CHAPTER XI
POLITICAL ORGANISATION
[1900-1920]
Fifty years ago, when Professor Brentano described the British Trade Union Movement with greater knowledge and insight than any one else had then shown,[707] nothing seemed more unlikely than that the Movement would become organised as an independent political party, appealing to the whole electorate on a general programme, returning its own contingent of members to the House of Commons, and asserting a claim, as soon as that contingent should become the strongest party in Parliament, to constitute a national administration. For nearly a quarter of a century more, as we have described in a previous chapter, though Trade Unionism was making itself slowly more and more felt in politics, it was still possible for economists and statesmen to believe that “Labour” in Great Britain would organise only to maintain its sectional industrial interests, and that it would impinge on politics, if at all, only occasionally, in defence of Trade Unionism itself, or in support of some particular project of industrial law. By 1894, when the first edition of this book was published, there was already manifest, as we then stated, a great shifting of Trade Union opinion on the
“pressing question of the position to be taken by the Trade Union world in the party struggles of To-day and the politics of To-morrow. In our chapter on ‘The Old Unionism and the New,’ we described the rapid conversion of the superior workman to the general principles of Collectivism. This revolution of opinion in the rank and file has been followed by a marked change of front on the part of the salaried officials, and by a growing distrust of the aristocratic and middle-class representatives of both the great political parties. To the working-man politician of 1894 it seems inconceivable that either landlords or capitalists will actively help him to nationalise land and mining royalties, to absorb unearned incomes by taxation, or to control private enterprise in the interests of the wage-earner. Thus we find throughout the whole Trade Union world an almost unanimous desire to make the working-class organisations in some way effective for political purposes. Nor is this a new thing. The sense of solidarity has, as we have seen, never been lacking among those active soldiers and non-commissioned officers who constitute the most vital element in the Trade Union army. The generous aid from trade to trade, the pathetic attempts to form General Unions, the constant aspirations after universal federation, all testify to the reality and force of this instinctive solidarity. The Collectivist faith of the ‘New Unionism’ is only another manifestation of the same deep-rooted belief in the essential Brotherhood of Labour. But, as we have seen, the basis of the association of these million and a half wage-earners is, primarily, sectional in its nature. They come together, and contribute their pence, for the defence of their interests as Boilermakers, Miners, Cotton-spinners, and not directly for the advancement of the whole working class. Among the salaried officers of the Unions, it is, as we have said, the Trade Official, chosen and paid for the express purpose of maintaining the interests of his own particular trade, who is the active force. The effect has been to intensify the sectionalism to which an organisation based on trades must necessarily be prone. The vague general Collectivism of the non-commissioned officers has hitherto got translated into practical proposals only in so far as it can be expressed in projects for the advantage of a particular trade. Some organised trades have known how to draft and to extort from Parliament a voluminous Labour Code, the provisions of which are exceptionally well adapted for the protection of the particular workers concerned. The ‘particulars clause’[708] and the law against the ‘over-steaming’ of weaving sheds are, for instance, triumphs of collective control which could hardly have been conceived by any one except the astute trade officials of the Cotton Operatives. But there is no attempt to deal with any question as a whole. Trade Unionists are, for instance, unanimously in favour of drastic legislation to put down ‘sweating’ in all trades whatsoever. But no salaried officer of the Trade Union world feels it to be his business to improve the Labour Code for any industry but his own. Thus, whereas the Factory Acts have been effectively elaborated to meet the special circumstances of a few trades, for all the rest they remain in the form of merely general prohibitions which it is practically impossible to enforce. How far it is possible, by the development of Trades Councils, the reform of the Trades Union Congress, the increased efficiency of the Parliamentary Committee, the growth of Trade Union representation in the House of Commons, or, finally, by the creation of any new federal machinery, to counteract the fundamental sectionalism of Trade Union organisation, to supplement the specialised trade officials by an equally specialised Civil Service of working-class politicians, and thus to render the Trade Union world, with its million of electors, and its leadership of Labour, an effective political force in the State, is, on the whole, the most momentous question of contemporary politics.” [709]
The quarter of a century that has elapsed since these words were written has seen an extensive political development of the Trade Union Movement, taking the form of building up a separate and independent party of “Labour” in the House of Commons, which we have now to record. [710]
The continued propaganda of the Socialists, and of others who wished to see the Trade Union Movement become an effective political force, which we have described as active from 1884 onwards, did not, for nearly a couple of decades, produce a political “Labour Party.” So strong was at that time the resistance of most of the Trade Union leaders to any participation of their societies in general politics, even on the lines of complete independence of both Liberal and Conservative Parties, that “Labour Representation” had still, for some years, to be fought for apart from Trade Unionism. The leaders, indeed, did not really care about Trade Union influence in the House of Commons.[711] Many of them, as we have described, remained for a whole generation averse even from legal regulation of the conditions of employment. In national politics they were mostly Liberals, with the strongest possible admiration for Gladstone and Bright; or else (as in Lancashire) convinced Conservatives, concerned to defend the Church of England or Roman Catholic elementary schools in which their children were being educated or carried away by the glamour of an Imperialist foreign policy. They asked for nothing more than a few working-class members in the House of Commons, belonging to one or other of the “respectable” parties, to which they could thus obtain access for the adjustment of any matters in which their societies happened to be interested.
In 1887, at his first appearance at the Trades Union Congress, J. Keir Hardie,[712] representing a small Union of Ayrshire Miners, demanded a new start. He called upon the Trade Unionists definitely to sever their connection with the existing political parties, by which the workmen were constantly befooled and betrayed, and insisted on the necessity of forming an entirely independent party of Labour, to which the whole working-class movement should rally. On the Congress he produced no apparent effect.[713] But, six months later, when a Parliamentary vacancy occurred in Mid-Lanark, Keir Hardie was nominated, against Liberal and Tory alike, on the principle of entire independence; and in spite of every effort to induce him to withdraw,[714] he went to the poll, obtaining only 619 votes. A society was then formed to work for independent Labour representation, under the designation of the Scottish Labour Party, having for chairman Mr. R. B. Cunninghame Graham, M.P., who had been elected as a Liberal but who had become a Socialist. The “new spirit” of 1889, which we have described, put heart into the movement for political independence; and after much further propaganda by the Socialists,[715] at the General Election of 1892 Keir Hardie was elected for West Ham, avowedly as the first member of an independent Party of Labour; together with fourteen other workmen,[716] whose independence of the Liberal Party, even where it was claimed, was less marked than their obvious jealousy of Keir Hardie. There was apparently still no hope of gaining the adherence of the Trade Unions as such; and at the Glasgow Trades Union Congress of 1892 arrangements were made by a few of the delegates to hold a smaller conference, which took place at Bradford, in 1893, under the chairmanship of Keir Hardie, when those who were determined to establish a separate political party formed a society, made up of individual adherents, which was styled the Independent Labour Party. In this the Scottish Labour Party was merged, but it remained without the affiliation of Trade Unions in their corporate capacity. The Independent Labour Party, of which throughout his life Keir Hardie was the outstanding figure, carried on a strenuous propagandist campaign, and during the next two years put up independent candidates at by-elections, with uniform ill-success. At the General Election of 1895, no fewer than twenty-eight “I.L.P.” candidates went to the poll, every one of them (including Keir Hardie himself at West Ham) being unsuccessful. With two or three exceptions, the Trade Unionist members in alliance with the Liberal Party successfully maintained their seats. The establishment of an aggressively independent Labour Party in Parliament still looked hopeless.
