Raise the banner of socialism Raise the banner of socialism British Perspectives Draft 1994 Introduction The British working class stands surrounded by the impact of twin bankruptcies. @ Despite the claimed ‘miracles’ under 15 years of Thatcherite policies, an economically bankrupt British capitalism is in crisis, once more on the rampage against jobs, wages and welfare rights. accepted the capitalist market system, have no answers or policies for a fightback.
The crisis of British capitalism arises from the MO Mere global convulsions of the market system, asit strug- ideological whim, or gles unsuccessfully — despite the compliance of the old stalinist bureaucrats — to recapture the lost markets and cheap labour of the ex- USSR, Eastern left-over from Thatcher: it is a central feature Europe and China.
The leading industrial powers are realigning into three competing trade blocs — Europe, North America and the Japanese- dominated Pacific Rim. This of post not only marginalises billions of workers and peas- Maastricht ants in the Thirds World and in countries doomed by capitalism to remain dependent and underdeveloped — it also brings new misery to millions of workers and youth in the advanced countries, squeezed dry and discarded by the drive for profit and competitive advantage.
John Major’s new offensive against the welfare state is therefore no mere ideological whim, orleft-over from Thatcherism: it is a central feature of post-Maastricht Europe, also emerging in other countries as the ‘free’ market eventually compels all states to match the meanest. _ And while the British working class — after 15 years of Thatcherism and the defeatist politics of new realism — has been more intimidated than its continental cousins, the timidity and failure of British social democracy is not an exception but the rule in a world where every mass workers’ party (with the marginal exceptions of Cuba and North Korea) has capitulated to the imperious demands of the capitalist market system.
For British workers, the task is to throw off the shackles of the draconian Tory anti-union laws, and unite in action to defend the welfare state — by removing the hated, internally divided Major government.
Labour’ s failure even to campaign for a general election spells out the spineless servility of a leadership unable to offer any Europe welfare state is positive rallying point for the working class, and reliant on the short-sighted, self-defeating tactic of attacking the Tories for increasing taxes.
It is clear from this wretched display that even the election of a Labour government will not in itself resolve any of the problems of the working class: it would simply improve the chances of workers themselves pursuing the fight, after seeing off the government of the class enemy.
John Major’s @ And the politically bankrupt leaders of the NEW offensive labour movement, having thrown in the towel and against the In this situation, in Britain as in many other countries, the strategic task for socialists is therefore to find tactical ways of building united front activity through which a new, broader, socialist current and tradition can be developed.
We must use our newspaper to spell out and organise campaigns for fighting policies and a programme which rejects the limits imposed by free market capitalism, and points to the need for a planned, socialist economy.
The work that we and our co-thinkers do — in the unions, in the Labour Party, among youth, students, the black communities, anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigns, lesbians and gay men, and broad campaigns to defend the welfare state — must lead towards this objective.
We must build support, popularise our programme, take on the political fight of arming the working class ees §«((O OVEItUT capitalism. As the British section of the Fourth International, we must raise the banner of socialism. 1) A world in crisis THE LOUDER the celebrations of imperialist leaders, the deeper the crisis blighting the lives of billions of working people around the world.
Even as it congratulates itself for outliving the miserable stalinist caricature of ‘socialism’, the capitalist market system continues to demonstrate its total failure to satisfy the most elementary needs of the majority of humankind.
And as it does so, the market system continues relentlessly to underline the political bankruptcy of all the political formations which depend upon it and act to implement it — whether they be British Tories, US Democrats, Spanish Socialists, Polish Communists or ANC nationalists. ‘ ERS DE
Raise the banner of socialism a ee ee ee ee RR es Sa eee a ees * Leadership: an unfilled vacancy The historic crisis of working class leadership that has predominated since the turn of the century has still not been resolved: and the price paid by the human race for the shackling of the world’s productive forces to the anarchic demands of capitalism is growing heavier each year that passes.
Never has the marxist programme been more clearly vindicated, never has revolutionary leadership been more sorely needed; yet even in the aftermath of the collapse of stalinism, which should have provided a fresh stimulus to socialist debate, there has been no corresponding growth in the popularity of socialism or the self-confidence of socialists.
It is almost as if the demise of the mortal enemy of revolutionary politics had dealt a body blow to marxism itself. In a sense this is a measure of the adaptation that had taken place within the marxist movement to the politics of stalinism, with its crude ‘campist’ positions and brutal parody of Leninism. 2) Exporting poverty THE MARKET system brings actual daily misery ;to billions of people. Poverty, hunger, disease, homelessness are rampant, with absolute poverty at record levels. 53% of the world’s population live in the poorest countries, with an average income of just $330 per person, sharing only 4.4% of the world’s income.
The gap between these poor countries and the advanced economies is growing: the richest countries with 16% of the world’s population had average incomes 59 times higher, sharing 78% of the total income.
The total wealth of Africa, with double the population of the USA, and despite its huge natural resources, is little Indeed the old stalinists in their ideological c1- ms = more than that of Belgium. lapse have been somewhat more resilient in Easten The total Europe, bouncing back under new names and labels, wealth of Africa, with another, dragging down with them whole layers of double the The pie al cook, Sata lai population of common factor in each case ts that t € politics the USA, and than their co-thinkers and fellow travellers in the west, who have reeled from one profound crisis to demoralised ‘left’ reformists. and even the rhetoric of class struggle, the battle for socialist planning against the free-for-all of the mar- despite its huge ketplace, have been displaced by an ever-increasing patural adaptation to market economics and varieties of ‘new realism’. current, a tradition of revolutionary socialism, a programme and an international movement that has not been discredited or superceded, and which is more relevant to more people today than it was when it was established in 1938.
To do this, our organisation has to strengthen its roots in the mass organisations of the working class and the oppressed, especially the trade unions and the Labour Party, building support under the banner of the newspaper. Within the labour movement we must see our role as reaching well beyond the existing layers of the organised left, building alliances capable of mobilising and politically educating new sections of youth, students, workers and others prepared to challenge the logic and fight the workings of the capitalist market system.
We have consistently orientated towards work in the mass organisations of the working class, coupled with the flexibility of work under the banner of the newspaper and the scope this gives for work with individuals, campaigns and groupings outside the traditional labour movement.
This means that we are well-placed to play a positive role in each of the battles taking shape up to and after the next gener:il election.
This document will explore some of the issues around which political development can take place, given determined intervention by our organisation. resources, is In the battles and activity ahead it is vital that we little more than keep in front of us the goal of rebuilding aculture,a that of Belgium.
The problems of poverty are worsened by interventions of the IMF, whose patent formulae for establishing capitalist market economies — privatising state _enterprises, cutting state spending, freeing up prices’ and stripping out subsidies — have brought abject mis- ‘ery to millions. Time and again, there have been angry demonstrations against food and fuel price increases and’currency devaluations ordered by the IMF.
Though privatisation has gone slowly in Africa, with less than a fifth of state firms sold off (and almost none of them the economically vital ones such as airlines, mining, telecoms or electricity) lasting damage is being done by the western- prompted reforms.
In Zimbabwe, the imposition of charges at health clinics has been followed by a tripling of numbers of a women dying in childbirth. In Zambia, the end of price controls have brought ruin to peasant maize farmers, while the textile industry, stripped of government protection, has collapsed.
In Ghana, the price of western intervention has been the sale at a knockdown price of half the government stake in Ashanti Goldfields — leaving Lonrho as the largest shareholder. The $1.4-$1.7 billion expected for the shares would increase the capitalisation of Ghana’s stockmarket by more ~ than ten times. But still there are fears that if the World Bank pulled out, Ghana’s fledgling capitalist development would collapse.
Much of Africa remains on the sidelines of the world economy. The total of foreign direct investment in the continent for 1993 was just £1.6 billion, less than 3% of global flows of investment. The latest World Bank study does not even measure this investment or bother to . assess its rate of return. China, not Africa, is the largest recipient of World Bank project funding.
By contrast, the IMF has just agreed a new £1.5 billion package to prop up the Yeltsin regime in Russia, and reinforce a $4 billion standby lo:in whichis keeping capitalist wolves from the door demanding repayments on the old USSR’s $80 billion foreign debt.
With the main imperialist powers struggling to resolve their own domestic economic problems, and seeking maximum strategic advantage from the collapse of stalinist rule in the east, there will be less chance than ever that Africa or south Asia can aitract the capital they need to construct viable capitalist econémies.
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For most imperialists there is simply not enough to lose in Africa for them to invest capital in it winning through. The law of uneven and combined development, under which newlyemerging capitalist enterprises are forced immediately to compete in a world market with the largest and most technically advanced and experienced multinationals makes it all but impossible for'Africa, Latin America or much of Asia ever to achieve more than dependent status.
Only measures running directly counter to the capitalist free market, expropriating domestic and international capital and offering a cancellation of past debts, technical aid, educational programmes and a ‘sustained programme for planned development on the basis of beneficial trade with more advanced economies can hope to rectify this imbalance.
To fight for this, marxist parties based on the working class and with a programme developing Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution are needed to lead the combined struggle for genuine independence from imperialist domination and for socialism, linking warking class and peasant struggles, and rejecting the blind alleys of collaboration with national or international capital which have led many nationalist movements astray. | 3) Will Eastern Europe go West?
THE ATTEMPTS to extend the market system into the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have so far led to an increase of misery, with a horrific 40% drop in industrial production in Russia, where 9% of enterprises are technically bankrupt, and economic and financial chaos in other ex-Soviet republics. £13 billion unpaid bank debts, leaving only Russia in default. Reactionary regimes seeking to roll back and a shortage of capital for investment.
Imperialism simply does not have the resources needed to construct new capitalist economies on the 130 million ruins and wastelands of decades of bureaucratic mis- rural management.
There will be encouraging words from the bankers, is officially privatise the nationalised economies in the ex-Stalin. acknowledged ist states face not only political obstacles at home, but to be 4 million, with a massive unemployed.
Raise the banner of socialism seeking themselves to oversee the transition to a new market system, and grab in the process a share of the pickings, the property to be privatised and the profits to be made.
Pieces of China for sale ’ THE CHINESE bureaucracy gives a crystal clear example of the readiness of stalinism to do far-reaching deals with capitalism — establishing a market system on its own terms. The Chi-’ nese economy, which in 1989 was little larger in GNP than that of Spain, is growing rapidly, but under the jealous eyes of bureaucrats unwilling to share more of the surplus than they have to in procuring western-technology and capital, and establishing a new market system under their control.
With only 62% of Chinese homes connected to electricity supplies, vast new deals are on offer to western power station manufacturers, but with future potential profits restricted to a 12% return on capital. Big capital investments in China are still unlikely as long as bankers and industrialists remain nervous about the political succession to Deng Xiaoping, and anxious at the lack of any infrastructure of legislation to protect their capital.
Itis clear that with a vast state bureaucracy seeking to exert its influence to maximise its own control over developments, the prospects of unfettered profitable investment and exploitation in China are not great for western capital.
The November 1993 Plenary of the CCP decided to take another step towards a “socialist market economic system” by setting up a new sytem of ‘modern enterprises’ as a staging post to privatisation. Some of these enterprises will be fully private, some limited corporations, and others will retain state shareholding.
Already some of the most efficient and profitable Ee terprises have been sold off — leaving the least Yet the western bankers hail as a success the fact Chinese urban that Poland has just signed a deal to repay most ofits unemployment attractive in state hands. The CCP carefully distances itself from the consequences of privatisation, declaring blandly that “Enterprises should, in accordance with the demands of the market economy, perfect and tighten up their internal management, and rigorously enforce labour discipline.” The imposition of market disciplines on enterprises also involves an attack on housing, health care and pension funds previously funded by the firm.
Thus even the enterprises that remain in state hands are imposing capitalist-style redundancies and speedup, overriding the power of workers councils and trade a few selected projects will be given cautious ik UN ONS. Chinese urban unemployment is officially acing, but as the Poles have found, this will fall far short of promoting them to the big league of a modern capitalist state. Overall, the lack of seriousness attached to investment: in-Eastern Europe was well symbolised by the ludicrous scandal of Jacques Attali and his marble-lined investment Bank, spending more on its headquarters than it lent to its target cquntries.
Levels of direct investment from the west have been growing, but are still little more than a flea-bite in comparison with the tasks involved. - As the old system collapses into crisis and cnminality, with wholesale theft and graft by the manugerial layers of the new bureaucracy, the backlash of stalinist and conservative elements links up with extreme nationalist and chauvinist forces to produce a growing political stalemate.
In more and more ex-stalinist states the old, often renamed, stalinist parties are moving back into positions of power, not to defend nationalised property or the social gains ol the masses, but knowledged to be 4 million, with a massive 130 million rural unemployed.
With the advent even of a “socialist” market in China comes the widening of class divisions and the spread of actual poverty. A recent trade union survey suggests up to 7 million families could be living 1n poverty with less than 50 yuan per month to live on: by contrast a lucky one million families have hit the big time, described by the Beijing Daily as “1 million yuan households”. The entrepreneurial top 3% of the Chinese population owns savings of 293 billion yuan, compared with the 274 billion shared between 800 million Chinese peasants. 7 Wary of allowing tensions to grow again to boiling point by provoking mass anger of the working masses, the bureaucracy has intervened to impose the traditional device of price contro!s to combat growing inflation.
Raise the banner of socialism _ SS ee ee SE Political revolution THE EVENTS in the ex-USSR, Eastern Europe and China serve to underline the basic tenets of the Trotskyist struggle for political revolution.
The 1980s, which began with the frontal challenge of Solidarnosc to the power of Poland’s Stalinist bureaucracy, saw Stalinist regimes increasingly face up to stark choices.
Even as the clung on to political power through increasingly desperate repressive measures, they were confronted with the stagnation and crisis of their economies, lagging ever further behind the technical advances in the West, yet forced to seek loans and credits from Western banks.
More and more regimes saw what at first had been passive working class resistance developing into the downright hostility of the masses. ket reforms, the masses are turning back to the revamped communist parties which are now increasingly led by managerial sectors who have some (temporary) interest in the maintenance of social property. At best this may provide some breathing space for the construction of real democratic socialist alternatives.
But there must be no illusions: the old ‘Communist’ parties, the state apparatus developed by stalinist parties in Eastern Europe and the degenerated workers’ state apparatus in thé Soviet Union, have proven themselves neither able or willing to defend either nationalised property or the historic gains of the working class after the expropriation of capital.
In Poland we have seen an old, discredited Communist Party return to implement a restorationist programme: in China we see aruthless stalinist regime using its continued monopoly of political power to enforce the re-imposition of capitalist property relations.
The fight for socialist political revolution, for socialist democracy, for workers’ control of industry and a-workers plan of Hopingsto avert a showdown and retain control, sections of the Soviet bureaucracy attempted a risky programme of structural reform (Glasnost and Perestroika), triggering a wholesale shift in bureaucratic policy throughout Eastern Europe.
But the introduction of elements of marketisation only resulted in the profound dislocation of the centralised ’command economy’. However, the limited democratic openings that the reforms entailed lifted the lid on the pent up anger of the workers, which, in turn, further propelled the disintegration of the state.
It became increasingly clear that the post-glasnost Soviet Union could not pose the military threat of intervention that had terrorised the working classes of Eastern Europe: the prison doors had been left Open, and the masses took advantage to rid themselves of hated bureaucrats: the clearest example was the events in East Germany which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. _ Without a revolutionary class party representing its interests, the proletariat was — not for the first time in history — cynically used as a battering ram against a discredited regime by alien political and class forces which have subsequently turned against it.
Facing mass unemployment, the workers in East Germany will have plenty of time to count the cost.
From then on, Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s failed reform Programme turned into a headlong, counterrevolutionary rush towards restoring capitalism, a Process aped by the other bureaucracies and newly elected governments of Eastern Europe. But the crisis has by no means been resolved. eae the contrary, Russia, and much of the ex-Soviet Union and tern Europe face an economic and social catastrophe. Bureau- liberalisation is going to make the cratic rule and the old command economy are in a state of disintegration, while at the same time it has proved impossible to restore a viable capitalist system in the short Of medium term.
Thus, Trotsky’s analysis of the counterrevolutionary character of the bureaucracy is confirmed, including his prediction that, in the absence of political revolution, attempts by the bure.ucracy to restore capitalism would only result in its own descent into criminality and the misery of the masses.
Despite the electoral advances made by some extreme nationalist, xenophobic and Populist leaders, such as Zhirinovsky in the Russian Federation, a more fundamental trend 1s descernable. Today, disillusioned with mar- L22S Bs ee iter Ee saa) We fight for socialist political revolution, for socialist democracy, for workers’ control of industry and a workers plan of production, for democratic, independent trade unions, for defence of nationalised property against Privatisation SaaS production, for democratic, independent trade unions, for defence of nationalised property against privatisation and profiteers, and for working class politics independent of the old bureaucracy and the new nationalists and pro-imperialists remains the key to the future: all .-other roads lead horribly and inexorably back to the! dark days of exploitation and — as the proliferation of ‘inter-ethnic conflicts show — barbarism.
Despite the break-up of the Soviet Union and the gairling of independence by its former republics, national rights continue to be trampled upon. Russia refuses to remove its forces from the Baltic states and has remained a key backer of Milosevic’s drive for a Greater Serbia, tacitly endorsing the Serb regime’s aggression against Kosovo, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina which has left 70% of Bosnia and 25% of Croatia under Serbian occupation. 4) GATTastrophe FANFARES in January greeted the GATT agreements ‘liberalising’ world trade to the overwhelming disadvantage of the working class and peasantry in the underdeveloped economies.
They will be the prime victims as fledgling domestic manufacturing industries, agriculture and extraction industries are exposed to the bitter blast of global competition with multinationals, and raw material prices continue their downward spiral.
As the GATT director general admitted “It is wrong to say that poor rich as a result of the Opportunity offered to them.” In fact the USA, Japan and the European Union will continue to monopolise 80% of world trade, leaving the poorest 20% of “1.195058 cope” 70, A somes ae? — 3E the world’s population to share less than 1% of trade. Poor countries are even asked to eliminate subsidies and protectionist measures, and to grow food for domestic consumpton rather than try to export cash crops on the world inurket.
Indeed even the limited ‘expansion’ which has taken place in the OECD countries, as key economies begin to clamber from outright recession, has taken place on the back of huge hidden subsidies from the oil-producing countries — where prices of £13 a barrel offer — ——— little more in real terms than the pitiful return }
before the oil shock brought 70% increases in 1973.
It is clear from the realities of world trade today that despite deals to trade technology between South Korea and China, and whatever growth might take place in Brazil, in India or elsewhere, there is no possibility of new industrial powers emerging to challenge the global domination of the present imperialist power blocs.
