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Left agency and class action: The paradox of workplace radicalism

Sheila Cohen Capital & Class 2011 35: 371 DOI: 10.1177/0309816811417839 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/35/3/371

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Left agency and class action: The paradox of workplace radicalism

Sheila Cohen

Capital & Class 35(3) 371389 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0309816811417839 c&c.sagepub.com

University of Hertfordshire, UK

Abstract This paper seeks to examine the valuable concept of left agency and interrogate it in terms of an inherent paradox not immediately apparent to many who support the role of politicised activists in the workplace. This paradox is that politicised workplace activists, particularly those belonging to revolutionary organisations, may in presenting an overtly political agenda centred on extra-workplace issues actually have weakened resistance against managements aggressively profitoriented agenda, particularly in the key period of the late-1970s and early 1980s. These arguments are further explored through an examination of approaches to workplace trade unionism by the Communist Party and International Socialism/ Socialist Workers Party, thus linking the question of left agency in the workplace with the broader political agenda in terms of the practice and objectives of the explicitly Marxist organisations that can be assumed to be concerned with, and influence, the activity of their workplace-based members and representatives. Keywords agency, activism, class, organisation, paradox, praxis, workplace

Introduction
In the current context of worldwide capitalist crisis, the issue of worker response or agency comes ever more sharply into focus. The fragility revealed at the heart of capitalist relations of production, along with capitals viciously anti-working class response, raises once more the fundamental question of social transformation; and within that the role of the working class, the force identified within classical Marxism as the central agent of such transformation.

Corresponding author: Sheila Cohen, University of Hertfordshire. Email: mooco3@btinternet.com

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The issue of agency has not been neglected even in less turbulent times: attention to workplace-based trade union activity has been a consistent thread in labour history and industrial relations since their inception, and despite the decline of classical industrial sociology, the onset and development of labour process studies has to some degree maintained interest in and analysis of worker response. The growing literature on the decline of trade unionism since the early 1980s in Britain and elsewhere has focused not only on environmental factors, but to the response to these constraints, itself a mixture of ideology and institutionalism, spontaneity and organisation (Charlwood, 2004). More recently, the rise of the organising model as a response to ongoing trade union decline has brought the agency side of the equation still more to the forefront. Specific issues surrounding the question of agency, such as worker mobilisation (Kelly, 1998; Gall, 2005; Atzeni, 2009), trade union effectiveness (Waddington and Whitston, 1997; Waddington, 2006), trade union propensity (Verma et al., 2002; TUC, 2003) and the role of committed rank-and-file activists in building and sustaining union growth (Heery et al., 1999; Findlay and McKinley, 2003; Gall, 2007) have also been extensively surveyed. Indeed, Kellys mobilisation thesis has sparked a plethora of literature relatively uncritical of its central thesis: that workplace resistance can be understood as a response to the perception of injustice as structured and orchestrated by workplace leaders. Against this somewhat stageist and moralistic approach, Atzeni (2010) counters the structural and spontaneous dynamics of actually existing worker resistance. The aspect of agency, then, has not been neglected, neither in the current literature or in the classic accounts of workplace organisation and activity that dominated the literature in the 1950s-70s heyday of industrial sociology. Since that time, other classics of workplace ethnography, such as the justly respected Cultures of Solidarity (Fantasia, 1988), have made a valued appearance, alongside research that emphasises the key role of workplace leaders and participative or direct workplace-based union democracy (Fosh and Cohen, 1990; Cohen, 2006). However, one comparatively neglected aspect of the study of agency in the trade union field is the role of conscious socialists, or indeed revolutionaries, in the workplace. Following on the increased emphasis on organising (a term that goes well beyond the traditional recruitment in its energetic and agency-based connotations), a number of critiques have noted the comparative absence of an examination of consciously political agency within workplace trade union dynamics. One critique and evaluation of Fairbrothers trade union renewal thesis (e.g. Fairbrother, 2000) argues, for example, that a major weakness in Fairbrothers work is that it is devoid of a political dynamic, that is a form of agency he fails to make any generalisation about the role or importance of political groupings (Gall, 1998: 154-5). In a study of the Communist Partys Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions (see below), McIlroy and Campbell (1999) argue that our comprehension of how trade union consciousness is developed and organisation constructed through politically configured exertions of human agency [is] depleted and distorted. Darlington (2002) hones in on the much neglected aspect of the subjective element in workplace industrial relations, in particular the crucial role that left-wing stewards and activists can play in mobilising workers for collective action; here the complex relationship between shop stewards leadership, left-wing activism and collective workplace union organisation is presented as a crucial aspect of agency in which workplace

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activists, either from the Communist Party or other left-wing groups, are identified as the key object of analysis. It is the intention of this paper to further interrogate the nature and dynamics of what is indeed a crucial force in the dynamics of working-class agency and resistance the layer of consciously revolutionary activists or left agents organically embedded in the workplace. As such, broader issues of social-democratic ideology, official trade union organising strategies and other aspects of current debate based to a greater or lesser extent on mainstream approaches to trade union struggle and renewal are not the focus here. Rather, the argument concentrates specifically on explicitly revolutionary activists within their workplace, and the impact (or otherwise) of their politics on less consciously revolutionary activists and indeed, the workforce as a whole. The paper will examine the interrelations, both empirical and theoretical, between Marxist class analysis and worker activity, and critically record the role of socialist organisations in working-class activity, particularly in the crucial period of the late1960s and 1970s, when workplace trade unionism was at its highest ebb for many decades before beginning its catastrophic decline in the early 1980s. Thus, while centrally concerned with both workplace-based and cross-movement trade union activity, the current argument should not be seen as part of the ongoing union renewal and organising versus partnership debates. Rather, it sets out specifically to look at the role of conscious socialists in organising, and potentially politicising, workplace-based organisation and resistance.

