The bitter lessons of the
Liverpool docks lock-out

By Chris Marsden

On September 27, the Liverpool dockers commemorated the second year of their lock-out by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company (MDHC). The anniversary rally of a dispute once hailed as a rebirth of trade union struggle and of working class internationalism saw its leaders forced to acknowledge the abject failure of the perspective which has guided it.

Shop stewards' chair Jimmy Nolan told the rally in Liverpool that Transport and General Workers Union General Secretary Bill Morris should resign. Financial Secretary Jimmy Davies said, "The T&G are not supporting the dispute but working actively behind the scenes against this dispute." Other speakers made clear that unions in other countries had refused to back the dockers on the grounds that the TGWU did not recognise the dispute.

These admissions not only stand as a condemnation of Morris and the TGWU and the shop stewards themselves. They expose the bankruptcy of the trade unions and the dead-end of trade unionism.

The Socialist Equality Party and its predecessor, the International Communist Party, from the start called for the mobilisation of genuine solidarity action at home and abroad against MDHC and the then Tory government. We insisted that this could not be organised through the pro-big business union apparatus, but only by developing an independent political movement based on a socialist programme.

This was vehemently opposed by the Mersey Port Shop Stewards Committee and their allies in the middle class radical groups, who banned all members of the ICP/SEP from dockers' meetings to stifle our views. They insisted that the dockers abide by the TGWU's demand to respect the laws against secondary action, or this would alienate the trade union movement and lead to isolation and defeat.

Two years on, the shop stewards have admitted that it is this strategy and not that advocated by the SEP that has enabled the TGWU, TUC, Labour Party and the International Transport Federation to isolate the Liverpool dockers.

Even now the dockers' leaders maintain that it is Morris that is the problem and not the TGWU as a whole. In a letter on the Internet, Nolan commented, "Our unions still have power, but with leaders who are afraid to move they are weakened further." Their answer is an appeal to Tony Blair to intervene on their behalf!

Illusions in the trade unions

Pickets, rallies and "international days of action" may yet be organised; but the claim that the dockers will ever return to work based on their present course of action can only be made by those utterly indifferent to the fate of the working class.

The question that must be addressed is why has there been no significant opposition to this perspective from the dockers?

In part this is because the only perspective that offered a way forward was proscribed and systematically ridiculed by the shop stewards at virtually every dockers' meeting. This was endorsed by every other tendency claiming to be socialist -- from the Socialist Party/Militant Labour, Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Workers Party to the handful of cynics led by Cliff Slaughter who publish the Dockers Charter. It would not have proved successful, however, had the shop stewards not been able to base themselves on workers' illusions in trade unionism and their loss of confidence in a socialist alternative.

The clearest expression of this was made by International Transport Federation (ITF) Communications Director, Richard Flint. He attacked all criticism of the ITF as being due to the "radical position that refuses to accept that anything short of full-blown global revolution can achieve anything...

"In my personal opinion, the vast majority of social improvements in the last century have been won as a direct result of mass action by the trade unions and their allies. In fact, the irony of these victories is that it was often revolutionaries who achieved the most substantial reforms... I personally do not believe that vanguard political parties or spontaneous mass action work or have ever done."

These ignorant statements go to the heart of the present crisis of the workers' movement.

First Flint caricatures socialism as an all-or-nothing struggle for world revolution in order to set up an Aunt Sally. His argument goes, since global revolution is not on the cards, dockers must instead rely on the realistic prospects offered by the unions.

But it is precisely the trade unions' historic rejection of the struggle for socialism that has now rendered them incapable of defending their members' interests.

The unions were founded in the late 19th century to defend workers' wages and conditions. In the main they never set their task as the abolition of the profit system and its exploitation of the working class, but to secure a more favourable compromise between the classes. Even in Germany where the unions were founded by Marxists and were nominally socialist, in their practice they were confined to the struggle for reforms.

The formation of trade unions took place at a time when economic life was organised on a largely national basis. This made it possible to utilise limited industrial militancy through the unions to force employers to make concessions in order to ensure the success of the national economy. In Britain this reformist perspective led to the formation of the Labour Party. It was most successful at times of economic growth and full employment.

The decades following the Second World War were the hey-day of the trade unions. The expansion in world trade and an economic boom enabled the ruling class to grant significant concessions to workers in order to maintain class peace.

To claim that this proves the superiority of the unions over vanguard Marxist parties or the spontaneous class struggle is a lie.

