The TUC to the rescue of the middle class-working class! We need communist unions

The Trades Union Congress is a rather a rarefied organisation at the best of times. This umbrella organisation for the vast majority of Britain's trades unions, currently 6.7 million strong, has a brief of to act as the eyes and ears of the unions, combating the bias against organised labour at government level, whilst producing research and policy papers to attempt to influence legislation. The official brief is set out as follows:

The Trades Union Congress:

-brings Britain’s unions together to draw up common policies
-lobbies the Government to implement policies that will benefit people at work
-campaigns on economic and social issues
-represents working people on public bodies
-represents British workers in international bodies, in the European Union and at the UN employment body - the International Labour Organisation
-carries out research on employment -related issues
-runs an extensive training and education programme for union representatives
-helps unions develop new services for their members
-helps unions avoid clashes with each other
-builds links with other trade union bodies worldwide

Basic stuff, but clearly focused on working class people in the publicity guff. In reality the TUC, and British unions in Toto, have always failed to be organisations of the working class in general. 6.7 million workers is less than one third of the working class population. The make up of the TUC is also heavily biased in favour of the public sector, where unionisation was easier to achieve; or in the skilled trades of the private sector. In some areas we have the legacy of state sector unionisation combined with the privileged private sector, for instance in the rail industry. So, when the TUC speaks as an advocate of working people in truth it speaks as an advocate of a privileged section of the working class, those in secure/skilled jobs where the costs of organisation and recruitment by full time union bureaucrats is felt to be worth while financially. The neo-liberal phase of capitalist political economy has not wrought significant changes to the higher wages and security of employment in the unionised sectors of the workforce.(1)

The enormous shake-out of industry in Britain, with the mass closure of mines, mills and large industrial plants has had a devastating effect on union density. Unions organised almost 50% of the workforce in 1979, the decline post Callaghan would clearly have effects on wages for the working class generally. This effect has been negative for those not unionised, but positive for those unions which survived. This is despite unions not making any serious effort to organise the unskilled, women, migrants and the like.(2)Those unions that have survived are the stronger and, as such, better able to command a wage premium (thus raising the “batting average” of unions). It is this capacity to garner a wage premium which is the unions central role. Contrary to the popular view on the left that Britain's industrial decline in the twentieth century is synonymous with Britain's decline as a world impenalist power, and therefore with lower real wages for all workers, the obverse is in fact true. Now we can see the significance of Lenin's argument that imperialism is the last stage of capitalism. The export of capital, the creation of large financial corporations and capitalist monopolies and the emergence of rentier states, and growing predominance of financiers and bankers, was the consequence of the increasing problems of finding profitable outlets for 'surplus capital' in all the dominant capitalist countries at the turn of the twentieth century. It was this that Lenin called imperialism, a product of capitalism at that particular time. This process began in the 1870s, with the scramble for Africa. By 1914 the world had already been partitioned, there were no new outlets for profitable investment etc, so it now had to be repartitioned according to the economic power of the major capitalist states. And how else could the matter be decided except by military conflict? But the outcome was not what Lenin or anyone else had expected. Although capitalism was overthrown in Russia, opportunism and chauvinism in all the major working class movements -- something which Lenin could explain -- prevented revolution in all the developed capitalist/imperialist countries. After a second world war, there was an outcome which, although very different, was similar in impact to what Kautsky thought possible under his 'far-fetched' ultra-imperialism. One country, the United States of America, totally dominated the world economy. It was this outcome, which Lenin could not have predicted, which allowed the 'peaceful' rapid expansion of capitalism of the major imperialist countries. The wars and revolutions, the poverty and oppression were confined, for the time being, to the rest of the world.

But the laws of capitalism did not change. The massive export of capital, the growth of financial and transnational corporations with global aspirations continued, and as Japan and Germany rebuilt their economies to become powerful competitors of the United States, inter-imperialist rivalries have reappeared in similar form to those Lenin outlined at the turn of the century. In this respect imperialism is the last stage of capitalism. Imperialism is alive and well and stomping its British jackboot over the lives of hundreds of millions of workers and farmers today in what are described as 'developing countries. Imperialism is fundamentally mono–poly capitalism. It is the historical period of the decay of capitalism and is characterised by parasitism. Imperialism is the era of finance capital in which enormously concentrated banking capital has fused with industrial and commercial capital. The export of capital – that is global investment – as opposed to export of commodities becomes the distinguishing feature of imperialism.