Instinctively, spontaneously social-democratic

There is little question that socialists (primarily meaning conscious, organised revolutionaries) have played a central role in the history of trade union organisation throughout capitalism. While many 19th-century socialists and revolutionary organisations such as the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) rejected trade unionism as somehow polluting the purity of socialism (Draper, 1978; Cohen, 1995), by the time the wave of New Unionism broke in the late-1880s, many had overcome their scruples. As is well known, Eleanor Marx and other avowed revolutionaries were prominent in the leadership of the 1889 dockers strike, while Annie Besant (then a member of the SDF, though she soon turned to Fabianism) is said to have played a crucial role in the famous matchgirls strike of 1888.1 In the process of struggle, workers become newly open to socialist ideas (Atzeni, 2009; Cohen, 2006; Fantasia, 1988; Hyman, 1983; Lendler, 1997; Panitch, 1986). While Lenin is widely assumed to have argued that socialism could be introduced into working-class consciousness only from without, recent analyses contend that the key polemic on which this assumption is based (What Is To Be Done) has been widely misinterpreted (Lih, 2008; Le Blanc, 2008). Lenin himself in fact wrote enthusiastically of the instinctively, spontaneously Social-Democratic character of the working class (Lenin, 1962: 32) a judgement made during the ferment of the 1905 revolution, when workers spontaneously developed the key Soviet form of organisation (Cohen, 2005). In the wake of 1905, Lenin repeated and built on this insight: At every step the workers come face to face with their main enemy the capitalist class. In combat with this enemy the worker becomes a socialist (Lenin, 1963: 301-2, cited in Hyman,

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1971: 42, emphasis in original). Among other classical Marxist writers, Luxemburg in her turn challenges the assumption that class consciousness is imparted from without in some gradual educational process: such consciousness does not proceed in a beautiful straight line but in a lightning-like zig-zag, via, Luxemburg is clear, the dynamic process of worker self-activity (Luxemburg, 1925: 73). Gramsci (1971) refers to workers arrival at more developed forms of class consciousness in similarly dynamic, and dialectical, terms: workers may indeed have [their] own conception of the world which manifests itself in action, but occasionally and in flashes when the group is acting as an organic totality (p327). All these classical thinkers, and Marx with them, saw working-class self-activity and organisation, rather than socialist propaganda per se, as central to the development of a potential class consciousness that explicitly revolutionary ideas could inform and clarify a fusion of Marxist theory with class action, rather than a process of delivering correct ideas from on high. For all these reasons and many more, the relationship between working-class activism and socialism deserves attention. This contribution seeks to add to the earlier work on left agency cited above by focusing specifically on the activity of explicitly revolutionary workplace-based activists and their interrelation both with workers in struggle and with the more conscious layers who may be open to socialist ideas even in normal times. While such analysis occupies the same theoretical territory as Kellys (1998) conceptions of workplace leadership and worker mobilisation, the present approach differs sharply in rooting workplace conflict in an objective, structural trajectory of resistance triggered by the exigencies of exploitation and the capitalist labour process rather than in what appears to be an idealist invocation of injustice (Cohen, 2006; Atzeni, 2010).

The paradox of politicisation

Within this structural framework, the direction of radicalisation is posed as rooted in the material conditions which, even on an everyday basis, will tend to push workers in a conflictual direction. Such a perspective, as shown above, is echoed in the writings of many classic Marxists; from this point of view it might be expected that left agents in the workplace would follow a trajectory of worker resistance and build towards a socialist analysis from that concrete base. Yet when we examine research into the activity and influence of left agents, we encounter a very different, and paradoxical, picture . While the historic complaint of many socialists has been that workplace trade unionists are insufficiently open to radical politics, historically the most decisive direction of influence has tended to be from explicit socialists towards rank-and-file activists and, as discussed more extensively below, not always in a positive sense. A double irony thus arises: that the problem is not, as so many radicals have argued, the avoidance of politics with a capital P by instrumental workplace activists, but, on the contrary, its widespread acceptance by such activists (certainly in the crucial period of the 1970s); and, simultaneously, the coupling of such acceptance with a failure on the part of both groups of activists to politicise, in the sense of rendering more class-independent, member-led and effective, the workplace unionism of those years. This point deserves more explanation. Politicisation has normally been understood, particularly by those socialists pleading for increased dissemination of political ideas within the working class, as a broadening of issues away from the purely economic (pay,
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work intensification, job security etc) to a wider sphere embracing such issues as war, racism and climate change (Kimber, 2007). Within the current argument, however, the notion of politics is centred on the class-based contradictions daily experienced in the workplace, which tend to lead to such wider awareness via economistically-based struggles, rather than the awareness, it is argued, being delivered directly through strategies propagandistic or otherwise of politicisation. This formulation reverses the conception and assumed direction of political development accepted, at least implicitly, by most revolutionary groups. Whether or not such a perspective is accepted and in general it has tended to be rejected, or at least neglected, by revolutionary socialists any exploration of left agency also needs to focus on the relationship from the opposite direction, namely the influence of activists directly involved in the nitty-gritty of daily workplace issues and usually lacking, at least initially, a broader political perspective, on conscious workplace revolutionaries. As Darlington rightly points out, no activist would be taken seriously without proving his or her effectiveness in dealing with membership grievances and the exploitation-related issues that crucially affect workers lives the realpolitik of everyday workplace organisation and resistance. In the rough-and-ready world of workplace representation, the credibility of activists is likely to rest on their instrumental efficacy rather than on the purity of their politics. As one veteran car industry activist and SWP member recalls, Generally speaking, people ignored the outside politics of the shop steward. What they wanted was somebody who could represent them on the job (Henderson, 2009: 62). Thus the paradox that Darlington himself invokes is that in order to gain credibility for politics with a trajectory far beyond the workplace, it is necessary to pursue issues that may seem to be far from political. However, this is an apparent contradiction that arises from the intrinsically exploitative character of the labour process under capitalism, and thus provides crucial potential for a link between what is often condemned as economism and a broader politics. The problem arises, on the contrary, when there is little or no relationship between socialist politics and the raw exploitation-related issues arising in the workplace. Rather than an absence of correct political policies on the part of consciously revolutionary activists and their associated organisations, what emerges as the key characteristic undermining the effectiveness of much left agency is the lack of fusion between their socialist ideals and the class content of economistic shopfloor issues.

