1. 1972 was to have been the year of victory for the Tories From the moment they came to office the Tories placed in the centre of their work the turn to the common market as the international precondition for the revival of British capitalism and the decisive weakening of the economic strength of the working class as the internal precondition. the first two years of office, Heath's main fight was to get entry into the Common Market. By 1972 the basic work for this had been completed. But in the domestic class struggle, the Tories had not got beyond preliminary skirmishes. These had gone reasonably well for them, particularly their satisfying victory over the Post Office workers, so that by the start of the year Heath's lieutenants appeared to relish the prospect of a fight.
The government set itself three main tasks in relation to the working class: to end its wage struggle through an exemplary struggle against the miners; to carry through a programme of modernisation at the expense of workers through massive redundancies. As on the wages front there was an exemplary struggle: Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, though whether this was of the government's choosing is more doubtful. The third crucial front for Heath was of course the direct legislative attack on the organisations of the working class through the Industrial Relations Act.
When the TUC met last Autumn there was no sign that the official leadership of the trade union movement had a policy which could begin to challenge these three central tactical plans of the government. In short, if the working class was to rely on the resources of the General Council, then Heath seemed to possess the formula for victory in 1972.
THE LINE IS STILL HELD AGAINST THE TORIES As every militant is well aware, Heath's tactical plans were blown off course. The Miners' strike was indeed a resounding victory but not for the government. The 7 per cent wages norm was smashed and the whole wage offensive has still not recovered. The current wages battle ground is the construction industry, where the biggest builders' strike movement since before the first world war has so far rejected an employers offer twice the size of Heath's 7 per cent norm. In the government's chosen preserve of public employees the local council workers are putting in a claim for the miners' norm of 20 per cent.
The fight against redundancies and capitalist rationalisation of industry has spread throughout the working class and the battle has by no means been decisively settled: the govern ment retreated over UCS, and by taking up new forms of struggle such as factory occupations and flying pickets some sections of workers have been able to follow Fisher Bendix and Plesseys to at least partial, temporary victories.
Most striking of all, the Industrial Relations Act, far from setting the seal on a decisive weakening of the working class's economic strength, has become a major headache for the government and provided the occasion for a series of nasty humiliations, such as in the victorious struggle to free the five and even against a section of workers with such a weak-kneed leadership as the railwaymen possess in the NUR.
In short, the neat formula of Heath's enthusiastic lieutenants has been pulled apart in the class struggle over the last 9 months and the government has been forced to work 2. Why was Heath checked and in what measure? All this is common ground within the: Labour movement: no tendency could disagree. But when we begin a serious analysis of the reasons for this Tory set-back and the degree to which the capitalist class and its political leadership has been checked, we find confusion and evasion within the left. Some want to obscure the real problems to avoid being put in the spot for failing to offer a solution. For such people - both Left and Right on the General Council - it is enough to hail the 'great victories' and denounce the wicked Tories, plus those who appear to be one step to the right of themselves. But the revolutionary left is also tending to replace analysis with revolutionary phrases combined with exhortations to workers to rely on nothing but their own militancy. This is, as a matter of fact exactly what working class militants have been doing over the last year, and if that is all th v have to do then there cannot be much wrung with the situation: maybe, a bit more militancy and a little greater paranoia over the plots and conspiracies of the trade union bureaucracies, but that is all; no real need for a political analysis.
