Will the real Richard Hyman please stand up?

Introduction

I am a little surprised that Capital & Class should devote a special issue to my writings, and am grateful to the editors both for their efforts and for the opportunity to respond to the contributions, almost all of which are measured and comradely in their criticism: indeed, in some cases remarkably uncritical. I will start with the four papers that focus on my work in the 1970s, before turning to the three that address my more recent writing on European trade unionism.

John McIlroy has outlined the industrial and academic context of my early published work. The broader background was also important. A key feature was the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), perhaps the first mass ‘new social movement’ in Britain in the postwar era. It was opposed by the leadership of the Labour Party and, initially, by the Communist Party. The main support, apart from religious groups, came from the ‘New Left’ that had emerged after 1956, with the active participation of the tiny Trotskyist sects. But CND also captured the involvement of many young people with no tradition of political activism. My first Aldermaston March was in 1959, when I was 16, and as for many others this was a route into left-wing politics.

By the time I went to university, I considered myself a Marxist, and was quickly attracted to the International Socialists (IS). Roger Protz, for five years editor of Socialist Worker, wrote of that period (Protz, 1997):

When I joined IS… I was impressed and enthused by the wide-ranging, open debates, the lack of tin-pot dictators, the intellectual rigour of International Socialism, good humour and good beer after meetings and, above all, a decent humility about the potential of a group with just a few hundred members. What a difference from the later IS that drew the conclusion that its lack of success demanded not retrenchment and self-criticism but the absurd leap into the crassly named ‘mini mass party’ of the SWP, with the expulsion of those who objected to the very type of ‘substitutionism’ that the early IS had always ridiculed.

Though IS emerged from the fragmented Trotsykist movement, what was striking – in addition to those points stressed by Protz – was the absence of attention to Trotsky’s writings. I am not sure whether I read any of his works until 1970, when I was researching in preparation for Marxism and the Sociology of Trade Unionism – and to be frank, did not then feel that I had missed much. Far more important was Rosa Luxemburg; as McIlroy notes, a double issue of the International Socialism journal was devoted to Cliff’s study of her life and work, three or four years before I joined IS (and long before his Leninist turn), and I read her writings extensively. One of Luxemburg’s slogans was ‘Socialism or Barbarism’. The threat of nuclear war, starkly reinforced during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, was a form of barbarism she could not have anticipated. The cause of socialism acquired an apocalyptic urgency, and at the same time inspired a genuine sense of possibility.

The 1964-70 Wilson government disillusioned many of those with illusions in social democracy: Wilson seemed to be acting out the script analysed a few years earlier by Ralph Miliband (1961); his record was ruthlessly dissected from an IS perspective by Paul Foot (1968). Wilson’s abject subordination to US foreign policy was countered by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, formed in 1966, which organised two mass demonstrations in 1968, the year of the ‘student revolt’. France in May 1968 was notable not only for the student insurgency but also for the mass strike action, which came close to overturning the Gaullist regime. The following year, the autunno caldo in Italy was less directly aimed at state power but achieved longer-lasting results, with the upsurge of factory committees which challenged managerial control as radically as those analysed, and inspired, by Gramsci half a century earlier. In Britain, the number of strikes and strikers was reaching a level never experienced before or since. Hence the vital importance of pursuing a coherent understanding of the relationship between trade unionism, industrial militancy and the potential for socialist transformation. In addressing this challenge, Marx himself (and those of his successors writing in the 19th or early 20th centuries) offered no more than schematic guidance. We had to think for ourselves.

Marxism, militancy and trade unionism

McIlroy provides a sensitive account of my efforts – while leading a dual life as an academic researcher into industrial relations in Coventry, and a political activist engaging with radical shop stewards – to comprehend both the limits and the potential of industrial militancy as a route to socialist consciousness. He also describes very clearly the ways in which IS in the 1970s, in its path to transformation (or deformation) into the SWP, oversimplified the complexities, often reducing them to a series of crude binary alternatives, and lapsed into ahistorical attempts to reproduce (‘the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’) the National Minority Movement (NMM) of the 1920s.

