The case of Walter Osborne

union law FOLLOWING the January 26 lobby of parliament, many union branches, building sites and factories will be discussing the next steps in the campaign.

The new Socialist Labour League pamphlet, 'No Laws Against Trade Unions, by G. Healy, is an important contribution to their discussions.

In a direct and straightforward way, the pamphlet states the dangers in store for trade unionists if the Labour government's proposals go through. It quotes from the Labour Party document of 1963, which already advocated legal restrictions on wages. mate mose importer is pot. while it is a Labour government that brings in the Bill, it could be a Tory government which uses it. The present situation prepares the way for a split in the movement, perhaps on the lines ofl 1931.

The pamphlet discusses the kind of campaign needed to defeat legislation and the polithis. It takes up the questions of loyalty to the Labour government, the role of the Labour 'lefts' and the attitude of the Communist Party.

Finally it calls for readers to support the building of the Socialist Labour League and to consider joining it.

The pamphlet should be sold widely throughout the unions and read by all workers who want to fight back against the employers' attacks.

No Laws Against Trade Unions by G. Healy - Pl This should be reas Socialist Policy Crisis Price 3d They can be ordered together for 8d (including postage) from: The Socialist Labour League, 186a Clapham High • Street, London, rice 3d 1 with :

Osborne

WITH the Taft Vale ployers had committed a major blunder, despite the fact that temporary advantages had been secured.

By pampering to the short-term interests of a waning section of their class (railway and mine owners), they had endangered the long-term interests of their class as a whole.

CLEAR RESPONSE A new political awareness now gripped the minds of millions of workers. The Taff Vale judgement posed deep political questions to the trade unions and, as we have seen, brought a clear political responsethe foundation of an independent working - class party to fight for and defend unions in parliament.

This was a grave threat to the entire political system carefully Vale The second of two articles dealing with two court cases threatened the freedom of the trade unions at a time when elaborated by the capitalists for centuries. As a result, within the labour movement the rift between the Labour Representation Committee : and the old guard bureaucrats like Richard Bell, secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) grew wider.

He continued to appear on Liberal Party platforms even after the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, claiming that his candidature at Derby had been endorsed beforehand and that he owed the Committee no allegiance.

BREAK CALL

The Independent Labour Party group in the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, which had sponsored the historical Weymouth resolution, now demanded a complete break from the Liberals, but Bell called for support for Liberal candidates in by-elections and attacked the 'isolationism' of Kier Hardie.

At a by-election in Norwich he refused a request of the local union branch to speak on behalf of the Labour candidate. Bell's claim that the Labour candidate would 'split' the trade union vote received wide publicity in the capitalist press and, when the Liberals won, Bell sent a telegram which read 'Great triumph for progress. Hearty congratulations.

As a result, the Labour Representation Committee. called for members running on their ticket to 'strictly abstain from identifying themselves with any section representatives into of the Liberal or Conservative Party.

The decision to raise a levy for payment of Labour MPs enabled the unions to enforce discipline on their parliamentary representatives.

A Labour Representation Committee deputation, led by Ramsay MacDonald, was received by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants to discuss Bell's political activities in March 1904. When Bell still refused to accept the Representation Committee's constitution, a compromise was reached.

However, the effects of the Taff Vale decision brought new Labour victories in by-elections, including two new ASRS MPs, and Bell's position was more untenable.

After Labour's success in 1906, the union demanded all its MPs abide by the Labour Party constitution.

COLLABORATION Bell now found himself in the opposite lobby to the other union MPs, notably on the question of hours worked by railwaymen.

Knowing that he would never be endorsed again, he went further in his collaboration with the Liberals.

At the union conference in 1908, he wanted his case discussed publicly so that his 'statesmanlike' activities would receive wide publicity.

But the union held the inquiry in camera.

On December 31, 1909, Bell resigned. His Derby. seat was at the beginning they were fighting Parliament taken in the following year by J. H. Thomas, who later became secretary of the railwaymen's union.

While Bell was fighting a rearguard action against the emerging Labour Party, Walter V. Osborne tackled the threat to the capitalist system posed by such a Party in quite another way.

Walthamstow branch of the ASRS was one of the few which expressed regret at Bell's departure. Osborne was its secretary.

He had started work as a porter on the railways in 1890 and had been a member of the Social Democratic Federation. By 1900, he was head porter at Clapton, and a member of the Walthamstow Liberal Association!

OBLIGATORY LEVY What brought Osborne into action was the question of the political levy.

