BRITISH CP MAKES A FURTHER SHIFT TO RIGHT

SAY NO MARKET The extent of the rightward shift in the policies of the Communist Party of Great Britain is shown by an article in the current issue of 'Marxism Today' by one of its leading economists, Ron Bellamy, entitled Trends in British Capitalism in the 1970s'.

The article begins with a confused excursion into theory which amounts to a rejection of historical materialism. According to Bellamy, scientific and technological advance makes possible what he calls an increase in 'the potential productive forces'. act of will on the capitalists.

They can, he says, "decide to use the potential available to them, and thus [establish] a new and different, structure of relations'. Theoretical gibberish of this kind is used to draw conclusions from Stalinist theory of 'state monopoly capitalism' with a very definite political content: class collaboration.

He argues that, for British capitalism, the gains from international co-operation within the Common Market are too low, some other form of co-operation must therefore be envisaged.

The purpose of such •cooperation is to make possible the utilization of 'the potential of the newly available productive forces'. He adds a typically under-consumptionist argument which runs as follows:

The increased output of consumer goods made possible by full employment and rising productivity are bought back by the workers: In the 1970s,' he says, rising real wages, and the increasing leisure to enjoy what they will buy, will lie at the heart of the struggle for job security?

Bellamy sees no reason to explain why, over the past two or three years, unemployment in the capitalist countries of western Europe and North America has been increasing.

He is more interested in the effects of concentration and monopoly on small traders and 'the growth of anti-capitalist ideology among the traditional recruits for higher management', not to speak of the leftward movement in the Labour Party and trade unions.

This is taken in conjunction with the 'objective weaknesses in the position of British imperialism' not crisis but 'weaknesses'). "British imperialism can survive,' he concludes, only if the 'domestic industrial base is reconstructed'. He hunts around for some solution for the capitalists.

After raising the spectre of attacks upon the working people,' he finds one. Britain needs a more modern industry. This means taking part in the international division of labour. 'But if that modernization,' he writes, is to be compatible with job security, rising living standards and increased leisure, it can be so only with a quite different conception of Britain's role in the world.

'When we say "No" to the Common Market, we also say "Yes" to the European security treaty, and to new forms of all-European economic cooperation. It is tragic that at a time when Japan and the US •U1 MARKE are proposing, through necessity, increasing their trade with the socialist countries in a massive way, and West Germany and France have recognized some of the realities of the balance of forces, it is the British government which plays the most reactionary role.' CHILDREN On the eve of Common Market entry, the CP reported the above anti-EEC march without mentioning the fact that the National Front marched In a large contingent. not to the monopolists So not to there will still be 'monopolists' Bellamy says 'monopoly capitalism is anti-democratic, robs people of economic and political control over their environment (!) and increasingly puts them at the mercy of remote forces, not only in the boardrooms and in Whitehall, but in Detroit and Brussels'