The class struggle in Britain: Resolution of SLL

[p036] The class struggle in Britain 197 The following resolution, together with a resolu- tion based on the preceding article by T. Kemp, was adopted unanimously by the Fifth Annual Conference of the Socialist Labour League, June 1963. Certain slight alterations have been made in accordance with the requirements of general publi- cation. CAPITAL v. LABOUR IN BRITAIN 1. The political necessities flowing from the economic problems of the British capitalists are clear. They must increase the rate of exploitation sufficiently to offset the trend of the rate of profit to fall, dominant in the past year or two. This can only be done if the organised strength of the working class in the factories is broken. This strength stands in the way of the full rationalised use of the investment in techniques now being undertaken; it obstructs the ability of capital to locate its industry wherever it finds the most easily manageable labour force; it might, if not broken now, create bonds of solidarity which prevent the capitalists from allaying their problems by moving to favoured areas either within nations or internationally. 2. In this strategy of the employers, the trade union and Labour leadership have a central role. While the resistance of the class is broken, the trade union and Labour leaders must help in the disciplining of the working class, particularly of its militant industrial wing and of the working-class youth. The struggles of our epoch raise immediately the problem of power, and so the integration of the trade unions into the state, and of the Parliamentary Labour leaders more closely into the bureaucratic and militarised state, are necessary instruments. Both must collaborate in the security preparations of the capitalist state: hence their enthusiastic support for the Radcliffe report and the witch-hunt in the ETU. The fight against the youth movement is equally a part of this struggle, as is shown by the part it plays in leading the only political fight against unemployment. This tendency for the trade union and Labour bureaucracy to serve the bourgeois state and the employers as direct agents even in a period of attacks on the workers will be a general feature of the immediate period ahead. The problems of capitalism are such that the customary type of reformist compromise of British bargaining is acknow- ledged to be impossible. Fabian spokesmen, and the secretary of the TUC, Woodcock, have explicitly stated that a fall in labour’s share of the national income will be necessary if the British economy is to survive and achieve the 4 per cent rate of growth asked for by NEDC. The co-operation of the TUC on this body, an example of an international trend which includes the Stalinist unions, is for the purpose of enforcing the discipline or ‘co-operation’ necessary for this reduction, as well as helping the state in the various ways in which it must intervene in the economy. The trade union leaders may carry out this collaboration under the cloak of a more reasonable and planned direction of social and economic policy, in the manner of all reformists, but in fact it prepares the way for brutal attacks by the employers, the encouragement of extreme right-wing tendencies, and the eventual attack on trade unionism itself. While the trade union bureaucrats get closer to the state, the capitalist class will prepare itself for strike-breaking and terrorising the working class, It is important to encourage the most ruthless working- class opposition to the public appearance of fascist and racialist tendencies like the groups of Mosley, Jordan and Fountaine. But it would be a mistake to regard these groups as necessarily the form in which fascism will appear as 2 weapon of the ruling class. Within the labour movement itself, policies of class collabora- tion and integration into the capitalist state can develop a ‘left? or ‘radical’ wing of the corporatist kind. Ideas of producer-consumer councils, ‘abolition’ of the trade unions, an‘i-intellectualism, and the ‘dignity of manual labour’, pseudo-radical opposition to parliamentarism— all these are ideas which cou'd be used to mobilise the petty-bourgeoisie in a time of crisis. The development of resolu‘e and firm working-class policies against the monopolies and banks is the only way in which the middle strata can be won as allies. The struggle to unite employed and unemployed, and particularly to build a trade union and political relationship between youth and the labour movement, are undispensable preparations for this political struggle. There is no room in the present situation for left reformist movements. Tendencies within the unions and Labour Party, like Cousins and Wilson at different stages, will lean on the left: sections of the movement

