7. Trade Unions and Bolshevism¶
Core Argument¶
The trade union question is the axis on which the fate of the British working class turns, and this chapter dissects its contradictions with surgical precision. The immediate flashpoint is the political levy: the compulsory contribution from union members that funds the Labour Party. Bourgeois parties denounce this as an assault on individual liberty, yet their outcry is rank hypocrisy. The same ruling class that fought working-class enfranchisement for centuries now seeks to disarm Labour financially. The 1913 Act permitted the levy but allowed individual opt-outs, producing a ten per cent rebate. These ten per cent are political strike-breakers, and Marxists must recognise them as renegades to be excluded, not tolerated from abstract principle. As the Conservative Macquisten candidly admitted, a party is made with money—exposing the crude financial mechanics of liberal democracy. Even Baldwin, fearing open class conflict, refused to ban the levy outright, while Labour MPs like Thomas grovelled before the parliamentary cant that masks class war.
Yet the levy debate is merely a symptom of a deeper crisis. Britain’s economic insolvency is reflected most directly in the unions, whose membership has plummeted since its 1919 peak. A polemic between John Wheatley and Fred Bramley exposes the impasse: Bramley admits the decline in economic power but offers no way out, trapped in rivalry between union and party apparatuses. The same forces that radicalise the working class and grow the Labour Party simultaneously weaken the unions’ economic might. However, the unions still have a great future—precisely because they have no future within capitalism. They must take the path of socialist reorganisation, but only after the proletariat seizes power in a real, revolutionary sense, not a MacDonald ministry. The state apparatus must be subordinated to the proletariat, and only the trade unions can provide the personnel to manage nationalised industry. At present they are in an impasse; only revolution can save them. To take power, the proletariat needs a revolutionary party at its head. The reformist Labour Party weakens the unions; a revolutionary Labour party resting on them would be an instrument for their resurgence. The compulsory collection of political levies prefigures Bolshevik methods. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie fights the unions by organising administrative and technical staff as a ‘third party in industry’, an idea that meets Fabianism halfway. Displaced from the unions and Labour Party, Fabianism will increasingly merge with these intermediate elements, ending up entangled between capital and labour.