No More Putilovs ? Over the last few months some members of the faction have begun to develop an analysis of the class struggle in Britain, and perhaps more significantly the structure of the British working class, which have substantial implications for our theory and practice. Neil D in ISJ 139 and Colin B in his meeting at Marxism 2013 offer the clearest expressions of these developments. Neil D’s article on ‘the neo liberal era in Britain: Historical developments and current perspectives’ offers tantalising glimpses of an agenda which he hints at, but barely explains. He starts the article by suggesting that the SWP is innately conservative: “Capitalism involves underlying continuities, without which it would cease to exist, but also that it undergoes periodic changes in form, which are the expressions of its historical development. Revolutionaries have to recognise and respond to the latter, rather than denying their existence just because they threaten to disrupt venerable organisational forms or established interventionist strategies. They should instead look for what new possibilities these changes offer, however unfamiliar or unsettling they may be.” (my highlights) And he ends in the same vein: “There is always a danger of adapting to the environment in which we have achieved a degree of successful implantation, so that a particular sector is treated as decisively important to the working class simply because it is decisively important to us. The public sector trade unions play this role for the Socialist Workers Party.” And: “However, nostalgia for the pits, shipyards and power stations, and its corollary, despair over the call centres, supermarkets and dispatch centres, are not only useless, but also quite unnecessary.” The intention appears to be to suggest that the organisation which made such a successful turn to the working class in the late 60s and early 70s, the organisation which most came to terms with the downturn in class struggle in the late 70s and which recognised the significance of the growth of white collar workers, has now lost its way. Yet it seems to me that under the pretence of challenging conservatism and being prepared to ‘think outside the box’, there is a dangerous turn away from the centrality of the working class as the agent of socialist revolution being developed by Neil, Colin and their co-thinkers in the faction. At this year’s Marxism this was expressed in a number of meetings I attended. In his meeting on “what could a socialist revolution look like?” Colin B asks a question about where the future power may lie. “We can’t be prescriptive about what the social basis around which people will organise will be…. The Putilov works in Russia seems to be a natural organising centre, one of the biggest factories in the world. Obviously it is going to be a centre of organisation…… but then you think today, and you look around Manchester or Leeds or Sheffield or London those big big factories don’t have the same centrality as they did. Clearly other forms will emerge. I don’t know what they’ll be.” This was an astonishing proposition for a comrade of Colin’s standing. As Richard B B said in the discussion: “Yes there will be unexpected mobilisations from quarters we don’t expect and we have to respond to them. But the organised working class is still key.... When we say where are our Putilov factories? They’re the hospitals, they’re the transport workers, they’re the shopping centres where you get thousands of retail workers together.”

Now the valid point in Colin’s argument is that the working class has changed, and many of the massive production units which dominated the economic and political life of the working class in the 1970s are gone. But new ones are being created. Is it really the case that we have no key workplaces left in Britain? Every city and town has major workplaces, be they airports, hospitals, factories or retail parks. 76,000 people work in Heathrow Airport, dwarfing even the 30,000 employed in Putilov. Another 7,000 local workers are part of Heathrow’s supply chain. In Manchester Trafford Park industrial area has 1,400 companies employing 35,000 people, a massive concentration of workers in close proximity to each other. Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust employs nearly 15,000 people and there are 10 NHS Trusts which employ over 10,000 workers. Bluewater shopping centre employs 7,000 people. Jaguar Landrover employs 25,000 people, distributed across 6 major sites in the West Midlands and Merseyside, and these numbers are growing. In the Communist Manifesto Marx described the impact of capitalism on society “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation…” recognition of this, and its impact on a changing working class, is at the heart of SWP analysis. But while the working class haschanged, its role in society has not. We no longer have miners or shipbuilders in anyeffective numbers. The number of dockers has fallen significantly in London alone down from 20,000 in the 1970s to less than 500 in 1992. Yet unless I am mistaken the imports and exports to Britain, worth a cool £693 billion last year, are entirely dependent on the docks, airports and now the channel tunnel to function. These are all unionised workforces. Neil treats this fact with disdain “but this is more to do with their strategic position rather than their numerical strength.” But isn’t that an important point about the working class? It is our position in capitalist society that gives us the power to overthrow it. The working class in Russia was a small minority, yet they were the key class. Of course the working class has changed. At Marxism faction members were quoting the low number of private sector workers in unions, 2.5 million, as if it was a new discovery. In fact in ISJ 120 in 2008 Chris Harman charted this decline in his article on ‘snapshots of union strengths and weaknesses”. The implication of quoting these figures appears to be that there has been a massive flight from the unions. This simply hasn’t happened. With the decline of the industries that dominated the 70s we have seen the loss of union members. What does the working class look like today? For a start manufacturing is not dead. 2.6 million people work in it, 8% of the workforce, and it is the 3rd biggest section of the UK economy. Of course there have been big changes. In 1979 six million people were employed in manufacturing. The loss of 3.4 million jobs in manufacturing, one of the strongest bases of the unions in the 70s, goes a long way to describe why union membership has fallen. Under the Thatcher administration, from 1979 to 1990 union membership dropped by around 3.5 million. In the recession of 1989 to 1992 another 1.7 million union members lost their jobs. The current recession and austerity continue to see unionised workers, amongst others, laid off. Although direct comparisons are of little value due to different national traditions it is worth noting British union density compared with other OECD countries. While in the UK the density was 25.8% in 2011 this was higher than Germany, France and Greece. Notably the OECD countries as a whole have also seen a drop of union density from close to 35% in 1975 to 17% in 2011.

