Socialist strategy for unions under capitalism
Socialist Outlook1990sTranscribed by hand from the printed page.
A capitalist society means the domination by private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange; it means the rule of the profit motive, the law of value and the market system. It also means inevitable continued economic trade cycles and crises. Marxists have shown that there is no solution that can lead the way to crisis-free capitalism. Worse, late capitalism is today undergoing a long process of morbid decay. At the global level extreme poverty, starvation, repression, torture and war are the order of the day, as most of the poor, dependent countries drown in a sea of debt owed to the metropolitan banks. While global imperialism, contrary to popular beliefs, is still alive, 'third world' conditions have emerged in the metropolitan centres themselves, along with new killer diseases, many poisons in the food chain, corruption, state-sponsored drug addiction (in the USA) and appalling social misery. It is going to get a lot worse unless the organised working class, the one potential force on the planet that can put a stop it, is stirred into action. Given this global catastrophe, and given the basic historic division between workers and employers, which is also inevitable under capitalism, the purpose of trade unions must be to defend the independent interests of the workers they represent. They must also build solidarity with other workers in struggle, both at home and internationally.
This raises an immediate question. If crisis and conflict are inevitable under capitalism then how is it that unions can defend the interests of workers in capitalist society? Surely those interests can only be safeguarded by socialism, and anything else is an illusion? In the end this is true; when Thatcher and the Tory right talk about reintroducing Victorian values they mean they want to take away the social gains of the 20th century, and they have began to do just that. However, we insist that the struggle for rights and conditions now is inextricably linked to the fight to build a movement that can achieve socialism.
There have been many answers given by socialists about how to do this. Here we shall look at just four.
One approach is to argue that trade union struggles can actually achieve socialism on their own, and that the construction of a political movement for socialism is unnecessary, or, less dramatically, will follow naturally from, and depend on, such struggles. In other words, the process of defending immediate gains in the unions will lead directly on to a movement for a new society. This is the basis, for example, of syndicalism. Syndicalist traditions were particularly strong in the US labour movement in the early years of the century, through the influence of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The same was true in France and Spain, where syndicalism grew up side by side in conjunction with the anarchist movement. The syndicalist tradition is also important in the history of the British trade union movement. The high point of British syndicalism was in the period immediately before and after the First World War. Syndicalist ideas were prominent in the 'Great Unrest' of 1910/14, as shown by the writings of Tom Mann and the pamphlet The Miners' Next Step, produced by the unofficial reform committee of the South Wales miners. The war-time shop stewards movement also adopted syndicalist ideas to a large degree. However, the influence of a syndicalist approach did not stop with the end of the war. It carried on into the newly formed Communist Party after 1921 (many communist leaders were previous activists in the shop stewards movement and in syndicalist groups) and has remained an influence since then.
The influence of syndicalism in British communism and its continuing importance are a reflection of the deep-rooted political weakness of the working class and the labour movement in this country. This, mainly English, phenomenon, can be traced back to an early 'bourgeois revolution', otherwise known as the English Civil War, which was followed by the first industrialisation. The successes of the British capitalist state and its mercantile empire and the emergence of industrial capital that followed, ensured relative prosperity and social peace. In comparison with continental Europe, the necessity for a political struggle by the new employers was much reduced. German and Italian industrialisation, for example, was combined with the political battles around national unification and the other historic tasks of bourgeois national revolutions. The emerging working classes of these countries were not only mobilised and radicalised by the cause of democracy ('liberté, egalité et fraternité'), but also inspired by the radical social egalitarianism of left-wing Jacobinism, which in turn influenced socialist thought.
In Britain there was no equivalent ideological continuity between the great English Revolution of the 17th century and the Chartists of the 19th century. In Britain the social revolution took place before the development of a mass working class and its independent organisations. The English Revolution was couched in religious ideology and, as a consequence, the historically distant experiences of the Levellers and Diggers were difficult to appropriate. They were often seen as archaic and incomprehensible in an 'age of enlightenment', while the more immediate Jacobinism could be presented as just another foreign import.