[p037] 198 for their own purposes and to head off the real trend to the struggle for power. The job of Marxists is to campaign in such a way as to expose their treachery and in the process create the necessary leadership in struggle against them. 3. The proposals for ‘Workers’ Charters’, the move by the employers to introduce rigid control in the docks, the search for agreements which result in a reduced but more docile labour force (printing, Fords, hosiery industry), are the type of mechanism by which the employers hope to operate through the union leaders to discipline the working class. In all industries, speed-up and revised piece rates are being pushed through in the knowledge that the union leadership will not fight the problem as a general one. Instead, leaders like Woodcock even dress up their betrayal by appearing ‘liberal’ in permitting ‘local autonomy’ in settling wage rates; in effect they are condoning the break-up of trade unionism to permit the employers to split up the labour market in such a way as to get the maximum advantage of the reserve army of unemployed. Even the NEDC only contemplates jobs being found for 200,000 of those out of work, and so anticipates a permanent unemployed force of at least 500,000. The bureaucratic leadership will collaborate in keeping this force separate from the organised, employed workers and at the disposal of the most mobile of big capital. The trade union leadership thus serves the monopolies both politically and economically, 4. The flaw in the employers’ and labour bureaucracy’s strategy lies in the very basic contradiction of capitalism as a system. The hoped-for period of growth through disciplining cannot be won wiihout big class struggles. What the ruling classes require is a major change in the relationship of class forces in British industry: they need to undermine the expectations and destroy the me’hods of struggle built up on the basis of the special position held by Britain in the world economy for the last cen‘ury or more. The class struggles within industry and the political struggles within the Labour Party must be seen from this standpoint, There is crisis in both these spheres because the employing class and the bureaucracy which serves it cannot act scientifically and in a planned way. Their methods of organisation, strugg’e and ideology are the ougrowth of a whole past phase of class relationships in Britain. They respond to the present necessi‘ies for capitalism in ways which necessarily create critical situations, giving great oppor- tunities for the working class to act decisively. The problems of the British economy are so acute, and the relation between capital and its political agents so full of contradictions, that the problem of power is in fact continually posed, provided there can be built a leadership which consciously understands the changes in class relations and is able to advance a programme which demonstra‘es to the working class in struggle, the essence of this struggle for power as it arises in the fight for its immediate needs. LABOUR REVIEW—Summer 1963 5. The campaign against unemployment, and the in- separable fight in the Labour Party for socialist policies and against bans and proscriptions, is the focus of this struggle. Around it are clustered the fight against redundancy and speed-up, for shorter hours and the ending of overtime working. 1n the course of building this movement we are building also a revolutionary internationalist movement in the youngest genera‘ion of British workers. This generation, drawn into the struggle against youch unemployment, hated and feared by the bourgeoisie for its confidence, high expeciations and lack of ‘discipline’, already drawn into political activity by the youth movement, is the objective basis for the prospect of working-class advances in the construction of a revolutionary party related to every section of the working class. Around the campaign against unemployment, for the throwing out of the Tories, and for nationalization, will be built the basis of the new mass leadership in the trade unions, a process which will be helped by the parallel one of left developments within the Stalinist party, which is also encouraged by the campaigning of the youth. 6. The Labour ‘left’ and the Communist Party advance demands against unemployment which do not differ from those of the TUC and even of the government itself. This is not surprising in view of the inter- national policies of a Stalinist rapprochement with imperialism and the record of the Labour left in face of the right-wing offensive in the Labour Party since the Scarborough conference in 1960, when their bank- ruptcy was finally exposed. CND has commanded the general support of those who wanted to fight against the government’s war preparations, but its leadership has capitulated to opportunist politics of the ‘pressure’ type precisely when the class struggle indicates. the orientation to a class which can in fact overthrow the government. In this way the CND leaders have taken the royal road of pacifism everywhere and at all times, i.e., a capitulation to the bourgeoisie, once faced with the necessities of the class struggle. In all of these cases, however, the acuteness of the objective contra- dictions and the necessity of bitter struggles over conditions of work, pay and unemployment, provide a great opportunity for the exposure of false leaders and to the leadership by Marxists of the mass movement. While the Communist Party and the Labour spokesmen of all shades call for the direction of industry to areas with high unemployment, we combine a call for nationalization and a Labour government with fighting demands on the trade unions for elementary defence— unity of the unemployed and employed, union member- ship for youth and other unemployed, no overtime when men are out of work, local insistence on the employ- ment of youth, vigorous campaigning around local conditions in the labour exchanges. In this way we build the unity and confidence of the workers as a class, and this is directly counter to the Strategy of the employers and their agents, who want the class divided into localities, into generations, into skill grades, into well-paid and poorly-paid, into employed and unemployed.

