The Stoke Newington Eight Trial has finally come to an end. Anna Mendleson, Jimmy Greenfield, John Barker and Hilary Creek, have been found "guilty of conspiring to cause explosions", and have received ten year prison What has been notable throughout the trial is that there has been a singular lack of activity in solidarity with the '8'. This is not the fault of the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Committee who have worked very hard to organise pickets, demonstrations, meetings in universities, etc., but of the organised groups on the left. We must now ask "why?".
One position is to say that the '8' are just mad bombers; ultra lefts with whom we have nothing in common. Firstly, it is by no means clear that any of them were guilty. It looks quite likely that arms and explosives were planted by the police in the Amhurst Road flat, where all four of the imprisoned lived.
SOLIDARITY But that is not the main point. The main point is that revolutionaries should demand the freedom seriously? Because it clearly recognises that of these people, whether or not they are guilty. What after all have they been found guilty of? Using violence against the capitalist state. Are we not in solidarity with anybody who struggles against the capitalist state, in whatever way? That surely is the first tenet of revolutionary fraternalism. To be in solidarity with such people is not at all to be in agreement with their tactics or their philosophy. In an earlier article we made a critique of the tactics and strategy of armed propaganda outside a revolutionary situation (The Red Mole, 48). But this does not mean that we do not solidarise with them. Marx was very critical of the strategy and tactics of the leadership of the Paris Commune, but when it took place, as Lenin pointed out "Marx did not assume the rigid attitude of pedantically condemning it as a 'premature movement*.
It may be argued, however, that it is all very well supporting all workers who are in struggle against the capitalist state, but these people were not workers, they were 'petty-bourgeois anarchists" who present a spectacle which serves to divert the working class from its struggle. Such criticism comes from "revolutionaries" who clearly know less about the class struggle than the bourgeoisie. The ruling class took the trial very seriously. When the defence were on the offensive and at their best (when the prosecution were presenting their case), the bourgeois press quickly realised that liberal opinion would be offended by the contradictions in the prosecution, and ceased to cover the case. In many trials liberal opinion is offended, but in such cases, the defendants usually get off. In this case, however, the ruling class were determined not to be soft. CLASS STRUGGLE Why does the ruling class take the question these people are on the other side of the class barricades. They are articulate and they devoted most of their time to the class struggle even if not by directly intervening in the organised working class. For example, all four of those imprisoned were active in the claimants unions. We must fight against those who say that everything which takes place away from the point of production is a diversion from the class struggle As Lenin said, "The consciousness of the working masses cannot be truly class-consciousness if the workers... do not learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist evaluation of all sides of activity and life of all classes, strata and groups of the population."
STRUGGLE NOT OVER This is no abstract polemicising after the event. It has concrete relevance. For a start, the Stoke Newington Eight struggle is not over. It has now become the struggle to free Anna, Jimmy, John, and Hilary. All revolutionaries must make it their business to organise in defence of these four, wherever they have influence, whether in places of work, or study, amongst trade unionists, claimants or students. Already students at Enfield have voted to strike in solidarity with them on Wednesday, 13 December, and to organise a teach-in on the case. But that is not all. There will be more trials of this kind in the future. As the class struggle gets fiercer, so the modes of struggle of many layers of society become more militant, and at the same time more areas of struggle are made illegal.
The left must understand the importance of all political trials and make it their business to organise so that ultimately the working class will respond to them. It is no pipe dream to suppose that the class can respond to such things. The campaign in defence of Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States in the '20s had a considerable impact amongst wide sections of the working class. But it is a hard struggle. We must not let the quotation on a Defence Group leaflet become an eternal truth: "They came to take away the Mangrove Nine but I did nothing cos I'm not black. They came to evict the squatters but I did nothing cos l've got a home. They came to take away the claimants but I did nothing cos l've got a job. They came to take away the Stoke Newington Eight but I did nothing cos I'm not angry. Then LICy Came to lane me away anu micre was 10 one to help." blunders as the call in a highly trade union organised city like Dublin, late one Sunday night, for a genera] strike to begin the next morning. Another sign of this confusion was in the calls to action and inaction at the arrest of Mac Stiofain In Dublin, Sinn Fein's national leadership was calling for protests and demonstrations in Ireland, Britain and America. In Britain, James MacManus of the Guardian was able truthfully to quote "a prominent Provisional as being against activity on this question on the grounds that Mac Stiofain was only one man.
In some Dublin factories, Provisionals called for strikes in the name of the Republican movement, whereas a greater response would have been likely if they had been called in the name of Trade Union or Shop Stewards" organisations. This was an example of what Mary Holland, in a sympathetic piece in the New Statesman, described as the Provisionals "talking to themselves? - their almost total inability to contmunicate with anyone outside their own ethos.
TRADE UNIONS CONDEMN BILL The Executive Council of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions on Friday, 1 December condémned the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Bill as repressive and retrograde The council felt that it had highly dangerous and ominous overtones in relation to freedom of speech, of assembly and movement. It also considered that the proposed Bill threatened practices of generally accepted norms of democracy, civil liberties, citizens' conduct, and especially that of trade unionists.
The national leadership of Sinn Fein made it clear that it welcomed action from British left wing groups on this issue; Walter Lynch, Sinn Fein General-Secretary, at a press confer-