The Next Step: No. 32, February 1983

the next step Unemployment and the labour movement

WORKING

3 Million 2 Million Million 1974

ISN'T

Inside: Bermondsey-let's finish with Labour p5

BRIAN

Coventry needs communism p4 Greenham gals go round the outside p18 1976 1978 review of the Revolutionary Communist Party

LABOUR

ISN'T

IGHTING

1980 1982

Revolutionary Communist Party

LONDON

LIVING MARXISM

A series of discussions to celebrate ne marx centendry 1883-1983 Speaker: Frank Richards Thursday 3 February The Marxist theory of capital- Ist crisis. is i sui relevant today? Thursday 10 February The dictatorship of the concept? Thursday 17 February British Marxism a revolutionary critique Thursday 24 February Thursday 3 March He workine cas and the revolutionary party All meetings will be held at Camden Library, Regents Park Branch, Compton Close, Robert St (Warren St tube) at 7.30pm Cost: E1 per session or £4 Tor the series. cor turmer details contact Anita Lloyd on 01-274 3951

BIRMINGHAM

Wednesday 2 February Europe and America: the drive to World War Three erfas Contents Editorial Why we are not 'popular' Building the party...in Coventry Where have all the jobs gone?

Racism: harmony for some War and a British city Bermondsey Tatchell's democracy and ours Women for communism the next step, February 1983 Activities Wednesday 1o rebruary The crisis in Eastern Europe Wednesday 2 March Tories Rule Not OK - but Labour is no alternative will be held All meetings at Digbeth Civic Hall at 7.30pm

COVENTRY

Monday 7 February Ending the war drive peace camps are not tne answer Monday 14 February The Soviet Union: is there life after Brezhnev? Moneav a reoruary the crisis and the working class: the shape or uninos to come Monday 28 February South Africa - the cracks begin to show ivionday / Ivarcr Why the RCP? All meetings will be held at the Hare and Sauirrel New Union St, at 7.30pm

SHEFFIELD

The crisis in the labour movement Thursdav 10 February Behind the collapse of British industry Docklands Ireland Shoot to kill The Labour left Smash the PTA! Labour movement Miners in retreat Europe's unemployed Thursday 17 February The alternative capitalist strategy: Labour's solution for the bosser Thursday 24 February Building a new rank and file: workers' struggles today All meetings will be at 7.30pm See the next step sellers Tor venue

LEEDS

Thursday 10 February Who needs the Labour Party?

Speaker: Fran Eden roseective carliamentary candidate for Bermondsey Thursday 24 February Women and the trade unions See Leeds Other Paper

LIVERPOOL

Friday 25 February The Soviet Union: is there ite ater srezmnev Speaker: Frank Richards Swan Hotel, London Rd, Liverpoo/ 3, at 7,30pm the next step supporters group meets every Monday evening Contact sellers for details

BERMONDSEY

Hate the Tories? Fed up with Labour? Campaign for the party that really rignt for the working class. For detaits of the campaign, phone Fran Eden on 01-274 3951 Wednesday 16 February Bermondsey needs revolutionary communism Speaker: Fran Eden prospective parliamentary candleate Rotherhithe Civic Centre Albion Rd, SE 16 at 7.30pm 10 11 The working class - transformed 12 •

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

handbook an antilmperialist's guide to the Irish war MickHulme Due out in N handbook fighting racism in the workplace, in the unions, on the streets Judy Harrison Du The unemployed - marginalised Racism WAR on the move Who needs immigration controls?

Hackney: equal opportunities Women Stalinists fall out Greenham Common World War One Publications Junius Publications 1983 The Soviet Union on the move what drivesit andwhereitisgoing. Frank Richards Que out in M The Irish Freedom Movement The Workers Against Racism Reclaiming our unions a new direction for trade union activists Mike Freeman Ove out in Apri the next step every month 13 Reviews 14 The Irish War 15 Victor Serge 16 17 18 19 «in May +in March *in April *in April Published by Junius Publications Ltd BMC JPLTD, London WCIN 3XX Printed by Morning Litho Printers Ltd. (T.U.)

Typeset by Junius Publications Ltd (T.U.)

ISSN 0144-350X February 1983 20 The Peace People The German revolution Racism and repression Unions in depression Bukharin's road to socialism Preparing for power

Why we are not 'popular RECESSION HAS exposed all

THE

the rottenness of capitalist society. The Europe and North areas of industrial America are decaying Half the population of the Third World is slowly dying of malnutrition and disease.

To preserve their way of life, the world's are rearming with great conventional nuclear and WedDOLLS unprecedented destructive capacity. In every country 'shoot-to-kill' is the policy of ruling classes desperate to keep their face of enemies at grip on society in home or abroad. Because of the weakof its competitive position, TeNS class exhibits in British capitalist particularly striking way all the sordid features of an endangered bourgeoisie prepared to maintain its rule by means necessary distinct There are two to the crisis in British society prevalent through mass it seeks to be for Nuclear and establishing ive of destroying of providing for selecting issues - on the side the Irish Freedom the capitalist state: of campaign. The "popular The of decadent Cruise favourite targets of the labour these lety through the left's the classes politics of as Britain its focus creasingly of the Greenham Common reason to British Thus a recent

MORI

published opinion 23 favour only per cent ain's machine of recently and people. Argentinians Hence because this is Cruise sections of ruling certain Carver), bourgeois politicians Owen), bishops are opposed to highly on this, US-controlled, European are Cruise because of the growing tensions within the NATO alliance. Many middle class people follow out of their perception of how the true wasteland. interests of Britain can best be defended their personal and both Wider and still wider of For the left in CND the central concern is 'to keep it broad'. Leading Communist ference in Sheffield 'seriously at fault in ignoring the role of the church' which exceptionally important' in popularising the cause (Communist Focus, December). He was delighted that the any Conservative Party opponents of Cruise responses keeping it in step with a public opinion which reflects the views of middle class movement. The left follows the same basic app- Communist Party theoretician Sam Aar- Above all onovitch recently put forward the strategy of an alliance of the left with the Liberal Party and the Social Democrats against Thatcher (Tribune, 31 December).

needs. side of broad enough for March for Jobs. He warns of the danger 'enormous problems of winning create voters can be won to action on unemployment around a slogan that 'Govern-

CUTCHE

missiles, egy itself is common to the British left.

is achieved of the their various organisations listed their priorities Marxist Group (now the Socialist League) has inmissiles; No 8 - Defend the oppressed from (and even this did not include the Irish) (Socialist Challenge, 14 January). What unites the left's campaigns is the middle protest class dream of a Britain free from the The nasty characteristics that have come to the surface in the recession. Their vision are hostile nuclear) defence policy; with a government preferably under a Labour or SDP/ pinch, under a decent sort of Tory like at an acceptable one million rather than at a potentially disruptive three or four ordinate the labour movement to goals of the petit bourgeoisie.

slaughtering campaigning which today's left follows is that of the 'broad anti-fascist unity' of Opposition the 'thirties. Led by the Stalinist commbecause unist parties, the leading sections of the class Lord with the middle classes to protect bour- (David and Hume) the needs of the working class to resolve Indeed of the middle classes to sustain or against the next step rule than fascism. this point of view The consequences the fears of being infascist unity were less of its past defeats. been at war in was not organised around restore less coercive forms of bourgeois patriotism. Stalinist 'people's front' strategy was a disaster for the working class. The Spain currently in are subject of a serialised television documentary, itself heavily influenced by WOIKIg The problem in Spain was not that the The problem was that the left held back the working class and restricted its goals Instead of leading the working class to take power, the left handed it over to defeat at the hands of a savage dict- In Britain the consequences of 'antiscarcely less profound. The left led the labour movement into the Second World War under the banner of 'anti-fascism': it subordinated the working class to the objectives of British imperialism.

fascist unity' cemented the ideological subservience of the British working class to the British state. The fact that the left celebrated this catastrophic defeat of international working class interests as a victory for the British labour movement underlines how serious a defeat it was.

The fact that 40 years later the Second British Labour's finest hour shows how the left has failed to throw off the legacy Writing of the betrayals of the reformon their proclivity for choosing the lesser evil among different bourgeois politicians and different forms of bourgeois rule: To them it is a question of under whom to starve. To us, on the contrary, it is not a question of under which conditions it is better to die. We raise the question of how to fight and win.' (What next? Vital questions for the Fifty years later, the reformists are stil making the same choices. And Trotsky's Fighting the Falklands Factor The British ruling class manipulates public opinion to rally society in support particularly important - and Britain has year when the British state went to war in a more overt, but more limited engagement in the South Atlantic.

media use war to present a threat to the interests of the state as a threat to the whole British people. They thus whip up maximum backing for the Government ticularly successful in mobilising the more backward sections of the working class behind her militaristic postures in the Six Counties and the Malvinas - and in marginalising working class resistance on have left it paralysed before Thatcher's truly populist onslaught. There is no way that the left can mobilise public opinion various factions simply adapt to popular prejudices and denounce the IRA and deny the rights of the Argentine people actionary sections of the left have attempted to come to terms with Thatcher's post-Falklands success by devising new ways for the left to appropriate what they call. 'national-popular' sentiments by emulating the left's Second World War Today Watch Marxism further developments. We have a different response to the ruling class offensive. We campaign around can provide a focus for issues which class resistance against the During the Falklands War, of Argentina's claim Malvinas, the During the Irish War we have consistently campaigned in support of the Irish liberation struggle against British rule. These are not popular causes. Indeed, they are position they uphold. In Britain, ruling class and united in support of Britain against the

IRA

Many working class people go along with bourgeois view on issues. drawn towards a position which clearly expresses their class interests in solidarity with the oppressed against the British The British left is weak and isolated. Its weakness is most clearly revealed in its unwillingness to take an independent stand against bourgeois public opinion.

Above all, the left fears the accusation - usually levelled by the leaders of the of being 'sectarian' or 'divisive'. Today the working class is sorely in need of the sort of political clarification that can only come through the sharp clash of contending organisations different points of view 'disunity' and 'sectarianism' (a term usually used to characterise positions different from those held by the official labour movement) are often seen by the left as the sponse to this fear of political demarcation is always to move towards the parties and traditions of the past. The call for unity the terms of the Labour Party and its essen- The left's quest for popularity leads it inexorably in a right-wing direction.

Its failure to build a base of support among working class people leads it on a desperate search for influence in other sections of society. The left's great mistake is to imagine that it can build mass camincorporating the middle classes.

before it has secured its foundations in the working class. As a result, the left adopts more and more right-wing positions to win ever broader middle class support and moves further and further away first priority must go to building working class support for campaigns which express working class politics. It is not that we are against mass to mass campaigns supported by middle and based on working class politics. This is what is distinctive about the Irish Free- The IFM puts forward a very clear position on the Irish War - and it appeals to British workers to take sides against the state. The movement is not closed to vicars or generals, but we are not prepared to modify its politics one iota to accommodate them. So far we have had from such quarters. But we are getting an increasingly positive response from British workers. This is the only sort of popularity that really matters.

COVENTRY NEEDS COMMUNISM

Where have all the jobs gone? THEY USED to tell the story that if you got off the bus at Pool Meadow, would take your hand and somebody tell you where the job was. Even in the 'thirties Coventry was the 'fifties and 'sixties tens of thousands of workers came from other Britain, Ireland and abroad to the town where everybody had a future.

official unemployment levels in Coventry stand at 17.5 per cent for men and 13.5 per cent for women. economy is based Coventry's cars and motors; since manufacturing the late 'seventies it has virtually collapsed.

By the end of last percent of Coventry firms were working at full capacity. workers were once known Coventry for their high wages. Today those workers who still have jobs are amongst the worst paid in the country. Coventry men over 21 earn the second lowest average wages How has the country. labour movement responded to this onslaught? Participation planning for 'Popular the Trades Council's slogan. Local Labour councillors and union officials think that what went wrong with the last Labour Government was that they sulted enough. As a result, the Government failed to make Labour's alternatives popular enough. Taking as its inspiration the failed motorcycle co-op up the road at Meriden, the Trades Council wants to give workers exploitation. Their dream is that workers should have the same rights as shareholders, they should be involved in drawup investment ing what to produce. which these illusory alternatives lead is workers' participation in curbing union rights, holding down wages and sharing out redundancies. Workers from Rolls Royce at Parkside have seen the future Labour offers - and know it stinks. Managing director they Peter Burden has keyed into the support for participation amongst Coventry union Burden needs to increase proofficials. ductivity by 70 percent over the next two years, if his plant is to stay compet- But how can he achieve this aim?

itive. Through redundancies, shop floor speed-ups. Burden drew the shop stewards

VILO

participation exercises. He showed films, held group what things were trapped into unions were sacrifices Rolls Royce demanded. Veteran Communist Party convenor played a full part. It was not the time for a last ditch battle', he told a Financial Times reporter (19 August).

Patriotism Participation' has been one response to Coventry's crisis, another is the appeal to put Britain first. machine tool firm came to town, Labour MP George Park warned that a German firm was a long-term threat to British Redundant engineering steward Gordon Lee is pushing a Jobs for Britain' campaign in factories in Coventry. But when the working class first, •a hammering. Workers the lead followed Dave convenor he wards, the next step, February 1983 Building the Party... in Coventry In expanding. Today stead on We have year, less than 14 lenged the meetings. the same result Coventry's not by planning with them. social need' is weren't consay in their own plans and deciding The harsh reality to Local ed that Were there wage freezes, and the local team? and consultation discussions and told them The like in Japan. been quite effective. making the rela wons, Phil Higgs community suffered have sadly When Maho, a new few shop could •teach or two. Britain comes always takes at firms like Talbot have is Parshotam patriotic for This. man It is now nearly three years since the Revolutionary Communist Party started work in Coventry. We first began to build up a local base around our support for the cause of Irish freedom and our opposition to racism. In March 1981 we hosted the Coventry Conference - a gathering of trade union supporters of the hunger strikers' struggle for political status in the H-Blocks of the Six Counties. Later that year we attracted the hostility of the local labour bureaucracy vocacy of workers' defence against racist attacks in the city.