As a result capitalism has grown into a global system of national oppression and of financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of advanced countries. Imperialism divides the world between oppressed and oppressor nations; at the same time it brings about class differentiation within both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – the existence of purely parasitic financiers [rentier class] and the labour aristocracy bribed out of the superprofits of imperialism. Finally, after the territorial division of the world by a small number of rich capitalist countries at the beginning of the 20th century, the different pace of development of monopoly capitalism in different countries drives nations into conflicts that can only be resolved by force – that is by war.(3) This is what makes sense of the warmongering by US and UK Imperialism regards Iran.

Lenin was concerned to show how imperialism splits the working class movement and creates opportunist currents in the working class movement internationally, arguing that the ‘fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.’ That is why he attacks Kautsky who attempted to contain irreconcilable trends of the left and right within the same socialist movement, to justify ‘unity’ with the apologists of imperialism, refused to fight opportunism, and found himself and his followers united with the extreme (right) opportunists supporting imperialist war. Kautsky detached the politics of imperialism from its economics. Kautskyism, Lenin argued, is not an independent trend, because it has no roots either in the masses or in the privileged stratum of the working class which had gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie. It attempts to reconcile the working class with the ‘bourgeois labour party’ to preserve the unity of the working class with that party. It is, Lenin argued, the ‘inevitable fruit of the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, whose entire way of life holds them captive to bourgeois and petty bourgeois prejudices’. Such tendencies have to be combated by the party of the proletariat.

Britain’s relative industrial decline has been combined with a dynamic, aggressive imperialist expansion of commerce and finance overseas. This development has now reached unprecedented levels. Britain’s overseas assets in 2005 were £4,837.1bn, nearly four times Britain’s GDP. 56.4% of these assets, £2,727bn, more than double Britain’s GDP, were ‘other investments’, mainly loans and deposits abroad by UK banks – a ‘gigantic usury capital’. Only 15.6% of the overseas assets, £753.2bn, were direct investments (an investment in an enterprise abroad with 10% or more shares or voting stock), and 27.5%, £1,332.1bn, were portfolio investments (investments in shares, bonds and money market instruments). Britain’s overseas assets are now increasing every year by around 60% of Britain’s GDP. Since 1997 when the Labour government came to power they have increased nearly two and a half times. In 2005 at the current exchange rate they were 92% of the size of US foreign assets – $9,190.5bn to $10,008.7bn. However the foreign assets of the US were only equivalent to around 80% of the US GDP.(4)

At a certain historical point the tendency towards Imperialism expresses itself profound crisis:

‘The aggressive character of imperialism likewise necessarily flows from a crisis of valorisation.* Imperialism is a striving to restore the valorisation of capital at any cost, to weaken or eliminate the breakdown tendency. This explains its aggressive policies at home (an intensified attack on the working class) and abroad (a drive to transform foreign nations into tributaries). This is the hidden basis of the bourgeois rentier state, of the parasitic character of capitalism at an advanced stage of accumulation. Because the valorisation of capital fails in countries at a given, higher stage of accumulation, the tribute that flows in from abroad assumes ever greater importance. Parasitism becomes a method of prolonging the life of capitalism.’(5)

It is this point, when even the higher wages engendered by Britain's leading role as a exploiter of the world become an impossibility that we have the opportunity to transform the organisations of the working class, primarily the trade unions. This will not be done by the current leadership of the Trades Union Congress, which has recently issued a policy brief on why the government need to save the hard working middle class, which the TUC conflate as anybody on 21k per year. This judgement takes the US approach to class relations, which sees all people as middle class. There may be a rich and a poor at the marginal ends but basically everyone is middle class.Bear in mind, the TUC has a defined brief as fighting for working class people, not a vacuous middle class. The brief ends thus (concerning who the TUC and Labour should be on the side of): 'the real middle Britain, they remain the great neglected electoral group, doing badly under the Conservatives and standing still at best under Labour.'(6)

This utter tosh is what passes for TUC leadership today. To make such claims as these is to ignore the world imperialist role of the British capitalist class. A shown above, our masters currently have almost 5 times the national GDP invested abroad. The tribute from this is what allows our bloated middle class, which is people on way above 21k, to maintain their lifestyles. Th real middle class are those professionals/small business owners who are not economically, nor culturally close to the working class. This new sociological chicanery is the flip side of the 'we are all middle class now' thesis developed by neo-liberals who wanted to smash industry in Britain.

This classification of middle class in American terms is simply a method of denying a working class, a la US, for the reason that if you admit a working class exists then you have to really admit a non working - bosses class exists also. Where is the evidence that even the broad layers of the working class have done badly under Labour? Anybody who has gone to a hospital, a school, a city center etc in the last ten yrs should attest to the real material benefits which flow from being the worlds second Imperialist power. The tax take from the City of London used to make up a third of all tax receipts, providing the revenue for the funding of the NHS and Education, which, whilst standing below the level of Sweden perhaps has matched Franco-German spending through the 00s.(7) PFI schemes have undermined the benefit of this to working class people, allowing parasites to take large swathes of this funding. This reality does not challenge the idea that the better off workers gathered in the trade unions, as well as the middle classes, have been complicit in a social imperialism based on the super exploitation of the workers and poor abroad. Their is no escaping this reality.

