Here's a disturbing fact. In May’s UK General Election, if only workers in the private
sector had been allowed to vote, the Conservatives wouldn’t have just scraped a
majority, they would have absolutely romped home. Labour
got a paltry 26% of the vote (and the Tories 43%). How is this possible for
a party that was created, at the start of the last century, as a party of private
sector workers? And will the Blairite nemesis, Jeremy Corbyn, be able do
anything about it?
To understand Labour’s steady diminution on this issue and
the fact people manage to maintain a straight face when the Conservatives now
present themselves as a ‘workers’
party’, you have to look at history and the Labour party’s gradual
surrender to the forces of corporate Britain and the inexorable decline of
organised labour.
A brief of history of Labour and work
When Labour was formed in 1900 it was as a political party
representing the interests of trade unions - with a socialist wing attached.
Given that Britain at the time was a resolutely industrial society, trade
unions could justifiably claim to represent something approaching a majority of
society. The socialist wing of the Labour Party became dominant with the
adoption of the party’s Clause 4 constitution committing it to ‘common
ownership’ in 1918. The fact that the Labour party was officially socialist did
not mean that it was about to institute socialism. In the late 1920s and early
‘30s when it finally got it hands on power of some sort, Labour was
spectacularly conservative, supporting austerity and welfare cuts. But there
was nevertheless an assumption that the current autocratic organisation of
private sector work (there wasn’t a public sector to speak of at the time) was
living on borrowed time.
It was only after the Second World War, when Labour was
elected with a massive majority, its so-called ‘High Noon’, that the party
could make the kind of society it desired a reality and change the character of
work in the private sector. Writing in 1947 the American political scientist,
Robert Dahl, said there were two contradictory schools of economic thought
about which way Labour should go: “one advocating central
control of the economy in the hands of the state, and the other advocating workers’ control, where “workers
will no longer be merely passive victims of the productive process, but direct
participants in the control of productive enterprises”. The Labour government
decisively choose the first option: industry was controlled by civil servants
and appointed managers. Ownership may have changed but the new organisation
merely mimicked the old, autocratic form of private sector organisation. In
archive footage from the film, The Spirit of ’45, one miner laments
that the ‘same tyrants’ remained in charge after nationalisation.
Though few realised it at the time, the roots of the Labour
party’s alienation from private sector workers were laid here. But for a long
time Labour’s model of nationalisation held sway. For 30 years the economy was
resolutely mixed; even the travel agent Thomas Cook was in state hands. The
interests of workers were thought to be sufficiently represented by strong
trade unions, either in the now much larger public sector or the private
sector.
This changed utterly with the arrival of Margaret
Thatcher. The power of trade unions was destroyed and state industries
privatised. In retrospect, talk of a property-owning democracy now feels like a
transparent fraud, but Thatcher drove a tank through the mixed economy,
post-war consensus - helped enormously by fact that the City of London, media
magnates and other owners of private sector capital backed her the hilt.
The reaction of Labour was first to resist this new
dispensation, then reluctantly accept some of it (Labour under Neil Kinnock was
still in favour of some ‘social ownership), then to wholeheartedly embrace it
all under Tony Blair. The Labour Left, of which Jeremy Corbyn was a part,
merely defended the old approach from these multiple onslaughts.
New Labour and ‘the big end of town’
Tony Blair’s genius in winning elections was entirely the
product of convincing the City of London and media moguls like Murdoch and
Richard Desmond that New Labour wouldn’t interfere with their power. Originally
interested in Will Hutton’s stakeholder democracy idea for the running of
companies, Labour backed down the moment they discovered ‘the big end of town’
didn’t like it. The result was that New Labour’s view of the private sector – a
part of the economy employing about two-thirds of society – was entirely
determined by the desires and interests of those who owned those companies.
Yes, the Labour government made it slightly easier to get trade union
recognition, but, in a complete reversal of what the Labour party was
originally about, the assumption became entrenched that the interests of the
owners of companies and those that worked for them were identical. Both wanted ‘success’
and, in practice, what that entailed was left to the owners to define. To even
whisper about nationalisation, or, heaven forbid, workers’ control, was to
immediately place yourself beyond the pale.
When Ed Miliband lost May’s general election, the idea
instantly sprang up amongst the Blairites that a primary reason was that he was
anti-business. Yvette
‘Work Capability Assessment’ Cooper recalled going to a CBI conference after
the election and being confronted by a businesswoman who told her, ‘You pushed
me away. I felt like you did not want my vote. My staff felt the same.’” Note
the location and the trademark assumption that that interests of owners of
capital and employees were indistinguishable, although only the owner gets to
articulate them. Added to this was the specious and, politically dumb,
assumption that wealth
creation was a gift generously bestowed by the owners of businesses and
entrepreneurs.
But though the Labour Left may not have liked these
associations or conclusions, it had very little to say about the private
sector. This was, now that the trade unions in the private sector had been
decimated, decisively ‘enemy territory’. The public sector, however, palpably
needed defending, first from the import of private sector techniques under New
Labour, and then from austerity. This turn inwards was disastrous. The envy that
has underpinned hostility towards benefit claimants stems in part from a
perception that private sector workers feel abandoned by an official Left that
doesn’t seem remotely interested in them, or their problems. With the desertion
of the Left, the private sector is perceived as an homogeneous mass, not the
locus of conflicting interests, desires and outright coercion that it is.
All the new thinking about how private sector businesses
should be organised has come from outside
the Labour party. American economist, Richard Wolff, is trying to forge a
social movement in favour of worker
self-directed enterprises. In the UK, the authors of the influential book, The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and
Richard Wilkinson (who have backed Corbyn), advocate the development of workplace
democracy, along the lines of the famous Mondragon group of cooperatives,
throughout the economy.
The major stumbling block, sturdily erected by New Labour,
is that it would be suicidal to focus on anything but the success of private
sector companies, for the sake of workers as much as anybody. But the obsession
with conflating success with the interests of owners, though deregulation and
tax cuts, has led to its complete opposite – an endless financial crisis and
insipid economic growth.
Beyond neo-syndicalism
However, before advocating that a Corbyn-led Labour party
embraces a neo-syndicalism, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the nature
of work has dramatically changed in the last 40 years. In the 1970s, it could
be said that workers were still essential to the way production was carried
out, and to ignore them was to invite disaster. Workers’ control was possible
and, in some places, implicitly happened. Forty years later, the UK is largely
a de-industrialised country and workers live with the ever-present threat of
abandonment. If they are not necessary to produce profit, they won’t be used.
Around 15% of UK workers are now self-employed anyway. Moreover, whereas manual
labour was a source of pride and identity, today work is often characterised by
just going through the motions to get a wage. According to a 2013 US Gallop
survey, seven out of ten workers are ‘actively
disengaged’ from their jobs. In Britain, 37 per cent of employees think
their jobs are meaningless.
Democracy at work won’t alter the fact that many people want to get away from
their jobs, to many they are a necessary evil.
This is where an unconditional basic income could come in. A
basic income could enable activities unrelated to work but vital for a
flourishing society – such child-rearing, caring or artistic pursuits, but also
facilitate small-scale economic activity that could breathe life into areas
that the conventional corporate economy has left behind. The formation of
thousands of cooperatives, social enterprises and other small businesses would
become possible if they did not have to maximise profit. Both as an economic
strategy and a way for the Labour Left to escape from its public sector ghetto,
a basic income could be invaluable.