With the new century an effort was made on fresh lines. The continuous propaganda had had its effect, even on the Trades Union Congress. In 1898 it could be suggested in the presidential address[717] that a “committee should be appointed to draft a scheme of political organisation for the Trade Union world on the ground that just as trades federation is a matter of vital necessity for industrial organisation, so also will a scheme of political action be of vital necessity if we wish Parliament to faithfully register the effect of the industrial revolution on our social life.” The very next year a resolution—which had been drafted in London by the members of the Independent Labour Party—was carried on the motion of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, against the votes of the miners as well as of the textile workers, directing the convening of a special congress representing Trade Unions, Co-operative Societies, and Socialist organisations, in order to devise means of increasing the number of Labour members.[718] It was urged on the Parliamentary Committee that the Socialist organisations had a right to be strongly represented on the proposed Committee; and the Parliamentary Committee, which had no faith in the scheme and attached little importance to it, nominated four of its members (S. Woods, W. C. Steadman, R. Bell, and W. Thorne), all of whom afterwards became Members of Parliament, to sit with two representatives each from the Independent Labour Party (Keir Hardie and J. Ramsay MacDonald), the Fabian Society (G. Bernard Shaw and E. R. Pease), and the Social Democratic Federation (H. Quelch and H. R. Taylor). This Committee took the business into its own hands, and drew up a constitution, upon a federal basis, for a “Labour Representation Committee,” as an independent organisation, including Trade Unions and Trades Councils, along with Co-operative and Socialist Societies; and in February 1900 a specially summoned congress, attended by 129 delegates, representing Trade Unions aggregating half a million members, and Socialist societies claiming fewer than seventy thousand, adopted the draft constitution, established the new body, appointed its first executive, and gave it, in Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, not merely its first secretary but also a skilful organiser, to whose patient and persistent effort no small part of its subsequent success has been due.
For two years the Labour Representation Committee, in spite of diligent propaganda among Trade Union Executives, seemed to hang fire. The General Election of 1900 found it unprepared; and, though it put fifteen candidates in the field, only two of them were successful. No Co-operative Society joined; the Social Democratic Federation withdrew; scarcely a score of Trades Councils were enrolled; and though sixty-five separate Trade Unions gradually adhered—being only about five or six per cent of the total number—the aggregate affiliated membership of the Party did not reach half a million. Then the tide turned, mainly through the rally of Trade Unionism as it became aware of the full implications of the assault upon it made by the decision in the Taff Vale case, which we have already described. The miners stood aloof only because they preferred to use their own organisation. In 1901 the Miners’ Federation voted a levy of a penny per month on all its membership in order to create a Parliamentary Fund; and the running of as many as seventy candidates was then talked about. During the year 1902 the number of adhering Trade Unions and Trades Councils, and the total affiliated membership, were alike practically doubled. In the next two years the Committee contested no fewer than six Parliamentary by-elections, returning its members in half of them.[719] Meanwhile the Conservative Government obstinately refused to allow legislation restoring to Trade Unions the statutory status of 1871-76, of which the judges’ decision in the Taff Vale case had deprived them. Careful preparation was accordingly made for a successful appeal to Trade Unionists at the General Election which was approaching; and when it came, in January 1906, no fewer than fifty independent Labour candidates were put in the field against Liberals and Conservatives alike. To the general surprise of the political world, as many as twenty-nine of these were successful; besides a dozen other workmen, mostly miners, who again stood with Liberal Party support and were still regarded as belonging to that Party. The twenty-nine at once formed themselves into, and were recognised as, a separate independent party in the House of Commons, with its own officers and whips, concerned to push its own programme irrespective of the desires and convenience of the other political parties. At the same time the Labour Representation Committee changed its name to the Labour Party.
We need not concern ourselves with the Parliamentary struggles of the next three years, during which the Parliamentary Labour Party may claim to have indirectly secured the passage, as Government measures, of the Trade Disputes Act, the Miners’ Eight Hours Act, and the Trade Boards Act, and to have developed something like a Parliamentary programme. It suffered, however, in the Trade Union world, from its inevitable failure to impress its will on the triumphant Liberal majority of these years. What saved the Labour Party from decline, and gave it indeed fresh impetus in the Trade Union movement, was the renewed legal assault on Trade Unionism itself, which in 1909, as we have described, culminated in the Osborne Judgement of the highest Appeal Court, by which the Trade Unions were prohibited from applying any of their funds to political activities and to the support of the Labour Party in particular. The refusal of the Liberal Government for four whole years to remedy this gross miscarriage of justice though conscious that it was not permanently defensible; and the unconcealed desire of the Liberal Party politicians to put the Labour Party out of action as an independent political force, swung over to its side the great bulk of active Trade Unionists, including many, especially in Lancashire, who had hitherto counted to the Conservative Party. By 1913, in spite of a large number of injunctions restraining Trade Unions from affiliating, the Labour Party could count on a membership of nearly two millions, and this number has since steadily grown. The two General Elections of 1910, though dominated by other issues, left the Parliamentary Labour Party unshaken; whilst the accession to the Party of the Miners’ members raised its Parliamentary strength to forty-two. Payment of members was secured in 1911, and the Mines (Minimum Wage) Act in 1912, but not until 1913 could the Government be induced to pass into law the Trade Union Act, which once more permitted Trade Unions to engage in any lawful purposes that their members desired. This concession was, even then, made subject to any objecting member being enabled to withhold that part of his contribution applicable to political purposes—an illogical restriction, because it applied only to the dissentient’s tiny fraction of money, and he was not empowered to prevent the majority of members from using the indivisible corporate power of the Union itself. This restriction, not put upon any other corporate body, was universally believed to have been imposed, in the assumed interest of the Liberal Party, with the object of crippling the political influence of Trade Unionism; and is still bitterly resented. [720]
Whilst it was very largely the successive assaults on Trade Unionism itself that built up the Labour Party, the ultimate defeat of these assaults, the concession of Payment of Members, and the attainment of legal security by the Trade Union Act of 1913, did nothing to stay its progress. At the same time, the injunctions of the years 1909-12, and the fear of litigation, together with a certain disillusionment with Parliamentary action among the rank and file, led to the gradual falling away of some Trade Unions, mostly of comparatively small membership. The very basis of the Labour Party, upon which alone it has proved possible to build up a successful political force—the combination, within a political federation, of Trade Unions having extensive membership and not very intense political energy, and Socialist societies of relatively scanty membership but overflowing with political talent and zeal—necessarily led to complications. It needed all the tact and patient persuasion of the leaders of both sections to convince the Socialists that their ideals and projects were not being sacrificed to the stolidity and the prejudices of the mass of Trade Unionists; and at the same time to explain to the Trade Unionists how valuable was the aid of the knowledge, eloquence, and Parliamentary ability contributed by such Socialist representatives as Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden, J. Ramsay