THE WAGES FRONT An assessment of the state of battle which takes into account only the miners' strike and the railwaymen is inadequate. The most numerous section of workers involved in a pay dispute over the last year was the two and a half million strong engineering industry. Their claim has received a tiny amount The field where the working class has made a real qualitative leap forward over the last year has been the development of a whole range of new methods of struggle. In the face of acute social problems and a bankrupt official leadership, the rank and file has begun to use its own imagination, take independent initiatives and learn from each others" experiences. On this front more progress has been made in a year than over the whole of the previous decade. We can only breifly summarise some of these experiences here: (a) on the mass demonstrations in support of U.C.S. the Plessey workers used tactics which involved challenging the power of the police to direct the march. This preparedness to assert the masses authority over the police was shown again on the demonstration to Pentonville prison during the struggle to free the five. (b) the workers have in practice frequently asserted their direct control over the machinery in a straight fight with management. At Fakenham, for example, the women workers found the machinery which the management had moved out in anticipation of an occupation, and took it back to the factory for their own use. (C)
workers in struggle have begun to take up the task of organising self-defence in various ways:
first through winning sufficient support from other sections of workers to create an overwhelmingly favourable relation of forces on the picket line. Most dramatic in this respect was the action of the engineering workers in Birmingham during the miners' strike: when the police tried to smash the miners' picket at Saltley coal depot, more than thirty-thousand engineering workers struck and marched to the depot, forcing the police to close it down. Secondly, flying squads have been organised in case of police attack on occupations: for example, the dock workers in London organised themselves in readiness to send dozens of dockers to the defence of Bryant's colour printers who were occupying against redundancies. Workers at Fisher-Bendix installed steel barricades and hoses for defence against police attack. (d) During the railways dispute the ASLEF men at Waterloo demonstrated their attitude to the Industrial Relations Act in the sharpest possible way: the NIRC had banned them from working to rule, let alone striking, while a ballot was taken on the issue: instead of waiting for the ballot papers to arrive through the post, the workers struck to march to the social security office to pick up their ballot Patthe dav off of publicity when compared with the miners or railwaymen, for one very good reason: there was no national struggle in the engineering industry: the union with the most "left-wing' leader on the General Council avoided a national strike and its President, Mr Scanion declared the subsequent defeat reasonable" -the settlement in August had won the engineers the grand total of between 5 and 6 per cent increase. Thus the first point to note is that one great victory on the wages front by a section of the working class does not by any means settle the problem of the wages struggle for the whole working class: it encourages militants to take up a militant struggle, and it changes the climate of negotiations, but it can just as quickly be followed by a defeat on another sector of the front and the whole climate is transformed. The second point which must not be forgotten is the limitations of the wages struggle itself for solving the economic problems of the working class. Even the miners' twenty per cent is very quickly eroded by rising prices (a trend stimulated by the summer devaluation which will grow even stronger as the impact of the Common Market makes itslef felt). The NUM has already found it necessary to put in a new claim for a f7 a week increase and while the capitalist class maintains its control over the productive apparatus and the state it can counter-attack with impunity on other more unfavourable ground for working class struggle: indirect taxes on goods in the shops, income tax, cuts in welfare spending, cuts in housing 3. New methods of struggle to fill them in! (e) Recent articles in The Red Mole have given many other examples of the tremendous rise of creative activity by the masses in struggle over the last year, and in particular the revolutionary example of the Bryant colout printers during the struggle to free the five (see The Red Mole Strike Special No 47).
This spontaneity and creativity has taken the bourgeoisie and the trade union bureaucracy by surprise. Saturated in the prejudices of bourgeois politics they thought the workers were inert, stupid pawns which they could manipulate at will. Now they are convincing themselves that other forces - the Reds - are, doing the manipulation. In fact, of course, the initiative and creative imagination of even the most class conscious vanguard cannot possibly match that of the masses in from these experiences of the masses and struggle. The job of the vanguard is to learn communicate them throughout the society and to other countries workers.
But the principle job of the revolutionary left however is to situate these new tactics within a political perspective for mass struggle.
Without such a perspective being offered by the left, then this spontaneous self-mobilisation of the masses to solve their social problems will tend to be provided with a perspective of struggle by the bourgeoisie.
Already there are the first signs of this occuring: (a) the reactionary mobilisations of the road hauliers wives against the dockers pickets was due to the fact that the National Port Shop Stewards Committee, under the leadership of the CP was unable to get beyond sectional demands for the dockers, and demands which actually cut across the immediate interests of the lorry drivers.
(b) The dock pickets' militant struggles against the police had no political meaning for the rest of the working class because it did not express a goal to be struggled for by the whole class. (c) The porters in Smithfield and Billingsgate, though amongst the first to back the dockers in the freeing of the five were also quick to mobilise themselves (albeit in small numbers) behind the Fascists against the Ugandan Asians: the reason was the lack of any political perspective being offered by the left to deal with the social problems of housing, jobs, etc.
