Wages and the Bomb: A Single Front

[p005] Wages and the Bomb: A Single Front _ Industrial strife inevitable—Labour lacks leadership—Solidarity with the busmen —The socialist objective—The struggles merge—The H-bomb and working-class internationalism—The warning for the VFS leaders MAJOR industrial conflict now appears inevit- able. Tory arrogance has provoked the London busmen to the point where there is little alternative for them but to take strike action within the next few weeks. Frank Cousins, general secretary of the Trans- port and General Workers’ Union, has recognized that strike action cannot be avoided, and has declared that he will support such a measure in his union’s leading committees. HEN the events of the past month are reviewed, W one thing stands out clearly, and that is the de- termination of the employers and the Government to have a show-down with certain sections of the trade union movement. We emphasize the phrase ‘certain sections’ because the Government in our view is not strong enough to engage the trade union movement as a whole, or even certain powerful combinations within the movement. The Tories are planning to take on what they consider to be the weaker sections, to isolate them and defeat them piecemeal. They can succeed in doing this only if the rest of the trade union movement remains indifferent. The weakness of the trade unions today lies in their leadership. The leaders are not pre- pared for an all-out struggle against the Tories and in practice they confuse and hold back their own mem- bership. Every active trade unionist knew that the Cohen Council was anti-working-class, yet the Trades Union Congress majority participated in its delibera- tions. In the face of the Tory offensive against wage increases, the TUC has steadfastly avoided calling a meeting of the unions concerned, so that common action could be planned. It is this lack of leadership which provided the Tory Government with its most powerful weapon. E must not leave the busmen to go it alone. By W themscives they can be defeated, and this would be a major setback. Since the official leaders drag their feet, the initiative now passes into the hands of the shop stewards and other rank-and-file leaders. It is up to them to organize nation-wide solidarity action to force the employers to their knees. The oil tanker transport men and the dockers can give a powerful lead. N spite of the weaknesses of the official Labour Party Tins trade union leadership, the working class has one important advantage. If we take as a whole the fight on the industrial front together with the massive campaign against the manufacture of the H-bomb and the building of rocket bases, all roads lead to a com- mon objective—the need to replace capitalism with socialism, the next step being the overthrow of this Tory Government and its replacement with a Labour Government pledged to a socialist policy. This policy must include the nationalization of all the basic in- dustries, with strictly limited compensation only of those who need it. The present bureaucratic form of capitalist nationalization must be replaced by a sys- tem of workers’ control. Only on such firm foundations can a real socialist economy be built. ONE are the days when foreign affairs seemed remote to the vast majority of the working class. The H-bomb has changed all that, Today the fight against this most terrible of all weapons is more and more seen as a matter of life and death. Moreover this fight and the wages fight tend to merge in one single class struggle, in which economic and political resist- ance alike to a government of hunger and suicide place on the agenda the overthrow of the capitalist system and the capitalist State machine. And the struggle for socialist policies on the home front is interwoven with the struggle for socialist policies abroad. HE H-bomb is forcing the working class to develop: T an internationalist outlook. The struggle at home inevitably emphasizes the importance of inter- national working-class action. The demand for inter- 33

[p006] LABOUR REVIEW national working-class action to stop the manufacture of the H-bomb flows logically from the struggles which are now on the order of the day in Britain. Internation- alism has become a matter of everyday concern for the traditionally insular British Labour movement, and this must undoubtedly stimulate a great awakening of interest in Marxism, the only socialist theory which lays stress on the international ties and international role of the workers. ABOUR’S political leaders are no less inept than L their trade union counterparts. At Brighton last October Bevan justified his alliance with Gaitskell the Right-winger on the ground that this was the best way to protect us from the H-bomb. Now Gaitskell has informal talks with Macmillan—also justified on the ground that this is the best way to save us from the March-April 1958 H-bomb. And who is Macmillan but the representative of the system which introduced the H-bomb, which pins its faith on the H-bomb, which genuflects before the H- bomb as the Great Deterrent, to be used ‘whatever the cost’? Thus does the bankruptcy of Bevan’s Brighton policy reveal itself. There is here a most urgent warning for the leaders of the Victory for Socialism group. Let them resolutely guard against mere playing with Left ideas and Left phrases. Unless they are determined to organize and lead the fight to end British imperialism and replace it with a socialist society, unless they are prepared to mobilize the industrial workers in this fight, then the movement will sweep by them and they too will end up as Bevan has ended up. But not, perhaps, in his present congenial surroundings; for the H-bomb holocaust cannot be stopped by reformism and middle- of-the-road theories. Only the mass movement of the workers, on an international scale, can destroy the bomb and the system that spawned it.