The Tory Party is acting true to form. It attacks the trade unions, the old, the poor, and schoolchildren, while it gives a £300,000,000 tax handout which only really aids the rich. The question now is how to defeat the Tories.
The first steps have already been taken in the shape of conferences such as that of the London Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions on Nov. 14th and the many smaller ones being organised up and down the country by trades councils and other such bodies. At these meetings trade unionists and socialists can begin to thrash out a policy for defeating the Tories. The Dec. 8th strike is the first step along this path.
But all this is only a beginning. The Tories are in too tough an economic situation to give in just because of a 1-day strike. A long-term campaign will have to be waged against them. While a second 1-day strike on Jan. 12th would be a further step forward, to ensure that the campaign continues to pick up steam we must involve more and more workers in it.
Local Action To achieve the widest possible unity in action, all-inclusive action committees must be established in every town and industry. These committees should be open to all those willing to struggle against the Tory offensive. Let there be no bans and proscriptions in the fight against the Tory offensive.
Committees of this type have already been formed in several towns in order to prepare for the Dec. 8th strike. These can be extended, but they must be co-ordinated nationally if they are to have a maximum effect. It is vitally important that they do not simply disappear after Dec. 8th. If the Tory Bill is passed, then they will be needed to co-ordinate opposition to the Tories' attempts to fine and imprison trade unionists. If the Bill is defeated by industrial action, then these committees will be needed to prepare for new attacks by the Tories which are bound to follow.
It is also important to realise that even defeating the anti-union laws will not solve many of the problems facing the working class. Even without the Bill, prices will still rise, cuts will still be made in the social services and firms will still carry out large-scale redundancies. Local action committees can have an important role to play in coordinating activity against these and other attacks on living standards. Two things, however, are necessary if these committees are to play this role: firstly, they must be put on a permanent basis. This means that they must be made up of elected delegates from trade union branches and shopstewards committees. Secondly, the aims of these action committees should not be confined simply to fighting against the Bill, but must also include aiding struggles against productivity deals, aiding in unionisation drives, helping rent struggles, carrying out campaigns against the social service cuts, etc.
What Demands If we really want to defeat the Tories, then we must make demands which will not simply lead to temporary victories or which will be frittered away by price increases, etc. We must make demands which will increase workers' power and erode the power of the capitalists and the Tories. We must point out that capitalism cannot even grant such elementary demands as the right to a job, and the right to a wage increase without selling conditions through productivity deal strings. For this reason, we must put forward demands for workers' control, shop stewards control over hiring and firing, opening the books, nationalisation under workers' control (an obvious thing for Rolls Royce), etc.
Nationally At the same time as this is being done a fight must be waged to force union leaders to carry out the democratic decisions of their members and also to really fight the Tories. The suggestion that the TUC should do a deal with the government, offerin government, cotering aver dividens and prie rover dividends and prices is an extremely dangerous one. One of the aims of the Tories is to get the trade unions to police their own members and the TUC must not be a arty to this in any way. Its attacks on the Dec. 8th strike show that the TUC is more con cerned with damping down the struggle than with giving it a lead. As a result rank-and-file militants will have to be extra vigilant.
Unity M.P.s who say that they oppose the Tory offensive must show this by their actions, not just by a lot of hot air. They must campaign up and down the country in support of the Dec. 8th strike and industrial action; they must support trade unionists who refuse to pay any fines which are imposed if the Bill is passed. At the moment they are doing nothing. How can a man like Eric Heffer be taken seriously, when he claims to oppose legal restraints on trade unions and yet, on the other hand, he is prepared to offer "assistance" to Barbara Castle who produced the anti-union In Place of Strife proposals. To defeat the Tories we certainly need unity, but it must be unity which will destroy the Tories' attack on the living standardsof the working class, and not unity which will lead to a defeat. For example, it is ridiculous of the TUC to to ask Wilson to speak at their special meeting on Jan. 12th as Wilson is the very man whose government first introduced measures against the trade unions and paved the way for the Tory onslaught. Similarly the right-wing union leaders such as Cannon and Cooper have no real intention of fighting the Tories. The only unity which would include them would be one which would lead to an acceptance of the Tory proposals. There is no point in this type of unity. We are interested in unity in struggle, not in unity in defeat.
The immediate aim must of course be to gain the maximum industrial action for strikes such as that of Dec. 8th and Jan. 12th, but we must always point out that this is only a beginning. It still leaves unsolved most of the real problems. Only the driving out of the Toriesboth Labour and Conservative-can begin to solve these THE RED MOLE THE RED MOLE THE For regular information on the struggle in Britain, read The Red Mole, a 12-page fortnightly which carries articles on working-class history, trade union struggles, etc in addition to detailed coverage on anti-imperialist struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the last few issues, for example, we have carried: TRADE UNION NEWS: - 3 articles on the miners strike, a detailed discussion on the struggle against productivity deals in British Oxyger, on the trade union struggle in the South West, report on the Women cleaners strike.
WORKING CLASS HISTORY: - Articles on the trade union movement in the 1920s, on the 1926 General Strike, etc.
IRELAND: - Analysis of recent events in northern Ireland, interviews with the leaders of the Irish Republican Movement, a controversial exchange between Conor Cruise O'Brien and Raynor Lysaght. FOREIGN NEWS: - Special reports on the situation in Central Africa; detailed analysis of situation in Nigeria after the end of the civil war; accounts of attacks by Italian police on Italian militants. Special reports on repression of revolutionary socialists in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and their struggle against bureaucracy.
SPECIAL FEATURES:- Articles on the attitude of revolutionary socialists towards the Trade Unions and detailed analysis of the Tory anti-worker proposals.
Send for a sample copy to 182 Pentonville Road, London N.1, or your nearest Red Circle (seg list). SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE Please send me THE RED MOLE for the next 6/12 months. I enclose cheque /P.O./ cash for £1/£2.
Name.
Address.
THE RED MOLE, 182 Pentonville Road London N.1. 01-837 6954, 01-278 2616.