So the workers turned to those who did offer a readily assimilable perspective for struggle. programmes, increasing rents, emasculating the health service, stepping up redundancies, as well as directly attacking the organisations be repeated in a situation where the British of the workers. These obvious facts need to left tends to glorify the type of battle which is in the end least favourable for the working class: namely the passive withdrawal of labour power for an improvement in wages and conditions of work. And the situation becomes doubly dangerous when the revolutionary left attempts to 'lend this struggle a political character" by the simple verbal trick of proclaiming the battle to be exactly the reverse of what it actually is: when on one side the miners were attacking a single policy of the government and when on the other side the state was attacking the miners on all the fronts mentioned above, some comrades on the left fooled themselves into believing that it was actually the miners who were attacking the state in a general assault, while the state was impotent with its back against the wall. It is precisely the absence of significant forces organised within the labour movement on the basis of an understanding that the economic problems of the workers cannot find a solution even in the short term through an economic struggle, however militant, and however much led by the rank and file which constitutes the fatal flaw in the working class defences against the capitalist offensive. This does not mean that militants should give up the struggle on the wages front as hopeless, a tread-mill which they jump off to mount the political struggle to smash the state. What it does mean is that militants must begin to operate on the wages front in the way that is most useful from the point of view of strengthening the movement against the whole system, including the state. It means that demands must be fought for which have as their main purpose not earning as much or more for one group of workers as another, but strengthening the unity, fighting spirit and understanding of the entire class. Thus a demand like equal pay for women becomes more important than the demand for an extra pound for ones own immediate work-mates. We support without qualification the demand for the extra pound, but we recognise that the fight for equal pay is of enormously greater practical significance tor helping to solve our most immediate and pressing economic problems because it ends a vicious division within the working class and carries the whole labour movement forward against the entire capitalist system, because it implies a fight for the liberation of women Failure of leadership: dockers vote to go i 4. The Tories ha The Tories have in fact still got considerable room for manoeuvre and have already got the elements of a new tactical plan:
(a) The reflation of the economy which will paradoxically make it easier to speed up the redundancy drive in some respects since the electoral threat from rising unemployment will be mitigated: they would hope that levels will not rise sharply, thanks to expansion.
(b) The use of arbitration machinery plus endless talks with Feather to gain a breathing space over the Act. Secondly to retrieve the initiative of the Act itself by occupying
from a special slavery which capitalism inevitable breeds.
One single organisation on the left has been playing a leading role in the major class battles of the last year: the Communist Party. To assess the prospects for the future it is essential to carefully analyse its role in the main battles of the last months. THE FIGHT AGAINST here.
the problem of fighting redundancies is solved. But forcing somebody means applying either economic or political sanctions against him. And, like all other workers facing a shut-down, the U.C.S. workers had very little economic sanction to apply: only the refusal to complete existing contracts and the threatened destruction of existing plant and property which could otherwise be sold off. The work-in tactic involved surrendering both these economic sanctions. Other economic sanctions which could have been applied outside the yards - solidarity strikes in other industries involving some loss of taxation and a drain on Social Security payments, rent strikes, etc. used.
The Communist Party did in fact launch a political campaign around UCS: the campaign for the "Right to Work". But its influence was an electoralist one, an influence within the framework of bourgeois politics, For ever since the war the bourgeoisie has accepted the right to work, the right of the working class to full employment: any party which failed to grant that right was threatened with being cast out of the role of governing party within bourgeois politics, with being defeated electorally. Bourgeois politicians know this fact only too well, the Heath government was, by the new year getting alarmed at the electoral consequences of such high unemployment and UCS dramatised the issue as no other case did. Thus the CP's political campaign did not in essence say anything different from the hitherto established political ideas public opinion on the existing political positions of public opinion - a campaign for welfare capitalism. The Communist Party was, in essence doing no more than running a publicity campaign, pointing out that the the most prized piece of political terrain which the bourgeois state offers to all who are prepared to operate within its framework: the ground labelled: 1 am the one for constructive compromises and my opponant is negative and unreasonable.' Hence Heath's talk of amendments to the Act.
