Violence, I do not have to tell this Congress - least of all audiences - disgusts union opinion and divides union attitudes. It creates a climate of brutality. It is alien to the temperament and the intelligence of the British trade union movement."
Neil Kinnock, to TUC Congress, 1984 "A strike is inconceivable without propaganda and agitation. It is also inconceivable without pickets who, when they can, use persuasion, but, when obliged, use force... He who thinks of renouncing "physical struggle" must renounce all struggle, for the spirit does not live without flesh."
Leon Trotsky, 'Whither France', 1934 NO DELEGATE at the TUC spoke for his views, but the sentiment expressed by Trotsky 50 years ago are plainly far closer to the spirit and the needs of today's miners' strike than Neil Kinnock's public grovelling to the pre judice of bourgeois public opinion. While Trotsky's starting point is a grasp of the irreconcilable conflict of interest between the employers, their state machine, and their armies of scabs on the one hand, and the working class on the other, Kinnock's is the voice of class compromise, and demonstrates a contemptible ignorance of the history of the British labour movement.
Although he made passing reference to the new intensified policing tactics of the Tory government, there can be no doubt that Kinnock's condemnation of violence is aimed primarily against the striking miners. Yet any real understanding of these struggles shows us that while the violence of the ruling class and its state apparatus of police and military can always be dressed up as "preserving law and order" the self-defence and occasional resort to violent tactics by workers in pursuit of theirinterests is invariably portrayed as unacceptable, anti-social lawlessness.
The truth is that as British capitalism has developed from its violent origins in the English Revolution, and early
small scale workshops and single- owner firms to large-scale factory mass production, conglomerate corpora- tions, trusts and multinationals, the trade union movement has had to fight every inch of the way for its very exis- tence. In times of labour scarcity and economic boom, some limited conces- sions have been wrung from resistant THEALL CARINE N An 1875 demonstration hails the release from jail of five Cabinet Makers' Association members, sentenced for peaceful picketing. Socialist Viewpoint, No. 1, Autumn 1984. Page 7
employers; in times of recession and economic crisis, those same employers have utilised mass unemployment, the courts and volleys of Parliamentary legislation in their efforts to smash the strength of the unions and increase their exploitation of the working class.
The trade unions were not and
could not have been formed by postal
ballots, ACAS intervention or the pasUNITEDTO SUPPORT BUT NOT COMBINED ..TO: OPPRESS
1831: rioting workers fighting for electoral reform take control of Bristol. sive acquiescence of the employers. They were built as organisations of class struggle in defiance of repressive legislation, through harsh and bruising battles. If they had listened to Neil Kinnock, or to Len Murray, we would have no trade union movement today.
A look at the question of violence in British labour history involves looking both at the tactics of the workers and at those of the employers. As Friedrich Engels pointed out:
"We shall have single acts of violence and even of brutality to report, but it must always be kept in mind that the social war is avowedly raging in England; and that whereas it is in the interests of the bourgeoisie to conduct this war hypocritically, under the disguise of peace and even of philanthropy, the only help for the working men consists in laying bare the true state of things and destroying hypocrisy..."
(Condition of the Working Class in
As far back as 1768 a strike by coalheavers on the Thames struck horror into the hearts of the ruling classes. The strikers boarded several boats and physically removed the scabs; they picketed London streets and Thames wharfs, turning back supplies of coal, flour and wood. Sailors lent their support by unrigging the ships. The strike was successful.
That same year the coalheavers were among the London workers who backed the Movement for Popular Rights led by John Wilkes. As they did so, a mass demonstration in St Georges Fields was fired on by troops — leaving 6 dead and 15 injured
The French Revolution of 1789 frightened the British ruling classes, who brought in a battery of repressive
legislation to hold down any similar
The Shipping Offences Act (1793) threatened sentences of up to 14 years for anyone obstructing the loading and unloading, sailing or navigation of any vessel. In 1794 Habeas Corpus was suspended, and radicals from the London Corresponding Society were held in prison without trial for several months
Strikes, food riots and attacks on machinery continued, though violently repressed by troops, who were transferred to a nationwide network of bar-
separated from the general
In 1795 came the Seditious Meetings Act, restricting political agitation,
"As schools of war, the Unions are unexcelled. In them is developed the peculiar courage of the English. It is said on the Continent that the English, and especially the workingmen, are cowardly, that they cannot carry out a revolution because, unlike the French, they do not riot at intervals, because they apparently accept the bourgeois regime so quietly. This is a complete mistake. The English working-men are second to none in courage; they are quite as restless as the French, but they fight differently. The French, who are by nature politcal, struggle against social evils with political weapons; the English, for whom politics exist only as a matter of interest, solely in the interest of bourgeois society, fight, not against the Government, but directly against the bourgeoisie; and for the time, this can be done only in a peaceful manEngels, 'Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844? Socialist Viewpoint, No. 1, Autumn 1984. Page 8
and the Treason Act, outlawing written material against the monarchy. Mutinies at Spithead and the Nore brought the Incitement to Mutiny Act and the Administration of Illegal Oaths Act of 1797: both were to be used against workers in struggle.