As the recession has struck harder and harder against jobs and living standards throughout the West Midlands, the RCP has played an active role in workers' struggles against redundancies and wage cuts.

The fight for working class interests in Coventry means a relentless struggle against the Labour Party. That's why Coventry needs communism - and why we need even more members and supporters in 1983.

a staunch supporter of Labour's alternative economic strategy, import controls and all. Indeed, he hopes to be a Coventry Labour MP after the next election. Inof fighting Coventry employers, Edwards wants to link up with them to fight their overseas competitors.

consistently opposed the bosses' offensive in Coventry and chalreformists' compromises in factories, on picket lines and at public Our message is that participation and patriotism are strategies that lead to - defeat for Coventry's workers. Our interests are independent of We can firms like Talbot, BL and GEC.

only go forward by fighting against them participating or consulting, Pam Lawrence Harmony for some COVENTRY achieved notoriety in mid 1981, when racists murdered two Asians.

had always newspapers

DOCSL

"colour-blind'. was Coventry black footballers in

HOL

The City Council, race relations industry and police moved to cover up the deep cracks that had appeared in their facade of 'racial harmony". And they have George When Sir Young, junior Tory minister for race August visited Coventry 1982 he remarked on how hard and how successfully the police, voluntary organisations, Community Relations Council and worked had leaders soothe the troubles of the previous year.

He congratulated Coventry for not having that recurrences 'the minor Toxteth'. City happened in leaders today claim that Coventry is a model of race relations. Local expert Miami a Canon Berry returned from weeks ago declaring that Coventry that riot-torn city a thing Jobs for the boys The Community Relations Council has played a key role in the cover-up. It is in the Labour Party's pocket. Its chair Joshi, official interpreter Foleshill ward. Asian organisations - for our adprotested loudly when he gave a £7000 -a-year community relations job to prominent Labour councillor Arthur Waugh.

appointment Joshi's other Zia Butt, the leader of his Labour Party ward. This clique has done nothing to in Coventry, it has fight racism a lot of work into restoring the city's image of racial harmony. But the racist attacks continue. On Christmas Day the windows of a big Indian club in the smashed. Asian families in Stoke are areas like assed by racist insults and attacks.

Labour councillors extended to trying (unsuccessfully) to get the families moved. WAR's approach has been to push forward the sort of practical work which has succeeded in areas like Wood End. The Asian families living there have suffered a history attacks. serious racist A itiated by WAR with the active assistance and people in of socialists most recent series of incithe dents there. Mistakes at Masseys IT WAS NO surprise to WAR activists in the Coventry when Racial Equality exposed racist practices at Massey Ferguson's tractor plant last December. Massey Ferguson is only one of the many engineering firms in entry that discriminate Massey Ferguson workers. mistake of allowing their discrimination to become too obvious. Only six of the 6800 workers there were black.

the course of the CRE's investigations, this number increased to ten - in a town where ten per cent of the population is black. T, an anti-racist John Ferguson told Massey how discrimination works in practice: The management doesn't advertise for jobs. It waits for applications to come in.

People only find out about vacancies through their family and friends. So, because Massey have never made any effort to take on black workers news of jobs never reaches them.'

Even when black workers do manage to into firms like Massey get their prospects are limited. Their isolation, and the indifference of the unions, makes them reluctant to protest against discrimination in wages, promotion Even the CRE accused the unions of The TGWU convenor claimed apathy. the allegations were lies.

that could not deny that a racist foreman who rejected he "did not because workers, still holds his position.

situation at Massey Ferguson is an indication of the wider problem that workers face throughout Coventry. The AUEW and TWU leaders who refuse to recog nise discrimination when it stares them in the face, against racist harassment and attacks, are unable to defend their members from capitalist attacks. In the last few years, more than 2000 workers have lost their after plant enough threat their their jobs. they ranks, of question War and went. to put conflict. against Britain harcontinually scene has sympathy Irishmen were hanged of campaign inrendered the area, terribly factories The attacks. 1939, in Commission has become Cov- Britain's stand black against the made supporters ish, militarism. During called for sanctions worker at Prospective the next step condemning by Council flew its and the Malvinas. Ferguson, Ever try. Coventry conditions and for struggle British imperialism. another But he an Asian job applicant want coloured the last decade The Terrorism Act. and refuse to take a stand British occupation excellent start. jobs at Massey Ferguson. Last year the unions called off an occupation of the management had received applications for voluntary - те dundancies to enable them to withdraw compulsory of Hundreds more workers are due to lose The experience of Massey Ferguson shows that as long as workers tolerate the existence of racism in their divisions tolerating are which weaken them in the face of bosses' attacks. Far from being a side issue, the black people's defending rights is central in building a class fightback against the attacks being suffered by workers in Coventry. Jenny Graham a British City COVENTRY is no stranger to military When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, the IRA declared war and Coventry was the of one of the first engagements The bomb attack went wrong and several civilians were killed and injured. In the ensuing storm of anti-Irish hysteria two In November of the following year the German air force launched a series of devastating bombing raids on Coventry.

Hundreds were killed and thousands were Workers suffered homeless not least because of the inadequacy of shelters and firefighting equipment in the city which major armaments for obvious target made an managed authorities ride the storm of working class anger Having united the city against the Irish they succeeded in uniting it against the Germans in 1940.

November 1940 is commemorated by an annual Peace Week; in recent years this a great CND celebration against Germany is an occasion for celebration for CND - its American, not Britoppose When Coventry became involved in yet another war last yearthe HMS Coventry was one of the first ships to be sunk in the South Atlantic local CND activists stood up for Britain.

Leading Labour patriot Dave Edwards against Argentina. David Nellist Militant MP tried to hedge his support for the fleet Galtieri Thatcher and equally. Coventry's 'nuclear-free' Labour at half-mast in flags mourning over a setback to British imperialist aggression against Argentina • campaigners That Coventry's peace should refuse and Labour bureaucrats to uphold the democratic rights of Argen- , tina against British imperialism came as no surprise to RCP supporters in Covenour branch began in since have been the same people Irish people's refusing to support the self-determination against War is The Irish made its which has conflict mark on Coventry. Members of Coventry's substantial Irish community have been imprisoned in connection with the armed struggle against British rule over Hundreds more have been harassed under the Prevention of For us the campaign to stop war in the future begins from the struggle against militarism and oppression. For workers in Coventry the activities organised by the Irish Freedom Movement against the of Ireland and the use of the PTA in Britain provide an

credentials.

PETER TATCHELL

public eye when, as the already selected candidate the Bermondsey

HOTE

stituency in November 1981, he wrote an article for London Labour Briefing. This run-of-the-mill Labour left piece championed extra-parliamentary political campaigning and called for and defiant forms of protest to challenge moral and the government's right to rule'. In a quiet week, this gave Fleet Street a very convenient stick with which to beat the Labour Party leadership. Ever ready to appease the caterwauling of media reaction, Michael Foot proclaimed that Tatchell had been officially endorsed candidate, and never would be.

A little over a year later, Tatchell was reselected by the Bermondsey party. Foot The RCP's Bermondsey GUY'S Hospital is supposed to cater for the needs of people in its locality which includes Bermondsey. However, the already restricted to

ACCESS

at Guy's is now being curtailed even further. Cuts in services have five-week waiting list for a three- to abortions. In addition, Guy's 'prefer' to take women in the earliest stages of up to twelve weeks. Thus pregnancy by the time some women reached the top *There is always likely to be reluctance to sustain a disciplinary sanceioesainst a person who is prepared to make the right noises Tatchell's democracy As the Bermondsey byelection campaign gets underway, prospective RCP candidate Fran Eden has challenged prospective Labour parliamentarian Peter Tatchell to debate the question or ours?'. Helen Swift examines Tatchell's 'radical but democratic' first entered the con- (and as 'imaginative political Tatchell As not yet party as d sovereignty of Parliament, peared

RICHT TR

*tro work Campal NO

YES

Women for communism branch has been campaigning for abortion rights and nursery provision in the area. Bermondsey Labour Party women's representatives have been too busy explaining why they won't support our initiatives to do anything to defend women's interests.

them. The abortions meant Hospital joined (The Times, 12 December) and ours 'their democracy then graciously withdrew his embargo on Tatchell's candidature. Tatchell may not have prevailed over Foot's dead body, as the Labour leader once insisted he must unkind conculators suggested he did, but he did triumph over the corpse of his own past radicalism.

The price of Tatchell's success was his outspoken recognition of the subordinate relationship of extra-parliamentary campaigning to the authority of Parliament.

told the final selection conference, he stood for "peaceful social change with the consent of the electorate.

He was radical certainly, but above all, he was a democrat. Having got down on his knees to plead his deference to the Tatchell apenhanced to have greatly his prospects for ever getting a seat on one of R Bern of the waiting list Guy's refused to take hospital has reduced the number of abortions it carries out by approximately 20 percent.

20 local people On 12 January last, supported a picket of the hospital exposing its record on restricting abortion and demanding that it improve services to provide for the needs of local women.

workers and local residents the lively picket outside the its lower benches. Tatchell then discovered that if you on your knees before get down British political establishment, you get kicked in the teeth. Not satisfied with his subservience to the sacred rule of the of Commons, House insisted on his total repudiation extra-parliamentary activity. Resourceful reporters dug up an introduction Tatchell had penned to a new pamphlet in which he called the mother of parliaments an 'elitist charade'. Worse he claimed that 'nowhere in the world has radical social change ever been accomplished by Parliament. The spectre of a Tatchell bent on 'radical social change' by means of conspiracy and dynamite once more hung over Britain. The hapless Tatchell fought back yet again in the style he knows best Far from seeking to grover more. overthrow the state by conspiracy, he claimed he had been the victim of one.

Fiendish sub-editing by that living flashback to May '68, Robin Blackburn, had made Tatchell's democratic sound a bit too radical. Tatchell reassured the nation that the word 'alone' had been left off the end of the key sentence; the Labour Party breathed again. Not by Parliament alone? In fact, nothing can be achieved by Parliament alone - not the invasion of the Malvinas, not curbs on rights, services. But Parliament alone is Tatchell's current objective. Hence, any suggestion that he is equivocal in his respect for this institution must be firmly rebutted.

Bourgeois democracy a barrier Tatchell claims to stand for the interests of the people of Bermondsey, but he has become increasingly orthodox reformist views on aspects of the British constitution. As a matter of fact, parliamentary democracy is not of great concern to the people of Bermond- They are more interested in jobs.

sey. housing, nurseries - and serious political hospital. Ironically, some women couldn't make it to the picket because they fancy dragging their kids along with them and had access to any facilities. Women need nurseries Bermondsey has less authority nursery places.

usual plethora of 'self-help' and part-time care ranging from 'home from homes' to playschemes and community nurseries.

But none of this meets the needs of the women in area. enough to find a job, this lack of facilities probably means you won't be able to take it up and in fact some firms won't consider employing you if you've even got children. In the Surrey Docks area, 25 out of 33 firms said they only employed women who were single or past childbearing age. Token gestures Southwark Council's approach to the lack of facilities for women is the same as that of the GLC. It provides encouragement and even finance Two recent examples illustrate schemes. the consequences of this approach.

The South London Women's Hospital has been threatened with closure in months time. means provision for abortions and the loss of further jobs in the area. Rather than encouraging a fight against its closure, GLC has the offered bail out the Wandsworth District Health Authority. Here we need to get the local labour movement - workers in factories and offices nearby and in the hospital itself - to fight this cut. We'll be calling for strike action, not abandoning the struggle before it starts.

The GLC has also decided to fund a nursery project on Rockingham estate

BERMONDSEY

the Parliament than the press next of Bermondsey Socialist Society labour and Commons says that expenditure passed a law socialism tary democracy cuts in socia The prepared to are tarian, well known for his ot Commons. Palace in the Bermondsey. didn't childcare

GLC

than 180 local There is the this campaign If you're lucky 19 January. Labour resentatives to join us. want to that there just Common' Sue self-help to 18 evels Hes. £2½ million to less than the to all redundancies. issues like racism and Ireland. But Tatchell is more preoccupied with getting a seat in with representing the interests of his prospective constituents.

For Tatchell, getting into Parliament means publicly declaring his allegiance to its authority. But the authority of Parliament is a barrier to the defence of front, on every workers To workers who want jobs, , Parliament declares that industry must shake out To become competitive. workers who want decent homes, the central and local government must make cuts in public especially on housing To working class women who want childcare facilities, Westminster explains that the recession requires more women to return to the home, work part-time or not at all, and make their own arrangements for looking after their children British parliamentary democracy has just the Nationality Act which reminds all blacks that they are second-class citizens. It is about to renew another law - the Prevention of Terrorism Act - that removes all democratic rights from Irish people in Britain at the whim of the Home Secretary. Parliamendemocracy. is sham But for Tatchell it reigns supreme.

Our democracy Party Communist Revolutionary takes a different view of Parliament. We use the platform it But we are provides as far as possible.

prepared to defy it — as a facade disguising the pursuit of ruling class interests - whenever working class needs demand this.

