WHAT IS MARXIST THEORY FOR?

recognize the danger of a situation where a Tory Minister of Labour can place amendments to the Scheme before Parliament, knowing full well that he is assured of a majority of 100.

Perhaps Mr Cousins and Mr. O’Leary believe that the Tories will support the dockers against the employers?

The sheer evasion being practised by the union leaders about the strike-breaking proposals of the London Chamber of Commerce shows that they are unwilling to prepare any resistance to the employers’ attacks. Cousins’ left talk in the Labour Party is revealed as so much talk and nothing else.

Meanwhile at rank-and-file level the dockers are organizing their resistance. In Hull last Sunday, members of the National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers and the Transport and General Workers’ Union voted to reject any amendments to the Scheme.

They also urged the setting up of rank-and-file committees in all ports.

Unlike their leaders, the dockers place no faith in Tory Ministers of Labour and Tory-dominated Parliaments.

By Our Industrial Correspondent IN the first two of these articles I argued that Marxist theory shows us the need for a politically self-conscious working class, which is aware of the possibility and the necessity of a break with the whole existing order of class society.

In this article I want to discuss the respective ro!es of intellectuals and workers in bringing this about. Lenin saw the unity of intellectuals and workers in a Marxist Party as a precondition of a proper unity of theory and practice. We can see what he meant by looking at what happens when each group tries to act alone.

Vv A working-class movement without intellectuals is apt to despise theory. Because it despises theory, it has no perspective, no sense of a way forward beyond immediate needs and demands. It fights upon this or that paticular issue and is defeated more often than it need be because it lacks any larger strategy. And because of the narrowness of its aims its working-class members are themselves hindered from developing intellectually.

The whole British Labour movement has been infected by this narrowness. One reason why it is not surprising that this narrowness has prevailed is that the two alternatives which have been most obvious seem equally unattractive.

The first of these alternatives is the recruitment of intellectuals to be mere technicians and propagandists for the Labour “movement. Since 1926 the Labour Party has increasingly had its shop-window full of bright young men, who are able to offer academic justifications for the policies of the trade union