In 1901, his union had instituted a ls. a year voluntary levy for parliamentary representation. Some of this levy was to go to the Labour Representation Committee. This brought no opposition.

However, the vicious Taff Vale decision forced the union to make this levy obligatory, and ensured that all candidates were endorsed by the Labour Representation Committee.

At past conferences, the Walthamstow branch had stood out in support of Bell's line of conciliation with the Liberals. This is important to remember for there are often attempts by of this century which to put more and more bourgeois historians to separate the Taff Vale and Osborne cases and present the latter as an issue of 'individual conscience' isolated from the class struggle..

What is remarkable about Osborne is the apparent indifference he showed to the Taff Vale judgement.

Consequently, the executive committee of the union received a long letter of protest from Osborne's branch in March 1905.

OSBORNE'S APPEAL Osborne wrote to Bell mentioning he would appeal to the courts to question the legality of the political levy-the same courts that had made the Taff Vale case judgement! > The union sought counsel's opinion. Sir Edward Clarke (Conservative) and Sir Robert Reid (Liberal), both eminent lawyers, found nothing illegal about the levy providing the union had agreed to it at an annual general meeting.

Accordingly the October AGM endorsed a resolution to meet the cost of providing parliamentary representation out of union contributions.

At this AGM, Bell came to Osborne's aid by warning that rules could only be changed every three years—a point Osborne used in the courts later.

Another attempt by Osborne to get the rule disallowed by the Registrar of Friendly Societies was frustrated. The Registrar found the rules in order.

Osborne might have given up that point had it not been La change in the attitude of Bell: supported Osborne's action the ruling class towards the 'alarming threat' from the Labour Party.

The election of 1906 resulted in 29 Labour MPs-largely a reaction to the Taff Vale judgement. The capitalist press now began to step up the attack.

In January 1906, the 'Daily Mail' noted:

•... these working men by the simple device of collecting one penny per month per man from their trade unions, place themselves on so firm a financial basis that they are able to meet the representatives of capital on even ground at the polls. ... Their present success will be found to prove the beginning of a movement that will require much watching by capitalists of all conditions.' How frankly they wrote those days when the majority workers were illiterate!

The 'Daily Express' took the fight from there. Sir Al ander Henderson, chairman of

•REDEEMER OVERTHROWN PROM PAl, fo sassauypaM leaders revealed yet again by Sinyavsky • world-publicised trial, Andrei Sinyavsky, NE of the two Soviet writers jailed in stand in his defence statement to the court.

The route through which the Soviet authorities alleged Sinyavsky and fellow 'criminal' Yuli Daniel passed their manuscripts to be published in the West, has not been blocked. Soon after the trial this route supplied what is said to be Sinyavsky's address to the court.

It was printed in full in 'Il himself with his main character.

Giorno', a Milan centre-left "The artistic image has a conOne of his Then he made the statement is quoted in quoted earlier which lays the February 25. responsibility for his 'crime' of 'The court thinks it has in and squarely at the feet of the Nkrumah cannot evade his responsibility for the brutal murder of Lumumba (above). It was he who persuaded Lumumba to allow UN moqu элои Che Guevara The purging of Guevara was connected with Castro's insistence abandoning industrialisation in favour of agriculture.

March puris prog at trial tria newspaper.

most telling points 'The Guardian' of It runs as follows:

me a particularly subtle writer, one who hates not only Jews but Russians as well. But where, it should ask, could such monsters as we have sprung from? From somewhere else. Evidently from America.

We must have been dropped by parachute, Daniel and I, and we have been demolishing everything' It appears that Sinyavsky expected to be called to give his statement to the court on the Monday of the trial, but, without warning, was told to speak on Saturday. He was surprised and unprepared.

He said that the prosecution had built a wall of deafness around him which no truth could penetrate.

The basis of his 'defence" was that many lines had been taken out of context from his writings to prove that I hate motherhood, my own countrymen, and Jews and that I am a fascist'.

The state prosecutor, he said, was not interested in Sinyavsky's creative ideas and would not explain them.

But, he went on, he would like to explain some fundamental things about literature.

'A word is not an act, it is only a word.

"The author does identify H. Thomas took over union secretaryship from Bell.

Great Central Railway, who had schemes for amalgamation and economising on labour costs, also had a strong financial interest in the 'Daily Express'.

This paper began a campaign on September 16, 1906, against the 'fraud of socialism'. It looked for 'honest trade unionists' and printed letters from 'sane and practical working men' who felt that their sickness benefits conditional upon paying a levy to a party they did not support.