For Tatchell, the aspiring parliamenhappen until the nothing can Labour Party wins a majority in the House Fran Eden, by contrast, believes that the workers of Bermondsey cannot afford to wait. Tatchell's fight against the Tories might, just might, begin Westminster in 1984. of Fran Eden's fight has already begun on the streets of Bermondsey.

The initial idea came from workers on the estate and was taken up by the local tenants association. They wanted facilities which suited the needs of people on the estate which included provision for under-fives and at least five paid full-time workers. Instead, the has helped to subsidise another scheme way short of full nursery provision, staffed by the parents themselves.

Women in Labour We are fighting for free 24 hour nurseries paid for and run by the state. To push forward we decided to hold a protest outside Tooley Street Social Services department on Wednesday We invited Bermondsey Party's leading women Anne Ward (Southwark Council) didn't She told us to be make realistic, to get our priorities right and wasn't enough money around to provide for everyone. Ward believes that all forms of protest are counter-productive except for Greenham Goss (chair of Southwark's Women's Committee) just couldn't do it. Her position entitles her not only to extend provisions, but to allocate the cash; she told us that 'the context of your picket makes it difficult. What she really meant was that it exposes Labour's failure to fight for these facilities. Goss told us that she was looking forward to a new Labour government. We are looking forward to carry on the fight for women's rights in Bermondsey now and after the by election. Nothing RCP's election manifesto will do for the women of Bermondsey.

• Free abortion on demand.

• Free 24 hour nurseries.

• No to all cuts in services and opposition • No to all discrimination against women.

the next step, February 1983 5

BARGEWAYS IN THE SKY

BERMONDSEY

bargeway to Europe PLANNING FOR Docklands is now in the hands of the Tory Government-backed London Docklands Development Corporation. Set up in July 1981, this body aims to promote major private capital of investments the construction In offices, luxury housing and facilities for yachts and executive recreation on the waterfront. The LDDC is hotly opposed by the Labour Party - both because of the nature of its planning projects and its centralised administrative structure.

Prospective Labour MP Peter Tatchell wants to turn Docklands into a 'garden city', with low-rise houses surrounded by gardens and tree-lined streets' (Labour Herald, 14 January). He also plans major new industrial estate, based on new scientific industries and linked to polytechnics' for the Surrey Docks site: this would be a seed-bed for new inventions and alternative technologies, creating an industry of the future and local pros- The perity". riverside Tatchell wants turned into a bargeway, from which barges could leave for Europe, hence also cutting down the juggernaut traffic in the Tatchell also wants control over alcd. Docklands redevelopment to return to local representatives, where it lay under the last Labour Government. Before we look further at the current controversy over Docklands, it is useful to examine Labour's past attempts at urban planning in the area. Docklands destroyed The docks have been in decline throughout the twentieth century. Modern ships require more space, both in the water and for storing containers on land. With its access to road and rail, Tilbury, in the lower reaches of the Thames, provided a alternative good to the upper docks Since the Second World War, both trade and dockers have moved steadily down Containerisation 'sixties enabled the dock employers to rationalise labour on a large scale. Between 1969 and 1973, for example, the number of Lonwas cut by almost a half, don dockers from 23 000 to 12 000. In 1970, the Labour Government approved the closure of the Surrey Docks in Bermondsey. Now there are only a few hundred dockers left in London, mainly in the Royal Docks on the north bank of the river, which are scheduled to close shortly.

The official labour movement at every level, from the Government, to the local MPs, to the national and local trade union officials, cooperated fully in the rundown of the docks. Transport union leader Jack Jones worked closely with Tory MP Toby Lower's Port of London Authority (PLA) to secure the final closure of the docks. The union leaders made no attempt to link up with other dockers and other sections of the TGWU or other unions to torce the authontes to save iobs provide satisfactory alternatives. The best could manage was to negotiate they severance pay; by securing what seemed like substantial sums for some workers with long service records, the union divided the workforce and undermined resistance to redundancies. Many dockers left with only a pittance.

When the unions finally called strike action it was always too little, too late; designed more as a gesture to contain dockers' anger than as a real offensive

PLA.

against the At best, the officials used industrial action to negotiate higher 6 the next step, February 1983 The Olympic Games, a vertical take-off airport, an overhead railway, a - all these and much more have been proposed as projects for the 8.5 square mile area left vacant by the closure of severance pay. At worst, they blocked it from the beginning - as, for example, when the Royal Docks were threatened with closure in 1978. The Times comconsiderable anger within the docks, local officials of the TGWU, the biggest union the ports, said that any unofficial action now would be irresponsible and "industrial suicide" (7 July 1978). Not taking coordinated industrial action certurned out to be 'occupational suicide for tens of thousands of London It's workforce chronically demoralised by the fatal capitalist realism of its trade union and Labour Party representatives, the Surrey Docks closed quietly in 1970.

pecially with their local MP. Docker Gordon Long *Mr Mellish joined the fight too late. Feeling is running very high down here. We expected more from him. After all, Labour is in power and the Government could have prevented the docks closing.' (South London Press, 17 April A Labour government in power; a local MP who proclaimed himself 'the dockers' friend'; a union under a militant left-wing londsey he area have grown cynical about Labour pol- Having played a full part in the devastation of the docks, the Labour Party now embarked on a bold experiment in Joint in the the early 'seventies, was carried on by 74. Including representatives of the five bords The GLC and local community groups, it was for the sort of democratic accountability' currently being promoted and the in alternative to the Tory LDDC today.

Labour intended to raise the declining population of docklands from 56 000 to 100 000 over a 20-year period. It aimed to create more than 20000 new jobs and build 23 000 houses in the same period. It's -12 000 jobs and 6000 houses. The Labour Party Docklands redevelopment London's docks. As a substantial chunk of this area is in Bermondsey docklands redevelopment is certain to be a central issue in the forthcoming by-election. Paul Saunders reports.

intended to achieve these targets through a combination spending largely on infrastructural projects (housing, transport, etc) - and private capital invested in new industry: The Docklands Strategic Plan costed out the total development of £2038m at 1975 prices, of which f1138m was to come from the government and £900m from the private sector.

The private sector's contribution was expected to be relatively small over the first 10 years of the plan, increasing later as infrastructure works completed.' were (Who develops London's docklands?, September 1981) What were the fruits of this scheme to revive capitalism in Docklands?

By 1981, 800 jobs had been created while a further 8500 disappeared, bringing the total unemployment in the docklands boroughs up to 80 000. Of the 6000 new houses planned, only 1300 were built. The catastrophic failure of Labour's plan for Docklands contained a crucial lesson for the party, which it has clearly failed to learn. The decay of the Docklands - like the decay of the North-East, Merseyside and South Wales - is a symptom of the decay of British capitalism. Even when the economy was expanding in the 'fifties and 'sixties, massive public subsidies could not stop the rot in Britain's declining industrial areas. In today's rethe implementation cession oi a sys

SVS.

tematic capitalist development programme in areas like Docklands, in a way that will provide the jobs and homes working class people need, is simply impossible.

Tory realism - Labour cyncism The Tories understand the realities of the capitalist crisis. They appreciate that the only that capital can 'develop way Docklands is through asset stripping, speculative building and catering for the needs of the luxury leisure market. There is no dynamic sector in British industry that can lead an area like Bermondsey to the new prosperity of which Tatchell dreams. The Tories also know that the serious business of screwing profits out of Docklands demands an efficient organisation with clear lines of authority and Hence they have disdecision-making. pensed with the bureaucratic shambles through which Labour tried to plan Docklands. The LDDC is an agency determined to use public and private resources to maximum effect in the ruthless exploitation of whatever resources remain in Docklands. The LDDC is a godsend to Bermondsey Labour Party. Its representatives can seize on the most offensive aspects of the Tory plans - luxury flats on Corbett's Wharf at £100 000 each, six Centre Pointstyle office blocks for Hay's Wharf - to expose Tory profiteering. Certainly Bermondsey workers are disgusted by these schemes. But they are also disappointed by Labour's failure to defend jobs and living standards in Docklands. Tatchell's the LDDC provide stunts against distraction from Labour's convenient own sordid record. of the LDDC and its The bogey speculative schemes provides considerable scope for the Labour Party to promote its alternatives. Essentially these involve a return to the 1976 plan with some of Tatchell's own visionary ideas for the area tacked on. Tatchell promises houses with gardens' - but how does Labour plan to build them? Most of the housing sites in Surrey Docks have now been transferred to the LDDC. The council wants to get out of its contract to buy the new houses being built there. But there is nowhere else to rehouse tenants from the Downtown estates, which are also due for transfer.

Nevertheless, Southwark decided in December to refuse to buy any LDDC houses; and they have pulled out of Lysander's 'Southwark site' scheme. So they can't promise any houses - with gardens or not - unless a future Labour government provides the cash. Meanwhile they can blame the Development Corporation for all their failings - and restrict their fight' against Tory policies to a legal battle against the transfer of the 'Southwark site In one final respect the LDDC helps out the local Labour Party. Although it has the sham accountability given up cultivated by Labour's committee it still recognises the usefulness of consulting the community. Hence it has set aside €2.5 million for a 'community support budget: €500 000 is allocated for grants to community organisations. This discreet helps to subsidise the LDDC payola Docklands Forum body which brings together all sorts of groups includ the Newham Allotment Holders ing Federation, the Joint Docklands Action Group, local religious groups and the trade unions. Lots of the sort of activists that provide the rather frail backbone of the Bermondsey Labour Party are thus indirectly on the LDDC payroll.

Hence the LDDC not only funds private speculation - it also funds the 'community' opposition to its profiteering. This is the extent to which the Tories have Docklands sewn up - and a true measure of the cynicism of Labour's resistance to their plans. A real alternative There is an alternative way to defend jobs in Docklands. It begins from throwing out Labour's grandiose plans for a dockland utopia of the future. Capitalism Docklands. the cannot develop capitalists and their state can be forced to sustain jobs and living standards if their every attempt to attack them is met with concerted action now - not with illusory schemes for the future.

The devastation and demoralisation of Bermondsey under Labour means that there is much lost ground to make up.

We can make a start by supporting a candidate who is prepared to give a lead in the defence of working class interests.

SHOOT TO KILL

THE

COLD-BLOODED MURDER of seven Catholics in the course of the last two months has drawn attention to the shoot-to-kill policy of the British Army in Ireland. Confirmation of the existence of a covert anti- terrorist unit' with a shootto-kill policy by senior officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary led the Irish Times to comment on a 'major divergence from security policies prevailing for the last six years'. This is altogether false. The so-called anti-terrorist squad has long been operational. Early last year the British Army's own journal boasted that *The RUC's own Special Patrol Group has a well-deserved reputation for speed of response (Armed Forces, March 1982). The shoot-to-kill policy is as old as the Irish War itself. Politics and military strategy Since British troops first invaded the Six Counties of Ireland in 1969, imperialist strategy has undergone considerable modification. At the outset the British plan was to maintain Stormont as its regional parliament. The governeat promised reforms never came.

The introduction of Internment in August 1971 only accelerated Stormont's inevitable demise. Since the collapse of Stormont in March 1972 the British ruling class has alternated between trying to make straightforward Direct Rule acceptable and attempting to construct a facade power-sharing which would local politicians a role in the administration of Direct Rule.

In fact Whitehall has long recognised that the only alternative to Direct Rule is the reunification of Ireland. Since the whole object of the military occupation of Ireland is to maintain its partition, the only issue at stake for British imperialism is how to administer Direct Rule most effectively. most important aim of Direct Rule is to destroy the Irish liberation To realise movement. this objective the British military feel free to shoot, and The recent spree maim.

LOLLULC

of murders by British forces may well have been a response to the success of Sinn Fein in last year's Assembly elections. But it was a response that had been tried and tested through the experience of the past. 13 years. As early as 1969 the Cameron Committee set up by Westminster to inquire disturbances in Derry found the RUC 'guilty of misconduct which involved assault and battery (and) malicious damage to property in the streets in the area'. predominantly Catholic Bogside This early outburst of spontaneous state violence has been replaced by a wellcontrolled and well-calculated system of terror. Britain's terror machine was built order by Brigadier Frank Kitson, the well-known expert in counter-insurgeency appointed as Belfast Army Commander in 1970. Kitson's approach was straightforward: "Translated into normal terms, the aim of the government is to regain if necessary and then retain the allegiance of the population, and for this purpose it must eliminate those involved in subversion.' (F Kitson, Low intensity operations, 1971) The elimination of 'those involved in subversion' has become the principal aim of the British military.

The British Army had been in occupation less than a year when its General Officer Commanding made the first direct acknowledgement that the troops would not hesitate to shoot their opponents.

Lieutenant-General Freeland warned in April 1970 that the army would shoot • petrol bombers on sight. Selected marksmen were equipped with the army's latest night-sight rifles. I will not elaborate on this', said Freeland, 'but you do not want to get in the way of me' (The *Times, 4 April 1970). This was no empty 13 years old. 171T011 soldiers shot dead three civilians in riots.

By November the soldiers were instructed thrown at them, but to shoot first! (The The British military has always tried to the Irish War. Although British soldiers have shot down dozens of Irish people in cold blood, the elimination of freedom fighters has generally been left to covert units like the SAS or locally-raised secret units. Operating under the name Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF) these units unleashed a reign of terror in 1971 and 1972. Dozens of people were shot dead.