In 1799 and 1800 came the Combination Acts, sweeping legislation to outlaw any combination of workers to secure wage increases, shorter hours, a stoppage of work, or objecting to work with anyone else: the penalties were jail sentences of 3 months - or even if "conspiracy" were found
The trade unions which continued to organise under this draconian rep ression were forced underground binding themselves together with (illegal) oaths, staging repeated strikes, and taking violent reprisals against scabs, including the throwing of sulphuric acid. In Glasgow, the Cotton Spinners' Union established a fund to support those who killed or ambushed designated scabs.
In 1818 despite the legislation, a Scottish miners' union staged a general strike. The government was still nervous. ' Demobilised soldiers from the Napoleonic wars were returning to unemployment and poverty. In 1819 a vast peaceful demonstration in St Peter's Fields, Manchester demanding Parliamentary reform was viciously attacked by troops, killing eleven people.
Only in 1824 were the Combination Acts repealed, to be followed by an explosion of union organisation: but the employers still retained an armoury of repressive laws, including the Illegal Oaths Act, which in 1834 was the pretext for the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. The same period saw in 1830 the violent revolt of agricultural labour, headed by the legendary "Captain Swing"; it also led into the emergence of the Chartist movement as the first mass political expression of the British working class
Based on a 6-point programme of democratic demands, the Charter united the most advanced sections of workers, but, like every such movement, was increasingly divided between its revolutionary "physical force" wing and their reformist "moral force" opponents — the political ancestors of Kinnock and the TUC right wing
The "physical force" men did not shrink from calling openly for armed struggle, and in 1839 put forward the idea of a general strike, a "holy month" to secure their political objectives. The impotence of the dominant "moral force" leaders was confirmed in 1839 by Parliament's arrogant rejection of the multi-million signature petition for the Charter that had been so confidently assembled.
But the lack of organisation of the
"A complete battle was waged in Manchester in May, 1843, during my residence there. Pauling & Henfrey, a brick firm, had increased the size of the bricks without raising wages, and sold the bricks, of course, at a higher price. The workers, to whom higher wages were refused, struck work, and the Brickmakers' Union declared war upon the firm. The firm, meanwhile, succeeded with great difficulty in securing hands from the neighbourhood, and among the knobsticks, against whom in the beginning intimidation was used, the proprietors set twelve men to guard the yard, all ex-soldiers and policemen, armed with guns. When intimidation proved unavailing, the brickyard, which lay scarcely a hundred paces from an infantry barracks, was stormed at ten o'clock one night by a crowd of brickmakers, who advanced in military order, the first ranks armed with guns. They forced their way in, fired upon the watchmen as soon as they saw them, stamped out the wet bricks spread out to dry, tore down the piled-up rOWS of those already dry, demolished everything which came in their way, pressed into a building, where they destroyed the furniture and maltreated the wife of the overlooker who was living there..." "physical force" school was also demonstrated by the courageous, if doomed, uprising led by John Frost in Newport in 1839. The Chartist movement fell back and increasingly under bourgeois domination, though it was also to give rise to revolutionaries including Ernest Jones and George Harney who collaborated with Marx and Engels.
Class battles involving violent tactics by the workers were a constant feature of the mid-19th century, as Engels vividly records. Murder, arson and intimidation were resorted to against the most brutal employers and strikebreakers. Only during the period of economic boom from 1850-1885 were the unions able to achieve more stability, some legal rights, and to reach out beyond the politically conservative ranks of the most skilled workers.
Hostile court rulings in 1866 against the unions played a role in mobilising mass working class action to back up the 1867 Reform Bill, which for the first time included a section of the working class (the most privileged section) in the electorate. In 1871 and 1875 new laws reluctantly conceded the right to picket peacefuily and protected unions from claims for damages.
But as economic crisis once more returned to British capitalism, with growing international competition, and
UNIVERS, SUPER demonstrators. wide new sections of semi-skilled and manual workers were recruited in the 1880s to new, politically radical general unions, these rights came under all-round attack.
