other activities some of it only tenuously connected to their core function of defending members jobs, salaries and working conditions. They offer insurance, mortgages and run large administrative offices. Of course any organisation which has a membership of tens or hundreds of thousands requires a professional staff to collect money and provide specialised support services. A huge task like that can't just be done by voluntary workers in their spare time. Parallel with the administration every union has a group of elected and appointed officials who mediate between workers, employers and government. These are the general secretaries, their deputies, treasurers, chairs, regional officials and many more besides. Together they make up the bureaucracy in a party or union. Demagogy - an indispensable skill This separation between the workers they represent and the bureaucracy mirrors the division of labour in capitalist society. Workers don't have the free time themselves to fulltime union or political activity and often have to rely on union or party staff to keep them up to date with developments. These officials have access to a lot more information than the average worker about wage negotiations or the political situation and with this knowledge comes power and an aura of authority. The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci remarked that many of the individuals who rise to the tops of unions often do so because they combine administrative competence with the useful skill of demagogy. They can claim to have the full picture and understand the real complications and will do so in a way that often makes it difficult for rank and file workers or party members to challenge. Gradually the people who are supposed to be the servants of the members have a vast amount of autonomy inside the organisation. They know how to use the rule book to get what they want and will not think twice about using it to keep the members in line. The members' main duty is to passively obey the officials and obediently strike, not strike or suffer passively as instructed. The rhetoric about conferences being the sovereign decision making body of an organisation with a strong bureaucracy is transparently false to anyone who has ever sat through a
ON BUREAUCRACY trade union or Labour Party conference. Deals are stitched up behind the scenes and when conference makes a *wrong decision it's just ignored until the following year.
Another consequence of the division of labour in capitalist society is that individuals end up seeing the thing that they are doing as an end in itself. The union treasurer sees her job as solely that of keeping the union on a sound financial footing. The prospect of members taking industrial action which could result in a court stealing the union's money is the last thing someone in that position wants. This caution is understandable. The union's offices and bank accounts have been won as a result of previous successfully struggles. However these gains are both partial and reversible. The working class is still exploited in its workplaces and. as the current round of pay cuts demonstrates, the capitalist state's first instinet is to make the working class pay for capital's troubles. For the bureaucrat though the organisation is synonymous with the working class. What is good for the union or the party is good for working people and for most bureaucrats there is no clear line between what benefits them as a group and what benefits the organisation. Unofficial action -the bureaucrat's nightmare Members' passivity • is the customary justification that bureaucrats offer when they are challenged about the dominating positions that they hold. But the quickest way to get the bureaucrat out of the office is when members do start acting for themselves. An unofficial strike is a bureaucratic nightmare. It gives rank and file members a sense of their own power and at the same time denies the paid official her or his vital function of mediating between workers and management. Recent industrial history in Britain is punctuated by industrial action cut short as soon as
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TUC ON BUREAUCRACY the union officials arrive and they are not reluctant to use disciplinary sanctions against members who are unwilling to defer to their superior wisdom. Demoralisation, scepticism and lack of workers' confidence are a bureaucrat's best friend. A decline in militancy allows them to tighten their grip on the organisation which sets in motion a cycle of enhanced bureaucratic control. Effectively the bureaucracy is policing its members on behalf of the courts and the employers.
Even the earliest socialist organisations were alive to the risk of bureaucratisation. Marx and Engels were able to learn some valuable lessons from the experience of the Paris Commune which signpost steps a workers state or organisation can take to avoid the problem even in a society where the working class hold power. In The Civil War in France Marx proposed that all proceedings of government be completely transparent. This can apply with equal force to any working class organisation. Decisions should not be made in secret and contending points of view should be freely aired. To prevent officials becoming autonomous Marx argued that they should be subject to the right of recall at any time by the people who elected them. This proposal is always vigorously opposed by union officials who both enjoy the sense of prestige that goes with their position as well as the more intellectually rewarding work that they do.
As if the prestige and the mental stimulation were not reward enough there is usually a significant difference in salary between trade union officials and their members -and that's before the expense accounts are included. In social democratic parties MPs do not give their salaries to the party and that too creates a gulf between them and other, less affluent party members. The revolutionary Marxist solution to this is that the officials of workers' organisations should receive wages equivalent to those of a skilled worker. No imagination is needed to see how enforcing this rule on trade union officials would make them a lot less willing to accept below inflation pay deals. A fact of life In a capitalist society the bureaucracy in working class organisations is an inevitable fact of life. The problem is a real one is based on social conditions and material Please make cheques out to Socialist Resistance and send them with this form to Socialist Resistance, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU interests as much as the bad intentions of some individual union leaders or officials - rea as these often are.
The trade union bureaucracy 15 a strongly . Postcode Address Name conservative tendency and the struggle against is essentially a fight Socialist resistance is your journal. £20 international, £30 institutions. democracy. Through this We keep its production costs as its future, we urgently need your issues are: £10 UK, £15 Europe, low as possible but, to support strugg create subscriptions. The rates for 5 some the bureat The struggle has to an an into account union' workir several red deals have leaders a their men settlements one grou another.
Providing analysis is a prerequisite for building class struggle currents inside the trade unions which are willing to challenge the bureaucracy's arguments and strategic decisions. Networks of activists who are self-confident and are willing to provide a ISITIOS fighting leadership to protect members' standards of living in the face of rising fuel and food prices and New Labour's pay cuts are the nucleus of a real opposition to neo-liberalism.