Atter each assassination the army claimed they were fired on first. In no instance were weapons produced to substantiate these claims. All witnesses deny the civilments often underwent a metamorphosis first denying all knowledge and then 1973 and by the middle of the year directed specifically at killing the top thirty' IRA leaders (The Times, 17 May murdered in February and another one in The Guardian reported that criminals - the Littlejohn brothers been hired to assassinate prominent IRA Some recent victims of British murder squads: (top) Tony Harker, Stephen McConomy, Eamon Bradley: (middle) Gervais McKerr, Sean Burns, Eugene Toman; (bottom) Michael Tighe, Seamus Grew and Roddy Carroll

BRITAIN'S ONLY ANSWER

The British Army's recent orgy of assassinations in the Six Counties has led many in Britain to speculate on the emergence of a new hard line security policy. As David Douglas reports, the policy is now around men, including the Chief of Staff of the IRA at the time (The Guardian, 9 August resistance decided to unleash the murder squads top ten IRA leaders. The reign of terror officer claimed in December 1976: We got four of them. chased down South' (cited in T Geraghty, Who dares wins, p201). To keep up appearances British imperialism has always been careful to keep its ground. As a key part of British strategy to legitimise its domination over Ireland.

the army has always been cast in the role warning that British imperialism cannot For if suspicion were converted into belief, and belief into knowledge, that the civil power in Northern Ireland had resorted to countering the armed subversion of lawful order by its own perversion of lawful means, then not only would the confidence of the nationalist community be presence in the Province would vanish.' (5 reland In other words, the British Army must do its utmost to keep its dirty tricks out of the glare of publicity.

it was the job of Harold Wilson's Government to implement policies which Labour Government launched its policy of criminalisation. In April 1974, Mervyn and order", instead of a war time' climate in the Six Counties. To portray the war as a police problem, Rees abolished special category status for republican prisoners power of the state to endow their terror crime. To complement this approach, the RUC was designated as the main security force in the Six Counties, and the fiction of a local conflict in which British troops were innocent victims was reinforced Ulsterisation has given a new form to Loyalist security force of 10 955 in 1970 was almost doubled by 1980. Repression has been given a local flavour - one step removed from direct British involvement.

Irish freedom fighters since 1977 have had a degree of Loyalist involvement.

The summary execution of a three-man IRA service unit in 1978 was carried out by a team composed of SAS and RUC campaign waged against prominent H- Block activists was carried out by Loyalist freelancers, ostensibly without the knowmurdering John Turnley told the court that he had been working with the SAS.

same. All that has changed is that Kitson's instructions to eliminate 'subversives' are not changed. Every expression of nationarms. Thus Sinn Fein's electoral successes were followed by get an additional £14 million to increase reserve squad by 300. Not surprisingly, the year 1982 ended with an upsurge of state violence. RUC squads vented their on nationalist families living on council estates and sought every opportunity for shoot-outs with their (preferably unarmed) republican opponents.

Britain out of Ireland Liberal critics of British imperialism object to particular of military domination. Instances of torture, the use of plastic bullets and legal frameups are often denounced as inconsistent with the principles of British democracy.

This attitude is at best hypocritical or blind and at worst an apology for British imperialism. For as long as the occupation of Ireland continues to provoke resistance British imperialism will rule by the force of arms. Britain's ruthless terror and murder campaigns are not the arbitrary acts of crazed militarists. They are the outcome of a security policy rationally worked out Whitehall. Every 1n successful assassination helps to enforce Partition and sustain Britain's domination over Ireland. We cal on al our supporters to campaign actively on behalf of the Irish liberation struggle. Every victim of the occupation army must be avenged by a resolute campaign fighting for Britain's defeat. the next step, February 1983 7

Ireland

ALL LABOUR'S

SOLUTIONS

certain themes. They all accept the right of the British state to determine the future of the Irish people.

their condemnations of. struggle of the republican movement, all Labour left politicians deny the right of the Irish people to establish their own forms of government, British rule. Indeed the central concern of all recent Labour Party initiatives is to confer legitimacy on of British domination and the myths of British democracy. Let's take Allaun first. Labour for Ulster? Salford MP Allaun has been a left-wing Labour's national executive onl for longer than member. For the last couple of years he has given his personal backing to the notion that the Labour Party extend its organisation to include the occupied Six Counties of Ireland. Allaun has linked up with the Campaign for Labour Representation, a front for an obscure Stalinist faction political Its main writing letters to the British press, publishing a cyclostyled periodical from a Belfast address and Unionists for the support of orthodox Loyalist trade unionists. Until recently, nobody took the idea of Labour politicians going to the Six Counties - for any other purpose troops and approve the concentration camps - very seriously. But an impending general election, following constituency boundary changes unfavourable to Labprompted a re-assessment. Allaun our, could pick up reckonsLabour seats in Belfast and another elsewhere to boost its strength at Westminster.

The campaign to get Labour across the water has already made considerable Labour's 1981 special inquiry headway. report on Northern Ireland was drafted by a close sympathiser with the cause.

final draft included an extra The amendment inspired by and the CLR, agreeing to hold a conference with the trade unions in the Six Counties to consider appropriate forms of Labour representation. The Militant Tendency wants the union bureaucracy in the occupied territory to launch the Party Labour rather parachuted in from London; but it too the idea of a 'conference supports Labour to consider the matter further.

Allaun now intends January national executive that it begin to set up Labour Party branches in the Six Counties. Allaun's scheme has little chance of success. The trade union bureaucracy in the Six Counties only survives by scrupulously from austamig while discreetly upholding the connection. As one official told it is impossible to get Morning Star, involved with the political here without blowing the whole movement apart (6 January). Ireland trade union leader Terry Carlin immediately stated that Allaun's plan 'was not something with which unions wanted to get officially involved'. They had written to say that they were not prepared to host a conference on Labour representation. Other Labour politicians in Britain have pointed that the

OUL

based Social Democratic Party is a fellow member of the Socialist International. Labour's could only appeal to Protestants would thus be sucked into the sectarian politics of Northern Ireland', commented MP David Walsall Winnick. The real significance scheme lies more in what it reveals about socialist's leading British on Ireland than in any prospect it has of being implemented. Allaun begins from the assumption that the are part of the United Kingdom. The only question is how they can best be integrated into the political establishment. It is not simply a matter of Labour's electoral expediency - Allaun is also concerned about how to contain instability of the occupied area. This is 8 the next step, February 1983 share And with the armed independent of Frank most people can reshould Ireland. activities include competing with than to visit the three Frank Allaun than have way to pacify of branch out proposing to the Clive Soley 'politics' British his front bench office the refused to oppose structure Terrorism Northern post. the PTA и тетен the national executive against the new Ulster Assembly. Catholicsembly and Labour intervention it Tory to take of Allaun's his outlook the latest Six Counties aggrieved democracy. given substance, ban on the political widespread that British democracy it's British impose on Ireland in the future.

the central theme of the CLR: the best the Six Counties is to draw them into the 'normal' processes of British politics. The Labour left's plan to Ireland reflects into its desire to legitimise the integration of the Six Counties into the United Kingdom.

James Prior, roll on Labour's front bench Irish spokesman objective, shares but not his approach. As MP for Hammersmith, Soley has long taken an interest in Irish affairs. Last year he resigned from in a storm of publicity when his senior, Roy Hattersley, the Prevention of A few Parliament. Act in months later he quietly resumed his What principles will guide his line this year? We wait with Soley has the meantime found a new cause: he is campaigning of

SDLP

disqualification deputy-leader Seamus Mallon from the Mallon is now barred from the Asbecause he was appointed last year to the Dublin senate by outgoing Taoiseach Charles Haughey, in a cunning ruse to embarrass the British government.

As an honorary member of government of a 'foreign' country, Mallon is ineligible for a seat in the Assembly. Soley wants Government to allow Mallon that at least one obstacle to the SDLP's participation in British-imposed 'solution' to the Irish War could be removed.

Like many on the Labour left, Soley is that the nationalist people of Ireland have little faith in British That view must not be (Financial he insists the Times, 30 December). For Soley, Mallon only the encourages Irish people among vie w is a sham. In

THE LABOUR LEFT'S IRISH POLICY

Any solutionso long as The Labour left has more solutions to the Irish War today than it has excuses for staunchly upholding a decade of British military coercion.

Ken Livingstone wants to play Lloyd George to the republican movement in new treaty talks; Frank Allaun wants the Labour Party to set up shop in Belfast and Derry; Clive Soley wants to remove all possible barriers to the functioning of the new Ulster Assembly; and lots of Labour councillors want to make sure that Irish people in Britain can vote for them and whatever solution their party finally chooses to fact Soley's immediate problem is likely be • to soon resolved: appointment lapses this month with the formal takeover of Garret FitzGerald's new government. But Soley's enthusiasm for legitimising British domination over Ireland has not flagged. His latest cause is the promotion of an all-Ireland 'antiterrorist police force'. January) This measure ratify the existing state of affairs where the repressive apparatus of the Twenty- Six Counties is closely integrated into the British terror machine in the North to maximise the repression of the republican movement. Soley's would have the value of exposing the reality behind the token independence of the 'Irish Republic' dominates the whole of Ireland. Ironically Soley views this measure to consolidate British domination over Ireland as a step towards Irish unity!

Irish voting One of the growth areas of Labour Party activity on Ireland is its response to the Tory threat to remove the right to vote British elections for living in Britain. much about the Labour Party's response to the Irish War. Every time the republican movement launches a successful Warrenpoint, Britain Regents Park, Ballykelly backwoodsman crawls out to scream for the disenfranchisement of the Irish in Britain. There are two possible responses to this. One is to recognise that it is not a practicable proposal party conference refused to take it up and that its objective is simply to stir up anti-Irish prejudice. The best way to deal with it therefore is to give full support the Irish liberation struggle and to fight any attempts under the PTA to curtail activities of those who sympathise freedom fighters. In remain in Britain rish voters Hackney actively vote 1801 Act Britain habitants citizenship. the two voting rights community to its Mallon's Dublin gravy train. solution. (Observer, would simply in the Six Counties. no independent measure only mean - that Britain election. (Like Soley, Irish people favourable. This response reveals attack against to renounce Hyde Park, talks can take place. some Tory even the Tory Party and struggle of the Labour Party. with it in Britain. This is our approach.

The Labour Party sees the matter differently. In the past its representatives have simply tried to out-do the Tories in strident denunciations of the Irish this at least they consistent. However, new element has crept into Labour's reaction especially since it lost much Irish support over its gutless performance during the 1981 hunger strikes. Labour activists have recently seized the opportunity of Tory threats to Irish voters to launch a campaign to rebuild the traditional alliance between the Irish community and the Labour Party. In areas where there are substantial numbers of - Hammersmith, Islington, and Haringey in London. Manchester and Coventry - constituency parties and local councils are to be found campaigning against existent threat to Irish voting rights.

The fact that Irish people have the Britain reflects the historical domination of Ireland by Britain.

The of Union fused Ireland to - and until 1949 even the inof the Twenty-six counties enjoyed the dubious benefits of British The continuation of Irish voting rights in Britain and the absence of any immigration regulations between countries has ensured a tree flow of labour as required by British capital, as well as being an administrative convenience. Most Irish people's central concern is to have the right to a say in the political future of their own coun try - not to preserve a token of their subordination to Britain.

We uphold the right of anybody who lives in Britain to vote in elections here.

But that is not the point of the Irish controversy. The central issue is the right of the Irish to selfdetermination and the persistence of the British state in denying that right. The Labour Party's position in the controvery indicates that it is more concerned to maintain the legacy of British domination than to defend the Irish people's right to national freedom.

Livingstone's surrender terms This brings us finally to Ken Livingstone, whose GLC has recently added the Irish 'ethnic minorities Livingstone is currently the leading exponent of the 'negotiated The vital clue to grasping Livingstone's approach is that he always uses words like 'we, 'us", 'our' when discussing Britain's role in Ireland. 'After thirteen years of war' he often declares 'we have failed to bring about a solution Who is 'we"? Not the Irish - they have never had the chance to form their own government without British interference.

Not the British working class - it has had role in Irish politics for more than half a century. "We' can British ruling class to which Livingstone has appointed himself Irish adviser, and if only the Government would let him, negotiator-in-chief. What are Livingstone's terms? To the republican movement he has made himself very clear - stop the bombings, lay down arms and pursue the mandate given by the Assembly Livingstone is a great respecter of the democratic process of the Assembly elections). Livingstone's terms to the British state are much more He is on record as opposing plastic bullets and being in favour of the withdrawal of troops. But this is evidently not a precondition for negotiations: only the republican movement is obliged military methods before Livingstone is regarded by many Irish people and British socialists as having something new to offer in terms of the Labour Party's Irish policy. Our advice is —listen to Livingstone not the Sun. His Irish policy is as old as the Labour he condemns liberation the upholds Britain's right to determine the future of Ireland. The real friends of Irish freedom in Britain are not to be found on the left wing Mick Kennedy

A cause forsolidarity the PTA a key priority for anti-imperialists.

BRITAIN'S

continued Ireland depends on its success in confining the war to the Six Counties.

British ruling class knows that as long as domestic opposition to its there is no rule in Ireland it can pursue its war in whatever way it sees fit. As long as the government faces no internal disruption and the no threat that spill over into Britain it can full measures to smash the eration movement. The war at home To that domestic ensure persists the British ruling class has waged a successful campaign on the home front.

Backed up by both major Parliament and the considerable powers of the media, the British state has managed to the majority population that it really Ireland but war in democratic wishes of the majority against a bunch of violent and deranged criminals.