McIlroy is generous in his discussion, and writes little with which I would even marginally disagree. However, I would nuance somewhat one of his closing remarks: given their specific weight, and their potential universality as well as the insubstantiality of social movements we may question the view that unions cannot act as the organising centre of class struggle – or to avoid syndicalist and economistic implications, an important centre. There are few alternatives.’ First, it all depends on what we mean by class struggle. Trade unions are central vehicles of the struggles of some workers against some employers; yet how far (except with the traditional qualification, ‘objectively, comrade’) do they constitute agencies of class struggle, particularly when only a quarter of British workers are union members? (I am not sure what ‘potential universality’ means in this context.) As in many other countries, half of current union members will have retired in roughly a decade; fewer than 10 per cent of workers aged 25 and under are in a union. There are indeed few alternatives, and it is hard to envisage a movement for social transformation in which unions do not form a part. But this does not mean that actually existing trade unions are able and willing to take on such a transformatory role. The failure of most unions – not only in Britain – to capitalise on the most severe crisis of capitalism since the 1930s is a sobering lesson. Movements such as UK Uncut – which appeals to the Facebook and Twitter generation in a way in which trade unions have signally failed to do – present a far more vigorous challenge to global financialised capitalism.

Miguel Martínez Lucio offers a fascinating reinterpretation of my writings of the 1970s: ‘what Hyman really meant’. Other interpretations are certainly possible, but here too the account is very sympathetic, and there is little with which I would dissent. On trade union democracy, I do not see Peter Fairbrother’s booklet as having been primarily a ‘response’ to my own arguments a decade earlier, though of course we had our disagreements. It was mainly a broadside against the Thatcher government’s Green Paper Democracy in Trade Unions, which was followed by the 1984 Trade Union Act, requiring secret ballots before strikes, for the election of union executives and for the maintenance of political funds. His central purpose was to demolish the case for secret ballots. Though I shared his objections to Tory-imposed pretensions to ‘democratise’ trade unions, I was less convinced that a show of hands at a mass meeting was the epitome of democracy – the call ‘all those in favour’, the title of his book, was commonly a means to close off serious debate – and I was well aware that the secret ballot was one of the six points of the People’s Charter, a century and a half before. However, like Fairbrother I had long insisted that real democracy had to be participatory, though I placed more emphasis on the obstacles to effective participation, and was more conscious of the manipulative potential of mass participatory involvement.

Fairbrother concluded (1984: 109) that ‘union democracy is both the condition for and the means to socialist organisation and practice’. This heroic declaration ignored the issues with which I had grappled for over a decade before: that trade unionism, democratic or otherwise, is typically a means of negotiating within capitalism, not overthrowing it; and that in ‘normal’ circumstances, most members do not regard their unions as vehicles of socialist advance. To argue thus is not to present a ‘binary of the “political and economic”’, as Martínez Lucio suggests; rather it is to identify an institutional (and ideological) separation which can be transcended only in exceptional circumstances. One of the questions I tried to address was whether, and how, struggles for control at the point of production could generate more radical aspirations for collective control of economy and society. Hence my critical review of the writings of the Institute for Workers’ Control (Hyman 1974), an endeavour that was not well received by the Institute’s leadership, and my initiative to persuade Pluto Press to reprint Carter Goodrich’s classic text, The Frontier of Control (1920).

I am glad that Martínez Lucio devotes a section of his discussion to ideology and language, and relates this to ‘the current interest in difference, ambiguity and power in the representation of work and employment’. In Mussolini’s prisons, Gramsci struggled to explain why the Bolsheviks succeeded but the organisationally more robust Italian communists failed. His answer was that the stability of the Czarist regime rested almost wholly on the naked mechanics of state power; but in Italy, capitalist stability was buttressed and reproduced by a dense network of civil society institutions, including the ‘industrial legality’ won by the trade unions themselves. This could be overturned only through a sustained ‘war of position’. A similar ‘industrial legality’ arose from the activities of the militant shop stewards who were central to the IS project in the late-1960s and early 1970s – an insight that Burawoy (1979) would later develop. It seemed crucial to explore the ways in which beliefs, ideas and world-views were not merely abstractions in people’s heads but were generated by – and in turn fed back upon – their everyday practices and social relations. Though it was only much later that I encountered Bourdieu and his use of the notion of habitus, I see important affinities with my own emergent thinking in the 1970s.

