WHO IS IN DANGER?
There is one lie which every capitalist must maintain above all others. The British ruling class has pushed it more effectively than most. It is the lie that the working class cannot build an alternative society to that of the bourgeoisie.
They spread this lie through a myth called the rule of law. The story which they must get the working class to accept is that the class struggle must take place within the framework of the rule of law. So long as that framework is accepted the rule of the bourgeoisie is guaranteed.
After "Red Wednesday" when the dockers were freed, the capitalist class is scared.
The Times puts the matter bluntly. Its editorial is entitled "We are in danger'.
And Mr Rees Mogg, the editor of The Times, is frightened because on Red Wednesday' the myth was blown sky-high;
the class struggle is not based on the rule of law. Quite the opposite; the legal rules are changed and changed again depending on the relationship of forces in the class struggle.
The Economist spells out the results much mote clearly. "If the abiding memory from this week is merely going to be the funes of glory, then the country wil have of the unrepentant Mr Steer amid passed in these past days from the rule of law to the rule of something very underThat 'very undesirable something unfortunately stuck in The Economist's throat.
We will spell it out: the rule of labour, the power of the working class. That is what took the place of the rule of law, the rule of the bourgeois state on 'Red Wednesday'.
Last week hundreds of thousands of workers in practice began to challenge the authority of the bourgeois state. This happened in spite of the fact that the official leadership of the trade unions and Labour Party openly embraced the rule of law', Parliament, the courts and in fact the whole apparatus of the bourgeois state.
The task for the communists is to turn this practical rejection of the bourgeois state into a conscious, organised political strategy for smashing this state. As we said in the Red Mole strikespecial. communists must "seek to unite the working class on the basis of a fight against the main force of the ruling class -state, Parliament and the other agencies of fraud and repression."
The campaign of massive solidarity with the docks strike must be combined with a campaign within the working class for the re-launching of mass action to destroy the Industrial Relations Act. But within all this work the task of communists is to educate the tens of thousands of class-conscious workers who organised last week's great victory.
Let us explode the 'rule of law". We must build a strategy for the rule of the working class.
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE: Tariq Ali, Robin Blackburn, Peter Gowan, Alan Jones, Martin Meteyard, John Weal, Judith White.
DISTRIBUTION: Phil Sanders Published by Relgocrest for The Red Mole, 182 Pentonville Road, London N.I. 01-837 6954 Printed by F.l. Litho (T.U.) Ltd., 182 Pentonville Road, London N.1. 01-837 9987 No. 47 29th July 1972 Price 5p.