An element of politics
A scrutiny of Darlingtons own extensive study of workplace organisation in the key period of the 1970s-80s (Darlington, 1994) reveals much that seems to directly contradict the upbeat analysis of his 2002 contribution. The study, which examines shopsteward organisation in what had been three typically combative 1970s workplaces, demonstrates not only that socialist ideas were influential amongst a wide periphery of non-revolutionary activists, but also that the politicised nature of the explicitly revolutionary shop steward leadership worked against effective organisation and resistance in their own back yard. At a printing plant examined in the study, the workplace leadership was dominated by members of the Trotskyite Militant Tendency, later to become todays Socialist Party. Yet, while they were themselves rank-and-file workers with a long history of working and
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organising at the plant, these workplace leaders didnt have a real workplace base to their politics. They saw their role as being active in the Labour Party Organising on the shop floor was secondary to that, according to one workplace rep (p. 171). The Labour Party activism was explained by Militants then dominant entrist tactic; yet The other side of the same political coin was an emphasis on attempting to replace right-wing union officials with left-wingers through Broad Left groupings (p. 171) a species of electoralism and itself a historic pitfall for socialist activists who typically invest considerable energies in promoting left leaders only to see those individuals veer to the right. However, the main point here is that despite the convenors membership of an explicitly revolutionary organisation, constituting him as a left agent par excellence, he and his supporters did not, in Darlingtons own words, consider their main priority to be the strengthening of independent shop floor union organization through the advocacy of workplace struggle that built workers confidence, organization and political consciousness (p. 171). Thus the chapel committee later lacked the ideological and political resources to resist a disastrous so-called Survival Plan initiated under Rupert Murdoch in the early 1980s the crucial period when the massive workplace union strength built up during the 1970s might have produced the class awareness and conviction to resist such early forms of labour-management collaboration. Similarly, at the Birds Eye plant examined in the study, the left-wing convenor, described by one steward as very much politically minded a real socialist, saw the principal focus for his activity as being the local T&G branch, where we gradually introduced an element of politics into the branch we supported the Right to Work Campaign, the Anti-Nazi League and that (p. 99). Yet, as Darlington himself points out, the activists involved made little attempt to try to connect the political and socialist arguments that were held within the branch with the day-to-day interests and concerns of shopfloor union members back inside the factory (p. 100). A similar pattern was evident at Fords Halewood plant, the subject of the third case study. A bastion of militant workplace trade unionism in the 1960s and 1970s, Halewood was similarly caught off course by the major shift in the managementunion balance of power of the 1980s. While during the 1970s the preoccupation of the more militant stewards was with building up the strength of shop-floor organisation, faced with the challenges of the 1980s the same stewards turned to the apparently more political centre of resistance represented by the local TGWU union branch. As Darlington himself argues, with managements poisoned handshake approach and the downturn in workers struggles in the 1980s, some union militants looked to the TGWU branch as a short-cut solution to advance workers interests, sidestepping the hard slog of trying to restore morale and rebuild an organized core of opposition to management within each [workplace] section (p. 245). Nor were the shop steward organisations studied by Darlington alone in their perhaps counterproductive embrace of the political. The workplace union organisation at British Leylands assembly plant at Cowley, near Oxford, was led for many years by a group of stewards with explicitly revolutionary politics (Thornett, 1998). Yet, as with the steward organisations cited above, those politics proved inadequate to withstand the accentuated pace and aggression of class struggle in the late-1970s and early 1980s (Cohen, 2006: 177-81). The Cowley stewards use of largely propagandistic tactics was ultimately insufficient to counter the devious tactics of macho manager Michael Edwardes, leading