Raise the banner of socialism 6) Building blocs RATIONAL PLANNING and the market system are in constant contradiction with each other. So we find that behind the There is no new golden age of capitalist expansion: simply more of the old misery until the working class organises to take power in its hands and smash the market system. 5) Costing us the earth SHORT SIGHTED and reactionary regimes in the OPEC states are pumping out irrepaceable assets at such a givgaway price that alternative energy or conservation measures are not considered economic, while bland governmental phrases about the environment have done little to limit the output of green- _~. house gases. ( ) Indeed it is not only the advanced economies but ~ “also those struggling to catch up with them which are polluting the atmosphere to alarming proportions.
China and Brazil between them pumped almost a million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the air in 1987, while Japan with a GNP four times as large as both combined produced 220 tonnes.
The tide of pollution is even more serious when the leaks and discharges of radioactive and other poisonous waste products into the atmosphere, soil, rivers and seas are taken into account. The production of non-degradable plastic waste, consuming ever larger acreage in dangerous landfill dumps, is sowing seeds of disaster for future generations.
It is clear that as long as the world is driven by cost-cutting and the lust for profit these outrageous and short-sighted policies will continue to put the lives and health of millions at risk.
The environmental issue is above all one of planning, accountability and control: even in non-capitalist economies the disastrous legacy of environmental van- “»\dalism of the stalinist bureaucracies in the USSR and eastern Europe remains as an unresolved problem, even as the new, bankrupt, pro-capitalist regimes attempt to join the market.
Even while it fails to feed, house or educate hundreds of millions, the plundering market system is also taking a terrible toll of the earth’s natural resources. Not only fossil fuels, but forests and fish stocks are falling prey to the unfettered drive for profits: even the free-market fetishists of the Economist have begun calling for global policies to control fish stocks. ; ‘But such policies are ultimately only enforcible through a planned food policy, which in turn demands an end to the competition of the free market, so that fishing crews, like farm workers are guaranteed a decent stan: !::rd of living without having to strip bare the natural assets of the oceans.
Netherlands. facade of growing cooperation displayed at the G7 summits, the basic thrust of the market is increasingly dividing the‘advanced economies into three main trading blocs, headed by the USA, Japan and the European Union. ‘ Each bloc, and sometimes each major partner within each bloc, is primarily intent upon maximising its share of markets and preferential deals in the developing and underdeveloped countries, and each is seeking its ewn inroads into Eastern Europe.
The North American Free Trade Agreement cements a US-led alliance of USA, Canada and Mexico. In exchange The environmental issue is above all one of planning, accountability and control: the disastrous legacy of environmental vandalism of the stalinist bureaucracies in the USSR and eastern Europe is an unresolved problem taly Belgium: ~ France § “Average UK:
Spaln Ireland Greece Portugal Ecus a Source: OECD- . for lessening the pressure on Mexico to repay its $100 billion foreign debt, and erecting protective barriers to ward off competition for Mexican firms from Europe and Japan, the deal allows US and Canadian monopolies privileged access to the Mexican market, while acting as a stalking horse for US efforts to break into other world markets.
Under the guise of NAFTA, the USA is seeking to . prise open restricted markets in Asia and around the Pacific Rim countries, previously seen as more the preserve of Japan.
The Japanese remain the dominant voice of an increasingly powerful bloc of Asian countries where Japanese capital has played a key role in developing modern industries — notably South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia. Japan is currently funnelling additional investment into Indonesia and southern China.
The most vexed relations arise in the European Union, where the attempts to forge acommon trading bloc wielding political clout comparable to its economic strength run repeatedly into the conflicting national interests of substantial national bourgeoisies.
Nonethless, the fear of intense competition from NAFTA, together with the storm clouds from the dynamic Pacific-rim economies dominated by Japan, reinforce the dynamic towards European integration. i “Inctude emotoyers’ comnbdutions i lo social secuNTy 8Nd Ovals i insurance schemes and, 3 in aGdnton, pay 'or lime s nol worked AIST CODE OO NO DON IIE 28. ‘ers d0 15 . 20 ‘ Le ee EE ee eee 5
. Raise the banner of socialism a |S FSP ERAE SANE CAS) EH PH DIMPLN AT SOS AAS P ASO URS 7D EAA A SSBCHO MUNA SAREE OME OME SCRE IES SAE IEY A RETRUR IT OEE OS ANE T Ty ERPS The capitalist project for Europe was frozen half way between a simple free-tade zone (which the British Euro-sceptics want to retain) and a real federal state (which they totally reject). The Single Act and the Maastricht treaty were attempts to move forward beyond this untenable situation with the creation of, amongst other things, a common currency. The creation of a political and military authority was scheduled for later.
The more far-sighted European bourgeoisies have aimed at economic rationalisation on a European-wide scale. They pressed for a European Monetary System (EMS) and a Europe wide curb on government spending to rein in costly welfare states. Both North America and Japan have comparatively minimal social welfare programmes and larger, more efficient industries.
Though the ERM collapsed, the same programme is now being introduced through the back door, designed to bring the different states into line and further their integration, making the EU competitive with the other major blocs.
The ERM crisis and the subsequent attempts (0 ee defend the pound wiped out huge exchangereserves Political and economic the weakness of national banks in the face of the union, on the floating capital of international speculators and Maastricht formula, could only reduce It also brought into sharp focus the huge budget eyen further the in Britain (at least £15 billion), with similar losses in France, Italy and the Spanish state. This exposes bankers, of which $900 billion is exchanged daily (three times the combined exchange reserves of all the G7 countries). deficits building up in many European countries, making an onslaught on welfare spending inevitable limited if the EU countries are to meet the new Maastricht democratic accountablity of those with ment, privatisations, speed- up, new managment Power, the techniques, massive cuts in the social wage (even capitalist class limit of 3% of GDP.
The result of the Maastricht process is already making itself felt in the growth of mass unemploylegaly imposed limits to the levels of welfare spend- Europe’s workers hit back 7) New tides of struggle As fiscal deficits grow and the recession bites deeper into the countries of western Europe, compounded by high German interest rates and deflationary policies imposed by the Maastricht process, unemployment snowballs.
Countries like Britain, Italy and Spain are faced with huge deficits and catastrophic cuts in public spending (the richer, more efficient economies, dominated by Germany have fared a little better).
The full brunt of market-forces, privatisation, rationalisation, deregulation, and new management techniques, is being felt by the working class.
But the situation is not all gloomy. Even the British media have reported the waves of unrest and worker mobilisations sweeping continental Europe. TV screens in March showed images reminiscent of May ’68, as French youth mobilised in militant and often violent demonstations in every major city, forcing a humiliat-_ ing climb-down by the Balladur government over i” cheap labour policy. This important victory followec . on from other struggles by farmers, fishermen and, most importantly, the victory of the struggle of Air France airport workers and engineers who beat back 4,000 redundancies last October.
We have also seen mass struggles demonstrate the fighting strength of the working class in many other European countries. @ltaly has seen public services and much of industry shut in a four hour general strike against government economic policies, while mass demonstrations in the big cities protested against 11% unemployment, a goving), all of which compound the effects of the reces- and its ernment wage freeze and a tax system which allows sion, and erosion of democratic rights. representatives. employers to evade contributions. Strikes and occupames (0S, some successful, have fought redundancy. There Euro-betrayal This is why it is a major betrayal of working people everywhere that the Labour Party and union leaders fully support the creation of the EU, using the pathetic fig-leaf of the unenforcable Social Chapter as their justification.
Across the continent, the picture is the same. Workers’ patties, whether social democratic or revamped communist parties, have been roped in to support the capitalist strategy. This class collaboration has led toa further step away from any concept of socialism and Open embrace for the capitalist market —a ‘Euro new realism’ which has failed miserably to provide any alternative to the Capitalist crisis.
Political and economic union, on the Maastricht formula, could only reduce even further the limited democratic accountablity of those with power, the capitalist class and its representatives.
The losers must be those over whom that power would be exercised, the working class of Europe.
Externally, European Union represents increased danger of new world recession and pressure towards intensified inter- imperialist competition and trade wars. have been huge demonstations, 200,000 in Rome, against austerity and corruption, organised by the factory councils with a key role played by the Party of Communist Refoundation. 50,000 Italian women demonstrated on International Women’s Day. @In Germany, too, there have been repeated displays of growing militancy. 120,000 building workers demonstrated in Bon. against government plans to scrap winter lay-off payments. Miners occupied a power station that was threatening to switch to cheap imported coal, and organised a 60,000 strong demonstration against theatened job cuts. October saw demonstrations of the unemployed in numerous cities and towns. Stee! workers ive have been in action, anu uieic weie eal tears in the government and among employers of a threatened strike by the giant IG Metall = 8 union, after warning strikes by 1.2 million early in @ In Belgium, 150,000 have marched in Brussels, the biggest mass demonstration for many years, against the attempt by the government to impose a ’social pact’. __ | The Netherlands has been rocked by a huge demonstration in Amsterdam, the biggest by Dutch workers since the war. @ Spanish workers have fought back against austerity plans of the Gonzalez government, with militant regional days of action in December and a devastating one day general strike in January.
The Spanish resistance is one of the few that appears to have found any echo in the upper echelons of the mass workers’ parties, widening the gulf between Gonzalez’s *modernising’ wing and the more traditional social democrats headed by his One-time ally, Guerra’ ‘ a
Raise the banner of socialism BO 2 £5 6 WARNS LESTE ASUAN ANd ARN RIAN AVES | BUR 9 AEN SRI AT LIBAN AR AOE IS SOLS MTL TN PNT TE | But in general, though the German struggles raise a possibility of electoral defeat for Chancellor Kohl’s Christian Democrats, the reformist leaders echo the spineless performance of the British Labour Party.
The new militancy has not forced the mass workers’ parties to out of their torpor and years of class collaboration. The left in France remains in deep crisis, while the revamped Italian CP, which — after years of failed efforts to secure a ‘historic compromise’ deal with the Christian Democrats — led the alliance of the left in the Italian elections, failed to present any credible alternative.
This failure of the left to take its chances in Italy allowed the victory of right-wing populism in the form of Berlusconi, and, even more dangerous, the substantial strengthening of the main party of Italian Fascism, which vas 8 The continuing pressures of the market system In every country of Europe racism and national- have forced a component of his right wing alliance.
Eyes right ism are on the increase. Harassment is anevery new day part of life for Black people. This has been polarisation \led by governments — including sections of the “former Stalinist bureaucracy — who have attempted to use racism and nationalism both for with the their own electoral advantage and to head offthe Emergence of new working class militancy, far-right.
In Germany restrictions on asylum rights were supported by all the major parties, including the SPD. ‘Liberal’ Sweden has tightened up on asylum rights. but also across Europe, part a product of the social and political crisis and decay of Italian capitalism — far outweighs the MSI’s actual membership. Moreover, the Italian workers’ movement remains far from decisively defeated.
Although the far-right parties have been able to make significant electoral gains they have not been able to turn'their electoral support into real fascist movements except in Serbia and, to a much lesser extent, Croatia. !
Of course there are gangs of fascist thugs in every European country. Even one fascist is too many, and clearly they need to be combatted. But, for the moment, they remain relatively small, even in Germany, where the historic tendency of fragmentation on the far left appears matched by fragmentation of the ultraright. _.
Nor is electoral support for the far-right necessarily a clear vote for fascism: on the whole it is a vote for extreme nationalist solutions. In Russia, whilst Zhirinovsky may bea fascist (and that is by no means clear) the vast majority of his voters are not.
Two significant obstacles stand in the way of fascist movements coming to power in the foreseeable future.
Firstly, not a single important section of the bourgeoisie (including in Italy) or the would be bourgeoisie of Eastern Europe (including Milosevic) favours such a solution. Secondly, the workers’ movement through- ‘ out Europe has not suffered crushing defeats.
However continued economic crisis, coupled with the’ inability of the traditional working class parties to combat the bosses’ offensive or resolve the crisis, in the interests of the working class will create conditions in which far-right, including fascist, parties can grow. strengthening In France four immigrants were killed by the police within the first week of the Balladur government coming to office. deportations of Jamaicans over Christmas, the opening of Campsfield, the hunger strikes of Algerian detainees and the refusal of the government to allow large numbers of Bosnian refugees into Britain.
Expulsions of Romany communities have taken place throughout East Europe. In former Yugoslavia we have witnessed concentration camps and massacres on a scale unprecedented since the second world war.
Alongside official attacks on immigrant communities there has been a sharp increase in physical attacks, including murders.
Fire-bombings of immigrant houses and hostels or of synagogues have occurred in Germany. In Britain racist murders have taken place in numerous cities. Even in countries such as Spain - with little recent history of racist violence - there have been murders of Romanies and immigrants.
Increased official racist measures have not meant a decline in support for the far-right - with the partial exception of France.
Pandering to the far-right has, on the whole, led to a stepping up of their activities. In Belgium, Germany, Austria and in much of Eastern Europe the far-right remains in the ascendant. " In Russia the ultra-nationalist Zhirinovsky won 25 percent of the vote. In Serbia, whilst Seselj and other fascists saw a slight decline in their electoral fortunes, extreme Serbian nationalism remains the dominant current. And now in Italy we have seen the election victory of the populist Berlusconi, bringing the probability of fascists participating in the government.
Whilst this situation gives cause for concern we should not be led into drawing unnecessarily pessimistic conclusion. Fascism is not about to sweep across Europe.
Even in Italy, Berlusconi’s election victory opened up new conflicts with his tar-right electoral partners. the federalist Northern Leagues and the fascist MSI. The fascist vote — itself in new reactionary forces on the In Britain we have seen the mass detention and hard right.
For the moment, however, the biggest threat to Black people throughout Europe will be the tightening of anti-immigration laws and the actions of racist state institutions, particularly the police.
Sharp divisions The continuing pressures of the market system have forced a new polarisation across Europe, with the emergence of new militancy from sections of the working class, but also strengthening new reactionary forces on the hard right.
Stranded by the sidelines in this process are many intellectuals and former leading figures from the reformist left who have cracked under the ideological pressure of the 1980s and succumbed to defeatism or embraced the nostrums of new realism.
A pattern appears to emerge, suggesting that the European workers’ movement as a whole, though it has suffered damaging setbacks and faces threats from the right, has retained a fighting capacity that has been lost by the British labour movement.
Fifteen years of Thatcherism have certainly taken their toll of British working class militancy: the imposition of draconian anti-union laws — making even the reactionary restrictions on West German unions look liberal in comparison — has run far in advance of anything yet to hit other west European workers.
Also significant in this regard is the impact of the physical destruction of many of the British industrial sectors which provided the unions with their vanguard fighting forces — the docks, the mines, the piist, much of engineering.
The British experience offers a stark warning to the workers of Europe: if they do not continue to resist and develop a political response to the post-Maastricht offensive, they too could find their fighting strength attacked and undermined.
Raise the banner of socialism 8) Britain and Europe Major pushed by Union The attempt to erect a ‘democratic’ facade — a European Parliament with powers to override national parliamentary authority — to conceal the concentration of bureaucratic power has run alongside more crucial moves to assert centralised control over economic and social policy (Maastricht) and the ill- fated attempt at monetary union.
These moves have triggered divisions in sections of the European bourgeoisie, and some close-run referendum votes, but no crisis greater than the ongoing and deep split in the British Tory Party, torn as it is by British capitalism’s historic economic, military and political links with the USA and with the countries of the former empire.
After apparently succeeding in holding sufficient Tory Euro- sceptics in line to link up with Labour and the Liberals and push through ratification of Maastricht, Major has been plagued again by the chauvinist hostility to Europe that is rife in a large section of his own party.
For two or three days he toyed publicly with the idea of making an electoral virtue out of obstructing the expansion of the EU over the issue of minority voting rights, with Major’s team posing as the hardline defenders of ‘British interests’ against the European Union, branding Labour’s timid Europhiles as the ‘poodles of Brussels’. For a few fleeting hours, Major won the hearts of his ‘Euro-sceptic’ back-benchers — only to incur their anger and almost universal hostility when he then rapidly climbed [ante Os Ia be nae sae fl The only ‘democracy’ at stake in the EU is the right of the Tory government to block ‘socialist’ legislation from Europe, on such issues as the 48-hour week ‘ ignominious fudge further discrediting the government with its supporters as well as its opponents.
Her Majesty’s missing opposition ’ On Europe as on so many issues, the task of preserving John Major from the wrath of the electorate and the anger of his own back- benchers falls on the shoulders of John Smith’s miserable crew of Labour ‘modernisers’.
Labour since Kinnock has been tied hand and foot to the European Union. Now, with the probability of social democrats assuming the driving seat of the European Parliament and Labour probably wiping out most Tory MEPs, there is no doubt that sections of the Labour Party will look to Brussels rather than Westminster as the best hope of acquiring influence and achieving reforms.
The TUC and key unions such as the GMB have already drawn this defeatist and deluded conclusion and set up offices in Brussels even while they prune back activity at home.
For socialists, the fundamental objection to the EU as a bosses’ alliance against the European and interna>* tional working class retains all its validity. The grink consequences of the racist Schengen agreements and 9) Global jobs crisis the proposals to tighten restrictions on entry to Fortress Europe are beginning to be seen; the Europe- wide coordination in the cynical carve up of Bosnia in pursuit of a wider deal with the Serbs also spells out the logic of greater political union between the impedown. Against him now is not only the Europe issue and the so- rialist powers of western Europe. itself, but his political judgement in picking a fight called ‘Social While tactical advantage can on occasion be gained he could not win. a Chanter by exploiting the divisions between different sections The whole scheme lacked credibility from the apter beginning. Having swallowed the camel of Maastricht, which strips nation states of key areas of discretion in economic policy, Major was straining on the gnat of how many votes are required by a minority of states in the EU to block new legislation. But with Tory ministers claiming the BMW take-over of Rover as evidence of the ‘success’ of their industrial policy, it is obvious there is little nationalistic pride left in a government which has entirely embraced a world view based on the cash values of the market system.
Patriotism is transparently here, in Dr Johnson’s memorable phrase, the last refuge of the scoundrel. T It is clear that the only ‘democracy’ at stake is the right of the Tory government to block ‘socialist’ legislation from Europé, On such issues as the 48-hour week (viciously opposed by Tories), protective legislation on child labour, and of course the so- called ‘Social Chapter’, through which the German and other bourgeotsies seek to prevent themselves being under-cut in world markets by their wage-cutting, welfare-slashing British rivals, and by historically low-wage economies in Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey.