MacDonald, and W. C. Anderson. Moreover, the complications and difficulties of Parliamentary action in a House of Commons where the Government continuously possessed a solid majority; the political necessity of supporting the Liberal Party Bills relating to the Budget and the House of Lords, and of not playing into the hands of a still more reactionary Front Opposition Bench, were not readily comprehended by the average workman. What the militants in the country failed to allow for was the impotence of a small Parliamentary section to secure the adoption of its own policy by a Parliamentary majority. But it is, we think, now admitted that it was a misfortune that the Parliamentary Labour Party of these years never managed to put before the country the large outlines of an alternative programme based on the Party’s conception of a new social order, eliminating the capitalist profit-maker wherever possible, and giving free scope to communal and industrial Democracy—notably with regard to the administration of the railways and the mines, the prevention of Unemployment, and also the provision for the nation’s non-effectives, which the Government dealt with so unsatisfactorily in the National Insurance Act of 1911. The failure of the Parliamentary Labour Party between 1910 and 1914 to strike the imagination of the Trade Union world led to a certain reaction against political action as such, and to a growing doubt among the active spirits as to the value of a Labour Party which did not succeed in taking vigorous independent action, either in Parliament or on the platform and in the press, along the lines of changing the existing order of society. A like failure to strike the imagination characterised The Daily Citizen—the organ which the Labour Party and the Trade Union Movement had established with such high hopes—and its inability to gain either intellectual influence or adequate circulation did not lighten the somewhat gloomy atmosphere of the Labour Party councils of 1913-14.[721] This reaction did not appreciably affect the numerical and financial strength of the Labour Party itself, as the relatively few withdrawals of Unions were outweighed by the steady increase in membership of the hundred principal Unions which remained faithful, by the accession of other Unions, and by the continual increase in the number and strength of the affiliated Trades Councils and Local Labour Parties. But the reaction in Trade Union opinion weakened the influence of the members of the Parliamentary Party, alike in the House of Commons and in their own societies. A wave of “Labour Unrest,” of “Syndicalism,” of “rank and file movements” for a more aggressive Trade Unionism, of organisation by “shop stewards” in opposition to national executives, and of preference for “Direct Action” over Parliamentary procedure swept over British Trade Unionism, affecting especially the London building trades, the South Wales Miners, and the engineering and shipbuilding industry on the Clyde. The impetuous strikes in 1911-13 of the Railwaymen, the Coal-miners, the Transport Workers, and the London Building Trades, which we have already described, were influenced, partly, by this new spirit. The number of disputes reported to the Labour Department, which had sunk in 1908 to only 399, rose in 1911 to 903, and culminated in the latter half of 1913 and the first half of 1914 in the outbreak of something like a hundred and fifty strikes per month. British Trade Unionism was, in fact, in the summer of 1914, working up for an almost revolutionary outburst of gigantic industrial disputes, which could not have failed to be seriously embarrassing for the political organisation to which the movement had committed itself, when, in August 1914, war was declared, and all internal conflict had perforce to be suspended.
During the war (1914-18) the task of the Labour Party was one of exceptional difficulty. It had necessarily to support the Government in a struggle of which five-sixths of its Parliamentary representatives and probably nine-tenths of its aggregate membership approved. The very gravity of the national crisis compelled the Party to abstain from any action that would have weakened the country’s defence. On the other hand, the three successive Administrations that held office during the war were all driven by their needs, as we have already described, to impose upon the wage-earners cruel sacrifices, and to violate, not once but repeatedly, all that Organised Labour in Britain held dear. The Party could not refrain, at whatever cost of misconstruction, from withstanding unjustifiable demands by the Government;[722] protesting against its successive breaches of faith to the Trade Unions; demanding the conditions in the forthcoming Treaty of Peace that, as could be already foreseen, would be necessary to protect the wage-earning class; standing up for the scandalously ill-used “conscientious objectors,” and doing its best to secure, in the eventual demobilisation and social reconstruction, the utmost possible protection of the mass of the people against Unemployment and “Profiteering.” In all this the Labour Party earned the respect of the most thoughtful Trade Unionists, but necessarily exposed itself to a constant stream of newspaper misrepresentation and abuse. Any opposition or resistance to the official demands was inevitably misrepresented as, and mistaken for, an almost treasonable “Pacifism” or “Defeatism”—a misunderstanding of the attitude of the Party to which colour was lent by the persistence and eloquence with which the small Pacifist Minority within the Party—a minority which, it must be said, included some of the most talented and active of its leading members in the House of Commons—used every opportunity publicly to denounce the Government’s conduct in the war. But although the Pacifist Group in Parliament was strenuously supported in the country by the relatively small but extremely active constituent society of the Labour Party styled The Independent Labour Party—the very name helping the popular misunderstanding—the Trade Unionists, forming the vast majority of the Labour Party, remained, with extremely few exceptions, grimly determined at all costs to win the war.
If Organised Labour had been against the war, it is safe to say that the national effort could not have been maintained. The need for the formal association of the Labour Party with the Administration was recognised by Mr. Asquith in 1915, when he formed the first Coalition Cabinet, into which he invited the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Mr. Arthur Henderson (Friendly Society of Ironfounders), who became President of the Board of Education. Later on, in 1916, Mr. G. N. Barnes (Amalgamated Society of Engineers) was appointed to the new office of Minister of Pensions. When, in December 1916, Mr. Asquith resigned, and Mr. Lloyd George formed a new Coalition Government, Mr. Henderson entered the small War Cabinet that was then formed, with the nominal office of Paymaster-General; whilst Mr. Barnes continued Minister of Pensions, Mr. John Hodge (British Steel Smelters’ Society) was appointed to the new office of Minister of Labour, and three other members of the Party (Mr. W. Brace, South Wales Miners; Mr. G. H. Roberts, Typographical Society; and Mr. James Parker, National Union of General Workers) received minor ministerial posts. [723]
Throughout the whole period of the war all the several demands of the Government upon the organised workers, the abrogation of “Trade Union Conditions” in all industries working for war needs, the first and second Munitions of War Acts, the subversion of individual liberty by the successive orders under the Defence of the Realm Acts, the successive applications of the Military Service Acts, the imposition of what was practically Compulsory Arbitration to settle the rates of wages—were accepted, though only after serious protest, by large majorities at the various Conferences of the Labour Party, as well as by the various annual Trades Union Congresses,[724] in spite of the resistance of minorities, including more than “pacifists.” The entry of Mr. Henderson into Mr. Asquith’s first Coalition Government, and that of Mr. Barnes into Mr. Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, together with the acceptance of ministerial office by other leading members of the Labour Party—though any such ministerial coalition was in flagrant violation of the very principles of its existence, and was strenuously combated on grounds of expediency by many of its members who loyally supported the war—equally received the endorsement of large majorities at the Party Conferences. From the beginning of the war to the end, the Labour Party, alike in all its corporate acts and by the individual efforts of its leading members (other than the minority already mentioned), stuck at nothing in its determination to help the Government to win the war.