Gregor Gall offers a flattering assessment of my Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction. He also provides an ‘impact assessment’ for this work in comparison to John Kelly’s Rethinking Industrial Relations. Now I am not too impressed by citation counts, and I think that neither John nor I would regard ourselves as competitors, but the figures seem to show that we have both had some influence in shaping understanding of the complex realities of industrial relations. In response to what reads overall as an encomium, any rejoinder might seem churlish. But given Gall’s section on ‘weaknesses and shortcomings’, it is reasonable to offer my own reaction to his (certainly comradely) critique. His central thesis is that my analysis did not lead to guidelines for practice: the book is ‘a work of academic Marxism… notably less concerned with the application of Marxism to the workers’ movement and the practical problems contained therein’. It ‘does not address in anything more than a fleeting and superficial manner the tasks of Marxism, either in terms of pure practice or the form of praxis… [and] does not have an obvious Marxist purpose because Marxism is necessarily about creating revolutionary social agency’. Gall concedes that ‘many works of Marxism do not comprise route maps and proposals for praxis, and [in this] they are correct’. But this is not true when addressing ‘such practical contemporary matters of how best workers can collectively advance their interests through unions, and the relationship of this to the struggle for workers’ power’; in this case ‘there is invariably a need to have such Marxist analysis of workers’ industrial struggles relate to – by way of informing or illuminating – contemporary workers’ industrial struggle because workers are the weaker party in the employment relationship and in society. This could mostly easily take the form of some “lessons from history.”’

There is much space for legitimate disagreement as to the role, functions and obligations of Marxist ‘intellectuals’. To Gall’s arguments I would make two replies. First, the attempt to ‘save’ Marx’s own writings from Gall’s critique, on the implied grounds that Marx was not engaging with ‘practical contemporary matters’, is hardly persuasive. The essence of the social relation between wage-labour and capital, and the class conflicts that Marx viewed as the necessary result, formed his central concern throughout his life. Even when discussing workers’ struggles – as Marx often did – he made little attempt to suggest how these might generate ‘revolutionary social agency’. At times, he treated this as an inevitable outcome of ‘the immanent laws of capitalist production itself’, as in chapter 32 of Volume 1 of Capital. Note that even in the most ‘programmatic’ Marxist work, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, ‘route maps and proposals for praxis’ are remarkably absent: what we have is the same assumption of the inevitability of the ‘revolutionary combination’ of the proletariat. So perhaps Marx himself was not a Marxist?

Second, my experience in the years when IS was being transmuted into a ‘mini mass party’ taught me that those who attempt to derive simple ‘lessons from history’ normally draw the wrong lessons. More generally, I became very sceptical of the idea of ‘intellectuals’ writing recipe books for workers. Die Menschen machen ihre eigene Geschichte – people make their own history; certainly not just as they please, but neither as their academic ‘advisors’ envisage. Strategic learning within the labour movement, in my view, is a product of collective debate and collective struggle. In this process, the most useful contribution of academics is to elaborate the right questions, not to short-circuit the collective search for answers. One example of the dangers of seeking simple ‘lessons’ from history was the attempt by IS to re-invent the NMM. As James Hinton and I argued (1975) – and as McIlroy discusses in his contribution – creating the NMM in 1924 was almost certainly a serious strategic error; and the limited successes it did achieve reflected specific contingencies of the 1920s which had few if any parallels half a century later. The far more dismal failure of the National Rank and File Movement was a practical demonstration of this.

This leads me to the arguments of Ralph Darlington and Martin Upchurch. They point out that in my early writings I called attention to the caution and accommodation of union officials (no new insight, since I showed how the Webbs had analysed the same phenomenon in the late-19th century), and to the greater responsiveness of shop steward organisations to members’ grievances and aspirations. But ‘by the late 1970s Hyman had distanced himself from what he now perceived to be the “unsophisticated” view of classical Marxists and their contemporary Trotskyist adherents, the latter amongst whom he had “cut his own teeth” politically in the 1960s and early 1970s’. Hence they argue,

for Hyman the ‘bureaucratisation of the rank-and-file’ thesis undermined his earlier conceptualisation of a conflict of interests between the ‘union bureaucracy’ and ‘rank-and-file’. The ‘problem of bureaucracy’ was not rooted in the interests of a layer of full-time union officials (FTOs), but as a set of social relationships which ‘permeates the whole practice of trade unionism’ at every level of the representative structure (1979b: 61), with militant lay stewards and activists facing similar pressures towards bureaucratisation. Hyman concluded that intra-union relations could not be reduced to a rank-and-file/bureaucracy cleavage, but were complex and contradictory.