The success of the criminalisation of the republican movement was clearly shown the H-Block hunger strikes While people throughout the world 1981. marched in their of in solidarity with the H-Block men there was virtually no protest against Thatcher inside Britain. Critics of British rule in Ireland have generally feared to raise the issue of the war. They have isolated particular aspects of British oppression and discrimination of torture have called for their removal. At present the main example of this approach is the Labour left-in spired campaign bullets. Plastic bullets plastic objectionable aspect of British oppression.

But at a time when a much publicised "shoot-to-kill policy exists freedom fighters are being hunted down and murdered with lead futility of a narrow anti-plastic bullets campaign is clearly apparent. Any campaign, however well-intentioned, presents no challenge to imperialism if it refuses to take a stand on the issue of war.

Yet it is the very issue of war which the British left is always ready to ignore.

The Irish Freedom Movement an opposite view every initiative must be approached from point of view of popularising the cause of Irish freedom workers. That's why it is essential that our resources to around issues which challenge the ability of the state to conduct its colonial war in Ireland. In this respect fighting the PTA becomes central - for it is through the PTA that the ruling class conducts the Irish War inside Britain. Through the operation of the PTA the war acquires the greatest immediacy

WORKED.

SOUTH LONDON

Wednesday 2 February 6.00pm

SMASH THE PTA!

Mass lobby of Southwark Council Southwark Town Hall, Peckham Rd. SES Just how useful the Prevention of Terrorism Act can be to the British ruling class was made clear last December when it was activated to prevent the Sinn Fein delegation to London. Since its introduction in 1974 more than 5500 people have been detained under this repressive law. In March, the PTA will come up before Parliament for its annual renewal. Frank Richards outlines the case for making action against domination of controversial. ine Connolly: Party, violence might apply its Association Irish libconsensus organise British viously parties in to challenge of the confused about isn't fighting the protecting the of Out, November 1978) thousands time meaning. Since • such as instances and against catch are an mistaken.

CONVICE

and Irish that. Instead, of bullets, the criminalising the republican ists in that discussion of the Irish takes the - every activity and During of the PTA, among British fighting the

CONCIS

England, from the for British

BIRMINGHAM

Wednesday 9 March 7.30pm Public Meeting

SMASH THE PTA!

the PTA, and the IFM Digbeth Civic Hall The IFM's assessment of the PTA is The supporters of a conference on the PTA organised by the Association February on (including members of the Communist Labour left Troops Out and Movement) treat the PTA as an unnecessary piece of legislation that encourages rather than fights terrorism. The Connolly share the ruling seems to class obsession with terrorism. Its newspaper noted that it cannot be said the Act has much ettect in preventing terrorism. For this reason it is necessary to Obopposition to the Act.' imperialism easily can live with this sort of opposition.

But even more radical sections of the left - including people who really want British imperialism are the PTA. Thus in 1978 predecessors of the present Troops Out Movement wrote in their paper: •Merseyside UTOM has published a short guide to the Act, demanding that this most repressive piece of legislation passed in modern Britain outside wartime be scrapped. (Troops On the contrary - it is only in its warcontext that the PTA has any Why the PTA? its introduction in 1974, only 96 people - less than two percent of the 5500 detained - have been charged under the PTA. For many of its liberal critics, this is proof that the PTA has not done what it was intended to do - They are and convict 'terrorists.

PTA

was never meant

IRA

bombers existing criminal law is more than adequate for

PTA

the played a central role in the British state's strategy anyone who supports movement and its objectives. It has been used to harrass and terrorise Irish workers and anti-imperial- Britain. Convictions are irrelevant - what matters for the British state is an atmosphere is created where War is difficult and mass protest next to impossible.

ministerial broadcast in which he announced the introduction Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins justified the power to exclude people to the Six Counties on the grounds that it is from there that the infection comes.' The infection' is the resistance movement against British imperialism. In the eyes of the British state, of the infection the are Irish people. Prevention means keeping Wales and Scotland immune effects of war. That's why most of the detentions under the PTA occur at the point of entry to Britain.

Speakers: Eddie Caughey, the first victim of The Prevention of Terrorism Act ness - kept out of Britain.

up to five year's imprisonment.

More than two-thirds of all detentions have taken place at ports and airports at Liverpool, Stranraer and London. In Liverpool, where more than a quarter of the detentions have taken are anti-terrorist squads at the port, the airport and the railway station. Bridewell police station in the city has specially designated cells for detainees.

The PTA also provides an ideal weapon for creating a climate of fear in the Irish community in Britain. such as the ones carried out in London, Southampton, Birmingham and Liverpool in December 1979 have led to the detentof people whose only Ion with the Six Counties is their birth During the 1979 raids James Martin was arrested and detained for seven days.

IFM Activities

BIRMINGHAM

Saturday 5 March 9.45am Picket the Shadow Home Secretary, Roy Hattersley

SMASH THE PTA!

Sparkbrook Labour Club, Stratford Rd Another PTA picket at Paddington Green, London's special Irish detention centre British democracy? Not if you're Irish The original Prevention of Terrorism Act was rushed through Parliament in record time without any opposition in 1974. It gave the Home Secretary the power to ban any organisation appearing' to him to be involved in 'terrorism'. The Act specifically named the IRA - it became an offence to give support, raise funds or hold meetings on its behalf.

The Labour Government introduced broader powers of proscription to provide legal backing for the harassment of any Irish people in Britain, not just those directly involved with the republican movement. Under the new terms it became an offence to support "terrorism' in general - rather than simply the IRA. What constitutes support for "terrorism" is left to the judgement of the police. It can include selling anti-imperialist propaganda or collecting money for relatives of republican prisoners. The commonest offence however is just being Irish.

The second section of the PTA gives the state powers of exclusion from the country. Anybody the Home Secretary "believes' - on the basis of police reports which are not open to any legal challenge - to be involved in 'terrorism' can be deported. The country for the purposes of the PTA is Great Britain - not the United Kingdom. Thus Irish people can be expelled from Britain either to the Twenty-six or Six Counties, or - like Adams, Morrison and McGuin- Part three of the PTA deals with powers of detention. The police can arrest and detain anybody for 48 hours without issuing a warrant or making any charge. They can then apply to the Home Secretary for authorisation to hold a prisoner for a further five days, again with.

out making any charge. A prisoner can be photographed and fingerprinted without his consent.

The 1976 Act added another element to the state's repressive powers. It became an offence not to become an informer. Anybody is obliged to pass on information of material assistance' in preventing 'acts of terrorism' or in catching 'terrorists. Silence now carries a penalty of The PTA also gives the police the right to stop and search anybody they suspect of involvement in 'terrorism'. Anybody's home can be raided on the order of a police superintendent.

Under the PTA Irish people living in Britain have no democratic rights at all.

place, there the Six Counties, Northern Mass raids connection for weapon

SMASH THE PTA!

Victims of the Prevention of Terrorism Act in Liverpool: contact the Irish Freedom Movement. Phone 01-274 3951 Ireland Born in the Six Counties, his only safeguard against exclusion would have been another year's residence in Britain. But because he had lived in Britain for only 19 years he could be summarily expelled.

Despite the fact that his three children had been born here, he was excluded Six Counties. He lost his job and his council house. On arrival in the the Loyalist-controlled Ireland Housing Executive refused to rehouse him and his family.

James Martin's case serves as an object lesson to anyone Irish living in Britain who wants to speak out against Partition.

The threat of exclusion is a powerful silencing the opponents of imperialism inside Britain.

HUNGER STRIKE

COMMEMORATION

MARCH

ORGANISED BY

SINN FEIN

BIRMINGHAM,8 MAY

the next step, February 1983 9

Labour movement Minersinretreat Blame SINCE ARTHUR SCARGILL won the leadership of the workers have been waiting for the miners to lead the fightback against the Tories.

Many militants have looked to the miners the initiative to provide lead to a broader struggle for jobs and among workers in industries like pay steel and engineering. Cals. fightback has not Conse. miners have suffered more humiliating under Scargill than deeds predecessor Joe Gormley's under his right-wing leadership. The Scottish miners acceptance of the closure of Kinneil colliery, nation of the South Wales NUM to cuts and closures in its pits and the acquiescence of the Kent miners to the major loss of jobs at Snowdown represent the successful culmination of a determined National Coal Board offensive. The fact that these defeats took with well-established Party leaderships helps to explain both the betrayals ana mel consequences Stalinists. British

TOTE

at the NCB's strategy to rationalise the coal-mining industry. Coal board attack Over the past 30 years production in Britain has fallen from 200m tons to little more The number of pits has dropped from 900 to 200. As mechanisation has advanced, manpower has declined - from 690 000 in 1950 to The brief period of optimism today. about the future of mining following the mid 'seventies oil crisis is now at a The distant memory. devastated manufacturing industry and hence the demand for coal from power stations, steel mills and factories.

The result is massive stockpiles of coal at pitheads around the country.

The NCB has strategy towards the NUM in its drive to ensure the viability of British coal On the one hand it has been mining. prepared to cooperate closely with the NUM in presenting to the Government an image management united in the best interests of the British mining industry. Thus in 1981 the NCB colluded in a miners' national strike objective of with the state subsidies for the gave in and higher Tories facilitated further investment in collieries such as Selby in North Yorkshire; it also provided the cash to win union acceptance of schemes for redundancy and early retirement.

the other hand, always been ready to exploit the deep divisions among the NUM's loosely federated regions. In 1978 the board introduced productivity schemes which favoured areas with better geological condthe South Midlands and Nottitions ingham (also areas right-wing leadership). As the recession deepened differentials has NUM have widened. The areas with the largest numbers of inefficient pits with the worst geological conditions (and the worst bonuses) became the target of the latest round of rationalisations.

areas were also une wrawmona strong holds of the left. Tactical ineptitude Over the past year, have played into the hands of the NCB just as the broad drift of his policy has undermined miners resistance to the Board's offensive. Last October Scargill feared that he would not win the endorsement of his members for his 31 per cent pay claim. This figure was based on his obscure calculation of what the NCB the next step, February 1983 10 NUM thousands of that would But Instead the did they the resigplace in the Communist Let's look first annual coal than 100m could afford linked the pay around 200 000 sidered miners recession has for strike pursued a pragmatic problem of closures. and union winning more The industry. subsidies new the NCB has with a tradition of within the The These Scargill's tactics not the miners First in Scotland, then in South Wales and then in Kent - the leaders of the National Union of Mineworkers have thrown in the towel before the fight for jobs really got started. For the miners this has been a series of setbacks. For the working class, however, not been a total disaster: the betrayals of the NUM left promise to Party on the British trade union movement.

- not on what miners needed to stay ahead of inflation. So, he claim to opposition to the threat of closures - which he cona more popular issue among and appealed for backing for strike action on both issues. Most these were not impressed by shenanigans and - with the exception of the left areas (see table) - overwhelmingly rejected Scargill's call for action.

The result of Scargill's manoeuvre that the NUM was left without a mandate action on the mine cale issue of pay - or on the longer-term The NCB was quick to seize its ad-

CPGB

- nearing the end? travellers dominate the executives in Scotland, South Wales and Kent.

measure of the blow it represents to the party's standing in the unions.

furniture workers and tailors.

the CP than inside it, where they would have been a decade ago.

monious squabble aboard a slowly sinking ship.

many members still have not received their 1982 membership cards'.

Scargill and McGahey: British coal means jobless miners weaken still further the fatal influence of the politics of the Communist Immediately vantage. result was announced, the Board opened discussions at area level on the future of particular pits. Here the NCB used the commitment of the NUM to the British coal industry to weaken miners ance to closures. The left in particularly strongly with of coal' ever since its rise to power in the union in the 'seventies. Left wingers Daly, Mick like and Arthur Scargill criticised the right-wing leaders for their complicity in the rundown of the industry.

wanted to help make British coal great To achieve this goal as the reagain. The NUM is one of the few remaining unions in which the Communist Party of Great Britain still excercises considerable power. Its members and their fellowa former party member and a follower of the orthodox Stalinist line on issues like Poland, owes his position to CP support. The resignation of the CP's industrial organiser Mick Costello (for personal reasons) shortly after the Kinneil fiasco is a The NUM debacle seems likely to accelerate the CP's long declining trade union influence. The fact that the party now has three members - George Guy (sheet metal workers), Ken Gill (AUEW-TASS) and Mick McGahey - on the TUC General Coun cil is more a reflection of the natural progression of its ageing bureaucrats than of any increase in its strength at rank and file level. The decline of traditional industries has drastically eroded the CP's base. The shakeout in the docks and the motor industry has reduced its influence in the TGWU: in the AUEW its control now is only at district level. The CP only retains a foothold in the bureaucracies of small and declining unions: the building workers, sheet metal workers, tobacco workers, CP has relatively little influence in the recently booming public service unions. Here, it has been squeezed out by the Labour left. The younger generation of trade union officials can advance their careers in the bureaucracy better outside Inside the CP, however, the bureaucrats are in the ascendant. They tend to identify with the pro-Moscow faction against the Eurocommunists whose numbers are declining even faster than their own. The result is an increasingly acri- The party's national organiser stands on the bridge wringing his hands about the imminent demise of the Morning Star (now 25p for 6 pages) and trying to stir up the dead souls of British Stalinism "It is a fact, he wrote in December, 'in a certain sense an incredible fact.. that theleft, own Yorkshire base, seven pits were shut. British industry. the NUM's industry began

TRUS

transfers, this episode has the areas South Wales and Kent Scotland atter the ballot NOnT South Wales Yorkshire National Average

COOLS

Mick the NUM has identified determination the future pit in McGahey old the They Forth before bank holiday. goal. Scargill, gate conference to "sell-out. It was in South ability The have jobs in coal mining betrayals lead of their prepared ahead. cession bit they participated in an even more rapid rundown of the industry. In Scotland between 1978 and 1982 3600 jobs were lost and two pits Lady Victoria and Belday - were closed down.

