NAL THE INDEPENDENCE OF TRADE UNIONS IS IMPOSSIBLE'-TROTSKY

restore full employment i; implement a policy of payit ng full wages whilst working time; nationalize the basic industries, including the motor It was also decided to reconvene the conference in the event of attacks by the government on any section of workers on questions of mass sackings, implementation of the Devlin Report or wages policy.

On September 19 the Tyneside and Blythe Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions called for a December 12 lobby of parliament on unemployment.

The Labour Party Conference in October endorsed Labour's economic policies.

BROODING in the background of 'Women in Love' (Prince Charles Theatre, Director Ken Russel) are the pits:

They erupt like smouldering scars out of soft green landscapes, smoke hanging in the air like a yellow shroud.

Coal dust blackens the faces, penetrates the lungs, darkens the squat houses.

Nature is violated and men are violated by the plunder.

Some 50 years on from the historical placing of the film perhaps the miners' faces are less grimed in coal dust or the showers wash away what the bowels of the earth release; the formal black suits and white collars of Sunday best have given way to jackets and terylene; the brass bands have been replaced by electric guitars.

But the violation still remains.

And it is this violation of man that underlies this film.

Passionate

anthems D. H. Lawrence, the author of the novel 'Women in Love' is possibly the last great English novelist.

The son of a Nottinghamshire miner, his books are passionate anthems against the stuntedness of life. Much of his work is haunted by the blackened images of industrial rape, the tearing apart and encroachment by the machine of all that is natural.

Men are divided from men, women reduced to objects, and Lawrence is the individual voice struggling to break the The Young Socialists worked for a fight. for a mass lobby, but turn it into a mere token.

Following the lobby, economic crisis in the USA. until it was held.

It was at this time of f25 million BMH-Leyland merger.

Liaison Committee for workers' dissatisfaction December 3, 1967, they had 1969. 'left' MPs to fight Wilson. Pale carbon copy of D.H. Lawrence And it i! puritanism scored into On October 21 the Oxford conference was recalled at the request of the striking Merseyside dockers.

Links were forged between car workers and dockers at a conference attended by 368 A joint fight was undertaken against speed-up, unemployment, prices and incomes legislation, Measured-Day Work and Devlin.

Meanwhile the Socialist Labour League and Young Socialists supported the call for the December lobby but said it would achieve nothing unless it demanded that the 'left' MPs quit stalling and fight Wilson.

On December 2, 1967, we printed our Socialist Policy for the Crisis' demanding: Independence of the trade unions from the state; a sliding scale of wages; no sackings; workers' supervision and control; nationalization of the banks; suspension of interest payments on housing; nationalization of steel; repeal of the Immigration Act; scrapping of Labour's foreign policy; sack the Wilson leadership.

By contrast, the TUC and the National Confederation of Engineering and Shipbuilding Unions banned the December 12 lobby and it was immediately sabotaged by the Communist Party, which would not oppose the official trade union leadership.

LOBBY

Communist Party strove to Oxford Committee ment's incomes policy and called a national conference of trade unionists for February 3, 1968, to centre on the effects of devaluation and the At the beginning of 1968 government increased health charges and intensified its efforts to hold back wages.

The busmen's £l increase was frozen and the Transport Electric. and General Workers' leader, the 'left' Cousins, failed completely to lead any fight, despite mass meetings all over the country demanding strike action. action forced the engineering 'left' MPs restricted their fight to a call for a special meeting of the Labour Party NEC. We demanded a special conference of the Labour Party and said that no cuts should be implemented that the government provided strike.

La cheap The Communist Party called a national conference of its Defence of Trades Unions on February 17. Committee on November 22.

This conference was supported by the 'state capitalist' Its aim was to canalize the Labour government behind bureaucracies. At their previous conference on refused to consider a resolution from Lucas/CAV for the CINEMA bonds of alienation, to find a way through the humiliation of industrialization, to fight for a rebirth from the ashes of deprivation and puritanism to a highly personal and physical authenticity through the love of one woman.

His whole life was a striving towards • a oneness with a physical and natural that has been lost.

He paid dearly for it. Ostracised by society, he had to take the path of exile and wandering with the woman he loved.

True to form the English bourgeoisie hounded him, banned his boks, sent him packing.

The catalogue of such treatment is long; Byron, Keats and Browning are a few English writers who fen foul of the bourgeoisie's vindictiveness.

La heritage of that is deeply English culture 'Tribune' was taking a similar line.

