SLANDER HISTORY OF BRITISH WORKING CLASS

Last month's Empire Pool Rally, attended by 10,000 workers, youth and intel. lectuals, indicated the considerable interest which now exists about historical questions inside the working class move.

For Marxists, the growth of this interest in a period such as this comes as no surprise. For it arises from the nature of the political crisis which the working class now faces.

As Workers Press and the Socialist Labour League alone have insisted, the Heath govattacking the immediate living ernment is by no means merely standards millions workers. The Tories are engaged on a programme designed to strip the working class of every fundamental right it has won in the last 200 years of bitter struggle against the employers and their governments.

It is the growing recognition of this fact which is forcing those in the front ranks of the fight against the Tory government today to turn back to the experiences of history. They are driven to do this in order to find the theoretical and practical lessons to bring the fight against the Tory government, and the crisis-ridden capitalist' system it represents, to a decisive and final conclusion.

It is now the great responsibility of the Socialist Labour League and its growing number of supporters in the working-class movement to encourage and develop this study of history which the Empire Pool rally did so much to stimulate.

For us this has always been a revolutionary duty. The task of extracting from history its real lessons can • be done by those engaged in the dayby-day struggle to establish revolutionary leadership for the working class. The attitude of the revisionists and reformists to historical questions is quite the opposite.

Any attention which these people pay to history has always one purpose in view: to distort, obscure and the reatend ent revolutionary the history of the British working class. Because they believe implicitly in the stability of the power. The Stalinist movement could be forced to the left and made to carry out this historical task, they said.

This counter-revolutionary standpoint, and in particular the capitulation to Stalinism which this split involved, are writ large over Jones' 'analysis' of the history of the British working-class movement.

And because his purpose is to 'explain' the non-revolutionary nature of the British working class, he inevitably starts from the crudest form of idealism. He writes what might be called the 'If Only' theory of history. 'If only' British history had been more like that of the French... 'if only' the Marxist movement had been composed of men of the calibre of A. Jones ... then we would long ago have had a socialist revolution.

Like all middle-class renegades from Marxism, he is utterly unable to face up to the contradictory development of the working class in Britain, a contradictory development which had a real, historical and material foundation. He cannot begin in this way precisely because the task of revolutionary Marxism now consists in resolving in practice these contradictions.

This in turn involves summoning up all the historical forces which are contained in the revolutionary traditions of the British working class, traditions which stretch back to Chartism and beyond.

This is clear from his discussion of the Labour Party, with which his article begins. 'For some time now a series of articles in the "Red Mole" [paper of the IMG] have been trying to spell out an analysis of the British Labour Party The essence of this position is that the ideology of social democracy in its Labourite version ... represents a whole series of organizations which correspond to or "embody" a particular consciousness and that these organizations fundamentally determine the entire character of the British working-class movement.' And, as if to emphasize the point, he tells us on the next page: • the structure of the Labour Party . . . determines working-class movement, entire structure of the difference between trade union and political consciousness, saw no difference between the political and economic struggle with regard to where they were carried OUL. Whether a strike was political or not was determined by the consciousness of the fact that it was a trade union" affair.

Here Jones, at a stroke, dismisses entirely the materialist theory of knowledge in favour of the purest idealism. Whether a strike iS political or not he informs us, is determined by the consciousness of the people involved! So existence determined consciousness! At the very foundation of Marx's doctrine was the understanding that the class struggle existed independently of the consciousness of those involved in it and that it developed through its own, internal, dialectical logic, in times of crisis reaching not merely political, but revolutionary proportions.

All strikes against the Tory government are directly political. not because the majority of people realize that they are, which is Jones' idealistic those that they must distort the real nature of the history of the revol British working class, in this early case the historical significance again: of the Labour Party. violer It is no accident that the the si IMG has been in the leadership the t which has sought at all stages, particularly since the election Comt of the Conservative govern- to en ment in 1970, to turn the centu struggle of the working class learni away from one directed at the agent trade union leaders towards descr the most vulgar form of 'rank Jor and file-ism'. none In the same way they have serior failed consistently to call for ject the removal of the Tory gov- impur ernment and its replacement by a Labour government pledged Britis to a socialist programme. For was 1 what they dread above all is illega that the working class will, in fight the process of struggle, expose again: and defeat the traitors in its leadership. tende For the revisionist Jones, the more source of all the "problems' tions now afflicting the British work- inevit ing class are to be found in its devel period of origin, the period of Britai the French revolution. layer:

at dil set of evene Because of the early develop- union generations of workers, inspired by the French ution, sought to build the trade union movement st the most vicious and nt persecution of Pitt and tate. And for their efforts, rade unions were driven rground by the 1799-1800 ›ination Laws; they had Idure over a quarter of a iry of illegality and terror, ing to deal with spies and provocateurs of all iptions. les feels obliged to explain of these facts. Every us worker today will rewith contempt these dent attacks on the early union movement. The ¡h trade union movement born under conditions of lity and it must now for its life and future st the threat of illegality.

course the early unions id to be confined to the conservative, craft, secof workers. This was table, given the early opment of capitalism in in. And because different s of workers were affected fferent periods by the onf the industrial revolution,