[p038] CLASS STRUGGLE IN BRITAIN 7. The fact that nationalization under workers’ control can be raised successfully at this stage is indicative of the sharpness of the class struggle in Britain in basic economic terms, despite the muted forms it has taken in recent years. The further fact that the leader of the Labour Party makes pronouncements which raise the nationalization issue publicly only confirms the directness and relevance of this issue and of the whole question of working-class power. This has, in fact, been posed in Britain and all Western Europe since 1945. In this period, in all the Western European countries, the workers, though deprived of leadership, have expressed electorally the striving for power. In none of these countries can governmen‘s have con- tinuity or avoid crisis without relying on the social- democratic and Stalinist leaders to frustrate this striving for power. Our task is to provide a conscious lead for this striving, to show that every partial struggle can become a preparation for workers’ power, that 199 industrial and political struggles are only separated by the ruling class and its agents. 8. Both the Labour ‘left’ and the Stalinists are in- capable of a political lead on the issue of unemploy- ment. They are tendencies rooted in a past period of the aftermath of working-class defeat and have retained their hold on the militant sections because of the persistence of some strength in British imperialism since 1939. The depth of the present crisis, which is not a temporary but a deep historical one, finds all the bureaucracies and those political trends who are their apologists, working on a basis which drags them into crisis along with the social system. The campaign of the youth against unemployment and against the witch- hunt, and the construction of the revolutionary party in this struggle, is the historical ground of the defeat of these opportunist and centrist tendencies in the British labour movement. THE WORK OF THE SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE 1. Our conference in 1962 raised very sharply the problems of leadership. These problems were posed very concretely before us: how could we begin to face up to the enormous responsibilities of the working-class struggle in Britain. Only a revolutionary party with communist methods of organisation could carry through the struggle in the labour movement against the witch- hunt of the right wing. Only a movement which saw this fight against the witch-hunt in all its political meaning as the preparation and education of a new generation of proletarian revolutionaries would suffice. For the Socialist Labour League this meant establishing leadership in the mass movement, creating a relationship between Marxists and the labour movement as a whole which would lay the basis for a mass revolutionary party of the working class. In our own ranks, the crisis in the British working class was and is reflected. Routine and propaganda forms of activity, the result of a social-democratic environment in a powerful imperialist country, had to be consciously opposed at every turn. Our Area Con- ferences in late 1962 were the continuation of our National Conference discussion, enabling us to tackle concretely problems of branch leadership and local campaigning. This proved an invaluable preparation for the unemployment campaign in 1963. 2. The revolutionary party is based on revolutionary Marxist theory. Reformism and the bureaucratic types of organisation which it always works throuch, are opposed to theory, since they accept the possibility of working within the existing system without fundament- ally questioning it. Routine and bureaucratic methods of work in the SLL are only a variety of these social- democratic adap‘ations to the system. But the strucele for a partv based on revolutionary theory is not only a ‘theoretical’ question. The problem poses itself in a number of concrete tasks. A Marxist analysis of the economic and poliiical situation enables us to proceed from the objective needs of the working class. We are able to start with the need to fight on certain central or key questions, such as unemployment and the witch-hunt. The connection between them is not abstract, not just a question of making propaganda explanations. In the course of fighting the witch-hunt, we build and train a generation of young revolutionaries who take their place in action as the leaders of the class struggle against unemployment. The high point of this process was the campaign for the lobby on March 26. 3. In the SLL branches, the main question is to train branch officers who can tackle problems in this Marxist, revolutionary way. By starting from the political necessities, fighting for a political line and all the decisions which flow from it, we lay the basis for solving in struggle the various organisational problems, we draw into the construction of the party comrades working in various fields. Just as the campaign against unemployment and for socialist policies has drawn together the militant sections in the trade unions and to a certain extent in the Communist Party, so, within the League, the work of all comrades must be centred on these main campaigns. All our work in the Labour Party and trade unions will fall behind, fall into routine, unless it is consciously transformed in tune with the main political requirements. But this, again, boils down to a series of concrete decisions which must be fought for. The witch-hunts must be fought in every way, in every cons‘ituency and in every trade union organisation. On the one hand, the unemploy- ment campaign, led by our comrades, brings questions of socialist policy right into the organisations of the Labour movement. On the other, all our comrades must

