largest gathering of labour movement delegates to discuss unemployment since the 1930s.
With a lead from the Assembly's organisers - the Communist Party and the Labour left 27 March could see the launching of the most powerful rank and file movement ever seen in this country. Certainly the industrial 'muscle' will be there.
It is a fighting programme that is missing, along with the commitment to build an organised labour movement opposition to the right-wing policies and leadership of the Labour Party and trade unions.
Yet such a movement was built by these same forces - in name, at least — in the early 1920s, and in a similar situation.
FIERCE It was the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party in May 1924 which definitively inscribed in its perspectives the building of a National Minority Movement:
"The growing opposition movements now springing up in the leading trade unions, industries and the Labour Party are the first expressions of the concrete raising of the demands of the workers and of a definite challenge to the existing leadership. The CP welcomes these minority movements as the sign of the awakening of the workers..
(But) the various minority movements cannot realise their power so long as they remain sectional, separate and limited in their scope and character. The many streams of the rising forces of the workers must be gathered together into one powerful mass movement which will sweep away the old leadership and drive forward relentlessly to the struggle for power."
The adoption of this line was itself the result of a fierce debate inside the young Communist Party involving the direct intervention of the Thire Third International and its Red International of Labour Unions. In 1922 the Third International or Comintern adopted a series of theses on the united front, which basically said that in the absence of a direct revolutionary onslaught for power the major task of the Communist Parties was to develop the united class front of the workers organisations to defend and advance the positions of the working class and through this process lead the workers towards the struggle for power. YELLOW This involved important changes in tactics. The Red International of Labour Unions, for example, had previously characterised the Amsterthe trade unions still supporting social democracy adhered) as 'yellow'. It was them or us. Now a rapprochement was sought with this same yellow body, with the Russian trade unions demandig admission.
Not surprisingly, such changes caused some confusion in the ranks of the British CP. William Allan, secretary of the revolutionary breakaway United Mineworkers of Scotland, was to write later of the struggle to launch the National Minority Movement: 'Sneering descriptions of the NMM were given in the Party as an attempt to dress a red man in a pink cloak"? Surely the task was to build the Communist Party as such, not give credibility to fake lefts!
Indeed, despite the proddings of the Comintern and the Red Internanonal or Labour Unions, it was not until late in September 1923 that the CP's paper The Worker, under the banner headline The Rank and File Must Build a Minority Movement, wrote: In every union rank-and-file forces must be gathered (1) around a definite fighting policy, (2) around concrete demands for union consolidation and reorganisation, (3) around the necessity for creating a new ideology amongst the union membership, (4) around the necessity of training and developing a new leadership to replace the old."
In fact the CP's most successful industrial work in the early 1920s had already been conducted in the Miners and Engineers through the building of sectional Minority Movements. Under CP influence, Unofficial Reform Committees in South Wales, Fife and Lanark, Yorkshire and the North of England fields had agreed in March 1921 to dam International (the body to which form a Mining Section of the rank-and-file National Workers' Committee Movement.
In the wake of 'Black Friday' a month later, when the miners had 30 per cent wage cuts enforced upon them as a result of the collapse of the Triple Alliance between miners, rail and transport workers, the Communist Party launched a "back to the unions campaign'. In line with this district conferences were held in the pits in late 1923 as part of the *100 per cent trade union' campaign which prepared the way in January 1924 fer the launching of the Miners" Minority Movement and its paper The Mineworker.
Its policy, including affiliation to the Red International of Labour Unions, centred around demands for a single miners union to replace the Miners Federation, a return to the 1914 rate plus the 2/-a shift extra recommended in the Sankey report, and the six hour day.
The Miners Minority Movement achieved its greatest success before the national movement was launched. In January 1924 the arch right-winger Frank Hodges resigned as Miners Secretary to become a member of the Labour Cabinet, and the resulting election swept MMM candidate Arthur Cook to victory. longer a member of the Communist ent Labour Party.
