Ronan Scott reviews The Workers’ Committee: An Outline of its Principles and Structure, by J. T. Murphy (Strike Map and Manifesto, 2023)

The new ‘Industrial Unionism’ series from Strike Map and Manifesto Press is a real head-scratcher for those who are not in the know. We’re used to this on the Left. A surprise political party, publication, or plan of action appears, having been cooked in the slow oven of a bunch of comrades over the course of half their lives. We make deductions about what it is, ask around, see who’s involved, and come to a determination of its efficacy. In Scotland, if we take our eye off the English Left for too long we can easily find ourselves blindsided. It is nice, if confusing, to see our comrades from South proudly holding up their copies of The Workers’ Committee by J.T Murphy.

The comrades seem delighted with their little red book, though not quite as delighted as the folk you see holding the equivalent one in photographs from China. In this new pocket-sized guide you won’t find out how to correctly handle contradictions among the people, or where correct ideas come from, but what matter: you will find out how to organise a munitions workshop in Sheffield into an effective factory committee during the First World War.

On the front is Murphy, photographed making a point in an early 20th century suit, with the serious glasses of the serious rank-and-filer. Murphy’s pamphlet was first published in 1917, and it is short and sweet, only 6,500 words long. It criticised the trade union leadership and officials for failing to reflect the conditions and attitudes of the workers they were supposed to represent, and criticised the trade union structures for their disjointedness: they did not reflect the real organisation of workers in industry. On this last point, Murphy thought that the basic unit of trade union organisation, the branch, should include all the members in one workplace (not one locality or district) and that industries should not have multiple unions in them but should all be organised under the auspices of one union. The Workers’ Committee lays out a structure of workplace organisation, a pyramid with ‘Workshop Committees’ at the base, followed by ‘Local Industrial Committees’, ‘Plant Committees’, ‘Local Workers’ Committees’, ‘National Industrial Committees’, and finally the ‘National Workers’ Committee’. The crux of this system of organisation is that decisions and actions are taken by the workers themselves, rather than the officials in the trade unions.

Murphy was a part of The Workers’ Committee and Shop Stewards’ Movement, which originated on the Clyde in 1915, and was taken up in Sheffield, Manchester, and further afield shortly afterwards. Its principles were as Murphy describes in the pamphlet: cross-industry organising, and workers’ control. The movement contained a motley crew of trade unionists, with most of the leadership, including Murphy, opposing the First World War and supporting the October Revolution. The leadership of the movement were overwhelmingly revolutionary: they wanted to abolish the wage system entirely, and believed that a re-organisation of workers from the base would offer the formation needed for this attack. The movement disintegrated by the summer of 1922. In this period certain concepts were solidified which are now well-worn: ‘rank and file’ as opposed to union officials; ‘industrial unionism’ meaning the organisation of workers across industries rather than according to skill or craft; ‘syndicalism’ as the belief that industrial unionism will more or less spontaneously spawn revolution.

There’s an un-drawable, seven-dimensional political compass with ‘rank and file’ at one end, ‘industrial unionism’ somewhere in the middle, and ‘syndicalism’ in the depths. Someone with para-psychological instincts might divine the presence in there of ‘council communism’. To take an uneducated guess, it seems that what unites the producers of this industrial unionism series of reprints is not any specific ideology or call to action but instead rank-and-fileism, a hat that can fit nicely on the heads of Trotskyists, small-time anarchists and party Communists alike. That is to say, probably what everyone behind the series agrees we should learn from it is that workers’ control of trade unions is possible and is what we should aspire to. Strike Map call it ‘a blueprint for union renewal from the bottom up’.

It’s a fine starting point, though it is one of those answers that keeps producing more questions. The easiest critique of Murphy’s pamphlet, then and now, is that it is formalist, which is to say that it offers a theory of organisation which has no politics inherent to its form other than the classic Marxist trope of being ‘organised to fight as we are organised to produce’. The pamphlet does not describe how the union pyramid of factories and industries would take the worker to the point of threatening the organisations of capital, but merely states that it is a suitable mechanism to bring the worker who engages with its structure to a consciousness of the social character of the methods of production.