When ne economy cut ere announced, this paper o the 'left' gave prominence to an article by lennie Lee calling on the left to rally benind Wilson in order to keep out the right wing.

The February 17 lobby called for the TUC to impleTUC men had already demonstrated clearly that it was not prepared to fight the governThe February 3, 1968, conference called by the Oxford Liaison Committee was banned Woodcock, then general secretary of the TUC, but was attended by 550 delegates.

By contrast with the Stalinist conference a real fighting organization was launched -the All Trades Unions Alliance.

(The Stalinist conference even barred delegates on strike at Linton and Hirst, Swindon, and Lucas/CAV, Liverpool, on the grounds that strike committees were not official bodies!)

Meanwhile, the struggle was hotting up.

The Confederation of British Industries demanded an 18 month wage freeze and the engineers held one-day national stoppage in support of their f2 wage demand.

The May Day rally of Young Socialists called support for the engineers the implementation official policy of the AEF.

The AEF leaders, however, saw a one-day token strike as a substitute for a fight, not a prelude to one.

In June 1968, the Royal Commission on Trades Unions (Donovan) presented its report to parliament.

The idea of making unofficial strikes illegal was shelved for the time being.

The employers were still cautious.

Instead the Report attacked shop stewards' factory negotiating rights and said wages should be negotiated with the employers by national officials on a factory-to-factory basis, in line with the government's prices and incomes policy.

Its aim was to eliminate shop stewards' power prior to an attack on wages.

It was at this time that Mrs Castle appointed Mr Cattell, the employers' main authority on Measured-Day Work, to advise the government on wages.

A further conference of the Communist Party's Liaison Committee, again supported by the 'state capitalists', attracted only 120 delegates to the Beaver Hall. • The right-wing leaders were doing their best to put a brake on wages and to drive through productivity deals - for example, when the railwaymen's militancy had broken through the prices and incomes restrictions, the NUR leaders accepted a deal which included massive speed-ups and redundancies.

The workers were militant, however, and a lobby of the AEF National Comthat as Marxists must become aware of.

Its roots are deep and the bloom is Philistinism, suspicion, guilt, which the ruling class have wielded as a blunt weapons for generations.

When we smash capitalism, we tear out all its tentacular roots and institutions, its barbarism and its repression. That is the great task of the workers' revolution.

But for Lawrence there seemed no such way. He had a suspicion and a hostility to socialism.

Much of his passion led him to openly reactionary views; he substituted privilege and aristocracy for an aristocracy of the blood, as he called it.

His involvement with individual salvation made him suspicious of the institution and the mass.

But aspects of his work do not invalidate the central core. What burns behind every word on the page is the constant striving for man to achieve his own humanity, to grasp the On May 1, 1969, throughout Britain, tens of thousands of workers struck demanding the withdrawal of anti-union legislation. In Liverpool, workers from all sections of industry voted in favour of a call for a General Strike.

mittee on August 30 forced through a resolution to strike on October 21 for the £2 claim.

But there was a warning signal at the end of September when Scanton Work Measured - Day at Rootes, Linwood, Scotland.

The mood in the ranks was The 100th TUC Congress in October 1968 voted overwhelmingly (seven million votes) against the governdemanded the repeal of the Prices and Incomes Act.

The General Council got only a tiny majority for its own wage-vetting proposals.

The employers were also preparing, and the end of September 1968 saw the biggest merger in British industrial history-GEC/English The Labour Party Conference also demanded the repeal of the Prices and Incomes Actby a four million majority.

The very threat of strike employers to make concessions and as the strike date aproached the Socialist Labour League proposed to bring out "The Newsletter' three times a week. But Scanlon began to make concessions on productivity, failed to get equal pay for women, and called off the The All Trades Unions Alliance held a national conference on October 26, issued the pamphlet 'Your Wages in Danger' and called for a mass lobby of the AEF National On December 7, under the leadership of the Young Socialists, 150 apprentices and junior workers attended a conference in Manchester and called a mass demonstration and lobby in London for February 23, In December the building union leaders agreed to a wage-cut for their members. infinite richness of the relationships between men and men and women and women and men and women.

His books speak as constant and nagging reminders of what life could be, of what the future can hold. It is the voice that all great artists remind us with, the struggle for something else, a higher quality of experience.

What Lawrence could not see, but paradoxically seemed only to be aware of, is that struggle for interpersonal relationships is not separated from the struggle against the imprisoning social system that ensnares them.