I would like to comment on three aspects of these arguments. First, that there was a substantial shift in my own position, apparently linked to my refusal to join in the epochal task of constructing the SWP. Second, that in rejecting the rank-and-file/bureaucracy dichotomy, ‘Hyman critiqued a crudely defined model of the conflict of interest between FTOs and their members’. Third, that ‘the underlying fundamental cleavage of interests within trade unionism’ should be the primary axis of critical analysis and hence socialist strategy.

On the first point, I can only respond that far from representing a rejection of my earlier analysis, my 1979 article was an elaboration and refinement. I wrote in a footnote to that article (1979: 64), ‘in the period before leaving the International Socialists (which was then in the process of its identity change) I was becoming increasingly aware of inadequacies… in the analysis of trade unionism current within the organisation. Since then I have felt less restricted in thinking through my heterodoxy.’ The central themes, however, can certainly be found in my earlier writings: that bureaucracy had to be understood as a social relation as well as in terms of a stratum of personnel; and that the conservative tendencies evident in the case of full-time officials could be found among rank-and-file union representatives as well: the differences were often of degree rather than kind. For example, in 1975 (Hyman and Fryer, 1975: 191) I noted that despite ‘very important differences’ between union officials and shop stewards, ‘these differences should not lead us to ignore certain similarities. In some situations, particularly in the largest factories, the shop steward organization can itself display significant bureaucratization.’ In other writings, Darlington (2010: 129) has himself stressed the problems linked to ‘the bureaucratization and conservative process within workplace union organization’.

As to the charge that I addressed ‘a crudely defined model’ and ignored a ‘more nuanced and multi-dimensional revolutionary Marxist conception’ of trade unionism, I can only ask: where was that conception? The typical Trotskyist usage of ‘rank and file’ and ‘bureaucracy’ was under-theorised and sloganistic. Trotsky wrote in 1923: ‘if there were not a bureaucracy of the trade unions, then the police, the army, the courts, the lords, the monarchy would appear before the proletarian masses as nothing but pitiful and ridiculous playthings. The bureaucracy of the trade unions is the backbone of British imperialism.’ No doubt the ‘IS/SWP tradition’ was less ridiculous, but not theoretically much more sophisticated. Darlington and Upchurch do indeed refer to a 1970 lecture by Hal Draper as recognising ‘the dual social function of trade union leaders within capitalism’. Draper was a fine and sensitive Marxist, and his analysis on this point is intriguing, though his metaphors would have been troublesome for those of us with Luxemburgist-libertarian orientations:

When you are discussing the trade union bureaucracy, you’re talking about the organizational leadership of our class. I make the analogy: if you are in a revolutionary army, you have an officer corps – whether you call them officers, marshals, commissars, or whatever. That’s your officer corps; you’re fighting with them, while at the same time you may not like them. But you and they are on the same side of the barricades. In the same sense, I mean something similar when I emphasize that the trade union bureaucracy is the bureaucracy of our class. Now, the second side of that union leadership is that, at the same time as it is the bureaucracy of our class, it is the channel and the agency for the exercise of bourgeois influence on the working class, and for bourgeois control of the working class. And it is both of these two things at the same time.

I knew some of Draper’s work on Marxism, but not this piece, and have no recollection of Draper’s thesis being discussed within IS while I was a member. Few, I suspect, would have described FTOs as ‘on the same side of the barricades… the bureaucracy of our class’. I would add that a year after expounding the ‘dual social function’, he resigned from the American IS, for rather similar reasons to those which later drove many of my comrades (and me) out of its British counterpart. The idea that the ‘IS/SWP tradition’ offered a nuanced and multi-dimensional reading of the union bureaucracy is a retrospective fiction. What is important, however, is that there was a longer-established literature on the dualism of trade unionism as such, dating back at least to Will Herberg (1943) in America and introduced to Britain by the anti-Marxist Allan Flanders (1970) with his notion of the ‘two faces’ of trade unionism. The idea of a ‘dual character’ was later given a systematic Marxist interpretation by Rainer Zoll (1976).