Bell even granted the paper an interview which was publicised as an example of 'sober, solid trade unionism', and his plea for the independence of trade unions from all political parties was given great prominence though he found no difficulty in working very closely with Liberals and Tories.

FINANCIAL AID

Osborne then appealed for financial support in the 'Daily Express' on September 16, 1906. He made it clear to 'Express' readers that his object was legal action against his union and he claimed that the government had a duty to protect the political freedom of all subjects.

These financial appeals were repeated in the September 21 and 27 editions of the paper. By the end of the month, "sufficient funds were forthcoming' for him to ventional nature.' criticising the Soviet Union fairly bureaucracy.

His statement also said:

'The State Prosecutor has said "Even the foreign press says that these works are anti-Soviet". I think that this is a strange way to show the court's objectivity. If even the foreign press says this, then are we obliged to do the same? The word "even" sticks in my mind.' Returning to his main argument ain he said:

"Dozens of times my phrase "Because there were no more prisons, have built new prisons" has been cited here.

But next to that sentence have written "Communism is a luminnue anal" hut thie vnn Dul you have not wanted to read out He claimed that other writers who had criticised the Soviet Union by satire had not been arraigned before the courts because their works had been printed at home.

It was held against him he had connections abroad.

'The prosecutor has even brought up some napkins v vhich a French woman gave m e for my baby son to show that behind my honest facade lurks a stealthy nature.' (I)

begin his test case.

The writ was duly issued to the executive committee of the union in December 1907. It contested the legality of the political levy.

When the case opened, counsel for the prosecution, Mr. Jenkins, QC, took up two main points.

Firstly, he said that the rules could only be revised every third year, and secondly, that the funds were being handed over to a body what was 'frankly socialistic' Jenkins maintained that union may have subscriptions furthering its objects.

'What I say is they cannot use the funds for the purpose of furthering socialism.' The judge, however, noted that the Registrar of Friendly Societies had found the rules in order and held that the case did not raise a question of principle, but merely a technical difference of political opinion as to which party would further the union's interests best.

Osborne was ordered to pay costs.

It was probably the decision of the Miners' Federation to affiliate to the Labour Representation Committee in 1908 that led Osborne to appeal on November 12, 1908.

'ULTRA VIRES'

This time he raised questions of constitutional principle. He maintained that the levy was 'ultra vires' (beyond the powers) of the union and defended the 'constitutional rights of the ordinary citizen'.

He claimed it was contrary to the interests of the state if a parliamentary representative was to be a mouthpiece of those who paid him. Osborne won his appeal on these grounds.

It was a class decision. The union knew well that both the capitalist parties received large secret donations from industry and so they appealed to the Lords that the decision was unjust on the grounds of equity.

Railway companies, after all, paid huge salaries to their directors and there wer 'e 21 railway directors in parliam ent at the time.

Similarly, one questionKwame Nkrumah n Crawf ord • NE Of cant fall of Nkrumah is the complete absence of the slightest protest from the Ghanaian workers and peasants. The victory for imperialism did not provoke a single demonstration in support of the Osagyefo.

It underlines the ending of an era of political illusion. For 20 years the idea was abroad that imperialism could be defeated gradually. Independence and self - government of ex-colonial territories like the Gold Coast would produce regimes which would move steadily to the left.

'Third World' collapse According to this theory, an international Marxist leadership, preparing the workers both in the metropolitan and the colonial countries to take the power, was unnecessary.

But in the past few months left nationalist governments have collapsed in every corner of the 'third world'. From Indonesia to Algeria the complete inability of this type of movement to struggle against imperialism has been clearly shown.

Nkrumah was typical of the nationalist leaders who emerged from the mass struggles which swept Asia, South America and especially Africa at the end of the Second World War. A wave of strikes and demonstrations shook the Gold Goast in 19471948.

The Labour government ordered the arrest of Nkrumah and other leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention and sent a commission of inquiry.

Its report and the unrepresentative constitutional committee it ed the legality of unions financing Lib-Lab MPs in the past.

The appeal came before Lords on July 22, 1909 and December 21 the union lost case.

In the year that followed, dozens of injunctions were granted against unions to prevent their paying election expenses and MPs' salaries.

This serious blow at the working class and the trade union movement was no mean achievement for Osborne, a 23s. a week porter. Many in the labour movement suspected his financial backing. Certainly, the 'Daily Express' publicity was of great assistance to Osborne.

