THE SWORD IS
By Gerry Healy
1972Gerry HealyTory government Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
'IT IS a great shock' say the rev and Stalinists when referring 1 imposed on the Transport and Union by the Industrial Relations Here we see the underlying bankruptcy of the traditional forms of class-collaborationist leadership which has been continuously back-peddling the political fight against the Tory government since it came to power.
'Men make their own history,' said Marx, 'but they do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.' No matter how much the reformists and their allies may cringe and crawl before the Tory government the ghost of the 1901 Taff Vale judgement against trade unionism has reappeared from the past.
And how could it have been otherwise? The historical implications of great change between the major class forces have always been most deceptive in Britain.
For the slow movement in the appearances or form of relations between them has always been, in dialectical essence, the contradictory opposite of the deepgoing molecular process going on underneath, which formed the content. This is why in times of great crisis matters of law, which have hitherto been confined to the obscurity of courts, suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, become great national issues.
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sionists, reformists • the £5,000 fine General Workers' Court.
the debates between Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament in 1640.
Nobody, as Trotsky, quoting the French historian Guizot, remarked, wanted to draw the sword, but eventually they were forced to draw it.
The long drawn-out yearning for compromise was smashed by revolutionary events which finally led to the execution of Charles I in 1648.
All the learned bourgeois of the NIRC have done is 'drawn the sword'. From the point of view of capitalist law they are of course justified, Contempt of their courts is one of the most serious acts that can be committed.
Now we can see the enormous crimes of those trade union leaders and Stalinists who evaded a real struggle against the Tories in the months before the Industrial Relations Bill became law.
Forget all about the reformist clap-trap that the 'Tories dare not use the Act. Maybe if it were left to individual Tory MPs they would have actéd in a more reserved way, but, we repeat after Marx, men do not make history 'under circumstances chosen by themselves'.
The representatives of the ruling class have drawn the sword because they face an insoluble economic crisis. Nothing can be the same again.
Five years after the Taff Vale judgement in 1901, the Labour Representation Committee which founded the Labour Party was launched in 1906.
Today, the perspectives before trade unionists are entirely different. With its back to the wall the Tory government has hit out at the working class, whilst the reformists stand aside paralysed.
Trade unionism can only be defended today by means through a Those who refuse to create the conditions which would make the Tory government resign are in fact betraying trade unionism and the working class.
The policy of the Socialist Labour League is the only revolutionary organization to politically prepare the working class to meet the present crisis. Aldermaston protest ABOUT 500 people marched from Trafalgar Square yesterday on the first leg of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's Easter demonstration to Aldermaston.
CND secretary Dick Nettleton told me: 'We are reminding the people that Aldermaston is still there and it is still doing the same kind of work.
Forty Labour MPs have sponsored the march and we've got the backing of the Communist Party and the Co-op Party. We've from ther Sharston men, but what STOCKPORT SIT-IN LIFTED TWENTY TWO workers at Sharston Engineering, near Stockport, have lifted their factory occupation after being under threat of police action for 24 hours.
The men will return to work on Tuesday after the Easter holidays and their employer, Mrs Isabella Dubos' "reconsider' her in exchange, to decision to sack • them all and close the plant.
The retreat at Sharston cannot be disguised. It means that for just started a section in the Liberal Party and we've even got a few Tories who support us. It's a pretty fair spread of opinion.
Mr Nettleton said CND wanted to draw public attention to the danger involved in the Tory government's decision to switch the administration of Aldermaston from the civilian Atomic Energy Authority to the Ministry of Speaking Trafalgar the first time a court action by an employer has been successful in breaking an occupation.
The men took their decision to go back after long talks with john Tocher the Amalgamated Manchester orUnion of Engineering Workers, and Bernard Regan, Stockport's district secretary of the same union.
They are both Communist Party members.
Unions originally promised hey would try to pr tect Sharson workers with a 1 lass picket.
Over 7,000 worker: in Greater Square rally one of CND's original organizers, Walter Wolfgang said: 'We are marching at a time when far too many people have learned to live with the bomb.
'Given the size of the problem we have converted a good many people to a new way of thinking but given the urgency of the problem we well enough, Just haven't done See picture, Manchester and Warrington are now occupying Il factories. The latest to join are 2,000 workers at the Ruston Paxman diesels plant, Newton-le-Willows.
In theory it would now be possible for the ll other employers in the North-West also faced with occupations to sack their workers and take them to court tor trespass.
• 'Lessons of the sit-ins,' p. 12. Ford men occupy FORD workers have started to occupy their factory in Doncaster during the night shift as part ot their fight against redundancies.
This means the factory will be under the control of the work force during the period not covered by the two-shift sysfem.
So although men will work as normal, none of the vital dies they produce, used to manufacture components for the Capri, Escort and Granada models, will be allowed to leave the toolroom.
The decision to stage the sit-in was overwhelmingly agreed by 150 workers trom the plant at a meeting called on Wednesday by the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. RAIL union leaders Ts will meet in London next Wednesday to review the wages battle with British Rail.
THE TOUCHSTONE of British politics today is the 'direct rule' pian PAQE & Monkers Proas, Sedurday April 1, 1972 AROUND THE WORLD