In his fight against alienation, he himself became more alienated, forced into exile from the society that he hated, but could never relinquish a passionate concern for.

He was compelled into isolation.

As Marxists In January 1969, the All Trades Unions Alliance issued a statement warning of the employers' determination to force through legislation to make unofficial strikes illegal and to virtually destroy the unions.

The statement called for restoration of full wage bargaining rights to the unions and their independence from the state, repeal of the Prices and Incomes Act, nationalization as the answer to mergers, and the removal of trade union leaders who refused to fight.

We warned that the TUC's opposition was worthless.

In February this year the Socialist Labour League issued a call to Communist Party members for unity in action to smash anti-union laws.

We proposed a joint campaign for a national stoppage and suggested April 21 1969 as a date. The urgency was underlined by the action of Powellite councillors who went strike-breaking against the Lambeth dustmen.

On February 23, over 3,000 trade unionists, youth and students demonstrated against Wilson's attacks on the unions. For the first time all Ford plants in Britain were involved in a strike.

And Will Paynter joined the Commission on Industrial Relations, at £6,500 a year !

In March, the Socialist Labour League and the Young Socialists called for a national strike on May 1 in defence of trade unionism and against the attacks on wages and conditions that were accompanying re-organizations like that taking place at British-Leyland.

Also in March, the engineering leaders reached a settlement at Ford.

The Communist Party hailed this as a victory but, in return another way, but that fight does not seal us off from the vision of his experience and pen.

'He surveyed the rind of the world; houses, factories, trams, the discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all on the discarded surface. An earthquake had burst it all from inside. It was as if the surface of the world had been broken away entire: Ilkeston, streets, church, people, work, rule-of-the-day, all intact; and yet peeled away into unreality, leaving here exposed the inside, the reality; one's own being, strange feelings and passions and yearnings and beliefs and aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed, the permanent bedrock, knitted one rock with the woman one loved. It was confounding. Things are not what they seem. When he was a child, he had thought a woman was a woman merely by virtue of her skirts and petticoats. And now, lo, the whole world could be divested of its garment, the garment could lie there shed away intact, and one could stand in a new world, a new earth, naked in a new naked universe. It was too astounding and miraculous.

"This then was marriage!' "The Rainbow'.

Carbon copy

The film of Women in Love' is inevitably a pale carbon copy of the novel.

I say this not to demean the film as art form, as though there were some hierarchy operating, but simply that Lawrence's very style of writing, whereby he captures all the turns and changes of moods, feelings, sensations of an experience, describes what for small wage increases, these leaders accepted the right of the employers to withdraw bonuses for interrupted or disrupted production-and to relate bonuses to 'good behaviour'.

We said these union leaders would not fight against anti-union laws.

The 'left' MPs also had shown that they would not fight.

Only a general strike could stop Wilson.

'Left' trade union leaders were also exposed. Scanlon had refused to submit a new wage claim, refused to take any action for equal pay for women; defended the 1968 productivity deal and said the strings must be honoured; refused to support even token strikes against Mrs Castle's White Paper, and handed all responsibility to the TUC.

We warned that the TUC would betray, and when special congress of the TUC was called at Croydon on June we called for a one-day strike and lobby.

Tens of thousands had struck on May 1 and 2,500 marched with the YS May Day Hands off the Unions' demonstration.

But the TUC, by offering to control the workers itself, was half-way to Wilson's position.

Our call for a strike on June › was part of a campaign for a general strike to defend the unions.

The Communist Party also issued a call for a strike and lobby-but in order to support the 'lefts' and to keep movement in 'official' channels.

Since the 'lefts' went along with the TUC's 'self-discipline' proposals, the Communist Party was placing those workers who followed it in a position where they could not fight the right wing.

To struggle against this, the All Trades Unions Alliance called a conference in Birmingham for July 5. Ken Russel's direction brings out a feeling for the original book by D. H. Lawrence, and is matched by performances of Oliver Reed as Gerald and Glenda Jackson as Gudrun.

is going on inside his character, and internal life, is extremely difficult to translate to the screen, which relies on a more external form expression.

The physical aspects of the book are beautifully realized. The wrestling match where Just before this, Mr Dan McGarvey, the Boilermakers' leader, agreed to a wage-cut for shipbuilders.

At the end of June the government decided not to proceed immediately with anti-union laws.

The strength of the working class made Wilson hesitate.