On the third point, there is a degree of tension in the arguments Darlington and Upchurch counterpose to my own supposed abandonment of the idea that union officials occupy a distinctive position. They stress the pay levels of top trade union leaders; I have never denied the significance of these salaries, but would add that the pay of lower-level officials in many unions is not much higher than that of the members they represent. They discuss the pressures on negotiators to compromise and to mediate between labour and capital. Indeed, this has been a consistent theme throughout my work; what I added is that these pressures also affect workplace representatives (as the experience of ‘concession bargaining’ in the past three decades, and particularly during the current crisis, clearly demonstrates). They write that ‘ideological and political loyalty to Labourism has proved to be one of the clearest manifestations of the limitations of trade unionism within the framework of capitalist society’. Indeed, but is that a peculiarity of full-time officials, while the rank-and-file embrace revolutionary politics? The position I was developing throughout the 1970s, which I articulated in the 1979 article, and with which Darlington and Upchurch at times largely agree, is that to present a bureaucracy versus rank-and-file dichotomy is to oversimplify crudely a far more complex social problem, and to neglect more fundamental reasons for the limits of trade union militancy.

In 1976, while still (just) a member of IS, I wrote a review of The Origins of British Industrial Relations by Keith Burgess (Hyman, 1976: 24):

It could be argued that much of what Burgess describes is attributable to the contradictory practice of trade unionism as such in a period of social and political stability: the powerful pressures to contain oppositional activity within a stable bargaining relationship, to avoid frontal confrontations with the power of employers and the state which might smash union organisation itself. This fundamental contradiction was indeed overlaid by those factors which Burgess stresses: the distinctive interests and perspectives of officialdom, the privileged position of a skilled minority. But to seek to explain the development of trade unionism solely in these terms is to neglect the underlying problem of the limitations of trade unionism itself.

This, I would argue, has been my consistent position: that the distinctive status of full-time officials is an important, but usually secondary explanation of the problems confronting revolutionaries in trade unions.

Engaging with Europe

The contributions by Melanie Simms and Heather Connolly are distinctive in that each presents its author’s own original research within a framework derived, among others, from my 2001 book on European trade unionism. It is particularly encouraging that they have found this framework helpful. Simms gives a sensitive discussion of my writings on trade union identity and on the ambiguities of solidarity and class unity, and amplifies and extends these themes with reference to her own – very extensive – research into the ‘organising model’ espoused by British unions for the past decade or more:

By examining union organising efforts, we see that the objective of much organising activity is workplace labour market regulation, and rests on very narrow conceptualisations and expressions of collective solidarities. Organising tactics tend to emphasise the importance of trying to find common interest amongst the largest possible group of workers in an individual workplace and mobilising to improve working conditions in these areas. By rejecting class as an ‘imagined solidarity’ around which to collectivise and mobilise, unions have been forced to look for workplace issues… Even when organising atypical and new groups of workers, unions have largely failed to develop any consistent effort to develop and express new union agendas. (Simms, current issue)

There has thus been an ‘implicit move away from the “class identity” to the almost exclusive focus on the “labour market identity”’.

Why has this occurred? Essentially, Simms shows, the turn to organising has been framed by pre-existing conceptions of what trade unions are and what they are for. At the heart of these conceptions – in the majority of unions – is the individual workplace and the boundaries of interests that are socially constructed within it. Within this fragmented model, it is easy for minority interests to be marginalised or excluded altogether. The difficult but not impossible task is to reconstruct a broader conception of solidarities, in which workers as workers – not just as employees of this or that employer – assume central salience.

The thesis of trade union dualism points to a contradictory relationship between ‘movement’ and ‘organisation’ that has both internal and external dimensions. Internally, there is a tension between participatory democracy and hierarchical, ‘professional’ authority; externally, between mobilisation and conflict as against ritualised ‘bargaining in good faith’. The notion of trade union identity overlaps to some degree but addresses more complex issues of purpose, orientation and focus. My conception of market-class-society as a field of tension within which competing visions of trade unionism are in conflict (Hyman, 2001) was a stylised model, which – like all simple analytical frameworks – necessarily oversimplifies. The accounts I presented inevitably underplayed the differentiations between trade unions within any national context.

