thrown back on its own resources. The concept of “socialism in one country” gradually began to be articulated and fitted well with the needs and aspirations of the newly emerging party-state bureaucracy within the Soviet Union.48 Workers’ democracy had withered under the combined impact of an externally-backed and imposed civil war, famine, total economic collapse and destruction of the working class that had made the Russian Revolution.

It suggested Moscow would have to seek allies and security elsewhere, notably through alliances with “progressive” reformist elements in foreign labour movements, viewed as a means of securing international diplomatic legitimacy and discouraging anti-Soviet intervention by Western governments. Such an approach only became official doctrine in 1925-7, after bitter political and economic struggles in both party and state—with speeding-up of internal economic development its central and controlling aim. Ironically, in the process, both Zinoviev and Kamenev were themselves to become sidelined and thrown into opposition to Stalin and his rising power base, now allied with Nikolai Bukharin, who became de facto president of the Comintern after Zinoviev.

The strategic shift had extremely important implications for the Comintern and RILU as international diplomacy gradually began to take precedence over the imperative of extending socialist revolution abroad, with the Stalinist-controlled bureaucracy viewing foreign Communist parties such as the CPGB as essentially frontier guards of the Soviet Union. Already in the lead up to the 1926 General Strike, we can see the way in which it was this policy that encouraged the Russian leaders and their allies in the Comintern to attempt to heal the breach between the RILU and the International Federation of Trade Unions and facilitate the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee.

The relative weakness of the CPGB seemed to be offset by the position of the trade unions, which, while enjoying wide influence and prestige, were the dominant power within the Labour Party and had shown practical sympathy with the Russian Revolution. From the moment the “united front” policy had been proclaimed, the prospect of wining trade union support for Moscow had been judged to be more promising in Britain—a key imperialist state in Europe—than in any other country. In particular, Zinoviev, president of the Comintern, had become very impressed with the rise of industrial struggle and the emergence of the left union leaders. This was notably the case with Purcell, who had chaired a national “Hands Off Russia!”-Committee in 1919-20, headed a trade union delegation to Russia, contributed to the formation of the RILU, been a founder member of the CPGB (leaving in 1922) and was to become spokesperson of the left on the TUC General Council. Accordingly, at the Fifth Comintern Congress (June-July 1924), Zinoviev appeared to suggest the development of the CPGB was progressing too slowly for the objective possibilities being offered by developments in the British labour movement and implied that a short cut to the development of a mass revolutionary party could be built through the “other door” of an alliance with the left-leaning trade union (and Labour Party) leaders in Britain.49

It is true that the Fifth Comintern Congress formally agreed a resolution stating the extent to which the politically vacillating left leaders in Britain could be stiffened up and brought to a revolutionary position depended primarily on the strength of a rank-and-file minority movement led by the CPGB and the leaders’ willingness to support workers’ struggles. It declared that to overestimate the left, and ignore its timidity and inconsistency, would be a grave error.50 Yet, in many respects, this stance was to be undermined by the opportunist emphasis on encouraging fraternal links between the Russian unions and TUC leaders and making alliances with the left officials as a promising vehicle for securing Soviet legitimacy and protection.

At the same time, there was a contrast between the formal and substantive stance adopted by the RILU’s Third Congress in 1924, which immediately followed the Comintern. Formally, it agreed a Resolution on the Tasks of the Adherents of the RILU in Great Britain. It urged the need to form revolutionary minority groups of Red International adherents in different industries that should do all that was possible to break the British working masses away from the disintegrating influence of the reformist union leaders.51 However, such a rank-and-file approach was compromised by the way in which, since the adoption by the Comintern of the “united front”, the RILU tried in vain to heal the division with the Amsterdam-based International Federation of Trade Unions. By 1924, the original “Moscow versus Amsterdam” stance was replaced by the call for the unity of the international trade union movement (RILU and IFTU) into a new single world trade union International. In other words, the RILU now sought to co-operate in a common struggle in defence of workers’ immediate interests with the very reformist-led body it had initially been set up to destroy and had previously described “as an agency of the bourgeoisie in the workers camp”.52

The obvious paradox was that the RILU begged the question as to whether its whole project had been a mistake from the outset and whether it should now be dissolved, as some argued. The search for an end to its contradictory existence, notwithstanding its formal appeal for the development of left-wing minority groups in individual countries, took it in a different direction altogether—towards trying to unite with the bureaucrats who led the Amsterdam International. Crucially, there was the hope that trade unions affiliated to the IFTU, of which the largest and most influential national constituent was the British TUC, could be encouraged to use their influence to convince Amsterdam to agree to a joint congress between the two international bodies with a view to merger, thereby bringing the Russian unions into the fold.53