The solution to this social Imperialism is the extension of the trade unions to the poorest sections of the working class. The early trade unions were built by the poorest and most oppressed groups, such as farm and mill labourers, and operated as strike funds and solidarity committees, rather than the permanent bureaucracies of today. The struggle must also be waged to win the leadership of the unions. This would make possible a class struggle, as opposed to a class collaboration approach to worker-boss relations. This would not go far enough though. Between 1979 and 2005 the total number of workforce jobs has increased 13.2%, while public service jobs have risen by 36.8%, total service jobs by 46.1%, and finance and business services by a massive 111%. Manufac–turing jobs have over the same period declined by more than half – 52.3%. Workforce jobs in the manufacturing sector in September 2006 at 3.03m are at the lowest level since records began in 1841. Manufacturing output at the end of 2005 was no higher than it was when Labour came into power in 1997. Over the same period Britain’s industrial base fell to less than 16% of the British economy. In 2005 financial services alone accounted for 8.5% of GDP, up from 5.5% five years ago, while the share of manufacturing has fallen by over one third in 10 years to 13.6% of GDP. The struggle against allowing a working class to become a parasitic organism living off the super exploitation of workers abroad, must begin with winning the unions for communism. Communist led unions would fight for state power so as to expropriate under workers control and management the largest banks, insurance companies, pension funds, hedge funds, and what remains of domestic industry. The foreign holdings of British bosses would be exposed for the workers of the world to see. Workers labouring to feed the parasites of the City of London, and vicariously large swathes of trades unionists in the public sector and the skilled trades would be given ownership of their plants, stocks and shares in an act of solidarity; communist led unions would state clearly : we don't want to exploit you as our bosses did.

How do we get there? Do we rely on the lefts within the unions? No and No again! Bob Crow of the RMT has presided over spectacular victories for train drivers on the London Underground, now some of the highest paid workers in Britain. He has also been complicit in the development of a racial caste of cleaners, many of whom earning below the minimum wage (see, http://brennanism.blogspot.com/2009/11/tube-and-tfl-union-rmt-will-be-holding.html). Crow has also railed against Chinese workers willing, in his words, 'to work for a bowl of rice'! He has also called for an alliance with the mass murdering state to save the jobs of workers who support Naval expeditions against the poor of West and Central Asia (see, http://brennanism.blogspot.com/2010/01/unravelling-trot-bashing.html). Do we trust Serwotka? No! He has managed to lead a union through the loss of 130k members, whilst maintaining the pay and pensions of the older, more secure workforce-classic aristocratic trades unionism (see,http://www.bolshevik.org/Leaflets/PCSbetrayal.html)

We cannot rely on the established lefts within the unions. They are concerned with scrabbling for the crumbs they currently receive from the bosses table. These mis leaders have no qualms about selling out the majority of union members and the wider working class to further that nefarious end.

Workers need a rank and file movement within the trade unions aiming at expanding, renewing and controlling the unions from below. Workers also need clear communist leadership of their organisations to take advantage of the crisis of the system, where even aristocrats such as builders and engineers are forced to fight to defend their pay and conditions, pay and conditions the bosses can no longer afford. This crisis has been our opportunity. A revolutionary led union movement, committed to overthrowing the bosses at home and abroad, and of freeing the chains of parasatism whih have shackled the workers movement for too long is a vital goal all communist trade unionists should be fighting for.





(1) David Blanchflower, 'The Union Wage Premium in the US and the UK' :, p.2

(2Metcalf, D., K. Hansen, and A. Charlwood (2001), ‘Unions and the Sword of Justice: Unions and Pay Systems, Pay Inequality, Pay Discrimination and Low Pay’, National Institute Economic Review, 176, 61-75.

(3)David Yaffe: http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/index.php/britain/1042-britain-parasitic-and-decaying-capitalism-frfi-194-dec-2006-jan-2007.html

(4)ibid

(5) Henryk Grossman: The law of accumulation and breakdown of the capitalist system, Pluto Press, pp122-3)

(6) Who are the middle classes?: ToUChstone blog: A public policy blog from the TUC - http://www.touchstoneblog.org.uk

(7) Polly Toynbee, 'A spending landmine that enshrines Labour priorities for years'://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/29/taxandspending-economics