In Britain things played out differently. After the one-day national action on 11th November, 2011, as many within the unions and anti-austerity campaigns called for escalation against a clearly rattled government, the leaders of the GMB and Unison simply surrendered, conducting secret negotiations of their own with government ministers and then signing the “Heads of the Agreement” that provided for a rise in the retirement age to 67 on a reduced pension. The surrender left more militant unions like PCS and the NUT exposed and unable to carry on the fight on their own. The supine General Secretary of the GMB who led the climbdown, Paul Kenny, was rewarded by the Tories with a Knighthood, which he accepted “on behalf of his members”. Sir Paul went on to endorse fracking and attack Jeremy Corbyn for his anti-Trident policy.
The Leninism of Scargill and the abject defeatism of Kenny are two sides of the same coin–unimaginative, inflexible strategies imposed by arrogant trade union leaders convinced they speak for their members. If British trade unions are to lead successful campaigns to defend jobs and conditions, much less to participate in broader anticapitalist struggles, they have to transcend both. This will involve making alliances with a variety of organisations and campaigns such as the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, UK Uncut, Sisters Uncut, Frack-Off, the Anti-Bedroom Tax, the Benefit Justice Federation and others. In doing so they will have to move away from the sectional mentality and bureaucratic procedures that have defined them since the creation of the TUC in 1868 and embrace the principles and methods of Social Movement Unionism.
One hundred years before the Miners’ Strike, the German SPD was similarly tested. It had gone through the persecution of Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist laws in the 1880s and emerged stronger for it. In 1890 it secured 1,400,000 votes and won 35 seats in the Reichstag. Its 1892 Erfurt Programme, drafted by Kautsky, was essentially the Maximum Programme, predicting the inevitable demise of capitalism because of its inherent contradictions. Throughout his life Kautsky maintained that if the development of the productive forces of a capitalist society was partial or insufficient, if its proletariat was “immature” or lacked political cohesion, then the efforts of socialists to introduce a socialist programme could not succeed. But by 1914 he considered the productive forces and the labour movements of Western Europe and America had reached this level, and that therefore the key element in these circumstances was the “political result of the conquest of political power by the proletariat and not of the automatic collapse of the capitalist mode of production”.26
As early as 1892, Kautsky had supplied a commentary to the Erfurt Programme that filled the gap between the Maximum and Minimum Programmes. Of the “overthrow” of capitalism, he wrote:
A social revolution is not something that must be resolved in one fell swoop. Indeed, it may be doubted that this has ever happened. Revolutions are prepared in the course of political and economic struggles which last for years and decades, and occur through continuous modifications and oscillations in the relationship of forces between the particular parties and classes, often interrupted by counter-attacks of long duration (periods of reaction).27
The SPD would meanwhile exploit the expanded franchise of Imperial Germany to advance a programme of immediate demands to improve the lives of the working class. In 1892, Engels noted with approval the political progress of the SPD and its use of the democratic franchise to increase its support, which he considered “a model for the workers of all countries”. He concluded, “we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt”.28
Eduard Bernstein, with characteristic lack of cant, summed up the unarticulated beliefs of the majority of “practical” reformers and trade unionists across Europe who reserved flights of Marxist rhetoric for highdays and holidays. Writing in the SPD’S theoretical magazine Neue Zeit in 1898, he presented these beliefs with blunt honesty. “I frankly admit”, he wrote
that I have extraordinarily little feeling for, or interest in, what is usually called the ‘final goal’ of socialism. This goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me, the movement is everything. And by movement I mean both the general movement of society, i.e. social progress, and the political and economic agitation necessary to bring about this progress.29
Although this was the wide-spread belief system of most socialists in Western Europe, it was terra incognita for Lenin. Politically and intellectually marginalised on the edge of Europe, raised and formed within a state that had more in common with China than with Germany, he had no intuitive understanding of these developments. For him Bernstein and the reformists were simply cowards and criminals. This mentality led to an overestimation of the chances of violent social revolution in Western Europe and a widening of the gulf between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the RSDLP.
As part of their project to create a politically literate Russian working class able to assume political leadership, the Mensheviks increasingly prioritised non-party activity such as building trade unions, mutual assistance funds, cooperatives and reading clubs. Hence in 1906 they proposed a “Worker’s Congress”, a gathering of representatives from all socialist and trade union bodies to agree a common approach to building a popular socialist challenge inside Russia. It sought to break down barriers between trade unionists and socialists, Praktiki and intellectuals, the centre and activists. Lenin denounced it as a “chaotic idea” which would reduce working-class political activity, an ingenuous criticism as the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP was not supported by the voluntary contributions of working-class members. It was kept going by money from the armed “expropriations”, such as the infamous Tiflis bank job of 1907, that Lenin kept hidden from party scrutiny. Even after the RSDLP’s 1907 Congress again condemned the expropriations by a large majority (170 to 35), Lenin continued to squirrel away the proceeds from the robberies to fund the secret Bolshevik “Centre”.30
The differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were best expressed in their approach to the Duma. The Duma Electoral Law was not as generous as the October Manifesto had promised. It weighted the franchise towards landowners and peasants, with the working class and urban middle class under-represented. The Duma could draft laws but it could not legislate. The Tsar still appointed Ministers who were responsible to him alone. The Fundamental Laws which created the new constitutional settlement could not be amended by the Duma, only by the Tsar.