This onslaught on the trade unions had taken place under a Liberal government. Thus, when the elections came in 1910, Lloyd George's demagogy and much-vaunted reforms made little impression on workers.

LABOUR BALANCE The Liberals' huge majority was wiped out and Labour and the Irish Nationalists held the balance in Parliament.

Against a background of unprecedented mass strikes, the Labour group was able to secure the Trade Union Act in 1913, which permitted political funds.

But the ruling class was careful first of all to secure the allegiance of all MPs in the state by introducing a Bill to cover payment of MPs from Treasury funds. Thus the warning of Osborne was heeded.

The Labour Party was born out of struggles. The state power of the capitalists was used belatedly to strangle it at birth. Its historic task was the defence of the trade union movement.

When Brown and Wilson introduce legislation against the unions they strike a blow at the very basis of the Labour Party.

Only a party based on the class struggles as the basis of all political life can analyse this contradictory development.

Only with the conscious leadership of a Marxist party can the working class prevent the most disastrous betrayal in the coming months. recommended led tests.

In the course of these events the United Gold Coast Convention split and Nkrumah formed his more radical Convention People's Party.

He denounced the Coussey Constitution as a fraud. But when, in 1950, the first elections were held, the Convention People's Party contested them and won overwhelmingly. Nkrumah was immediately released from jail and invited to form a Cabinet.

Non encroachment

The imperialists and their 'Labour' government realised that Nkrumah would head off the mass movement. Despite his demagogic speeches, he would not go beyond certain bounds in encroaching upon imperialist investments.

By 1953, he was able to convince the Tory Colonial Secretary, Lyttleton, that: complete self-government could be safely granted to the Convention People's Party administration.

By 1956, an independent Ghana could be set up under the benevolent eyes of both Prince Philip and vice-President of America Richard Nixon.

In this period, leaders like Nkrumah could be allowed considerable leeway by world capitalism. He was able to become a major figure in the 'progressive' circles of the 'non-aligned' powers.

Manoeuvring between the British and Americans on the one hand and the Russians and IKE Banquo's gho st, the mystery of Che Guevara continues to haunt Fidel Castro •and his Stalinist henchmen.

Soon (in April) Cuba will be observing (?) the first anniversary of Guevara's 'disappearance" and the world will be waiting to hear what new 'explanation' the 'lider Maximo' will offer to placate the angry curiosity of Cuba's supporters.

This curiosity is not confined to those who support the Cuban revolution alone. Now the capitalist press, too, is beginning to ask some embarrassing questions about Guevara.

DOUBTS RAISED

Raymond Cartier, a prominent bourgeois journalist, in an article on Peking and Castro in the latest issue of 'Paris Match' not only raises doubts about the existence of Guévara but links his disappearance with Castro's split with Peking.

Cartier comments:

"The disappearance of Che Guevara, second man in the regime, was like the fading of a white mist at sunrise. He came from a journey of five months which, inaugurated by a speech at the United Nations, had taken him to Algeria, to Ghana, to Guinea, to the Congo, to Dahomey, to Egypt, to Dares-Salaam, then to China, then again to many countries in Africa. He went back to Havana on 15th April, 1965.

He was last seen on 21st April.

Then he was not seen' again.

For five months Castro-remained silent on Guevara. At first he tried to dismiss speculation with an air of mystification, but when curiosity turned to scepticism Castro decided to act.

'On September 28th, 5,000 chosen people were quickly called to the Chaplin Theatre in Havana. Castro read out an undated letter which, he said, had been sent to him by Chinese on the other, he managed to squeeze loans and grants from all sides.

Meanwhile his regime became increasingly dictatorial, based on a nauseating worship of Nkrumah the Redeemer.

His attempts at theoretical work reflected his precarious position between the workers and peasants and their exploiters. His book 'Conscientism' presented an incredible mish-mash of ideas drawn eclectically from sources ranging from Stalinism to symbolic logic.

This gibberish was hailed as a work of genius, especially by the Stalinists. On another occasion, he is reported to have described himself as 'a Marxist and a nondemoninational Christian'.

Nkrumah showed his real forces into the Congo.

MICHAEL Guevara he didn't say when.

•.. The touching letter and its strange publication raised doubts. Four more months passed without the presence of Che Guevara being known in any part of the world. ... In Washington the CIA is convinced that he did not leave Cuba-and that he is is dead.

NOT PERSONAL The purging of Guevara was not a personal vendetta. It was the product of a struggle over the path which the Cuban revolution was to traverse. Castro wanted to abandon industrialisation in favour of agriculture, i.e., perpetuating Cuba's dependence on the world market and relying on the peasantry.