But since Major has no long-term strategic alternative but to ally the weakened British } capitalism with the superior might of the EU, any tactical ploy of posing as hardline rejectionists could only backfire on the Tories in the longer term, and rapidly degenerate into an 1970=100 1970 75, American manufacturing Employment of the European bourgeoisie (and, for example, demanding superior EU provisions for health and safety or worker representation), the goal must be to break up this reactionary alliance. We are against Europe of the bosses, and for a Europe of the workers.
Just as we reject the absurd reformist delusion that socialism within a particular country can be achieved through parliament, sO we reject as even more absurd any notion that the European Parliament could be transformed through elections or the activity of socialist MEPs into a Socialist United States of Europe. In this respect, Euro-reformism, by diverting even further away from % any notion of class struggle at home against your ‘own’ bourgeoisie, is even more pernicious in the workers’ movement than the more traditional reformist politics.
However the growing interconnection of industry and the common dangers and struggles of workers in different EU countries underlines the importance of building genuine international links at the base of the trade unions, and of European-wide campaigns.
The joint work ith European sections of the FI on the Bosnia campaign, one of the biggest issues in European politics, represents the kind of initiative, based on international working class solidarity, through which the Fl can make its mark Europewide, and develop its political line. ‘
z Raise the banner of socialism The Detroit spinners FOR THE CENTRAL players in the capitalist market there are strategic structural problems to be resolved. The March G7 summit in Detroit showed the varying attitude of the governments of the seven richest countries to the growing tide of unemployment created by their policies at home.
Of 35 million officially deemed unemployed in the ‘west’, 20 million are in Europe, causing social tensions and potential problems for governments.
But while Bill Clinton and the British Tories press ruthlessly ahead with free market deregulation aimed at slashing wages and welfare spending to reduce overheads for employers, Japanese capitalism remains wedded to the Keynesian policies which elsewhere died with the post-war boom.
Cushioned by their vast trade surplus and competitive advantage in world markets arising from high rates of investment, Japanese ministers are still pumping extra cash into infrastructure schemes to boost the economy and of the capitalist market economy to take on an employer threatening redundancies by staging strikes and occupations, demanding the opening of the books and a policy of work sharing with no loss of pay.
Without such policies and fighting leadership, or even serious nationwide campaigns for a 35 hour week, workers can be persuaded to accept what to them often seems a relatively large lump sum of redundancy money rather than risk an untertain outcome to a half- hearted fight.
The policy of work sharing and the 35 hour week is also important for organising the unemployed alongside the unions — an anathema to the British union bureaucracy, who rejected any attempt at organising the unemployed in the early 1980s, threatening sanctions against Trades Councils which persisted. The consequences of this failure of the Britsih unions are pinfully clear for all to see.
In Europe, however, campaigns are growing again for the 35 hour week, and we should promote these while attacking the TUC’s abandonment of the unemployed. Local campaigns should be mounted aimed at mobilising and warning the G7 against “imprudent dismissals which In the USA, 90% __ organising part-timers, casual workers and the unemignore the feelings of employees”, and stresstheneed of the 1970 ployed. for redundant workers to be offered new jobs. wenetilievees Meanwhile in Europe the right wing French gov- 7 ’ ernment has run into a wall of militant oppositionto produced Tory fiddles can’t hide its plan to slash the wages of young workers, and angry protests have greeted austerity and redundancy packages in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium.
Best of a bad job?
UNDERLYING the global rise in unemployment is the rapid decline of employment in manufacturing industry, and of manufacturing as a percentage of the GDP of the advanced economies.
Of the advanced economies, only in Japan is the manufacturing workforce now larger (by 20%) than it was in 1970. In Britain, by contrast, the decline has been the most dramatic, to just 45% of the numbers employed in 1970. The demise of much British manufacturing has been accompanied by a worsening in the balance of payments, as consumer goods have been imported in ever larger quantities, while British firms have ever less variety ) of goods to export.
Just one British worker in five is now employed by a manufacturing firm, and one in six in the USA, compared with one in three in Germany and Japan. But this decline has run alongside a big increase in manufacturing productivity. In the USA, 90% of the 1970 workforce produced almost double the 1970 output in 1992.
Many of these industrial jobs have been switched to plants in lower-paid developing countries, often by subsidiaries of the same multinational firms. 40% of the output of British firms is now produced abroad. Other one-time bedrock manufacturing industries have been eclipsed by competition from abroad: in Britain, textiles, motorcycles, cars, shipbuilding, much electronics and now even coal mining have been largely wiped out and replaced by imports. Millions more jobs have been eliminated by technological advances, decimating the skilled workforce in print and other industries.
Organise the unemployed The scourge of unemployment is one of the most difficult to combat through normal trade unionism. It requires strong organisation and a high level of consciousness about the nature almost double the 1970 output . in 1992.
SS | jobless queues In Britain, repeated Tory claims that the recession is over and recovery under way sit uneasily alongside almost daily news of mass sackings reaching beyond the manufacturing sector deep into previously ‘secure’ service industries such as banking, insurance and retail: even Telecom management have been facing the axe, as have nurses, doctors, civil servants and council workers.
Official figures (fiddled no less than 29 times since 1979 in an effort to produce lower numbers) show just under 3 million on unemployment benefit: this figure will appear further reduced Working elsewhere Manufacturing employment % of total labour force ranked by change 0 % 10 20 30 South Korea Taiwan Singapore Ga 1961 1991 Malaysia |= Thailand Indonesia Japan ttaly Germany* Pyss— ae Canada France Britain | United States Sources: ILO; Tatwanese national statistics
Raise the banner of socialism ESS Se MN 2 a a a ‘ ‘Manufacturing when the dole is limited to just 6 months payments, although just as many people will be out of work.
Even now this official figure is hopelessly in- | 32 accurate. Recent surveys show that to measure the real numbers unemployed we must add over a million seeking work but unable to claim benefits, and another million who have for a month or more given up seeking work, but are not eligible for benefits.
In other words at least 5 million are currently : out of work in Britain, with between 3-5 million more trapped in the twilight of part-time or shortterm contract work giving no security. This vast © waste of human resources also compounds the Tory financial problems: jobless people do not pay taxes. shrinks UK manufacturing output as % of GDP 72 76 "e488 92 Even this understates the qualitative weakening of most British unions, where historically powerful industrial shop stewards movements and industrial unions such as the NUM have drive forward the wages struggle. The loss of these vanguard forces has yet to be compensated by the emergence of new, combative elements in the organisation of workers in the service sector.
A range of New Management Techniques, ranging from short term and individual contracts (now even ‘nil hours’ contracts offering no guaranteed wage week to week), and the abolition of most previous employment protection not only worsens conditions, but makes the fightback more difficult. Despite some important victories —two of them involving our comrades — the pace Nor can they buy much onthe miserable bread-li1e TTT Of victimisations continues to increase with a consebenefits available in Major’s Britain.
Not surprisingly, the economy is still deep in crisis, tered out in the new year as workers prepared for the blast of new tax increases to take effect, robbing the ‘average family’ of £7-£10 per week from April.
Some £20 with little evidence of any more than superficial im- billion was given provements. The pre-Christmas spending spree pe- in tax cuts to top earners from 1988 — quent loss of activists. : .
The problem is compounded by the relative strengthening of the grip of full-time union officials, as lay and unofficial structures have weakened and collapsed. This helps reinforce the grip of new realism and the defeatist right wing, and lay the groundwork for future retreats and betrayals.
Even among the employed, fewer workers now almost half the feel secure enough or rich enough to afford a house, even with sharply reduced mortgage interest payments. present public spending deficit.
Runaway profits Despite all of the cuts in working class living "EEE The Jatest evidence suggests that once again the Britstandards imposed since Thatcher took office, the fundamental weakness of the remaining rump of British manufacturing industry leaves the economy at the mercy of the slump in Europe.
The de-industrialisation of Britain has wors- & ened the balance of payments crisis, while the [a relentless Tory attack on the infrastructure indus- E ; tries — coal, steel, transport — has increased unem- [= ployment and left the economy even less fe equipped to compete with modern rivals and FS more dependent on imports.
End of the conveyor belt Men’s real wages* 2 .| 1979=100 Alongside the decline of manufacturing has fs data come the expansion of jobs in the service |* sector, ranging from retail and catering through to finance, computing and design. }4 However the service sector is also suffering |2.2 a squeeze on jobs. Privatisation in Britain and elsewhere of what were state-owned utilities and services has triggered a new wave of job cuts and sub- contracting, slashing jobs and working conditions for millions more workers. * The break-up of the historic centres of proletarian power, the big factories and centres of manufacturing, has struck a major blow at trade union strength. And while drastically reducing the numbers of traditionally ‘male’, full-time jobs, the rise of the service sector has created grow :ng numbers of part-time and casual, often low-paid woik tc an increasingly unorganised woikforce, many of them women.
The British trade union movement has been especially hard hit by this international phenomenon. Traditionally strongly organised, it has suffered a combined rise in unemployment and a rapid drop in union membership, down to just 38% of the workforce, having lost 4.5 million members since 1979. ish bourgeoisie is resorting to its traditional practice as profits have begun to recover from the low point of the recession: capitalists have been taking the money and running, with little sign that they intend to invest in expanded productive capacity.
While consumer spending has increased by a modest 5% since the recession officially ‘ended’ at the beginning of 1992, business investment has sharply declined, to 20% below its peak of 1990. As the Economist, warning that this underinvestment is the ‘age-old British disease’, warns: “As a result, the following pattern is familiar: the recovery, while still young, uses up all the economy’s =] spare capacity; the balance of trade sinks deeper into 4] the red as imports increase; inflation soars. This time mgrrerrecrrnee 4 ; »| comparable period of the previous recovery.” The cash generated by profits expected to grow by another 15-20% this year will be frittered away in 3] dividends to rich shareholders or invested overseas. *| Thisis a formula for short term fits and starts of growth — that do nothing to tackle the underlying problems. It also sets up the likely economic scenario for a possible Thirsty investors Dividend, profits, investment. 1979 = 100, adjusted for inflation. 7 === Dividend : payouts 5, — Investment == Gross trading profits ge 1979 80 81 82 83 84 85 86. 87 88 89 9 91 ‘92 B Source: Datastream — ee — the economy seems even more unbalanced than in the « ww f
Raise the banner of socialism return of a Labour government, which will inherit a capitalist economy weaker, more unstable and more subject to external pressures than ever before.
The Debt Mountain One of the reasons investment remins at a low level is that free market liberalism has largely failed to resolve the world fiscal crisis and clear up the huge state budget deficits, which include not only the crippling package comprising the biggest tax hike ever in peace time, alongside far-reaching measures to attack welfare state benefits.
Taxes went up with increased national insurance contributions, cuts in mortgage tax relief, a decision not to increase personal allowances this year in line with inflation, new taxes on insurance and on air travel, and of course the extehsion of VAT to heating fuel.
Five million public sector workers were told they face/a three year pay freeze.
The welfare cuts were sweeping in their scope. Unemployment benefit will be cut to give just six months cover, with unemployed workers obliged to sign a ‘job-seekers agreement’ designed to Third World debt but also the gigantic trillion- gas force acceptance of low-paid work. Invalidity, sickness dollar US deficit and growing debts in Europe.
The long wave of stagnation and recession simultaneously increased the social security costs of grow- been convinced ing unemployment while it reduced government by years of experience that revenues through loss of taxes. Further cuts in state spending ¢ on capital projects and services — cut outgoings, but also increase unemployment and they can get deepen the recession, further undermining tax re- away with deep-going cuts ceipts. In the USA, even the Reagan ‘boom’, pumpprimed by colossal militry spending, widened the , :
Jeficit, and forced up interest rates asthe government !n social was forced to borrow on the money markets to bridge security the gap.
In Britain, the deficit has grown to such an extent Sea oil has prevented a much earlier crisis.
British bourgeois tradition of investing abroad. 60% of British capital investment goes abroad — more UNIONS easily since Thatcher’s deregulation of the City - es and 45% of British manufacturing activity takes place overseas.
Counting the cost of tax cuts On top of this fundamental problem of sluggish or non-existent recovery, the British budget gap has been widened by the profligate tax hand-outs to the rich in the final years of Chancellor Lawson’s. reign at Number 11 Downing Street, in which some £20 billion was given to top earners from 1988 — almost half the present public spending deficit.
The combination of minimal growth and huge debts is a sure-fire recipe for crisis.
The British economy after 15 years of Tory rule is to use Ken Livingstone’s phrase ‘technically bankrupt’.
With a public sector deficit projected at £50 billion in 1994-5 and growing, abalance of payments deficit running at over £20 billion a year, little révenue to be gained from new privatisation, and no hope of serious largescale economic growth, the Tories have had no option but to resort to massive cuts in spending on the welfare state accompanied by hefty tax increases, taking care to target these on the working class and the poorest who are judged least able to fight back and defend themselves.
Kenneth Clarke’s November budget accordingly put forward a Unemployment Males and females:
Thousands, UK.
The Tories have benefits with as to threaten the bankruptcy of the state; only North little or no resistance from The problem has been exacerbated by the historic the trade < Males e=um Females and disability benefits will be scrapped. Instead a new, rigorous ‘incapacity benefit’ will be introduced, designed to withdraw payments from tens of thousands of claimants with disabilities.
Pensioners get just £1.30 extra, or £1.85 for acouple, leaving British pensioners among the paupers of Europe. Women workers face an extension of the retirement age to 65 by 2020 — robbing a whole generation of women.
Local authority cash is to be cut by 3% in real terms in 1994-5, bringing more redundancies and cuts in services, while council tax bills go up by an average 7%. Spending on secondary schools is to be cut as a result by 2-3%, leading to further redundancies and clostres: John Patten is reportedly planning to axe up to 1,000 schools after the local and European elections this year. In higher education, student grants are to be cut by another 10%.
Government cash for housing is slashed by another £150m, with new regulations designed to exclude thousands of families from their right to rehousing.
Other government spending will also be slashed back by billions, bringing fresh crises in infrastructure projects including public transport. 10) Farewell to welfare?
THE IMPLICATIONS of these measures are far-reaching.
In the short-term this year’s tax increases have already chopped off the pathetic beginnings of the promised green shoots of recovery. In the longer term the changes being made to the welfare state pose a massive threat to the well-being of every working class household.
The Tory economic strategy is leading to a society where employed workers — often eking out an existence on low-paid part-time work — struggle to keep their heads above water under a permanent threat of unemployment, while a mass of permanently unemployed workers are pauperised. The old, the sick and those with disabilities would eo to the wall unless they are rich.
This ts ‘Back to Basics’ with a vengeance — back to the Thirties, before the welfare state, the brutal years of the means test, cuts in the dole, * hunger and sickness. Major doesn’t yet Source: Datastream
Raise the banner of socialism a ER aD SS feel strong enough to seek immediate destruction of the entire welfare state: but he intends to do it serious damage before the next election.
Who’s afraid of the unemployed?
The Tories have been convinced by years of experience that they can get away with deep-going cuts in social security benefits with little or no resistance from the trade unions or a largely ignorant electorate.
They know that Smith’s Labour leadership, trapped in its de facto economic consensus with the government, is also looking at possible ways of limiting welfare spending, perhaps by ‘targeting’ of benefits — and is thus poorly placed to wage a defence of the unemployed and claimants.
But this weakness is not new. In its lack of concern for the problems of those in deepest poverty in Britain, the Labour leadership reflects not only the politics of new realism but also the traditionally narrow con- In eleven cers of sections of the trade union bureaucracy and regions of the the layer of activists which controls the Party. This blind spot has always damaged Labour’s ability to working class.
As they plan to cut dole payments to just six months, the Tories will remember how easily and lated unemployment benefits in the early years of Male Thatcher’s government, with barely a whisper of opposition from Labour or the unions. country the mobilise the support of the very poorest layers of the Number of women at work exceeds the silently they managed to scrap the old earnings-re- Number of men. unemployment own party.
Similarly, successful broad-based local campaigns have been built in defence of threatened hospitals and NHS services, linking health workers with patients and local communities. As the devastation caused by the Tory NHS reforms-becomes ever more apparent, such campaigns can play a key role in uniting opposition and strengthening the fightback in more towns and cities.
With a properly-resourced campaign mounted by civil service and other trade unions, it would be possible to rally sections of employed and unemployed workers to defend threatened social security benefits, and to put the defence of the welfare state right at the centre of political attention.
Equally, local campaigns could be built by local government and other unions jointly with Labour Parties, pensioners and other pressure groups, on the issue of social services cuts, and on the housing cuts and new legislation.
Teachers unions could also link up with parents, school students, community organisations and Labour Parties against the new round of cuts in education.
To take up these questions, our organisation must fight for a broad campaign in defence of the welfare state to be the key priority of the left in the unions and Labour Party, and for this campaign to be taken up Ry : the labour movement as a whole.
It would be a disaster for the workers’ movement to “watch the welfare state being dismantled without a finger being lifted to defend it.
The existing leaderships of the public sector trade unions have shown themselves to be incapable of defending the welfare state from the Tory’s onslaught.
Part of the fight to defend the welfare state has to be the fight for class struggle leaderships within the trade The imposition of the cash-limited Social Fund, is at 14% ofthe unions. offering miserable loans to desperate people in place workforce, the highest level since the 1930s.
The community care reforms, which are nOW Start- _uppeeeeeeeeeeees of the previous system of special needs payments, has brought misery to hundreds of thousands of claimants, but was implemented largely unnoticed. ing to rob tens of thousands of elderly people of hundreds of millions as it forces them to sell their homes and spend their life savings to pay for their own health care, also went through on the nod, with the actual support of dim-witted and indifferent Labour leaders.
Clarke clearly hopes and expects that his plans to strip invalidity benefits from many thousands of people, and his attacks on sickness benefit can be accomplished with similar passive acquiescence from Labour leaders, the TUC, civil service unions and wider interest groups.
There is no doubt that these latest planned cuts have an even more sinister significance: if Clarke gets away with these measures, he, with Thatcherites Portillo and Lilley, will immediately be back with even more far-reaching plans to slash away at the dwindling welfare state. Fresh attacks on pensions appear to be next on the Tory agenda.
The scandalous failure of TUC or Labour Party to mount any fight for these benefits is no longer any surprise, but must be combatted by a campaign within the labour movement, linking anti- poverty groups, organisations of the unemployed, trade unions and Labour Parties.
The vocal campaign by pensioners’ groups on the issue of VAT on heating fuel, whici, almost unaided by a reluctani and feeble Labour Party. galvanised a nationwide movement of petitions, lobbies and meetings, showed that it is possible to unite and mobilise sections affected by attacks on the welfare state.
Though they did not force the withdrawal of the tax, or succeed in persuading Labour to repeal it, the pensioners did win cash concessions from the Tories, keeping the issue at the top of the political agenda and raising the possibility of splits in Major's A good example of the impact the left can have is in education, where the NUT has only been forced to continue its boycott of SATs tests as a result of the consistent campaigning pressure of the Socialist Teachers Alliance.