We called this 'an unstable class truce' The Prices and Incomes Act had been broken through by a powerful wages movement.

The Tories and the employers were not confident.

But complacency would give them time to prepare. The breathing space gained had to be used to build up a revolutionary leadership in the working class.

Over 600 people attended the July 5 All Trades Unions Alliance Conference in Birmingham and declared their total opposition to the TUC decision to accept the principle of disciplining workers on behalf of the employers.

The conference called for a socialist policy to hit big business, defend the unions, stop rises in the cost of living, introduce nationalization under workers' control -and without compensatio" for an anti-union laws, and emergency Labour Party conference and a Labour government with a socialist policy.

In July 1,000 men were sacked on the Clyde.

The TUC last September demanded the repeal of the Prices and Incomes Act in its entirety, but it was clear by now that mass action by the working class was necessary to make such decisions mean anything.

MILITANCY

Working-class militancy was shown by the wage increases won by the strike of 1,300 blastfurnacemen at Port Talbot-but the union leaders accepted a productivity deal which could mean future redundancies.

It was shown by the struggle of the GEC-English Electric workers against redundancies —but the lack of a revolutionary leadership enabled the right wing to make a comeback and destroy the plans to occupy the factories.

It was shown again and again by the strikes of dustmen, bakers, miners.

Meanwhile the growing militancy in the working class and the mounting economic crisis produced a swing to the right in the Tory Party, which resulted in the real victor at the Conservative Party Conference being Enoch Powell.

But the September 28 1,500strong rally at Brighton on the eve of the Labour Party Conference heralded the greatest weapon yet forged in the working-class movement - the first daily Trotskyist paper, the Workers Press.

This paper came just at the right time.

The agreement with the CBI signed by trade union leaders - including the 'left' Jack Jones-bore early fruit when the two central male characters, Birkin and Gerald, strip, has a marvellous sense of contact and release that Lawrence strives for in the book.

Throughout the film there is a delicacy and feel for the original in Ken Russel's direction, matched by the Vic Feather intervened the miners' strike.

The record is clear.

The Labour leaders sticking to their prices The TUC is lining up openly against strikes, preparing for an even more blatant betrayal than in 1926 MPs refused to fight.

The 'left' trade union leaders have been exposed one after the other - Cousins, Scanlon, McGarvey, Jones and now Dales Up for these Tests wity in turn trail behind the TUC, which backs Wilson who carries out the wishes of the international bankers.

At each step along this road the revisionist 'state capitalist' and Pabloite group supported the Stalinists.

The issue facing the unions is that posed by Trotsky in "Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay' :

In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent only to the extent thạt they are conscious of being, in action, the organs of proletarian revolution...

'The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.' The Communist Party has consistently covered up for the 'lefts' Cousins, Scanlon, McGarvey, Jones and Daly who have at each stage betrayed the fight against the anti-union legislation.

An examination of the record of all political tendencies on the question of the independence of the trade unions since the Labour government came to power has shown that all of them-with the single exception of the Socialist Labour League-have taken the path that would tie the unions to the capitalist state and turn them into instruments for controlling the working class.

This bears out Trotsky's conclusion :

'Without the political leadership of the Fourth International the independence of the trade unions is impossible.' performances, particularly of Oliver Reed as Gerald and Glenda Jackson as Gudrun, though Alan Bates' Birkin is too lightweight to convey the brooding and restless character of the novel.

And it is this last quality which is missing from the film and ultimately reduces it. Birkin's outrage is lacking.

The conflict within himself is concealed by the too charming smiles of the actor; his recoil from the barbarism and oppressiveness of English society never transcends a mild irony.

Conflict

For Birkin is at war with himself, wrestling for a meaning to his relationships and experiences. This is the centre of the conflict of the novel which is echoed in the strivings of the other characters.

The violence and the passion in the book somehow appear as mere incidents, set pieces held within the frame, but not really integrated into the total struggle of conflicting opposites, of love and hate, creation and destruction, ardour and coldness.

It is rather like watching a facsimile; the ingredients appear to be there and they are present with skill, respect and artistry, but the living pulse has been removed, the ragged edges smoothed, it is all too resolved.

For without the anguish we have merely a reproduction.

And Lawrence's anguish still has a meeting.

And the roots of anguish are still there.

The pits still puncture earth, the plunder contir ues, grinding wheels of exploit:

violate us all.

PAGE ITALY Wednesday, November