Political Philosophy: Part Three

 The third in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. The first two posts dealt with the neutralising of an authentically working class public space and popular culture between the Industrial Revolution and the Second World War. This one will examine the history of working class self-organisation in industry.

Part Three: Blackshirts from the Combination Acts to the New Right: the union double standard

In 1792, with successful revolutions having taken place across the Atlantic and across the Channel, the British elite moved to ensure that no such thing would occur on its soil. A Tory politician, John Reeves founded the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. Its mission: inciting mobs to attack radicals, burning effigies of Thomas Paine, and assisting the authorities with prosecutions for sedition, such as those which led to the treason trials of 1794. After successfully keeping the British people under the rule of church and king, it faded away, but the tactic of employing private force to suppress working class revolt emerged again and again.

The Association’s main targets were the network of republican organisations such as the London Corresponding Society, which disseminated radical literature and agitated for political change. Their members were typically skilled artisans, whose trades were in high demand, making them less vulnerable to boycotts aimed at curbing their political activism. In response to this flurry of popular self-organisation, Parliament passed an act in 1793 forcing all such groups to register their constitutions and lists of office-bearers with the government. Four years later, they were banned from administering oaths to new members.

The practice of working class self-organisation (and the paranoid elite reaction thereto) dotted the radical history of nineteenth-century Britain. Schools were established which promoted radical opposition to the regime of the day, only to be forced out of existence by the provision of compulsory state education. The co-operative movement was formed in Rochdale in 1844. Friendly societies popped up everywhere, only to be made into historical relics by the coming of the welfare state. The repression of unions, however, was the most powerful use of the state’s power against the working class. History remembers the Tolpuddle Martyrs, but less so the prolonged struggle for the right to organise of which they formed a part. The British state banned unions, then legalised them but severely restricted their activities; it also replaced customary Saints’ Days with Bank Holidays, of which there were fewer, in order to impose greater discipline on the workforce. As late as 1911, Westminster (in the person of Home Secretary Winston Churchill) was still willing to use military force against striking coal miners in South Wales.

The tactics pioneered by the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers were employed again in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Faced with worker occupations of factories, the country’s classical liberal ruling class began negotiations to hand power in an orderly fashion to the workers’ movement, and the owners of the FIAT motor company offered to turn their factory in Turin into a co-operative. Not all of the country’s elites, however, were as conciliatory, and the ones who weren’t found an ally in Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Far from being some new radical, revolutionary form of right-wing politics indigenous to the twentieth century, as many historians have argued, fascism can be seen as the mid-twentieth century’s version of a tradition of elite-inspired private violence against popular self-organisation which goes back at least to the anti-republican mobs of 1790s Britain.

When the elites can stifle working class self-organisation through peaceful, legal means, however, they will choose to do so. If one examines the provisions of anti-union legislation enacted over the years, one can see many restrictions on behaviour which would be denounced as unconscionable violations of freedom of speech and association if applied to any other type of organisation (especially a corporation). The landmark Taft-Hartley Act, for example, prevents American unions from donating to political campaigns, engaging in secondary boycotts, solidarity strikes, or wildcat strikes, and negotiating ‘closed shops’ with employers. It also requires union leaders to affirm that they are not communists. The Act succeeded insofar as it locked unions into a three-way coalition with the state and business for three decades, but every new generation brings new measures imposed from above to stifle the struggle for freedom and equality.

Observers struggle to account for how the world has changed since the end of the Keynesian Consensus. I put forward here a few suggestions which provide an outline of my explanation of the triumph of the New Right and the malaise of the left:

• The spike in working class activism (France’s May 1968, Italy’s Hot Autumn, Britain’s mid-1970s wave of strikes) led the elites to believe that the Keynesian Consensus was no longer enough to contain the aspirations of workers.
• The economic crises of the early 1970s (the end of the Bretton Woods system, the OPEC-induced oil shock, etc.) allowed for those inspired by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand to pounce.
• The aim of the world’s elites for the past few decades has been to reduce demand for public goods (transport infrastructure, dams, etc.), so as to allow that part of the world’s wealth which is not paid to workers as wages to accrue to them in the form of accumulated capital.
• Far from being a radical, anti-systemic critique of capitalism, the ‘green’ ideology serves one of the key purposes of the New Right’s agenda. By pointing out (and usually exaggerating) the negative environmental effects of railways, dams, and other forms of infrastructure, greens help to stave off popular clamour for more and better public goods.
• The increasing militarisation of society (SWAT teams, the War on Drugs, CCTV cameras) is a means of dulling the rebellious spirit of the people. 
• The New Right’s Gramscian ideological hegemony manifests itself in the most mundane ways: witness the spontaneous outpouring of grief last year over the death of that modern-day robber baron capitalist, Steve Jobs. Entrepreneurship and innovation in the production of useless consumer goods have become more fashionable to freedom, justice, or equality.