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to the eventual debacle in which workers throughout the company voted for the elimination of their own jobs. Relying mainly on tried and tested left tactics of oppositional leaflets and newsletters, the Cowley stewards overlooked the need for continual, one-to-one membership involvement and direct rank-and-file education to decisively combat Edwardess siren calls to Save British Leyland. Towards the end of the 1970s, other key groups of organised workers were arguably diverted by the radical ideas associated with Bennism away from their own highly effective class forms of organisation. As the (short-lived) Industry Minister in the 1974 Labour government, Benn had drawn up proposals for workers plans in industry, to be activated in consultation with shop stewards a worthy aim in itself. But while Labour swiftly withdrew from such radical forms of intervention, Bennite notions of workers control via such strategies as worker cooperatives and grass-roots industrial democracy remained influential on the left, including within the highly politicised shop steward leadership of the time. The late-1970s were the heyday of one of the most class-oriented of rank-and-file organisations: the combine committees, which linked together stewards or convenors from different plants within the same company, a process central in bringing together activists from different parts of the movement. All the major shop steward committees attracted to Bennism were part of these combines. By the late-1970s, the strategy of workers plans for industries under attack was being taken up by leading shop steward committees such as those at Vickers, C.A. Parsons, Metal Box, Thorn EMI and, most notoriously, Lucas (Wainwright and Elliott, 1979; Beynon and Wainwright, 1979). Unfortunately, initiatives such as the Lucas Plan, derived from a personal suggestion by Benn, did nothing to build on the class strength of this organisational form, but rather led to a diversion away from the crucial role of combines in linking workers across different workplaces and thus building workplace strength and solidarity. The Lucas Plan was predictably rejected by the company, leaving workers robbed of the impetus to fight threatened plant closures with more traditional methods such solidarity strikes or occupations. Here, as in all three of Darlingtons case studies, the very embrace of broader politics by leading stewards appeared to go hand in hand with an inability to contest management over basic issues surrounding job security and the intensification of labour. While such matters may seem prosaic, in fact the defeat of effective, independent workplace organisation around just such issues was the true beginning of the end of the trade union power of the 1968-74 upsurge period, with all its associated class potential. The massive and massively promising radicalisation of stewards during the upsurge period and beyond brought this crucial layer of activists very close, in many cases, to explicit revolutionary politics. Yet, paradoxically, it was this very closeness, and the allied exposure to the broader demands and programmes advocated by radicals and revolutionaries, that took them away from the independent, class-based resistance to the demands of capital central to the forms of organisation that had opened them up to an interest in socialism in the first place. Such relatively simple principles as class independence and workplace union democracy closeness and accountability to the membership base took second place to broader political priorities and the maintenance of a campaigning mindset even on issues requiring direct resistance and membership mobilisation.

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The problem here is not the rectitude or otherwise of socialist ideas, demands and programmes. It is that, as has been noted elsewhere (Draper 1992), such demands and policies are frequently substituted for a direct concern with the terrain in which class conflict and thus, potentially, consciousness is at its strongest the capitalist labour process. The project of developing specifically revolutionary consciousness out of the experience of workplace conflict should not mean that working-class activists are, almost literally, removed from that terrain into an idealist sphere in which socialism is about almost anything rather than their own workplace experience of exploitation, organisation and resistance. Perhaps these issues would matter less if not for the fact that the distancing from the workplace described, for example, in Darlingtons study took place at a time of accelerated management aggression and a far more focused strategy by capital aimed at restoring its damaged profitability. It was at this very point that the same stewards whose leadership had extended their activities well beyond the economic into the political nevertheless overwhelmingly lacked the socialist politics and self-confidence to reject the arguments of management that only increased efficiency and profitability could save jobs (Darlington, 1994: 108). And this was a failure that went well beyond the loss of improved pay and conditions in a specific workplace to the lamentable class defeats under Thatcherism in the wake of which we struggle today. The crucial defeats of the 1980s took place at the base with the abandonment, through class confusion as much as class collaboration, of the essential element of independence from both management and a union leadership only too eager for realism and, ultimately, partnership. It may well be asked why, given the explicitly revolutionary politics of the activists described above, the independent class focus required should have been thus lacking. Essentially and again paradoxically it appears that these activists ranged themselves alongside others of a left-reformist persuasion in declamatory forms of protest politics, rather than focusing on the already-existing class power of their own membership.

No position of exclusivity?
In examining further how and why the boundaries between revolutionary and left reformist responses should have been so porous, it will be useful to look at the history of left agency intervention not only in specific workplaces but across rank-and-file trade unionism generally, as symbolised by two of the most prominent organisations of the late-1960s and 1970s: the Communist Party (CP) and International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party (IS/SWP). During this crucial upsurge period, the CPs role in workplace union activity was played out primarily through its cross-movement shop stewards network, the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions (LCDTU). This initiative illustrates in its brief history both the undoubted potential of a focus within socialist organisations on building industrial strength, and the ease of abandonment of this potential when other political considerations intervene. The formation of the LCDTU in 1967 has been attributed to a shift in strategy by the CP after the 1964 Labour election victory, when, in order to push Labour to the left, it adopted a policy of collaboration with the non-CP left in the trade union field (Thompson, 1992). As part of this turn, CP leaders recognised the need for a broader,

