Fifty years ago this year, in 1956, perhaps the greatest technological revolution of the 20th century started. It was much more prosaic, “low-tech”, and distant from advanced scientific discoveries than the innovations with computers and microelectronics, but has arguably had a greater social and economic impact.
It was “containerisation” — putting seagoing cargo into big, standard-sized metal boxes. Over the decades it has reduced global sea transport costs hugely, driving the economic processes of “globalisation” more than any other technological factor.
The USA did not start to develop its interstate highway system until 1956. In that year, an imaginative haulage contractor came up with the idea of getting round the delays on poor roads by putting his truck-trailers onto coastal shipping.
He found that he needed to take the wheels off the trailers, and adapt the ships to fit them. But he did that, and it worked. The full spread of containerisation required bigger cranes, new ships, redesigned and re-sited ports — and, indeed, new highway systems — but gradually it conquered the world.
As with all technological revolutions under capitalism, but on a huge scale, the social and economic effects have been paradoxical.
Some areas in some poor countries have been able to industrialise fast because their products can reach global markets much more cheaply than before. But larger areas have been pauperised by the simultaneous inrush of cheap imports from more developed countries. Where there has been industrialisation, it has always — unless and until “civilised” by working-class organisation and struggle — based on hideous super-exploitation, often in “free trade zones” exempt from whatever few controls and taxes on employers exist further away from the container ports.
Before containerisation, docks were among the biggest workplaces — measured by number of workers — in most big cities. London had 50,000 dockers in the early 1950s.
The dockers worked in a way scarcely changed for centuries, carrying loads on their backs piecemeal from wharves to ships and ships to wharves. Once one of the most brutalised and super-exploited sections of the working class, in Britain and other countries they had fought themselves up to a position of relatively good wages and high trade-union solidarity.
If one group of workers had to take the lead on an issue of general importance to the working class, the dockers, with their traditions of struggle and their strategic position in the economy, would be the first choice. In 1972, it was dockers who defeated the Tories’ first attempt at anti-union laws in Britain (in a struggle where the background, paradoxically, was the inexorable advance of containerisation).
Now, in Britain, dockers have been reduced to a small, casualised, non-union workforce, mostly outside the big cities. Other countries too have seen dockers decline, if less drastically.
The docker’s job today is, to be sure, cleaner, safer, and less back-breaking than in the old days. But tens of thousands of men have had their livelihoods and their communities destroyed in long, grinding years of struggle to break the old mass docks workforce.
In the years where containerisation was advancing in Britain, socialists on the docks argued, not for resisting it in a conservative way, but for responding with demands for the nationalisation of the ports, workers’ control, and a shorter working week.
In other words, they argued for a struggle to shape the technological revolution in a pro-worker rather than a pro-capitalist way.
If a serious struggle had started along those lines, it could not possibly have been victorious as a sectional industrial struggle alone. The scope and size of the technological revolution was too much for that.
It could have won only if it had expanded into a general working-class struggle for common ownership and workers’ control across the whole economy — and specifically, for a workers’ government, a different sort of government, a government that would regulate and promote technological revolution on the criteria of the common good rather than of profit.
An industrial struggle of the size of that unleashed by the decades-long technological revolution in the ports cannot be resolved by a slight pushing-back of one side or another in the way some smaller trade-union battles can. In the end, one side or another — the employers or the workers — had to break, to be broken. And it was not possible to break the employers in the docks industry alone. To break them, the workers had to break the power of the whole capitalist class. If the struggle stopped short of that political extension, then, sooner or later, it would be workers who would be broken.
In a world of accelerating technological revolution, trade unionism cannot be effective on a large scale unless it is extended into a fight for a workers’ government.
