Sent to the Red Mole in recognition of your refusal to support the policy of brutality, torture, The tidal wave of the miners' strike has left the British ruling class in a state of bedraggled confusion. Heath's TV attempt to pretend that nobody had won the strike evidently failed to convince a single member of his own class, which has been involved in a heated, if muddled debate as to what or who is to blame.
tantrums The Economist has put on a most unbecoming display of tantrums since the strike. Having prided itself for so long on its detached, clinical approach to the class struggle, the miners victory has tranformed it into a spoilt upper class brat whose lollypop has been grabbed by one of the servants: in the first week after the settlement it turned its fury against the miners, dreaming up all manner of vicious schemes for closing down the pits; in the second week it sank its teeth into Wilberforce and said some shocking things about the poor fellow who was after all only doing what he was told. But Heath's broadcast produced a final paroxysm of rage:
The Prime Minister talked on television last Sunday of the double danger before Britain, of growing inflation and growing intimidation: I do not believe you elect any government to allow that to happen, and I can promise you that it will not be tolerated. Instead, his government has decided it will be rewarded. Mr. Heath spoke on the morrow of giving an inflationary E100 m. a year to the striking miners, and on the eve of giving £35m. to the Clyde sitters-in.....The message that is being taught by Goverment in Britain today i that, if you are in a declining industry, then your beat course is either to picket your work-place or (better) the workplace of some expanding industries, to intimidate, to demonstrate as loudly as possible, to seite property, to strike. "
The Red Mole considers such remarks to be grossly unfair to the Prime Minister who did everything he could to ah the miners. Those cosy arm-chair strategists at The mist must face up to one of the facts of life: that when the mass of workers really get on the move in defence of their living standards, there is precious little that can stop them short of armed repression. But it is not enough to deprecate outbursts like those of The Economist. We must try to understand what internment and mass murder"
The Red Mole 13 March 1972 Pane causes them. And the answer is that the journal is scared to death by the economic problems of the bourgeoisie, the chronic inability of the capitalist class to accumulate capital at a sufficient rate to be able to hold its own against its hungry rivals in the jungle of international competion. What infuriates The Economist leadership admit, in fact take as their starting point, the recognise that such growth depends on taking extraunions, and cut the living standards of the workers. This is precisely the dilemma before the leaders of the bourgeoisie: the economic needs of their class point very clearly in one direction-that of confrontation with wide layers of the middle class, are still not prepared to the white flag to the miners. They then flood the newsto its job; we were palmed off with junior ministers fair pay differentials.
there are also clearly moves in favour of sacking various ministers. is that all sections of bourgeois opinion including the Labour need for the rapid growth of British capital, but refuse to ordinary measures to increase the rate of exploitation of the working class, to destroy the fighting strength of the the unions -while a substantial section of their own class, epitomised by such papers as The Times, not to mention face the political consequences of such economic necessities and instead sighed with relief when Lord Wilberforce waved papers with all manner of panaceas and red herrings. Some look for administrative solutions: the Department of Trade and Industry is too big, say some businessmen, it's not up and under secretaries during the crisis. We need to split it up, or we need the old Prices and Incomes Board back, or and Rhodesia. we need some new independent body" which will sort out Others see the problem as one of personnel. The whole trouble, grumbles the Financial Times, was that the conciliation officers, the NCB men and the government ministers were not really up to the job. Within the government and the Conservative Party Inevitably the legalists have a panacea in the shape of new laws on such things as picketing. No doubt it is only a matter of months before the bourgeoisie's legal experts finally hit upon the obvious solution to all problems and work out a law banning all strikes and any other kind of independent The crisis has even prompted some elements in this most empiricist and pragmatic of bourgeoisies to suggest that the root of the problem lies in the realms of theory, arguing that the whole economic philosophy of the State has been wrong since the adoption of 'Keynesianism' and that we need to revive the obscure theories of some academic back- on strike.