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united front approach, noting that confidence in the partys good faith and goodwill would be enhanced among industrial militants once they saw that [the CP] sought no position of exclusivity (Thompson, 1992: 134). This particular slice of left agency had, then, taken two important steps towards a nonsectarian consolidation of left forces within the working class: an orientation to the trade union rank-and-file, and a willingness to allow for independent discussion and strategy formation within that milieu. Or so it seemed at first, as the Party leadership stood back and the perspectives of experienced and political CP and some non-CP trade union activists prevailed: after 1963, the Communist Partys essential relationship with trade unionism was to mobilise its members to support action by workers rather to instigate workers to industrial action in pursuit of its own policies and aims (Thompson, 1992: 136). This was clearly a positive move in the direction of a non-sectarian process of supporting, consolidating and building already existing worker resistance. The explosion of resentment amongst workers against the Labour governments wage freeze and anti-strike In Place Of Strife proposals created a major practical role for the LCDTU in mobilising and coordinating resistance; and after the Tory victory in 1970, this was expanded into organising mass unofficial protests against the 1971 Industrial Relations Act and, most of all, cross-movement support securing the famous victory of the Pentonville Five in 1972 (although the young International Socialists also played a key role: see Darlington and Lyddon, 2001). During the period, the CP also held a number of impressive rank-and-file conferences, in which working-class activists participated in their hundreds, if not thousands. However, ultimately, this constructive process of coalition-building was directed towards winning elected positions and securing the adoption of resolutions, rather than mobilising the grass roots. Indeed, the aim was to direct the pressures of militancy into the official channels of the movement (Thompson, 1992: 137-8). For the CP, the LCDTUs industrial achievements contrasted painfully with the partys ever-declining electoral performance a contradiction which, given the partys determinedly political orientation, led to the abandonment of the industrial strategy rather than its expansion. The Tories narrow defeat in 1974, along with the CPs apparent failure to match the growth of the new Trotskyist organisations, led to a fatal reorientation towards pursuing left Labour MPs and union leaders, with any cross-sectoral industrial organisation coming a poor second. Thus, while an impressive number of stewards and activists remained a part of the CP or its milieu, their organisation into any effective rank-and-file network had dwindled long before the defeats and demoralisation of the 1980s. The demise of this particular example of left agency was not only a question of the Communist Partys political objectives. It was also, in a dynamic itself linked with those politics, a result of the approach of that organisation in its relations with workplace trade unionism. While valuing its then impressive industrial base, the Party totally failed to prioritise building this workplace network on the basis of conscious recognition of its potential for developing industrial struggle in a revolutionary direction. Rather, the principal political function of the LCDTU was seen not in terms of sharpening the political meaning and heft of workplace class struggle, but in contributing to the growth and influence of the CP per se an influence still seen primarily in electoral terms. In this sense, an underlying problem with the LCDTU was its nature as a front with its appearance and disappearance in the hands of the CP, rather than as a national

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organisation owned by union militants (McIlroy and Campbell, 1999: 20). Not only did support for workers raising militant demands and taking unofficial action risk bringing [the LCDTU] into conflict with union leaders the CP was anxious to cultivate, but the whole notion of allowing such activists the independence to organise for themselves on a class basis was anathema to the CPs compulsion to control and dominate such activity in the interest of building its own organisation. Once again, the leaderships political priorities this time specifically electoral had taken priority over the classoriented task of building a rank-and-file network spearheaded, but not dominated, by the CPs own experienced grassroots militants.

What about the Socialist Workers?

It was the same party-building priorities that also arguably destroyed a futher promising exercise of left agency among workplace-based union activists; the IS-led attempt to construct a National Rank and File Movement. During roughly the same period as that in which CP was beginning its decline as a force within workplace trade unionism, the then relatively young International Socialists (IS) began an impressive process of mobilisation within the same milieu. Darlington lists the achievements: the mass sales, almost entirely to shop stewards, of IS leader Tony Cliff s The Employers Offensive (Cliff, 1970); the recruitment of many young workers; the workplace branches ranging from factories to docks (Darlington, 2002: 115). Indeed, the group had begun to have impact even before the major upsurge period of 1969-74: an earlier booklet critical of incomes policy (Barker and Cliff, 1966) had sold like hot cakes the great majority to factory workers (Cliff, 2000: 82-3). While these figures may be embroidered by their enthusiastic advocates, they certainly point to an audience far beyond the usual suspects for this kind of focused, practical, worker-oriented political activity. In sharp contrast to the CPs incorporation into the workplace bureaucratisation of the 1970s (Hyman, 1979), the SWP placed the emphasis on the need for militant rank and file activity from the shop floor (as part of a wider strategy for social revolution from below). And, perhaps most importantly, In pursuit of this strategy it took the initiative to launch rank and file organizations which linked together many thousands of activists who, although not party members, recognised the need for class-wide struggle independently of the official union leadership. In summary, a national rank and file movement was launched (Darlington, 2002: 116, emphasis added). The significance of the phrase although not party members will be returned to. First, however, a historical correction is required. The organisation under which a national rank and file movement was launched was in fact the International Socialists (IS), not the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The distinction may seem pedantic, but it denotes a major political disagreement within the organisation, as part of which the foundation of the Party in 1977 symbolised a turn away from the class IS had once embraced so enthusiastically. The formal turn to the class undertaken by IS in 1970 signalled a widespread adoption of the essentially non-sectarian rank-and-file perspective described above, based on bringing workplace activists into networks of the like-minded across unions, industries and sectors. The leadership concentrated attention, as Marxists had not done in Britain since the 1920s, on the forms of organisation at the point of production (Shaw, 1978:

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106), organising at rank-and-file level among dockers, car workers, teachers, local government workers, miners, bus workers, and engineering workers amongst others (Higgins, 1997: 87-8). One useful insight into the organisations activities is provided by a recent history of the National Union of Journalists, which notes, From 1971 the far left were grouped around Journalists Charter, a rank-and-file organisation of the type promoted in many unions by the Trotskyite International Socialist (IS) group It was not an exclusive or membership group and it was by no means controlled by the IS, but it formed a basis for networking It was tremendously effective at connecting members from different sectors and areas (Gopsill and Neale, 2007). By 1971, the group had industrial factions in ten unions and six industrial sections. Further, national IS-initiated rank-and-file conferences in 1974 and 1977 (see below) attracted several hundred activists representing thousands more of their rank-and-file members in the workplace.

