CONFRONTED

The success of the Young Socialists' Right - to - Work marches is something which will prove decisive in the building of a Marxist party One year after the resolution carried at the Alexandra Palace 197 To r/ rally (February 14, 1971), was being practically implemented throughout the country. The resolution called for the transformation of the Socialist Labour League into a Already in the autumn of 1970, the All Trades Unions Alliance and the Socialist Labour League had put forward the Charter of Basic Rights, with the right to work asserted against the growing mass unemployment.

Then, in October 1971, the Right-to-Work campaign began in earnest and the marches from Glasgow, Liverpool and Swanséa were planned.

Indeed, the first lesson of the campaign and the marches is that only those who had grasped the depth of capitalism's crisis could prepare for the great increase in million ment in reaching the million mark January 1972. Every other tendency on the left was either asking the government for 'reflationary' measures or had doubts that the capital boom would soon reassert its upward course. tendencies except reasons Socialist For the same all the Labour League completely underestimated the strength and fighting capacity: of the working class. Consequently, when the miners' strike developed as an open challenge to the Tory government's staying in office and the Birmingham engineers joined the struggle, the Right-to-Work marchers were able to fight their way through all these experiences, to learn from them and to be sustained along the way by a working class which was undergoing profound changes:

While every other 'left' grouping remained utterly unprepared and isolated from these changes, the Young Socialists and the Socialist Labour League were able, through the Right-to-Work marches and the daily Workers Press, to provide the political vehicle for learning the lessons and preparing the next stage of the struggles of the British workstrength of the ranks had brought them to the point of collapse, then it was necessary to look for a new leadership. And here, in the Right-to-Work marches, were Young Socialists not just talking about building an alternative leadership, but actually fighting for it In the teeth of all the betrayals of the reformists and their Stalinist aides.

As the marches gathered strength, raised massive financial support from the factories, and received the aid of the rank and file of the working class in every town, so the Labour and union leaders ran in the opposite direction.

The ordinary workers recognized in the marchers the need of their future, opened up for them by the miners' strike. But the leaders set out on their own course.

Reeling from the miners' strike, Heath and the Tories were forced to retreat, publicly, from their intention to smash the working class at one blow. They had to advance £100m to the nationalized coal industry, in clear breach of their declared policy; and they voted £34m to the 'lame duck' of the Clydeside. They approached the union leaders for a programme of co-operation.

The message was clear: the strength of the working class threatens the union leaders as much as it threatens us, the Tory government: therefore let us join together!

TUC general secretary Victor Feather and the General Council responded positively. Every marcher, like thousands of workers, recalled that these gentlemen had been unable to find the time to call together the transport unions to support the miners, but now they ran to 10 Downing St at the drop of a hat. The meeting, according to the capitalist press. began with tea and ended with whisky and soda.

Jack Jones, darling of the 'left' and boss of the Transport and General Workers, Britain's largest And introduce pleaded with the Tories introcuce state-regulated industrial bargaining, and told an assembly of businessmen that class-collaboration was necessary to save the 'British way of life He meant the way of life of businessmen and trade union bureaucrats, threatened by the working class. is to abolish any socialist content from the Labour Party's programme, and to use the Labour Party as nothing more than a middle-class reform movement. Behind this declared aim is the sinister face of collaboration with the capitalists in a coalition programme to destroy the working-class movement.

Why does the right wing make this open bid at this time? Here again the lessons of the Right-toWork marches are indispensable.

The right-wing moves because every basic question facing the working class, and especially unemployment, iS forcing the workers to demand socialist solutions of nationalization. This demand is certain to be reflected in the trade unions and the Labour Party itself. All the middle-class instincts of Jenkins and his friends make them react and prepare in advance against this.

It was, therefore, essential that at the end of the marches, the participants should come face-to-face with the crisis right inside the Labour Party and especially the Parliamentary At the lobby of Labour MPs on March 13, one question predominated: how to fight the right wing. Any Labour MP who puts 'unity' with the right above these basic class needs is historically doomed to betray.

Stanley Orme defended Jenkins' 'rights' on the grounds that the Labour Party is la coalition'. This coalition, with the spokesmen for monopoly inside the the sure to coalition with the Tory Party, the party of the monopolists. At this point, then, all the political and theoretical lessons learned along the march were brought together in a rich experience.

All along the hundreds miles travelled, the old bans and proscriptions, against the Young Socialists had been brought out by the right wing, but had been brushed aside. For example, the Harrow Trades Council received the TUC circular instructing them to give no assistance to the marchers pointing out Young Socialists was a proscribed circular was torn up, and the Trades Council provided accommodation as well as laying on a welcoming meeting.

Certainly the bureaucracy at of the marchers, secondly the aggressive nature of their demands, and thirdly their completely different political quality.

Besides this change, there was another transformation. In the 1963 period of unemployment, the Trotskyists in the Young Socialists movement (then in the Labour Party) had organized the unemployed youth, intervened in the trade union lobbies of parliament on the question, and won the majority leadership in the YS at the Easter Conference of that year. At that stage, however, Wilson and the right wing were able to carry out wholesale expulsions in 1964 and temporarily cut the YS off from the adult movement: it was necessary to set up the YS independently of the Labour Party and then turn it into the trade unions.

The struggle to do this has now made possible our Right-toWork campaign under conditions where the working class is quickly changing, and the youth are recognized by many older workers as the core of the new and necessary alternative revolutionary leadership. This is the meaning of the breach made by the 'young marchers in the regime of bans and proscriptions.

The demand for the right to work has been criticized by some self-proclaimed Marxists (in the International Socialism and Militant groups) as a reformist demand. But what reforms are possible under capitalism in 1972 which could guarantee this right?

It is a transitional demand. To fight for the right to work today means to pose the question of state power and revolutionary inroads into capitalist property. And this takes a verv concrete political form, a definite path determined by our historical conditions: the young unemployed fight to bring the organized, the employed, into the struggle to make the Tory government resign and return a Labour government pledged to socialist policies. mortal blow to the false, middle-class professional 'revolutionary' groups. After all, their frantic condemnations of the SLL as 'sectarian' and 'dogmatic'-con. demnations gratefully echoed by the capitalist press-they find themselves completely isolated and confronted by Trotskyist movement able to intervene on the decisive issues.

The 'state capitalist manoeuvre requesting that their banners be carried on our marches was exposed as a blatant and pathetic attempt to jump on on the bandwagon and transform a revolutionary movement into a reformist protest.

The Right-to-Work marches were, literally, a new generation on the march: a new generation confidently challenging the old reformist and Stalinist leaders.

This generation learned one thing above all. This was that it can come forward and take its rightful place only on the basis of the past conquests of the working class and of Marxist theory. At every stage, it was necessary to study Marxist theory, to learn through the Marxist method from every experience, to understand where our movement had come from in the struggle against reformism, Stalinism and revisionism.

What marched in this campaign was the Fourth International, founded by Trotsky in 1938 as the continuation of the teaching of Marx and Engels, of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party of the October Revolution and the early years of the Communist International.

This is what frightened the reformists and the Stalinists: the banner at the head of the Rightto-Work marches, fighting on the transitional demands of the Charter of Basic Rights, was the banner of the Fourth International.

ME WORK NOT NOSTA LOND