In the same period South Wales lost 3100 jobs and four pits. In Scargill's Barnsley lost 800 Yorkshire jobs, Doncaster 1000, South 1300 and North Yorkshire 1000; in all, Scargill's defence of miners' jobs and living standards is based on his advocacy of the place of British coal above foreign coal and other sources of energy for But the NCB argues that British coal must be competitive: miners can see the stockpiles and recognise the gross inefficiency of the older The NCB won and less productive pits.

the propaganda battle in the coalfields; a viable commitment to effective in much justifying acceptance of closures than as The NCB a strategy for fighting them.

its of programme closures and redundancies in where tne arguments or the left had the strongest hold - Scotland, Votes for strike action for pay and against closures - October 1982 % in favour 69 39 Both Scargill and Scottish miners' leader McGahey have long declared their lead strike action LU against any attempt to close the Kinneil West Lothian. The NUM argued that Kinneil could be made viable by means of an underground link-up with Longannet field in Fife. The NCB argued that a tunnel under the Firth of feasible for geological reasons: Kinneil would have to close.

When the NCB announced the closure Christmas the miners response was immediate: they came out on strike - some even occupied the pit over the McGahey now discovered what Scargill had discovered in October: if you pro British coal a policy to make profitable, you paralyse resistance to the brutal measures necessary to achieve this McGahey realised that enthusiasm for a strike was low. Instead of enacting its mandate and calling for strike action, McGahey's executive summoned a delecall off the action that had begun spontaneously. A shame faced McGahey witnessed Scottish miners fighting one another in a Glasgow street embittered Kinneil workers shouted essentially the same story Wales and Kent. The South Wales NUM has consistently appealed to the Government to ensure the viaof its ancient coalfield through protection from steel and coal imports.

Kent miners put forward a plan to save Snowdown drawn up by a joint union-management team. In both cases, when it came to the crunch, the bureaucrats put the needs of the coal industry before the livelihoods of their members, and blocked industrial action to save jobs.

The setbacks of the past few weeks exposed the catastrophic consequences of the left's approach to saving However, if the Kinneil and Snowdown at miners to question the politics leaders, they will be better will lie for the battles that Russell Osborne

IN THE EEC alone almost 12 million people are now orncially unemployed. The denial of the right to work to this vast section of the proletariat is the living evidence of the barbarism of capitalist society in the 1980s.

The existence of a mass of unemployed excluded from the productive people life of society is also living proof of the bankruptcy of the official labour movement institutions. The trade unions to defend the right to work has given the bosses the green light to They are creating a pool of proceed. 'redundant' workers, and fragment and weaken the working class as a whole. Trade unions in retreat One of the most visible consequences of the recession has been the accelerating decline of trade union 1979 the British TUC has Since itself. lost more than two million (one sixth) of its affiliated members. The largest French trade union dominated CT - has lost half its membership since 1977. In Belgium a particularly severe process of rationalisation of heavy industry has created one of the highest unemployment Europe. Trade unionism has been so severely afflicted as a result that rival Socialist Christian and buried their mutual hostility and formed a joint contract with the Under the slogan "solidarity" this unholy alliance is attempting to make drastic cuts in wages and state benefits acceptable among traditionally gian workers. The trade union leaders harshly confronted with quences of their failure to defend workers' interests. They are "solidarity' seek refuge governments and employers.

by loss of membership, even closer to the state. In the process, distancing they are further trom the concerns and needs of the rank and file workers. Rather than defending workers, the union leadership is assisting the bosses to reorganise the conditions of life for the working class in line with capitalist requirements.

Bureaucrats in panic The case of the German metal workers' the IGM - provides a typical union example of the panic of the union establishment. Traditionally West Germany, the union in now being hit hard. Output in metal manufacture dropped by registered plant closures, cent mark. failure of the announced using it to already massively remains of its the IGM leaders made Bill Sirs' even organisation pay-offs for workers Stalinist the The The initially frosty rates in ment under Helmut Kohl. unions have The recession hit government. later than Britain. only now beginning. militant Belthe capitalist no less ferocious. have been been the consethe turning to with their Weakened symptom they are moving class and destroying isation. the four month All these the strongest IGM is drive towards frontation in Europe. five per cent in 1982 alone. In the basic iron and steel industries production shrank by 15 per cent. One of the areas most severely affected is the iron and steel region of the Saarland bordering France and Belgium. After years of negotiated this unemployment in the 25 per region is now approaching In December the Arbed steel concern - one of the biggest in the industry rationalisation plans. It intends to shake out the rest of its workforce depleted and virtually cease operations in the Saar.

Faced with the prospect of losing what Saarland membership, a deal which grovelling before the British Steel Corporation cannot match.

The union agreed to forsake redundancy several thousand sacked Arbed's exchange In

IOT

promises to keep the rest of the workers workers who kept their jobs had to sacrifice their Christmas bonus.

deal did much to improve the between the IGM and the new conservative-led govern- Back to child labour Europe continental Swinging attacks on the working class of the kind experienced in Britain for more than five years are Despite its delay, offensive in Europe is Soup kitchens have opened in the once prosperous steel city of Dortmund in West Germany.

A quarter of the working population of city are now jobless. Child labour in French and Spanish sweatshops is one of this social decay ot the 'advanced' capitalist society.

Since mid 1982 all European governments have set about reducing the customary living standards of the working workplace organ- Every where there are signs of a new hard line: the fall of the German government under Helmut Schmidt; Mitterand's mid summer Cabinet reshuffle, followed by the introduction of a six month pay freeze; the near collapse of old Fanfani administration; and the coming to power of Spain's pro-capitalist democrat Gonzales.

developments indicate the austerity and class con- The test of strength In each country the balance of class forces decides how far the bosses can In Italy workers recently launched go. a wave of mass strikes and demonstrations against Fanfani's package wages and state services. This culminated in a widely observed one-day strike on 18 January. Despite 11 per cent militancy unemployment, the Italian labour movement still presents a major obstacle to the employers.

other In most

COLLECS

resistance has been fragmented. Belgium stands out as the country where, after years of class collaboration unions and the state in shaking out industry, demoralisation runs particulardeep. In 1982, while real wages still ly held up most European Belgian workers suffered a 2.5 per cent cut in purchasing power. In December, with the support of the unions, the Belgian government. introduced a new law 'on pay, working time and job creation'. This breakthrough in the 'solidarity' strategy Belgian capital. Under the pursued by law maximum pay rises for 1983 are pegged at a rate of five per cent below the current rate of inflation.

still are the regulations working time and "job creation'.

Governments throughout Europe have been eager to take up the idea of cuts in working hours bureaucrats everywhere have been parading as an alternative to redundancies.

The Belgian experience shows what a sham this job creation method is. Far from protecting jobs, cuts in time have been used in addition to redundancies in order to flexible working times at reduced rates Under the new law, Belgian of pay. workers in major industries lucky enough to hang on to their jobs will work for only 32 hours a week. For the eight hours lay-off time they only 60 per cent of the normal hourly wage. In Belgium the bosses' drive has further than elsewhere. gone same methods are being applied throughout the continent. In Spain tight labour laws inherited from Franco the provided at least a modicum of job are becoming a security, profitability. Recent labour reforms' again dressed up grammes this undesirable legacy. are now permitted to employ up to Arbertslos, Sans-Emplo Capital's Unemployment is not measured in blatant acts of injustice or coercion but in lifeless statistics. And unlike wage cuts or speed-ups in factories and offices, unemployment is experienced by individual workers in isolation. Sabena Norton reports on the scale of this, the most discreet form of capitalist oppression throughout Europe.

orary workers. sacked already of cuts in and usually national measule of the workers' very straightforward. between purportedly countries, ramme Tebbit and the out Europe. Youth marks a new major recession. More vicious concerning and ever criminalising which trade union not to co-operate working introduce and trade unions, over will receive But the Capital's twelve million strong. dictatorship, which the crisis. barrier to as job creation prodesigned to eliminate Small firms Unemployment Unemployed, twelve million rejects 50 per cent of their workforce as temp- Such workers have no contracts, no holidays, no sick pay social insurance. Since the law came into force in July, many smaller firms have their entire workforce replaced it with casual labour - For good women and youths. restrictions on homeworking and child labour have also been lifted.

Youth The aim behind all these measures The bosses want to create a pool of cheap and unorganised workers ready to take any job on any terms. In pursuing this objective the state cynically exploits programmes designed to alleviate the plight of youth unemployment. Schemes like the British Youth Training' prog recently launched by Norman TUC abound throughunemployment

OTESCILLS

threat to social stability in the Spain and France In Italy, youths now make up almost half the unemployed. The control of unemployed youth is one of the major preoccupations of the bourgeoisie. Alongside blacks and immigrants of all ages, youths are today the main target for new repressive laws By widening police powers. unemployed youth, the ruling class hopes to divide this potentially explosive layer from the older generation of workers. But repression alone to social stability. conducive Governments have been quite prepared the trade unions' with and reformist parties' demands to do something' for unemployed youth. Work centres, job schemes and training programmes, run jointly by state institutions are springing up Europe. This is one of the areas in which the trade union bureaucracy's desire to participate in the management of the working class in the crisis finds unlimited scope for action.

industrial reserve army 1S It is a powerful lever for use against the working class.

But the unemployed can also become part of the working class's solution to That depends on the labour Europe fighting movement throughout against the capitalists and their governments on behalf of the unemployed. The first step is to break the complicity of the official labour movement in the oppression of the unemployed the next step, February 1983 11

SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR the shape of the working class has changed almost beyond recognition.

'forties the typical British worker was a male manual worker in manufacturing, infrastructural or in basic industries such as mining and construction, docks and railways. wore overalls and boots at work and a flat cap to the football on Saturdays.

Today much more visualise the average worker - the working class has become more heterogeneous.

After the war two-thirds of workers were men; now only slightly more than half the employed working class The working class now includes more than half a million blacks; thirty years ago there were only a few thousand.

The proportion of workers engaged in labour manual in manufacturing other basic industries has declined steadily through the 'sixties, and precipitately over the last decade. At the same time the number of especially in public services, has expanded rapidly; only in the last couple of years of deepening recession has employment in services begun to decline. there is a typical worker in the 'eighties, he wears a collar and tie to work in an office in a town hall, government service or insurance company football on television. Heavy metal past The decline of employment in manu.

facturing industry reflects the declining competitiveness of British capitalism. In sixties employment was already the beginning to contract - down to eight million by 1970. In the 'seventies, especally in the second half of te decade the shakeout of jobs accelerated and a further 1.5 million disappeared. In the eighties the collapse early with the loss of almost another one million jobs up to 1982. Two key industries motors indicate distinct of decline. Both textile production have been in decline in Britain since the turn of the century.

The steady downhill course industries interrupted was world wars. But since 1945 nothing has succeeded in stopping the rot. It has accelerated dramatically ession began in 1974. After the Second World War there were around one million workers in the industry; in 1974 there were still 600 000; today the figure is around 300 000. Shipbuilding and steel have followed a similar, if less precipitous, path of decline. By contrast, industry boomed in the post-war years.

Car production increased astronomically and employment in the industry, though sometimes with demand, steadily rose - even up to the early seventies. The recession Parucularly since 19/9 - has caused a sudden collapse British of the industry as a result of falling demand and growing overseas competition.

ployment in the industry has plummetted after a long period of growth. A similar, if less extreme, pattern can be seen in much of engineering and metal manufacturing industry: Over the post-war period the state has been obliged to intervene more and more to preserve conditions for profitable capital accumulation in industry.

state in Britain has taken mining, gas, water and electricity; the railways, the docks and air transport; steel, shipbuilding and sections of the and engineering ployment in most of these industries, which have traditionally provided hundreds of thousands manual workers, has declined, in some cases over a long period, in others part- 12 the next step, February 1983

THE WORKING CLASS

Transformed Workers industry sell their labour In the late supervisors or service He probably commodities for sale on difficult to receive ensure that the is male. for work again on remain workers; and white collar workers, ufacturing If employer forces still and in the watches of workers continued population. - textiles and patterns their unions colton and woollen CaUROUS of these both by since the rec-

SECLOS

"fifties jobs expanded million to the motor alfluctuating wildly to decline. was a major factor in motor unemployment after 1979. Emby 1976 there The million workers in Over coa rapid rise in the industry. Emmillion workers; 1.0 million. of jobs for male the . recession icularly since the recession hit.

private manufacturing in power to a more or less clearly identifiable boss, represented at all times by managers, and foremen. They work with their hands in factories to produce which immediately become the property of their employer market. In the exchange wages, usually at an hourly basic rate, paid in cash weekly.

Wages are fixed at a level sufficient to worker and his family can be fed, housed and clothed and enjoy certain comtorts - but not so great as to deter him from presenting himself Monday. Workers get wages which make sure they always make bosses profits which, as long as they can sell the products of the workers' labour, ensure that they get richer and richer. The relations of expoitation are fries dear in mone workers recognised a conflict of interests between themselves and their bosses. Even when these industries are nationalised and the becomes the state, market workplace rule relations. Neither Tory nor Labour governments have ever hesitated to remind workers nationalised industries the imperatives of capitalist profitability.

The decline of manual labour in the manufacturing industries provides part of the explanation for the lack of a working class response to mass unemployment. The hard core of the British labour movement has been decimated. The sort fought the employers

-WRO

to form trade unions, and who founded the Labour Party and later the Communist Party to fight the capitalist class are now in a minority in the working The ranks of the workers most known for their industrial militancy over the last 30 years - the miners, the dockers, the shipbuilding and car workers - are now vastly depleted and have generally become and defensive. They have become increasingly incapable of defending themselves, let alone the unemployed.