(c) Occupying the ground of 1 stand for the whole society against a narrow sectional interest' in order to set up another clobbering for the right union at the right time on the wages front. had been saying for 25 years should be done. A section of the revolutionary left replied to the CP's political campaign by saying: ignore public opinion and do what workers have always done in the economic struggle: rely on their own muscle — the economic sanctions they can bring to bear by striking and eccupying. This is an equally bankrupt approach. It is necessary for revolutionaries to utilise the contradiction between bourgeois public opinion and the existing practice of the bourgeoisie, and it is vital to change the opinions of the working class public in order to win. Where the Communist Party was guilty of opportunism was in basing its tactics on bourgeois public opinion and in failing to educate working class pubBe opinion in a practical method for tackling redundancies. A slogan should have been raised which would not simply win sympathy from the working class but which would give workers a practical orientation against unemployment: the correct demand should have been: WORK OR FULL MAINTENANCE: FIVE DAYS WORK OR FIVE DAYS PAY. Around such a slogan, the UCS workers would have been transformed from the most hard-hit, yet determined section of the working class into the leadership of a national political fight of the whole class; between June and August of last year the eyes of hundreds of thousands of workers were turned to the UCS looking for a lead: on 14th June the government refused aid to the yards. One week later one hundred thousand workers in the West of Scotland struck against the closure. At the Scottish TUC, the bureaucrats were under ards - the Communist Party had the whole working class movement in Scotland at its feet. The mobilisation continued from June when 25,000 workers marched through Glasgow till August when the streets of Glasgow were filled with 80,000 demonstrators. But without a political orientation, without a perspective for struggle, the movement faded away. Instead of the pressure of bourgeois public opinion on the government being strengthened, made more urgent by a working class offensive, the UCS workers were left at the mercy of Heath's clectoral calculations, and American capital's thirst for profit.
The Government's UCS retreat did not signal a general retreat into saving redundant workers; it was a retreat all on its own, an exemplary retreat, a symbol of reconciliation in order the more easily to get the substance of rationalisation through redundancies without the odium of the electorate.
THE DOCKS: THE LIMITS OF THE C.P.'s POLITICAL RESOURCES At UCS the Communist Party's political line did not lead to the clear and open defeat of the struggle against redundancy.
The struggle appeared to be a success of some kind. In the docks, on the contrary the problem could not be dealt with by the CP. and the result has been a bad defeat.
The National Port Shop Stewards"
It is not of course true that militant workers have no perspective for struggle, no objectives around which to organise. They do have a perspective drawn from the traditions of the British Labour movement: namely a Labourist strategy. It can be summed up in two phrases: Tories out! The trade union movement right or wrong.
The dock strike defeat has shown in a dramatic way the limits of even extremely militant trade union action when it is trapped within a Labourist perspective of struggle. Un til that time, the working class Committee did not actually raise the demand that the dockers should be given the jobs of the workers in the container depots; instead it demanded that all work in the that the stewards were demanding that the workers in the container depots should be allowed onto the dock register and should be paid the same wages as other port workBut it could equally mean that the econtainer depot workers should have been sacked in favour of the dockers. The demand was ambiguous, it glossed over the issue. But the actions of the dockers in picketing container depots were not so ambiguous: they were fighting the containers depots for one thing: the jobs within them. The situation was a very difficult one for the dockers: many of the workers in the depots were influenced by the most backward prejudices and some at least of their leaders were prepared to operate as the bully boys of their employers. But it is precisely to deal with such difficult situations that the working class needs a political party. And such a party must be clear, not ambiguous. Its demands and lines of action must at all times stand for the interests of the whole class and must point the way towards practical solutions for real problems.