A massive demonstration for free speech in London turned into a full-scale riot when broken up by police on "Bloody Sunday" 1887. The scenes would no doubt have horrified Neil Kinnock:
"During the melee, the police freely used their weapons, and the people, who were armed with iron bars, pokers, gaspipes and short sticks, and even knives, resisted them in a most determined manner... A similar scene was being enacted in the Strand at the corner of Wellington Street..." (Reynold's Newspaper, Nov. 20, 1887)
Successful strikes by Matchgirls (1888) and dockers (1889) redoubled the employers determination to prevent the further spread of unionisation. They set up the scab "Shipping Federation" and other agencies for strikebreaking: once again resorted to anti-union legislation and Socialist Viewpoint, No. 1. Autumn 1984. Page 9
Peterloo Massacre, 1819: sabre-wielding troops attack peaceful their control of the courts.
The 1890' saw a succession of anti-union rulings restricting picketing which culminated in the 1901 Taff Vale judgement. This left unions and their officials vulnerable to punitive damages if sued by an employer. It forced even some of the most conservative union leaders to recognise the need for political action to reverse this legislation — and led to the first steps towards forming the Labour Party as a distinct party from the bourgeois Liberals. In a vain effort to head off this movement, the Liberal government passed legislation to negate the Taff Vale judgement; but they were too late to halt a long-overdue political break by the British workers' movement.
Even the foundation of the Labour Party did not — whatever Kinnock may believe — end the violence of the class struggle in Britain. The years 1910-1914 brought an almost unparallelled wave of strikes across basic industries; and time and again police and even military violence was the means employed by the government to attack the workers.
1889 dock strike. The wave of militancy continued, despite the jingoism of the war period, in the powerful shop stewards' movement on "Red Clydeside", only to be met by tanks on the streets of Glasgow when the Red Flag was flown from City
The employers prepared carefully for the confrontations of the 1920s, and in particular for the General Strike of 1926, in which an orchestrated, state-run scabbing operation was backed up by mounted police and troops in violent action against pickets.
Yet even after the TUC's squalid betrayal of the General Strike; even after the new 1927 anti-union laws which followed on the defeat of the isolated miners; even in the misery of the 1930s depression, the workers repeatedly showed themselves ready to fight back physically against police harassment of the Hunger Marchers,
demonstrations, those fighting to crush Moseley's fascist
The onset of World War 2 and the coalition of Labour with the Tories with the total collaboration of the TUC (and. after 1941, the Communist Party) was combined with intensified laws against strikes, some of which lasted into the
It is only in the period of the postwar "boom", and as a result of the expansion of the working class, the consolidation of its trade unions, the spread of the closed shop and the temporary possibility of obtaining improved conditions through "peaceful" negotiations or industrial action, that it could be argued that violence to a large degree faded — with notable exceptions - from the daily reality of trade union struggle.
The end of that boom, however was once again accompanied - under both Labour and Tory governments -
new anti-union laws, escalating police measures against picketing, and the cultivation of scab firms and agencies. It is sheer hypocrisy for Kinnock, as leader of the same Labour Party
Armed police escort a traction engine during the 1911 rail strike. which fostered the picket-busting Special Patrol Group and unleashed it upon the mass pickets outside the scab Grunwick photographic plant in 191178 to complain now of violence by workers subjected to cavalry charges and beatings from such baton-weilding thugs.
Today's labour movement could not have been built if workers had not long ago rejected Kinnock's attitude and recognised the need to beat back the scabs and enforce a united class line against the employers
To suggest that today's working class can survive without facing violent struggle is to brush aside the experience of every current industrial dispute - in which police intervention and organised scabbing are almost the rule rather than the exception - and the brutal facts of life facing workers in the black communities, up against racist attacks and police harassment.
Kinnock's speeches complain of Tory policies, yet he has yet to grasp that Thatcher's cuts, mass unemployment and anti-union laws are seeking to turn back the clock to the mid19th century. Faced with this, does he seriously expect us to believe workers should fight back with classSocialist Viewpoint, No. 1, Autumn 1984. Page 10
r3c0Б collaborationist policies when the employers show quite clearly that they have no interest in collaboration?
Of course we do not, as Marxists, argue for workers to adopt a strategy of vitriol-throwing and official union "hit squads" carrying out assassinations; the task is to break the isolation of the miners' strike and mobilise the strength of the working class as a whole to defeat and bring down this Tory government.
For those of us who look to such a perspective, the question is not denouncing the "violence" of the striking miners, but preparing the workers movement to confront the intensified violence that can be expected from the police and armed forces in the course of the struggle
It is for that reason that workers should be looking to the sound analysis and advice offered by Leon Trotsky, based on his experience as a leader in 1917 of the world's only successful working class revolution.
And an opponent of the bureaucratic caste under Stalin which subsequently turned that revolution in a conservative, reactionary direction. Look to Trotsky, and reject the empty and useless moralising of Roy Hattersley's sidekick Neil Kinnock.
The