The Demand for the Elimination of the Capitalist Profit-maker
It is interesting to note that this widening enlargement of the aspirations and purposes of Trade Unionism has been accompanied, not by any decline, but by an actual renewal of the faith in Communal Socialism, towards which we described the Trade Union Movement as tending in 1889-94. For the Trade Unionist objects, more strongly than ever, to any financial partnership with the capitalist employers, or with the shareholders, in any industry or service, on the sufficient ground that any such sharing of profits would, whilst leaving intact the tribute of rent and interest to proprietors, irretrievably break up the solidarity of the manual working class. To the new school of Trade Unionists the nationalisation or municipalisation of industry, or its assumption by consumers’ co-operation, is a necessary preliminary to the partnership of Labour in its government. What they are after is to alter, not only the status of the manual worker, but also the status of the employer who is the director of industry; they wish them both to become the agents of the community; they desire that manual workers and brain workers alike should be inspired, not by the greed of gain made by profit on price, but by the desire to produce the commodities and services needed by the community in return for a sufficient livelihood, and the personal freedom and personal responsibility which they believe would spring from vocational self-government. Thus we find Mr. Hodges, the General Secretary of the Miners’ Federation, in one of his numerous speeches in favour of the nationalisation of the mines, declaring that what they demanded was “a new status for the worker as a controller of his industry. Miners were not anarchists, although they had the power to be. They realised that their interests were bound up with those of the community, and therefore they demanded conditions which would develop the corporate sense.... Education was carrying men along social rather than individualistic lines, and right throughout the mining industry there was the desire to be something different from what they were. This desire to be master of the work in which the man was engaged was the great thing that was vital in working-class life.... There had never been a movement born of greater moral aspiration than this movement for the nationalisation of the mines. The miner wanted to be in a position where it would be to him a point of honour not to allow even a piece of timber to be wasted, where he would want to do his work well. He wanted a Social Contract.” [705]
The demand for the nationalisation or municipalisation of industries and services, or their absorption by the Consumers’ Co-operative Movement, was greatly strengthened by the experience, during the war and after the Armistice, of the failure of every alternative method of preventing “profiteering.” The rapid development of capitalist combinations and price-agreements[706]; the ill-success of the most stringent Government control in preventing alarming increases of price; the inability of even legally fixed maximum prices to do anything more, under private ownership, than authorise the charge required to cover the cost at the least efficient and least well-equipped establishment of which the output was needed; the enormous and even unprecedented profits made throughout the whole range of business enterprise; the helplessness of the consumers, in the mere expectation of shortage, and their willingness to pay almost any price that was demanded rather than go without—combined with the obvious breakdown of capitalist competition as a safeguard of the public which the proceedings under the Profiteering Act revealed—all these things co-operated to convince the bulk of the wage-earning class, many of the families living on fixed incomes, and (in spite of the objection to “bureaucratic control”) some even among business men, that there was practically no other course open, in the industries and services that were sufficiently highly developed to render such a course practicable, than a gradual substitution of public for private ownership. This advance in public opinion is naturally reflected in the passionate support of public ownership, with participation of the workers in administration and control, given by the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party Conference.
It will have become clear from our review of the larger conception now current of the place of Trade Unionism in the State, that the Trade Unionist, as such, no longer retains the acquiescent and neutral attitude towards the two great parties of British politics, nor to the Capitalist System itself, which characterised the Trade Unionism of thirty or forty years ago. The object and purpose of the New Unionism of 1913-19—not without analogy with that of 1830-34, but with a significant difference—cannot be attained without the transformation of British politics, and the supersession, in one occupation after another, of the capitalist profit-maker as the governor and director of industry. Meanwhile, as a result of the successive attacks upon the very existence of Trade Unionism, even in its most limited form, there has been growing up a distinct political organisation of the Trade Union Movement, aiming at securing the acceptance by the electorate, as a whole, of a definitely Socialist policy in the administration of both home and foreign affairs. It is this formation of a Labour Party, ready for the carrying into effect of the new ideas, that we have now to describe.