A criticism of the November editorial in the industrial bulletin¶
Core Argument¶
This internal party bulletin from December 1944 intervenes in a debate over how the revolutionary left should respond to the looming redundancy crisis as war production winds down. The author’s core argument is that the main danger is not yet mass unemployment, but the bosses’ systematic use of the redundancy situation to lower wages, smash union organisation, and divide the working class into warring sections—men against women, craftsmen against dilutees, unionists against the unorganised. The November editorial of the industrial bulletin is criticised for endorsing the demand that non-trade unionists should be sacked first, a position the author denounces as a sectarian error that would split the workers rather than unite them against the employers.
The author insists that the revolutionary task is to give a lead to the unifying forces within the class, pushing issues that bind workers together and opposing those that fragment them. The demand for “Work or full maintenance” must be handled with extreme caution; raised as the main slogan, it would implicitly accept the principle of unemployment and could even be taken up by the government to clear organised workers out of the factories, with promises later broken. Instead, the central tactic must be to keep workers inside the factories. Where localised closures occur—such as the South Wales Royal Ordnance Factories—stay-in strikes should be organised not as isolated protests but as general political issues, properly organised to prevent the bosses from dumping workers onto the streets as an amorphous, unorganisable mass.
The author draws on the historical experience of the building trade to argue that redundancy cannot be solved by a post-war housing boom: building is a dependent industry, and prefabrication may see engineering absorb parts of it. Redundancy is therefore not a narrow industrial question soluble through trade-union methods. It is a striking example of the impasse of capitalism, which in the last instance can only be resolved through the overthrow of the system and the establishment of socialism. A real struggle against redundancy is thus essentially a political struggle. The polemic is directed against trade-unionist and reformist illusions that the problem can be managed within the existing order, and against the left’s own tendency to adopt divisive slogans that play into the employers’ strategy of divide and rule.