[p039] 206 learn how to utilise every contact in the labour move- ment to provide new openings for the campaign. In the unemployment campaign, it has been shown that, even in very adverse conditions, our campaigns have shown the possibility of mobilising masses of hitherto politically inactive workers, particularly young workers, against the government and against the reformist leadership. The national and local leadership has the task of grasping consciously each stage of this concrete development, in which the revolutionary youth is winning the leadership of the working class, and constructing the revolutionary party in the process. 4. On this basis, every local campaign requires creative thinking to work out every aspect of the implications of our political struggle. Every section of League construction— education, the collection of finance, recruiting, the sale of literature, handling of security, planning of work in other organisations— must command detailed political preparation. In our area conferences we discussed the training of branch leadership to carry out these tasks. We prepared for these conferences by actually planning work on these various aspects in the branches beforehand, instead of discussing purely formal resolutions and taking formal decisions. Branch leaders must take the responsibility of this political preparation. If the League is to grow in proportion to the needs of the working class, we must regard every present member as someone to be trained for such branch leadership. Our comrades are con- stantly involved in political meetings, in propaganda activities, and in leading the battle against the witch- hunters. Branch leaders must handle all of these very concretely, Every political intervention, such as a visit to a trade union branch on behalf of the un- employment campaign, or a series of Labour Exchange meetings, must be politically prepared in small meetings beforehand. Comrades must explain how to analyse and use the weakness of the enemy, the tradition of working-class struggle, and how to work on current political events for propaganda purposes. Difficulties and problems must be thought out and anticipated by leadership. Without stifling initiative, branch officers must learn how to prepare all our comrades politically, in an all-round way, for the tasks they undertake. Such an understanding is the basis for overcoming the day-to-day difficulties which arise. These ‘difficulties’ are only the stages of development of the working class itself, struggling towards conscious organisation. We are part of that struggle, the most important part because of Marxist conscicusness. But that conscious- ness, Marxist theory, is a science that develops only through struggle. 5. Wherever a number of comrades work in the same industry or trade union, they must be organised to campaign on League policy. This, too, is the respon- sibility of local as well as national leadership. Out of the unemployment campaign we are building the nucleus LABOUR REVIEW—Summer 1963 of future powerful trade union factions. Here also constant political preparation is necessary. The first responsibility of our trade union members is to the revolutionary party, which leads the working class in its in‘erests as a whole, as a class. This means that we begin from the struggle for political power and the construction of the Marxist party. In our trade union work we fight around our political policies in all their implications, including those for particular industries. In this way, we are against all tendencies, such as syndicalism, which see trade union or industrial work, as a sphere of the class struggle which is a law unto itself. It is clear that here, too, the construction of branches of the League which fight to carry out the political line of the League, is the first task. This will give unity and meaning to the day-to-day work in the trade unions and the factories, Our political campaigns are the real answer to the problems which are constantly posed by industrial militants, How do we build rank-and-file movements? How can we ever defeat the trade union bureaucracy? How can we fight redundancy? Only the construction of the League in the fight for the political line corresponds to the real needs of the workers in the trade unions, and the work of our trade union factions must flow from this. 6. Recruitment to the Socialist Labour League is a vital question, a great test for our