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London: Jonathan Cape, 1964. Copyright 1950, 1951 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
“The True Society traces the genesis of the trade-union movement in general […] It’s later chapters are, however, very coloured by the trade-union movements in the U.S.A.” (From the introduction by the rt. hon. the Lord Robens of Woldingham, P.C.)
Trade-unionism is the conservative movement of our time. It is the counterrevolution. Unwittingly, it has turned its back upon most of the political and economic ideas that have nourished western Europe and the United States during the last two centuries. In practice, though not in words, it denies the heritage that stems from the French Revolution and from English liberalism. It is also a complete repudiation of Marxism. (p. 3)
The dependence of “popular upheavals” such as Communism, Fascism, and Nazism on “formal ideologies” makes them of “passing import” and their weakness is “attested by their readiness to use force to impose upon society the design their ideology calls for.” On the other hand, the trade union movement’s “very lack of ideas made it strong and enabled it to concentrate upon immediate ends without wasting its energies in futile pursuit of Utopia.” (p. 4) “It has gathered power within the community until it has suddenly dawned upon men that a new force—not an idea, but a new force—has come into being.” (p. 5)
The trade union movement is not a problem to be solved, like “the slow and at times violent transition from a feudal to a commercial and industrial commonweasth, it is clear that there was nothing the older society could have done to prevent the newer design from taking shape.” (Tannenbaum suffers from a belief in the inevitability of history.) “The rising merchants had no revolutionary objectives. ‘They only asked of society to make for them a place compatible with the sort of life they were leading.’” Then as now “the real problem was how to meet the newer needs with the least possible violence.” With the trade union movement, “What the workers asked for when the factory had welded them into coherent groups were a few changes in the rules governing their daily labor. The workers wanted the right: (1) to organize; (2) to bargain collectively; (3) to keep nonmembers off the pay roll [(great, just great)]; (4) to participate in fixing wages and conditions of labor; (5) to meet freely for their purposes; (6) to define the jurisdictions of their jobs.” (p. 6) The trade union movement forces these things upon society.
Trade unions are a reaction to other forces. The United States “has become a nation of employees. We are dependent upon others for our means of livelihood, and most of our people have become completely dependent upon wages. If they lose their jobs they lose every resource” (p. 9).
“In terms of the individual, the union returns to the worker his ‘society.’ It gives him a fellowship, a part in a drama that he can understand, and life takes on meaning once again because he shares a value system common to others.” (p. 10) (What is this value system?) “[T]he trade-union is a repudiation of the individualism of the French Revolution and of the liberalism of English utilitarian philosophers [because] It rests upon the group, upon the organized ‘society’ forged by the mine, mill, and factory. Trade unionism is a repudiation of Markism because its ends are moral rather than economic. It is a social and ethical system, not merely an economic one. It is concerned with the whole man. Its ends are the ‘good life.’ […] It is an unwitting effort to return to values derived from the past: security, justice, freedom, and faith. It is in those values, explicit and inherent, that man had found his human dignity.” (p. 10-11) (Whenever the effort is unwitting there seems to be some substantial stagnation.) Trade unionism is counterrevolutionary because it tries “to build these values into our industrial society by working at them specifically and in detail, without any commitment to a general theory or an ideology, and even without a sense of direction. But the sum of these thousands of little acts adds up, precedents, rights, and priveleges adds up to a rebuilding of our industrial system along different lines”. (p. 11) (Keep wishin’.) “If man cannot once again make freedom, security, and work synonymous, he will destroy the machine.” (p. 12) (These things should be synonymous, but what bothers me is: when and how often was freedom, security, and work synonymous? Seems to me, most people have remained oppressed to various degrees in I don’t have any blind faith that the struggle will lead to victory, or even that people will necessarily struggle. *sob*) Liberalism and Marxism “both assume that the good society can be built upon economic motives” and this “explains their failure to develop a satisfying theory for our time.” (duh, right, of course failure proves this.) “If the possession of money is the goal of all our efforts, the lack of it is complete failure, for without it nothing is to be had, not even the barest subsistence. [(but how do unions change this?)] The moral inadequacy of industrialism lies in substituting a ‘good wage’ for the good life.” (Which is what modern business unions try to do.) (p. 12)
“The trade-union stepped into this breach between the good life and work for a money wage [… through its interests in the detailed relationships between the worker and his employer … it] has survived because it satisfies the human craving for moral status in a recognizable society.” (p. 13) (All right, but it would do much better if the economic situation were a little more fair.
