Your article on the subject of violence against Landon bus crews IRed Wiekly 30 Januaryl wes an utter disgrace, Capitalist commentators teil us there are people around calico thugs who co about beating people up for no reason.
Ase deterrent, they recammend longer all terms flochin And so on What does Red Weekiy say? Paople who assault someone who happens to be • trade unionist are just 'thugs", never mind their motives. The answer is a more dogs are to replace bourgeois cope and This is hopeless. In order to re-direct the violence towards the real enemy, we must first unmask the causes which ine Fleet Street hacks conceal. Even if Red Peekir had no analysis, it could at least haver urged the unions to set up their own inquiry to discover them.
However, some of the reasons are hardly very difficult to find. To take one obvious example. Every day of the wook possengers who have waited an hour or more for a bus understandably refuse to pay their fare, It conductors respond by ordaring them off the bui ter ipers get lost all round.
406 bu ories cor con are appo ing. Yet it is the bue crews rather than the state bureaucrats no bier the brunt of In spite of the fact that the play firmly sides with the working class inovement, it depicts a very partial, fragmented view of the world, Irelandwhich startingly impinges on the plot when Mary takes up with a murderous Scottish protestant who joins the UDA and becomes a sectarian assassin-remains, like the family, unexamined or undiscussed by the main characters Its vision of the future strugele consists merely of hopes and wishful declarations that things will change, that things can be done, coupled with an equivocal view of the labour Party, whose past failures are put down to leaders who didn't have the determarination to carry things through' The occupation-tactic on its own is recognised as i linited form of struggle but alternative perspectives are thin The play vividly depicts working class consciousness, but fails in the essential task of helping to advance it.
Yet despite these weaknesses this play still remains a rich, entertaining and fascinating piece of theatre which militants should see and discuss. Its drama and optimism almost make up for its flawed politics. ane pune now an interrat in bus crew getting higher wages ito attract morn staff to run the buses thet now stand in the garages all dey!. And they shoutd be trained how to win over the more clai conscious passengers on the bus in the course of such confrontat ons The unions should also demand tha our conduciors are not contractualy obl god to demand peyment of lares and bus crews should only adopt form of industrial action that win over the public For exemple, why not have a Tered strike' lie. give free rides to all instead af stopping work?
What is more, why doesn't Red Meekly have the courage to stage the fact that some bus workers are racists? Telling black youths If you want to swing on something, go back to the jur will not imprave the safety of bus crew The unions should campaign against rac ism among their members and set up a complaints procedure open to members the public who feel they heve been vict ims of racist attacks.
Self-defence, ves. But in this case, politich are a better defence than Alsat dogs leven if accessery as a last resorti Dags educate nobody. Socialist revolutic comes about anly through changes in th political consclousnese of the masses by a proliferation of proletarian seif-de Rece guards. -JOHN KILBANE, Londo 21 FEBRUARY, 1885: Naisalm X"
one of the first modern black revalut ionaries, was assassinsted on the bal cony of his home in Hariem, New York, He wis one of the first black leaders to point out the necessity to break with the pecifist, integrationist methods of people like Martin Luther King. He summed this up in his lam ous phrase: Vie must free ourselves by any moans necessary