On the miners' strike & strike ballot

He appeals to his members to endorse the strike call, and he says in this interview that he is prepared to face demand a determined struggle for state power.

La general strike 'absolutely, and without qualification'.

He accepts that such a general strike, just like the miners' action, is against the Tory government, 'a major political confrontation'.

All his answers in this interview must be looked at in the light of this class fight.

Time and time again the working class shows itself reădy to fight, but the question of victory or defeat in these battles is one which can only be settled by political leadership in the workers' movement, in the trade unions.

Why are the Tories resisting wage increases, preparing to attack the 'unions, encouraging scab labour, and working to defeat and demoralize workers in a series of disputes as unemployment builds up?

It is not a temporary tactic, because they cannot proceed otherwise.

Historical

The world capitalist crisis, particularly as it affects the oldest capitalist power, britain, torces he capitalist class to press for a major historical change in working-class rights.

They must win, or risk extinc.

That is why those trade union leaders who call for pressure on the government to change its policy, and continue discussion and negotiation with the government, are dangerous for the working class, because they obscure the real objective to which the Tories are driving.

Because the crisis is so deep there are no reform or patched. up solutions for the problems of any section of workers. The needs of the capitalist class are such that they seek to press home any advantage they gain in order to drive back the workers.

Daly rightly draws attention to the hundreds of millions of pounds paid out since pit nationalization to ex-owners and bankers. All this has come off the backs of the miners.

But when he tells the Tory government that some of this money must be returned to the industry to protect jobs and increase wages, he must next answer the questions:

How is this money to be got back ?

Who will go and get it?

Tory government policies of large cuts in public expenditure and denationalization of the most profitable parts of state industries are already at work in coal-mining.

Government spending is to be kept down by telling Robens not to meet the miners' increase.

Profitable operations like tunnelling developments are more and more being handed over to private companies under contract, just like opencast mining, which was much more profitable than underground mining.

Everything now depends upon the working class being equipped with a leadership which has the theory, the determination, class-consciousness, the trained party membership, and the programme of working-class power.

Any other leadership will hesitate, withdraw, collapse and will condemn the working class to defeat at the very first sign of the ruling class taking the mailed fist from out of the velvet glove of procedure and parliamentarism.

This is not a judgement on the individual strength or weakness of trade union leaders, but a political conclusion from the whole epoch of working-class revolution.

No one can escape these conclusions: Capitalism's crisis is such that the working class will be presented with revolutionary opportunities, situations which I would like information about by a Marxist, revolutionary party.

But the taking of power, the carrying through of every struggle with this aim, can only be done the struggle today, Lawrence

All talk of workers' unity or unity of industrial and political action, even from powertul trade union leaders, is inadequate by itself.

If persisted in, it becomes positively disarming.

The really fundamental lesson of the 1926 General Strike was not the contrast pointed out by Lawrence Daly (that in 1926 the miners were on the defensive, now they are on the attack), but that the Marxist forces-at that time in the Communist Partydid not concentrate everything on the building of an independent revolutionary leadership in all the unions, with a programme of workers' power.

Instead, they welcomed uncritically militant-sounding speeches of 'left' TUC General Council leaders.

At the height of the strike action in 1926, these "lefts' assisted A. J. Thomas and his right-wing majority to call off the strike soon as the Tories, through Sir John Simon, made it plain that they considered it had reached revolutionary proportions.

Smillie, the miners' leader, had retreated exactly similar Gebige reminded him sharpid him sharply that to go on with the strike would mean his taking responsibility for 'civil war".

The issue was not and is not civil war, but which class shall rule ?

Can jobs be saved, can wages be maintained or increased, can the unions themselves remain in existence if the employing class continues to rule?

Is not every single one of these basic rights under attack by the Tories? Can they be beaten back except by challenging the whole basis of their rule?

New content Therefore every struggle, strike and demand is now filled with a new content: how can the working class be mobilized, behind revolutionary leadership, in the struggle to defeat the Tory government and institute workers' power?

That is the meaning of the programme adopted by the Socialist Labour League - a section of which appears on this page.