More controversial were the persistent efforts made by the Labour Party to maintain its international relations with the Labour and Socialist Movements of Continental Europe. From the first it was seen to be important to get the representatives of the Trade Unions and Socialist organisations of the Allied Nations, and not merely their Governments, united in a declaration of the aims and the justification of a war that was everywhere outraging working-class idealism. Such a unanimity was successfully achieved in February 1915 at a conference, held in London at the instance of the Labour Party, of delegates from the working-class organisations of France, Belgium, and Great Britain, with Russian representatives, then allied in arms against the Central Empires.[725] Later on, when a Minority Party had been formed among the German Socialists, and when the Austrian and Hungarian working-class Movements were also in revolt against the militarism of their Government, repeated efforts were made by the Labour Party to encourage this revolt, and for this purpose to obtain the necessary Government facilities for a meeting, in some neutral city, of the working-class “International,” at which the Allied Case could be laid before the neutrals, and a basis found for united action with all the working-class elements in opposition to the dominant military Imperialism. After the Russian revolution of March 1917, the Petrograd Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council actually issued an invitation for a working-class “International” at Stockholm; and the participation of the British Labour Party in this International Congress, which was not then favoured by Mr. Henderson, received at one time no small support from the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George. In the end the Government despatched Mr. Henderson on an official mission to Petrograd (incidentally empowering him, if he thought fit, to remain there as Ambassador at £8000 a year). Meanwhile the proposal for an International Congress had been modified, first into one for a purely consultative gathering, and then into one for a series of separate interviews between a committee of neutrals and the representatives of each of the belligerents in turn, with a view to discovering a possible basis for peace—a project to which Mr. Henderson, from what he learnt at Petrograd, was converted. A National Conference of the Labour Party in August 1917 approved of participation in such a Congress at Stockholm; but the French and Italian Governments would not hear of it, and Mr. Lloyd George went back on his prior approval, absolutely declining to allow passports to be issued. Amid great excitement, and under circumstances of insult and indignity which created resentment among the British working class, Mr. Henderson felt obliged to tender his resignation of his place in the War Cabinet, in which he was succeeded by Mr. Barnes, who was getting more and more out of sympathy with the majority of the Party.[726] The Labour Party Executive, in alliance with the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, then applied itself to getting agreement among the Labour and Socialist Movements of the Allied Nations as to the lines on which—assuming an Allied victory—the terms of peace should be drawn, in order to avert as much as possible of the widespread misery which, it could be foreseen, must necessarily fall upon the wage-earning class. In this effort, in which Mr. Henderson displayed great tact and patience, he had the implicit sanction of the British Government, and, with some reluctance, also of the Governments of the other Allied Nations by whom the necessary passports were issued for an Inter-Allied Conference in London in August 1917, which was abortive; for provisional discussions at Paris in February 1918; and for a second Inter-Allied Conference at the end of the same month in London, which resulted in a virtually unanimous agreement upon what should be the terms of peace,[727] on a basis already approved on December 28, 1917, by a Joint Conference of the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, and widely published all over the world. The terms thus agreed were, in fact, immediately adopted in outline in a public deliverance by Mr. Lloyd George as those on which Germany could have peace at any time; and the same proposals were promptly made the basis of President Wilson’s celebrated “Fourteen Points” on which eventually (but only after another ten months’ costly war) the Armistice of November 11, 1918, was concluded. Profound was the disappointment, and bitter the resentment, of the greater part of the organised Labour Movement of Great Britain when it was revealed how seriously the diplomatists at the Paris Conference had departed from these terms in the Treaty of Peace which was imposed on the Central Empires. [728]
We have already attempted to sum up the effect of the Great War on the industrial status of Trade Unionism. It is more difficult to estimate its effect on the political organisation of the movement. The outbreak of the war had found the Labour Party, in the see-saw of Trade Union opinion to which we have elsewhere referred, suffering from an inevitable disillusionment among Trade Unionists as to the immediate potency of Parliamentary representation—a disillusionment manifested in the outbreak of rebellious strikes that characterised the years 1911-14. The achievements of the Labour Party in the House of Commons had fallen short of the eager hopes with which the new party had raised its standard on its triumphant entry in 1906. In 1914, it may be said, the Labour Party was at a dead point. The effect upon it of the Great War was to raise it in proportion to the height of the vastly greater issues with which it was compelled to deal. Amid the stress of war, and of the intensely controversial decisions which it had necessarily to take, the Labour Party revised its constitution, widened its aims, opened its ranks to the “workers by brain” as well as the workers by hand, and received the accession of many thousands of converts from the Liberal and Conservative Parties. It made great progress in its difficult task of superimposing, on an organisation based on national societies, the necessary complementary organisation of its affiliated membership by geographical constituencies. It equipped itself during the war, for the first time, with a far-reaching and well-considered programme not confined to distinctively “Labour” issues, but covering the whole field of home politics, and even extending to foreign relations.[729] The formulation of such a programme, from beginning to end essentially Socialist in character, and including alike ideals of social reconstruction and detailed reforms of immediate practicability, together with the wholehearted adoption of this programme, after six months’ consideration by the constituent societies and branches, was a notable achievement, which placed the British Labour Party ahead of those of other countries. Moreover, the formulation of a comprehensive social programme and of “terms of Peace,” based on the principles for which the war had ostensibly been fought—principles which were certainly not carried in the Treaty of Peace—transformed the Labour Party from a group representing merely the class interests of the manual workers into a fully constituted political Party of national scope, ready to take over the government of the country and to conduct both home and foreign affairs on definite principles. Taken together with the intellectual bankruptcy of the Liberal Party and its apparent incapacity to formulate any positive policy, whether with regard to the redistribution of wealth within our own community or with regard to our attitude towards other races within or without the British Empire, the emergence of the Labour Party programme meant that the Party stood forth, in public opinion, as the inevitable alternative to the present Coalition Government when the time came for this to fall. The result was that, aided by the steady growth of Trade Unionism, the Party came near, between 1914 and 1919, to doubling its aggregate membership. When hostilities ceased, it insisted on resuming the complete independence of the other political parties, which it had, by joining the successive Coalition Governments, consented temporarily to forgo; and such of its leaders as refused to withdraw from ministerial office[730] were unhesitatingly shed from the Party. Meanwhile, the extension of the franchise and redistribution of seats, which had been carried by general consent in the spring of 1918, turned out to raise the electorate to nearly treble that of 1910, whilst the new constituencies proved to have been so adjusted as greatly to facilitate an increase in the number of miners’ representatives. When the General Election came, in December 1918, though the Labour Party fought under great disadvantages and it was seen that most of the soldier