chiefs of the legal apparatus, are very unhappy about because a golden rule of the British bourgeoisie has been broken by the Heath leadership: the rule is that the class struggle must take place within the framework of the bourgeois law; now the class struggle is taking place against an important part of the framework of bourgeois law. The ruling class has always wanted its judges to play the role of regulators of the ciass struggle which must be fought by the workers against individual employers or against the government; now the judges are forced to appear in the role of protagonists in class battles which are 'not a matter for the government but for the courts.
THE ACT-WILL IT REMAIN? In addition a number of other things have happened to reduce the credibility of the Act-the fact that it did not undermine the railwaymen's leadership as it was supposed to. Also there are a number of legalistic contradictions in the Act-Denning's decision that the T&G should not pay the fine was acclaimed by lawyers as introducing a solid backbone of law into the Act while at the same time it destroyed the Act's political backbone. With the freeing of the dockers the credibility of the Act and its administrative agency the NIRC has been yet further reduced. There are no doubt sections of the ruling class denouncing Heath for an administrative conception of politicsintroducing the legal-administrative measures before the necessary political job had been done on the trade unions. It is true that the Law Lords have, on paper, opened the ground for strengthening the operations of the Act in the way that the government originally intended, but their decision remains at present simply a formula on paper. Can the government work out a realistic tactic for turning that into a political reality?
The first point is that the government has no choice but to try: if the Act is destroyed then the government would also be in political ruins. The tactics now of the government will most probably be to attempt to gain a breathing space and at least offer concessions to the trade union bureaucracy on certain aspects of the Act, like for example the closed shop, in This pamphlet attempts to politically situate the "Angry Brigade' bombings and the issues which immediately surround them, such as the trial of the Stoke Newington Eight. The treatment of this specific question leads to a consideration of more general political questions which the pamphlet discusses. What makes it so important is that much of the pamphlet is taken up with a polemic against the British left. This polemic was an inevitable outcome of the attitude which the British left had on the bombings, the attitude it had over the Ian and Jake trial, and the attitude which most of it is taking over the Stoke Newington Eight trial. The polemic is both very lively and very necessary, highlighting the following inadequacies of the British Left.
1. Its tendency to tail end the class struggle rather than to play a vanguard role.
2. Its reluctance to solidarise with those who participate in forms of struggle which it does not think advisable.
3. Its reluctance to solidarise with those with whom it has political differences but who themselves are playing a vanguard role in the struggle (e.g. the attitude of most of the British left towards the IRA).
4. Its reluctance to break with bourgeois legality.
However, while agreeing on this, it is also necessary to discuss one's profound disagree ments with other parts of the pamphlet.
THE QUESTION OF THE PARTY There seem to be a whole number of confusions in the pamphlet regarding what a revolutionary party is. It is absurd to claim as they do that the Marxist-Leninist theory of the party (the straight left approach?) sets as the task for the revolutionary, the building of the revolutionary party as a thing in itself which is supposed to operate in a vacuum. On the contrary, a revolutionary party which does not intervene in the class struggle, and therefore in the organisations which have spontaneously been thrown up in that struggle, is a contradiction in terms. The key to the Leninist theory of the party is that of political centralism. In capitalist society, it would be utopian to suppose that even all those directly in struggle against capitalism could ever be politically centralised around revolutionary socialist politics, let alone around a specific anticapitalist strategy; hence the Leninist theory of the party, if applied consistently, leads precisely to involvement in other organisations.
With regard to so-called "marginal" groups, the pampniet is correct to point to the economism of the British left, but they over-state their posi tion. What makes the "industrial sphere" more "crucial than other areas is simply the fact that capitalist society rests upon the working class and it is that section of society which can ultimately make or break capitalism and provide the economic basis for socialism. This does not mean that it is more crucial in other senses. The inhumanity of capitalism may be expressed just sphere. The other struggles are just as crucial with respect to what has to be achieved through the revolution. The other struggles are, at times, just as crucial, with respect to immediate tactics.
ARMED PROPAGANDA The activities of the Angry Brigade' are criticised in the pamphlet but there, is a fundamental misconception which serves to give these activities more justification than they deserve, namely that the blowing up of a symbolic build- The question of the criminal milieu as a source ing or the assassination of a famous person simply of revolutionary activity isn't absurd, though puts across the idea that one wants to get rid of what the building symbolises, or what the person But it is a concrete question, which has to be is famous for. This is incorrect, for armed propaganda has two components. It serves to advocate sophistical arguments. not only the struggle against something but also the method of struggle.
This misconception leads naturally to the idea taking place at the same time. Hence the pamphlet does not criticise the Carr bombing which marxist revolutionaries can lear a lot. and the Post Office Tower bombing, but on the contrary regards them as being tactically correct. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Carr bombing stole the headlines from the activities of the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions on the T.U.C.'s pseudo day of action on 12 January, 1971, and the Post Office bombing stole the headlines from the mass AIL demonstration last October. Indeed it has been suggested that this masking effect was so marked as to make it reasonable to suspect that these particular bombings were not done by revolutionaries at all, but by agents of the bourgeois state itself.
Of course, the comrades from the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Group can correctly ask what the British left has done in the way of propagandising the need for armed struggle, And while we regard armed propaganda as an ultra-left tactic to adopt at present, this does not at all mean that we deny the need today of posing the question of armed struggle, and politically preparing for it.
REVOLUTIONARY CRIMINALITY The last section of the pamphlet deals with what it calls revolutionary criminality. Its theme seems to be that revolutionaries have to break from bourgeois legality, thus revolutionaries are criminal, therefore criminals are revalutionary. Now, while the first stage of the argument might be linguistically correct, i.e. a situation of dual power is criminal", the second state of the argument is clearly invalid.
it may be unfamiliar outside of libertarian circles considered carefully without resorting to I have stressed some of the main faults of the pamphlet: Despite the importance of these faults, the fact remains that overall the pamphlet that a bombing will complement a demonstration is essential reading, and represents a healthy trend within the libertarian movement; a trend from The Red Mole 7 August 1972 Page 3