The STA has successfully underlined the threat SATs pose to a continuing system of comprehensive state education, while the other teaching unions have capitulated on the issue without any organised resistance from their membership.
Women at sharp end of crisis Campaigning on these issues must address the particular impact of the Tory offensive on women, who stand as the main losers in the economic offensive and the ‘back to basics’ campaign.
Fundamental shifts in employment patterns have undermined the traditional “family values’ which the Tories claim to support.
There is little scope for working class men to act as the ‘breadwinner’ in the household.
The expansion of the service sector since World War 2, with women as the key component of this new workforce, has run alongside the erosion of the manufacturing base in which most men have worked. Women now make up 49% of the !ubour force, and since 1970, 90% of all new jobs created in Britain have gone to women.
In eleven regions of the country the number of women at work exceeds the number of men. Male unemployment is at 14% of the workforce, the highest level since the 1930s. By contrast, just 5.5% of the female workforce is unemployed: hut these figures are deceptive. Larger percentages of jobless women do not register since they are not eligible for benefit payments, ‘and half
massive productivity increases onto low-paid women Raise the banner of socialism of those in jobs are in part-time work, often very poorly paid.
Women’s entry into the labour force, and high unemployment among men serve to undermine the traditional family unit. Single mothers are now a ‘normal’ part of society, representing 20% of all households. Many young women in areas of high unemployment see little use in having unemployed young men live with them and their children. Rootless, jobless young men, walled out from society, are in turn more likely to resort to crime and drug abuse.
But most single parent families are poor. 42% of single mothers have gross weekly incomes of less than £100, compared with 4% of married couples. Lack of nursery provision makes it very hard for single mothers to work.
Cutting the welfare state and forcing its functions back into the family, and onto women - the ultimate in ‘privatisation’ — is now a financial imperative for the Tories as they seek to slash back spending on social security from 12.3% of GDP.
Women make up the majority of the public sector workforce, with almost | million employed in the NHS alone: their jobs and working conditions have been eroded as part of every cut in public spending. Privatisation and ‘market-testing’ of services in the NHS, local government and now the civil service have forced workers. Cuts in education spending, de-skilling attacks on qualified nursing and professional staff in the new market-style NHS Trusts, and other attacks are also hitting better paid layers of women workers.
ELE TR ET pressure on the Treasury, simply underlines its real purpose. The opposition to the CSA has been extremely vocal and active.
Ironically, some of the leading spokesmen for the campaign represent the views of the organisation ‘Families need Fathers’ , which shares the government’s belief in paternal rights and responsibilities, and argues not for the scrapping Of the Act, but for the targetting of those who pay nothing — which includes those least able to pay — instead of the ‘responsible’ fathers who pay something.
While the campaign is correct in opposing the high demands of the CSA, it has suffered because of its concentration on the sectional interests of the fathers who already pay maintenance.
The CSA has been able to invoke ‘feminist’ arguments and even feminist supporters in its defence.
Feminists and socialists should oppose any measure that increases the financial dependence of women on men. Efforts to compel the support of fathers for their children by cutting social benefits to mothers discriminates against those women who choose to have children independently of men, or to make a clean and permanent. break with a broken Out of a job, or , stuck in casual or low-paid service industry hamburger-flippin g work which relationship.
Feminist campaigners against the Agency warned that the legislation was not only liable to subject women to increased risk of violence from partners they were happier to live without, but also inherently racist ‘— since half of black families of Caribbean descent are headed by single mothers.
By implication men of African, Asian or Caribbean demoralises and descent, the most likely in racist Britain to be unem- Caring - for nothing degrades them, . ployed, low-paid or in jail, would also be the most vulnerable to the Child Support Agency. If they were most youth now = deemed ‘failing to maintain’, some black men could be The toll has involved much more than jobs. Key caring services have been slashed back, forcing the burden largely onto women in the home. Psychiatric hospitals and beds have been closed, and long movement term care for the frail elderly squeezed out ofthe Which does NHS where it was provided free of charge at point nothing to of use.
Care of the elderly now centres on means-tested social services, often dumping patients (most of whom are women) into privately- run, profit-seeking residential and nursing homes. Many households are unable to pay the hefty charges involved in sending frail elderly relatives to this accommodation, and increasing numbers of working women are obliged to give up paid employment to look after mothers or other relatives at home.
Even before these changes 6.8 million people in Britain — including 17% of all women — were carers looking after adult relatives or friends. They were giving-an unwitting subsidy to the state estimated at £24 billiona year. |% This will be increasing with each year of the | Tory community care reforms (which are also supported by Labour).
Nursery provision in Britain is amongst the worst in Europe, and maternity leave is not a universal right. To make matters worse for working women, wages councils which protected the pay levels of the poorest paid have been scrapped, and now women’s retirement age is to be increased to 65.
The Child Support Agency is another part of the ‘Back to Basics’ attack, resting on the idea of support for children being a private, paternal matter, rather than a social responsibility. The tact that the maintenance money collected by the CSA does not increase the income of the custodial parent, but simply eases the also remain outside a labour attract them. ees (0 SCrap it. It has criticised the under-resourcing liable for deportation.
Soft Labour On this, like almost every attack on welfare and the public services, the response of the Labour Party has been lamentable. It has criticised the working of the CSA but refused to commit itself of community care but refused to fight its imposition of means- tested charges on the elderly. It has challenged John Major’s brief flirtation with the issue of nursery education, but avoided any firm pledge to provide universal nursery services.
This weakness not only fits in with Labour’s overall ‘new realist’ retreat from even pretending to challenge the market system, but also conforms with its historic failure to challenge the bourgeois conception of the family.
Harriet Harman, echoing generations of cloth-capped male union bureaucrats, has criticised the fact that the ‘Left’ has ‘let the issue of the family become the domain of the Right.” ‘ Marjorie Mowlem echoed the miserable prewomen’s liberation days of Labour Women’s “sections making sandwiches rather than policies when she spoke up at Labour’s women’s + conference for policies offering ‘family friendliness’.
From the same flawed starting point, Labour has also failed to grasp or fight for the issue of gay and lesbian rights, rejecting appeals to instruct MPs to vote fora lowering of the cge of consent for gay men to 16. HacKney’s Labour council has led the retreat
Raise the banner of socialism a LE SO OS ETS on the issue of positive images, seeking to dump its ‘loony left’ image before the May elections by launching a ferocious witchhunt against primary school head Jane Brown which left even John Patten in the shade.
Failure to fight the Tories on the family is just a spin-off from the general ideological collapse of the Labour Party into a wretched consensus on social and economic issues. Unless a thorough break is made from the logic of the free market system, Labour will be unable to pledge any significant reconstruction of the shattered welfare state.
Significantly David Blunkett’s latest timid policy offerings on the NHS -— the jewel in the crown of the British welfare state — step back from the previous commitment to scrap NHS Trusts, resort to renaming rather than scrapping the internal market system, and make no provision for elected health authorities.
Learning nothing and forgetting nothing from 15 years of failure to exploit the NHS issue, once again Labour has failed to use a powerful lever to polarise large sections of voters against the Tories., 11) Youth: rebels without a future The crisis of the market system means the misery of the dole queue and a blighted future for hundreds of millions of young people across the globe. The problems vary from continent to continent.
In Africa, few teenagers receive secondary schooling: in Europe, East and West, the problem tends to be the lack of jobs for school-leavers, and of jobs that can utilise the skills of graduates leaving college.
In Britain, youth unemployment is around 17%, in France 25%, in Italy 30%. In each case the problem is sharpest for those aged under 25; only in Western Germany of the G7 countries was youth unemployment lower than that of the workforce as a whole in 1992.
The unemployment — and the restricted variety of low wage, dead-end, often part-time work that is available to youth — breed alienation, demoralisation and revolt.
In some countries this revolt has taken a collective, organised and political character. In France, mass demonstrations of young workers, students and unemployed have beaten back governmentefforts to cut the wages Our current is of younger workers as part of a Reagan- style ‘job too small to creation’ plan.
But where no such collective focus and radicalisavinced it is doomed to be worse off than its parents, and and that it will never have any meaningful stake ina society geared exclusively to the needs of those with unsettling and anti-social behaviour.
Crime levels have been soaring, and the link with poverty and unemployment is so obvious it takes a order, offering a mindless consensus that anti-social yobs and thic»es should be locked up by ou: :arvel- should properly be tackled by As a Party wedded to the market system and new the labour lous boys in blue. realism, led nationally and often locally by wellheeled educated middle-aged white QCs and biblebashing social conservatives, Labour appears light whole. take on the tion has emerged, the alienation of a generation con- Organisation mobilisation of wealth and property, can lead to some profoundly unemployed and alienated youth in Tory Home Secretary to miss it. And Labour's Tony general: these Blair courts votes by outdoing the Toriesonlawand are tasks that movementasa the working class are no closer to understanding the problems of today’s working class youth. Their complacent councillor colleagues in Town Halls implement the ‘dented shield’ policy, slashing leisure services in order to implement Tory cash limits — while complaining that their smart sports cars are being stolen for joy-riding by youth who know they can never Own one.
None of the Labour establishment —certainly none of the union leaders smugly calculating their own early retirement entitlements, or seeking to disguise lost membership through bureaucratic mergers — ever gives voice to the brute anger and anguish of a betrayed generation brought up in the heartless Thatcher years, for whom there apparently is no room in the labour movement.
While it denounces the victims of the system when they lash out in unacceptable ways and impolitely show their disaffection, Labour offers no perspective whatever to rally angry youth against the main enemy — the Tory government. The Party promises nothing that would substantially change life for millions of youth already condemned to life on the scrapheap of capitalism.
The destruction of much manufacturing industry and the advance of new technology have brought a massive de-skilling of work, a decline in apprenticeships and workplace training, and also an end to the traditional ways in which young workers would enter the trade union movement, with many as shop stewards or branch officers becoming part of its structures.
Instead, out of a job, or stuck in casual or low-paid service industry hamburger-flipping work which demoralises and degrades them, most youth now also remain outside a labour movement which does nothing to attract or encourage them.
Lack of employment opportunities have also contributed to the massively increased demand for places on higher and further education courses, despite the low level of the student grant and the shortage of student accommodation.
Unions hold back from organising the multinational burger chains, hotel and catering monopolies; USDAW has become notorious for its hopeless ‘sweetheart’ deals with retail and warehouse chains, in which branches are run by middle or even senior managers; and often those workers who do fight back against their exploitation, like those at Burnsalls, find themselves left stranded by a union bureaucracy that will take no risks and offer no lead.
The Labour Party is little different. Having effectively dissolved its remaining youth work in order to attack Militant, it has retained a core of intervention in the student movement only in order to test out the ability of a fresh generation of would-be bureaucrats and councillors to control a potentially angry movement.
The top Labour and union figures recruited from the student movement — typified by Jack Straw — tell a tale of mind-crushing right wing conformism, defeatism and careerism. However, panicked by the age-profile of the Party, the bureaucracy have recently reconstituted and promoted a new youth wing, Young Labour, in a predictably undemocratic fashion.
With the mass organisations of the labour movement demonstrably indifferent to them, youth have rallied from time to time to single issue radical issues — huge turn-outs for anti-racist events, anti-apartheid, Band Aid and strong youth support for ecological issues show a potential Uiat the left as a whole, with the partial exception of Militant, has shown surprisingly little enthusiasm to tap. For the SWP, with its total lack of internal democracy, the potential threat to central discipline posed by the entry of working class youth is clearly too ‘great to contemplate, and they years away from the reality of life on forgotch COU, —_TIE 0-5 remain nooriously opposed to front organisations cil estates. ‘Traditional’ right wing reformists from ‘ which they cannot be certain to control.
EE ENE a ST REY
the system, and determine to work their way through. Others give up, drop out, play truant, steal Cars, shoplift, or indulge in more violent activity.
Self-destructive, individual forms of revolt continue to blight the lives of millions of youth. Drug, solvent and alcohol abuse working class youth nothing but repression, exploitation and disillusion.
Right out in hunt for youth IN KEY areas, where the depression is great and social tensions are at breaking point, notably in inner-city areas but also in closed coalfields, the far right have begun to tap intoa growing seam of frustration, leading sometimes considerable numbers of young workers and others into the reac- We | to allocate resources to develop; skills, iti i experience of our co-thinkers j in the world movement, allowing our members, where finances allow, to Participate in tie youth meetings and j international schools of the FT. !
The production and sales of the youth paper are essential components of all this. The Paper will allow us to draw around us a team of Liberation! Supporters, and give our youth a series of the propaganda and technical skills they will need. tionary panacea of nationalism, racism, and fascist Against militarism and war violence.
In the recession skinhead and fascist movements have grown as a visible, » aggressively active minority Jacross Europe, not least in Eastern Europe where the political vacuum left by the repression of decades of Stalinism has been filled by a variety of confused reactionary, nationalistic and religious movements.
In response, many black youth have had to lear how to defend themselves physically against a constant threat of violence, and have had to do so without any offer of collective Or Organised support. Individualism and separatism, and theoretical justifications for this, including a resort to fundamentalist religion, have also grown in different ways among various sections of black andj immigrant communities across Europe.
What we can do Our current is too small to take on the organisation and mobilisation of unemployed and alienated youth in general: these are tasks that should tens of thousands taking to the streets to beat back wage cuts We must aim at developing the kind of links between students, young workers and trade unionists that brought an upsurge of mass struggles in France, with THE WORLD recession will increase the threat of war by the imperialist countries against the developing world and the j Increasing use of military force by the UN.
The establishment of a European Union ‘Eurocorps’ points to the mechanism through which the west seeks Fae can be brought into Britain - as we have seen with the RCP’s CAM and their establishment of a School students’ CAM.
The BAe and Irangate stories show the central placing of Britain’s arms trade with regard to both the current government and to its world role, while the continuing fight to get British troops out of Ireland offers a much closer focus for youth wanting to fight militarism.
The John Pilger film on East Timor opened up new possibilities for the work we have begun to build on the issue, especially through colleges. The East Timor for young issue and the wider struggle against militarism have properly be tackled by the labour movement as shown a special appeal to young women. a whole. In the trade unions we should be argu- Workers. The International Youth Camp offers an opportunity ing for recruitment campaigns aimed at young a ETS) bring these issues together and bring young activists ‘people. In the Labour Party we should raise the demand for greater autonomy and democracy for Young Labour. New debates about how to Organise and recruit youth to the labour movement should be used to raise me Key issues homelessness and benefit rights. eter coy begin to accumulate and traina cadre of youth in the various priority areas of our intervention, es towards a situation where we can launch a youth —— with a more general appeal and a wider range or activity: a year Every year that goes by without progress in ar iia of defeat for the marxist movement. The building of a y ee met a at | be examined from the pout of « ‘ew of how we can get Closes: io the young aaa rosea and how we ca ani, ohener rey ie school youth around i ee nae fichting for their unions and grants, or cane real i fighting cuts, factory workers fighting on ve oh catering workers trying to organise a union. ven edito make ou organisation lively and apprcachable enough to attra into membership. of youth into contact with international co-thinkers. It will carry increased importance for us this year as a test of the success of our turn towards youth work. 12) Students under the Tory axe her Despite continual and intensifying Tory attacks one = education, which have involved cuts in scans —_ | science students, an funding for arts and socia cane colleges to compete in a new marketplace he numbers of students regardless of the accommo i : ‘ale have to offer, there has been no automatic fightbac —— and flows ° The student movement continues to experience ebbs t cuts f st le that brought large-scale demoustOe aw ‘ in 1986 and against student loans in 1988 and 1990, bu ‘ between.
Raise the banner of socialism oe PSP SEY, es Se The lack of any continuity of struggle matches the situation in the wider workers’ movement, and it is clear that the dominant, dampening impact of new realism has also done serious damage to the level and self-confidence of student activism.
The current crisis created by the Tory attack on higher education and their efforts to dismantle the National Union of Students demands a response from more than just students themselves.
Under new realist leadership the NUS has been weakened by its failure to mobilise any broad-based or sustained fightback in defence of grants, against loans, and for the democratic rights of students to organise without external interference.
Instead, the initiative has been handed de facto to the far left, which has attempted to step into the breach, but without any developed conception of how to unite broad sectors of students in common struggle.
The 23 February demonstration protesting the 30% cut in the grant, called by the far left, was sponsored by several college student unions. Though the turn-out reflected a new flare-up of student anger, it is still not big enough to open up the possibility for a national intervention into the student body through issues concerning students. the future of student militancy, whether or not the NUS is formally closed. struggle, and to develop if necessary some form of ad-hoc link of campaigning unions through which students can fight back for their interests. also raise not only in the teaching and lecturers’ unions but also within the wider trade union and SSUES, while labour movement the issue of defence of student reserving our political stance unions and the living standards of students.
We must aim at developing the kind of links between students, young workers and trade unionists Of defending the that brought an upsurge of mass struggles against the right to self-organisation a eae ee Balladur government in France, with tens of thousands taking to the streets to beat back wage cuts for young workers.
The development of a layer of pauperised, atomised youth and students in this country would represent a serious problem for the labour movement. We must find ways to popularise these issues as another aspect of the attack on the welfare state. _Within student unions our previous line is unchanged. We are ene to — positions in the unions where we have a base at offers us the chanc i i i ataemcen eof an effective campaign ona programme 13) Fighting racism and fascism The eruption of the BNP By the end of the 197 relegated back to the Tien National Front had been Political side-lines. There were two ely labelled the ans solely - by the ie pebion Firstly they had been eficctiv azi Front Primarily - but by no me - Nazi League. e election of Thatcher cut the | Si The lories in office were a espectabis pole of attraction for and disiitegrating, National Front actions of the Anti . Secondly, and most decisively, th &round from undemeath the fascist ede’ “nore powerful and racists than the small, Squalid to any genuine We must struggle to avert the total dissolution of mobilisations student unions as arenas for political denate and mass called by any of the main campaigns on To maximise our impact in doing this, we must key anti-racist It has only been in the last few years that the fascists, mainly in the form of the BNP, though the NF still has support in some areas, have re-emerged as a force with any base — notably with the election of Derek Beackon in Millwall.
This is not accidental. The strong Thatcher government has given way to a weak, crisis ridden government under Major. The fascists have been the main beneficiaries of the growing social crisis. A In the East Midlands, for example, the decline of the mining industry has led to a significant increase in support for the BNP amongst sections of unemployed white youth.
The overwhelming responsibility for the rise of the far-right amongst sections of the white working class lies with the Labour and trade union leaderships.