The new wave The decay of British capitalism has been marked by the growth of the service Employment in services grew only slowly in the boom years of the by about 0.5 million. As the economy stagnated in the 'sixties, service more rapidly, by 1.5 11.5 by 1970. The service expansion continued into the recession, growing to more than 13 million in 1980 as industrial employment dropped. In the early eighties however total employment in services first stabilised and then began The inability of the service sector any longer to compensate for the shakeout of labour from manufacturing upsurge the of Two sectors in particular illustrate the dramatic rise in service employment - one in the private sphere, the other in the state sector. Insurance, banking and finance employed around 400 000 in the late 'forties; by the mid "sixties there were around 800 000. The recession produced an even more dramatic rise: were more than one this area and by 1981, 1.2 million. Employment in the health services underwent an even more "sixties. "fifties and At the time of the establishment of the NHS in 1949 it employed around 0.5 by 1974 there were The extension of the NHS slowed as provoked a squeeze on public expenditure: however employment unthinkable. years in the foreseeable future.

back against mass unemployment. Why not?

British capitalism. The changing structure of the working class continued to grow - in 1981 1.3 million people worked in Britain's hospitals.

The boom in service employment is closely linked to the proportion of white collar workers. Although the industries include some manual workers in transport and communications, hospitals and schools and in local government - the majority of workers in this sector are white collar. Indeed the proportion of white collar workers in manufacturing industry has also increased.

from 16 per cent in 1948 to 27 per cent in 1977. The service sector is also the major growth area for women's employment - notably in recent years in parttime jobs. Unlike workers in privale facturing, service workers change their labour power against capital in the production of surplus value. They are paid out of revenue, a deduction from the surplus value industry. Although

SOLIC

itional employers in banks and insurance companies, most service Unemploymer Why solittle response? Ten years ago an unemployment level of four million would have been For thirty years the number out of work had been below one million; for much of the 'fifties and 'sixties it had stayed well below 500 000. Yet the official jobless total passed one million in October 1975, two million at the end of 1980 and three million in January 1982. Most unofficial estimates put the current level at around four million. Even the most optimistic economic forecasters do not expect unemployment to return to levels generally accepted as normal throughout the post-war A decade ago it would also have been unthinkable that society could contain a permanent pool of three or four million unemployed without a major breakdown in social stability and public order.

of the employers and the government, and to the dismay of many trade unionists and workers on the dole, mass unemployment has become an acceptable fact of life. For the most part the working class has not fought To answer this question we look first at the modern working class and examine how it is being transformed according to the requirements of changing the nature of the jobs people do and the character of the people doing them. A closer look at the unemployed themselves and their relationship to workers who still have jobs provides important clues to an under standing of why mass unemployment has become tolerated.

their employer. service of workers in this sector.

though conditions in some of a sense their administrators developed among service workers.

ing class reaction do not exing class Although public produced in most workers in face tradfamiliar with and backward in political outlook.

workers are Yet, to the relief million 3.07 2.5 Source: Social Trends 19b directly confronted with the state as Traditions of paternal- 2.0ism and attitudes of service to the community all help to obscure the exploitation Thus, even wage levels are often low and areas very poor, working class solidarity in 1.5against the capitalists and is often weakly The rise of white collar workers and the service sector provides another part 1.0of the explanation for the lack of workto unemployment. The working class has been growing in recent years in sections where trade unionism has traditionally been weak 0.5 and a political identification with work organisations weaker. even service unions have become more militant in recent years services untrade union traditions Un

t OVER THE PAST TEN YEARS the working class has received three hammer blows in succession. The effect has left the labour movement reeling under the impact of mass unemployment. First, the traditional manufacturing and went into an apparently terminal decline from the mid 'seventies: textiles, steel, shipbuilding and the docks remain the biggest contributors to the dole queues in the 'eighties. Then the more modern manufacturing industries eering, chemicals seventies. FaTe eighties the service to stagnate and then to contract.

shakeout of public services in particular promises to have an increasing effect on unemployment levels in the months ahead. The redundancy trap Redundancy is nothing new to workers in Britain's long declining industries. Especially for unskilled manual workers at the fringes of the labour market in smaller firms involved shipbuilding or the docks in chronically of the depressed regions redundancy has been a tamiliar of working life One of the period. impending crisis, and of the government's recognition of the need to begin to restructure industry and the labour market, was Labour's 1965 Redundancy Payments Act. This introduced the payment of token sums roughly proportionate to length of service when a worker was made redundant. Many nothing, and most got little, but some got what sounded like big sums of money.

The object of the new scheme was to undermine workers' resistance to redundancies in increasing numbers was successtu More important than 1977 1972 aloyment: by duration

THE UNEMPLOYED

Marginalised cumulative elsewhere. Second World the nationalised industries in textiles, the mostly industries - cats, engin- - took a nose dive Finally in the they tles. sector began into services. The weeks, by declining industries, means unknown in areas of the economy. in textiles, dustry country part through the post-war the Midlands. earliest signs of orate workers got depended on on to seek work elsewhere.

and it redundancies severance pay scale weeks out of work less than 2 2-8 8-26 26-52 more than z 1981 Source: Social Trends 1983 to most workers pushed out of the declining industries was their expectation that they could fairly easily find work This was the experience of workers for 20 years and move after War. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs shipbuilding, the mines, railways and the docks. But they succeeded in finding work the more dynamic sectors. In the 'fifties and 'sixties they drifted into expanding chemicals, consmotors truction. Later, in the 'sixties and 'sevenmoved in growing numbers Many first ex- WOrKerS perience of the problem of unemployment was the lengthening time it took to find a new job after losing their old In 1973 it took an average of 11 1978 it had increased to 17 weeks-and by 1980 it was 20 weeks; a year later it had passed six months.

Redundancy was commonplace in the but it was by no the dynamic The motor inmore labour the in 'fifties and 'sixties but transient rises such as that following the Suez crisis in 1956- 57 led to thousands of redundancies in Seasonal variations demand for cars produced fluctations in employment up to the 'sixties. Redundancies also took place from time to time in the booming engineering and electrical industries according to market and corprequirements. example the GEC-AEI merger in 1967 caused major redundancies in a generally expanding sector. Just as in the declining sectors, workers tended to accept that their jobs fortunes company and rather than put up any resistance moved The problems began in earnest when began to become large and systematic rather than small 500 thousands 400 300 Male unemployment in different age groups, April 1982. • Source: Employment Gazette Unemployment is highest for older younger and workers; those between 35 and 55 are relatively little affected The number of long term is now fast unemployed approaching million one and occasional. 'something experience of led them still to approach redundancy notices with a view to negotiating the best possible redundancy them over while they searched for a new job. But when more and more workers could not find meagre severance pay ran out they began form up in to queues. And by the time you discover you can't find late to fight to save the last one. Hence workers' long record of acceptance of redundancies led them down the slippery slope to the acceptance of mass employment. The service cushion The expansion of service employment has cushioned the impact of the recession on the working class. If the service sector had not increased its workforce since 1970 unemployment today between five million not three million to four million.

cushioning effect of service employment acts on a regional as well as a national level. Unlike traditional manufacturing, which tends to be concentrated in certain geographical areas,

SCIVICES

evenly spread around the country. This has had the effect of evening out the regional distribution of unemployment and preventing extreme, and politically destabilising, regional disparities.

There is a striking contrast with the 'thirties when some traditional industries were devastated and the service safety net was much less well developed. In the northern town of Jarrow, for example unemployment in September 1935. (The Tories subsequently fiddled the figures by combining Jarrow with neighbouring Hebburn - this brought the level down to 39.6 per cent.)

Jarrow As depended Consett half a century later so nearby depended on steel. in Consett worked in various public services than worked in its steel works. Hence when were shut down in 1981 unemployment rose to 18.4 percent, bad enough for Consett's workers, but way below the level in Jarrow in the 'thirties.

Consett's unemployment level was exceeded in 1981 by steel town Corby, with a level of 19.8 per cent. But even this was only eight per cent above the national average of 11 per cent. Equally significant is the fact that in the region with the lowest unemployment, the South East, the rate of jobless was running at eight per cent (a 100 per cent increase in five years) - only three per cent behind the national average. In the 'thirties unemployment cities like Coventry and other parts in of the West Midlands five percent while it 50 percent in parts of Scotland, Wales and the North. Tebbit's father could get places on his bike and why today's unemployed youth cannot. Migration from the North East for example, which proceeded steadily in the post-war years, has slowed down in the recession. Service employment has provided a vital bulwark particularly in areas where the industrial collapse has been greatest. The incomes of many families have been kept above the poverty line by wages coming in from a family member working in the public services when others in manufacturing. employed man is more likely to have an unemployed wife, many have become reliant on of women in services. The sight of men with prams doing the shopping while their wives work, often part-time, has become commonplace in industrial areas.

The other side of the coin of booming service employment is that of the modern working class has been relatively little affected by employment. At • least until couple of years, the jobs workers were secure and they were able to maintain their wages at a level just about sufficient to keep up living Especially costs. However, workers' long up' turning as 1981 deal to tide another job and the ever lengthening dole in another job, it's too of public unlabour be would and six million, ober 1980 The Among 11 1979). fairly are ment has many other end

CACICEL

labour force movement, reached 72.9 per cent 110 affiliates. unemployed on shipbuilding. But more people employment massive the works and blacks. more than another former the working population. Why has effect on white collar jobs never exceeded topped 40 and This is why Norman 1n as likely worker with a job. instantly identifiable. against the recession, mufflers caps, around areas of the country. employed are have lost jobs Even though an unhave become invisible. families the earnings working class. the bulk which were mass unworkers, the last of service with rising the public sector, mass unemployment and market forces were little use to the authorities as levers against their employees.

As late workers best placed to those use industrial muscle against the state the miners, power workers and gas and water workers - succeeded in winning pay rises well above the going rate in private industry. Public service workers the civil service and the

NHS

have displayed a growing readiness to take on the government to defend their wages and conditons. But there has been little evidence of growing class solidarity and private sector workers or of employed and unemployed workers against the state. Indeed the divisions and differentials have increased.

Atomisation The unemployed are isolated from the movement. They have become concentrated at either end of the spectrum of the working class. In Octunemployment the along 16-24 age group averaged 16 per cent - an increase from nine per cent in 1979 the rate the over-sixties was per cent (from eight. per cent in However among the age group 25 to 60 the unemployment level was on average slightly less than six per cent (from four per cent in 1974). Unemployparticularly hit the young, of whom have never had the opportunity to join a trade union. At the of the scale, many older workers have been pressed to take early and squeezed out of the - and out of the labour often after a lifetime's involvement in both. A TUC survey in 1980 of trade union facilities for the unemployed elicited only 27 replies from its Of these 23 allowed workers to retain union membership, some at reduced rates, but few provided any special facilities The other big growth areas for unworkers are groups of which have always been marginal to the labour force and neglected by the organised labour movement women Between 1975 and 1980 unemployment among women rose by 200 per cent (compared with a 60 per cent growth for men).

Blacks make up four percent of the unemployed, but only two percent of the labour movement not responded to unemployment? Because, in a sense, the official labour movement has not been affected by unemployment.

The recession has so far had little serious male white workers in the age range from 35 to 55, if they are in and especially if the jobs are in public services. Such workers are the dominant force in today's labour movement. Their jobs have been fairly secure and their unions fairly effective securing wage rises to keep them abreast of inflation. The typical member of the dole queue is a young, unskilled, unqualified, manual worker - and twice to be female or black than a In the 'thirties the unemployed were They wore cloth and clogs and stood on street corners in depressed Today the unmuch less recognisable: Because they are everywhere, they are to be found nowhere in very large concentrations. They have retreated from the streets to watch day-time television: they The recession has transformed the The changing needs of capital have changed the structure of the working class. Old divisions - between white collar and manual workers, between male and female workers - have been reinforced in new forms. Divisions of little significance 30 years ago - between white and black between employed and unemployed workers have acquired a new significance today. Overcoming the divisions forged by capital in the ranks of labour will be a central task in the rebuilding of a labour movement capable of fighting for working class interests the next step, February 1983 13

300 march against race checks Basil Gwatidzo (inset) a Zimbabwean student threatened with deportation tells Sheffield WAR supporters to keep up the fight for all victims of Britain's racist immigration laws Racism

BRUTISH

ON SATURDAY 15 JANUARY 300

people took part in a Sheffield day of against the race checks and the 261101 Nationality Act, AGAINST RACISM. Local WAR organiser Bob Radcliffe described the demonstration, which was followed by an action conference, as very encouraging It showed the strength of feeling amongst trade unionists in this area about the current attacks on black workers'. Over 30 labour isations supported the event, including Police ON 12 JANUARY Colin Roach received a fatal shot-gun wound in the entrance.