One reason that I did not focus on France was the sheer diversity of the kaleidoscope of its union landscape. Connolly applies the same framework to an analysis of a specific union, SUD-Rail, which is at one and the same time a trade union of a new type and an heir to a century-old tradition of combative, class-oriented collective action. I would highlight three points in her account. First, all the unions in the Solidaires group are committed to participatory democracy. They constitute a union syndicale rather than a confederation: in other words, the industrial unions are relatively autonomous, in contrast to the centralisation of the CFDT in particular (Vivier, 2011). Rather than a general secretary, Solidaires has a délégué général. The principle of rotation of posts is favoured. In passing, one might note that in France, with formal union membership de facto restricted to a small core of militants, activist democracy should be easier to sustain. Nevertheless, Connolly shows the difficulties of maintaining widespread participation, and the growing dependence on a small cadre of experienced activists who benefit from time off from work for their union functions. One might add that – as is clear from her more detailed case study (Connolly, 2010) – participation disproportionately involves left-wing political activists whose internecine disputes may well alienate the broader (actual and potential) membership.

Second, she shows that the commitment of Solidaires to a broad ‘social movement unionism’ sits uneasily with its implantation among relatively secure public service workers. Nevertheless, Connolly shows that SUD-Rail has indeed made serious efforts to represent the growing numbers of precarious workers within the sector. Third, permanent mobilisation and contestation usually prove unsustainable. Workers may well support class-struggle unionism when it yields results; but sophisticated managements learn how to marginalise militants and favour more accommodating unions and representatives. The failure of the major strike action in May 2010 has been cited as a reason for the decline (albeit small) in support for SUD-Rail in the 2011 works committee elections (Andolfatto, 2011). The traditional reluctance in France of both authoritarian managements and leftist unions to sign formal agreements allowed a process of ‘arms-length bargaining’ in which honour could be satisfied on both sides. The shift in recent years towards more formalised collective bargaining is one reason for the recentrage of the CGT. At a different level, Connolly shows how ‘SUD-Rail, while embracing an ideology of class opposition, had to reach a tacit accommodation with the existing social order through its engagement in workplace representative institutions’ (an essential source of organisational resources). Perhaps the most optimistic finding to emerge from her account is that these tensions and contradictions are recognised, providing ‘a source of dynamism in SUD-Rail and a stimulus for ongoing reflection on the processes of union renewal’.

Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié. In turning to the contribution by Graham Taylor, Andrew Mathers and Martin Upchurch, I fear that some of my customary sweet nature may evaporate. I recognise few of my own ideas in those they castigate. Let me address five issues: my invention of the term ‘political economism’; my ‘largely uncritical embrace of the regulation approach’ and its ‘structural functionalist methodology’ which entails an acceptance (‘albeit critical’) of ‘neoliberal flexibility’; the claim that I ‘overstate… the autonomy of civil society from the state and economy’; the ‘suggestion that “Europe” is the terrain on which unions are able to operate in order to secure a new social settlement for labour’; and the authors’ preferred alternative to my own analysis, based on their book The Crisis of Social Democratic Trade Unionism in Western Europe (Upchurch et al., 2009).

I coined the term ‘political economism’ to indicate that mainstream west European trade unionism engaged in politics primarily to secure a framework – full employment, rising real wages, an expansionary welfare state – which complemented and was often subordinated to its role in collective bargaining. In this sense, political activity did not fundamentally transcend the economism of ‘business unionism’. Since the 1970s, for multiple reasons, this form of unionism no longer yields positive material outcomes. This, I would have thought, is an analysis consistent with the perspectives of Taylor et al. They complain, however, that ‘the category tends to obscure the contradictions of the post-war settlement and the extent to which this form of “identity” highlighted the strength and obscured the weakness of organised labour’. Since they give no indication of when and where I committed this ‘obscurantism’, I find it neither possible nor necessary to respond.

‘Hyman has explicitly acknowledged his debt to the “regulation approach”’. Here we are referred to one source, a paragraph in a piece in 1994. As Taylor et al. note, I wrote (1994: 7) that ‘it is unnecessary to embrace all elements of “regulation theory” in order to recognize the value of such an account for making sense of the relative stabilization of mid-20th century industrial relations’. They add that ‘it is, however, unclear which aspects of regulation theory Hyman rejected’. Some clarification might be found in a more recent paper (Hyman, 2005a). A crucial starting point must be that there are many regulation theories, most but not all of which are Marxist in inspiration. Some are far more determinist (‘functionalist’) than others. The idea that ‘regimes of accumulation’ shape distinctive ‘modes of regulation’ has a long heritage. Some expressions are rather simplistic: ‘the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist’. Others are more sophisticated: ‘the specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled… [and] reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state’.