Guevara wanted a policy of 'state capitalism', i.e., a policy of vigorous industrialisation, less reliance on the Soviet bureaucracy, more independent and radical foreign policy and closer alignment with China.

Castro, relying on the Moscow Stalinists around Blas Roca and Rodriguez, and drawing support from the rural masses who had gained most from the revolution, won out.

Joan Robinson, the Fabian economist and right-wing apologist, in a recent article in world politics at the Congo rebellion.

Let no one forget tha it was he above all who pr rsuaded Lumumba to accept Russian advice and allow United Nations forces to enter the Congo.

Nkrumah UN force Nkrumah cannot evade his responsibility for Lumumba's brutal murder by the stooges of imperialism. It is ironical that the same army that Nkrumah dispatched as part of the UN force was later responsible for his downfall.

We must also recall his actions against the workers at the time of the strike in protest at the economy measures of 1961.

The type of regime of which Nkrumah's was an example was •Monthly Review, endorses Castro's policy and confirms the change:

"The grand strategy that has been adopted is to continue to develop sugar, and to push ahead with cattle-raising and fruit (as well as increasing home food production), thus building up foreign earnings from whoever will buy, using the proceeds for import-saving industrial investments, and so getting the spiral of development going. This is a sharp break with conceptions hitherto current in the socialist world!

(My emphasis)

There is basically no difference between Castro's economic policies and Wilson's in Britain.

WORKERS' PRIVATION The upshot of this policy is increased privation for the working class. According to official statisticians there is Il per cent turban unemployment in Cuba today. A sad commentary on the first Declaration of Havana which reads:

'the right of the worker to the fruit of his labour; ... the right of the young to work..?!

To return to Cartier, however. Guevara's disappearance, according to him, was not the end but the beginning of a new chapter of repression:

Page Th based in the conditions of the post-w. r boom. In the case of Ghana it was bound up with the world price of cocoa, which soared to unprecedented heights during the Korean war and after.

The changed economic situation and, in particular, the near collapse of the cocoa market last year, drastically narrowed the room to manoeuvre between the class forces.

British capital, which had, with some grumbling, managed to coexist with Nkrumah for so long, began to find his taxation policies unbearable. The U.S: authorities were increasingly irritated by his relations with Moscow and, even worse, with Peking.

Army rule

In ways which will no doubt become clearer in the next few months, the imperialists decided he must go. As in half-a-dozen other 'independent' African states, army leaders took over the government.

Nkrumah and his like are as incapable of leading struggles which can smash imperialism as the German social-democrats were of fighting Hitler. In each case, their defeat was a defeat for the working class caused by their refusal to base themselves on its international power.

But the defeat in Ghana need not be decisive. The political maturity of the African labour movement can be very rapid.

Marxist leadership in West Africa can lead to a renewal of struggles against imperialism on a far higher plane than ever before.

'A purge was started on his friends-the pro-Chinese. Four were expelled from the Central Committee. The Cuban refugees who arrive at Miami...

say that splits raged in the Communist Party and that a certain number of expellees took the road to concentration camps in which Castro admits he has shut "from 15 to 20,000 counter-revolutionaries":

The political motives of this purge were clearly revealed at the Tri-Continental Conference in January when the Cubans lined up openly with the Soviet and Indian delegations to oppose any denunciation by the Chinese and Vietnamese of the United Nations and 'peaceful co-existence'.

The mystery of Guevara will continue to deepen until a new revolutionary upsurge in Cuba establishes the truth of this sordid affair and wipes away the filth of Stalinist calumny and intrigue.

When that day comes Castro and his henchmen will be recognised for what they are: the junior partners of world imperialism.

As for the revisionists in the Socialist Workers' Party of America and the United Secretariat they will not have to wait that long. Their apologies for Castro today clearly reveal them to be the enemies of Marxism and the ideological hod carriers for the counter-revolutionary Soviet bureaucracy.

Marx once said that the social development of a country could be judged by the status of woman in that country. Joan Robinson in 'Monthly Review' says of Cuba:

"The rate of growth of population is alarmingly high, and women in the country • are oppressed with family cares;

but birth control is only mildly encouraged and abortion is kept illegal (mainly with an eye to the "image" of socialism in Catholic America). Communist ideology, in spite of the militia girls, does not seem to have made much dent in the "male chauvinism" characteristic of Latin culture?

Unofficial Portworkers' Committee in Hull given The Newsletter the following exclusive Page March 5, 196