the same platform as Enoch Powell, but that did not stop him from appearing alongside such enamies of the working class movement Sunday. This does not mean that socialists should not support Bob Wright in the elections for AUEW general secretary against arch LAST WEEK JACK WODDIS felt obliged to write a four-part series in the Morning Star to try and justify the CP's capitulation to nationalism the Common Market.
The fact that the CP now thinks it permissible for the working class to share its platforms with Enoch Powell (even if it still thinks the fascist National Front is out of bounds") must have stuck in the throats of a lot of their own militants. So along came Woddis.
'THE REAL PEOPLE'
"In essence," he writes, "we are faced with two problems. First the national question. Secondly, the parliamentary question." He then goes to incredible lengths to justify the CP's defence of British 'national sovereignty'-that is, the sovereignty of the capitalist nation state. He does this on the basis that the "teal nation is not the capitalist state of the ruling class, but a mystical entity known as 'the real British people. This category which deliberately blurs the irreconcilable conflict of the interests of the working class with all sections of the capita hist class, excludes only the big monopolies.
For Wodds it & these monopolies which are presented as the source of all attacks on the democratic rights and organisations of the working class. But in reality it is frenzied sections of small capital, ground between the millstones of capitalist competition and the mass strugele of the working class, who are the most hysterical opponents of the workers movement But because sections of small capital, whom the likes of Enoch Powell partly reproSent, oppose the Common Market, for their own reasons, the CP try to hide this fact in order to cobble together a united campaign with these reactionary forces.
This position opens up big dangers for the workers' movement Nothing suits the far right better than the CP and the Labour left banian is Montananam platform to take the rest of their poisonous divisive ideas into the working class. By legitimising the notion of national sovereignty. as il all classes in Britain had something in common to defend, the CP undermines the possibsity of an independent working class fight against the Common Market, and the struggle for the working class alternative to the EEC-the United Socialist States of Europe, There is a deadly logic in the Communist Party's defence of "national sovereignty. It flows from the CP's belief that there is a peculiarly "British" road to socialism based on the 'democratic traditions" of British society. Red Weekly readers will remember that the Communist Party of Chile told the same story before the workers? movement was drowned in blood following the military coup in Rank-and-file pressure may have forced Broed Left member of the AUEW executive Bob Wright to back down from appearing on as Taisinesman James Towler (far richt) and Monday Club MP Richard Rody Inext to himl at a CBOC rally in Manchester last right-winger John Boyd, whose victory would be an immense boost for the capitalist class — merely that they should be aware that in the final analysis Wright too will opt for class collaboration rather than class struggle.
September 1973.
PARLIAMENT
The comerstone of the CP's strategy is the perspective... ot transforming Parlisment from being an instrument of the capitalist class into becomine an organ of the representative power of the working people, an instrument of tac people's will to end capitalism and introduce Socialism. The Common Market attack on the sovereignty of Parlia ment means a threat to the Socialist airs of the working class. (Morning Star, 27 February), Thus the Communist Party's defence of Parliament. which they admit is still a capitalist institution, against "the faceless, soulless bureaucrats in Brussels' (Morning Star 25 February), is in fact a defence of their own rotten They then Have the audacity to quote Lenin to justity their positions.
both in his writings and his pructice, that only through smashing the capitalist state apparatus and waging the most determined fight against all forms of collaboration with the capitalist class, could the working proposing in the fight against the Common Market is not a united front of workers organisations, but collaboration with capitalist spokesmen-Liberals, Tories and Lenin's statement in Left Wing take advantage of 'every "fissure" however small, in the ranks of paining un ally among the masses, by Woddis to include leading anti Market Torics. Since when have communists considered the Tories of national sovereignty not only it undermines the ability of the working class to defend the basic rights the Cl hold so dear.
ism in practice can be seen in its reports of the occupation against unable to deal with the political their jobs not on the capitalist on the basis that the crisis is a the anti-British activity of the own typewriter industry basis of the capitalist market: it could only work as part of the even Enoch Powell. Woddis quotes Communism that it is necessary to our enemies' to justify collaboration with the class enemy. And Lenin's insistence on 'taking advantage of every possibility, however small, of even though this ally be temporary. vacillating, unstable, unreliable and conditional" (our emphasis) is read to be representatives of "the masses"?
IN PRACTICE The Communist Party's defence confuses and misleads working class opposition to the Common Market, An example of the CP's chauvinthe sackings at Imperial Typewriten, Hull The Morning Star is completely confusion of the workers that results from their anti-American chauvinism. The workers are blaming the loss of crisis (and therefore deferding them capitalist crisis for which the working class will refuse to pay), but on US multinational, Litton Industries. With a union jack flying over the top of the occupied factory, the workers are claiming that Britain needs its Even at this level the argument is nonsense. A typewriter industry in Britain could not survive on the "Foreign' capital.