They may occasionally, like the TUC, in its leaflet for the March 19th demo, correctly identify the social issues on which the fascists feed; but the new realist leaders have failed to mount any struggle against Tory attacks. :
Any fight against the fascists in Tower Hamlets has EE iQ start by recognising the social problems of the area We should give The demonstration also shows a rough contour of critical support and putting forward proposals to resolve them.
Fighting the docklands housing crisis calls for bold measures, demanding a socialist council that will defy , restrictions and spend over the limit on housing, and encouraging occupations and squats of empty office ‘blocks, with the demand they be converted into housing. Such policies would break the law — so union and Labour leaders do nothing.
Whilst the words ‘working class’ are largely anathema to the Labour leaders the BNP has no reservations about posing as a party that somehow defends the interests of the white working class. They offer seemingly ‘radical’ solutions to impatient and desperate people, whilst all the labour movement can offer is moralism about racism being evil.
It’s evil right enough: but to defeat racism, the anti racists must fight for concrete measures that correspond to the real needs of the working class, black and white.
Although the election of Beackon was a defeat, we should not exaggerate its scale. One BNP councillor is hardly a mass fascist movement.
But the decay of inner city areas and demoralisation of isolated communities like those on the Isle of Dogs does offer the fascists hope of making further gains. We must do all we can to ensure“ old, socialist policies to unify the most downtrodden and angry sections of workers against the real enemy that has caused their misery: the Tories and the wretched system they represent that has spawned the multi-billion folly of the new Docklands on the doorstep of grinding poverty , We should also learn the lesson of Millwall, and take pre-emp- The type of initiative we heen “< va iis img era é © should be aiming towards, for ple, would be to campaign for Labour MP ; Meale, Simpson and others in th ur MPs Benn, Skinner, NUM in organising a regional t 6 ee eeilanids to join with the demonstration a ee € union and labour movement n areas where fascist vj tc black and ce develops as a Systematic threat must be prepared to ies Gene teen the labour movement tactics. It makes no sense tq —. . resolutions and electoral their refusal to confront the fesdiitielSt i ae ct oe actual and threatened violence Ps “Eee OCialists must not fe Se nities to fight —_ aan Paris nght of attacked commupractical solidar; a. VIE Own self-defence, but offe arity. Such solidarity must be acc : I y mus ountble fo threat-
t Raise the banner of socialism ened communities, and might include involvement in police monitoring organisations, workers’ defence squads, or other initiatives. In order for labour movement involvement and support to be credible and effective, it must be consistent.
In distinction to the freelance efforts of ultra-left and anarchist ‘squaddist’ responses to fascism, which often leave local people defenceless by moving elsewhere after carrying out their anti-fascist adventure, workers’ defence squads would take an ongoing responsibility for the area they cover, prioritise establishing genuine links and roots in the affected communities, and make themselves accountable to local people.
State racism Whilst most of the left - including ourselves at times - has focused on the rise of the far-right and racist murders, the much more important issue of state racism has largely been ignored.
There have been exceptions such as the response to the murder of Joy Gardner, and the work our comrades have led around Campsfield and the Communities of Resistance conference, but these have ~Yeen rare. Part of the failure stems from the nature of che main anti- racist/fascist organisations.
The Anti-Racist Alliance, whilst on paper having a very broad level of support and correct positions on Black leadership, is led by an alliance of Black careerists, Socialist Action and the Morning Star, relying for their strength on an unprincipled relationship with white trade union and Labour bureaucrats.
The potential strengths of the ARA have from the outset been limited by the bureaucratic methods and witch-hunting political hostility of its narrow leading core not only to its obvious rivals in the SWP/ANL but to any currents daring to criticise the ARA. All critics are shamelessly attacked as the ‘white left’.
These sectarian, bureaucratic tendencies underly the ARA’s lack of any democratic structure, and its repeated refusals to participate in joint events where it cannot guarantee to be in total control.
The ARA alliance itself appears to have become rather fraught, with continual conflicts with the separatist inclined Natignal Black Caucus now enlivened by the recent punch-up between Ken Livingstone and . Mare Wadsworth. 7 "Although ARA has a level of broad support, it 1s unable and unwilling to turn this into any real action. — In Belgium the anti- racist movement was able to bring 20,000 school students out on strike against racism and fascism. No such bold and controversial gestures should be expected from ARA, whose cosy relationship with new realist union chiefs would be put at risk. OS _ ; And whilst ARA has regularly raised the issue of state racism there is a major contradiction in their strategy: their primary demand is for the (racist) state to ban the BNP, and to introduce a law against racial harassment and violence, to be implemented by the (racist) police and enforced by the (racist) courts.
Today's relaunched Anti Nazi League, by contrast, 1s evel more a front for the SWP than the original 1970s version. 1 hardly involves itself in anti-r= istcampaigning excep wien there is likely to be a sizeable response. such as the demi a the murder of Joy Gardener, which would allow it to recruit. Al its activities are determined by the SWP and there ts virtually no possibility to have a say on policy, let alone influence it.
The ANL remains opposed to Black autonomy. Nevertheless, the SWP are able to utilise the NL to attract important layers a youth, including Black youth, around them - both in Britain anc close role.
Cae ee, Valuable work has been done, not least around the campaign to Campsfield and for the release of those held under the Asylum Act, in which we have played a leading | | | abroad, where the ANL is easily the best known of the British anti- racist/fascist organisations.
Youth Against Racism in Europe is largely a front for Militant.
It has, however, been able to establish itself as the organisation most interested in united anti-fascist activities - to a large extent by default, since the other organisations are usually so sectarian.
Itis the only organisation that has attempted to do serious work amongst school students and white youth on the estates! where the BNP organise. It called a one day school students strike in Tower Hamlets recently, which was supported by about 150 mainly white youth.
Whilst YRE is, in some ways, more open and democratic than either ARA or ANL, if there were any real challenge to the Militant’s domination it would almost certainly cease to be open to other currents. Despite Militant’s new found enthusiasm for the politics of Malcolm X and their professed support for Black self- organisation, this did not prevent a split in Panther, with sections accusing the Militant leadership of simply using Panther as a vehicle for recruiting to Militant.
The possibilities for us as a relatively small current outside both existing campaigns developing our antiracist work are clearly restricted: but valuable work has been done, not least around the campaign to close Campsfield and for the release of those held under the Asylum Act, in which we have played a leading role.
Itremains to be seen whether the positive experience of the 50,000-strong TUC anti-racist march on March 19, Which was the first to unite the various wings of the movement, could form the basis for fresh local initiatives uniting forces on specific campaigning issues.
We should explore all possible openings for such initiatives, and we should give critical support to any genuine mobilisations called by any of the main campaigns on key anti-racist issues, while reserving our political stance of defending the right to self-organisation, and pressing for class struggle and active solutions to the oppresson of black people and ethnic minorities by the state, the far right, or in the workplace. 14) Black liberation Suffering not only racist pressures and police harassment but also the brunt of the economic crisis through much higher unemployment, low pay, poor housing and poverty, it is scarcely surprising that many black youth and older workers have been less than inspired by the lead offered by John Smith’s Labour Party.
After Kinnock went all out to smash any possible threat arising from the growth of Black Sections as an autonomous grouping within the Labour Party, the issue appears to have died away by mutual consent: the careerists from Black Sections have made their peace with new realism and slid into the Labour establishment, while the more militant elements angrily turned their backs on a Party which did not want them or other militant black halleging right wing policies. .
TT hese pntoanosalteh 1 GWU leader Bill Morris who ieee kill off Black Sections was obliged himself to head uP en opposition to the detention of a planeload oLiamaamnr —_ detention of black asylum seekers : in the absen any interest from Labour's front bench. _ " Aeasection of society largely ignored by all three Cee the parties, and for all but tokenistic purposes ignored also a eal trade union movement, it is also predictable that the polit
Raise the banner of socialism . debates and currents that have developed within the various black communities should have looked in other directions for inspiration.
American-based political theories and currents, reflecting the chronic political weakness and rampant racism of the US labour movement, have found an audience among some sections of black communities. The surge of interest in Malcolm X during 1993 predictably in these circumstances focused more on his religious beliefs and his separatist pronouncements than on his later turn towards a socialist perspective.
The growth of Islamic fundamentalism in sections of the British Asian communities also compounds the complexity of political developments in which separatism can now mean separating blacks from whites, separating muslims from non-muslims, or separating men from women.
While they clearly group and establish the identity of distinct sections of the oppressed, the extent to which any of these religious and semi-religious movements can be seen as offering any kind of ‘liberation’ — least of all to women — is obviously restricted.
For socialists, defending the right of communities and individuals to their religious beliefs and practices must be coupled with defence of the concept of a secular state, and opposition to the perpetuation of patriarchal repression.
It is the task of a developing socialist current to devise ways of popularising its policies and programme to win over the best militants from the black and ethnic minority communities; but there is no principled way in which the democratic or socialist programme can be adapted to be acceptable to hardline religious zealots of any persuasion.
Further analysis is needed of the debates and developments on black liberation within the black communities. To do this, our small organisation needs to deepen its work with black militants in anti-racist and other campaigns, and recruit additional black members.
A recent development has been more frequent and active involvement of the Turkish and Kurdish communities, particularly in Germany, France and Britain, not only in anti-racist struggles but also in struggles of the labour movement.
In France and Germany the Turkish and Kurdish communities are frequently the largest contingent on demonstrations on a wide range of political issues. In Britain one of the biggest meetings Arthur Scargill addressed during the pits campaign was at the Halkevi centre in London, with an overwhelmingly Turkish or Kurdish audience.
Though the major Turkish and Kurdish organisations are nice dominated by Stalinist ideology (with the addition of onalism in the case of the Kurdish PKK) some activists are Open to joint work and wider political discussion with us. 15) Lesbian/gay Struggles | ' The lesbian and gay movement retreat from politics since th ton 28.
Rec : i fen os ni have further alienated whole sections Stace te our movement. Not only did the 36 Labour MPs secured the defeat of the age of consent vote drive as a whole has been in € mass Campuign against Secyn SS eee eS The brutal . anti-union policies pursued by some Labour councils in London (Southwark!) give a flavour of the politics on offer in many local ward parties. en ee ee extra nails into a coffin lid already largely secured, but Hackney council’s involvement in the victimisation of Jane Brown has confirmed to many lesbians that both Labour politics and the gay-male dominated movement are hopeless.
Ins uch circumstances there is wholesale abstention from politics, while small numbers of gay men are attfacted to direct action-type groups like OutRage which, by basing their whole strategy on media-orientated stunts, offer no way forwatd.
Healthier forces have remained active in their trade unions, where gains hve been made in policy and self-organisation, and in the LCLGR, where we have provided a lead over many years.
Our current perspective is to use this base to conduct a suatained campaign around the ‘family’, promoting the struggle by highlighting the contradiction between Labour’s policies for equality and the social conservatism of the front bench.
Campaigning to maintain and extend existing policies throughout the labour movement will be the general approach of the coming period. It is also the only way to seek to re-open the lesbian and gay movement to labour movement politics nd the progressive politics we have fought for through LCLGR.
Our understanding of the strategic and ideological significance of the family in particulr and our proz~ gramme for lesbian and gay liberation in general coul, enable our current to make gains — if we can combine effective propaganda in our press and campaigns with an attractivce profile through our work.
To promote this campaign successfully and develop its full potential we must ensure that the issue of lesbian and gay liberation is more fully integrated into the work we do and the way we organise our forces. 16) Major’s impasse Leaning on Labour FIFTEEN years after Margaret Thatcher exploited the failure of the Wilson-Callaghan government to win a Tory majority, and twenty years after its own last general election victory, Labour’s political chal-_. lenge to the beleagured Major government is weaker an: less effective than ever.
Labour’s opinion poll lead over the Tories and probable electoral victories in May and June owe less to any political endorsement for their feeble policies, which few voters know or understand, than to massive popular anger and hostility toa Tory government exposed as sleazy, incompetent and indifferent to the mounting social crisis its policies have unleashed.
The succession of scandals and revelations that have followed John Major’s desperate and reactionary “Back to Basics’ speech at last October’s Tory conference serve pri marily to highlight the hypocrisy, corruption and double standards of a government that has been in office too long for its own good, surrounding itself with a layer of ‘yes’ men and subservient quangos But the extent to which these problems have been exposed in the bright lights ard lurid headlines of the press sad velevision also underlines the desperate problem of a Tory leader who ha lost the Support of the traditional Tory mass media. The soirom able liberal critique of Tory policy by the Guardian Observer and Daily Mirror has been eclipsed by the ferocious onslaught on Major by the hard-line right wing. not least the tabloids which regard themseves as the custodians of the Tory vote and are warning the Tories that their policies are almost impossible to sell ‘5 7
. to the punters in the street.
The Tory Party is polarised in different ways, between Thatcherite ‘bastards’ and the ‘left’; between Euro-sceptics and Europhiles; and on various issues between ideologues and pragmatists. This makes the emergence of a credible challenger to Major extremely difficult, though, as Major’s own rise to power showed, not impossible.
The determined re-emergence of Heseltine, eclipsing the taxraising Kenneth Clarke, and the waning fortunes of the loosetongued golden boy Portillo and the vicious Michael Howard leave many possible permutations, though probably only Heseltine would have the populist skills to masquerade as a genuinely new leadership and bring sections of traditional Tories back on board.
Talk of a Tory leadership challenge in the autumn should be met with the call for a general election and a new government, which could win wide support were Labour to campaign for it.
Isolated radicals Major’s Major’s government has lost none of the aggres- government has sive radicalism of the Thatcher years: but ithas lost none of the acquired none of Thatcher’s populist touch in aggressive selecting policies which will polarise a carefully-selected majority against a target minority.
And Major is labouring against the disadvan- His government, desperately looking for assets to sell to balance the books, has found that all of the ‘popular’ privatisation has already been done. He is in selecting forced to scrape the barrel of privatisation, and to policies resort to brutal tax increases and attacks on the welfare state in order to cut back the rampant budget deficit.
While Thatcher bought off whole layers of middle class and even some working class voters with share issues in British Telecom electricity and British Gas, and even got away with privatising water, Major is left with the hugely unpopular task of trying to offload British Rail, the small remnants of post-Heseltine British Coal, and even the Post Office — which at present contributes £200m a year of its surplus to the Exchequer.
Thatcher’ s master-stroke was the privatisation of council housing, by far the biggest of the privatisation exercises, which not only netted a massive £28 billion in revenue by 1993 (more than gas, electricity and BT put together) but enabled the Tories to slash government spending on housing by more than half, from £13.1 billion in 1979/80 to just £5.8 billion by 1991/2. It also, as we know, opened up opportunities for unscrupulous boroughs like Westminster and Wandsworth to indulge in carefullyplanned gerrymandering and social engineering experiments, designed to ensure a permanent Tory majority.
But now Major faces the mounting problems as the corrupt practices of Tory boroughs are exposed, along with the social problems arising in inner cities and elsewhere from the dire short.ge of affordable housing.
With council house building now almost paralysed by govern ment cash limits, a minimum of 100,000 social housing units are needed:each year to meet growing pressures from families which cannot afford to buy a house. Up to 500,000 building workers are unemployed — and still Major dare not allow local councils to spend on building the billions chev have been forced! to collect from selling houses. radicalism of the Thatcher tage of a huge economic crisis created by Chan- Y©@"S* but it has cellor Lawson’s massive tax giveaways to the acquired none rich. of Thatcher’s populist touch Raise the banner of socialism While Thatcher ignored public opposition to push through legislation for the market-style NHS ‘reforms’, Major’s government has been stuck with the task of imposing the huge package of hospital closures which arise from them, and explaining away the massive increases in bureaucracy.
In its determination to push the market system into education, Major’s government has run into generalised opposition to its imposition of tests, with Education Secretary Patten drivén into ungainly retreat by the teaching unions. Opted-out schools are discovering there is far less money available for development than they had been led to believe, and the Jane Brown case has underlined the risks the Tories have run by giving parents and governors sole authority over opt-out schools.
Howard fought the law...
Home Secretary Michael Howard’s willingness to confront the police and judiciary with his reform package has also ended in a succession of ignominious concessions under fire. Prison chiefs have angrily protested at his campaign to have more offenders jailed for longer terms while the prisons are already overflowing.
The Tories have run into repeated conflict with the legal profession; and Major’s team have even imposed the first redundancies on serving soldiers, including troops currently serving in Bosnia.
With the civil service facing a brutal attack involving market testing and massive job losses, there is scarcely a section of traditional core Tory support in the professions, the armed forces, or the state apparatus that Major’s government has not antagonised.
The 1992-93 conflict over the closure of most remaining coal mines showed that Heseltine along with his cabinet colleagues were happy to kick their old tri kebreaking allies of the UDM in the teeth.
The huge and unexpected mushrooming of opposition to the pit closures reached deep into Tory heartlands and Tory electoral support, leaving the government dangerously exposed. But the level of support from Tory MPs could only ever be a secondary factor to the campaign. It was obvious that clever tactical footwork would enable Heseltine to delay enough of the closures for long enough to defuse his inner-party opposition.
Meanwhile on the streets, it took the special talent of the TUC and Labour leaders, (coupled with unfortunate tactical errors by Arthur Scargill, who let them off the hook by relying on public opinion and not balloting unul too late for strike action) to squander the support, lose the head of steam that had been created, and deliver a piecemeal but equally damaging defeat.
The possibility of a genuine upsurge, even of one-day general strike action, had been visibly within the grasp of the British labour movement: instead we have had two more years of record low levels of strike action.
Roads to nowhere WHILE MAJOR can cc. brate the ineptitude of the ....our movement's leadership, and cling on to office for lack of opposition, it is less clear whom he now hopes can be rallied to the Tory banner of free market economics and war on the welfare state. Almost everyone has been antagonised.
Sections of the traditionally Tory rural middle classes have FE
Raise the banner of socialism , driven by Range Rover to join growing popular revolts against the Tory road-building programme which takes the place of any transport policy.
Throughout the country, opinion polls suggest that the Tory Party is bumping along little higher in popularity than the Liberal Democrats.
Even the bigoted middle class and layers of conservative workers who were the intended target audience of the Back to Basics crusade have been less than impressed by the sexual antics of Tory MPs, the revelations of cynical abuse of power over the Matrix Churchill case, and the abject failure of the government to deliver on its economic promises.
They might be relieved to see a puritanical John Patten pillory sex education in schools and Brian Mawhinney pulp booklets on sex education, but this is scarcely going to restore the mythical golden age of family values when so many families are struggling for survival on poverty wages and reducing benefits.
Only the abject weakness of the Labour Party can give Major any hopes of retrieving the fortunes of a government that has disappointed and turned on its own supporters, and lost its way in the market system it lives to support.
