The most striking feature of this body was its tremendous power, It certainly puts to shame those trade union leaders who try to squirm off the book by arguing that the major unions are powerless against the Government, and that only the TUC can lead effective action. When the TUC and the Labour Party Failed to act in 1918, the Triple Alliance proved that it could make and break Government policy by itself, if necessary, Moreover, the struggles of these years shows the tremendous willingness of the rank andfile to fight. Time and again it was the insistence of the rank-and-file on solidarity that pulled the fat out of the fire-during the 1918 rail strike and the 1920 coal strike, for example. Then, as now, the feeble burcaucrats" excuse that they cannot act because their members would not follow was a treacherous slander. At the same time, the workers" movement remained trapped in a contradiction that persists to this very day on the one hand, the tremendous strength of its organisations and the combativity of the rank-and-file, on the other, the ruthlessly pro-capitalist nature of the trade union leadership and the The collapse of the Triple Alliance meant that the ruling class was able to impose savage unemployment despite milit political backwardness of the movement as
Red Weekly1974Red Weekly No. 34, 11 January 1974
Power of the Triple Alliance
The scan: rw-no34-jan-11-1974.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive, opens at this page)
Uncorrected machine reading. This text was read by machine (Apple Vision OCR) from a scan of a newspaper page, and the page was cut into articles by machine, at the headlines found by their type size. Nothing has been corrected: expect misread words, text from a neighbouring article, and titles that are the machine reading of the headline, some of them only fragments. Quote from the scan, not from this page.
How this article was cut and titled: headline found by type size in the OCR geometry (split_tabloid.py); 2-2 of 5; machine-segmented newspaper page; uncorrected Vision OCR.