It would be transitional
As IS activist and historian Jim Higgins writes of this earlier period: The pattern was beginning to be set, the lessons of the Minority Movement assimilated. The role of the revolutionary organisation was to initiate and service activity, to help develop the sort of programme that would help the workers concerned to build their own strategy for advance. It would be transitional, both in terms of the expansion of trade union demands and in raising and expanding political consciousness (Higgins,1997: 88). The perspective seemed to bear fruit; between March 1972 and March 1974, IS membership overall increased from 2,351 to 3,310, while the number of manual worker members almost doubled from 613 to 1,155. It was not, however, entirely a question of the membership figures with which the leadership was to become more and more obsessed. During roughly the same period, about 750 additional workers were recruited but could not be integrated into IS (Higgins, 1997: 97). This issue, and the similar difficulty in building stable factory branches among largely inexperienced and politically unaware young workers, pointed to the existence of a significant periphery that could have been nurtured by the workplace-based activists within the group itself. The potential was indicated by the creation during this period of the industrial factions and sections mentioned above, affirming the valuable insight in Darlingtons evocation of the organisations rank-and-file activity as link[ing] together many thousands of activists who, although not party members, recognised the need for class-wide struggle (Darlington, 2002: 116). Ironically, then, it appears to be the exclusion of any insistence on or condition of party membership that may be necessary to the project of building a rank-and-file movement. Initially, in Higginss account, the IS perspective did indeed allow for a much looser organisational form of peripheral consolidation and rank-and-file autonomy: The Rank and File Movement was not something that the IS could, or should, control, but it would need the resources and initial input of the Group to set it up (Higgins, 1997:100). Yet all too soon such thoughtful nurturing of highly promising beginnings, guarding at all times the fragile roots of political organisation and understanding in what was recognised to be valuable working class soil, was becoming sacrificed to the increasingly dominant goal of building the group in a hurry. By 1973, a

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very different perspective was beginning to dominate, summed up in Higginss wry comment that The only measure of revolutionary advance [was] the membership figures never mind the quality, feel the width (Higgins, 1997: 98-129). What rapidly became an open faction fight thus developed between the preoccupations of the ace recruiters and Kleeneze salesmen of the IS centre, and those with a primary orientation towards independent rank-and-file organisation. The quarrel came to a head as early as 1973, when Cliff successfully argued for prioritising an IS recruitment rally over the first National Rank and File Movement (NRFM) conference, already planned for early 1974. The duly organised rally attracted 1,200; the rank-and-file conference roughly half that number. Yet the 600 or so trade unionists in attendance represented parts of the movement not yet covered by ISs existing, and enthusiastic, 3,000-plus membership: 249 union branches, 19 Trades Councils, representatives from strike committees and occupations, and 40 combine and shop stewards committees. Already, the IS leadership was making the mistake of confusing numbers per se with the degree of power and class meaning those numbers represented; and the obsession with width rather than quality continued. Although IS/SWP sustained its rank-andfile approach intermittently over the next few years, holding another almost equally successful conference in 1977, the overweening desire to build the party rode over these more modest, but in their own way so much more promising, beginnings. As Higgins laments, the great IS experiment was over. The dynamics of the sect had won again (Higgins, 1997: 123). Why this particular piece of left agency in effect turned away from the class even during what was then accepted as an unprecedented era, post war, of class struggle - and from the workplace in which this class is best approached, best organised, best politicised, is the subject of the next section. While it is only reasonable to acknowledge the SWPs own retrospective explanation of its change in perspective in terms of an alleged downturn in industrial struggle from the mid-1970s, dissection of this analysis only strengthens the case that party organisations will tend to view whatever the outside world has to offer primarily within the context of the line.

Crisis, what crisis? Downturn what ?

A recent SWP writer (Smith 2002) has argued that despite the perfectly respectable level of support for the 1970s NFRM conferences, the rank and file movement was stillborn. Why? While the small industrial base of IS compared to the CP is invoked, the main reason was that the confidence of the rank and file was subsiding first under Labour and the Social Contract and secondly under the vicious anti-union onslaught undertaken by Thatcher (Smith, 2002: 69,70). The leading SWP theorist Callinicos had earlier argued that IS rank-and-file initiative was launched just as the pendulum of class struggle began to swing back in the bosses favour (Callinicos, 1995: 51). This subsiding of confidence, this swinging back of the pendulum away from working-class power are alternative characterisations of what became, in the 1980s and 1990s at least, the iconic SWP notion of the downturn. Time and again, the downturn was invoked by loyal SWP writers to justify an apparently inevitable turn away from the rank-and-file perspective, or, indeed, any central focus on the workplace per se.

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However, along with Cliff s relatively late coinage of the term downturn itself (Cliff, 1979), such writings suggest a retrospective justification of the move away from a rankand-file perspective rather than an accurate reflection of the class dynamics of the period. To question the downturn analysis as portrayed in these writings, we need do little more than examine the contemporary writings of IS activists themselves. Thus, in early 1975, IS loyalist Steve Jefferys could write, Now a new militancy has returned The last year of Labour government has seen [a] rising tide of rank and file action creat[ing] good conditions for the development of a national rank and file movement (Jefferys, 1975). Towards the end of that year, a fellow activist notes that Historically rank and file movements have emerged during those periods of increased struggle by the working class the working class faces exactly such a situation now (Appleby, 1975). These writers not only confidently asserted the continuing militancy of the working class during this period, emphasising the promising role of newly-developing grass roots organisations like combine committees, but warned clearly of the dangers if IS failed to take an active role in linking different parts of the movement: the major problem facing the class is that of fragmentation. This fragmentation will lead straight to defeat, unless a movement such as Rank and File can intervene (Appleby, 1975). Given the healthy residue of resistance within the working class at the time, not to mention the continued emphasis by many IS loyalists on the need to maintain and build rank-and-file organisation, the organisations pull away from the perspective deserves some explanation. In part this is supplied by the apparent decline, or at least stasis, of the National Rank and File Movement itself. While the initial NRFM programme contained a commitment to organise rank and file groups inside each union, a year later its chronicler could describe the organisations limited credibility in terms of small-scale initiatives like organising the adoption of Chilean trade unionists and running schools on safety, racialism and equal pay (Jefferys, 1975: 14). However worthwhile, these activities are hardly the stuff of which a rank-and-file movement is made; and such emolliency perhaps allows for Cliff s own robust retrospective analysis of the failure of the National Rank and File Movement. Rejecting what he describes as the movements new slogan Small is beautiful Concentration on small problems, Cliff argues that the whole concept of a rank and file movement is to think big: beyond the shop in the factory, or even beyond the individual factory (2000: 136). Yet neither think big abstractions or think small pragmatism adequately define the central task of a rank-and-file movement: to build from and bring together what actually exists out there in the working class movement, on whatever scale. As another IS contribution put it, there exists among the best militants a tradition of linking up informally on an ad-hoc basis The formation of an effective, on-going rank-and-file movement would involve the co-ordinat[ing] and integrat[ing] [of ] these existing groupings (Nagliati, 1974: 11-12). IS was well placed at the time to bring together such groupings and their associated activists, many of whom remained committed and active well beyond even such downturn as occurred in the mid-1970s. Yet at some point between the original March 1974 Rank and File Conference and the last attempt in November 1977, the clarity of this objective appears to have been lost. In fact, for the IS leadership, the trigger for the beginning of the end of the rank-andfile movement had been pulled well over a year before. The organisation made the turn