For socialists the biggest problem is that any new leadership emerging in the Tory Party would be fighting a labour movement hobbled politically and in the trade union movement by a hopelessly inept and right wing bureaucracy.
But even this could well not suffice to prevent the re-election for the first time in over 20 years of a Labour government. 17) What’s left in Labour Party?
THE RETURN of a Labour government will, as it did in 1964 and 1974 pose the question of the readiness and political strength of its left wing to fight the inevitable compromises and betrayals that will swiftly follow.
Unfortunately, 15 years of defeats for reformist politics have led to a serious weakening of the left, many of whom have drifted out of the Party. Membership has fallen, activity in many areas 1S at a very low ebb, and many CLPs and wards are now run by new realist, LCC or Kinnockite forces with little or no link or affinity with the wider trade union and working class movement.
The death knell of the struggle in local government represents more than the weakening of the left.
The slaughter of democratic rights abolished by the Tories in the process of defeating the Labour lefthas Calls for been phenomenal.
Between 1979 and 1992 the government introduced 144 separate Acts of parliament which affect finance the powers of local government. The main effect of infrastructure these has been to transfer power and resources from projects and the democratically elected local councils, either to unelected quangos or to central government.
In1 “8-79 local govertument raised all (ne money it spent through loca! taxation. Now it raises Only 19 per cent.
The collapse of the strategy of the so-called ‘left’ dangerously creative accountants, and the failure of the Labour radical Party to fight the Tory onslaught means the political Ree terrain has changed. Labour vic tory in iocal elections 1S NOw a pyrrhic victory, since the power of locally borrowing to creation of full ) per cent of employmext are seen as elected representatives has been so significantly decreased.
Recent court action against councillors who had not paid their poll tax yet voted in budget setting meetings underlines the massive erosion of local democracy.
Whilst we never had any illusions in the. ‘socialism in one borough’ politics of the local government left, it was an arena for raising our demands and a place of real struggle within the Labour movement. Now the issue of democracy and accountability is one which is increasingly on the agenda, and which links into the struggles against NHS quangos, and increasingly with the perceived illegitimacy of the Tories to govern.
The failure of Labour to fight the Tories over rate capping and the implementation of subsequent local government legislation has created a nightmare scenario.
Now Labour councils simply administrate local government for the Tories with very little control over spending. They obediently implement Tory cuts which attack the workforce and local service users. :
All this helps create the ground for the rise of the far nght, who exploit the lack of resources by championing the white working class at the expense of the black working class. It has also increasingly alienated Labour’s traditional base of support amongst the trade unions. More and more Labour Councils have . been engaged in vicious struggles with their own workforce.
The brutal anti-union policies pursued by some Labour councils in London (Southwark!) and Birmingham also give a flavour of the politics on offer in many local ward parties.
This illustrates the collapse of the left but also underlines how divorced many Labour groups have become from their traditional base of support in the trade unions.
The exodus from the Labour Party of many activists in former local government left strongholds has left local parties in the hands of new recruits inculcated with the 80s ‘efficiency’ message of the LCC or the traditional right.
The witch hunt and changes in policy making structure in the party have driven many former activists from the party and produced a cynicism and hopelessness which has dampened the enthusiasm of those still active for a fight. Party activists are now barely even regarded as mere foot soldiers for electioneering. The political level in debate has significantly declined. Those in control of the local parties are out of touch and in some cases ignorant of and contemptuous of the wider labour movement.
Outflanking Tories It is clear that Labour’s current policies as expounded by the likes of Blair, Brown and Smith consist in a combination of outflanking the Tories on social Even Bryan Gould’s limited issues — such as crime — while adapting any Labour spending and economic commitments to minimal levels that avoid challenging or disrupting the free- market system.
Even Bryan Gould’s limited calls for borrowing to finance infrastructure projects and the creation of full employment are seen as dangerously radical, and Labour offers nothing anywhere near as ambitious as Bill Clinton’s programme in the USA. Instead we have the wordy and complex efforts to explain Labour’s hopes of attracting private finance in to the NHS, trans. *rt and other p»blic sector projects.
None of this is calculated to enthuse or aitract working class voters — or anyone else: its primary objective Is to avoid alienating sections of the middle class or the mass media. by creating the image of Labour as a safe pair of hands for the management of British cap.ialism For this reason unanswered quesuons on the resto- ER SST
. . Raise the banner of socialism ration of trade union nghts, the rescuing of the NHS, education and the welfare state, the lifting of racist restrictions on asylum and immigration and other contentious issues must be pressed to the forefront now in the run-up to the next General Election, in readiness for the struggles which must immediately follow.
Signs of life in constituencies?
DESPITE the rightward evolution, it is clear that the Labour Party membership as a whole remains well to the left of the Labour leadership, and in many CLPs of the 1993 Labour Conference.
However the Socialist Campaign Group, after a period of relative inactivity, has now re-emerged. The Network is calling a conference on Full Employment, which offers a useful focus for political debate both in the Party and the unions.
The Campaign Group of MPs are slowly and belatedly beginning to realise that they need to organise their base and beginning to see the SCGN as the vehicle to do that. ad The June conference ‘Socialist Policies for the 21 Century - Fighting for Full Employment’ will be a starting point for the development of alternative left policies to be fought for running battles continue for local leadership SHE Rn pid apossiile Labour savanna, Ay positions — battles which could be influenced by Labour’s kowtowing to In some areas there has been evidence of asmall, ‘socialist’ the involvement of fresh layers of activists. but significant increase in activity by the left, and we can expect a new surge of interest (not least by more versions of opportunistelements scenting a possible Labour gov- Market philosophy has led it nowhere.
But these developments should not be exagger- Splits in the ‘ed, and in any event the task ahead is not simply to new realist ernment) after the May elections, although any substantive change still depends upon a genuine upturn in class struggle. reorganise those still active and already in the MO, but to find ways to use the local organisation to reach alliance provide outwards and mobilise fresh layers of workers, youth Openings to put and campaigners around key projects and issues for socialism back the working class, creating conditions to change the balance of forces decisively in the favour of the left. resources at local and national leadership level.
Members must be mobilised to fight for our campaigns and initiatives. The work that we do must be much more systematically organised, so that we are able consistently to work with left formations and activists in the Labour Party, arguing that they turn outwards towards campaigns like defence of the welfare state. We aim to connect the left at local level with the Socialist Campaign Group Network, though we do not insist that every local left formation need call itself a Campaign Group.
Our Labour Party work must not be aHowed to degenerate into a routine tail-ending of local activities or standing for officers’ positions in moribund wards, but must be used to exploit opportunities to group and organise a genuine socialist current that fights in all wings of the movement for policies to unite and develop the class struggle.
Only this approach can give a serious content to the call for building local Campaign Groups as part of the Socialist Campaign Group Network, based ona fight for alternative left policies to break the economic consensus.
It is clear that a new injection of human resources and political energy is desperately needed. The_crowning irony of Labour politics at the end of 1993 was to see the weakened remnants of the Labour Left remain largely tongue-tied on the key political issue of the day — defence of the welfare state and breaking the economic consensus with the Tories — while the pace of Oppositidn to Smith’ s capitulationist politics was set by arch new-realists Bryan Gould and GMB boss John Edmonds.
Gould of course has since himself capitulated to the lure of cash in New Zealand, though the fight against the economic consensus hss been taken on by the equal’. unlikely figure of Peter Hain, who is himself now trying to join the Campaign Group. Other ex- Tribunites, Roger Berry. Neil Gerrard and Lynn Jones have joined the Campaign Group. This small shift should be tken seriously.
Edmonds has predictably done nothing to build on the conferences on Full Employment and the weliare state which he used to publicise his displeasure with Jolin Smith and some decisions on the agenda.
Our special tactic needs an injection of politi¢q) ists want ideological answers and policies to arm them.
The SCGN can only be effective if it focuses political debate and develops policies around which there can be a real campaign against the current policy of economic consensus. :
The ideological struggle against the market has massive potential.
For the majority of people, socialism does offer an alternative to the tyranny of the market. Labour’s kowtowing to ‘socialist’ versions of market philosophy has led it nowhere. The collapsing social infrastructure cries out for a socialist alternative. Splits in the new realist alliance provide openings to put socialism back on the agenda, and a campaign for socialist policies could be a cutting edge to break the consensus.
We have an opportunity to ‘raise the banner of socialism’ in the Labour Party, but we must do so with awareness of the change in terrain. Many current Party members are not schooled in the old left/right battles, nor in the history of the labour movement.
But we cannot afford to assume that those currently in the party cannot be won to socialist policies, or are fixed in support of current party policy. We must campaign for left alternatives in a manner which engages with all those willing to struggle in the Labour Party. Raising demands on social questions such as health, housing and education is much easier now and is on the agenda of many Labour activists. "Raising demands such as increased power to local councils to spend capital receipts from the sale of council houses on new house building programmes to house the homeless and create work for the army of unemployed building workers is not as difficult now as it was even two/three years ago.
Our fight in the LP has to use the SCGN as a means to promote policy to defend the welfare state, to break the economic consensus and to raise the demand for the right to strike alongside defence of the trade union link.
In waging this fight we should not underestimate the significance of some of the splits that have emerged in the new realist alliance that has dominated Labour politics since it foisted Neil Kinnock on the Party as leader after the 1983 election disaster. 18) Unions at the crosroads Last year’s Labour conference saw further changes to weaken the unions’ influence on selection procedures through OMOV, but made no real change to the role of unions in the conference itself. .
However there are indications that the ‘new realist’ xiliance Hee ST A
Raise the banner of socialism 7 that has dominated the key TUC unions for a decade is beginning to break up as Labour's political weakness and the scale of the political failure of new realism makes itself felt at every level. It is hard to keep arguing to wait for a Labour government after four successive electoral failures.
Fifteen years of retreats have left the unions hog-tied by legislation even as they struggle for survival.
The virtual impossiblity of taking legal and successful strike action under the present Tory anti-union laws has been rammed home by the recent NATFHE judgement, which declared that a union of 80,000 members should know to within ten individuals the names and addresses of all them, and that unions can be obliged to submit a full list of members voting in advance of any ballot on strike action.
This would make strikes for union recognition virtually impossible to organise, since union members could simply be picked off and victimised at will by management before any strike took place. , For larger unions such as UNISON, claiming 1.4 - Tom Sawyer who have now realised how thoroughly LCC and right wing councillors have exploited their union’s policy to shaft their members.
Organisation ; The pressure of the rank and file is important, but by no‘means the decisive factor breaking up the new realist alliance. Right wing union leaders like the GMB’s John Edmonds, who have: no interest in the views of their shop-floor members, and no wish to see any genuine class struggle, have nevertheless become painfully aware of the disastrous impact of new realism on the organisations they claim to represent.
Ten years of retreats and betrayals designed to accomodate to the ‘new reality’ have lost the TUC unions millions of members and most of their political influence.
While many union bureaucrats no doubt relish the easy life running shrinking organisations which place little or million members, or manual unions the problems of NNN © demands upon them, others are clearly frustrated at accurate membership lists could be insuperable, Up to half the meaning that any ballot and any strike call, no matter 14 amb ership how democratic the vote, could be thrown out by the courts. harsher context. Workers must choose between losing the right to strike, or breaking the law. the right to strike, taking forward our previous work in the Unshackle the Unions campaign. .
While this new legislation gives massive advan- inflated tages to the employers, it has yet to be seriously tested membership figures, now militant, combative mood in the workers’ movement €Stimates over which is putting additional pressure on union leaders, 20% could be by a determined section of workers.
There are small but significant signs of a more and even notching up a few small but important victories. lost could be lost What is now at stake is the very righttostrikeitself. from the GMB This puts the issue of the anti-union laws into a much and TGWU, while UNISON, We should seek to build a national campaign for seeking to cover up their loss of prestige and the potentially devastating loss of membership which could decimate the strength of the bigger unions. Several unions are already raiding their dwindling reserves for lavish payments to maki dozens of officials redundant.
Now the latest round of anti-union legislation threatens, by attacking the check-off system (and obliging union members to sign up afresh every three years), to slash tens more thousands from membership rolls, especially in the big manual and general unions.
Up to half the membership could be lost from the GMB and TGWU, while UNISON, seeking to cover up inflated membership figures at time of merger and rapid losses since, especially in health, now estimates over 20% could be lost, and warns that even a 5% reduction on its claimed 1.4 million members could cut its income by £5 million. Many of its health and local government branches have only ever existed on the basis of the check-off system.
The major victory of the teaching unions Ve SATS and the national curriculum; the successful RMT strike action which secured the reinstatement of victimised LUL officer Pat Sikorski; the mass occupation staged by Sefton council workers in defiance of the anti-union laws, and the unofficial one-day walk-out by thousands of council staff in Sheffield are examples of a hardening of resistance.
The length and determination of the Timex and Burnsall strikes, despite the problems of a right wing union bureaucracy, and the courageous action by small numbers of health workers striking against cuts at London’s University College Hospital also reveal the tenacity of those who opt to fight back. This fighting Strength remains just beneath the surface of the working class.
Even in unions not affiliated to the Labour Party new realist leaderships, who have become identified as apologists for Tory Cuts, are coming under pressure. The NUT has just seen left winger Carol Regan win the Vice Presidency, while the bureaucratic “Broad Left” current is finding difficulty fielding candidates for local branch officer posts. Pressure from a rank and file buoyed up by the unions’ victories over John Patten means that the NUT is the only union still committed to boycotting SATS.
In UNISON, manual ~orkers angered at years of att:...s from Labour councils have begun successfully demanding that their union's political fund money is not given to support the local Party in the May elections — correctly breaking from years of acceptance of the ‘dented shield’ policy, and bringing sharp political debate into the unions. Itis significant that this fightback beginning in Lambeth «nd Southwark, is Jed not by the left but by forces traditionally to the right of NUPE, key supporters of Political weakness As the left predicted, the disasters inflicted by new realism on the unions have brought no compensating advantages for the ~ Labour Party. Labour’s electoral prospects were the strongest at the height of the miners’ strike, but receded with Kinnock’s subsequent concessions. Labour’s present poll ratings are much more an index of anti-Toryism than pro-Labour enthusiasm.
But while the mood of the working class has detectably changed under the impact of the pay freeze, Clarke’s brutal budget, and the successive Tory scandals exposing the government’s divisions and weaknesses, Labour’s leadership appears locked in a paralysis, like rabbits caught in the glare of headlights, lacking either the policies or the will to fight.
This political paralysis is proving a serious embarrassment to union leaders: it has left the Party unable effectively to oppose such key issues as rail privatisation (for fear of defending nationalisation), orto ¢;-ell out any serious policies to defend the welfare State or end unemployment (afraid of calline for anv increase in public spending). : ; At last year’s Labour conference John Smith deliberately courted media support by picking a tight with the TGWU and GMB over an aspect of the OMOV issue. But some of the architects « f new realism — notably Edmonds — were not amused and have since begun to impleineni their ‘no say; no pay’ a
Raise the banner of socialism threat.
The GMB has withdrawn its £500,000 a year backing for Trade Unions for Labour, with the reluctant TGWU unable to leave only because it is in the chair of TUFL. UNISON, under the political direction of NUPE new realist Tom Sawyer, also joined the GMB and TGWU in sponsoring an unofficial conference in defence of the welfare state which in December made loud calls for a more energetic Labour opposition to the Tory attacks. Shop workers’ union USDAW was also represented.
The GMB with three other national unions has also backed Bryan Gould’s Keynesian economic ‘alternative’, in the form of the Full Employment Forum, which has exposed Labour’ s abysmal lack of economic policy and publicly declared its intention of break the Party’s ‘consensus’ with the Tories. Its limited horizon of establishing a new reformist consensus around Clinton-style economics does not prevent the Forum playing a galvanising role in the current situation.
With the traditional hard right bloc of the AEU and EETPU now predccupied with a bitter power feud within the weakness’ — while in fact a firm call to acti i i are weak could have struck a chord of wadkinies es been the galvanising element that has been missing for so lon While we should retain the objective of a concerted day 7 action and mounting a more sustained industrial challenge to the Tory offensive, we do not make this into a fixed, all-purpose slogan as Militant and the SWP have tended to do with their calls for a one-day General Strike. To make such demands more than empty propaganda the right conditions of welling anger and militancy need to be present: the slogans remain ready for use in Our armoury, but are not appropriate for day-to-day agitation.
Defend and extend union organisation As we have consistently shown, the bosses’ ofmerged AEEU, the unions have emerged forthe fit _IEmmummmmms f€nsive has continued and deepened with the intime in years as a potentially dynamic, oppositional Edmonds’ force within the labour movement.
Despite its obvious limitations and self-interested motives, Edmonds’ criticism of Labour’s lack-lustre Labour’s leadership, their abject lack of positive policy, and Jack-lustre their feeble stance on defence of the welfare state also echoes the frustration and anger of many rank and file union activists. the TUC has moved in the opposite direction, swapping invitations with Tory ministers, appointing top Liberal Des Wilson as campaigns manager andseek- Stance on ing to downplay any commitment to the retun of a defence of the welfare state Labour government.
The new TUC regime under John Monks has broken from the slovenly irrelevance of Norman also echoes the Willis to project a new business-like image as ear- frustration and anger of many nestly seeking collaboration with the CBI and Tories — just as the NATFHE judgement reveals how comprehensively the latest round of anti-union laws has tank and file union activists. now shackled the right to strike. criticism of leadership, their abject lack of But of course this has also been the point at which positive policy, and their feeble troduction of a battery of New Management Techniques aimed at undermining trade union strength in the workplace, and ultimately at derecognition.
The offensive has been most advanced in the print and broadcasting industries, with wholesale derecognitton of NUJ and BETA chapels in magazines, book publishing, local and national newspapers, radio and television.
This has run alongside a drive towards ‘personal contracts’, and now a move spearheaded by provincial newspaper bosses and regional TV to impose ‘multiskilling’ on journalists and photographers. But the offensive against union organisation is also reaching into manufacturing industry, with Caterpillar management the first to offer a GCHQ-style buy-out of manual workers’ union rights, promoting a tame ‘staff association’.
New Management Techniques, including the introduction of Total Quality Management have been transferred from industry into the new market-style NHS, pees | ONgSide a cash-cutting Skill Mix Review that is de- Activism and leadership The TUC’s rightward lurch comes at a time of low levels of activism at the base of the unions. Almost every union is recording lower levels of branch attendance, finding trouble electing sufficient stewards and officers, and facing a reduction in resources — partially masked in a few instances by bureaucratic mergers which have yet to deliver significant benefits to activists or the wider membership.