I remain persuaded that such an analytical model helps our understanding of the post-war stabilisation of European industrial relations and the subsequent crises of trade unionism. After several readings of their article, I am not altogether clear where Taylor et al. disagree. Nor do I see ‘regulation theory’ as a more than peripheral underpinning of my discussion of trade union identity. What I find offensive, however, is the suggestion that because of my ‘surrender’ to regulation theory, ‘Hyman also accepts, albeit critically, the post-Fordist fantasy that a new and progressive social settlement for labour is possible if only organised labour can bend its organisational form and bargaining agendas in the direction of neoliberal flexibility’. No references are given for this slur. I have written four papers that centrally address issues of flexibility (Hyman, 1988, 1991a, 1991b, 2006a); all systematically contest the neoliberal agenda. But I have also suggested that because the discourse of flexibility is so firmly embedded, unions might demand forms of flexibility which benefit workers. There is nothing inherently progressive about the Fordist – yes, I find the word a useful shorthand – compromise between capital and labour which established a standardised ‘common rule’ governing work and employment, through which workers accepted their subordination to managerial authority in return for a measure of job security. An offensive use of the discourse of flexibility would turn neoliberal arguments on their head, insisting on enhanced workers’ control of the use of their labour power and the deployment of their working time. Whether or not this proposal is dismissed as ‘utopian’, to suggest that I am advocating an accommodation with neoliberalism is a grotesque travesty.

Taylor et al. also castigate ‘the weakness of the neo-Gramscian conceptualisation of civil society to which Hyman subscribes’. I have never quite understood what is meant by ‘neo-Gramscianism’ – as meaningless a term as ‘neo-Marxism’ – but certainly I have long found Gramsci’s writings full of important insights (though also of obscurities, partly because of the circumstances in which he wrote during imprisonment). I also find it hard to understand how I can be both a structural functionalist and a Gramscian, neo or otherwise. As I make very clear in the passage (2001: 58-9) to which Taylor et al. refer, the notion of civil society is commonly used with a multiplicity of conflicting meanings but can be understood, as Gramsci understood it, as a terrain of social relations certainly not autonomous from the state and economy but neither fully determined by them. It is an arena of contradiction and struggle. And I have come increasingly to the view (not a novel insight, since I wrote about social values in the early 1970s) that materialism is not enough; that ideas, beliefs and language can exert a partly independent influence which many trade unions have insufficiently appreciated. I use the notion of ‘moral economy’, which I took from Edward Thompson (1971), to indicate (as he did) a set of working-class values which can directly confront bourgeois political economy. And I see the confrontation between the two as an essential element in contemporary civil society.

Indeed I also see the slogan of ‘social Europe’ as a potential element in a working-class moral economy. At the same time I regularly insist that the notion has usually been deployed mendaciously as a cloak for an attack on workers’ rights, and that its use by mainstream trade unions has too often been vacuous and defensive. But according to Taylor et al., my refusal to abandon the slogan to workers’ enemies means that ‘Hyman is thus part of a broader project of social-democratic renewal that aims to resurrect the decaying institutions of national Keynesianism at the European level’. To my mind, this replaces critique with abuse. They add that ‘the project of Social Europe lacks an effective social base to struggle for its implementation and its ideological appeal rests ultimately on its claim to historical necessity’. I have no idea where they think that I have asserted claims to historical necessity. Nor do I accept that ‘an effective social base’ must either exist already or else is impossible to achieve: my understanding of Marxism has always been that the task is to create such a base. Let me quote the conclusion of one of the sources they reference (Hyman, 2005b: 35-6):

Unions’ engagement with the EU has largely abdicated contentious politics in favour of industrial legality. Such an outcome… has been systematically cultivated by the Commission.… Conversely, an autonomous trade union policy for social Europe would need to be radically distanced from official EU conceptions of welfare and labour market modernization. It would require a vision and imagination capable of meeting the interests and aspirations of a diverse and sophisticated workforce; a language of social solidarity able to rekindle unions’ moral legitimacy as a ‘sword of justice’; and a will and capacity to re-learn cross-nationally both strategies and tactics. Utopian indeed: but utopias are indispensable in the bureaucratic maze of official Europe.

