FREEDOM FROM THE BOTTOM UP
POLITICAL ORGANISATION OF THE EARLY COMMONWEALTH, 1929–1934
MARIAN J. WOODS
1971
In 1920, George Hardy wrote an article offering a path for structural change to the International Workers of the World during a period of reconstruction in the history of the union. With much of the organisational and administrative leadership imprisoned on sedition charges, the following year Hardy was chosen to serve as general secretary–treasurer of the union, during which period many of his suggested reforms were put into practice. In overseeing this push for restructuring, Hardy brought the operation of the union into line with the demands of the contemporary economic world. His goal was the creation of an efficient movement, organised from the bottom up, capable of bringing about the abolition of the system of private ownership, and with it the capitalist class.
By the end of the decade, Hardy, returned to his native Britain, found himself the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress. Previously the Organisational Secretary of the National Minority Movement, his election to the leadership of the TUC in 1927 came in large part on the back of his reputation as a man able to marry a keen dedication to his cause with a canny administrative ability. During the General Strike, it was Hardy who masterminded the creation of the improvised national infrastructure network that allowed the circulation of people and supplies necessary for the survival of the workers’ movement. Following the surrender of the Cliveden Parliament and the return of legislative power to Westminster with the founding of the Workers’ Commonwealth, Hardy, as both an experienced organiser and the nominal leader of the trade unionist movement, was seen as the natural choice to lead the effort to craft a new mode of organising political power in Britain.
The Workers’ Council and the Constitution of 1929
At the inception of the Commonwealth, with legislative authority vested still by default in the House of Commons, it was generally agreed amongst the leadership of the unionist movement that an interim body needed to be empowered so as to draft the necessary articles to establish the legal existence of the new workers’ state. The Westminster Parliament was found to be inadequate for meeting the task at hand: of its 268 members, 259 were members of Oswald Mosley’s Provisional Labour–Unionist Alliance which, while unofficially endorsed by the TUC, did not reflect the full spectrum of opinion within the workers’ movement. Further, it was thought that 268 people was far too large a group to decide on the necessary constitutional framework within a short period of time; every day without an established system of government was a day with the shaky foundations of the new Commonwealth vulnerable to exploitation by enemies of the workers’ movement. Thus it was decided that a provisional workers’ council of 55 delegates would be elected from amongst the representatives of the constituent unions of the TUC. Balloting took place according to the organisational system used by the TUC’s General Council, whereby unions were formed according to industry into 18 groups. Each industrial grouping elected three delegates, with George Hardy appointed by acclamation as the fifty-fifth member of the council.
The Workers’ Council convened in a meeting room in the Palace of Westminster on the morning of February 27th. The idea of using the Commons Chamber was rejected, both on symbolic grounds – the Workers’ Council was after all a body unrelated to the former Westminster Parliament – and for practical reasons: it was thought that the oppositional arrangement of the seating in the chamber would not be conducive to the drafting of a democratic framework of government. The Council’s first act, after unanimously electing Hardy as its chairman, was to formally dissolve the Westminster Parliament and set a date for fresh elections in three months’ time, at the end of May. The Council then set the parameters of its task. It was decided that its job would be to formulate only the framework necessary for the establishment of a proper legislature and a proper executive, as well as a basic judicial system. It would then be for the first government of the Commonwealth to decide more complex questions, such as that of ownership.
Although not officially delimited by party, the 55 delegates naturally represented a breadth of opinion as to how the structure of the new state should function. Even within the TUC, which had throughout the revolutionary period acted in large part according to one, shared will, with the call to lay the foundations of the new Commonwealth came the revelation that, theoretically, the body was diverse. Broadly, one can speak of three main camps that emerged within the Council. While never organised as such, or even given names as groups, the trends can be identified as follows. Firstly, there was a tendency particularly amongst the part of the group most associated with the CPGB (and not just the Minority Movement) to favour a bureaucratic, multipartite government structure, drawn largely from the government of the USSR. This group advocated for a murky executive power, not strictly invested in one person or one body, but exercised by a wider apparatus on behalf of the workers. They were most stridently opposed by the second group, which might be called the Mosleyite group, who distrusted the idea of a large bureaucracy and favoured instead a streamlined executive with broad powers, capable of directing a fast effort of reconstruction. This was thought to be a necessary organisational response to the crisis of unemployment, and the parlous situation of the economy more generally, which after all had not been magically solved by the abolition of the United Kingdom. Between these two opinions sat a third tendency, which drew somewhat from Hardy’s reformation of the IWW, which proposed a system of largely devolved political power vested in regional and industrial councils, coordinated at a national scale by a limited executive body.
The organisational structure of the International Workers of the World, as reformed during the general-secretaryship of George Hardy, first premier of the Workers' Commonwealth of Britain.
