The Plebs

Over the last few years I have been arguing for a return to the authentic Marxism of Marx and Engels, whose central tenet was that Socialism means the SELF-emancipation of the working class, brought about by its own collective action. Those ideas have been smothered in more than a century of muck laid down by the various Left statists, the Lassalleans and Fabians, whose ideas dominated the Second International, and in the revolutionary variant of those ideas represented by Leninism, which in turn split into the bureaucratic/reformist version of Stalinism and the revolutionary but sociologically petit-bourgeois version of Trotskyism, which in its turn necessarily degenerated into varieties of Opportunism and reformism via the Third Camp, or else into sectism. It is no wonder then that the idea of working class self-activity in practice is so alien to today’s Left. Even where it is propounded it is merely a piece of propaganda, a token to hide the real nature of the statist politics, which continues to dominate the organised Left. It is reduced effectively for calls for workers to act – independently, yes – via their Trade Unions or other organisations, but to act only in so far as their action is a means of applying pressure on the bourgeois state to act in their interests!

Nothing in this self-activity has anything in common with the self-activity that Marx and Engels spoke of, a self-activity which decried such calls on the bourgeois state to act in workers interests, but rather which relied on the workers themselves creating their own solutions not just separate from, but in militant opposition to that State, solutions which prefigure the society of the future in the society of today.

To suggest that workers should establish their own enterprises, should set up their own Co-operative organisations to own and control their communities, still less that they should fail to simply accept the conventional wisdom that something like the NHS has nothing to do with Socialism, but is yet another bourgeois institution whose purpose is to meet the needs of Capital, and condition the working class is at best seen as irrelevant by this Left, and at worst is seen as heresy, even by those that proclaim their belief in “independent working action”. A century of “Welfarism” has conditioned the Left and the working class that nothing is possible other than winning crumbs from the table of Capital (at best) in the short term, in the form of reforms – which are of course neutered and/or taken back at the first opportunity leaving workers with a class struggle that resembles the Labours of Sisyphus – whilst plying the idea of the Socialist Revolution as the only real solution in the long term, thereby turning the Social Revolution into a single even – like October 1917 – as opposed to the process described by Marx and Engels.

Yet, the history of the working class – which is what Marxists are supposed to systemise and draw lessons from – is replete with examples of working class self-activity of the kind described by Marx and Engels, and which is neither of the reformist or millenarianist variety described above. From, the establishment of Co-op shops and factories in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the creation of a whole series of different types of community organisations, to workers sporting clubs, choral societies, brass bands and so on, workers have demonstrated that they can and do create their own organisations to meet their needs without reliance on the bourgeois state.

In this blog I want to talk about one such example that keys into something I’ve spoken about before – Education – in particular what I said in my post about setting up Co-operative Colleges and Universities, See: Economics of Co-operation .

I’ve been prompted by reading some old material from Capital & Class (Journal of the Conference of Socialist Economists). In particular, a reproduction of “Economics For Workers In The 1920’s – Beginning With The Beginner” in C&C No. 7, from Spring 1979. It is about the activities during that period of the Plebs League – for Independent Working Class Education. The original article had appeared in Plebs, the journal of that organisation in 1920, and was written by Fred Casey, who was a tutor at the Manchester Labour College. According to Tim Putnam, who provides the C&C Introduction to the material, Casey later gained a reputation as an expositor of Joseph Dietzgen’s ‘Monist’ philosophy in his “Methods of Thinking”.

Putnam writes,

“The Movement for Independent Working Class Education became one of the most important forms of class organisation in this country during and immediately after the First World War. The Plebs League grew out of a revolt by trade union students at Ruskin College, Oxford , in 1908 against an attempt by the University to take over the college, sack radical staff and replace socialist curricula with safer material. The league developed an extensive network of part-time and full-time study under working class control, at a time when various state agencies were perceiving the need to integrate working class representatives into public institutions. Vehemently opposing any notion of class impartial ‘objective’ knowledge, and the National Council for Labour Colleges with which it merged struggled against the WEA (Workers Educational Association) under the banner of: ‘No compromise with bourgeois culture!’

“…Casey did not find his worker-students ‘apathetic’… Casey implicitly asks us to look again at the aspirations and expectations of political leaders who encountered apathy, suggesting either that their analysis was insufficiently materialist or that their political practice itself created the apathy it pretended to discover. The short time it took Plebs to achieve a monthly circulation of over 10,000 and the National Council for Labour Colleges to build a national organisation which reached ten times as many workers certainly bears out Casey’s point. Nor was the activity limited to study; as 1926 approached the League’s position as a class organisation made its meetings an important forum of strategy and tactics for the anticipated trial of strength.”