Labor has always organized; guilds were economic, social, and political; they go back several thousand years. (He neglects to note that most, though far from all, of the guilds that he cites are evidentally in relatively highly skilled occupations.)
Suggests that their was a good amount of popular control in the manoral court, under feudalism. “Membership in a guild, manorial estate, or village protected man throughout his life and gave him the peace and the serenity from which could flow the medieval art and craft. The life of man was a nearly unified whole. Being a member of an integrated society pretected anraised the dignity of the individual, and gave each person his own special role. […] His individuality and his ambitions were fulfilled within the customary law that ruled the community to which he belonged.” (p 30) (How great was it? For how many people? Should we, perhaps, look at her individuality and ambitions as well? Could anyone break out of their wonderful special role in the total life drama, could they choose their roles?) “The enclosures and the agricultural revolution, among other events and influences, destroyed the manorial court and undermined the rural village, while the changing conditions of the market and the difficulties of maintaining a limited monopoly weakened the guilds. Their final abolition by legal enactment, in france in 1776 and 1791, in England in 1814 and 1835, and later in Germany and other European countries, made a drastic change in the historically ‘normal’ association among men working at similar tasks.” (p 30-31); (None of this seems like neutral economic forces to me, how are we to make major changes without challenging the basis of the economy? Very little of this just happenned. People were actively shaping it to fit their own interests.)
“It was the payment of a money wage to each separate worker, man, woman, or child, that became the immediate cause of the breakdown of the older society.” (p 33) “With the worker’s loss of his age-old claims upon the soil went his traditional rights and participation in the community. The disinherited laborer who had no job was forced upon the public rolls. The adoption of the Speenhamland system by the Berkshire magistrates in 1795 pauperized the English working class.” (p 40) The “Combination Laws of 1789 tried to free the rising industrialists from any interference by either the state or the workers. These acts made it a crime, not merely to strike for higher wages, but ‘by any means whatsoever to directly or indirectly decoy, persuade, solicit, intimidate, influence, or prevail. …’ It was also a crime to refuse to work for another person, or to attend meetings, or to contribute to meetings that had it as their purpose to secure combination.” (p 46) The conditions in England and America were obviously horrible, worse than before the industrial revolution. “These things happen when a society natural to men working together disappears. When there is no community, there is no custom, rule, or law within which man can live in decency as a member of a society, and when the community disappears, the dignity of the worker as a human being declines.” (p 48) (I would be inclined to view it as the result of dispossession, as the result of humongous differences in power based on ownership of land, money, etc. in an economy structured so that he who owns the resources, rules.)
“The disintegration of the community came at a time when the prevailing political and moral theory insisted that each man was endowed with equal rights. It also argued that every man, by himself, had all the knowledge and wisdom required to make him the best judge of what was his own true interest. It gave each person credit for a true inner light by which he could tell the subtle distinctions between good and evil. It was always possible, and under the theory necessary, for the individual to do what was best for him, and therefore best for society.” (p 49) “Morality, too, was completely personal, for on the principle of ‘pleasure and pain’ only the inner man could be an adequate judge of what was good or evil.” (p 50) “It is characteristic of the Industrial Revolution that each of the theories that accompanied it denied the community. […] In each of these theories, even in the Marxian conception of ‘to each the full product of his labor,’ there is the uncritical belief that men in pursuit of their own private ends will produce a self-perpetuating, free, and perfect world that will last forever. The perfect competition of the economist and the classless society of the Socialist both imply a static world. […] both the extreme individualist and the extreme communist aspire for the same goal, and individual felicity resting upon economic satisfactions and ending in so perfect a harmony that any movement would prove a disturbance. The idual is quietude, perfect stillness—death. All these theories would relieve man from exercising any moral responsibility, for man can have a responsible role only in an imperfect world, a world of conflicting values and contradictory ends. Dissidence and stress are essential, not merely to a moral life, but to life itself.” (p 52-53) (I don’t know any of these theories well enough, but I am pretty sure he is misrepresenting them all to some degree. I guess it is important to not that both perfect competition and classlessness will not exist by themselves; I suppose one should also never claim that they know how to reach perfection even if that is what one is striving for, that the justification for any change should be to make things better and not perfect. And how does each person receiving the full product of their labor - I didn't know Marx had said that - how does that perpetuate the dissolution of community or society, or the responsibility of people to be moral? No economy can ever replace the need for democracy, besides the fact that the structure most be subordinate to society making decisions, there will always be large areas without and the need for vigilance within the economy that will require the attention of society to make decisions. But as long as society is going to have an economy to make decisions that don't require its particular attention, we ought to debate and decide how to set these structures up and how individuals or groups will react and whether these reactions will benefit society or not.)