A Mongrel Collective
Ultimately, as was perhaps always inevitable, a compromise system emerged combining aspects of all three philosophies. In line with the devolutionist tendency, political power would be organised predominately at the regional level, with district and city councils invested with various powers to direct the management of local affairs. These councils were to be elected directly by the people using a system of proportional representation with closed party lists. Only anti-capitalist and anti-fascist parties were to be permitted to put candidate lists forward. From these district councils, a national Workers’ Assembly was to be elected once a year to coordinate the activity of the regions on a national level, and also to oversee the conduct of the Executive Committee (Exco), whose chairman the Assembly would also appoint. Hardy triumphantly declared that the system would give the people of Britain “freedom from the bottom up”.
The powers of the Exco were to be mainly concerned with economic management and coordination, as well as directing national diplomatic relations and matters of defence. The Exco was to be responsible for the coordination of the economy on a national scale, as well as the management of the relationship between the Commonwealth and the global economy. In practice, this meant the control of trade and monetary policy. It also meant coordination of the “commanding heights of the economy” at a national level: public utilities, natural resources (including coal), infrastructure and heavy industry. In addition to its direct role in managing the national economy, the Exco would be responsible for coordinating the provision of welfare and other state services, though the actual responsibility for material provision would fall to the regional councils.
Thus the new Commonwealth had its legislative and executive structures, and the relationship between the two had been delimited. Legislative power was to flow from the bottom up, with national bodies elected by the regions and regional bodies elected by the people. The national legislature was to be responsible for the appointment of the head of government – the Chairman of the Executive Committee – and also a head of state – the President of the Commonwealth, Britain’s chief representative on the international stage. It was a delicate balancing act of powers and responsibilities, to be tried and tested vigorously by the events of the coming years. Its task was fundamentally unenviable: at once to manage the operation of the Commonwealth as a material network of economic and social relations on the one hand, and as a collective of individual personalities and political egos on the other. Oswald Mosley was unfavourable, surmising in 1965 that the 1929 constitution outlined a “mongrel collective, designed in theory to satisfy as broad a section of the workers’ movement as possible, without in practice giving much consideration to the day-to-day operation of government.” Neither an endorsement of centralised bureaucratic management, nor of complete devolution of organisational power to the workers themselves, the system of government devised in 1929 was in many ways a best attempt at answering the urgent question of how the Commonwealth would function. On May 23rd, 1929, two years to the day since the start of the miners’ strike, the constitution was read out by George Hardy to an assembled crowd in Parliament Square and ratified by acclamation. The Workers’ Council passed a measure setting a date for its dissolution, also to be the date on which the first Workers’ Assembly would convene, on Monday 24th June. The first elections would take place the Thursday before, on June 20th.
The Fate of the 1929 Constitution
It was natural, as with any invented system, that difficulties would be encountered and failings exposed once theory was put to work in practice. The first years of the Commonwealth were marked by great periods of turbulence as Britain dealt with counter-revolutionary activity at home and trouble abroad. Economic recovery was complicated by the Great Depression beginning in late 1929, which sent much of Europe into a prolonged period of political unrest as the orthodoxy arrived at after the Great War was confronted by the volatility of market capitalism.
Domestically, the shortcomings and tensions that existed within the 1929 system were quickly discovered. The first election saw a turnout of only 36 per-cent as swathes of the bourgeoisie stayed away from the polls. Not once between 1929 and 1934 would turnout exceed half of the registered electorate, peaking at 49.6 per-cent in 1932. This gave great impetus to the counter-revolutionary movement, which greatly played up voting statistics as evidence of the “death of British democracy”. Its (predominately fascist) agents thus shunned the councils and the assemblies, instead preferring to organise rallies and demonstrations of strength. By 1933, when counter-revolutionary activity was at its peak, the Fascist movement was able to claim that it counted twice as many people among its ranks as voted for the Communist Party at that year’s election. Seeing as even the most generous estimates of the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence put the number of fascist agitators in 1933 as approaching 50 thousand, the claim is soon exposed as a desperate exaggeration (the Communist vote in 1933 was a record high at over 2 million). Yet the boast is indicative of a sense that the counter-revolution was on the ascendant, and fears ran high enough that the following year Oswald Mosley faced little opposition from the Workers’ Assembly when he enacted the first of the constitutional reforms that saw state power concentrated in a more centralised apparatus, supposedly less vulnerable to the threat of the counter-revolution.
Before Mosley’s consolidation of power, it is not hard to paint the political landscape of the Commonwealth as tumultuous. While the first governments were consistent in being dominated by leading figures of the revolutionary period, almost exclusively members of the CPGB, these governments were equally consistent in their tendencies for experimentation. Under the 1929 system, the Chairman of the Executive Committee was elected for a term of one year. Before Mosley’s accession to power, five different men served as chairman in as many years. Each appointed a largely unique committee, with only a handful of committee members serving in post for more than a year before moving elsewhere. The overall effect was mitigated by the fact that these governments tended to follow party policy, rather than individual whim (Arthur Cook, who had joined the PLUA in 1928, was the only non-CPGB premier before 1934). But the constantly rotating cast of men directing government policy nevertheless did little to contribute to the formation of a stable polity.
Oswald Mosley, Director of the Office of Economic Planning from 1929, shown at his desk c. 1932.
