CHRISTINE THOMAS outlines how, despite their entrenched conservatism and pro-capitalist outlook, the trade union leaders were pushed by events at the end of the 19th century into taking steps towards the building of an independent political voice for the working-class.
In 1899, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) approved a resolution on political representation moved by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS). This instructed the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee “to invite the co-operation of all co-operative, socialistic, trade union and other working-class organisations… in convening a special Congress of representatives… to devise ways and means for securing an increased number of Labour members in the next parliament”. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was established the following year, eventually leading to the formation of the Labour Party in 1906.
While recognising its political limitations, in particular a reformist leadership that had not ideologically broken from the capitalist Liberal Party, Vladimir Lenin nonetheless welcomed the creation of this “parliamentary representative of the trade unions”, “the first step on the part of the really proletarian organisations of England [sic] towards a class-conscious policy and towards a Socialist Labour Party” (International Socialist Bureau, 1908). When, in 1920, small groups of revolutionaries united to form a Communist Party (CP) in Britain, Lenin urged the infant party to affiliate to the much larger Labour Party, with its mass trade union base, on the condition that it could maintain its own independent political identity and activity, as Labour Party rules at that time allowed. Unfortunately, still conditioned by the sectarian history of some of its constituent groups, the CP worded its request for affiliation in such a way that the Labour Party leadership could reject it without provoking significant opposition from the rank and file who were striving for workers’ unity.
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