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at the beginning of 1976 towards a very different initiative: the Right to Work Campaign. Cliff s account premises the rise of the one on the fall of the other: The failure of the National Rank and File Movement was crucial to the rise of the Right to Work Campaign the child replaced the parent (Cliff, 2000: 136-7).2 This campaign against the rising unemployment of the era consisted, like most such initiatives, of propagandistic slogans, marches and rallies largely enacted by definition outside the workplace.

In and out of the workplace

Again, we return to the paradox at the heart of this examination of Left Agency. While classical Marxism and indeed Leninism are in no doubt that the working class is at the centre of the socialist project in both structural and agency terms, most organisations laying claim to this revolutionary tradition seem curiously reluctant to centre their activities where the working class can still, despite the ravages of neoliberalism, be found the workplace. Even the most stellar representatives of left agency, as we have seen, display a marked inclination to lead their troops away from that terrain and towards radical forms of industrial democracy, new social forces, broader political issues etc. This aversion is reflected in the continuing assumption among many sections of the left that trade unionism seen not only as male, stale and pale but as fundamentally establishment-oriented is one of the least likely forces for social transformation. Such doubts have, historically, been shared by even the most orthodox Marxist organisations, notably the Communist Party. As one historian/participant writes of the CP, It cannot be said that the Communist Party was ever workerist those who formed the Communist Party in 1920-21 were making a conscious break with their syndicalist past. In a different twist on the same question, the Eurocommunism of the mid-to-late-1970s was constituted in terms of opposition to economism (i.e. wages militancy)" (Samuel, 2006: 203, 161-2). Hobsbawms classic invocation of The Forward March of Labour Halted (Hobsbawm [ed.], 1980) similarly provided a conclusive dismissal of economistic militancy, though this is more marked in many of its contributions than in Hobsbawms more nuanced account. Historically, then, the Partys disdain for much workplace-based struggle ultimately skewed it away from the very class which, for Marxism, constitutes the fundamental force for social transformation. As long ago as 1847, Marx was excoriating contemporary socialists for ignoring the key question of worker resistance: When it is a question of making a precise study of strikes, combinations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out before our eyes their organisation as a class, some are seized with real fear and others display a transcendental disdain (Marx, 1973: 151; emphasis in original). Not only was Marx the first leading figure in the history of socialism to adopt a position of support to trade unions and trade unionism, on principle (Draper, 1978: 81); still more significantly for the current argument, Marx and Engels were almost completely isolated among contemporary socialists in promoting this perspective. While socialists today are more sophisticated on the question (largely as a result of structural trade union organisation becoming a force impossible to ignore), the 19th-century sectarians who, to Engels fury, insisted on asking dockers leaders to raise a red flag at a strike rally were not unlike todays eager party-builders in their insistence on a pre-emptive politicisation of otherwise unworthy economistic struggles.

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Most carriers of left agency are more responsible and less sectarian, yet the principle remains the same: more often than not, consciously revolutionary left agency acts as a force that undervalues or overlooks the political potential of workplace-sited, exploitationbased resistance, and to use an old critique substitutes its own political and partybuilding objectives for the organic and essential process of building the movement itself, from the ground up. So what could or should be the role of left agency in the workplace? It is no part of the argument in this article to claim that issues like war, the destruction of the NHS, the horrors of New Labour, etc., as highlighted in the SWPs recent advocacy of political trade unionism (Kimber, 2007) are unimportant. Nor is it the case that, in Britain at least, the masses are indifferent to these questions. Every town sees anger and protest about fire station and hospital closures, not to mention trenchant opposition to the war and diligent concern with the environment. The question, once again, is that of the nature and impact of resistance, and thus of agency. In order to make real, rather than symbolic, progress on the broader political issues, a massively strengthened labour movement is needed. The question is how this is mobilised, and how it becomes effective, in terms of forceful, focused revolt rather than protest politics. As shown above, the left has long disdained workplace struggles as insufficiently political. Yet one of the major forces if not the only force galvanising workers from apathy and fatalism to consciousness and action is management provocation in the workplace. Workers previously unaware of or indifferent to the system will react with anger and resistance once hit, so to speak, by that system from behind. And once stirred to action? Two things: the experience of struggle further radicalises its participants; and capital stands impotent and seething as its key resource, labour, stubbornly refuses to produce value.