electors would be unable to record their votes, it put no fewer than 361 Labour candidates in the field against Liberal and Conservative alike, contesting two-thirds of all the constituencies in Great Britain. In face of a “Lloyd George tide” of unprecedented strength these Labour candidates received nearly one-fourth of all the votes polled in the United Kingdom; and though five-sixths of these numerous Labour candidatures were unsuccessful (including, unfortunately, most of its ablest Parliamentarians such as Messrs. Henderson,[731] MacDonald, Anderson, and Snowden), the Party increased its numerical strength in the House of Commons by 50 per cent, and, to the universal surprise, returned more than twice as many members as did the remnant of the Liberal Party adhering to Mr. Asquith—becoming, in fact, entitled to the position of “His Majesty’s Opposition.” It can hardly be said that during the session of 1919 the Parliamentary Labour Party, considerably strengthened in numbers but weakened by the defeat of its ablest Parliamentarians, has, under the leadership of the Right Honourable W. Adamson (Scottish Miners), made as much of its opportunities as the Labour Party in the country expected and desired. The political organisation of the Trade Union world remains, indeed, very far from adequate to the achievement of its far-reaching aims. It is not merely that the average British Trade Unionist, unlike the German, the Danish, Swedish, or the Belgian, has learnt so little the duty of subordinating minor personal or local issues, and of voting with his Party with as much loyalty as he shows in striking with his fellow-unionists, that by no means all the aggregate British Trade Union membership can steadfastly be relied on to vote for the Labour candidates. Nor is it only that the British Labour Party still fails to command the affiliation of as many Trade Unions as the Trades Union Congress, and that the great majority of the smaller and the local societies—less from dissent than out of apathy—remain aloof from both sides of the national organisation. The Trades Union Congress itself, after engendering, as independent organisations, first the General Federation of Trade Unions, and then the Labour Party, has not yet resigned itself to limiting its activities. The General Federation of Trade Unions may be said, indeed, to have now disappeared from the Trade Union world as an effective force in the determination of industrial or political policy. There remain three separate organisations of national scope; the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress which it is now proposed to transform into a General Council, the Executive Committee of the Labour Party, and the members of the House of Commons who form the Parliamentary Labour Party. Unfortunately, between these three groups there has been some lack of mutual consultation, and an indefiniteness if not a confusion of policy which stands in the way of effective leadership.[732] This has prevented the bringing to bear upon the political field of the full force, now almost a moiety of the whole registered electorate of Great Britain, that the Trade Union world may (including the wives of Trade Unionist electors) fairly claim to include. Fundamentally, however, the shortcomings of the political organisation of the Trade Union world are to be ascribed to its failure, down to the present, to develop a staff of trained political officers at all equal to those of the Trade Union organisers and Trade Union negotiators in the industrial field. The Labour Party, which can as yet rely only on the quite inadequate contribution from its affiliated societies of no more than twopence per member annually, has, so far, not succeeded in obtaining and keeping the services, as Registration Officers and Election Agents, of anything like so extensive and so competent a staff as either of the other political parties; and Labour Party candidatures are still run, occasionally with astonishing success, very largely upon that transient enthusiasm of the crowd upon which experienced electioneers wisely decline to rely for victory. What is, however, much more crippling to the Labour Party than the scanty funds with which its constituent societies supply it, and this insufficiency in the staff of trained election organisers, is the scarcity of trained Parliamentary representatives. Down to to-day the great bulk of Labour Members of Parliament have been drawn from the ranks of the salaried secretaries and other industrial officers of Trade Unions, who are nearly always not only men of competence in their own spheres, but also exceptionally good speakers for popular audiences, and, generally, in many respects above the average of middle-class candidates. But as Members of Parliament they have serious shortcomings. They can, to begin with, seldom devote the necessary time to their new duties. They usually find themselves compelled to strive to combine attendance at the House of Commons with the onerous industrial service of their societies. The Trade Unions have, as yet, only in a few cases realised the necessity of setting free from the constant burden of Trade Union work—as they might by promotion to some such consultative office as that of a salaried President—such of their officials as secure election to Parliament; whilst these officers, unable to maintain themselves and their families in London on their Parliamentary allowance for expenses of £400 a year, and afraid lest the loss of their seats may presently leave them without incomes, dare not resign their Trade Union posts. The result is an imperfect and always uncertain attendance of the Labour Members at the House of Commons; a fatal division and diversion of their attention; and an inevitable failure on their part to discharge with the fullest efficiency the duties of their two offices. Equally destructive of Parliamentary efficiency is the omission of the Trade Union world to provide or secure any training in the duties of a Member of Parliament for those whom they select as candidates and whose election expenses they defray with unstinted liberality. The lifelong training which these candidates have enjoyed as Branch and District Secretaries, as industrial organisers and negotiators, and as administrators of great Trade Unions, valuable as it is for Trade Union purposes, does not include, and indeed tends rather to exclude, the practical training in general politics, the working acquaintance with the British Constitution, the knowledge of how to use and how to control the adroit and well-equipped Civil Service, and the ability to translate both the half-articulate desires of the electorate to the House of Commons, and the advice of the political expert to the electorate, which, coupled with the general art of “Parliamentarianism,” constitutes the equipment of the really efficient Member of the House of Commons. Add to this that the very training which the life of the successful Trade Union official has given him, his perpetual struggle to rise in his vocation in competitive rivalry, not with persons of opposite views but actually with personal acquaintances of the same craft and the same political opinions as himself, is, in itself, not a good preparation for the incessant mutual consultation and carefully planned “team-work” which contributes so much to the effectiveness of a minority party in the House of Commons. Add to this again the personal rivalries among members of the Party, the jealousies from which no party is free, and the almost complete lack of opportunity for the constant social intercourse with each other away from the House of Commons that the members of the other parties enjoy—and it will be realised how seriously the Parliamentary Labour Party is handicapped by being made up, as it is at present, almost entirely of men who are compelled also to serve as Trade Union officials. Already, however, there are signs of improvement. Some Trade Unions, whilst willing to spend large sums on Parliamentary candidatures, are demurring to their salaried officials going to Westminster. The Workers’ Educational Association, Ruskin College, and other educational agencies are doing much to provide a wider political training than Trade Unionists have heretofore enjoyed. And as the Parliamentary Labour Party, claiming to-day to represent, not the Trade Unionists only, but the whole community of “workers by hand or by brain,” expands from sixty to four or six times that number—as it must before it can be confronted with the task of forming a Government—it will necessarily come to include an ever-increasing proportion of members drawn from other than Trade Union ranks; whilst even its Trade Union members cannot fail to acquire more of that habit of mutual intercourse and that art of combined action which, coupled with the Parliamentary skill and capacity for public administration of those who rise to leadership, is the necessary basis of successful party achievement.