TUC coal In August 1924, 270 delegates were only four million trade unionists at this time) gathered in London to launch the National Minority Movement. Along with basic demands for a f4 a week minimum wage and a 44-hour week, the National Programme of Action called for workshop and factory committees, workers control over industry, and industrial unionism. Also included was the demand for a stronger TUC General Council with control over the Labour Party.
It had been part of the CP's industrial policy since 1922 to turn the General Council into the "General Staff of the labour movement. UPWARDS the demands for the formation of factory and pit committees, and the struggle to base trades councils on direct representation from the factories and give them delegates to the TUC.
basis for action for individual militants, syndicalists and Labour The Minority Movement's greatest success was perhaps the election of its candidate Arthur Cook as Miners' Secretary Cook was no Party but a member of the IndependA few months later, in May 1924, the Metal Workers Minority Movement was also launched amongst the Enginrepresenting 200,000 workers (there But this was always coupled with NAME....
The MM programme provided a Party members as well as Communists, and the overall programme formed the basis of a challenge to the right-wing leadership. And by adopting a complex federal structure involving anarca union branenes, trade. councils, unemployed committees and actual Minority Movement groups, held together by a strong central body, the MM was able to unite these diverse forces behind a single prog ramme. From 271 delegates in 1924, to 443 in 1925, to 547 delegates representing 957,000 workers in March 1926, the growth of the Minority Movement seemed all upwards.
But other more contradictory developments were also taking place. An Anglo-Russian trade treaty was signed in 1924, and what on the surface appeared to be a very successful TUC visit to Russia took place. The first however was used to downgrade attacks on the first Labour Government, meaning that the Minority Movement developed no Subscribe Write to RED WEEKLY (distribution), 182 Pentonville Road, London N.1 brought the TUC lefts - Alonzo Swales, A.A. Purcell and George Hicks - to centre stage in the General Council.
The core of the apple was becoming rotten. Under the influence of the incipient Stalinism of the Soviet Union, the Comintern and RILU were increasingly subordinating the tasks of the world proletariat to defence of the Soviet Unien.
Between Red Friday 1925 -when the Government was forced to retreat at the prospect of a General Strike in support of the miners -and March 1926 when the MM called a special conference, no pre paration was made by the MM for the inevitable confrontation with the Baldwin Government. The necessary united front with the lefts had been turned into a united pact in silence about these people's role in any decisive confrontation.
The slogan "All Power to the General Council' was divorced from the struggle for new forms of organisation to control it. The subsequent betrayal of the working class in the General Strike, and the destruction of the Minority Movement as a serious force in the labour movement, were simultaneously prepared.
FERMENT Many similarities exist between the early 1920s and today, when the task facing socialists is to challenge the right-wing leadership of the workers movement in a situation where revolutionaries cannot immediately pose themselves as ar alternative leadership. Such a leadership will only be forged through protracted struggle with and against the lefts for the removal of the existing leadership A deep ferment exists in society but often the battles being fought at a time when only a united struggle holds out the possibility of lasting success. This poses very sharply the need to develop a united class front against the capitalist class and their agents in the labour movement leadership on the most central issues of the dayopposition to any form of incomes policy, in defence of the right to work and against the cuts - and to tie in other political campaigns to this task FAILED A clear challenge to the rightwing leadership was the promise of the early Minority Movement. It never fulfilled it because it failed to combine its united front offensive towards the lefts with a ceaseless denunciation of their vacillations and unreliability. It failed to differentiate between the building of the Minority Movement and the independent tasks involved in constructing the revolutionary party itself.
Nevertheless the background to the launching of the Minority Movement - and later the National Left Wing Movement in the Labour Party, to which we will return in subsequent articles - is rich in lessons for socialists today as they strive to build a class struggle opposition to the rotten policies and leadership of the Labour Party and tO ONCE ONLY SPECIAL OFFER 10 ISSUES FOR £1