members, and particularly for local leadership. Every step forward in our campaigns in the labour movement will be followed by a lapse into inactivity and disillusionment unless in every area we increase our membership, thus making possible a series of continual leaps forward in national and local campaigns. Every action in the class struggle involves new layers of workers, par- ticularly among the youth. Our work with contacts must be very systematic. For example, when we organise for the maximum mass participation in a particular demonstration or meeting to defeat the right wing, branch leaders must prepare, both before and after, the allocation of members to particular contacts so that they can learn the maximum from each event. Because our Marxist theory is an accurate guide to the needs of the class, we are able to lead workers into struggles which educate them very quickly. This explains the wide support for the campaign against unemployment. We have surpassed the recruiting target set at our Area Conferences, and we must now under- take systematic contact work and recruitment. At the same time, we must combat the tendency to neglect members once they are recruited. In many branches, once a new member is admitted, it tends to be assumed that he is now convinced, and it is simply a matter of loading him up with work to whatever degree he is willing. This shows a completely false attitude to our movement. All our activity, and the tasks allotted to every comrade, must have a conscious political basis. Local leadership must show all members how to think through the connection between our revolutionary inter- national politics and the concrete tasks of the branches.

[p040] CLASS STRUGGLE IN BRITAIN 7. The campaign against unemployment brings our comrades into constant struggle against other political tendencies in the labour movement, as outlined in earlier sections of the resolution. Our comrades, even very inexperienced ones, must fight the left reformists, Stalinists and others, as well as the official right-wing machine. All of these are part of international opportunist and revisionist trends, A successful fight against them can only be waged if we ourselves are carrying through the struggle at international level. This is the meaning of our fight for Marxist theory within the international Trotskyist movement. For example, the campaign against unemployment is providing many big opportunities, as has done our Note by the Editors The Fifth Annual Conference of the Socialist Labour League in June 1963 completed its work barely two weeks before the onset of the profound governmental crisis sparked off by the ‘Profumo scandal’, During the boom of the 1950s, not only the old reformists but many ‘New Left and other revisionists peddled theories of ‘new capitalism’, able to maintain full employment, meet an expanding market, and resolve the classical contradictions of the capitalist system. These people condemned Marxists as doctrinaire victims of outdated slogans and formulae. All talk of class struggle, of mass unemployment, of violence, of dangers from racialism, was seen by them as only the ravings of ‘mindless militants’. Such people will find it difficult to explain, let alone to intervene in the present crisis. In the aftermath of a winter of unemployment and of the Profumo scandal, there has been revealed a world 201 campaign in the ETU, for recruiting many members of the Communist Party. Only if we have successfully fought for Trotskyist ideas inside the ranks of the Fourth International can we provide the alternative leadership which these CP workers seek as the crisis of Stalinism deepens. There must be an an all-round struggle for Marxist theory and explanation of the international discussion, for this is part of the same process as our campaigns on unemployment and against the right wing—the struggle to construct a revolutionary internationalist party leading the new generation of the British working class. Adopted unanimously by SLL Fifth Conference June 1963 of organised violence and racialism for the protection of investments in property. Millions of people are able to see the true nature of capitalism and its ruling class. In Britain and in the United States, where the Negro struggle is breaking the bonds of liberal leadership, the class war is being fought on the basic issues of jobs and housing—so much for the ‘new capitalism’! The conference documents reprinted here were written some months before the ‘Profumo crisis’ and before the Negro struggle in the United States reached its present level of intensity. Yet the concentration of these conference reports and resolutions on the basic class relations of modern imperialism made possible agreement on a perspec- tive which has been richly confirmed by these subsequent developments. The revisionists, on the other hand, find themselves confounded by the violent turn of the political situation.

[p041] Stockholm, April, 1917: Lenin’s party en route to Russia. Lenin in centre (with umbrella). Zinoviev and son on extreme left. Review article by A. Banda Organizing for victory