Neil mocks ‘nostalgia for …. Power stations.’ Well I don’t know what his computer and internet provider run on, but mine are electricity. This is another group of workers who have fallen dramatically in number, yet retain immense power. Take a look at the retail sector. Supermarkets dominate food consumption in this country. Yet just in time delivery methods mean they are vulnerable to accidents or stoppages. If you travel on any motorway you can see the huge supermarket distribution hubs. A strike in these would see an immediate impact on the food on the shelves. They are also extremely vulnerable to 70s style mass picketing. They mostly have only one or two entrances and they need to keep these open. Tesco workers are organised and in some areas they are well organised. The fall in numbers in the unions is undoubtedly a concern for those who see the working class as the centre of their political vision. This is particularly true of the private sector and we should play whatever role we can in helping to unionise new sections of workers. But the real organising power is the struggle itself. Every major strike has seen significant increases in union membership. In the 70s the struggles of the most powerful sections of workers; miners, dockers, engineers etc, gave confidence to the building workers to fight, and to unionise sites across the country with militant actions. It was also the confidence created by the militancy of the backbone of the labour movement at the time that led to struggles amongst what were then weaker sections – civil servants took their first action, teachers and health workers started acting like trade unionists. The membership of the SWP is largely confined to the public sector as a result not of some strategic plan, nor even inertia. It is the product of the defeats of the working class in the 80s and 90s. Do we want to break out into the private sector, manual workers etc? Oh yes. But the extent to which we succeed won’t simply be set by our consistency in working around these areas, important as this can be. It will be set by the tide of the struggle. And in this we can have some influence, even from our public sector base. The role played by the SWP in the NUT and UCU, to a lesser but important extent in UNISON, and the hard left’s impact in the PCS, has helped raise the prospect of coordinated, and sometimes militant action. Without our continued work in these areas would the movement be stronger or weaker? Is it all bad news? Figures for the rise and fall of the unions between 1995 and 2012 show a loss of 650,000 members. While this is not good news it is a far less serious decline than the previous period. If you look closer at the figures you see two contrasting trends – while nearly 1 million union members have been lost in manufacturing and 138,000 in construction; education has increased by 481,000 members, a 45% increase, and health and social work have increased by over 250,000 members. So, far from the SWP deciding what is ‘decisively important to the working class simply because it is decisively important to us’ it turns out that public sector trade unions are a significant growth area for the trade union movement and are currently decisively important to the movement. The development of the faction has, despite many denials, begun a process for some comrades of developing ideas which are moving away from ideas which are central to the SWP. The road to revolution is a complex one, and in the world’s oldest capitalist democracy it is certainly a slow one. Along the way shiny new movements come along that look like they are a better, quicker and easier route. Yet the left is littered with individuals and organisations whose move away from the working class as the key power for socialist revolution started with small steps. John Rees, formerly of the SWP and now Counterfire, parted ways with us over differences over Stop the War. Other disagreements were downplayed but are now far clearer. At the launch of the People’s Assembly John stated that the working class struggle is

just one arm of the movement, of equal importance to the movement on the streets. James Meadway also recently published an article on Counterfire which offered a conservative analysis of the working class and announced that workplaces are the ‘most depoliticised spaces in British society’! I hope that members of the faction, some with long experience in our organisation, aren’t on the same path where a disagreement over one issue becomes a catalyst for breaking with our general politics. Neil D opened the debate at Marxism with a long list of things he doesn’t think – precariat etc. yet by the end I was no clearer about what he does think. Capitalism has changed, yes. The working class has changed, well yes. Rather than sniping at the party, tell us what you are saying is wrong with our analysis of the working class today, tell us what you think the correct analysis should be, and tell us how it would change our practice. For this is the real test – how would you change our intervention in the class struggle? We all feel frustration at the low level of struggle. But if we decide that there are no more Putilovs and we need to look outside of the working class for alternative sources of power, this is the end of revolutionary socialism. Pete (Birmingham Small Heath)