Mikhail Tomsky, president of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, addressed the 1924 Hull TUC Congress and promoted international unity amidst a strong pro-Soviet sentiment inside British unions. Several prominent left-wing union leaders—including Purcell, Swales, Hicks, along with Cook (Miners’ Union), Fred Bramley (TUC General Secretary) and Ben Tillett (Transport Workers)—supported closer ties with Soviet unions. A TUC delegation, led by Purcell, then visited Russia and agreed in principle to Moscow’s proposal to establish an Anglo-Russian Committee, a joint body linking the TUC General Council with the All-Russian Central Council of Unions. The CPGB and NMM actively campaigned for the TUC to endorse this proposal. In April 1925, the TUC finally formally agreed to the Committee (on which Purcell, Swales and Hicks were elected), giving the Soviet unions a channel to influence British union leaders at a bureaucratic level. Purcell became the leading advocate for bringing the Russians into the IFTU.

The ramifications of such developments were to be a qualitative shift in the CPGB’s industrial orientation. As previously noted, since 1920, the Communist Party had combined a stress on building workplace-based rank-and-file organisation with an increasing tendency to look to TUC leadership from above. However, from 1925, the Stalinist-influenced strategy of forging alliances with the union bureaucracy expressed in Britain through the formation of the Anglo-Russian Committee fundamentally spurred on the CPGB’s trend towards an orientation on the TUC General Council. It encouraged the party to restrain criticism of the left union leaders, whose collaboration with Soviet unions gave them a certain revolutionary aura, in the interests of encouraging support for international unity. In the process, it also helped to foster workers’ illusions more broadly in the TUC leading the struggle forward in the months leading up to the General Strike.

Trotsky was the only major figure in the Russian leadership to stand out against such developments. Although he overestimated the revolutionary situation in Britain and was not opposed in principle to the Anglo-Russian Committee, he criticised Stalin’s approach on the basis that a continuing attempt to spread the revolution internationally was still the best guarantee to defend Soviet Russia. He also emphasised that while the British left-wing union leaders were an expression of a radicalised mood inside the working-class movement, they were also a primary brake on its development. In March 1926, Trotsky was to warn of the way left leaders, just like their right-wing counterparts, directed their efforts towards the conciliatory and conservative solution of the problem of the mining industry crisis:

Even when in words they admit the inevitability of struggle and revolution they are hoping in their hearts for some miracle which will release them from these perspectives. And in any event they themselves will stall, evade, temporise, shift responsibility and effectively assist Thomas [right-wing TUC leader] over any really major question of the British labour movement (with regard to international questions they are a bit bolder!).54

He explained that it was necessary to assist the British Communist Party to arm rank-and-file activists with an understanding that, rather than encouraging any faith or reliance on the left leaders, the CPGB would only be able to lead the working class through relentless criticism of the union bureaucracy’s predisposition towards compromise and treachery.55 However, by now, Trotsky and the Left Opposition had become marginalised and subject to a barrage of Russian party and state condemnation.

Meanwhile, domestic events in July 1925 reinforced the CPGB’s trajectory. With mine owners giving notice of wage cuts and threatening a national lock-out, widespread grassroots trade union movement pressure led to a special conference of trade union executives organised by the TUC. It agreed to place a solidarity embargo on the movement of coal by rail and transport workers. Although the Stanley Baldwin government backed down, had the lock-out notices withdrawn and announced a nine-month subsidy to maintain miners’ wage rates, the victory of Red Friday only postponed the inevitable future confrontation. Moreover, it the generated misapprehension inside the CPGB that the TUC General Council could be relied upon to act firmly again when the mining crisis finally came to a head in May 1926. As Mann wrote:

No need to recite the many occasions in the last 30 years when officials of the unions have made it abundantly clear to all concerned that they were not out for class antagonisms but on the contrary for class collaboration… [However,] the General Council is creditably active, and we hope and believe becoming more so, and as far as our influence goes, we do and we shall help to make that Council more perfectly representative of the whole organised workers of the country, and increasingly efficient to conduct the great and growing movement to victory.56

The unwillingness to criticise the “lefts” for fear of antagonising their allies on the Anglo-Russian Committee meant that in the months between Red Friday and the General Strike, the abject failure of the General Council—including its left wing—to make any preparations was rarely criticised, and when it was, the tone was mild. By October 1925, Workers’ Weekly stated: “We should avoid rivalry and recognise the General Council as the General Staff directing the unions in the struggle”.57 In other words, for the NMM, local organisation in the run-up to the General Strike was now no longer viewed as the means of building a new rank-and-file leadership to develop control from below on the General Council so as to ensure they did not use any increase in powers to betray the workers, as previously stated. It was merely a method of putting into effect the course agreed by the TUC leaders.

