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From International Socialism, No.73, December 1974, pp.29-30.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Will Thorne: Constructive Militant
E.A. and G.H. Radice
Allen and Unwin, £3.60.
THE BIOGRAPHY of Will Thorne encapsulates the history of a generation of working-class leaders of the turn of the century. Born in Birmingham in 1857, unskilled and uneducated, he drifted to London as a gasworker after being dismissed as a troublemaker from several jobs. He joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, the year it became the first British party to adopt an openly socialist programme, as one of its few unskilled working-class members. Thorne established a reputation as a popular platform speaker, and developed a close acquaintance with Marx’s daughter Eleanor, who was largely responsible for teaching him to write. During the upsurge of ‘new unionism’ in 1889 she helped him form a Gasworkers’ Union, which conducted a dramatically successful campaign for the 8-hour working day, and served for a time on its Executive. Thorne himself became full-time General Secretary.
The remainder of his career saw the gradual transition from socialist militant to labour statesman. He nursed the new union through the hard years of the 1890s and helped guide its expansion between 1910 and 1920 into one of the largest labour organisations in the country; in 1924 he presided over the amalgamation which formed the present General and Municipal Workers’ Union (GMWU). He remained General Secretary until 1933, when he had reached the age of 76. Elected Labour MP for West Ham in 1906, he continued in Parliament until 1945. For two decades he was a member of the TUC General Council.
Thorne adjusted his political attitudes in step with his position – though the transformation was less abrupt than in the case of some of his contemporaries. Famous as the leader of a violent attack on blacklegs during the 1890 Leeds gasworkers’ strike, he was soon to counsel against ‘reckless’ militancy. His affiliation to the ‘Marxist’ SDF blended into Labour Party gradualism. For many years an advocate of a ‘citizen army’, in 1914 he became a fervent supporter of war. His changed social attitudes emerge in his memoirs, where he describes a visit to Russia in 1917: the gift of a fur coat for the journey by a right-wing Tory MP receives as much attention as the actual conditions in revolutionary Petrograd. In the 1920s, his GMWU established itself firmly on the right of the movement, clamping down on internal democracy and leading a witch-hunt of Communists.
The story is a familiar one, and of immense importance to revolutionaries. The lesson is the strength of the pressures, inherent in even the most militant trade unionism, towards accommodation with capitalism. Concern for organisational stability leads to caution in policy and action; committed to caution, the leadership develops a manipulative attitude towards the rank and file; ‘socialism’ is relegated to the rhetoric of the conference platform, a goal of the distant future, typically interpreted in gradualist terms which do not threaten the capitalist social order; militant action by the membership which might disturb established relations with employers and governments is opposed and if possible suppressed. Only a clear understanding of these tendencies and commitment to a revolutionary alternative can provide an effective safeguard against such degeneration.
Unfortunately, the ‘Marxism’ of the SDF gave Thorne no such protection. Its ‘socialism’ was defined simply in terms of state ownership of industry and state welfare provision; there was no emphasis on workers’ control, no clear conception of revolutionary transition to socialism through working-class self-activity. Its perspectives were thus not clearly distinguished from the reformism espoused by the Labour Party; while its central focus on the role of the nation-state paved the way to the ‘patriotism’ of most SDF leaders in 1914. Scarcely surprising, then, that members like Thorne, once catapulted into trade union leadership, became quickly absorbed into the day-today routines of reformism.
Unfortunately, this biography of Thorne is unconcerned with such questions. The hundred pages of text lean heavily on previously published work and provide little in the way of new information. Nor does the book seriously explore the theoretical issues raised by Thorne’s career and the history of the union which he founded. Giles Radice was Research Officer of the GMWU before his selection as Labour candidate for the mining stronghold of Chester-le-Street (one of the last ‘fixes’ by North-East GMWU boss Andy Cunningham before his downfall in the Poulson scandal). Not surprisingly, then, the authors have no criticism of their subject beyond points of detail.
Yet even an uncritical biography might have been more informative. Thorne’s role in the TUC is barely discussed. There is virtually nothing about the problems of internal control in an organisation of several hundred thousand members, the tensions between centralised administration and membership democracy, the implications of union bureaucratisation. The label ‘constructive militancy’ in the book’s title is used to paper over the contradictions in Thorne’s objectives. His early militancy never had the theoretical basis which might have given it long-term point and direction, preserving it against the pressures towards containment and accommodation; while his later commitment to reformist gradualism spelled impotence between the wars when many of the previous gains (in union membership, established wages and conditions, and the general standards of the working class) were lost in demoralising defeats. In refusing to face up to this contradiction, the authors make no serious attempt to justify their agreement with Thorne’s ‘constructive’ approach. All in all a readable but disappointing book.
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