But as at UCS, the Communist Party refused to approach the problem from the point of view of strengthening the whole struggle of the entire working class, and instead approached the fight against docks redundancy in a sectional way and in a way designed to placate bourgeois public opinion. At U.G.S., failure to keep the workers" jobs would obviously lead to a catastrophic loss of employment in the surrounding areas: the west of Scotland was a depressed area for all to see: therefore a struggle within the political limits of the sectional needs of the US workers and the utilisation of bourgeois public sympathy was not catastrophic. But the docks were quite different: the success of the dockers' sectional struggle appeared to involve the loss of jobs by workers in the container depots in the surrounding areas. Secondly, it was a different story on the public opinion front; given the attack on the jobs of other workers and given the use of unofficial militant picketing, given the mobilisation of bourgeois public opinion against the unions over the freeing of the five, the choice was immediately posed either be defeated by the contradiction between bourgeois public opinion and a sectionalist dockers' struggle; or organise the struggle of the dockers on a basis which undermines bourgoois opinion by representing the interests, not simply of the dockers, but of the whole working class: a struggle for a common objective was in fact possible around one of the four demands of the Port Shop Stewards. In effect they were demanding five days work or five days pay for every dock worker, work or full maintenance in the docks. This great opportunity for a national anti-capitalist fight against unemployment was provided by the unique position portworkers had won through the ending of casual dock labour: the próvision of fall5. From labourism to an anti-capitalist fight had more or less been able to hold the line against the tactics of the Heath leadership.
The tremendous rise in mass initiative over the past year has demonstrated that the working class is not lacking in fighting spirit and it will take a great deal more than a docks defeat to break this will to struggle:
the coming period will be one of large and even sharper bettles before the ruling class can approach its aim of emasculating the trade union movement. But, in the end the defence of the trade union movement cannot be secured through appeals to the masses to oppose the Act and throw out Dockers" leaders, Steer & Tumer back pay for unemployed dockers. But the CP refused this opportunity as it had at U.C.S. and the working class suffered defeat. THE FIGHT AGAINST THE INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS ACT.
The Red Mole has already made an analysis of the state of the bourgeoisie's efforts to enforce the Industrial Relations Act (see "The Ruling Class Takes Stock", The Red Mole 48), following the freeing of the five. The central weakness of the trade union leadership's policy is not its lack of a firm stand against the Act, but the political assumptions on which both the militant and the moderate lines rest: first that the source of the Act lies in the heads of the Tories and not in the most basic processes of capitalism; secondly, that the tight to defend the trade unions can be reduced to a policy of opposition to the Act. As The Red Mole has repeatedly stressed, the only road forward for British capitalism, the precondition for its stable growth in the increasingly stormy waters of rivalry between competing imperialisms lies in emasculating the economic organisation of the working class it is totally unrealistic for any labour leader to imagine that trade union organisation can be defeated without a preparedness to take up a struggle against the capitalist system and everything it stands for. It is criminal folly to imagine that simply a policy of militant opposition to the A and to the Tory government will remon. the capitalist offensive against the organisations of the working class. Every single resource of bourgeois society, from the school curriculum to racist propaganda against the gandan Asians helps the capitalist class deal with its main internal problem: the fight to cripple the working class's capacity to struggle. This means that any trade unionist who wants to strengthen the trade union movement must approach a question such as arrival of the Ugandan Asians in a totally new way: instead of viewing it as a diversion from his or her trade union work, however strongly opp osed one may be to racism, trade unionists must seize on the controversy as a welcome opportunity to strengthen the working class's defence of its unions at one of its weakest points: chauvinism and racism. The fact that on the revolutionary left itself this view of the struggle is not yet understood shows that from a strategic point of view the bourgeoisie still remains in a very much stronger position than the the Tories, through piecemeal wages struggles, however militantly fought, or even through the creative spontaneity of the masses in struggle. It requires a programme which offers real solutions for the basic social problems of the working class and other oppressed sections of the society: no such programme will emerge from any of the tendencies, left or right, at the TUC congress. Militants must turn to the still pityfully weak organisations of the revolutionary left to find the tools with which to hammer out such an anti-capitalist programme.
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REDUNDANCIES: U.C.S. The example of UCS is crucially important The leadership of the struggle at UCS,
the Communist Party, argues that the govern- ment was forced to retreat on this issue. If this is correct then by following US tactics
of the bourgeoisie. It was a political cam- paign which attempted to mobilise official
government should do what the bourgeoieie oom for manoeuvre
such pressure that they stood for minutes to give a standing ovation to the UCS stew-
container depots should be undertaken by registered dock labour. This could mean