Meanwhile, the political organisation of the Trade Union Movement, and the enlargement of its ideas on Communal and Industrial Democracy, have been manifesting themselves also in the important sphere of Local Government. After the “Labour” successes at the elections of Local Authorities, which continued for a whole decade from 1892, and placed over a thousand Trade Unionists and Socialists on Parish, District, Borough and County Councils, there ensued another decade in which, in the majority of districts, this active participation in local elections was impaired by the diversion of interest, both to Parliament and to industrial organisation. From 1914 to 1919 local elections were suspended. On their resumption in the latter year, they were energetically contested by the Labour Party, all over Great Britain, on its new and definitely Socialist programme, with the unexpected result that, up and down the country, the Labour candidates frequently swept the board, polling in the aggregate a very substantial proportion of the votes, electing altogether several thousand Councillors (five or six hundred in Scotland alone), and being returned in actual majorities in nearly half the Metropolitan Boroughs, several important Counties and Municipalities, and many Urban Districts and Parishes.
It must be apparent that any history of Trade Unionism that breaks off at the beginning of 1920 halts, not at the end of an epoch, but—we may almost say—at the opening of a new chapter. British Trade Unionism, at a moment when it is, both industrially and politically, stronger than ever before, is seething with new ideas and far-reaching aspirations. At the same time, its most recent advances in status and power are by no means yet accepted by what remains the governing class; its political and industrial position is still precarious, and within a very brief space it may again find itself fighting against a frontal attack upon its very existence. And in face of the common enemy—now united as an autocratic capitalism—Industrial Democracy is uncertain of itself, and almost blindly groping after a precise adjustment of powers and functions between Associations of Producers and Associations of Consumers.
Let us elaborate these points in detail. One result of the Great War has been, if not the actual enthronement of Democracy, a tremendous shifting of authority to the mass of the people. Of this shifting of the basis of power the advance in the status of Trade Unionism and the advent, in British politics, of the Labour Party, are but preliminary manifestations. As yet the mass of the people, to whom power is passing, have made but little effective use of their opportunities. At least seven-eighths of the nation’s accumulated wealth, and with it nearly all the effective authority, is still in the hands of one-eighth of the population; and the seven-eighths of the people find themselves in consequence still restricted, as regards the means of life, to less than half of that national income which is exclusively the product of those who labour, by hand or by brain. The “leisure class”—the men and women who live by owning and not by working, a class increasing in actual numbers, if not relatively to the workers—seem to the great mass of working people to be showing themselves, if possible, more frivolous and more insolent in their irresponsible consumption, by themselves and their families, of the relatively enormous share that they are able to take from the national income. It is coming to be more and more felt that the continued existence of this class involves a quite unwarranted burden upon their fellow-citizens working by hand or by brain. Very naturally there is widespread discontent, and the emergence of all sorts of exasperated criticisms and extravagant schemes.
The truth is, of course, that Democracy, whether political or industrial, is still in its infancy. The common run of men and women, who have only just been enfranchised politically, and are even yet only partially organised industrially, are as yet unable to make full use of Democratic institutions. The majority of them cannot be induced, in the economic pressure to which Capitalism subjects them, to take the trouble or give the continuous thought involved in any effective participation in public affairs. The result is that such Democratic institutions as we possess are, of necessity, still inefficiently managed; and neither the citizen-consumers nor the Trade Unionist producers find themselves exercising much effective control over their own lives. The active-minded minority sees itself submerged by the “apathetic mass”; the individual feels enslaved by the “machine.” The complaint of the “rank and file”—using that term to mean, not any “extremist” minority, but merely the majority, the “common run of men”—comes to no more than that they do not find themselves obtaining the results in their daily lives which they expected, and which they were, as they understood, promised. This, we think, is the explanation of the perpetual “see-saw” within the Labour Movement, decade after decade, between an infatuation for industrial or “direct” action and an equal infatuation for political or Parliamentary and Municipal action—each, unfortunately, to the temporary neglect of the other. Or to state the Democratic problem in a more fundamental form, the see-saw is between the aspiration to vest the control over the instruments of production in Democracies of Producers, and the alternating belief that this control can best be vested in Democracies of Consumers. But it is abundantly clear, alike from history and economic analysis, that in any genuine Democracy both forms of organisation are indispensably required. In the modern State every person throughout his whole life consumes a great variety of commodities and services which he cannot produce; whilst men and women, occupied in production, habitually produce a single commodity or service for other persons to consume. Their interests and desires as producers, and as producers of a single commodity or service, are not, and can never be, identical with the interests and desires of these same people as consumers of many different commodities and services—just as their interests and desires as citizens of a community, or as members of a race which they wish to continue in independent existence, are not necessarily identical with those of which they are conscious either as producers or as consumers.
It is, in fact, now realised that Democratic organisation involves the acceptance, not of a single basis—that of the undifferentiated human being—but of various separate and distinct bases: man as a producer; man as a consumer; man as a citizen concerned with the continued existence and independence of his race or community; possibly also other bases, such as man as a scientist or man as a religious believer. What is wrong in each successive generation is the intolerant fanaticism of the enthusiasts which leads them to insist on any one form of this multiplex Democracy to the exclusion of the other forms. We see to-day uppermost a revival of faith in Associations of Producers, as being, in an industrial community, the form of Democratic organisation most important to the working people. To some one-sided minds, as was inevitable, the all-embracing Association of Producers seems the only form that Democratic organisation can validly take. Interesting to the historian is the intellectual connection of this revival with the previous manifestations, in the Trade Union Movement, of the idea of “Co-operative Production,” whether in the revolutionary Owenism of 1830-34, the Christian Socialism of 1848-52, or the experiments of particular Unions in 1872. As we have explained, the Trade Union, being essentially an Association of Producers, has never quite lost the idea that, so far as industry is concerned, this form of association, and no other, is Democracy. But the new form in which the faith in Associations of Producers is now expressing itself is concerned less with the ownership of the instruments of production (it being to-day commonly taken for granted that this must be vested in the community as a whole) than with the management of industry. According to the most thoroughgoing advocates of this creed, the management of each industry should be placed, not separately in the hands of those engaged in each establishment, any more than in the hands of private capitalist employers, but in the hands of the whole body of persons throughout the community who are actually co-operating in the work of the industry, whether by hand or by brain; this management being shared, by Workshop or Pit Committees, District Councils and National Boards, among all these “workers.”
