the class struggle There seems every prospect that the Labour Party conference will occupy itself with days of political discussion and debate without once getting to grips with the real issues thrown up by the recent stormy class stuggles. In this the conference will be a faithful mirror of the Labour Party itself which was a largely irrelevant and marginal element in these events.
STORMY STRUGGLES The last year has been one of stormy class struggles in which defeat after defeat has been inflicted on the ruling class by the forces of organised labour. It has been a year in which British workers have made their own a whole new range of militant methods of struggle from factory occupations to the flying mass picket. Yet curiously enough the ruling class has been enfeebled without the working class being correspondingly strengthened. British capitalism has been prevented from raising the rate of exploitation and this weakens it vis-a-vis its foreign competitors; but the working class has not begun to challenge the system of capitalist exploitation as such so all its gains are transitory and ambiguous.
The Clydeside workers forced the Government to abandon its lame duck policy but they failed to really guarantee their own jobs and even those who do retain them at the moment have accepted a series of compromising conditions. The miners sent a flying mass picket right through the middle of the Government's wages policy and evoked a decisive demonstration of proletarian solidarity. But inflation has already eaten away the economic gains made by the settlement and there is every sign that the miners will continue to be chosen victoms of capitalist rationalisation of the mining industry. The five dockers were sprung from jail but the Law Lords' decision strengthened the Government's Industrial Relations Act and the messy conclusion of the dock strike itself means that the organised force of the dockers has been gravely undermined. CLASS POLITICS The missing element in all these confrontations was the emergence of a virorous working class politics counterposed to the politics of the ruling class. Throughout the last year the main political preoccupation of the La our left was the reactionary and chauvinist campaign against British entry to the Common Market. Instead of seeking ways to develop an autonomous political mobilisation of the working class, much energy and rhetoric was expended on rallying to the defence of the sovereignty of the British bourgeois state. Both Tribune and the Morning Star were found extolling the virtues of Parliament and the necessity of defending it from the Brussels The name is always different. This time it's 'anti-inflation proposals; in the past it has been prices and incomes policy, or planned growth of incomes'. But the great bulk of trade unionists know only too well what the game is. In essence it is wage restraint - just what the TUC opposed a couple of weeks ago in Brighton. But there is a new twist in these pro posals. Heath is trying to present himself as the friend of the lower paid, holding down the incomes of the higher paid sections of workers more than the others. He can then turn on trade unionists and say: "Either you support my proposals, or you oppose any special help for the lower paid. Heads I win, tails you lose!"
Of course, nobody should imagine that the lower paid would actually be better off as a result of these proposals. In the first place two pounds a week will be eaten away altogehter by inflation - even a union like the G&MWU is forced to demand £4 a week minimum increase for local council workers to maintain any credibility amongst its members. Secondly, it is a really grotesque argument for Heath at the very moment he is introducing the Housing Finance Act which will push rents up considerably. (For this reason, the General Council, the CBI and Sir Frank Figgures of Neddy have joined forces to suggest that the Housing Act should be put on ice for the moment.) Thirdly means testing and the wage stop ensures that an extra pound on the wage packet means an equivalent cut in rent rebates and supplementary benefits for the low paid. NOT ENOUGH But these facts are not enough to unite the lower paid and less strongly organised groups of workers with the strong sections of the working class in a common struggle against the economic attacks on the working class. It is necessary to totally oppose the Heath Victor Feather announcing the General Council's willingness to continue talks with Heath. proposals and any negotiations over them by the General council. BUT IT IS NOT ENOUGH. The labour movement must adopt a fighting policy for the whole of the working class including the lowest paid workers. Such a policy means taking the claims of strong groups like the Ford workers who are demanding E10 a week increases and organising a united struggle of all workers around this demand; it means taking up the slogan of the building workers - £30 for 35 hours -and making that the demand of the whole class.
The same holds for the threshold agreement. It is not sufficient to reject the insulting suggestion that cost of living wage rises could take place when the price ind ex rose above 6 per cent (so much for Heath's "intention to hold prices down to 5 percent!) The working class must formulate its own policy for dealing with rising prices: for every precentage point increase in the cost of living index there should be an automatic increase in wage rates.
HEATH'S TURN MUST BE MET What these proposals show is that the Government has learnt a lesson from its defeats over the last year. It had been trying head-on confrontations with the trade union movement as a whole and it had been defeated. Now it is trying to posture as the defender of the weak sections of the working class against the strong. Secondly, instead of outright confrontation tactics, Heath is trying to manoeuvre to win 'moderate' opinion to his side by negotiations with the TUC, etc., so that when the crunch comes the Government will not be so isolated as it was during the miners' strike. In the face of the old head-long confrontation tactics of the government, the class collaborators on the General Council had no possibility of a deal with Heath, and workers in struggle gained considerable support from the rest of the class. Industrial muscle could win through.
But today it would be a dangerous policy for the strongly organised sections of the working class to rely on nothing but their own industrial muscle. For if the government manages to split the working class and isolate sectional struggles from popular support, then industrial muscle will be no match for the muscle of the state. What is urgently needed is an end to the fragmentation of the wage struggle and the start of campaigns which unite the whole class around common demands in the interests of all workers. RANK AND FILE ORGANISATION Such united struggle will not be achieved under the leadership of the trade union bureau-