Notable among the exceptions to the one-year rule was Mosley himself, who was appointed by George Hardy, as the Commonwealth’s first premier, to direct the Office for Economic Planning in 1929 and stayed in post throughout the first period of the Commonwealth. As the foremost economic thinker amongst the revolutionary leadership, and certainly the most energetic, Mosley was appointed to fill the role as much on merit as in deference to the fact that he led a sizeable national political movement. Hardy never entirely trusted Mosley, and disagreed with his preference for a concentrated, powerful executive. Nevertheless, positioning himself in government – not entirely without justification – as the chief architect of the Commonwealth’s so-called “economic miracle”, Mosley’s popularity continued to grow after 1929, and it became increasingly difficult for the CPGB to hold onto its predominant position in government.
With the pre-1929 political parties entirely discredited, if not proscribed outright by the new restrictions on political organisation, a vacuum of party association emerged. Neither of the two surviving pre-1929 parties, the CPGB and the PLUA, had yet to develop a robust national organisational framework of the sort that would allow electoral dominance. As the main agents of the revolution, the CPGB hoped to claim what they viewed as their rightful reward at the ballot box. In a sense, their hopes were fulfilled – but it was a mixed blessing; while the CPGB vote share rocketed from 2.35 per-cent in February 1929 to 10.4 per-cent in June, it was hardly the sort of dominance Albert Inkpin and his comrades had been counting on. Similarly, while Mosley’s own popularity kept his party’s fortunes buoyant, the introduction of proportional representation left the PLUA short-changed. They too failed to fill the vacuum.
Instead, during the first years of the Commonwealth the political landscape was dominated by a loose group of notionally independent Leftist candidates drawn from the ranks of the trade unions. Neither committed wholesale to the Marxism-Leninism of the Communist Party nor the Mosleyite Keynesianism of the PLUA (rebranded for the new order as the Party of Labour and Unionist Action), these men were orthodox socialists motivated primarily by the material concerns of the workers’ movement. Even after organising as the United Socialist Front in time for the elections of 1930, their leadership was indistinct and they were quite content supporting Communist-led governments drawn from the revolutionary leadership. Thus while some might pinpoint Mosley’s reorganisation of government in 1934 as the end of truly representative workers’ democracy in the Commonwealth, from the start a trend existed for minority, ideologically-driven governments propped up by trade unionists less concerned with party differences than with the material necessities of government.
Conclusion: Freedom, or the image of freedom?
On June 29, 1934, Oswald Mosley gave a radio address to the nation via the CBC Wireless Service to explain various aspects of his governmental reforms. Talking about the extension of the period between elections from one to four years, Mosley opined that “a people cannot be judged to be free on the basis of how often they are allowed to elect their leaders”. He continued:
“It is only by the material quality of the life offered to the people by the actions of their government that one can begin to assess whether or not those people are free. A man cannot subsist on ballot papers alone. Similarly, a good government is not that which has the largest mandate, but that which works to produce, with the utmost efficiency of means, conditions under which its citizens can live free from want or fear. Such a government cannot be expected to work effectively if it operates with fundamental change as a constant companion, as has been the case over the last five years.”
In making this argument, that elections provided only a representation of freedom that was not the real thing, Mosley framed his central critique of the 1929 constitution. For him, its obsession with representative democracy was an obstacle to “efficient” government. Mosley viewed the annual elections stipulated by the constitution as bureaucracy which needed to be cut through, and moreover could not reconcile his given task of overseeing the reconstruction of the British economy with the uncertainty that came with having to be reappointed every year. Thus he came to see this aspect of the Commonwealth’s democratising efforts as not only excessive, but meaningless. What did yearly elections contribute to the well-being of the nation, except the feeling that its people were being listened to? And was this worth it when the price was, apparently, persistent fascist activity and delayed economic recovery?
The truth likely owes as much to the composition of the various governments of the early Commonwealth as it does to the fact of their annual election. The CPGB at the time was lead by proficient party organisers who were excellent organisers and activists, but who were on the whole too wedded to the dogmas of Marxism-Leninism to exercise the imaginative capacity needed to actually build life after revolution. There were of course exceptions: both George Hardy and Arthur Cook, the first two premiers of the Commonwealth, had gained invaluable knowledge of government working to oversee the informal economic networks that sustained the strike. But these were union men. The premiership of Harry Pollitt in 1932 saw a particular decline into more bureaucratic government, increasingly dominated by a Stalinist faith in the primacy of party doctrine over the material reality of state government. Under his long stewardship, the CPGB fell into an extended period of irrelevance during which it consistently championed the application of Soviet policy in Britain.
Thus while Mosley’s claims were devised according to a particular political mythology, they were not without truth. By 1934, George Hardy’s initial vision of “freedom from the bottom up” had devolved into a system of “confusion from the top down”, which at once was capable of organising massive economic reconstruction, and plagued by Fascisti violence and political unrest. It would be naive to suggest that the Mosley era was the inevitable consequence of the first period of the Commonwealth, but it would be an oversight not to recognise the extent to which the former was a direct reaction to the latter, sustained in power until in time it too succumbed to the transformation of innovation into dogma.