This conception seems to us too one-sided to be adopted in its entirety, or to be successful if it were so adopted. We venture to give, necessarily in a cursory and generalised form, the results of our own investigations into the management of industries and services by Democracies of Producers and Democracies of Consumers respectively. In so far as we may draw any valid inferences from previous experiments of different kinds, we must note that the record of the successive attempts, in modern industry, to place the entire management of industrial undertakings in the hands of Associations of Producers has been one of failure. In marked contrast, the opposite form of Democracy, in which the management has been placed in the hands of Associations of Consumers, has achieved a large and constantly increasing measure of success. We do not refer merely to the ever-growing development throughout the civilised world, in certain extensive fields of industrial operation, of Municipal and National Government, though from this some valuable lessons may be learnt. Even more instructive is the continuous and ever-widening success, in the importing, manufacturing, and distributing of household supplies, of the voluntary Associations of Consumers known as the Co-operative Movement, which is almost entirely made up of the same class of men and women—often, indeed, of the very same individuals—as we find in the abortive “self-governing workshops” and in the Trade Union Movement. Why, for instance, is it possible for the manual workers, organised as consumers, to carry on successfully the most extensive establishments for the milling of flour, the baking of bread, the making of boots and shoes, and the weaving of cloth, when repeated attempts to conduct such establishments by the same kind of members organised as Associations of Producers have not succeeded? [733]
The Democracy of Associations of Consumers, whatever its shortcomings and defects, has, we suggest, the great advantage of being demonstrably practicable. The job can be done. It has also the further merit that it solves the problem presented by what the economists call the Law of Rent. It does not leave to any individual or group of individuals the appropriation and enjoyment of those advantages of superior sites and soils, and other differential factors in production, which should be, economically and ethically, taken only by the community as a whole. Moreover, management by Associations of Consumers, whether National, Municipal, or Co-operative, gives one practical solution to the problem of fixing prices without competition, by enabling every producer to be paid at his own full Standard Rate, and distributing the various products at prices just over cost, the whole eventual surplus being returned to the purchasers in a rebate or discount on purchases, called “dividend”; or otherwise appropriated for the benefit and by direction of the consumers themselves. Hence there is no danger of private monopoly; no opportunity for particular groups of producers to make corners in raw materials; to get monopoly prices for commodities in times of scarcity, or to resist legitimate improvements in machinery or processes merely because these would interfere with the vested interests of the persons owning particular instruments of production or possessing a particular kind of skill. In short, the control of industries and services by Democracies of Consumers realises the Socialist principle of production for use and not for exchange, with all its manifold advantages. The most significant of these superiorities of Production for Use over Production for Exchange is its inevitable effect on the structure and working of Democracy. Seeing that the larger the output the smaller the burden of overhead charges—or, to put it in another way, the greater the membership the more advantageous the enterprise—Associations of Consumers are not tempted to close their ranks. This kind of Democracy automatically remains always open to new-comers. On the other hand, Associations of Producers, whether capitalists, technicians or manual workers, exactly because they turn out commodities and services not for their own use, but for exchange, are perpetually impelled to limit their numbers, so as to get, for the existing membership, the highest possible remuneration. This kind of Democracy is, therefore, instinctively exclusive, tending always to become, within the community, a privileged body. All this amounts to a solid reason in favour of “nationalisation,” “municipalisation,” and the consumers’ Co-operative Movement, which is reflected in the continuous and actually accelerating extension of all of them, not in one country only, but throughout the civilised world. [734]
But the Democracy based on Associations of Consumers, whether in the National Government, the Municipality, or the Co-operative Society, reveals certain shortcomings and defects, some transient and resulting only from the existing Capitalism, and others needing the remedy of a complementary Democracy of Producers. So long as we have a society characterised by gross inequalities of income, it is inevitable that the conduct of industries and services by Associations of Consumers should be even more advantageous to the rich than to the poor, and of little or no use to those who are destitute. The same trail of a Capitalist environment affects also the conditions of employment. The Co-operative Society, the Municipality or the Government Department cannot practically depart far from the normal conditions of the rest of the community; and thus avails little to raise the condition of the manual working class. If, however, the Associations of Consumers were co-extensive with the community, they would themselves fix the standard. But there is a more fundamental criticism. The Democracy of Consumers, in Co-operative Society, Municipality or State—however wide may be the franchise, however effective may be the Parliamentary machinery, and however much the elected executive is brought under constituency control—has the outstanding defect to the manual-working producer that, so far as his own working life is concerned, he does not feel it to be Democracy at all! The management, it is complained, is always “government from above.” It is exactly for this reason that in the evolution of British Democracy the conduct of industries and services by Associations of Consumers—whether in the voluntary Co-operative Society or in the geographically organised Municipality or State—has had, for a correlative, the organisation of Associations of Producers, whether Professional Societies or Trade Unions. Their first object was merely to maintain and improve their members’ Standard of Life. Without the enforcement of a Standard Rate and protection against personal tyranny, government by Associations of Consumers is apt to develop many of the evils of the “sweating” characteristic of unrestrained capitalism. It is not now denied, even by the economists, that Trade Unionism, in its establishment of the Doctrine of the Common Rule, and the elaboration of this into the Standard Rate, the Normal Day, and the Policy of the National Minimum, has to its credit during the past three-quarters of a century no small measure of success, with more triumphs easily within view. Trade Unionism among the manual workers, like Professional Association among the brain-workers,[735] has emphatically justified itself by its achievements.
But Trade Unionism, though it has gone far to protect the worker from tyranny, has not, as yet, gained for him any positive participation in industrial management. To this extent the complaints of the objectors among the manual-working class are justified. In the perpetual see-saw of opinion in the Labour world the movement towards Parliamentary action and in favour of what we may call Communal Socialism became, at one time, almost an infatuation, in that its most enthusiastic advocates thought that it would, by itself, solve all problems. A reaction was inevitable. The danger is that this reaction may itself take on the character of an infatuation—this time in favour of the universal domination of Associations of Producers, and the “Direct Action” to which they are prone—against which, in the perpetual see-saw, there will come, in its turn, a contrary reaction, in the course of which Trade Unionism itself may suffer.