The other factor, mentioned above, and probably the decisive one in the formation of British working-class politics, was the growth of Britain's empire and global hegemony during the 19th century. With the partial exception of Chartism, it enabled the British capitalist class to manage industrial development without high levels of political and social conflict either internationally in its own ranks or, crucially, with the emergent working class to whom it offered reforms and concessions. The result was a large labour movement with very strong traditions of industrial organisation but very weak traditions of political involvement or revolutionary struggle. It was natural that the syndicalist perspective of reducing politics to industrial struggle would find a ready echo in the early British unions.
While syndicalism has the merit of giving full weight to the rank and file activity of ordinary trade unionists and drawing out its radical potential, it is seriously over-optimistic about the prospects for trade unions under capitalism. Consequently Syndicalists rarely look beyond the narrow economic struggle. This is a fundamental error in a capitalist society like Britain where economic and political power are inextricably fused, and where economic life is to some extent regulated and in the last analysis defended by the institutions of the state. In reality, militant trade unionism unavoidably becomes political in nature and to imagine otherwise is to wage the fight unprepared. The miners' strike of 1984/5 is a good example. The economic struggles of trade unions cannot, on their own, ensure workers' rights, without being linked to the political struggle for socialism.
Syndicalism, by its concentration on rank and file struggles in the unions as the agency for social change, tends to downplay the question of trade union leadership. It also, especially, plays down political leadership which is by definition political parties. But the working class needs its party not only to centralise its own struggles against the multi-nationals and their political state power, but to lead the struggle for workers' power and to form workers' governments that will break with the logic of capitalism. This will require building the broadest possible social alliances behind the working class. Without the unity of the working class as a whole with the oppressed, it cannot go forward and win.
Syndicalists correctly call for the unions to unite and defend the interests of the workers, but in a situation where the union leadership is systematically attacking those interests there is often a tendency for them to avoid challenging this by focusing only on the local struggles of the rank and file. This lets the bureaucrats off the hook and leaves them free to work against the struggle.
There are two key historical examples of this in Britain. First, there is the experience of the period around the General Strike in 1926. The two years preceding the strike saw the development, through the influence of the Communist Party, of the best organised left-wing seen to date in the British trade unions: the Minority Movement. The Minority Movement (MM) was potentially able to mount a real challenge to the leadership of the trade unions. Its first conference in August 1924 saw 200,000 workers represented. It quickly grew through the 1924 strike wave, which included the winning of a 10% wage increase by the miners, stimulated in part by militancy inspired by the MM. This carried over into widespread wage militancy in 1925, including the NUR, AEU, shipbuilders and TGWU, culminating in 'Red Friday' in July 1925 when the government and mine-owners were forced to back down temporarily from proposed wage cuts and lengthened hours. The MM had already moved beyond a syndicalist framework, but the legacy of syndicalism meant that it often concentrated on building the unions in general and neglected the political struggles taking place inside the unions around the policies of the union leaderships. This was compounded by the Communist Party's policy adopted from 1925 onwards under the direction of the Soviet Union, of forging an alliance with the left-wing union leaders through the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. When this alliance was tested in the General Strike it fell apart, as the union leaderships, right and left, abandoned the strike. The Minority Movement was left unable to mount an effective response to the calling off of the strike.
The second example is the experience of the 1970s and 80s. During the 1960s and the 1970s growing union militancy, based in large measure on the rejuvenated and much expanded shop stewards movement, raised the level of trade union struggle to a point not seen since the 1920s. While syndicalist ideas were not explicitly present in this period in the way they had been earlier, the practice of those taking action did very much conform to the syndicalist model. This meant that when the Tories returned to power in 1979 and launched their onslaught against the trade unions, the shop stewards movement, which had defeated In Place of Strife, the Labour Government's plan to weaken the unions, and the Industrial Relations Act, and defeated Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon and Labour's 5% wages policy during the 'winter of discontent' was, ultimately inadequate to confront them. Despite the huge industrial challenges to the Tories between January 1980 (the steel workers) and 1985 (the miners), a combination of deliberately created mass unemployment, a new round of anti-trade union laws, and the development of 'new realism' in the unions posed political problems that even a shop stewards movement at the height of its post war power and a high level of industrial militancy could not deal with. The movement lacked an adequate political response both to the strategy of the new realists and to the attacks on jobs. The steel workers, for example, won on wages (a 17% increase) but lost on jobs, 55,000 jobs. By the time the Tories took on the miners and the NUM defended the jobs of the miners in a year-long strike job losses had become almost routine in many industries and the politically unchallenged new realists ensured that the miners fought alone.
