FROM MILITANCY TO
MARXISM
A personal and political account of organizing car workers
Alan Thornett
Left View Books, London, 1987
HIS BOOK is the first part of a trilogy that Alan Thornett is writing on the workers' struggles and trade-union organization in the key sectors of the British car industry, in particular the Morris assembly plant at the British Leyland factory in Cowley near Oxford.
This first volume covers the period from the mid-1950s to the first half of
The second will cover
1974-79, and the third will analyze the phase in which the Conservative government and the new Cowley management unleashed a brutal attack against the gains of the workers and the trade-union movement.
Alan Thornett, born in 1937, began working in the car industry in 1959,
For about a quarter of a century he played an important role, first as a shop steward and later as an organizer of his local district of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU)
and finally as chair of the 5/55 union branch and the Shop Stewards Committee in the Oxford region. It was the target of attacks and reprisals both from the bosses and the trade-union bureaucrats. In
Thornett joined the Communist Party in 1959. He left it in 1964, after adopting revolutionary Marxist positions. He was active for ten years in the Socialist Labour
League, Gerry Healy's organization.
Subsequently, he belonged to other organizations identifying with a pa
Trotskyism.
of drganising car workers
In
May
1987, as a member of the
Socialist Viewpoint editorial board, he participated in the unification of the
ECONOMY • BOOKS magazine with Internationa/ to produce a new journal, Socialist Outlook.
In his preface, he writes: "I have tried to bring into these pages not just the politics of the shop floor, but some of the richness of life in the factory as well. I have tried not to trivialise factory life, as is so often the case, by reducing the thoughts of the workers to a crude reaction to management."
Further on he explains that he has written the book as a tribute to the hundreds of activists who are the "unsung heroes of the labour movement" and "hardly recognized by the official union movement". They not only faced the daily pressures of the extremely tough work on the track, but also the problems of organizing the union in the face of management attacks.
He also stresses the militant leadership that existed in the plant by the 1960s, that was "prepared to take initiatives and lead struggles both in defence of the workforce and in order to improve wages and conditions."
A detailed but gripping analysis
Thornett has managed to achieve his goals. His book is an extremely detailed but at the same time gripping analysis of a long series of struggles at different levels that had a great influence on the British workers' movement. He provides all the facts on the birth and development of the shop stewards' movement, its objectives, struggles and organizational forms.
For example, Thornett writes about the 5/55 TGWU branch in the Oxford region, which unquestioningly played a vanguard role in the 1960s and early 1970s in mobilizing rank and file
The car workers' movement - Thornett rightly recalls - succeeded in winning considerable partial victories: "Wages went up
MILITANCY substantially and, at
to MARXISM the same time,
the quality of
ALAN THORNETT life of the
Working conproved beyond recognition, arsorted out, obnoxious conditions alleviated, protective clothing introduced and health and safety standards enforced." What's more, this led to a situation where the workers could exercise considerable control in the political sense, but i: 11 trol. "It was not 'workers' conNovember 23, 1987 • International Viewpoint
BOOKS • AROUND THE WORLD was an important step towards it."
There are other significant passages, for example Thornett highlights very clearly the role played by the bureaucratic leaderships of the Labour Party and of the trade unions, including those who were considered on the left. He shows how they consciously misled the masses, making apparently radical speeches when they had already made backroom deals with the government and the bosses. A lack of political answers in the movement
Their only concern was to get their capitulations swallowed without provoking too great a reaction. Among the most scandalous episodes was in May 1968 during a very sharp struggle around the policy of wage control, productivity increases and limitations on the right to strike that the Wilson government wanted to introduce. Barbara Castle, first secretary of state for employment and productivity in the Labour government, took her holidays in the luxurious yacht of Charles Forte, a wealthy employer and a determined enemy of the trade unions.
Finally, Thornett is not unaware of the limits of the movement in which he participated, and even of its vanguard He emphasizes the case of very important militants who did not move beyond a purely trade-union outlook, and who, because of their lack of a political perspective, after having led very bitter struggles, ended up collaborating with the most conservative wing of the trade-union bureaucracy.
Thornett writes that generally "the shop stewards have been more militant than the officials, and have been closer to and more responsive to the members, but at the end of the day they have often lacked the political answers to the problems. Most sigapproach to the challenge of unemployment, of factory closures, of 'bankrupt companies and non-viable
The next two volumes from Alan Thornett are eagerly awaited and should be as interesting as the first. In the last 20 years many revolutionary Marxists have participated in important struggles in the car industry.
If some of them wrote books like
Thornett's about Fiat in Turin, Mercedes Benz in Stuttgart, Volvo in
Göteburg, Seat in Barcelona or Renault in Billancourt, this would be a very valuable contribution to the history of the workers' movement and a precious lesson for the struggles of today and tomorrow. *
12
Livio Maitan International Viewpoint • November 23, 1987