“As long as man followed his ‘economic interests,’ every other need would automatically fulfill itself. The fact that the pursuit, or seeming pursuit, of economic ends also led to social disintegration was unnoticed. Men without a stable family and a secure membership in a society can have no moral personality, and therefore no moral status.” (p 48) (You may be right, but do not use the results of accelerated exploitation as evidence of what happens when community is ignored.)
“In the long run the trade-union movement can survive as a unique society, resting upon a functional grouping, only if it fulfills the manifold duties of any institution, which are to serve and protect its members, whom it conceives to be the entire community.” (p 48) (Um, what about everybody not in a particular trade-union?)
He criticizes Communists, Socialists, Syndicalists, and Anarchists for viewing the labor unions only as a means to a (my usual criticism:) vaguely defined end. He throws out the usual disparagements about “utopians,” in particular that they envisioned a perfect society composed of perfect men. (Whatever, I don’t know. But he portrays these groups as being outside of and wholly separate from the trade unions, and I do know that Socialists, Syndicalists, Communists, and even Anarchists (or at least anarcho-syndicalists) played HUGE roles in the development of trade unions, and that without “radical” ideas and “millennial” visions, organized labor wouldn’t be halfway where it is today. And where is it today?) The revolutionaries “failed to see that the labor unions were an organic growth in modern society, and that they fulfilled a necessary and inevitable service in re-creating a ‘society’ within which the worker could regain his dignity as a man and once again play the part of a moral person.” (p 99-100) (Unfortunately, labor organization appears to be little more inevitable than revolution. Incidentally, the vaunted “pure and simple” unions crippled their ability to protect their own workers, let alone do anything about the conditions of the unorganized majority, by expelling all these ‘outsiders’ when the leaders used the tactic of targeting the communists within their union to expel or render powerless socialists, syndicalists, anarchists, and frankly anyone else within the union who disagreed with the leadership. If trade unions concentrate on the immediate ends, better wages and working conditions, they run the risk of not only ignoring the societal conditions that affect their conditions (particularly the conditions of other workers), they run the risk of losing sight of the principles of freedom and justice (which Tannenbaum cites as the core of the trade union goals).) “Organized labor is not merely an economic, or political, or social movement. It is all of these and more; it is the whole society cast in an additional pattern.” (p 95). (I’ll buy this, although on one level you could say it about any movement that causes significant changes, but do workers really feel a part of another society, in particular, can ‘pure and simple’ unionism ever provide this? Tannenbaum’s own claims about trade unionism are just a tad utopian, I feel, but he said that was a bad thing, not me. Mostly, to talk about the labor movement and socialists and their ilk as if they were separate and distinct, indeed separable, is absurd. He may not like them, but they were critical in fostering the spread and success of trade unions.)
“In its essence, trade-unionism is a revulsion agianst social atomization on the one hand, and the divorce of owner and worker from their historical functions as moral agents in industry on the other. […] What gnaws at the psychological and moral roots of the contemporary world is that most urban people, workers and owners, belong to nothing real, nothing greater than their own impersonal pecuniary interests.”(p 105-106)
Tannenbaum describes corporate concentration in 1940.
“The growing monopoly of capital is faced by the growing monopoly of labor.” (p. 113)
Tannenbaum describes labor monopoly in neutral terms (but as far as I can tell labor monopoly can be almost as evil as corporate monopoly.
Apparently, capitalism (unlike Communism, Fascism, and Nazism - see page 4) has no ideas associated with it; or even if it does nothing worthwhile has any ideas associated with it.
Tannenbaum ignores the fact that labor makes its gains when it is espousing some sort of ideology.
Exactly, what has changed is the amount of things that we produce for ourselves. The problem is that the way society is structured, our very dependence upon wages, allows some to skim off the result of production which they do not deserve.
He talks about the fact that owners are dissociated from management, which is true, but he gives the false impression that ownership is very spread out among individuals “both worker and stockholder are individually helpless” (p 107), whereas ownership compared to working is extremely concentrated. The truly small stockholder is usually mostly a worker.