The significance of the formation of trade unions was that they gave organised expression to the spontaneous struggles of the working class. The role of revolutionaries in them was not "ironic". Marxists played a key role in establishing unions. They have always been the most resolute fighters for the daily needs of the working class because they pursue the class struggle with the aim of securing the eventual abolition of capitalism, not winning a happy compromise.

What the trade unions did not and could not do was provide workers with a conscious political leadership. For that a Marxist vanguard party was needed. This is the central lesson that must be drawn from the 1917 Russian Revolution. Despite its subsequent degeneration, this remains the only occasion where the working class has been able to take power. Behind every concession made by big business since then lays the unstated fear that workers would again rally behind a Marxist vanguard party as they had in October 1917.

A heavy price

The working class paid a heavy price for the political domination of the trade unions in the post-war period. Combined with the betrayals of Stalinism, it encouraged reformist illusions in the Labour Party and undermined the influence of genuine socialism.

In this period, the unions established ever closer relations with management, government and the state in order to regulate labour relations -- particularly in the nationalised industries and the public sector.

Many of the major industrial battles of the 1950s, '60s and early '70s emerged in opposition to the union leaders. The Stalinist Liverpool shop stewards leader Jimmy Nolan recently said that in his 34 years on the docks he had participated in 55 strikes. Only four of these had been officially backed by the union.

Workers did not become hostile to the trade unions because of this, but to the union leaders. Indeed militant pressure was often successful in forcing the bureaucracy to reflect the wishes of the rank and file. It also boosted the political standing of the (often Stalinist) shop stewards who led these strikes, who opposed a more fundamental challenge to the union bureaucracy. Nolan and company still rely on this past reputation to distance themselves from Morris and the national leadership.

Impact of globalisation

Only an arrogant bureaucrat who feels no responsibility for the working class could continue to boast of the success of the unions, under conditions in which workers have suffered one betrayal and defeat after another, leaving them poorer than they were 25 years ago.

This cannot be attributed to the actions of a few bad leaders.

The globalisation of production, under the domination of giant transnational corporations, has rendered the trade union perspective of pressurising national corporations and governments for reforms impotent. TNCs are able to scour the world for the cheapest labour, lowest taxes and biggest subsidies and demand the removal of all barriers to their profit-making. In response the union bureaucracy now offers its services to the corporations as enforcers of wage cuts, speed ups and job losses.

The TGWU exemplified the corporatist set-up of the post-war period. Under the National Docks Labour Scheme, it worked with management to regulate wages and conditions in Britain's ports.

In 1989 the Thatcher government set out to end all such protective measures that prevented British industry being globally competitive. The TGWU never fought against this, but suppressed the nation-wide strike movement that erupted in order to secure a new arrangement with the private employers. Dock labour was casualised and thousands of jobs were destroyed.

Following 1989, TGWU officials sought to secure their own share of the spoils of deregulation in many ports by establishing labour supply companies. Only in Liverpool did conditions approaching those under the scheme remain. This was because the Mersey dockers had refused to heed the call of the TGWU to go back to work. Instead of mobilising a rebellion against the union's sell-out, the Liverpool stewards merely secured more favourable conditions than in the rest of Britain.

MDHC still needed access to the same cheap casual labour as existed in rival ports to remain competitive. They again turned to the TGWU to provide it -- which they did by setting up Torside contractors. This allowed dockers' sons to work alongside those covered by the old conditions on much lower wages. It is this that paved the way for undermining conditions for both generations and eventually sparked the walk-out in September 1995. Recently the shop stewards proposed to set up a new labour contracting company in order to end the dispute, this time made up of the sacked dockers and controlled directly by MDHC!

A new strategy of struggle

The failure of the Liverpool dockers struggle poses before workers the need to develop a new leadership and a new strategy of struggle. Any fight against employers must be international. It must be guided by a programme which places the needs of the working class above the profits of the capitalists. For that very reason such a struggle must be independent of the old union organisations.

The Liverpool dockers found themselves confronted not only by MDHC but the police, anti-union laws, a hostile government and their own union's attempts to ensure their defeat. None of this changed with the election of a Labour government.

The working class is engaged in a struggle against the profit system as a whole and must formulate its own independent political response. No effective counter-offensive can be waged and no lasting gains achieved until workers undertake the construction of their own mass socialist party.

The aim of this party must be to place into power a workers' government, committed to the reorganisation of economic life to meet the needs of working people and not big business.

This is the programme of the Socialist Equality Party. Those dockers not resigned to yet another "glorious defeat" should make this perspective their own.

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