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THE ACTION OF THE RULING CLASS
How can the action of the ruling class be explained at Chobham Farm?
First: why keep the three men from arrest? The Sunday Times explanation that the right people simply happened to have the same right idea at the right time is simply an unscientific way of saying that the ideology of the ruling class acts as an effective instrument of that class' hold on society. The class is trained to have the right instincts about how to operate in the class struggle. Thus, unless we accept that those people were specially chosen by some metaphysical force and endowed with identical divine inspiration, we must attribute this 'coincidence' to material causes: its ideology enables the ruling class to think what to do. Ideology operates though individuals within the class (as indeed do all Marxist categories - history is human history.) The Chobham Farm incident is a peculiarly clear instance of its operation and one that the Sunday Times reports whose stock in trade is phenomenal events are led to call 'astonishing' and to deny the phenomenal appearance of a 'conspiracy'.
Second: the ruling class acted to prevent the operation of a free labour market. Why? The disruption to production caused by a dock strike and the political confrontation caused by the creation of Industrial Relations Act martyrs far outweighed the cost to the class of keeping on the container workers or indeed even granting the dockers additional rights at all container depots.
THE ACTION OF THE WORKING CLASS
The workings of capitalism produced a situation where workers were competing against each other in the labour market: this was expressed in (l) open economic struggle and (2) in recourse to the law. As Marxists we know that this is one of the fundamental features of capitalism; the working class must sell its labour power as a commodity on the market. Workers will try to get the highest price possible and the employers will try to employ the workers at the lowest possible price. The national labour market produces a national rate of exploitation of labour and a national wage rate. As in the case of profits, in some cases the average will be exceeded and in some cases workers will be underpaid. Both in the case of wages and conditions (rate of exploitation) and the workings of the labour market (the employers hiring and firing 'at will' to stay afloat through the vicissitudes of capitalism), sections of the working class try to insulate themselves against the operation of the national average: to protect themselves against the laws of capitalism. In Britain this has occurred when a change in the technical level of the means of production have increased labour productivity and broken down traditional divisions of labour. The workers working in the old way resist the change.
The dockers have been able to do this because after 1889 when they went on strike for the first time and gained their demands virtually in full, the dock workers have been recognised by the ruling class and the trade union leaders as a force to be reckoned with. Entry into docking jobs is passed down within families; it is in no way subject to the labour market. The change in the technique of freight handling has thrown the docks open to the full rigours of competition with their fellow workers both for jobs and wages and conditions. The ruling class took the decision to insulate the dockers from the full effects of this change (thereby acknowledging the strength of the dockers as an organised force) seven years ago when the Devlin Report gave major concessions in return for co-operation with modernisation. It did so again at Chobham Farm.
In other countries, e.g. Germany and the US, such, resistance is easily crushed - both by the use of authority against the working class which has not struggled on the basis of rank and file resistance but on well developed leadership and by that leadership being conscious of the necessity for the change and negotiating at a price well worth the working class', while in Britain, union leaders have never led their members. They have instead acted as agents of the rank and file. Thus, their consciousness is irrelevant because they have no power to impose it on their members. In the US and Germany, where the working class follows conscious leadership, that leadership keeps abreast of the developments of capitalism - it has to in order to deliver the goods. In Britain, the goods are delivered on the basis of the rank and file making a demand, standing out for that demand and delegating their agents to get as much of that demand as they can through negotiating and politicking - backed up in that bargaining by the strength of the class in open economic struggle. The trade union leader's job is to keep his ear to the ground and know which way his members are moving.