If syndicalism neglects the political sphere, a second, apparently opposite, response is 'economism', as Lenin described it. 'Economism', puts great stress on the desirability of manipulating capitalist democracy and Parliament to achieve trade union (i.e., economic) aims, while reducing union struggles to, at best, an auxiliary to Parliament. This trend within the workers' movement, which had strong support inside the trade union bureaucracy, wanted to give the economic struggle a political expression or character. These leaders said that much could be gained by having friends in Parliament. More recently, union bosses such as Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, albeit with bases in the rank and file, pursued this kind of perspective, as do lesser leaders like Rodney Bickerstaff and Bill Morris today.
During the 19th century, the trade union leaders had first turned to the Liberal Party for economic concessions, as today in the USA the bureaucrats still turn to the Democrats, to whom they deliver the great majority of the working class vote. In Britain it was a hundred years ago that the battle for independent labour representation was recognised as the necessary next step; workers wanted real representatives of their interests who could also be made more easily accountable. It was the powerful influence of the union bureaucracies which was to determine the character of the Labour Party. They have controlled the Labour Party as their political expression for nearly a century. Of course there were other socialist and Marxist trends (for example the Social Democratic Federation, or SDF) which participated in the battles to found an independent labour party, but they were a minority.
Various reformist and social democratic trends have also emerged, some left-wing in character, such as the Tribune Group, or the Campaign Group of MPs, who, although more ideological and political than the 'economists', like them also see the independent movement and self-activity of the working class merely as an adjunct to negotiations or to the 'political struggle' in Parliament. As reformists they tend to be more radical on those social and political issues which do not confront the 'core' interests of capital.
According to the more sophisticated left reformists today, Britain is a special kind of capitalist country. Dominated by multinationals and by the financial interests of the City of London, with an archaic political system, British industry is seen as particularly weak in international terms. The outcome of this is a 'low wage/low investment/low productivity' economy, from which springs the employers' offensive. The argument is that trade union pressure, by closing off the option of low wages and investment for employers, can shift the economy to a new path of high productivity and technical change, breaking the power of the City. This would still obviously be a capitalist society, but one in which the position of unions was qualitatively strengthened. This would in turn improve the position of workers in future battles.
This view formed much of the basis for the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) of the Labour left in the 1970s and early 1980s. Elements of it survive in the economic plans of writers as varied as Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Will Hutton. It has the merit of recognising important national peculiarities of the British state. However, it is again misleading as a guide to action. The most important particularity of Britain is not the role of the City but its position in the world economy, as an imperialist country. British industry located in Britain may be weak, but British firms producing abroad are immensely strong; and in that overseas production they are backed up by, not in conflict with, the activities of the City. A move to high investment and productivity in industry within Britain would be unlikely to strengthen trade unions or reduce the intensity of work, rather the reverse, as shown by the motor industry in the 1990s. Other countries, such as Germany, which have been looked to as a model by writers like Hutton, are currently dismantling many of the safeguards for workers which he admires. Even Hutton's radical (capitalist) reforms would require the mobilisation of the working class to be implemented, which is why Tony Blair's 'stake-holder society' is merely a very pale reflection of this idea.
These approaches fail because they do not challenge the real power in society, the capitalist ruling class and its state. Syndicalism neglects politics by focusing exclusively on rank and file struggles, while all brands of reformism including the AES option neglect the fundamental economic constraints of capitalism and the class character of the state and its parliamentary institutions. This is why the political breakthrough they seek is utopian. Not only this, both strategies treat the unions and the working class as an undifferentiated whole, ignoring the divisions about the best way forward that can arise between workers, and in particular the divisions between the rank and file and the union leaders. For syndicalists, the entire union movement by itself can become a revolutionary force and either sweep the leaders out of the way or win them over. For those supporting projects of radical reform like the AES, the implication is that the union leadership, union activists and members can unite in an unproblematic way to present a political alternative through the ballot box.
In contradiction to both these strategies we start from a Marxist concept of the struggle by the working class for political and state power. Central to this approach is the need for a clear anti-capitalist programme combined with the method of the 'united front'. Like the Syndicalists our starting point is also the defence of the immediate interests of workers by the unions. However, we believe that such a defence becomes inescapably political in nature at a certain point and requires a political struggle as well as economic and industrial militancy.