The decisive role of leadership in creating the present crisis cannot be over-stated. There is no objective reason why the better-organised British workers’ movement should not be mobilising million-strong demonstrations like that in Paris on January 16 or preparing general strike action as in Spain, Italy or Belgium.
But the British union leaders missed out on the Autumn 1992 radicalisation around the miners’ struggle which brought huge demonstrations across the country. Instead of building on and developing this movement, they allowed the issue to be shunted into the sidelines of parliamentary debate.
Proposals for the TUC to call a Day of Action against the public sector pay freeze on April 11 came to nothing, being only feebly promoted by the union officials that flirted with the idea.
The defeatists in the bureaucracy were quick to trot out the traditional complaint that to call for action could ‘expose our stroying tens of thousands of jobs of qualified nursing and support staff, replacing them with less well-trained and cheaper employees.
The SMTUC has been at the forefront of moves to explain and challenge the various forms of the management offensive.
SMTUC caucuses from each industry can play a useful role in discussing and analysing the particular issues most relevant to union members, and developing appropriate propaganda.
But the biggest and newest threat to union organisation is the attack on check-off, which is targeted on the soft underbelly of the unions — the gulf between the bureaucracy and the committed activists on the one hand, and the more passive layers of shop floor membership on the other.
Of course union officials are aware of the threat to the subscription revenue that pays their wages: and it is not a foregone conclusion that the Tory move will succeed. The example of the imposition of political fund ballots, which backfired on the Tories by persuading more unions to set up political funds, and consolidating the funds already in existence, must be remembered.
Successful union campaigns on check-off can again minimise the damage and even strengthen union organisation.
But the danger is real: even the RMT, which on the rail and tubes has taken more industrial action more successfully than almost any other union in recent years is expecting to lose up to a third of its membership through the Tory check-off offensive.
Bureaucratic ‘sign up’ campaigns even from the ‘right on’
UNISON leadership will not be enough to combat the pressure on more passive elements to drop out.
There is little to attract workers to docile unions which connive at redundancies and offer neither leadership nor collective strength. The fight must therefore be integrated with a political challenge to new realism and the fight for mobilisation on Ke issues affecting the rank and file. :
Among the many live issues are opposition to the pay freeze fighting speed up, job losses, unfilled vacancies, health and safety issues, and the basic democratic issue of the right to union recognition.
Build Broad Lefts in the unions The fight for new leadership in the trade unions demands the best possible organisation, and maximum Raise the banner of socialism a chosen slate i : 1ona i Our goal Geet lofts in the ee detend unions and the ah Wate ! ‘ Sn lo strike ts that they should fight f leadership, Strategy and policy within the eh as ‘clive vam paigning organisations, responding j D g S..Tes to the needs é fic g ds of the rank and The scale of the tasks and depth of the crisis facing the trade union movement mean that broad lefts have to be prepared to take initiatives that reach out to new layers of union activists engaging In actions and discussions with broader forces. Building up confidence for strike action strike in the teeth of the Tory antiunion: laws ‘means building solidarity and wherever possible Organising simultaneous action in other sectors.
Broad lefts also need to be able to reach out to joint work with other left formations, forging inter-union alliances on issues such as defence of the welfare state, and smashing public sector pay limits.
This can also help generalise political and organisational experiences and open possibilities of coordinating a unity of the forces of the left. fh tback.
To give concrete expression to our fight foraclass To give In breaking from its excessively passive role, a struggle left wing in the labour movement, we have concrete reorganised SMTUC should take immediate steps to always supported the building of ‘broad lefts’ and other left formations in the unions, wherever these expression to improve its links with the broad lefts, and seek wherever possible to promote and facilitate cross union are genuinely left wing in their political objectives and genuinely ‘broad’, in that they offer a democratic framework for joint action by militants who are members of different left currents or independents.
Like shop stewards committees, whether of single unions or joint works committees, broad lefts can play a valuable role in linking those most prepared to fight — but do not in themselves answer the political questions facing the working class.
Some broad lefts, including notably that in the NCU, have even won key positions in their unions but then failed to deliver the fighting policies for which they were elected.
Some have from time to time been taken over and effectively destroyed as broad organisations by individual left currents such as Militant or the SWP, who have tended to use such bodies as front organisations for their own politics. We reject this sectarian conception of their role, and resist efforts to narrow down their political platform to the supporters of any one ‘ Jeft current. ' Other formations, such as the ‘broad left’ in the NUT, retain only the formal name ‘broad left’, while representing the right wing of the bureaucracy.
Indeed while the number of broad left organisations is relatively small, they span a wide political spectrum, ranging from the bureaucratised and select TGWU broad left to the more radical Socialist Teachers Alliance in the NUT, which is more openly aclass our fight for a class struggle left wing in the labour movement, we have always supported the building of ‘broad lefts’ and other left formations in the unions, wherever these are genuinely left wing in their political objectives and genuinely ‘broad’ hn Sa initiatives within a political framework.
SMTUC The Socialist Movement Trade Union Committee (SMTUC) has built its reputation on its consistent campaigning against the anti- union laws, and arguing for solidarity with workers in struggle.
It has shown the potential to attract a layer of independent left activists from a wide spectrum of unions to its conferences, and still offers a pole of attraction for militants disillusioned by the weakness or failure of its potential competitors — Militant’s bureaucratic and sectarian Public Sector Alliance and the stalinistled LCDTU.
However the SMTUC has failed systematically to develop or build on this strength. Instead it has become routinised, offering only occasional conferences and outdated mailings, coupled with limited initiatives around the theme of Unshackle the Unions. Since July 1992 it has been in a state of virtual paralysis, missing out on every development which has taken place. Its internal structures, the steering committee and officers, have ceased to function, leaving the SMTUC in the hands of certain officers: even the steering committee meeting to elect new officers after the 1994 conference has been postponed twice. struggle left wing than the old-style broad lefts, and has become an effective and dynamic force within the union. __ The emergence of new broad lefts such as the Campaign fora Fighting and Democratic Union in the RMT reflects the scale of crisis faced by the ‘new realist’ union bureaucracies.
But they also raise new questions on what role the left should play, demanding answers to new and sharp political problems.
Our comrades need to be a force at the centre of these debates within the broad lefts.
We have a combined responsibility to raise and support fighting policies within broad lefts, and to press for them to be active, outward-going, campaigning organisations, which build a strength at local workplace and branch level as well as among delegates in the annual hothouse of policy-making conferences, and which do not restrict their efforts to boosting ballot votes for Despite growing evidence of these problems, we have invested considerable effort in building the SMTUC, and it remains crucial to our work in the unions: but we must also recognise that it has been seriously damaged by the bureaucratic political methods of a minority current of our organisation, who have been able to dominate its structure, and exclude any involvement by supporters of our majority leadership.
To stand any chance of achieving its potential impact, the SMTUC has to be democratised: and we must play a leading role in in this process. Its leading committee must be made to function, and its committees broadened out to reflect the forces affiliated and active in the work.
The SMTUC must become an active, interventionist, campaigning organisation capable of responding swiftly to events and struggles when they emerge, and seeking to act, wherever possi- Foss TN SEAT PINEN ac PTR SAPONINS SEAS NEST SAAS PEE IRE SSR ES
ble, as a coordinating force between the various union broad lefts.
We have mapped out tactical proposals to achieve these changes in the SMTUC, which will have been implemented before our July conference. Success is essential, since there is no comparable broad initiative in the unions which can play this kind of coordinating role.
Central to the SMTUC’s campaigning must be four main arenas of struggle in the unions, each of which also involves the political fight to break the economic consensus with the Tories which has stifled any serious political challenge. * Fighting the public sector pay freeze; * Defending the welfare state; * Fighting privatisation and market testing. * Fight for the nght to strike. 1) Fighting the pay freeze tor unions not only table pay demands, but to campaign among the membership to convince sector could force concessions from an already weakened government.
The demand raised by the left in UNISON, forall the left in the sectors of the union to synchronise the dates of their labour pay claims should be raised throughout the public pnovement, call sector: a blanket wage freeze should be met by concerted action. only to come back with a similar threat in 1994, has seen anger erupt into a mass unofficial walk-out, organisations of a delegate Sheffield council, which last year convinced staff conference on to accept a pay cut of 3.25% to avert redundancies, defence of the Welfare State.
Raise the banner of socialism than undermine the welfare state. Such policies include a commitment to full employment, increased public spending on welfare services, introducing system of progressive taxation, and replacing the Tory system of Social Fund and student loans with grants.
Following the failure of the Militant-led Public Sector Alliance to fulfil its apparent potential, the SMTUC should, if possible jointly with the Socialist Campaign Group Network and other organisations of the left in the labour movement, call a delegate conference on defence of the Welfare State. .
This conference should aim to concretise policies for an ongoing campaign, aimed at linking the widest possible alliance of unions and campaigning bodies, and encouraging La- Following the failure of the Militant-led Public Sector The left must organise to ensure the public sec- Alliance to fulfil bour activists to take the fight into the Party, which has been short on positive policy commitments to defend these vital services. 3) Fight privatisation and market testing its apparent . them of the need to fight now. Members must potential, the be convinced that a programme of rolling and SMTUC should, escalating strike action throughout the public with other Hundreds of thousands of civil servants, rail workers, council workers, miners and health workers face the threat of privatisation under the renewed Tory offensive, which is openly described as privatisation in BR and British Coal, but masquerades as “market testing’ elsewhere.
Many private companies, too, are delegating inhouse services to contractors who produce cost ‘savings’ by employing staff on inferior wages and conditions.
The market testing exercise is an extension of the competitive tendering which decimated the ancillary workforce and wrecked standards of hygeine and patient care in the NHS after 1984.
The pressure of competition is designed to drive similar militancy could develop elsewhere on jobs as down pay and conditions of staff while driving up well as wages, especially after the local elections in May. 2) Defend the welfare _ state The December conference in defence of the welfare state chaired by Ken Livingstone was officially backed by unions comprising more than half the TUC. But little or no concerted effort has been made by the unions to alert members to the scale of the threat to the welfare state or the need for the various public sector unions to join forces in action to defend it.
The left must demand a massive publicity and propaganda effort by each union to explain the Tory plans and agitate for action to oppose them. The TUC must be called upon to organise national and regional action.
Unions should organise through Trades Councils or collectively to leaflet Job Centres and benefit offices, and attempt to organise with sections of pensioners, the unemployed and students in a joint campaign. The combined objective should be to widen public opposition to the Tory measures and prepare the basis for public sector unions to take action against them.
The left must campaign during this year’s union conferences to commit them to break from the economic consensus with the Tories and campaign for economic policies which support rather levels of exploitation. Learning nothing from the NHS experience, unions appear to be collaborating in market testing, apparently oblivious of the fact that only through cutting their own members’ pay and conditions can they deliver the lowest priced tender.
The greatest immediate potential for a big campaign against privatisation is in the fight against privatisation of British Rail which is hugely unpopular, and which clearly has drastic implications for safety and the continued availability of key services. 20) Our programme WE DO NOT call for a Labour vote because of any agreement with its wretched manifesto. We do not expect to transform a Smith-led Labour government into a socialist or a workers’ government. But we do work in the mass organisations of the working class for socialist policies to be fought for against a future Labour government, and we do call for a Labour vote as a class vote against the Tories.
Despite Labour’s total political bankruptcy, we campaign for the return of a Labour government as the best hope of opening up a favourable situation for working class action.
If the Tory government, the iron fist of the employers’ offensive, could be defeated and removed, and a government at least
- Raise the banner of socialism pretending to respond to workers’ demands were to be elected, the doors would be opened to a new tide of militant action and demands, and a new strengthening of workplace organisation as activists recovered confidence and fighting capacity.
We cannot expect any carbon copy of the great surge of mass action which followed the re-election of Harold Wilson when Labour last took office, twenty years ago in 1974.
The heavy defeats inflicted on the shop floor organisation of the working class and the virtual disappearance of key industrial sectors which had fought the Heath government and remained in the vanguard under Labour — dockers, printworkers, miners and others — mean that there is little in the way of a shop stewards’ movement to lead a new fight.
However the Wilson government also encouraged action from sections that had little record of mass struggle: nurses came to the fore, and rail workers discovered a more militant side; the Engineers’ union AUEW decided to defy the Tory anti-union law and force Labour to act swiftly to avoid a national strike.
Other‘campaigns were pushed up the agenda, but hoods; @ The fight against imperialism and war; @ Developing local organisations of working class power to challenge the centralised power of the capitalist state; @ Fighting for a genuine workers’ government.
Recognising the need to combat Smith’s right wing programme for managing capitalism with a fight for socialist policies, we need to spell out what those policies will be, and'we need to step up the fight for them in the unions and Labour Party.
We need to make clear our warning that while the election of a Labour government will open up new possibilities for struggle, its actions as it seeks a new compromise with the market system will represent attacks on the independence of the unions and the interests of the working class.
Historically, this is nothing new: it is the track record of every Labour government; each has restricted itself to tinkering with the capitalist system.
Key demands from the first days of such a government will be that it stop and reverse the Tory attacks on the workers without success: victimised Shrewsbury building un- 2 movement and the oppressed. ion pickets remained in jail, surcharged Clay Cross No other councillors found no reprieve, but the fight was rekindled. conditions for learning political lessons and discussing the way forward and the kind of leadership morale can be challenged by a determined agitation around demands and issues which raise the level of the fight. gandist slogan politics of much of the far left; in the 1990s a much greater danger is the weakened forces of the left and the continued dominance of new broad realism and defeatism in the labour movement.
While the 1974 far left focused excessively on maximum demands of immediate nationalisation and ‘socialist policies’, the problem now is that after 15 opportunity section of the When large numbers of workers begin to take left has shown action on their own demands, this creates the best any willingness to go beyond needed in the labour movement. The ‘armchair so- Sloganising cialism’ that takes root in periods of relatively low defence of the welfare state, and none is In 1974 this was restricted by the ultra-left, propa- prepared to build genuinely campaigns. This gives us a real This means demanding the repeal of the anti-union laws, and of the racist Asylum and Nationality Acts, a lifting of the public sector pay freeze, and replacement of the brutal Social Fund loans schemes with special needs payments. Pensions, state benefits and student grants must be increased to reverse Tory cuts.
All privatisation, market testing and compulsory competitive tendering measures must be halted. Tory restrictions on local government spending must be lifted, along with Section 28 and other restrictive legislation shackling teachers to the bigoted values of Back to Basics.
Labour must halt the Tory hospital closure programme, and inject cash to restore services cut in the NHS, schools and higher education.
These policies in themselves go far beyond the timid programme on offer from Smith and co: without massive pressure from the workers’ movement it is unlikely that any of them would be carried out.
But a more developed series of demands must also years of Tory onslaught, much of today’s Labouran\¢d io be put forward, which lead the most advanced workers trade union left would settle for almost anything from a Labour government that was not outright Thatcherism.
The task now, as then, is to link the day-to-day problems and struggles of the working class with the fight for socialist solutions. It was to address precisely this strategic problem that the early Comintern, and later the new Fourth International, turned to the adoption of transitional demands which contain this potential dynamic of leading from one phase of the struggle into a new, higher phase.
The central thrust of the 1938 Transitional Programme focuses on almost all the key issues still confronting the working class today. @ Defence of living standards; @ Development of serious class struggle politics in the unions; @ Challenging the bosses’ stock excuse of ensuring ‘viability’ by demands for an end to business secrecy, and the opening of the books and plans of the enterprise to elected trade union committees; @ Fighting for workers’ control inthe workplace, and in whole industries,leading to the development of a workers’ plan for production; @ Mobilising around the demand for the nationalisation of separate groups of capitalists, and of banks and the finance houses; @ Defence of picket lines and of working class neighbourto recognise the limitations and essentially capitalist, pro-imperialist character of the Labour leadership, and the need for an alternative.
M@ For acrash programme of public works — housing, hospitals, community care, schools, colleges, transport, infrastructure, energy research, childcare, social services— to create new and worthwhile employment for 4-5 million jobless youth and adults at trade union rates of pay. @ Fora shorter working week without loss of pay!
M@ For a statutory minimum wage to raise the income of the lowest paid, enforced by trade union monitoring in each area.
W@ Reject Maastricht, the racist Schengen agreements, the EU Common Agricultural Policy and EU subsidies to capitalist monopolies. @ Close and scrap the lethal THORP reprocessing plant: scrap Trident and the British nuclear weapons programme. Begin urgent research into the safe disposal of millions of tons of dangerous nuclear waste already created.
HM Troops out of Ireland and the Malvinas. Britain out of NATO. Expel all US bases from Britain. @ Stop aircraft and arms sales to the Indonesian butcher regime: arm the freedom fighters of FRETILIN.
In theory any or all of these policies could be implemented by a reforming capitalist government in Britain: but in practice each conflicts with the interests of British imperialism, and will be resolutely opposed in practice by Labour in government.
We must also look further ahead at the situation which would
Raise the banner of socialism | | 2A en RCE Uc OR RRO SCS RAG MRIS NE SS ENING 8 BORER MSTE UCR N NTA NN EG ST IIT MR SE EN ST TSE SESE | confront a new Labour government, and the forces that will drive it into conflict with the working class. Like previous Labour governments, Smith would face an instant flight of capital. unhindered by any restriants since Thatcher’s deregulation. Sterling’s value would plummet, bringing a rapid community self-policing. Replace the bosses’ courts with their arbitrary, reactionary judiciary with elected, accountable figures and institutions.
These and many other policies relating to the special needs of women workers, black people and ethnic minorities, increase of inflation as costs of imported goods amd materials went up.
The new government would also face mass unemployment, widespread poverty, a built-in massive trade deficit, dwindling North Sea oil supplies and a crumbling infrastructure of housing, schools, sewers, hospitals and transport. Almost all the state-owned industries have been privatised, on a scale well beyond any reformist scheme for repurchasing the shares.
Under these pressures the temptation for new realists and old- fashioned reformists will be to scrap any progressive policies and dig in to stabilise the capitalist system — by imposing new wage controls, (SESE aS Our task is to build a current for socialism, a current in the unions, the Labour Party, in community and broader campaigns, embracing lesbians and gay men, people with disabilities and the elderly, must be fought for and popularised + not as a long wooden list, but singly or in appropriate combinations where the opportunity offers — through agitation and propaganda at the base of the labour movement and in wider-reaching campaigns. They will be opposed not only by Labour ministers, but also by trade union bureaucrats and those who shrink from revolutionary conclusions to the British capitalist cri- SiS.
Our task is to build a current for socialism, a current in the unions, the Labour Party, in community and broader campaigns, embracing students and unemployed youth, pensioners and claimants. Insofar as the and by offering concessions and guarantees to bank- students and ers and speculators at the expense of the working dias: unemployed Only a radical socialist programme offers any real youth, alternative.
