TORIES CONSIDER COMPULSORY WAGE POLICY

The government must impose a compulsory incomes policy this winter, declares an editorial in yesterday's 'Times'. his leading capitalist newspaper rejects any compromise wages policy that might be negotiated with the TUC leaders. Such an greement, it says, would not be worth having in terms of its impact on inflation'. In other words, a powerful section of the ruling class is demanding a total, legallyenforced wage freeze. 'The Times' is unimpressed by Thursday's TUC resolution rejecting pay restraint. The important thing, it says, was that 'it was clearly understood at Brighton that the Downing St talks would go on'. st what was involved in the unanimous TUC decision to continue talks with the Tories, was revealed when 'The Times' declared that the talks 'are an essential prelude to a compulsory policy. hat has happened is that a wing of the Tory Party-encouraged by the collapse of the TUC's opposition to the Industrial Relations Act and the failure of the union leaders to develop the miners' • railwaymen's and dockers' struggles into a fight to bring down the government - is determined to go even more strongly onto the offensive. The more the union leaders crawl before the class enemy, the more arrogant he becomes. The Tories see the purpose of their talks with the TUC not only as a smokescreen behind which a compulsory wage freeze will be • prepared, but as leaders to it to • their members. le talks, says 'The Times', 'will give the best chance of the widest possible acceptance by trade unionists and by the public at large of a decreed policy. his is a major step towards corporatism. The union leaders are to be used to persuade their members to accept direct state legislation on wages. 'The Times' underlines this by ayıng that if the unions do ot fall into line, Heath should go to the country.

This bluntly, FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT central task of the government is to transform the unions from organizations that defend workers' wages and conditions against the employers and the state, into organizations which transmit the edicts of the employers' state into the working class. otsky warned of this in "Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay' when he declared that the unions would either be transformed by Marxists into instruments of revolutionary struggle or they would be transformed by the capitalist class into instruments of control over the working class. ere is no doubt that the present trade union leaders will seek to collaborate with the latter process, as their predecessors in Germany sought to collaborate with he Times' can contemplate the prospects of an electoral victory only because the top men the TUC and the unions have left the working class leaderless and confused by actions like the sell out of the dockers' strike. ley have been assisted in this by the Communist Party, which has consistently covered up for the 'lefts' like Jones and Scanlon and held back the working class from breaking with them. le revisionist groups, like the anti-communist International Socialists and the International Marxist Group, have lined up with the Communist Party. Calling only for 'more nilitancy', they then turn on the working class and blame them, rather than their leaders, for sell-outs and defeats. But the strike struggles last eight months have shown the enormous strength working class.

They have also shown however that for a decisive victory over the Tories more is needed than militancy, however deternined. For that, a conscious Marxist leadership is required a leadership that can only be built in struggle against the union leaders, including the 'lefts' and their Stalinist and revisionist allies. le conference of the All Trades Unions Alliance in Birmingham on October 22, will be a major step in that fight.