The recent decision of the electricians' union (now amalgamated into the AEEU) to rejoin the TUC has put an end to discussion of a possible political split in the British trade union movement.
in fact the main body of the TUC has moved rightwards on many issues, while its almost total inactivity has won it the renewed confidence of the strike-break The unchanged right wing politics of both wings of the AEEU leadership are plain for all to see. The union was the first movement and hail the end of the recesson, Joing noraser Lamont at Jonn Major in detecting minuscule 'green shoots' of recovery.
The eagerness with which the AEEU searched for and greeted this developlong before the defeatist politics of "new realism' were even a twinkle in Neil Kinnock's eye, right wing union officials have more or less explicitly tied their hopes of winning pay increases and other concessions to the fortunes of the emMost of the apparently "left' union Icaders share the same basic view.
The logic is clear chouch: it the aim is no more than to win reforms within capidevelop profitably, so that the employers can afford to be age-old practice of class-collaboration.
All the 'new realists" have done is try to set the clock back 100 years - to the days before the British trade union and working class movement even aspired to 'Non-political' unions Of course there is nothing inherently USA and many other countries large tual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has of mental production, so that thereby. generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production In other words, as an oppressed class, the working class can only transcend the ideas and ideology of capitalism insofar as it wages a conscious fight for a coberThis development was a long time even beginning in the British unions. Engels wrote as late as 1882 in a letter to "..You ask me what the English workers think about the colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about pontes in general the same as te party here, you see, only Conservatives Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England's monopoly of the world market and the colonies."
Schools of war
This was not a contradiction to Engels' carlier description of the trade unions as schools or war for the proicartal or mis observations on the militancy and courage of British trade uniogstruggles in the late 1840s. Engels recognised that without a political development, trade unionism could not offer any real progress. As he wrote to Eduard Bernstein in 1879:
...for many years past the English working class movement has confined higher wages and shorter bours. These strikes are an end in themselves and are Lenin: class politics ers to the politics and ideology of capitalism.
Lenin addressed the same problem in his key pamphlet What is to be Done?, in which he marked out a decisive break from the politics and methods of the reformists within the Second International.
While sontancous, traud union soug® gle represents a healthy working class revolt against the rule of capital, it could never be sufficient to overtur that rule, he argues. Insisting that revolutionary socialist ideas had to be brought into the working class movement "from without", Lenin labours the point.
"The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e. the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions fight the employers and scrive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of Socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, were elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals."
Lenin is not arguing for a party based on intellectuals, but on the necessity to fight inside the trade unions and wider labour movement for socialist ideas which run counter to the 'spontaneous idcology of reformism. Nor is there any NEWHAM NALGO In other words it is not sufficient to link up strikers or rank and file trade union militants on the level of trade union militancy; the fight must be waged for a political development.
The key issue has therefore always been how marxists should organise the trade unions - fighting often against the stream for a line that runs counter to the mood and prejudices of the workers Engels had begun to address this probthe Second International should embrace the demand for the terr carat-nour cay. requiring workers to go beyond simple trade union struggle at the workplace level and confront the problems posed by bourgeois state.
Revolutionary party
Lenin went much further than Marx and Engels in the building of a revolutionary party, which was also obliged from an carly stage to differentiate itself politically from the reformist wing of Russian social democracy.
Lenin's advance was to rocognise the importance of a regular newspaper as an organicer for the minority of marxist forces fighting in the much wider arena unions and other broad movements of the oppressed.
But equally vital to Lenin's conception of a new way of working was to establish a framework of discipline, designed to ensure that all members of the Bolshevik Party threw their weight benina a common te t the ponca strug gles that took place.
That way a minority could maximise its impact. From this stemmed the innovatory notion of democratic centralism as the means whereby individual members