Smash Master Bakers Sabotage – By Workers’ Control¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter from Socialist Appeal (No. 28a) presents a sharp polemic against the Labour Government’s handling of the Master Bakers’ sabotage of the bread rationing scheme. The core argument is that the government’s retreat in the face of capitalist pressure reveals its fundamental class character: it is willing to use the mailed fist against striking workers but treats employers with kid gloves. The Master Bakers’ campaign—plastering anti-Labour posters across major cities and threatening direct or partial sabotage of rationing—is identified as a reactionary offensive orchestrated by Churchill and the Tories, exploiting backward prejudices among shopkeepers and the least politically developed sections of the working class. The chapter insists that this is the first hot issue the Tories have been able to seize since their electoral defeat, and they are whipping it for all it is worth.
The evidence cited is concrete: Strachey, the minister responsible, has already increased sugar allocations to bakers by 25 per cent to compensate for lost profits, and instead of taking decisive action, he is consulting “law officers.” The contrast is drawn explicitly with the government’s immediate deployment of thousands of troops to smash the dockers’ strike, while even the hint of using troops against the Master Bakers was met with a public denial. The chapter’s theoretical grounding is a straightforward Marxist class analysis: the Master Bakers do not bake or distribute bread—workers do—and their only genuine interest is profit. Their claims of concern for customers are dismissed as dishonest.
The polemic is directed against both the Tories and the Labour Government. The latter is accused of failing to act in a militant class manner representative of the working class that put it into power. The chapter’s solution is uncompromising: the government should take over the enterprises of all bakers employing labour who refuse to carry out rationing, call upon the workers to continue production under their own committees, and establish committees of control locally and nationally to coordinate production. This is presented as the class answer to the Tories, the socialist way to instil confidence in workers’ ability to run society and raise class consciousness for future socialist tasks. The tone is urgent and combative, rejecting any compromise with capitalist sabotage.