Robert Seifert and Tom Sibley,Revolutionary Communist at Work: A Political Biography of Bert Ramelson

Robert Seifert and Tom Sibley, Revolutionary Communist at Work: A Political Biography of Bert Ramelson. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2012, 384 pp., £25.00 (pbk).

In 1902, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin published What is to be Done? This famous polemic outlined the role that trade unions should play in ushering in communist revolution. He was particularly critical of unions, and more especially their leaders, who chased after improvements in wages and employment conditions in the here and now. Such behaviour, which he scornfully described as economism, distracted them from developing the political consciousness necessary for revolutionary struggle. He said that ‘the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology’ (p. 80). For Lenin, trade unions needed to be led by intellectuals, members of the revolutionary party; persons outside the economic struggle.

In 1928, Selig Perlman, in A Theory of the Labor Movement, provided a trenchant critique of the Leninist position. He saw unions as struggling not only against employers, but also intellectuals, who he defined, like Lenin, as persons outside the economic struggle who seek to redirect unions to some other goal, such as revolutionary change. He saw such activity as being little more than ‘pie in the sky’. He maintained that what workers want from unions is to develop and maintain job rights on the shop floor. For Perlman, the task of unions was to aggressively take on employers and to fight for improved wages and employment conditions.

Revisiting this seminal debate in labour movement theorising has relevance for the life of Bert Ramelson, a leading figure of the Communist Party of Great Britain, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, whose life and times have been chronicled by Robert Seifert and Tom Sibley. Ramelson’s distinctive contribution is seen in his trade union work; especially his opposition to wages and incomes policies and promotion of rank-and-file activism by left-wing and progressive forces within union ranks. Seifert and Sibley paint Ramelson as a pragmatic communist. They say:

They also point out that:

It might be best to describe Ramelson as an ‘outsider’ who supported and advocated on behalf of unions in their struggles against employers and various arms of the state. While he knew the lexicon of Lenin and other Marxists, his actions and behaviour were not consistent with that of a Leninist; they were, in fact, more consistent with that of Selig Perlman. Ramelson was, and in all probability Perlman also would have been, opposed to the wages and incomes policies that intellectuals, in this case governments, sought to impose from above in limiting the activities of rank-and-file workers in pursuing improvements in the here and now.

An even more prosaic point can be made to distinguish Ramelson from the thinkers who apparently nourished his intellectual life. Where communist revolutions occurred, they resulted from the activities of men and women carrying guns and either killing or forcing opponents to flee. The role of unions in such activities was minor, at best. The problem for persons such as Ramelson has been to generalise the collectivism in what Lenin would describe as the ‘bourgeois ideology’ of unions – wanting more for their members – to workers as a whole, the proletariat who lay at the heart of so much Marxist discourse, who will initiate revolutionary change.

Seifert and Sibley provide brief details on Ramelson’s early life. He was born into a Jewish family in the Ukraine in 1910. Members of his family, especially his sisters, were active in the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. For her troubles, his sister Rosa subsequently spent 10 years in a labour camp and her husband was murdered by ‘the authorities’ in the 1930s (p. 60). His father, a Rabbi, had the foresight to immigrate to Canada in 1922 because of fears that despite the wonderful revolution, anti-Semitism would rear its ugly head once again. Ramelson acquired a law degree, immigrated to Israel, became disenchanted with Zionism, participated in the Spanish civil war, rejected George Orwell’s stinging critique of Stalinism in Homage to Catalonia (1938) as naive, moved to England, was conscripted and captured at Tobruk, escaped and rejoined the British army, and served in India and supported its independence.

Probably the most distinctive contribution of Revolutionary Communist at Work is that it provides a trip down the memory lane of many of the major issues that occurred in British industrial relations after the Second World War. Other than criticising Ramelson for turning a blind eye to atrocities committed against Jews by Stalin, Seifert and Sibley are supportive of Ramelson’s position on various issues and defend him against criticisms levelled at him by various members of the Left over the years. Ramelson and the British Communist Party are seen as being more theoretically informed, strategic, disciplined and pragmatic than other leftist forces that competed with each other over the correct and proper interpretation of how to bring about revolutionary change. In his later life, Ramelson became disillusioned about the prospects for such change in Britain. Rather than criticise him for his thinking, Seifert and Sibley explain this as being due to changes in material and political conditions in the latter years of the 20th century.

Revolutionary Communist at Work is not a book that is kind to readers. It is overwritten and repetitive. Even comrades will find it difficult to muster the will to keep on turning over the pages. The book needed a firmer editorial hand. Its length could have been substantially shortened without any loss of content. It does provide an account of an individual who played a prominent role in the affairs of the Communist Party of Great Britain.