Proponents of industrial unionism in the very early 20th century (when the theory had its heyday) did not always agree on the function of trade unions in the struggle overall. James Connolly called economic struggle “the preparatory school and training ground for Socialists” and thought that an organisation in the form of One Big Union (the aspiration of the Industrial Workers of the World) would allow the workers to be schooled in the correct way. Sylvia Pankurst, partly because of her analysis of the Shop Stewards’ Movement, lost faith in attempts to work with the existing trade union structures, and proposed a system of revolutionary workers’ councils entirely independent of the trade unions. Murphy, at the time of the movements, seemed to believe that the Shop Stewards’ Movement should grow within the existing trade unions. Whatever way you look at it, industrial unionism failed, despite the conditions for its success (the war, the organisation of the workforce into factories, the Russian Revolution, the existence of a functioning Communist Party) being much more favourable than today. Our diagnosis of why the Shop Stewards’ Movement and the Workers’ Committee movement collapsed determines what lessons we can learn from them.

Murphy himself changed his mind about the best course of action. This is not to discredit him – learning from our mistakes is a virtue in this movement. But it does raise the question of which Murphy we should pay most attention to. The one who eschewed political struggle in favour of pure trade union struggle? Or the one who regretted that the form of industrial unionism he promoted during the war never took a principled anti-war stance? The one who rejected leadership and centralising structures in favour of local action? Or the one who was impressed by the character of organisation in the Soviet Union? Are we to follow Murphy the pure syndicalist, as he is presented in this pamphlet, with his prentice hand on the workers’ movement? Or should we grapple with the same problems that Murphy grappled with, for which his comrades, James Connolly, Sylvia Pankhurst, Willie Gallacher, John Maclean, John Muir, came up with very different solutions? What are we to make of Murphy’s subsequent indictment of The Miners’ Next Step, the next classic rank and file text that has been produced in this series? At the end of the workers’ committees experiment, almost all of the communist-minded ringleaders had regrets about the non-revolutionary character of the movement they had been involved with.

They had two concerns that still stand for us today. One was that the movement had stayed inside the narrow realm of the economic struggle, and had not engaged with politics. The other was that the movement had not come to terms with its relationship to empire. When we ask about the trades unions, ‘how can we transform this lacklustre reformist movement into a lustrous revolutionary one?’, it is reasonable to look at points in the history of these islands where workers were bolder and more powerful. We stand on the shoulders of those revolutionaries who worked in these same streets, and framed local institutions of the working class that we still operate in today. The British Left has been outstanding in its adherence to the trade union movement. But we all know that celebrating this approach uncritically might be to resign ourselves to a fate whose limits are determined by the narrow successes of the wage struggle. Socialist traditions in most other countries in the world, including in the Global North, tend to pay far less attention to trade union struggle. It’s taken for granted here that socialism and trade unionism are married, but we also know that, firstly, socialists must analyse their material conditions to know how to proceed, not rely on the toothless wisdom of the ages, and, secondly, that, as Marx said, we need to move the slogan from ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ to ‘Abolition of the Wage System’. The relative importance of the trade union struggle in the communist movement in the UK over one hundred years ago might well stoke our imaginations. But it also allows us to reflect, given the material conditions that we have now, whether trade unions are for us the primary movers of communism, be it through rank and file organising or through the other classic uses of the labour movement in the UK – influence on the Labour party, using the unions to win transitional demands, and so on.

When it comes to internationalism, we should heed Gallacher’s, Connolly’s and especially Maclean’s instincts that revolutionary work involves destroying the British Empire. Industrial unionism lacks, so far, in its theory and practice, a good anti-imperialist strategy. We do not want to copy J.T .Murphy’s comrades by simply increasing the wages of workers who are creating munitions to cement Britain’s power in Palestine. This history of the 1910s is a useful area to mine for the Left, but we won’t find a map buried in there with red crosses and ‘bulk of treasure here’ written in a small neat hand. Only six months ago, the publication ‘Notes from Below’, who have also endorsed this new pamphlet series, offered self-criticism on the basis that they had been engaged in ‘syndicalism’, which they defined as ‘becoming deeply embedded within the trade union movement without any form of external political organisation’. ‘It is crucial,’ they wrote that ‘we fight for ways to go beyond the constraints of trade unionism and use this activity as a launching pad for political struggle’.

As we map those ways, let us take a new look at Gallacher, Pankhurst, Maclean, Politt, Crawfurd, Connolly. They were clear-headed, and made careful and self-critical analyses of their activity. Hopefully this series will allow us to be as self-critical ourselves. They would have wanted us to learn from their mistakes.