Counter-intuitively The US experience

So, if left agents can be argued to have foundered so far on the rocks of the paradoxes cited above, what course should they have been steering? Perhaps controversially, one answer can be found in the rather less class-conscious environment of the USA. Here, during the same crucial period of upsurge investigated above (Moody, 1988) a US offshoot of IS rebelled against the British turn to the party and instead focused on building two cross-class initiatives that have survived to this day, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and Labor Notes. Both networks, TDU specifically focusing on the then highly corrupt Teamsters union, and Labor Notes reaching out to workplace-based activists across the movement, sought to base their work on already-existing activity embodied in the ongoing strikes and struggles of the mid-to-late-1970s a perspective that has continued into the 21st century. Labor Notes 2010 conference, gathering together over 1,000 working-class activists, was its biggest yet. Thus, in a country in which socialist ideas and consciousness appear to go impossibly against the stream, two organisations have managed to establish a bridgehead within the working class, at its very roots, for ideas and strategies which, if not explicitly political in the sense advocated by todays SWP and many other vectors of left agency, promote

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increased class awareness and build grass roots organisational strategy towards maximum efficacy in current circumstances. It is often argued that in Britain, with a less abysmally bureaucratic in fact sometimes quasi-socialist union leadership, a rank-and-file network rooted in workplace issues is less necessary and less appropriate. Yet on the contrary, in a more politically sympathetic environment such an initiative might be thought to be open to wider expansion and to play, potentially, a stronger part in building trade union renewal from the ground upwards. In fact, the appearance of a Labor Notes-style rank-and-file trade union newsletter, Trade Union News, was greeted with enthusiasm by British workplace activists in the 1990s circulation rapidly rose to more than 4,000 non-usual suspects. Yet, after five years, the project finally fell victim to the pressures of left sectarianism (Cohen, 2006: 14). In 2007, a National Shop Stewards Network was set up that would appear to answer exactly the requirement of workplace-based cross-movement organisation. However, this project was undermined by left sectarianism from its inception, despite many staunch efforts to the contrary, and is now dominated by the Socialist Party. The attractions of the political programme, the correct demands, the party line the urge to build the party, to propagate the policies known to be right and good, to attack the system propagandistically rather than economistically such pressures have overwhelmingly influenced the revolutionary left and its workplace agents. Yet the dynamics of consciousness-building lie in another and less dramatic direction: the recognition of where workers are, consciously and strategically, rather than where socialists might like them to be. Where that place comes alive, when it becomes open to revolutionary ideas, is in the realm of workplace-based class conflict, which liberates workers, at least temporarily, from capitalist and reformist ideologies. As indicated above, the current crisis of capitalism may possibly generate such breaks from ideological domination; indeed, to a limited extent it already has. The issue is not to attempt to predict whether recession will bring class conflict or as seems equally likely reaction and despair. Rather, socialists particularly those workplace-based left agents who play the most direct and crucial role are there to build from potential struggles, however uneven and flawed, rather than diverting them in a correct but ultimately debilitating direction. If the role of consciously revolutionary left agents is not, then, to push a party line or indeed build the party, what must it be? It is to use the crucial and lasting insights of Marxism and Leninism, to build the movement from below and influence it in the direction of decisive class victories, rather than propagandistic and moralistic campaigns; it is to be there with the class, rather than attempting to bend the stick of existing class activity in a party-imposed direction; it is to build the movement through the party, rather than the party through the movement. The foregoing analysis of left agency does not question the need for revolutionary leadership and its expression through workplace activism and organisation: it questions the method and praxis of much such left agency in the past. Examples of more promising, movement-led approaches are provided with the early, transitional, rank-and-file activity of the British IS and its historical predecessors. The lessons of the past, particularly those of the crucial upsurge period and its aftermath, can be distilled into relatively simple principles. Not only the 1968-74 upsurge but earlier periods such as that of the

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post First World War shop stewards movement show the crucial need for cross-class unity and coordination of struggles, while the need for a rigorous and conscious independence from managerial notions of job viability (Thornett, 1998), from unionmanagement cooperation strategies and from union leaderships themselves, when necessary3, again emerge from the study of working-class history, including the more specific workplace examples reviewed here. Such lessons can still be embodied within revolutionary, but essentially non-sectarian and class-oriented activity within existing rank-and-file organisations and networks, as well as in the workplace per se. As the example of early IS practice demonstrates, such an approach can be embraced by an organisation which is itself consciously revolutionary, but which recognises the need to value and build on existing working-class activity, rather than prioritising the introduction of party-related demands and programmes. It is not a repudiation of broader politics, of revolutionary leadership, of the crucial importance of explicitly socialist left agency in the workplace, but a suggestion for a different direction one aimed at taking the movement toward social transformation from the ground up rather than the party down, from the actually-existing activity of workers in the workplace to the broader, but intrinsically connected, aim of a permanent end to exploitation, oppression, social injustice and capitalist terror. Endnotes
1. A recent analysis (Raw, 2009) has criticised this assumption. 2. A personal reminiscence may be in order here: visiting a prominent IS/SWP activist in the late-1990s, I was intrigued to hear him reminisce that the rationale behind the Right To Work march was that this was an easier recruiting vehicle for Cliff. 3. Here, the famous 1915 Clyde Workers Committee statement should be born in mind: We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them (see Hinton, 1972: 12).

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Author biography Sheila Cohen is a senior research fellow in the Work and Employment Research Unit, University of Hertfordshire. She is active in the field of grassroots trade unionism, reporting for trade union publications and writing and researching on themes relevant to workplace activists. In 2006 she published Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost Their Power and How to Get It Back, and she is currently writing the history of a major workplace-based trade union branch.

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