U woodsman by the name of Hayek (but he sounds rather foreign don't you think?) heath's tactics The last editorial in The Red Mole outlined the basic framework within which bourgeois politics would evolve following the strike. Events since then suggest that Heath has been forced at least to appear to make concessions to the 'conciliationist wing of the ruling class. These concessions take the form of open-ended discussions with the TUC (and of course the CBI). The Times, which has played a consistently flabby role during the last two years in its efforts to stand above the class struggle has hailed these talks as "a turn of events of extreme importance" The talks will indeed mark an important turn if either the TUC decides to support a wage freeze on Heath's terms or the government decides to accept the TUC's idea of linking wage increases to price increases. For the TUC to accept a wage freeze would undoubtedly split the trade union movement in a situation where the right-wing leadership had absolutely nothing to gain from such a split. On the other side the very holding of the talks, combined with the UCS deal and Wilberforce, has created a crisis of 'morale' inside the Conservative Party, which is already torn over the Common Market and facing a crisis over both Ireland The talks are much more likely to be used by Heath to pacify the conciliationist tendency within the ruling class in the interval before the next important wages struggle, at which point the government will revert to its confrontation tactic, possibly use sections of the Industrial Relations Act, say goodbye to the TUC and hopefully win a resounding victory in the strike, thus silencing the conciliationists, and revivifying the Tory Party. Subsequently it could happily offer renewed talks with the TUC.
working-class response But whatever the outcome of the heartsearchings and manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, the basic tasks of working class militants in the economic struggle must remain the same: to smash any wage freeze in whatever guise and under whoever's sponsorship; to make the Industrial Relations Act unusable; and to redouble solidarity action for any section of workers
The statement about UCS by John Davies, Minister of Trade and Industry, in the House of Commons on 28 February, represented a complete shift of Tory Govemment policy. According to press reports, this change in policy was arrived at only after a sharp struggle in the Cabinet.
This climb-down, closely following the surrender to the miners (which also involved accepting the principle that the Government would assist an unprofitable industry for "social reasons'), has upset some of the Government's warmest supporters. The Economist of March 4, was bitter: "This featherbedding is the third very bad economic mistake" (the other two being the 'unimaginative fixing of exchange rates and the climb down in face of the miners) "made by the Heath Government in the past 10 weeks". The journal considers that these mistakes have jeopardised the "good chance of at The so called "lame duck' policy is just a gimmicky way of describing a basic mechanism of capitalism: that of allowing market forces to eliminate inefficient and backward sectors of industry. The arguments of the Tories and others who support this policy are as follows: to make British capitalism more competitive, investment has to flow from those sectors which are outmoded to those which are most modern and which, therefore, make higher profits and are expanding. Subsidising loss-making industries or services, so the argument goes, merely holds back the modernising of industry. Hence, the argument continues, although featherbedding may appear to solve unemployment it merely meets the immediate problem at the expense of bringing about long-term trends which make Britain less and less competitive. This, in turn, leads to balance of payments problems, stop-go, deflation, and hence more unemployment. Of course, not even the present PROTEST However, there is a half-truth in the arguments of the lame-duckers' -economic policies have to be considered as a totality Feather-bedding'-for no matter what reason, e.g. to keep a 'vital" industry going or to avert repercussions like a growth in militancy -iocreases the general tendency for inflation and falling rates of profit. Government subsidies come from taxation. Taxation on business profits narrows profit margins and when applied against the working class increases the pressure for larger wage claims (when British capitalism was rapidly expanding more funds from taxation came from the same level of taxation on a greater amount of production). So whilst a decision like that on US will prevent a given amount of unemployment, other things being equal it does this at the expense of increasing inflationary tendencies and/or pressure on profit margins.
Of course these are surface phenomena and the underlying cause of unemployment is to be found in the nature of the capitalist system, and, in particular, in the contradiction betwen the increasingly social nature of production and social relations based upon production for profit.
As noted before, no government could today fully operate a policy of allowing market forces to determine the pattern of industry despite the brave words of The Economist. What the Tory Government did (and still loes) is to allow a limited operation of this cendency to rationalise British industry more rapidly. Some of the decisions taken in this field are, no doubt, connected with Britain's forthcoming entry into the Common Market. The capitalist class does not want to take into that community further spare REDUNDANCY words of the Morning Star-a left policy
----- pull-quotes -----
working class action! Red Mole nOW!
CAGE 4. HUT 35
Seamus aver Twing baumplet Herally welcome