An analysis of the tactics and strategy of the Inter- national Socialism Group. By Michael Banda

The Tories' decision to enter the Common Market threatens British workers with the most savage attacks so far made against their living standards and their basic It is a significant and sinister sten in the direction integracorporate state; the tion of the unions into the apparatus of the state.

It is no accident that the communiqué of the Summit Conference combines the Bonapartist idea of ensuring 'the increasing involvement of labour and management In une economic ana ; an 4L -social decisions of the community and 'consumer protection' with the plans for setting up mammoth continental monopolies, transferring capital, dividing up markets and centralizing research in preparation for the greatest trade war in history.

The essential condition for the success of this strategy of the bankrupt rulers of Europe, the heirs of Hitler, Mussolini and Salazar, is the integration of the Social Democratic and Stalinist bureaucracies in the Brussels political and administrative apparatus while, at the same time, strengthening the repressive powers of the state and its control over wages and the exercise of workers' rights.

This is the only way in which the European capitalists can even hope to raise European productivity to US and Japanese levels, realize a large export surplus and set up a monetary union.

If this plan fails-and there is no indication that it will succeed-the European and British rulers will have no choice but to try and defeat the working class with military-police measures and impose the naked dictatorship of monopoly capital unadorned by the fig-leaf of parliamentary democracy.

Police - military dictatorship and fascism is the logical end of the protectionist Utopia of the Common Market.

The entry into the Market gives an entirely new dimension and quality to the struggles of the working class. The most important feature of the coming period will be a tremendous acceleration of that process already seen in the Industrial Relations, Housing Finance, and Immigration Acts whereby more and more power will be transferred from the legislature - parliament - to the state executive; not merely to Whitehall but to the Brussels Secretariat.

Parliament will be reduced to the status of the French National Assembly under the Fifth Republic—an impotent rubber stamp for bureaucratic decision. The degrading of parliament will expose further the blatant bankruptcy of the Social Democratic Oppositional safety valve.

Another equally important feature of the creation of the Market is that, every major struggle of any section of European workers against their state implicitly poses the quesCOLL of the destruction of the Market and the progressive Not east west Europe under the banner of the Socialist United States of Europe. There Is no other road for Europe.

Lastly, unquestionably-and most important-the plans of the European monopolies to undermine and destroy the working class movement cannot be halted or defeated the economic struggles of the working class waged by the trade unions.

virtue of its entry into the Market the British capitalist class has increased considerably its manoeuvre against the unions and its ability to attack them by the elimination of the fiscal and legal barriers to mergers, by the transfer of capital and the creation of unemployment. In this sense the Common Market aimed principally at the British trade unions.

These features of the Common Market lead unalterably to the conclusion that the only way forward for British workers is the political struggle to create an alternative revolutionary leadership to Stalinism and reformism; to take the state power and construct a economy with help of the European working class.

This leadership iS today being built by the sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

The building of such a leadership means essentially the tically-conscious elements of the working Cass into Te• volutionary party which fights constantly against the prevailing non-revolutionary trade union consciousness of workCIS and for clear Marxist understanding of the crisis, the role the volutionary nature of the political tasks facing the working class. This was the task set bv the October 22 Conterence of the All Trades Unions Alliance.

The struggle for such a leadership, however, does not Lake nace in a vacuum As the economic crisis worsens the extent and intensity of trade union struggles, far from receding, will grow rapidly.

Trade consciousness whose basis is the wages militancy and individualism of the class will be continually inforced by strike struggles. But at the same time the ruling class will defend itself with open and increasingly vicious, political measures.

The contradiction between the limited reformist aims and method of trade union militancy and the great tasks posed by the death agony of the capitalist regime must 4340 come--and are coming-into conflict. Out of this conflict will grow the conditions for the recruitment, education and training of a cadre of Marxist leaders who will lead the coming socialist revolution in Britain.

Necessity for Theory Revisionist sceptics will no doubt scoff at the idea that doctrinal training of the vanguard is more important than all the elemental struggles of the working class.

But history-including the history of bourgeois revolutionary movements in Britain shows with compelling force, that the correct theory and practice of a conscious leadership—no matter how 'abstract' and 'sectarian' it may seemcan give an immeasurably greater impulse to historical development than all the 'spontaneous' struggles of an oppressed class.

Christopher Hill, in his biography, of Cromwell, vindicates this argument when he reveals that the rise of the Puritan movement was intimately linked to doctrinal struggle and training. Commenting on the defeats of the 1590s Hill states:

•... the underground Presbyterian movement was broken up, and in the last two parliaments of Elizabeth's reign (1597-1601) there was no vocal Puritan opposition. hough there was plenty of opposition to government economic policies.

"The snake was scotched, not killed. For the fundamental fact of the gentrys' wish to be free to control their parishes and their parsons without supervision from Bishops or High Commission was matched by the inner logic of Protestantism: its exaltation of preaching and the study of the Bible was continually training consciences which would stand out against any attempt to regiment them or dictate to them. After their defeat in the 1590s the Puritan clergy put more emphasis on preaching, character-forming, moralebuilding, less on forms of church organization and discipline. In the long run they forged a better weapon, which in 1640 was too strong to be broken as it had been in the 1590s.' ('God's Englishman' p. 24. Penguin Books.)

The British Marxists of today no less than their Puritan Independent predecessors of the 16th and 17th centuries, cannot advance the liberation of their class without the highest possible development of its theoretical consciousness through the practice of political struggle.

But every analogy has its limits. Whereas the Puritan bourgeoisie perfected their own ideology-after borrowing it from their Swiss, German and Dutch predecessorsBritish Marxists base their work on the premise that the working class, i.e. the trade union movement, cannot, of its own accord, elaborate an independent ideology.

November