Jean Monds draws a valuable distinction between the workerist belief that ‘the struggle for power at the point of production leads to advances in class consciousness in and of itself and without the intervention of political organization in the working class’ and the correct assumption that ‘the key relationship of importance for the development of revolutionary politics . . . is the dialectic between point of production organization . . . and the working-class political party.’ There is a second distinction which it is also necessary to insist upon. It is a dangerous habit (inherited perhaps from the Lenin of 1902) to polemicize against workerism without at the same time warning against the opposite danger of substitutionism—historiographically speaking, the overestimation of the degree to which the internal development of revolutionary political parties operates independently of modes and movements of consciousness within the working class which those parties do not, in any direct or easily demonstrable way, cause. (It is too frequently forgotten that, three years after writing What is to be Done?, and in a very different objective situation, Lenin was berating Russian Social Democracy for its failure to grasp the degree to which: ‘The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic.’) I raise this question at the outset because it was within this problematic territory of the relationship between ‘spontaneity’ and ‘consciousness’ that my own work on the shop stewards’ movement was conceived and developed. Monds’ attempt to force my book into a workerist stereotype is misconceived. In his zeal to root out workerism, he appears to have quite lost sight of the opposite, substitutionist, danger.

One criticism I fully accept. Monds insists rightly on the need to investigate the whole social life of the workers, not merely their experience at the point of production. It was a self-imposed limitation of my own work, which I subsequently came to regret, that I neglected the social life of the craftsmen outside the factories. I cannot say how far such an investigation would have led me to modify my conclusions. I am sure that this point has particular force in relation to Clydeside, in ways that Monds suggests. His attempt to push it to the exclusion of technological factors must, however, be implausible to anyone acquainted with what the Clyde Workers’ Committee actually talked about.

The nub of Monds’ argument, however, is that I neglect, not the social history of the engineers, but the role of the working-class political vanguard in the development of the shop stewards’ movement. As a criticism of my work I find this rather extraordinary, since the central focus of the book is precisely on the dialectical relationship between a pre-existing vanguard of predominantly syndicalist revolutionaries and the wartime militancy of the mass of engineering craftsmen themselves. Now I can see that Monds may feel that the amount of space devoted to strikes and their organization is disproportionate to the treatment of sectarian conflict within the revolutionary political movement itself. But a monograph should not be confused with a general history, and I had no wish to repeat the discussion in Walter Kendall’s book, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain. Possibly my polemics against Kendall’s treatment of the shop stewards’ movement, and his failure to grasp its real significance for the development of the revolutionary movement, could be read as a denial of other influences on that development. But I was careful to point out that no such denial was intended.