The United Front
However, this political struggle takes a very different form from the approach typified by the AES. First, revolutionary socialists argue for united actions on concrete demands that not only take forward the fight in the immediate interests of the workers, but result in greater class unity and self-confidence, and the raising of class consciousness. Essential to our strategy is the self-activity of the working class. We reject the paternalist parliamentarism of the reformists. Often the key demands around which a united fight can be built are thrown up by the grass roots membership of the unions themselves. This happened in France during the strikes of autumn 1995. The task of socialists was to generalise these slogans. However, in the absence of such demands being thrown up by the movement itself, socialists try to convince their fellow workers of the need for more political demands drawn from the historic experience of the working class (see below on the role of 'minimum demands' and 'transitional demands').
Second, the broad unity that can be built around just demands can be strengthened if it also includes the official leaderships of the movement, while maintaining rank and file control and a capacity for independent action. The method of the united front requires that every current and leader should be included. But it can also be a weapon against those union leaders who refuse to join the united struggle of the workers. A refusal to back the fight and to lead will show them in their true colours before the working class. Our aim therefore must be to force, if necessary, the leadership into supporting the actions of ordinary trade unionists, not to by-pass or ignore the traditional trade union leaders, as the ultra-lefts and the Syndicalists would do. Dragging them into the action helps to create the conditions for the struggles to be generalised to involve wider groups of workers. This is because many workers will be unwilling to take action without official leadership support, so it helps avoid the danger of the activity which does take place becoming isolated and fragmented. Further, without a political struggle which places demands on the union leaders, taking the discussion to a higher level by the raising of new demands, the task of forging a new cohesion of the rank and file, raising the level of consciousness, will not take place. Leaderships, programmes and political organisations which claim to represent the interests of the working class can only be tested in the struggle itself.
Unlike the supporters of the AES, we recognise conflicts of interest between union members and the bureaucratised leaderships, which means that their support for workers' struggles is by no means automatic. This conflict has a long history and is one of the reasons why a new revolutionary party is needed. But, unlike the Syndicalists, we do not believe that the active struggle to gain support from the union leaders can simply be bypassed by narrowly focusing on rank and file activity. We have to build united front initiatives and actions across the unions and beyond which embrace all those prepared to fight for the interests of the working class: sections of the union leaders, shop stewards and rank-and-file organisations along with campaigns and individuals and MPs who support the aims of the alliance. Such alliances have been built in the past around issues such as opposition to anti-union laws, In Place of Strife and the Industrial Relations Act, and later against the Corrie Bill in the early 1980s, which attacked a woman's right to chose, and in support of the miners in 1984-5. More recently alliances have been built around opposition to the Poll Tax, the Gulf War, and against the Immigration and Asylum Bill.
The key to the success of such alliances is a non-sectarian and inclusive approach and a democratic mode of functioning, something which is all too rarely achieved by such initiatives and which limits their effectiveness. The above are examples of the united front but there are other important forms of organisation. The Minority Movement of the 1920s was not a classical united front but an advanced alliance of trade unionists, a left wing forged out of a process of struggle and united front actions. But it was a highly effective form of organisation.
Despite its imperfections, the Minority Movement vividly shows the power of this general unitary approach when applied to organising in the unions. Unfortunately, the Communist Party, which was the driving force behind the MM, failed twice to follow this through consistently. First, in the year preceding the General Strike, as described above, they neglected rank and file activity in favour of building bureaucratic alliances at the top with supposedly left wing union leaders. Second, from 1929 to 1931 they changed completely, aiming to set up 'red' trade unions outside the official labour movement and launching over-ambitious strikes that failed comprehensively. This was ultra-left and divisive, and even went so far as to exclude branch officers from strike committees and other bodies. The effect of this was to discredit both militancy and the MM. The CP veered between sectarianism and opportunism.
In this way the gains made in 1924 and 1925 through applying the tactic of the united front were decisively squandered. However, what was achieved in those years shows the potential of the approach, especially if applied consistently over a longer time period.
