Lessons In Organising - What Trade Unionists Can Learn From The War On Teachers, by Gawain Little, Ellie Sharp, Howard Stephenson, David Wilson. Pluto Press, £14.49
Turning to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci for inspiration to work out how British trade unions should respond to the conditions they face is the bold approach of this book, and the authors have succeeded in constructing a coherent case for trade union renewal by doing so.
The book applies lessons of trade unionists in one sector – education - to the issues of organisation and campaigning for the wider movement, learning from the experience of the National Education Union and one of its predecessor unions, the NUT. “We are not claiming here that the process of renewal we discuss in this book was guided by some tidy Gramscian plan,” they say, “but we are arguing that the ideas of Gramsci were being engaged with and provided useful and influential frameworks for activists and officers to consider how to both understand the immediate situation and to build a movement capable of creating something better.”
It is rare and extremely valuable for activists involved in the work of their union to produce such a frank volume of analysis, with the intention of setting out a systematic theoretical framework based on their experience. By applying the ideas of Gramsci, they have succeeded in breaking down artificial barriers between theory and practice, one of the most valuable features of the book.
Lessons In Organising argues that, as class conflict is constantly present within capitalism, and as that the visibility and intensity of that conflict ebbs and flows, so it is useful to draw on Gramsci’s concepts of the different forms of class conflict and how they are conducted. “Gramsci’s concept of a war of movement was a very direct confrontation between opposing forces,” they say, “often lasting for a limited amount of time.” Whereas Gramsci’s notion of a war of position “reflected a less visible, but constant and ongoing, struggle over the ideas that dominate our lives and frame how people make sense of ‘reality’.” So the perpetual battle over education, and the war on teachers, explodes at times – such as protracted and intense industrial disputes - and also plays out as an ongoing war of position, such as over the right’s ideas for an education system based on competition, privatisation and cultural conservatism. By looking at teaching and schools in this way, Lessons In Organising proposes that trade union organisation has to be capable of waging both forms of struggle. “In short, the labour movement needs to engage in its own war of position, alongside its readiness to engage in the war of movement that can erupt any moment (indeed, engagement in a war of position is essential preparation for the war of movement). The requires the trade union movement to build working-class power by acting industrially and politically, organising at the workplace, but also in political and civil society. Building this type of trade unionism, industrially militant and politically campaigning, is the strategic challenge facing the labour movement.” Lessons In Organising is a discussion of what that model looks like.
The book’s contributors are predominantly trade unionists active in the National Education Union - and an academic, Howard Stephenson. Gawain Little, at the time of co-writing, was a member of the national executive of the NEU and is now the General Secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions; Ellie Sharp is a primary school teacher and NEU activist; David Wilson is the Assistant General Secretary of the NEU, responsible for campaigns, communications and political engagement. The NEU is the biggest teachers’ union in Europe, and one of the larger affiliates of the TUC. “We offer these points not as external observers, but as labour movement activists, speaking about a movement of which we are part,” they say.
On publication, the active labour movement background of the authors provoked a backlash from the right. Released at the height of the teachers’ strikes this year, Lessons In Organising was described as “scary,” and a “profoundly frightening new book” by Tory MP Jonathan Gullis in his review for the Telegraph, which was entitled “Trotskyites have infiltrated the teachers’ union.” “Class struggle: book reveals teachers’ strike militants’ political goals” was the headline in The Times. Writing in the Spectator, Iain Mansfield, the director of research and head of education at Policy Exchange said, “this astonishingly open self-revelatory tome should be a wake-up call for government engagement with the NEU.” There ought to be much wider awareness on the left of a book that has been so aggressively received on the right.
It is a fact that the situation facing trade unions in Britain remains highly challenging. The labour movement lives with a terrain shaped by defeats of the 1980s. Unions operate under hostile and highly restrictive labour laws. Conditions of privatisation, outsourcing, deindustrialisation and precarious work have had a major impact on working class communities and working class organisation. Trade union membership saw a steep decline after the 1970s. Over decades there has been a relentless battle to assert neo-liberal ideas as the dominant ones in society, and to side-line competing arguments of collectivism and solidarity. The question of how to restore collective power has run through the labour movement for decades. Lessons In Organising makes a particularly important contribution to that long debate precisely because it is an analysis of activists who are able to draw on the concrete experience of their union in order to expand on their broader conclusions.
And that experience is undeniably rich: the crisis over school closures during the covid pandemic, for example; or the problems of organising in the new fragmented school system; or fighting school cuts during in the general election of 2017 when the NUT spent a total of £326,000, making it one of the highest-spending ‘third parties’ in the election - causing Conservative Home’s Mark Wallace, to comment later that “an under-appreciated factor in Jeremy Corbyn’s better than expected performance in 2017 was the punishing campaign by teaching unions aimed at parents of schoolchildren.” Campaign geeks will welcome the inclusion of campaigning techniques that have informed the union’s activity, such as the use of big data and new digital organising tools.
A chapter on the war on teachers outlines the contested and political nature of education, reviewing the emergence progressive education from the 1960s, and the right’s onslaught against this at the time and since. Under Margaret Thatcher, battles over teachers’ pay were part of a wide fight over teachers’ autonomy and control of teachers’ work. The Tories imposed changes to how teachers’ pay is determined, so that school teachers in England have not been able to engage in national collective bargaining over pay since 1987. Ground-breaking curriculum developments such as over homophobia, racism and sexism were attacked. Section 28 was rammed through. All of these questions were alive simultaneously. Thus the authors argue that “struggles over teachers’ work can never be restricted to narrow questions of pay and workload, but must always address the totality of teachers’ work.”
