SURPLUS

of this year the trade graph continued its relentless plunge downwards.

Tonnage fell to 3,101,017 compared with 3,544,93l in the first half of 1971. In the five weeks ending June 25 the total was 576,876 against 712,787 tons for the corresponding period last year.

The port has been rocked by a series of closures. Associated Humber Lines has stopped trading, Cargo Operations Ltd, a stevedoring firm, went into liquidation and two other dock employers recently suffered a sudden demise.

With short-sea journeys, the land transport costs are correspondingly a greater proportion of total costs. Hence it can be marginally more profitable to group cargo near the port, especially if rates are that little bit lower than the big inland container bases.

In Hull there has developed a host of warehouse and haulage operators who have taken work away from the port, not only causing the major blow to Hull.

But the fiercest controversy has raged around the smaller operations along the rivers Trent and Ouse.

There are about a dozen private ports served by the Humber. Some consist of a jetty that can take one small 1,000-ton vessel a week. The cargo is often handled by part-time farm labour for wages and conditions way below those won by registered dockers.

The growth of these 'docking cowboys' has been alarming. In 1968, 677 ships passed

Anyone interested in seeing where the road of middle-class protest leads would have had a great deal to learn from the National Anti-War Convention held at the Los Angeles campus of the University of California on July 21-23.

Since so many years of 'mass mobilizations' have failed to stop the Vietnam war continuing with all its genocidal ferocity, it might be thought that the futility of such activities would have dawned on those involved.

But not a bit of it.

It was clear that most cf the 500 participants in the convention, dominated by the ex-Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party, had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They have not yet woken up to the fact that gone forever are the balmy days of three or four years ago when tens of thousands marched down Fifth Avenue and every campus was aflame with protest.

All the sections of the American left present at the convention - from the McGovernites to the sectarians of the Spartacist League-had to measure their policies against changes that have taken place since that time.

Not only have the diminishing anti-war protest stunts failed to do anything to arrest imnerialist barharitv. at the same time they have become increasingly remote from important developments in the American working class.

Efforts to keep down wages in order to allow the American capitalists to compete in the growing international trade war have resulted in recent months in sharp struggles by dockers on both coasts, by groups of public employees, and many other workers.

The policies of Nixon have forced even some of the most reactionary trade union leaders to resign from the National Pay Board when attempts were made to introduce a wages freeze.

The selection as Democratic presidential candidate of George McGovern, not noted in any way for friendliness towards the trade unions, has torced many union leaders to adopt a position of neutrality between the two main capitalist parties for the first time since 1940.

In this situation the political independence of the working class is posed more sharply than for a generation. The struggle for a Labour Party in the United States through a national congress of the working-class movement can thus have a significance that it has not had for many years.

Despite the presence of a good number of trade unionists at the convention, however, such considerations were virtually absent from its proceedings. The SWP, which dominated all the votes, thought that the most important problem was how to have yet bigger and better demonstrations, more campus protests and much more of everything else that has happened so many times before.

What struck the foreign visitor about such activity was not simply its futility; but also the assumption that everybody in the world was waiting for it to take place.

Not only was it true, said the SWP, that the President and his friends quaked in their shoes every time they knew there was going to be a demonstration, but the heroic liberaton ngnters or viernam depended on these protests to keep up their spirits. Such views are a most degenerated form of American 'particularism', showing a negation of any real form of internatior alism.

But the policies of the SWP are worse than inis. Ineir vice-presidential candidate Andrew Pulley spoke at the convention itself and at a number of campaign meetings beforehand. He spoke about the discrimination against women, against homosexuals and against racial minorities. The working class was usually mentioned, if at all, as just another group in society with grievances which needed to unite with the others in a mass movement to overthrow the present order.

Such a view of capitalist sncietv cleariv abandons all serious consideration of the struggle between the classes to impressions about the reactionary character of the working class. It is little wonder that one SWP member tried to explain to the conference that dialectical materialism was the science of starting from concrete reality.

If he really believes just this, then it is hardly surprising that his party bases its work on its surface impressions of American society.

The degeneration of the SWP goes well beyond its abandonment of Marxist philosophical positions. The convention made it clear how such attitudes lead directly into the camp of the bourgeoisie.

The most active and hardworking group at the conference was one devoted to securing support for McGovern. Their argument was simple. McGovern has said he will end the war.

The SWP and their friends have argued that the war is the 'single issue' that unites them, so why could they not then support this anti-worl ring class candidate? Why not indeed?

Although the SWP does not openly attack those who will not support McGovern, as the Communist Party does, they can present few answers to arguments of this kind. Working with the Stalinists in the same milieu of "progressives' and protesters, it is little wonder that their policies have come to represent a similar adaptation to certain sections of the ruling class.

Although they have candidates of their own in this election, the SWP does not turn them seriously towards the working class. They say virtually nothing about the need for the political independence of the working class, and it thus becomes more and more difficult for them to maintain any of their own few tenuous links with political independence.

Perhaps the clearest expression of this was in the separate discussion among the trade unionists at the convention. Here those union members who supported the SWP were the most pessimistic about the possibility of the working-class movement doing anything to end the war.

Workers, especially those in industries in some way connected with the war, were too fearful for their jobs. The call for a Labour Party, it was said, was only 'the music of the future' . Even those who supported McGovern had a more positive message than this.

It was left to the Workers League and the Young Socialists to fight for the only policy that would give the anti-war