Provocation as a Feature Not a Bug: Notes on the UCU Congress

This weekend I encountered a view of the UCU Congress debacle that called into question my previous interpretation of the events, and I found it so striking that I wanted to share it further. The view came from a friend who I will call Mary (not her real name). Mary is in her late 60s and has been an active and often a central participant in most of the major movements of the post-war British left, from the Young Communists League to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to the 1970s and 1980s miners’ strikes to current campaigns against privatization and so on.

As such she had a front-row seat for the development of some of the competing political forces that currently dominate our UCU national executive committee. The union leadership is for the most part split into two factions: the IBL (Independent Broad Left), which has the majority and includes the UCU president and vice president, and UCU Left. In the 1980s, my friend took part in resisting the gradual takeover of the British Communist Party by the ‘Eurocommunists’, which is one precursor to our own IBL. But in her work in the trade union movement, she was also highly critical of the tactics and slogans adopted by the SWP (Socialist Workers Party), one of the current groups within the UCU Left. So while Mary’s perspective is by no means neutral, her history has not predisposed her to favour to either of the two factions now active in UCU leadership.

When I described the events at Congress, Mary raised doubts about the view I shared of the IBL actions around motions 10 and 11, which has circulated in several post-Congress accounts. In this interpretation, the IBL mistook the controversial motions for yet another set of moves in its eternal war of position with the UCU Left, when it instead should have recognised the motions as interventions by a newly energetic and radicalized rank and file. And because the IBL leadership thus did not take on board the fact that UCU membership had changed qualitatively as well as quantitatively, they went for a nuclear option that blew up in their faces when time and again the majority of Congress delegates voted to hear motions 10 and 11.

In Mary’s view, though, the IBL leadership is entirely too canny and experienced when it comes to internal organizational politics to have made such a fundamental error, particularly with regard to motions that directly challenged their grip on UCU leadership in the person of the general secretary, Sally Hunt, who is aligned with the IBL faction. Mary suggested that the IBL would have made it their business to understand exactly who was behind the motions, how long the delegates from those branches had been active in the union and what our general politics seemed to be, and so on. In other words, the IBL may have been happy to call the delegates in question SWP and ‘ultra-Left’ in the press and on Twitter, but that did not mean they believed their own smear campaign.

Instead, my friend suggested that the IBL actions were reminiscent of a longstanding and to her familiar tactic adopted in unions, Left political parties and broad community campaigns: the leadership ‘engineers a split’. As the phrase suggests, this means staging a conflict extreme enough that one’s enemies feel they have no choice but to split off from the organisation. Often this entails deliberately provoking an overt, high-stakes clash over what had previously been submerged disagreements or power struggles. For the engineers of the split, the benefits are clear: a troublesome opposition in effect expels itself, and the ideological lines of the organization are reinforced with those opposition views and energies now placed firmly outside.

In the context of the UCU Congress, this would mean that the provocative nature of the IBL actions – the unbelievable outrageousness of their repeated refusal to accept the results of votes they themselves kept calling – is a feature not a bug. And, provided we accept Mary’s view that the IBL were perfectly clear on the fact that motions 10 and 11 emerged from a newly radicalised rank and file, then this provocation was aimed not at their longstanding factional oppostion but at that newly radicalised rank and file. The very outrageousness that was so clearly visible behind the smoke screen of workers-rights rhetoric was itself meant to send a message. And the message was: This isn’t your organization, it’s ours. We don’t play fair. You won’t like it here, and you’ll always lose. You’d probably prefer to leave. Bye!

This interpretation seems to me to explain what I otherwise found most puzzling about the IBL actions: why a group of people who have for decades espoused pragmatism and Realpolitik would act in a way that seemed to gain them very little. To me, it seemed obvious that the smarter approach to Congress would have been to let the censure motions pass if it did (no one ever thought the resignation motion would pass) and just shrug it off: it would have no real effect on Hunt or anyone else, and would show the IBL in a favorable light as able to countenance criticism. It puzzled me that the IBL would not have seen it as politically expedient to mollify the radicalised rank and file in this way, when it would cost them nothing in terms of their actual power within the organization.

But this is only a puzzle if you assume that the IBL has an interest in keeping the newly energized rank and file members active and engaged. And as Mary asked me, why would the IBL want that? In fact, there are a great many reasons they might not be particularly enamoured of the idea. Mary pointed to her experience in a number of campaigns across decades where, faced with the mass movement getting close to significant victories, the leadership backed off from maintaining the struggle, and indeed often consciously sought to wind down the organisation or the campaign. The possible motivations are complex and intertwined but for the purposes of this account can be divided into two general categories:

• Fear of defeat. Given the grim experience of the last forty years, leadership may have honest doubts about the prospects of success if a more aggressive line is taken. This can relate either to the immediate battle and to the longer term. In the former case the leadership may feel that the rank and file are over-confident and by pursuing the struggle the organisation is setting themselves up for a devastating failure. In the latter, they may fear that an initial success will only provoke the Establishment to organise a counter-stroke. In effect, leadership’s belief that workers have been ‘educated in defeat’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Fear of success. Winning may be just too scary, for a number of reasons. There is the fact that an emboldened membership might reject the leadership. So leaders may prefer to damage the organisation than lose their power within it, a recklessness that has been apparent across post-war Left history in Britain. If they are deposed, they would also lose their cosy relationship with the establishment, whereas if the organisation is merely weakened, the leadership/establishment relationship is arguably strengthened.

Any one of these fears may make a radicalised membership appear more trouble than it’s worth. And in practice, all these fears are likely to be intermingled and mutually self-reinforcing. And then the whole bundle is normalised and rationalised so it no longer needs to be articulated as such among those acting from these motivations. The perceived danger of an aggressive and energetic rank and file can be experienced as an assault on the good of the organisation as a whole, in which case extreme measures such as engineering a split come to seem excusable and necessary.

While I am personally convinced by this interpretation, I put it forward not to demand that it be accepted as such, but rather because I think it is imperative we consider it as a real possibility. Because if Mary is correct about the tactics used at Congress, then the existing reading – that the IBL misidentified their opponents and hence misjudged the situation – would amount to a dangerous underestimation of the IBL’s organisational savvy and political will. Moreover, if the radicalised rank and file decamp as a response, we would in effect be bringing the IBL splitting strategy to fruition. What we do with this interpretation, if we accept it, is something we must decide as the fight turns to its next incarnation.

I’ll leave you with Mary’s final observation to me: the point most leadership bodies don’t or won’t grasp – but a militant membership does – is that there are some struggles where workers are faced with such fundamental attacks on their industry and their own conditions of service, that it is better to stand and fight it through to the bitter end than allow the workers to be ‘educated’ in defeatism yet again.