The approach of the united front is not limited to demanding support from the trade union leaders. It is also essential to argue for support for workers struggles from the leaders of the Labour Party. We reject the idea that one can simply separate the labour movement, industrial and political, into two wings — trade union and Labour Party. The trade union and Labour leaderships in Britain have traditionally been 'one principle', as Leon Trotsky observed. It is this that Tony Blair wants to break with in order to change the class basis of the party. While as much pressure as possible should be put on the union and Labour Party leaders to join in supporting struggles and to live up to their stated positions and promises, it is also the case that within any such alliance socialists need to maintain their ability to put forward their own positions and link up each individual campaign with the broader picture. At the same time the united front relies on vigorous rank and file activity, particularly since without such activity there will be insufficient momentum to push the leadership into action.
The concept of the united front, then, combined with a rigorous attention to workers' democracy, is an essential strategy for building unity, supporting struggles, raising demands and raising political class consciousness within the trade unions. Even more, it is the way to win.
Minimum and Maximum Demands and Transitional Method
The demands we raise in the unions are in part founded on what we describe as the 'transitional' method. This involves pressing for demands which correspond to the everyday needs of the workers, but which also link the movement to the higher struggle for socialism. The struggle for these demands not only improves the position of workers and increases their confidence for the next set of struggles, it begins to pose in a partial way the question of power. Which class controls society? Given the class nature of capitalism and the resistance of employers to meeting the needs of workers, such demands would open up the potentiality for future struggles and further gains, taking us towards the decisive goal of overcoming the power of the capitalist class and its state. They are also demands which increase political consciousness: the political barriers inevitably placed in the way of achieving such demands make it clearer and clearer what is needed to defend the interest of workers in the long term. The immediate struggles of unions, as they encounter the opposing priorities of management, raise the question of the ultimate purpose and direction of the system. In particular, as the movement builds its power and self-confidence, the issue of workers' control over production comes more and more to the fore.
To bring this out, however, requires the active presence of organised socialists in trade unions, who will generalise the partial experience gained in particular disputes by linking these to other experiences. In this way, the economic struggle of trade unions and the struggle of socialists for political trade unionism proceed together and are inseparably linked. Of course we support all legitimate partial or 'minimum' demands of the workers. We also embrace a full or 'maximum' socialist programme. However, transitional demands combined with the united front and workers' democracy are the only way that a bridge can be created between these two levels of struggle and programme. We reject the limitations imposed by reformists of all kinds, who are often prepared to support minimum demands while retaining the idea of socialism as a distant ideal, occasionally referred to in speeches. We insist on an active strategy and programme for socialism.
Transitional demands are sometimes difficult to formulate, they are certainly not the dogmatic abstractions they have sometimes been reduced to by sectarian groups. The key question of workers' control provides an example of the differences in approach between Marxists and Syndicalists. There are some similarities; in particular, both we and the Syndicalists see the need, at some stage, in a sharply developing conflict to establish workers control of the workplace, control over the production process, line speeds, conditions of work and hiring and firing. However, we also see the need for workers' management of the enterprises and expropriation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Without this, workers' control can only be a temporary phenomenon. A movement is needed that can establish and defend a workers' government as it begins an attack on the institutions of capitalist power. For such a government to consolidate itself it needs to mobilise the power of the working class and transform itself into a revolutionary government that dismantles the old state power and establishes a new, workers' power.
The slogan of the general strike can and will be raised at some point in such a confrontation, a crucial stage in building a movement. However, we would argue that a general strike is a defining moment, the culmination of a period of intense struggle and must be capable of uniting, not only the organised workers, but a majority of the broad masses of the working class and its allies. The slogan for the general strike poses directly the question: which class rules. All kinds of crises could trigger a general strike, from state repression of strikers, or other sectors, coup attempts against a radical workers' government which has been elected to office, or the threat of war. Such a confrontation between the classes must advance the struggle for power by establishing 'councils of action' and workers' control in preparation for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. The alternative could be terrible defeat. This is why Marxists always take the general strike slogan so seriously.
Before the general strike slogan can be raised, there can and must be a political struggle over the direction of production, the issues of workers' vetoes and workers' control. The question of the class nature of the capitalist state and the way in which the state determines production has to be raised. The capitalist state is linked to the employers and possesses a monopoly of repressive power. Consequently, in addition to the general strike carried out by the unions, the movement for workers' control requires a political form through which the movement can challenge the state. This is provided, in a revolutionary situation, by workers' councils, or, to use the Russian term, soviets.