Mi To stem the flight of capital, traditional Labourite efforts at exchange controls have proved impotent pensioners and claimants. mass movement runs into conflict with the capitalist aspirations of a Labour government, we can gain a hearing and win support for aspects of our programme.
In some instances we will be able to turn specific demands from general propaganda into concrete agitation, even make them the central focus of mass action.
At each stage, in sharp distinction to the Militant — and appear now to have been discarded by ney —————NEME SCHOO] of politics, we must emphasise that the socialist realism. Instead we call for workers’ control of the banking and financial sector, with the opening of the books to expose the huge hidden deals and swindles, and show the need for nationalisation of the banks, insurance and finance houses to control the sharks and speculators. @ Against soaring inflation, workers’ wages and state b enefits must be protected by a sliding scale of indexed increases to keep pace point by point with the cost of living as monitored by trade union committees.
Wi In place of continued redundancies and closures in the name of rationalisation, unions must fight for work sharing on full pay, dividing the work available between the whole existing workforce, under the control of elected trade union committees.
M@ To generate the increased wealth required to create millions of new, socially useful jobs and increase the living standards of . the lowest-paid, pensioners and claimants requires an expansion in production, putting the country back to work. But since the capitalist market finds such expansion unprofitable, preferring to divert investment overseas or into speculation, expansion calls for the expropriation of key industries and socialist planning in place of free market chaos. Britain’s coal mines must be renationalised and reopened, and other national assets maximised.
W@ Privatised industries and public utilities (gas, electricity, telecom, water, etc) must be expropriated, to redirect their vast surpluses and productive potential into a planned expansion rather than the pockets of the rich. To build support for this bold step, trade unions must fight for the opening of the books to show the multi-billion rip-offs involved in privatisation. @ The development of a workers’ plan for production to cater for unmet needs and create new jobs must be seen as the way to prove the need for a socialist, planned economy. Included in this plan should be research and development into alternative sources of environmentally friendly energy to replace fossil fuels and potentially deadly nuclear power plants. @ Open up new trading links with the developing and underdeveloped countries of the Third World, ending the old imperialist relationship based on inequality and exploitation.
M@ Repeal the massive new powers granted to the police by Thatcher and Major. Against police racist and anti- union violence, demand the scrapping of the police, and establishment of revolution in Britain requires not just maximum demands on a Labour government, but a working class mobilised to fight for its own demands against the employers and the state.
Our alternatives to Labour’s class collaboration are alternatives for the workers, to be fought for by the workers. We offer the alternative of class struggle, consciusly carried through to the level of mass action to expropriate the monopolies and the banks, seize the ppwer, smash the existing machinery of the capitalist state, and establish workers’ power.
That is why our agitation and propaganda must be aimed not only at the existing narrow circles of the left in the labour movement, but also into the wider rank and file of the unions and as wide as we can reach into the broader ranks of the working class and the oppressed. 21) Us and the hard left A particular problem in the building of a section of the FI in Britain is the existence of the Socialist Workers Party, now one of the biggest far left organisations in the world.
Working inside it is not an option, since it lacks any basic democracy (factions and tendencies are not allowed, and people are expelled in true Healyite style for the crime of “secret factionalism’). But at the same time its politics are woefully inadequate for the construction of a serious revolutionary movement in this country.
Having clung dogmatically for 13 years to a theory of a ‘downturn’ in class struggle — turning a blind eye to inner- city riots, the miners’ strike, the Wapping print dispute and large scale NHS pay battles — they suddenly announced an ‘up- turn’ in October 1992 — on the strength of the demonstrations against pit closures, which they saw as a fresh opportunity to recruit. having not even called for a one-day general strike in 1985, they called for an all-out general strike in the autumn of 1992!
For the SWP, in the truest sectarian tradition, the interests of their own organisation is placed above any other conéideration of the class struggle. Any line of march or analysis can be
\ embraced or ditched according to the recruitment possibilities.
Add to this a tradition of workerism, economism, opposition to the self- organisation of the specially oppressed, and the inability to grasp the national question (as shown by their reactionary line on Bosnia), and of course the misleading theory of state capitalism, now hopelessly lost in the events of the ex-USSR, and the recipe is one of predictable bankruptcy.
The SWP manages to get around this by it populist presentational skills, and by the well-planned use of a large apparatus to attract new forces on a low political level.
We cannot hope to outmanoevre or out-grow the SWP in the short term. In politically confronting the SWP, the key for us is precisely the political differences, which sum up our strengths and their weaknesses. Our analysis of the big political issues — the collapse of Stalinism, the war in ex- Yugoslavia, Ireland, and women’s liberation is vastly superior to the SWP. And our strategic grasp of the need to fight politically in the mass organisations of the working class, and to oppose sectarianism is also a strength in the eyes of many independent militants. they have stabilised to some extent around the YRE, and remain an organisation of around 1,000 members, again with sizable resources and apparatus.
Militant’s line in some ways is more interesting than the SWP, especially on issues like women’s liberation, where they have made a Step forward from horrendous past positions. They have made no comparable development on the national question, as can be seen from their line on Bosnia.
However their exit from the Labour Party marked a leftist, sectarian turn, and they retain an equally sectarian, bureaucratic internal regime, as shown by the expulsion of Ted Grant.
As with the SWP, our best grounds for politically combatting Militant is on the strength of our analysis on key political issues.
Of the smaller far-left currents, Socialist Organiser is probably the most significant for us in terms of our work, especially among students where they have focused much of their recruitment activity.
Although SO has a labour movement orientation, which often places them in the same alliances as us, it remains in its internal regime and its politics a deeply sectarian group, which systematically educates its members in this tradition.
SO makes a central feature of its bankrupt political positions on the national questions (notably on Ireland and Palestine), and since a major split ten years ago (with forces some of whom are now in our organisation) it has reverted to a characterisation of the USSR and Eastern Europe as-state capitalist — an analysis which has only impeded their attempts to account for the events now shaking these countries as they seek to restore capitalism.
Though they are more politically sophisticated than either the SWP or Militant, we have no reason to fear political interventions from them. But we must ensure comrades are sufficiently educated, confident and combative to take them on.
In practice, SO are generally not a serious problem for our work in most areas, though their sectarian zeal can mean they can miracle to win the leadership of the entire British hard left tomorrow, our forces would still be weak and isolated from the mass organisations of the workers’ movement.
Se Raise the banner of socialism mobilise numbers for selected events, and their apparent homogeneity (fuelled by an authoritarian internal regime) can cause difficulties where we are not properly prepared to combat them. 22) Building alliances Some tactics are forced upon us by our size as an organisation: but others are broader strategic problems affecting every Current which seriously aspires to play a leadership role in the struggle for socialism in Britain and internationally. - The facile and sectarian answers offered to these problems by much larger organisations than ours help to increase the difficulty of organising the left in the unions and conducting a serious political fight for the development of a hard left in the Labour Party. Though they have become adeptat self-publicity and building sizable forces in their own chosen milieux SSS SESS members since their high point in the Poll Tax strug- aa e jas _ gle as a result of their turn to launch an open party, by a tionary party one by one, now echoed by the Socialist Workers Party and by Militant, wall them off from any serious attempt at building broader campaigns.
This criticism is not just sour grapes on our part.
There is a genuine historic problem of political development to be confronted in Britain, to which sectarian stunts offer no serious solution.
Unlike other countries in Europe and elsewhere, revolutionary politics have only ever had the most tenuous hold on the British working class. The dead weight of Labourism, with its recruiting sergeants and thought police in the unions, has left socialism as a minority pursuit for all but the smallest layers.
Even were we by some miracle to win the leadership of the entire British hard left tomorrow, our forces would still be weak and isolated from the mass organisations of the workers’ movement. Our priority would still have to be orientating towards these mass organisations, the unions, the Labour Party, and of course the big broader campaigns, finding ways of working alongside and mobilising forces politically to our right.
While political developments in the Labour Party and the unions often lag behind more explosive changes and upheavals in the class and among wider layers of the oppressed, almost any serious and deep going struggle finds its eventual reflection within the labour movement, and activists from other campaigns — as well as refugees from previous involvement in hard left groups — are drawn towards it as a focus.
There is no doubt that regardless of the politics on offer from John Smith’s sorry bunch, the true guage of mass political revulsion at the Tory onslaught will be not the derisory hundreds of votes that could be won by far-left candidates, but a wholesale turn towards Labour in local elections, Euro elections and the next general election.
This is why a political fight targeted at the labour movement itself, and not seeking to skirt around it through building stage armies of ‘rank and file’ groups or pretend mass parties remains essential to the struggle for socialism in Britain.
Even if we were already leading a revolutionary party of 10,000 our key task would be not just propaganda and self-proclamation but working on the method of the united front to maximise the impact we could have on the day to day struggles of the working class. This means not just giving ourselves the moral satisfaction of denouncing the reformists and bureaucrats, but devising tactical means to draw their base into joint action, and to expose the social democrats in practice before the eyes of
broad layers of the working class.
To take one example: instead of simply slagging off John Edmonds, Bill Morris, UNISON chiefs and fellow bureaucrats for their failure to defend the welfare state, we must call on them to put their brave words and conference speeches into practice.
We must go back into the labour movement to build campaigns — conferences, propaganda, other activities — in defence of welfare which reach out to the best sections of TGWU, GMB and other union activists, to Labour Party left wingers, and to others not currently organised in the labour movement — and ask why Edmonds, Morris and co are nowhere to be seen.
We must organise in UNISON and civil service unions for resolutions and ballots calling for strikes in defence of key welfare services — and expose Edmonds and co as unwilling to support workers in struggle.
We must take up every opportunity to broaden our appeal to our right, while mobilising the left.
In this sense our attitude to alliances and to united front work now is simply a smaller scale replica of what it would be in more favourable circumstances: the obvious difference is that our options are limited at present by our lack of forces and resources.
We all know that our organisation is small in relation to our _ principal rivals on the far left in Britain — Militant and the SWP.
Unlike them we have never had — or sought — the homogeneity which can only be imposed in organisations tightly led and politically dominated by bureaucratic and sectarian leaderships intolerant of internal debate and opposition.
But we do have political strengths and a tradition of respect for workers’ democracy which give us plenty to offer today’s labour movement. :
Roots Our organisation needs to root itself in the labour movement under the banner of the newspaper, enabling us to fight for the sort of alliances we need in the mass organisations and in wider campaigns.
We seek alliances based on clearly defined and agreed tasks and policies. This is only possible where the alliances themselves incorporte a democratic structure.
We must not be conservative in our approach to building alliances or assume that we are condemned always to address just the same small audience of the ) existing left. Building campaigns in defence nof the welfare state will need labour movement backing, but can also prove attractive to a much wider layer, including the unemployed, pensioners groups and others.
In some areas of work — NHS campaigning, Bosnia work, Campsfield, and our involvement in CAAT in particular — comrades-have discovered new possi- (pi ee eee We must not be conservative in our approach to building alliances or assume that we are condemned always to address just the same small audience of the existing left. : Raise the banner of socialism vidual ex- NUPE supporters from the Militant tradition. Chances to link up with radicalised layers of NUPE and COHSE to build a much broader opposition to the UNISON bureaucracy have not yet been exploited: nor is this problem resolved by proposals for joint fringe meetings with the SWP. ' We must ensure that the practical work and profile of the SMTUC is reshaped to allow us to use this as a vehicle fo attract new layers of militants, and that the campaign for the Socialist Campaign Group Network conference makes similarly wide appeal to forces inside and outside the existing Labour left.
To follow through this kind of work, a raised profile is required for our own newspaper and group activities. While being the best builders of broad campaigns, we must also build our own current, ensuring that we hold educational and public events to which those interested in our politics can be invited, and become involved in campaigning with us.
If we work in this way, we should lay a firm basis for recruitment of new forces, men and women, youth activists, students, anti-racist campaigners, Bosnia solidarity campaigners, union militants and Labour left wingers.
This in tum would open up new tactical options for the organisation as the situation evolves towards the next general election. 24) Priorities for work We must make choices on where to concentrate our main political energies.
We are not in a position to give equal weight to all the many tasks which socialists face in the coming period. Our organisation has limited human and resources that can be committed; and it has outstanding obligations to certain areas of work in which comrades already play leading roles.
We take for granted the continued activity of our comrades and co-thinkers in trade union work (where our coordination of work in fractions and our joint activity around the SMTUC must be stepped up) and in the Labour Party (where the Socialist Campaign Group Network, despite its weaknesses, offers a rallying point for the left).
But this work needs to be given political shape and direction. For this reason we propose three priority areas of work, in which we expect all local branches to map out proposals and initiatives, each of which should also be raised politically in union branches, Labour Parties and other labour movement organisations. 1) Welfare state We need to focus fresh attention and specific iliti i roductively on single issues not We: ie | i aa trod ears who — nacessily iden- initiatives on the strategic question of defence of only ot necess tify themselves politically as left wing, but also of the welfare state. . sincroeltenatil-Mieburen using local and national press, radio and television to get over Our analysis shows this to be acrucial a basic information to millions, rather than the thousands addressed leaflets. an a make more out of these opportunities to link our organisation with popular campaigns in which we play akey role.
In some of our trade union work and to some extent in the Labour Party, where ‘independent’ left forces have become so thin on the ground, we have tended to be too conservative 1n at ee organising with small numbers of the known, nti x ty ne glecting opportunities to play a wider role in aye ee sme struggles. One example is the extent to which the left oppost in UNISON has largely by default wound up little more t me renamed version of the NALGO left, with the addition of indi- 29 the demands of British capitalism and the needs of the working -— while the Tories are committed to attacking welfare, the: reformist organisations offer no more than verbal a a despite the fact that the welfare state in all its guises hea th. education, higher education, social security, pensions, Sic ieee benefits, social services, social housing ~ 1S extremely popular.
Indeed the Labour leadership 1s conducting its own back-room review of the possibility of scrapping certain universal benefits é esorung ory-style ‘targetung . a he fight for mae: =pite therefore | nvolves a continuing political fight inside the labour movement for a break in Labour’s
rn consensus with the Tories : : tit must go beyond Propaganda, to begin mobilising on a ‘ ding the r t Proposed SMTU eth on the welfare state; it means Sekine alliances “~: a in 1c sector unions —- UNISON, Civil service teaching and a sh ke nny (Ocal conferences, produce publicity, and €r links with pensioners pro igns, ups, NHS dents, and where I set fiduenuie , Possible reach out to sectio ns of the une and claimants whose benefits are at risk. ales No other section of the left issue in advance of the next Stage of the Tory attack _ Todefend the welfare state is therefore noteasily encompassed In One phrase, one campaign, one initiative: it involves activity and polifical struggle on a range of fronts at local and national level. Itis a flexible formula that can be adapted to the needs and possibilities of each locality, and, through regular reports in the Paper, can offer a unifying theme to the work we do in the labour movement. 2) Anti-racist work The important pioneering work by our comrades building the Close Campsfield campaign must be built upon, and other branches should examine local possibilities for developing campaign work against the Asylum Bill and the racist Immigration Act.
The fight against racism and fascism must be pursued within the unions and Labour Party, proposing and building labour movement mobilisations wherever fascists attempt to mount campaigns, or black communities come under attack from the far right or the police. 3) Bosnia campaign Since last summer the Bosnia campaign work has seen the spilt with the WRP (over their hijacking of the campaign and opposition to basic democracy) more than outweighed by the increasing involvement of European sections of the Fourth International, , backed by support from the Bureau and the USEC.
Although the involvement of the European sections has been uneven, with particular reticence from the LCR in France, it is the first example for a very long time of a European wide campaign involving a number of European sections.
For the FI and the individual sections it has been and isa highly political and educative campaign which has developed our conceptions on ex- Yugoslavia and our understandings of the war and has developed more of a common view. It starts at the level of international working class solidarity in the form of material aid and ends up at the centre of European and world politics. It can raise the political level of the organisation and our supporters and of the debates in the FI.
The currently proposed reactionary deal promoted by the US for the cantonisation of Bosnia along ethnic lines and the resulting cease-fire between Bosnia and Croatia does not in the least devalue the campaign.
In any case our campaign is a political campaign based on material aid and the political side needs to be maintained and stepped up. This means that the campaign should continue in its present form with more emphasis on direct links, twinning, tours of trade unionists from the Ex-Yugoslavia and if possible a conference in the region.
The biggest problem for us in Britain has been the politics of the British left.
This situati 5 Situation has been both a weakness and an Opportunity Itisaw i ae ipso because it means that the Campaign in Britain mass Campaign, but a strength because it allows us to use our political stre i i ! ngth in a practical c: i * solidari which can draw in new forces. 2 a eal *oliarity It also gives US a political cuttin left Organisations. It is the Only iss felt obliged to respond to us.
Our approach to the campaign i itai ur a Paign in Britain has b ild i both inside and Outside of the labour movement. Wehave te mie the campaign as systematical] i aioe y as we can in both the Labour Party The basic com affiliated labour & edge against the bigger far ue on which the Militant has : ed; plus independent activists who can be drawn into the campaign: Bosnian refugees where possible.
Boga enn i pport from the street - There 1S Support for : general population which can be tapped if we can build campaigns in the right way.
Once independents are attracted into the campaign they have to be given a level of activity and political interest to keep them there and keep them active, they will not be kept just around routine organising meetings. Events have to be build which will develop their interest and involvement.
The lesson from this is that low key campaigns directing predominantly into the labour movement will not build significant initiatives - and they will certainly not build campaigns which can purchase lorries and send them to ex- Yugoslavia.
At the same time there is an important student dimension to the campaign - which has already produced some results. The Swansea campaign is predominantly student based and both West London and Manchester have important student components. With the campaign being both activist based and highly political at the level of international politics it can be very attractive in the colleges.
Though it will not last for ever, the campaign in Britain has only realised a part of its potential.
The most important subjective factor in this has been the slowness of some of our branches to turn towards it and to turn to the type of public work which it implies. It is the only campaign we have been involved in for some time (with the partial exception of the poll tax campaign) where a key part of the work has been campaigning on the streets directly to the general public.
Youth and student work Every branch, every member should be involved in some form of work targeted at mobilising, organising and recruiting youth and students, both from the broader work that we do in other campaigns (young health workers, young black activists, young campaigners for Bosnia) and from sales of Liberation! and systematic work directed specifically towards student unions and young workers.
Promoting our press As the vehicle for our politics, presenting up to date analysis of the campaigns and work in which we are involved as well as broader news and analysis of world politics, the paper is a crucial tool in the work.
Sales of the paper, and following up contacts and supporters drawn to it will be key.to the development of the work, we carry out in every section of the working class movement. ‘