Industrial unionism¶
Core Argument¶
Industrial Unionism
This chapter advances a rigorous defence of industrial unionism as the necessary organisational form for working-class struggle, arguing that capitalist development has rendered craft skill obsolete and thereby created the material conditions for its complete abolition. The technical evolution of industry, the text contends, has outmoded the craft divisions that historically fragmented labour, making industrial organisation not merely desirable but objectively necessary. Against those who cling to sectional privileges—exemplified by defence of the Dilution Agreement—the chapter insists that such positions, far from protecting past gains, split the organised workers and weaken the fight against the ruling class.
The core of the argument concerns the contradictory character of the trade unions. They are class organisations, to be defended against capitalist attack, yet simultaneously marked by reactionary features, above all the treachery of their present leadership. This dual character demands a nuanced tactical approach. The closed shop is raised as a defensive slogan in periods of rising unemployment, when the unorganised workers, facing attacks on wages and conditions, turn in greater numbers towards union organisation—provided they receive a fighting lead from the shop-floor.
The chapter’s most sustained polemic is directed against what it terms “infantile ultra-leftism”: the refusal to recognise the reality of capitalist crisis and sackings, the elevation of abstract unity into a fetish. Drawing on Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, the text recalls that combination among workers becomes more necessary in the face of united capital. It mobilises Trotsky’s Where Is Britain Going? to argue that the struggle against the most backward layers of the proletariat—those who refuse organisation—is a legitimate and necessary part of defending the unions. The demand that non-unionists be the first to go in dismissals flows logically from the closed shop principle; to struggle for the closed shop during hiring but abandon it during firing is a blatant contradiction.
The chapter anticipates and rebuts the objection that many unorganised workers are militant while some union card-holders are reactionary. This, it argues, is impressionism and empiricism, not Marxism. The trade unions contain the distilled experience of the working class over a century and a half of struggle; the revolution will not be accomplished in Britain without them. To equate them with the unorganised mass is an error of the same order as equating the unions with the revolutionary party itself.