Strike Strategy

[p009] Strike Strategy LSEWHERE in this issue Bob Potter, a London bus conductor and a member of the Battersea strike committee during the recent dispute, discusses that dispute, its background and its lessons. The London busmen, portworkers and Smithfield market men have each won a partial victory. That is to say, they have held their positions against the offensive of the employ- ing class. ‘There has been no breach in the front. T hey have demonstrated a degree of combativeness and awareness of what was at stake that has greatly sur- prised, not to say alarmed, both the employers’ Press and the trade union leaders. The first round is over. The need now is for the whole working class to absorb and assimilate, as deeply as possible, the lessons of these struggles, so that they enter the second round in fighting trim. And the second round may not be long delayed: the Economist is already calling openly for what it describes as a ‘blacklegs’ charter’. HERE are four outstanding lessons of the recent dispute. First, vigorous rank-and-file activity and a powerful rank-and-file movement are urgently needed. One of the glaring weaknesses of the bus strike was the failure of the official leadership to harness the latent energy and creative initiative of the ordinary ‘members. What is needed is a national network of rank- and-file bodies, with efficient liaison and a central organ, so that information can be pooled, experiences shared and generalized, and the sense of participating in a common class battle fostered. Secondly, the incapacity of the trade union leaders has been abundantly demon- strated. The General Council of the Trades Union Con- gress has rightly earned the contempt and hostility of great numbers of workers by its active hindering of any extension of the bus strike. Frank Cousins, too, though it is true he led his members into a fight, displayed all the weaknesses that led to the Covent Garden sell-out last year. He advocated a return to work on terms tantamount to surrender and was decisively rebuffed by his members. He failed to extend the struggle, even within his own membership. Yet an extension to tanker- men would have been the speediest and most effective way of forcing the Government to give in or get out. This brings us to the third lesson. The main difference between the industrial disputes of 1945-57 and those of this new period is that an industrial challenge to the employers now implies, from the outset, a political challenge to their government. This is so however little it may be understood by any particular section at any particular stage. And this aspect is going to become in- creasingly important as the struggle opens out, and as section after section, in its resistance to the capitalist class offensive, finds itself facing not merely its own employers but the whole force of the capitalist State. The fourth lesson, the most fundamental of all, follows from the other three: there is a burning need for a com- prehensive strike strategy which the working class may counterpose to the strategy of its enemies. ‘(71 ONE are the days when the workers could afford to fight each partial and limited struggle as if it were an isolated incident, separated by a Chinese 70 wall from what was going on in other industries. The pattern of sackings, victimizations and wage refusals is now utterly clear. There is an unmistakable central plan, which peeps out occasionally in the dailies and weeklies written for ruling-class consumption; it is a broad stra- tegic plan to throw back the workers section by section. This is called ‘disciplining’ them. The need to isolate each section under attack is openly spoken of. The great tragedy of the recent struggle was the way the railway- men’s leaders fell in with the Government’s strategy and accepted a 3 per cent. increase offered with the aim of preventing a united struggle of busmen and railwaymen. The need to forestall such divisions in the future has got to be burned into the consciousness of the workers. Every propagandist, agitator and steward, every writer of leaflets, every militant, every branch official, must hammer home to those he leads and influences, again and again, the fact that the only way to resist employers who stick together against the workers is for the workers to stick together in their turn, to see their common in- _terest as a class, to sink the sectional differences, inter- union rivalries and craft prejudices that stand in the way of solidarity action. In this respect the example of the Tocley Street dockers is a very fine one. True to their traditions, these men stubbornly refused to be bullied or cajoled by union officials into handling meat that a strike of fellow-workers had rendered ‘black’. This is the spirit that needs to be infused into every industry, so that every attack can be met with solid, united and determined resistance. We have no wish to glorify or flatter the dockers: but it is a plain fact that at-this moment, thanks to a combination of circumstances, in- cluding a stormy history rich in experiences of struggle, these workers are in the vanguard of their class. They have much to teach, and it is important that their prin- ciples—this “quixotry’ that so galls and irritates the Manchester Guardian—should be universally recognized as the guiding rules of working-class conduct and working-class morality. E propose to return to this question of strike strategy in subsequent issues. We believe that the future of the British working class for decades to come may well be shaped in these next two or three years. We would add that the course of the recent strugcles has once again shown beyond a shadow of dcubt that neither the Fabian nor the Stalinist trade union leaders have any strategy whatever for defeating the Tory offensive. Once again the Marxists are vindic- ated. This is because Marxists understand the real signi- ficance of the class struggle, base their analyses and their activity on it, and raise the question, not merely of partial victories within the framework of the capitalist system, but of the overthrow of that system altogether. Only on the basis of Marxism, which understands the workers’ needs, interests, role and tasks as a class, which sees the conquest of working-class power as the funda- mental aim of the class struggle, can a successful strategy for the day-to-day struggle of the workers against the employers and their Government be worked out and applied.