For us, then, unlike the Syndicalists, trade union struggle or even workers' control, will not on its own grow into socialism. But it is an important foundation for socialist politics. On the other hand, the assertion of the independent interests of workers must stand as the foundation of trade union activity. The question then becomes one of how such assertion can be taken forward successfully. This is the topic of the rest of this pamphlet.
Under today's conditions in which the workers' movement is on the defensive in the face of recession and government attack, the most important set of demands are those for the preservation of jobs and against closures and sackings. To date the unions have singularly failed to resist market forces and the process of capitalist rationalisation and closure. Nonetheless, the only programme that can turn this situation around must not start from any conception of the viability of a company or enterprise in terms of private profit or the government budget deficit, but from the needs of the workers that the union represents. It is the bosses' profits that must be squeezed, not workers' livelihoods.
Against mass unemployment the trade unions should be campaigning for the reduction of the working week with no loss of pay. In a situation of over-production they should argue for direction of production into areas where needs remain glaringly unfilled, health, housing, education, care for the elderly, public transport and so on.
The first demand must be for a 35-hour week with no loss of earnings. This demand, which should be implemented nationally, has had more resonance in Europe, where significant campaigns exist, than in Britain. The demand is also appropriate at the level of the individual company, where other important demands can be raised. The need for accurate information about the state of the company suggests the traditional demand for the employers to open the books on their financial situation, investment plans, corporate strategy and so on. Recent developments in information technology, so often used against workers, massively increase the potential ability of unions to analyse the strategies of employers, if given access to the information and data bases. If the financial situation of a company is poor (as opposed to cases when closures are simply being pushed through to start production elsewhere where wages are lower and conditions worse), then the next demand can be for 'work-sharing with no loss of pay'. In the longer term the demand can be for the implementation of workers' plans for converting enterprises to the production of new, socially useful products. If companies refuse to implement such plans the demand then can be that they should be nationalised under workers' control, so that the plans are put into effect. Unfortunately today, when the Labour Party has abandoned Clause Four and the idea of nationalisation, this can only be a propaganda demand.
Of course at every stage of this process the demands made will be resisted by the employers. This is because such demands are actually in conflict with the requirements of the competitive market and the maintenance of their profit margins. Even the demand for open information about company strategies is resisted much more sharply now than twenty years ago. On working hours, rather than looking to a decrease in working time, the trend is for an increase. In the United States average working hours have increased by 168 hours a year over the last twenty years, an extra month's work! The response of European politicians is to demand an increase in working hours as well. The production of goods and services to meet social need immediately runs up against the issue of inequality. Those goods needed by society are exactly those which people do not have money to buy; so any attempt to direct production to making them is a challenge to the logic of the market.
In this way the measures needed to combat unemployment will run up against tremendous resistance. They could not be fully implemented without building a socialist society. However, that does not mean that struggling for them is doomed to failure. Even if they are only partly undertaken this will increase the confidence and better the position of workers. Further, the issues raised by campaigning along these lines will raise consciousness and prepare the way for future battles. The most important trade union fightback against job losses and closures in recent years was the miners' strike of 1984-5, which showed the scale of the opposition that such a struggle against market forces will generate. At the same time it showed elements of a clear alternative, and it highlighted the kind of solidarity that is needed for such an alternative to be successfully fought for: a unity that grew beyond the trades unions and included the whole working class and the specially oppressed.
The proper application of the transitional method outlined above requires the careful selection of the appropriate demand for the conditions that the workers immediately face. Socialists should not attempt to foist onto the movement a full programme, when there is no agreement on that programme and when the programme is too advanced for the existing level of struggle. Such an approach is sectarian, and misunderstands the role of the united front tactic, which is capable of mobilising powerful forces on a single crucial demand. Without a campaign for the united front, about which there has been a major miseducation within the British left, the transitional programme can appear abstract and utopian. Yet within the context of arguing for the defence of the interests of workers by uniting various forces around a single issue, the transitional method has life breathed into it and becomes extraordinarily powerful. Even in times when activity is at a low ebb and unions are on the defensive it is still possible, by starting from what is necessary to defend the position of union members, to take immediate struggles forward and unite wider layers of workers. This pamphlet deals with ways in which this can be done. It looks at key areas; this does not mean to suggest that these are the only ones of importance. We would argue, though, that the issues discussed below are central to the regeneration of the trade union movement.