Left agency and class action: The paradox of workplace radicalism

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine the valuable concept of left agency and interrogate it in terms of an inherent paradox not immediately apparent to many who support the role of politicised activists in the workplace. This paradox is that politicised workplace activists, particularly those belonging to revolutionary organisations, may in presenting an overtly political agenda centred on extra-workplace issues actually have weakened resistance against management’s aggressively profit-oriented agenda, particularly in the key period of the late-1970s and early 1980s. These arguments are further explored through an examination of approaches to workplace trade unionism by the Communist Party and International Socialism/Socialist Workers’ Party, thus linking the question of left agency in the workplace with the broader political agenda in terms of the practice and objectives of the explicitly Marxist organisations that can be assumed to be concerned with, and influence, the activity of their workplace-based members and representatives.

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