The CPGB’s slogan in Workers’ Weekly adopted on 1 January 1926, “All Power to the General Council!” (a conscious echo of Lenin’s “All Power to the Soviets” in the Russian Revolution) symbolised this decisive shift. The party refrained from warning workers of the danger of TUC betrayal, challenging the verbal militancy of the left leaders and preparing workers for the approaching confrontation by campaigning for independent rank-and-file organisation to provide alternative centres of leadership. Instead, it effectively encouraged workers to place their trust and reliance on the TUC official left-wing and General Council. Whereas the CPGB had previously proposed the idea of “more power to the General Council” and establishment of a “General Staff of Labour” by replacing its personnel with avowed shopfloor militants and revolutionaries (a doubtful tactic in the first place), it now pushed the current General Council forward, reinforcing the impression that they were capable of leading the working class to victory.58

In March 1926, in his opening address to a special NMM Conference of Action, Mann made a rallying appeal for the mobilisation of workers in each locality, with strong factory committees and trades councils to set themselves up as Councils of Action to co-ordinate the General Strike at a local level, with the formation of Workers’ Defence Corps to protect trade union headquarters. However, he simultaneously insisted: “The real central body through which we must function is the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. All unions should be loyal thereto and cooperate loyally therewith”.59 Ironically, the party’s trusting faith in the TUC leadership was expressed by Murphy in an article that appeared on the front page of Workers’ Weekly three days before the General Strike. He described “those who do not look for a path along which to retreat as good trade union leaders who have sufficient character to stand firm on the demands of the miners”, even though he thought they were incapable of facing all the implications of a united working-class challenge to the state.60

In reality, just as there had been a complete failure by the TUC to prepare for a General Strike, so there was an equal failure to lead and conduct the struggle. Reflecting fears that a class-wide general strike could escalate beyond their control, they exerted all their efforts to restricting the numbers involved, restraining workers’ militancy and undermining the strike’s impact, before shamefully calling it off without securing any settlement of the dispute or withdrawal of mine owners’ lockout notices, and with no guarantees regarding the victimisation of strikers. In effect, it accepted wage cuts on behalf of miners who had not been directly involved in negotiations themselves. Every single one of the left TUC leaders agreed to this complete treacherous surrender.

Moreover, despite the fact thousands of party activists heroically threw themselves into local strike committees and promoted the Councils of Action to co-ordinate the General Strike at a local level, the CP and NMM’s strategic orientation prioritised unity with, and loyalty to, the TUC General Council. Even after the TUC, including its entire left, had called off the strike and betrayed the miners, the CPGB continued to be constrained by its fidelity to the Anglo-Russian Committee and therefore targeted criticism of the betrayal primarily at the right-wing leaders of the General Council. It warned: “There will be a reaction within our party against working with left leaders. We must fight down this natural feeling and get better contact with these leaders and more mass pressure on them”.61

Historical interpretation

It is in this light that we can see the misjudgement of Hinton and Hyman’s claim that the CPGB’s over-dependence on the left union bureaucracy was to be explained mainly in terms of home-grown factors, a viewpoint that effectively throws the baby out with the bathwater. The fact that the British party was a national section of a centralised world revolutionary movement, which owed its very existence to the Russian Revolution and prestige of its Bolshevik leaders, meant it was profoundly shaped by advice and guidance from Moscow. Indeed, the British party—like the NMM—was in all essentials politically subordinate, financially subsidised and closely supervised by Moscow.62 In such circumstances, the changing and sometimes contradictory strategic and tactical line of the Comintern was bound to be decisive. With British Communist leaders tending to regard the “Russians as the masters, the British the pupils”, they were all too often politically swayed by the leadership of Zinoviev and then Stalin, and it was this which proved to be the crucial determining factor.63 Indeed, one of the main reasons the British party leadership managed to avoid a purge by the Comintern in 1925-6, compared with their much larger and more influential European Communist counterparts, was their prompt outright condemnation of the first signs of “Trotskyism”, including Trotsky’s Lessons of October and Where is Britain Going?.64

It is true, as Hinton and Hyman pointed out, that the party and NMM never abandoned their exhortations for the TUC General Council to implement the Congress resolution endorsing the formation of factory committees, appeals to its supporters to take their own initiative in establishing such factory committees and calls for local trades councils to set up Councils of Action to coordinate action across union bodies.65 However, in 1926, it was not principally objective conditions beyond the party’s control that undermined such calls to action, but the way in which they were subordinated to the overall strategic thrust of the strategy of “All Power to the General Council!”, which flowed directly from the Russian leadership’s approach.