Lawrence Daly is certainly taking up a fundamental issue when he 'presses' the government to remove the capital interest burden and when he says 'no pit closures; but the Tories' own programme is to just as resolutęly resist on these matters.

So the question arises: how to break them?

Trade union power is necessary for this task . . . but it is not sufficient. We require a political struggle for Marxism, waged successfully in the British labour against the dominant ideology movement.

This reformist ideology—co.laboration and discussion with the employers and the state to gradually win concessions for the THE RIGHT WORK:

The unprecedented dangers confronting the working class demand new forms of struggle. The right of the worker to a job stands higher than the workers without ever provoking revolutionary clashes - is acted out every day in the NUM and other unions by the Stalinists and 'lefts' upon whom Daly relies in refers to the few things on which he disagrees with the Socialist Labour League and that the disagreement, over the primacy of building revolutionary leadership to take the workers to power, is the most fundamental political cleavage possible in our epoch of wars and revolutions.

The struggles into which a leader like Lawrence Daly is forced to take his members mean that historic choices will be made.

Individual intentions nothwithstanding, leaders like. Daly have become part of the trade union bureaucracy in the last dozen Break The full political implications of the struggle which he now sees facing the miners pose the question of a break with that of Daly's answers. Last Saturday's Workers Press carried an exclusive interview with National Union of Mineworkers general secretary Lawrence Daly dealing particularly with the miners? pay claim and strike action. Here Cliff Slaughter, SLL Central Committee member, comments on some Being prepared to face a general strike, therefore, means being prepared politically to go through to the struggle for power, and not simply to draw in the strength of other unions behind any section, vital though that is.

In so far as Lawrence Daly fights against the government and against right-wing policies in the unions and Labour Party, he will encourage and bring to the fore many new workers in the struggle, who then become open to the work and influence of the revolutionary party.

But we cannot avoid posing the principled question as to Daly himself.

Our Trotskyist movement is founded on the struggle against the betrayals of the Stalinist bureaucracy. We will not make

the same fatal error as the Com. munist Party in 1926 and rely on 'left' leaders' words.

Lawrence Daly, for example, refers to the promised Transport and General Workers' Union support in the coming miners' strike.

No doubt this finds a warm response in the hearts of many miners and other militants, looking forward to a united struggle against the government.

Lessons

But the lessons of history— both of 50 years ago, and of the last three months—must be burned into our minds.

There were leading militants before the great 1920 - 1921 strikes who said: 'Why do we need a party if we have the Triple Alliance (of miners', railwaymen's and transport workers' unions)?' But it was precisely the lack of such a party in 1920-1921, and the later Stalinist corruption of the new , Communist Party in 1926, which made possible the defeats of that period.

The Tory governments of those days relied entirely on the Triple Alliance leaders and TUC Genéral Council not raising the question of state power.

And now, in every major strike since the June 1970 election, union leaders have used their position to drive the workers back to work on the employers' terms.

Heath himself drew the conclusion. In the September 24 TV interview in which he referred to a possible general strike, he commended the outcome of the national docks and GKN-Sankey disputes.

behind the employers and forcing the workers back on terms offered much earlier.

This, said Heath, must become the pattern. On the docks, it was the T&GWU and Jack Jones who took the men back with the final acceptance of Devlin assured.

At GKN-Sankey, the T&GWU, through Mr Moss Evans, drove the strikers back to work after the Municipal and General Workers' Union had failed to do so.

Transport and General Workers' miners Pledge of support in the Union tions must be answered.

If trade union léadership has already been instrumental in creating a situation where the Tories, despite workers' combative strength, feel tactically secure enough to proceed with their present attacks, then evidently the question of political leadership in the unions, revolutionary leadership, is at the top of the agenda for the working class.

It is obvious that behind our differences lies a divergence on the evaluation of the period in which we work.

For us the depth of the crisis so sharpens the class issues that the situation is rapidly developing to one in which the direct conquest of working-class power is posed. Daly finds himself talking very differently from 12 months ago, ment in office, he lost the confi- with the Labour governdence of tens of thousands of striking miners 'in the surfacemen's hours dispute.

All the weight of the middle class, of the official' traditions of the British labour movement, and of the indulgence of reformism in the working class itself, placed against this perspective and in favour of the hopeless search for yet another series of compromises.