The article can be viewed at the CSE’s online archive here Beginning With The Beginner .

At the same time as demonstrating that workers CAN develop such truly independent working class organisation not just to apply pressure on the bourgeois state to make available provision, but to provide directly for its own needs, the fact that such organisation has effectively disappeared demonstrates both the success that the Capitalist State has had in incorporating such provision, and the complicity of the Left in that process in limiting itself to simply demanding that the bourgeois state DOES make that provision, a provision which the Plebs and others recognised would necessarily be to meet the needs of Capital not of workers. That process can be seen as the collapse of the Left into “Welfarism”, a process which helps to incorporate the working class, socialises it into a placid acceptance of the evils of Capitalism, and at worst turns large sections of the class into the modern day equivalent of the medieval serf, dependent upon that State for their survival.

In a review in the same edition of C&C Norman Ginsburg looks at two books on that issue – “The Development Of The British Welfare State, 1880-1975” by J.R. Hay, and “The Origins of British Social Policy” Edited by Pat Thane.

See: Reviews Page 3 of the PDF.

On the one hand Norman points to the contribution by Pat Ryan on the role of “Poplarism” the struggle by Poplar Council under the leader of George Lansbury, and the successes it had in winning some reforms for workers, and which provided, during the 1980’s some of the inspiration for the ideas of “Municipal Socialism”, which inevitably ended in isolation and defeat. As Norman says even of Poplar,

“This study shows vividly how the use of the machinery of bourgeois democracy by the representatives of labour can in certain circumstances present something of a fundamental, if short-lived, threat to capitalist welfare principles and the enforcement of 'work incentive'.”

But, one has to wonder how “fundamental” it was given that it was “short-lived”. There was, in fact, nothing in the experience of Poplar or any other experiments in “Municipal Socialism”, which could lead necessarily towards Socialism, precisely because they WERE based on acceptance of the local bourgeois state as the framework within which these provisions were to be made, and as the experience of Poplar and the 1980’s demonstrated, even if the Permanent bureaucracy of that local State does not undermine you ultimately, then the national bourgeois state will. Such strategies only replicate at a political level the kind of continual guerrilla warfare in the workplace that Marx warned the workers not to allow themselves to waste too many of their energies upon.

More significant I think are the other papers.

“The papers by Roy Hay and John Brown show how the national
insurance system was imbued from the beginning with quite specific
functions of 'social control' concerned with the enforcement of labour
discipline and the regulation of family life . Employers exerted considerable
control over the work of the 'approved societies' who ran the national insurance
system and the continual administrative obsession with malingering
and work-incentive sought to ensure that levels and accessibility of benefit
did not threaten the wage relation or relations of dependence within the
extended family .”

And,

“The extracts from the views of workers and working class organisations on welfare convey clearly the dilemmas which labour exchanges and national insurance, for example, posed in the Edwardian era and which legislation still presents to the working class today .

This theme also recurs several times in Pat Thane's book . On the one
hand, there was the view that "the aim of the working class ought to be
to bring about economic conditions in which there should be no need for
the distribution of state alms" (Hay p . 17), that the wage itself should
fully cover workers' and their families' needs and that state welfare interfered
with the independence of working class organisation and control . On
the other hand, the degradation and inadequacy of the poor law, and the
gathering parliamentary strength of the organised working class ensured
that the T .U .C . pushed for an extension of state welfare, from pensions
reform at the turn of the century to the establishment of the Beveridge
committee in 1941 . The suggestion left implicit in Roy Hay's book is that
the welfare state has been shaped . by a struggle of articulated views and
ideology .”

In fact, this demonstrates the facility with which the State is able to implement such a policy of incorporation. It is precisely the “degradation” referred to here that makes the reformist option of gaining a few more crumbs from the table a more appealing option, and the means by which the bourgeois state conveys its ideology into the working class – through the Trade Unions in particular – provides the basis for offering such a solution that fails to provide any systemic challenge. But, yet again the Left and workers from the time were at least aware of that dilemma in a way that the left today does not even seem to recognise i.e. “that state welfare interfered with the independence of working class organisation and control .” On the contrary much of the Left today simply sees its role as arguing for an extension of it!