This is not to say that the legitimate and desirable movement, specially characteristic of the present century, for increased direct participation in “management” of the Associations of Producers—whether of Professional Societies or of Trade Unions, of doctors and teachers, or of miners and railwaymen—has been, in this or any other country, anything like exhausted. In our view, in fact, it is along these lines that the next developments are to be expected. But, unless we are mistaken in our analysis, this does not mean that the Trade Unions or Professional Societies will take over the entire management of their industries or services, for which, in our opinion, no Association of Producers can be fitted.[736] Democracies of Producers, like Democracies of Consumers, have their peculiar defects, and develop certain characteristic toxins from the very intensity of the interests that they represent. The chief of these defects is the corporate exclusiveness and corporate selfishness habitually developed by associations based on the common interest of a particular section of workers, as against other sections of workers on the one hand, and against the whole body of consumers and citizens on the other. When Democracies of Producers own the instruments of production, or even secure a monopoly of the service to be rendered, they have always tended in the past to close their ranks, to stereotype their processes and faculties, to exclude outsiders and to ban heterodoxy. We see this tendency at work alike in the ancient and modern world, in the castes of India and the Gilds of China, in the mediæval Craft Gilds as well as in the modern Trade Unions and Professional Associations. So long as the Trade Union is an organ of revolt against the Capitalist System—so long as the manual workers are fighting a common enemy in the private owner of land and capital—this corporate selfishness is held in check; though the frequency of demarcation disputes, even in the Trade Union Movement of to-day, gives some indication of what might happen if the Trade Union became an organ of government. We see no way of securing the community of consumers and citizens against this spirit of corporate exclusiveness, and against the inherent objection of an existing generation of producers to new methods of working unfamiliar to them, otherwise than placing the supreme control in the Democracies of Consumers and citizens. There is a further and more subtle defect in Democracies of Producers, the very mention of which may perhaps be resented by those Industrial Unionists who seek to curb the “corporateness” of National Gilds by the “self-government” of the workshop. The experience of self-governing workshops shows that the relationship between the indispensable director or manager (who must, like the conductor of an orchestra, decide the tune and set the time) and the workers whom he directs becomes hopelessly untenable if this director or manager is elected or dismissible by the very persons to whom he gives orders. Over and over again, in the records of the almost innumerable self-governing workshops that have been established in Great Britain or on the Continent, we find their failure intimately connected with the impracticable position of a manager directing the workers during the day, and being reprimanded or altogether superseded by a committee meeting of these same workers in the evening! Finally, there is the difficult question of the price to be put on the article when it passes to the consumer. Normally the price of a commodity must cover the cost of production, and this cost is, in the main, determined by the character of the machinery and process employed. Hence, if the organised workers are given the power to decide not only the number and qualifications of the persons to be employed but also the machinery and process to be used, they will, in fact, determine the price to be charged to the consumer—not always to the consumer’s advantage, or consistently with the interests of other sections of workers. [737]
To sum up, we expect to see the supreme authority in each industry or service vested, not in the workers as such, but in the community as a whole. Any National Board may well include representatives of the producers of the particular product or service, and also of its consumers, but they must be reinforced by the presence of representatives of the community organised as citizens, interested in the future as well as the present prosperity of the community. The management of industry, a complex function of many kinds and grades, will, as we see it, not be the sole sphere of either the one or the other set of partners, but is clearly destined to be distributed between them—the actual direction and decision being shared between the representatives of the Trade Union or Professional Society on the one hand, and those of the community in Co-operative Society, Municipality, or National Government on the other. And this recognition of the essential partnership in management between Associations of Producers and that Association of Consumers which is the community in one or other form, will, we suggest, take different shapes in different industries and services, in different countries, and at different periods; and, as we must add, will necessarily take time and thought to work out in detail. One thing is clear. There will be a steadily increasing recognition of a fundamental change in the status both of the directors and managers of industry (who are now usually either themselves capitalists, or hired for the service of capitalist interests), and of the technicians and manual workers. The directors and managers of industry, however they may be selected and paid, will become increasingly the officers of the community, serving not their own but the whole community’s interests. The technicians and manual workers will become ever less and less the personal servants of the directors and managers; and will be more and more enrolled, like them, in the service, not of any private employer, but of the community itself, whether the form be that of State or Municipality or Co-operative Society, or any combination or variant of these. To use the expression of the present General Secretary of the Miners’ Federation (Frank Hodges), manager, technician, and manual worker alike will become parties to a “social” as distinguished from a commercial contract. All alike, indeed, whatever may be the exact form of ownership of the instruments of production, will, so far as function is concerned, become increasingly partners in the performance of a common public service.
We see in this evolution a great future for the Trade Unions, if they will, in organisation and personal equipment, rise to the height of their enlarged function. They will need, by amalgamation or federation, and by affording facilities for easy admission and for a simple transfer of membership, to make themselves much more nearly than at present co-extensive with their several industries. They will have to make special provision in their constitutions to secure an effective representation, on their own executive and legislative councils, of distinct crafts, grades, or specialisations, which must always form small minorities of the whole body. They will find it necessary to make the local organisation of their members, in branch or district, much more coincident than at present with their members’ several places of employment, so as to approximate to making identical the workshop and the branch. There would seem to be a great development opening up for the Works Committees and the “Shop Stewards,” brought effectively into organic relation with the nationally settled industrial policy. At any rate, in industries already passing under the control of Associations of Consumers, whether by nationalisation or municipalisation, or by the spread of consumers’ co-operation, there will be great scope for District Councils and National Boards, as well as for Advisory and Research Committees representative of different specialities, in which managers and foremen, technicians and operatives, will jointly supersede the capitalist Board of Directors. But the management of each industry is very far from being the whole of the task. In Parliament itself, and on Municipal Councils, the World of Labour, by hand or by brain, will need to give a continuous and an equal backing to its own political party, in order to see to it that it has its own representatives—specialised and trained for this supreme political function—not by ones and twos, but in force; gradually coming, in fact, to predominate over the representatives of the surviving capitalist and landlord parties. Trade Unionists, in the mass, will not only have to continue and extend the loyalty and self-devotion which have always been characteristic of successful Trade Unionism, but also to acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the working of democratic institutions, a more accurate appreciation of the imperative necessity of combining both the leading types of democratic self-government—on the one hand the self-government based on the common needs of the whole population divided into geographical constituencies, and on the other the self-government springing from the special requirements of men and women bound together by the fellowship of a common task and a common technique. The Trade Unions and Professional Societies, if they are increasingly to participate in the government of their industries and services, will in particular have to provide themselves with a greater number of whole-time specialist representatives, better paid and more considerately treated than at present, and supplied with increased opportunities for education and training.
We end on a note of warning. The object and purpose of the workers, organised vocationally in Trade Unions and Professional Associations, and politically in the Labour Party, is no mere increase of wages or reduction of hours.[738] It comprises nothing less than a reconstruction of society, by the elimination, from the nation’s industries and services, of the Capitalist Profitmaker, and the consequent shrinking up of the class of functionless persons who live merely by owning. Profit-making as a pursuit, with its sanctification of the motive of pecuniary self-interest, is the demon that has to be exorcised. The journey of the Labour Party towards its goal must necessarily be a long and arduous one. In the painful “Pilgrim’s Progress” of Democracy the workers will be perpetually tempted into by-paths that lead only to the Slough of Despond. It is not so much the enticing away of individuals in the open pursuit of wealth that is to be feared, as the temptation of particular Trade Unions, or particular sections of the workers, to enter into alliances with Associations of Capitalist Employers for the exploitation of the consumer. “Co-partnership,” or profit-sharing with individual capitalists, has been seen through and rejected. But the “co-partnership” of Trade Unions with Associations of Capitalists—whether as a development of “Whitley Councils” or otherwise—which far-sighted capitalists will presently offer in specious forms (with a view, particularly, to Protective Customs Tariffs and other devices for maintaining unnecessarily high prices, or to governmental favours and remissions of taxation) is, we fear, hankered after by some Trade Union leaders, and might be made seductive to particular grades or sections of workers. Any such policy, however plausible, would in our judgement be a disastrous undermining of the solidarity of the whole working class, and a formidable obstacle to any genuine Democratic Control of Industry, as well as to any general progress in personal freedom and in the more equal sharing of the National Product.