Moreover, Hinton and Hyman provided a misconstrued and lopsided interpretation by claiming that rather than the CPGB being pulled to the right by the Comintern, it was criticised from the left by Moscow, reflecting contrasting estimations of revolutionary possibilities and roles of the left leaders. They emphasised the way in which between March and May 1926, the Executive Committee of the Comintern, now under the leadership of Bukharin, announced that TUC leaders in Britain were irresolute, with some prepared to betray the fight before it had even begun, and with left-wing leaders showing themselves to be unequal to the situation. Likewise, it criticised the CPGB for paying insufficient attention to the hesitation of the left leaders. Once the strike was in progress, the Comintern stressed both the revolutionary possibilities of the strike, and inadequacies of the official lefts. After the TUC betrayal, the Comintern chastised the CPGB for its failure to criticise sharply enough the “left capitulators” on the General Council, a message also made in a manifesto issued by the All-Russian Trade Union Council (a behind-the-scenes initiative of Stalin), which was only published in Workers’ Weekly after Russian pressure.66

Yet, despite such formal left pronouncements by the Comintern, the inexorable logic of Moscow’s search for allies on the TUC inevitably distorted the trade union policy of the CPGB’s leaders. Moreover, crucially, Hinton and Hyman downplayed the way in which the Comintern’s directives were bound up with the explicit and disingenuous attempt by the growing Stalinist faction within the Russian leadership to outflank Trotsky’s criticism of the CPGB’s subordination to the TUC left and his demand for Russian withdrawal from the Anglo-Russian Committee. It reflected the Comintern’s preparedness to switch between opportunism and leftism, depending on the immediate needs of the developing Russian bureaucracy. Ironically, Stalin subsequently publicly exonerated the CPGB, expressing the view that the party had acted correctly throughout the strike and his (qualified) continuing faith in the future of the Anglo-Russian Committee. What is more, in practice, the CPGB’s trajectory was a direct consequence of Moscow’s policy, not something that occurred irrespective of it or in some secondary fashion to domestic conditions.67

Overall, then, although there were undoubtedly important “native” opportunist tendencies, the fact that the Comintern and RILU themselves built illusions in both the TUC lefts and the General Council was bound to be pivotal, and Hinton and Hyman unintentionally absolved Moscow and the growing Stalinist element within the party-state bureaucracy of their main responsibility for the CPGB’s conduct.68

Of course, even if the party had adopted a different strategy, it would be a mistake to assume it would have been strong enough to have built a rank-and-file movement that could have completely altered the eventual outcome of events. However, it could have reduced illusions in the left leaders, strengthened workers’ preparedness, mitigated the shock of the General Council’s capitulation, provided a coherent political explanation of the defeat and placed the party in a better position to weather the downturn in struggle that followed.

Contemporary implications

There are some important contemporary implications. First, the need for theoretical clarity about the structural limits of full-time trade union officials. Their social role is to function as intermediaries between capital and labour, and they have interests different from rank-and-file members. Crucially, even though they express their members’ grievances, and sometimes threaten or lead strikes, the union bureaucracy is also subject to powerful moderating pressures to make compromises with employers and the state. This is premised on a social and economic system that is founded on the continued exploitation of the members they represent. Anxious to defend the union’s organisational and financial stability, as well as their own vested position in the continued existence of the economic and political system upon which their livelihood and position depend, they become committed to confining the class struggle. Instead, union bureaucrats tend to searches for reforms within the framework of a capitalist society and the authority of its state apparatus, and are therefore encouraged to limit workers’ struggles and end strikes on compromise terms detrimental to rank-and-file interests and aspirations.69

Second, although ideological and political differences between “left-” and “right-wing” officials are obviously important (and which revolutionaries cannot ignore or be dismissive about), they are ancillary to the much more fundamental common material social role, position and interests that bind all officials together as a distinct social group, and therefore subordinate to the much more fundamental antagonism of interest that exists within the trade union movement between the union bureaucracy as a whole and the rank-and-file membership. This means left-wing officials, despite their sometimes evident personal integrity, previous commitment to militancy and radical rhetoric, are ultimately subject to the same imperatives to vacillation, restraint, compromise and betrayal as their right-wing counterparts.