This difference also underlines Daly's position on the role of his predecessor as NUM general secretary, Will Paynter.

Paynter, for most of his life a leading Communist Party member, last year accepted an appointment to the Commission on Industrial Relations, alongside Géorge Woodcock.

This CIR • will be the main instrument the operation of the Tories industrial courts, should their anti-union Bill become law.

All the dangers of Lawrence Daly's union militancy without revolutionary theory, which must inevitably lead into the politics of the trade union bureaucracy, are expressed when he says:

'... it was better to have someone like him [Paynter] from the unions than perhaps someone with different political and industrial attitudes.' Participation in the growth of capitalist state institutions to control the unions is here accepted by Daly, on the grounds that it is 'the lesser evil'.

Deadly

This outlook is deadly: the real question was to fight Wilson, Castle and the Labour government on their whole policy, which created if the CIR the first bases of the' nascent corporate state now being worked for by the Tories. That has surely now been proved.

Paynter's decision to join the CIR was a betrayal. It represented the logical end of his years of opportunist sharing of NUM power with Sidney Ford and the right wing, his piloting of hundreds of pit closures.

It was the logical end, too, of his life's devotion to stalinism, the main counter-revolutionary force internationally, the main political force on a world scale collaborating with the capitalist class in integrating the unions into the capitalist state.

The trade union bureaucracy and Stalinists try to collaborate in the state and governmental institutions.

Transform

The revolutionary party draws the opposite conclusion from the increasing intervention of the state in the unions: fight for a Marxist leadership in the trade unions able to transform them into instruments of the revoluBecause Lawrence Daly, in our opinion, ignores these fundamental theoretical questions, he looks for some vanishing middle ground of trade union militancy and unity in struggle, plus volume of accumulated socialist propaganda against Toryism.

Whatever the intentions of those who purvey this mixture, by itself it can only mislead the workers in their struggles. ing up when it was actually spreading.

From his answers to Stephen Johns on this strike, it is obvious that he does not connect it with the political questions we have raised in relation to the fight against the Tories.

'Left'

The unoficial strike leadership was in the hands of NUM branch officials. Dominant among these officials were members or 'left' friends of the Communist Party in S Wales and Yorskhire, although working with them were right wingers.

These were the men who, unwilling and unable to fight through the battle against the Labour government, told Daly that there was a danger of the strike break-

Lawrence Daly opposed the strike, and favoured the return to work, because he had no political alternative to these centrists and Stalinists, and had, to a great extent, become dependent on his relations with them in the NUM.

That relation with the Stalinists, and the question of building the revolutionary alternative, was the essence of the question, and it will be the essence of the coming miners' strike.

It will not. do for Lawrence Daly to excuse Paynter on the grounds that he held NUM office at a time when the miners, according to him, were not in a militant mood, and then himself to refuse support to a militant struggle because of the union rules and the misleadership in the areas.

Responsibility The' real question was to take responsibility for a political fight against the government, which required a serious political preparation.

If Lawrence Daly is, in fact, going to take the extremely important step of trying to draw in transport workers on the side of the miners then this political preparation now becomes a matter of extraordinary urgency.

What is to be concluded from this interview?

If Lawrence Daly were to act consistently on his statements calling for industrial action to defeat the anti-union laws and to force the Tory government to resign, if he is going to ruthlessly fight productivity deals, if he is prepared to face a general strike, then the most serious theorétical and political questions arise.

Every one of these issues poses the revolutionary struggle for workers' power, which, of necessity, requires a party based on Marxist theory, built in struggle against reformism and Stalinism.

That is the meaning of the Socialist Labour League's programme of action against the Tory government.

These questions are now unavoidable because of the accumulated historical contradictions and the resultant tension between the classes.

There will be no personal exceptions to this choice for trade union leaders-Lawrence Daly or anyone else.

We are all for going forward in a united struggle to support the miners and on to defeat the Tory government. But when Lawrence Daly says to us the important thing is to get together and start pushing, we must go further, to the essential point.

The fate of the miners, and of the whole working class, will be decided by the fundamental political and theoretical question: the revolutionary party, the building of alternative revolutionary leadership.