Editorial

Editorial British workers have rejected the Government's pay policy.

While Callaghan and Healey promise more cuts in state expenditure and ruthless controls on the money supply, section after section of the working class has declared its opposition to Labour's five per cent wage limit. Industrial action in private industry has been followed by strike threats in the public sector. Militant defiance is the working class response to the continuing attack on living standards.

Meanwhile the capitalist offensive on the working class intensifies. The lockout of workers in The Times newspaper group indicates the determination of the bourgeoisie to crush the trade union movement. The ruling class has reverted to tactics that have hardly been used since the last major recession in the 'thirties. Recently, the Texaco Oil Company took over Burntisland, a subsidiary of British Shipbuilders, because equipment it had ordered had been subject to long delays. These, former Burntisland chairman Sir John Brown explained, were due to the workers' 'lack of effort and drive'. Texaco therefore set about motivating the workers by promptly sacking all 600, offering to sign them up again under 'new arrangements' which included a mandatory 60 hour week.' The state leads the attack on the working class and its organisations. of declining plans for the nationalisation of steel, shipbuilding and engineering. At British Leyland, management conceded a wage rise higher than the Government pay limit in exchange for union agreement to 7000 voluntary redundancies and increased productivity.' More and more, workers' resistance to the demands of capital has been met with the force of the bourgeois state. In recent months picketing bakers and journalists have been attacked by the police. The Labour Government has no compunction about calling in the troops to break have been undermined by absence of an independent working class alternative to bourgeois solutions of the crisis. Events at Singer's sewing machine factory on Clydebank provide a clear example of this. Threatened with mass redundancies, the unions commissioned a study by PA Management Consultants. Their brief was to draw up a plan that would save the maximum number of jobs.

The unions accepted that the company had to be made profitable and were forced to agree with management that this could only be achieved at the cost of jobs. The union leadership was reduced to negotiating over just how many would have to go. Management wanted to axe 2800; the unions followed their consultants' recommendations and sug gested 1800. ' When this poker game with workers livelihoods reached deadlock, Singer announced it would go ahead and close the factory altogether. If Singer's plans go through, 8000 workers will join the dole queues in an area in which unemployment is already double the national average.* This is what the absence of a revolutionary leadership means for the British working class today. The state socialists of the Communist Party (CP) and the Tribune group have paved the way for a series of setbacks to the working class. Their enthusiastic support for the establishment of 'workers' control' and 'workers' plans' under capitalism has only helped reconcile trade unionists to the Government's reactionary schemes to solve the crisis. The collapse of Kirkby Manufacturing Enterprises, the 'workers' co-operative' set up by the Government in 1974, shows the consequences of the state socialist strategy. The takeover of this ailing brainchild of Tony Benn resulted in the loss of over 200 jobs." Tribune supporter Robert Kilroy-Silk, MP, denied that the co-operative was a failure. He called on the Government to save jobs at Kirkby by using the National Enterprise Board — the same Government agency which has supervised mass redundancies at British Leyland and elsewhere. Once

expands, the outlay of funds on journals and pamphlets BM RCT, London WCIV 6XX again state socialism directs the working class up a blind alley.

The strength of state socialism today is a result of the prolonged disintegration of Marxist politics in the labour movement. Workers now face a major recession tied to a political strategy that is based on a drastic revision of independent working class politics. In these conditions the Marxist theory of the state is of crucial importance. It is therefore not surprising that Marxism has come under such attack from opportunist trends in the labour movement. In France, Italy, Japan and Spain, large and influential communist parties have launched a major assault on Marx and Lenin. The rejection of the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is one consequence of their campaign. Beneath this concerted attack on proletarian science lies the reformist strategy of drawing the working class behind the bourgeois state.

The revisionism of the official communist movement gives an ideological coherence to the state socialist perspective.

The main article in this issue of Revolutionary Communist is a critique of the theory of State Monopoly Capitalism - the dominant expression of revisionism in the world today. This article traces the evolution of the strategy of state socialism; rom the vulgar socialist adversaries of Marx and Engels brough the leaders of classical Social Democracy, to the reformist planners of the 'thirties.

Shortly after the first triumph of socialism in the Russian Revolution, the international working class entered a period of defeats — a period from which it has not yet recovered. Stalin's rise to power in the Soviet Union was paralleled bureaucratic degeneration of the entire official Communist Movement. The reversals which led to fascism and the Second World War were reflected in the liquidation of Marxism. For over 40 years revisionist theories of the state and of capitalist oppression have been presented as the authentic tradition of Marx and Lenin. The ideological convergence of Stalinism and classical Social Democracy in the post-war period has meant that petit-bourgeois ideology has become institutionalised in the political parties of the labour movement. In the current crisis, the struggle for the political independence of the working class is the struggle against this reactionary fusion of decadent bourgeois trends in the labour movement.

Although the Communist Party is not a mass organisation, Movement and a reputation for fostering the industrial milancy of the working class. In his discussion article, Keith Tompson reviews the post-war record of CP opposition to Government wage control. His analysis shows that the CP's claim to have been consistently hostile to incomes policy is a false one: the reformist politics of the CP lead inexorably to the acceptance of the right of the state to 'plan incomes.

The Revolutionary Communist Tendency enters 1979 with some achievements from the past year and much to accomplish in the next 12 months. We have now firmly established Revolutionary Communist Papers and plan to extend its circulation. Future issues will include articles on the welfare state, on imperialism and Africa, on the European Economic Community and on the National Enterprise Board.

Over the past year the RCT has grown in numbers and in political experience. These in gains membership and programmatic development were consolidated in the first conference of the RCT in November 1978. One of the main decisions reached by this conference was to publish a Review by the end of 1979. Its aim will be to present revolutionary communism in the form of regular propaganda.

Many readers of RCT publications congratulate us on the high standard of production. But though we try to keep prices low enough to ensure maximum circulation in the labour movement, the financial burden of maintaining this standard is enormous. As the range of RCT propaganda 3 constantly rises. If you read our propaganda and appreciate its political and technical standard, help us to extend and diversify it. The simplest form of assistance is to take out a subscription to Revolutionary Communist Papers. Even better: take up the special £10 offer and for one year receive all our publications post-free as soon as we bring them out. Better still: make a financial contribution to the £2000 fund drive to launch a regular Review. And best of all: join the struggle for revolutionary communism. Write for more information to the address below; 13 January 1979 The Guardian, 11 January 1979, p2.

The Times, 30 November 1978, p21.

Financial Times, 3 November 1978, p5.

The Guardian, 20 December 1978, pl.

The Times, 17 November 1978, p22.

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