I leave the reader to judge whether this matches the caricature presented by Taylor et al. Another Europe is possible, but certainly not inevitable.

Finally, let me turn briefly to the superior alternative to my own approach, as presented in The Crisis of Social Democratic Trade Unionism. In a review of the book, I wrote (Hyman, 2009: 618):

I find the model of alternative futures unhelpful. I am not sure why ‘third way’ and ‘traditional social democracy’ are necessarily national in orientation: in its origins, the latter was certainly internationalist (an identity which French social democracy long emphasised in its very name). Nor do I understand why ‘traditional social democracy’ is necessarily oppositional while its ‘cosmopolitan’ variant is integrative. Nor, finally, why ‘radicalised political unionism’ need be genuinely internationalist – it might surely involve a more militant but nationalistic defence of workers’ interests.

Their book concludes (2008:9: 179) with a prediction of the ‘“opening-up” of workers’ organised political dissent within wider civil society’ (yes, our authors themselves sometimes succumb to ‘neo-Gramscianism’). But I fear that their recipe is actually for fragmented, and perhaps introspective syndicalism. It is interesting to compare Upchurch et al. with the study by Roland Erne (2008): he also provides a 2x2 matrix, with technocracy/democracy on one axis and EU-level/national level on the other. While I am not wholly persuaded by his analysis, in my view the technocracy/democracy antimony is important. And I share his insistence that the struggle at EU level cannot be abdicated. The concept of European civil society is indeed problematic, as Taylor et al. comment. It does not exist, yet it is a project to be struggled for – as Taylor and Mathers, at least, have argued elsewhere.

Final reflections

On the invitation of the editors, I end with some brief final reflections. The first is to return to the context of my first main publications in the 1970s. In much of Europe there was a rise in industrial conflict, a growth in trade unionism and an advance of the political left. In 1974, the ‘carnation revolution’ overthrew the Portuguese dictatorship and the Greek junta was ejected, while Spanish fascism collapsed with the death of Franco the following year. A revolutionary scenario seemed on the agenda. As a Marxist, I thought I knew all the answers. But I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now. Today I am far more aware of what is still to be known.

This relates in part to the meaning of Marxism. I wrote in A Marxist Introduction (1975: 4) that ‘no authoritative definition of the meaning of Marxism is possible’. Today I would make this point even more strongly, as I did in a recent discussion of the relevance of Marx to industrial sociology and industrial relations (Hyman, 2006). Not only are Marx’s writings ambiguous or contradictory on crucial points, but they also ignore or marginalise critical issues – most importantly, perhaps, the significance of gender. In many respects, we need to invent our own Marxism(s), and in doing so we must inevitably draw on work that is not Marxist (as Marx himself did, working in the British Museum). And indeed, I am less sure what is or is not to count as Marxism, and suspect that only dogmatic sectarians would wish to make a clear distinction.

In Volume 3 of Capital, Marx left the final chapter on classes incomplete. We have to find our own answers to the problematics of class in the 21st century: on the one hand, how to address the increasingly evident segmentations within the working class; on the other, how to theorise the connections (or disconnect) between ‘objective’ relations in production and collective consciousness of identity and interests.

This links back to the issues of subjectivity, ideas and values. Materialism, as I argued above, is not enough. In rejecting Hegelian idealism, Marx tended to reduce consciousness to a mere derivative of economic (or at times, technological) forces. This is no longer plausible: beliefs, ideology, language can acquire material force. Post-modernists have given discourse a bad name, but this is no reason for Marxists to dismiss the whole area of investigation. To take just one example, the issue of ‘framing’, analysed by Kelly (1998) in the context of mobilisation theory, is today widely recognised as essential for any adequate analysis of trade union efforts to win recruits and activists.

My last point concerns the understanding of the state, which as I argued in 1975 represents a key factor in industrial relations even when it superficially ‘abstains’ from intervention. Traditional Marxist approaches tended to adopt a rather mechanical conception of the state: ‘special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc.’. Since the 1970s – certainly encouraged by many sensitive contributions to Capital & Class – Marxist analysis has increasingly insisted that the state must be understood in more complex terms, as a social form and a social relation. I have recently tried to explore some of the implications of such broader approaches to state theory for industrial relations (Hyman, 2008). In my view, the contradictions at the heart of the state represent both threats and opportunities for socialists. Before we can change the world, we have first to understand it.