Three models of trade unionism emerged in response to the defeats and struggles of the eighties and nineties and are addressed here. Rapprochement is seen as a dead end; and resistance – whilst rightly recognising the antagonism between employer and employee - is seen as being reactive. So Lessons In Organising shapes an argument for a comprehensive form of the third response: trade union renewal.
Any serious attempt at renewal must be driven by a relentless focus on workplace organising, the authors argue. Or, as they say, “the union is not in headquarters, it is in the workplace.” There is heavy emphasis on the power of workplace reps as an organising force, based on the NUT-NEU experience in schools, the so-called ‘rep effect’. (Indeed, an interesting passage discusses the emergence of ‘covid reps’ during the pandemic). In many cases also renewal means change in democratic structures to maximise members’ involvement through their reps. Renewal involves a different approach to leadership: “the reality is that without consciously and strategically building leadership within its own ranks, the trade union movement will wither inexorably.” A helpful discussion of leadership models concludes that what is required “is not leadership ‘from above’ or ‘from below,’ but it is leadership exercised at every level of the organisation, and it transcends formal and informal structures.” The authors argue that having a left leadership in the NUT-NEU has contributed to many of the advances discussed in the book and also that a left leadership alone is not sufficient – it requires a corresponding growth in organisational participation, strength and political consciousness among broad layers of the membership.
But renewal also involves recognising that organising must be political. For a start, education itself is political, since “it is fundamentally a struggle over what the future can look like.” However, the need to address the realm of politics is not limited to education. That is, “there is a limit to what can be achieved at the level of the workplace. The wider economic and political context cannot simply be swept away solely by workplace struggle. Workers must wage a sustained political struggle in order to change the wider context.” Therefore it follows that trade unions’ struggles involve fighting to change the ideological terms themselves. Examining the NUT’s response to the aggressive reforms of Michael Gove’s period as Education Secretary, the union’s approach is shown to be counter-hegemonic, by seeking to break the neoliberal consensus that had dominated education policy and posing an alternative. In pursuing this approach teaching activists have had to fight on three terrains – the industrial/economic, the ideological and the political. From this viewpoint, workplace organising must provide a base for building solidarity, whilst also connecting workplace concerns with a political critique of neoliberalism, and demands for an education system based on equality and democracy. The outcome of this is an argument for an expansive conception of politics from a socialist perspective. “Capitalism divides the political and the industrial, allowing a limited, distorted and precarious form of democracy to exist in the former while excluding democracy almost entirely from the latter.” So political struggle should not be seen as being purely parliamentary politics, and it is also not something which can simply be “contracted out” by unions to the Labour Party. “The real question,” the book argues, “is how we build workers’ power, from the workplace up, and at the same time politicise it, combining industrial and political struggle. Our aim should be to build our power to the point where workers begin to determine what happens in society, including decisions at Westminster.”
In a number of ways the authors’ argument about the political implications of organising constitutes an important argument. First, it does not counterpose workplace struggles to politics but instead connects these two spheres. Secondly, by definition, it does not go down the road of limiting the labour movement to pure economic questions – on the contrary, it is an argument to link economic questions to wider ones, within and beyond the workplace, and indeed to challenging the dominant ideology within society itself. Thirdly, it involves support for wider civil society alliances whilst maintaining the integrity of the labour movement’s position. In other words, uniting with others around agreed aims but maintaining the union’s own independent view of the world. In its openness to political campaigning and civil society alliances the book stands for a revitalised and confident version of trade unionism.
In their conclusion the authors argue for increased co-ordination of grassroots and national collective action as part of the wider case for solidarity. The “best way to strengthen this working-class solidarity,” they say, “is by building a cross-union co-ordination of leaders at multiple levels in the movement, something akin to the shop stewards movement that developed in engineering and shipbuilding at the end of the First World War or the movement built around the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions in the 1960s and 1970s, but in ways that reflect the much-changed contexts that confront us today.” They add: “The struggle to build a new national movement of shop stewards and activists is the new imperative.”
In the combination of its main arguments, Lessons In Organising contains one of the most clearly-set out expressions of what may be described as class-struggle trade unionism that is hegemonic in approach, consciously extending into politics and alliance-building. As such it is of interest to trade union activists but also for discussions of left strategy.
One important aspect of how Little, Sharp, Stevenson and Wilson have approached their subject is to embrace both theory as well as practical questions, rather than falsely placing them in opposition to each other. In this regard Lessons In Organising is refreshingly unrestricted by the features of labourism that shy away from the connection between theory and practice. From the modern British labour movement’s earliest days the dominant tradition involved an artificial choice between theory – particularly Marxism - and practice. In his speech to the founding conference of the Independent Labour Party in 1893, Ben Tillett, the dockers’ leader whose union later helped form Transport and General Workers’ Union, set out this view very clearly: he would “sooner have the solid, progressive, matter-of-fact, fighting trades unionism of England than all the hare-brained chatterers and magpies of continental revolutionists.”1 In Tillett’s remarks, we can see the dominant, majority tradition of the British labour movement being given early form: a disinterest in theory and its counter-position to practicality; and a belief in the superiority of a ‘practical’ (British) model.
With its argument for the relevance of Gramsci and its discussion of ideology and politics in relation to trade unionism, Lessons In Organising transcends that tradition.
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See Tom Nairn, ‘The Nature Of The Labour Party, Part 1’, New Left Review. See also Henry Pelling, Origins of the Labour Party 1880-1900 (second edition 1965), p118.