Third, while this does not mean we should stand aloof from such officials, we do need to recognise the complexities of how we relate to them. Even though we would ideally like to see a militant rank-and-file movement that could act independently of union officials (similar to the shop stewards’ movement), the current reality in Britain is that in most situations, workers lack the confidence to take strike action without an official union lead, and activists on the ground are unable to bridge this gap. What this means is that union leaders, notably on the left, who are prepared to express the mood to fight can often play a crucial (albeit contradictory) role. This was shown when official calls for action in the 2022-3 strike wave contributed enormously to the readiness and enthusiasm of many hundreds of thousands of workers to respond, opening up the space for grassroots organisation to develop. It underlined why revolutionaries should support and work with left-wing union leaders when they back workers’ struggles. Likewise, we should stand shoulder to shoulder with them when they demonstrate a principled willingness to publicly associate themselves with political initiatives such as Stand Up to Racism and Palestine solidarity as these increase the potential for building collective working-class resistance.

However, a readiness to co-operate with left-wing union leaders for particular temporary and limited ends is by no means the same as sowing illusions or relying upon them, still less believing they can ever be a substitute for encouraging rank-and-file confidence, organisation and activity capable of fighting independently of any section of the union bureaucracy. Hence, in 2022-3, left union leaders—like the right—only half-heartedly called limited and episodic strikes and wasted the potential to escalate, coordinate and generalise action that could potentially have broken through to win decisive victories against employers and government. This emphasised the way in which the often-used phrase “working with and against the officials” must mean not only being prepared to support officials when they “rightly represent us”, but at the same time arming activists with a clear picture of the underlying fundamental critical prerequisites of this interplay.

Currently, this means tapping into workers’ raised expectations of what is possible under an Andy Burnham government by encouraging maximum pressure on the officials to call strike action over pay restoration and/or job cutbacks to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis and austerity mark II. In the process, it means countering union leaders’ arguments of “giving Burnham a chance” and avoiding action that would “embarrass Labour”, and being prepared to critique them if they fail to mobilise their members. Even if they do call strikes—over pay, jobs or any other issue—it means, at the same as backing the initiative, warning from the outset that they cannot be relied upon to deliver the type of action necessary to win and advancing the need for grassroots initiatives to push the action through on the scale required. It obviously means, moreover, voicing sharp condemnation if they call off action by selling out with a shoddy deal. At the same time, we need to be critical of left officials on different important political issues, such as when they falsely counterpose the protection of jobs (and need for continued North Sea oil and gas drilling and increased military spending) to action on climate change and war.

In other words, while we should attempt to exploit the ideological and political tensions that exist within the union bureaucracy (which as the recent Unite election demonstrated is not always a straightforward contest between left and right) to accentuate the positive, our overall guiding compass must be to always do everything possible to raise the level of confidence and combativity of workers. The historical lesson of the Minority Movement is not that it was a mistake per se to have attempted to draw left officials into an alliance with the rank and file in a form of hybrid body, but that it should not have simply tailed those left officials and acted effectively as opportunist cheerleaders. Instead, encouraging workers to use such an organisational alliance as a waystation on the road to building the strength of rank-and-file organisation to act independently from the bureaucracy should have been key. It follows that, while supporting the election of left candidates to official union positions, we should never prioritise a “Broad Left” electoral strategy over of a rank-and-file orientation. Although we have to actively work inside union structures—in local branches, at annual conferences and even (sometimes) on lay national executives—the primary emphasis has always to be on building shopfloor workers’ collective strength and self-activity.

Fourth, it is clear the strength and militancy of the pre-First World War workers’ struggles, wartime shop stewards’ movement and 1920s NMM did not develop in a political vacuum, with revolutionary syndicalists, socialists and communists crucial to providing the political glue that bound together militants across different workplaces, unions and industries. These movements were led by revolutionary left activists because it was only they who had the (real or potential) capacity to give such rank-and-file organisation the necessary political independence of the union bureaucracy, pushing struggles beyond the limits of the officials. The subsequent deflected role of the CPGB in relation to the TUC underlines the fundamental role of a revolutionary socialist party in providing political guidance and direction and avoiding the pressures of union electoralism and tailing of left officials.

Ralph Darlington is Emeritus Professor of Employment Relations at Salford University and a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He is the author of Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism and Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-1914, co-author of Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain 1972 and editor of What’s the Point of Industrial Relations? In Defence of Critical Social Science.

Notes