Newington Stoke police The police say it was suicide. -particularly in view of black youth "shoot to kill' episode in the recent Kensington think otherwise. seven people have so far been arrested in confrontations outside the police station, by militant black youth demanding to know the truth The Labour Party advocates of police accountability in London are desperate to keep things under control. At an angry meeting of local black people in Hackney after Colin's death, Greater London Police Committee chairman - did what he knows best; offered money for the purposes of conducting an endless inquiry into the affair.

unfortunately named Brynley Heaven, of Hackney Case de Committee, followed suit. Backed up by 14 the next step, February 1983

NUPE

NO SEELD HOSPIAS

works joint called by WORKERS ion and the speakers Hallamshire Hospital. movement organout of Hackney! station. Local Forty- When even Paul Boateng over to Britain. The Council's Police

INCH

seven NUM branches, Rotherham steel crafts committee, all the local dole office and health union branches and a significant number of Labour Parties. Support from the black community included the Asian Welfare Association, the Bangladesh Welfare Associat- Yemeni Workers' Association. Martin Robinson, chairman of the All-Sheffield Health Workers Joint Shop Stewards Committee, was amongst the at the opening rally outside A significant feature of the day was Les Skeates from the local Communist Party, he stressed that it was even more urgent now to set up a democratically elected police authority in London.

At a time when the police have declared war on black people, these gentlemen still want to make peace with them Whitelaw admits that over 6000 firearms are issued to the police each year - and one in five in the Metropolitan police force are trained to use them - they are still trying to improve police-community relations.

In Parliament the Labour Party has expressed its horror at the methods used by the security forces in Ireland spilling But since they have always condemned the liberation struggle and supported the forces of law and order in Ireland, they have no right to complain.

Black youth in Hackney do not need advice from hypocritical civil libertarians; they need the police out of Hackney.

LEGE

SU the comment immigration controls. afternoon conference voted overwhelmingly against any form of immigration or nationality laws - They also resolved to coordinate a series of weeks of action against state racism of England in the north with Leeds on 14 February.

Sheffield determined to force translate its anti-apartheid council to rhetoric into backyard.

HASNA

BEGUM

works Telecom at Finsbury Circus in London.

She is in the Civil and Public Servants Like Association. many workers in the postal service she has been made to smash all Delegates at the Tory or Labour. beginning WAR is now even more the local Labour its

-OWE

British Telecom the racist employer she of clerical posts. white, from her supervisor. British for British Trades Council for and is fighting black other Clerical Officer. 1111

NO TO NHS

APARTHEID |

WRECK THE

RACIST FOWLER

SCHEME!

LEEDS

WEEK OF ACTION

14-19 February WAR video, exhibition, meetings, debate Leeds Workers Against Racism phone 01-274 3951 for details

SMASH

THE NATIONALITY ACT

WRECK

THE RACE CHECKS

subjected to overt discrimination.

Despite having (by management's own work record, admission) an exemplary Clerical Officer was demoted from to a Clerical Assistant grade. The official excuse was la contraction in the number Meanwhile numerous junior colleagues have been promoted in her place. When Hasna protested she got a mouthful of racist abuse With WAR's help Hasna is taking on and her Her Telecom CPSA representative cared so much about problems that he could not ever find her documents. And she has beer told by the union that it's not really a trade union matter anyway.

It is! As long as this subtle variety of racism is tolerated by the unions they will never be able to unite their members WAR has won the support of Camden Hasna's campaign throughout the

CPSA

in London for her re-instatement as a

against deportation.

EVERY

TRADE

UNION

in supports immigration immediate the pleaded with successive governments to halt the open door policy that suited British bosses at the time. In recent years when immigration has all but ceased, the unions have merely called for quotas in certain sectors like catering. Today the TUC bureaucrats are more sensitive about "race relations'; their language has changed but the message is the same rants are at best a problem, at worst a threat to British jobs. The unions' standpoint is consistent with that of the Labour Party. The 1982 Labour Programme pleaded that Britain's tiny island was full up: In the near future it will not be possible for the economy to provide jobs for significant numbers of workers from overseas... We will continue the admission of workers only in exceptional categories (eg to meet a need for skilled workers).' Left-wing assured Tory right winger Ivor Stanbrook that the Labour Party has made it clear that it believes there is an for immigration controls in Britain on economic and labour market grounds' (Hansard, 11 November 1982).

Labour's anti-racist face But has the Labour Party made its position clear? Ever since the Tories took office Opposition has the critical of the Government's une immigration. A high point in Shadow Home Secretary Roy Hattersley's career was the defeat of Whitelaw's proposals on the immigration rules spouses. On 16 December Labour joined forces with 51 Tory rebels to vote out the new rules by a majority of 18. Labour's excuse for choosing such strange parliamentary bedfellows was its disapproval of Whitelaw's 'racist and sexist recommendations on arranged marriages.

And the Nationality Act that came into force on 1 January 1983 has been the subject of outspoken criticisms from Opposition benches. the The Party particularly indignant 1S a seven centuries old tradition has been violated by the Act; the automatic right of children born on British soil to British citizenship

CASE

Labour is pledged to repeal the Nationality Act when it next returns to office.

On the face of it, the Labour Party has adopted a radical anti-racist stance. It is actively black and has three black prospective parliamentary candidates. It is promising a Who needs immigration controls? Last month Shaukat Darr, A TGWU busman from Leeds, won his fight The intervention of Workers Against Racism was decisive in forcing his union and the TUC to take up his case.

Such action is rare. Even rarer is a trade union that actively fights all immigration controls. In the first month of the new Nationality Act Judy Harrison examines the pernicious effect of the official labour movement's support for 'non-racist' immigration controls.

Britain wide-ranging package the tunities policies. And yet

TUC

Tories mercilessly keep repeating current Nationality Act. Labour's Nationality Act Says. became outmoded because it encouraged ration lawsh to the derait they ma - Immig ration laws to the contrary.they a right of entry to the United Kingdom' East African Asians thought that because they held UK passports they had a right ment passed an Act to stop them.

introduced a voucher' system, and also firmly established for the first time the concept of 'patriality. What this meant was in future to be limited to British "kith and kin'. This began to get nationality law which had accorded the status of 'citizen of the UK and colonies' But it did not entirely solve the prob lem. In 1971 the Tories refined Labour's legislation. By 1973 there was very little been very new on many immigrants were still keen to bring their dependants over. turned its attention to this issue. Vir governing mass detentions and deportations were some of the methods it used to stem the trickle of dependants. But increassomething else was needed - a new minister Alex Lyon served notice of the Within the next year or so, we shall define a Labour British citizen for the first time. A British that citizen will have free right of entry. Anyone else, whether a Commonwealth alien, will have to subscribe to the immigration rules which will be redefined so that they accord longer. with our needs for labour. (4 March 1976) By April 1977 the Home Office had published a Green Paper which set out the new ideas. councillors patriality throughout; 'there must be a more meaningful citizenship who have close links with ship British was suggested for all the rest.

Labour's proposals new Act works as follows: British citizens, • only 'British matic right of abode in Britain • only patrials for 'British citizenship' • only their parents are of equal opporthe -as - the So the Labour Governfrom their families, these changes, difficulties. ration, The emphasis was on for those the United Kingdom'. And a new type of citizenoverseas citizenship' Tories honour Labour's pledges Labour did not get the opportunity to follow through the Green Paper's recom mendations. But the Tories have fulfilled their 1979 election pledge and done it for them. With some minor modifications The are now law. them there are three categories of citizenship: citizens of dependent territories and British overseas citizens.

citizens' have an autoqualify automatically British citizens' are automatically entitled to state benefits and full Children born in Britain will not auto- Certain exceptions have been made, consistent with the emphasis on patriality.

Falkland Islanders and Gibraltarians, although from dependent territories, have automatic right of entry to Britain.

Citizens of Hong Kong (a more problematic case) will not, but will receive one The immediate consequences of the • an increase in the naturalisation fee • widowed or divorced wives of British • greater discretion by the Home Secretary to refuse citizenship to anyone 'not conducive to the public good' - with Within five years, anyone not naturalised under the new Act will experience great difficulties in becoming a British citizen.

The Nationality Act is not principally That happened a long time ago. It is about controlling the influx of dependants and exercising greater internal control over state does not discount a future East Africa crisis, it is mainly concerned to stabilise the existing situation and cut cost of maintaining the existing immigrant population. The current introduction of race checks into hospitals and doles is an extension of the new nationalcheap foreign workers on a contract labour system. Rather, it actively used the Commonwealth connection to import concern purposes of political expediency corded these workers citizenship status.

Britain is therefore not so easily able to rid itself of workers surplus to the em- It needs ployers' needs, or keep them separated only working class. The Labour Party was the architect of but for the time being it is trying to disown its past. This is to be expected from a party in opposition desperately trying to score a few points, and cynically courting the black and 'middle ground' vote. But it creates a lot The Labour Party deprivation firmly committed to controlling immig including introducing a new Nationality Act the minute it has repealed the old one - Roy Hattersley told the House of Commons he 'did not wish to labour suggest a Nationality Act was not needed' (29 January 1981). The Labour Party also has a problem in clarifying exactly they what it objects to in the Act, anyway.

worker. The Labour Party generally opts for Workers some vague criticism such as that the law is 'too complicated'. This is also a favour- Racism ite argument of the race relations quangos like the Commission for Racial Equality, Joint Council for the Welfare of Immig rants and the National Council for Civil Liberties. All advocate a new, less complex, shorter Act to be passed by the next Labour government. However, this is unlikely prospect. The Nationality Act is complicated for a good reason; Britain's long, sordid track-record of carving up its colonies - and 'de-colonising' at the opportune moment - 2left a very complicated situation.

The Nationality Act is the appropriate legislation for the world created by Has the sun set? According to the Labour Party, British imperialism is a thing of the past. Indeed, according to Tony Benn, ialism. From this standpoint, it follows that Britain is perfectly entitled foreign threats to its interests; Argentina, The Labour Party sees the difference between its immigration controls and the Tories' as one of purpose. Its controls, unlike Thatcher's, are for the purposes of constructing a socialist, planned econ- Furthermore, they are non-racist (and non-sexist) because - well, because it says so in the Labour Party Programme For black workers, immigration controls are all the same, whichever government is Britain are no less barbaric than those conducted in the name of free enterprise.

governments, anke what is good for the nation' as the As a general election approaches, each party is busy dusting down its traditional decorations. The Tory backwoodsmen are reminding Whitelaw and Thatcher what gets them votes. As another Tory rebel MP, Tony Marlow, said about the spouses debate, 'politically there are at least ten committed to effective immigration conlib' (Why I will vote against my party, His advice to Whitelaw: forget all this Rights, and stick by the 1979 election cluded not only a promise to restrict bands and fiancees, but also a statutory register of dependants and quotas. Whitelaw, reeling from his parliamentary defeat, has made a gesture in this direction - and winger David Waddington at pedalling on the race issue, projecting its for a multi-racial Britain and attacking the 'excesses' of Tory strategy on this, as on other issues. In reality, the British state needs both approaches.

the of 'integration' to carrot promote social stability as much as the stick of a hard line on immigration. The class that needs neither is the Smash all immigration controls The working class has no need to consider what is good for 'the nation'. It does not own any of it. Workers do not need to calculate whether Britain can afford any more immigrants; they are not the cause of mass unemployment and social - capitalism is. And it suits the capitalists to keep workers divided along national and racial lines.

For over 20 years - ever since the 1962 Immigration Act official movement has allowed the state to do just that. The TUC in the factories, the Labour Party in Parliament; together, have kept worker divided from The Nationality Act is the consummation of 20 years of class treachery.

not immigration need unity, controls. Smash them now!

the next step, February 1983 15

The 'positive discrimination fraud Racism HACKNEY HAS BEEN a Labour borough for decades and has had an equal opporpolicy 1979. tunities recent inquiry by the Commission for Racial Equality revealed, it has consistently discriminated against blacks.

In May 1981 the Labour Party took over at the Town Hall, under the leadership of Anthony Kendall. Judging by the number of fullpage advertisements the placed for black trainee managers, Kendall is serious about promoting equal opportunities. For the first time ever Hackney has a black mayor, Barbados-born Sam Springer. Forty-two black organisations receive council grants, 10 W more than 100 workers. A new Ethnic Minorities Business Programme' has been launched, and an equal sub-committee up Ser council and the unions. All this is good news for a handful of black businessmen and professionals, but what about local black More than 70per percent of black youth unemployed. Their only alternative to the dole queue is a 'wage' of £23.50 on temporary Manpower Commission scheme. tunate enough to have a job suffer severe discrimination. In borough approximately one third of the population is black, the proportion of black workers in council jobs is generally less than one fifth even in the lowest paid grades in which blacks are concentrated.

Employment of black workers by Hackney Council, 1982 (Total workforce employed Senior officers Higher admin grades 65 Lower admin grades 91 Clerical grades Typists Trainee grades Manual workers f/t 469 Manual workers p/t 180 Until 1981 there dustmen, one of the best paid manual jobs in the borough. Only 9.4 per cent of engineers are blacks. On the other hand, 30.5 per cent of home helps and 71.1 per cent of residential home assistants are black, most of them women.

Black families are dumped on the most rundown estates - like Stonebridge, Lea View and Holly Street. Here, 60 and 80 per cent of the tenants are black, whilst hardly any live on the newer Hoxton. estates black families are forced to live in the private sector, paying extortionate rents to slum landlords or getting increasingly into debt on their mortgages.

The council that cuts The council acknowledges there is discrimination and has resolved to change But how? It has no plans to things. expand employment in the In fact, it is currently debating whether to axe one third of the council workforce as an alternative to raising the rates by 50 per cent. When the last major industrial employer, Lesney's toy firm, through 3000 redundancies, cil's only suggestion - to save 100 jobs. plans to expand the housing stock, with 15 000 already on the waiting list; or to renovate the 50 per cent of council properties urgent need Hackney Council actually underspent on housing by f6 million last year. Like every other Labour authority, it can only foresee more cuts while the Tories are in power. This would seem like a bad time to make promises to the black community.

16 the next step, February 1983 But, as "new left' in the council has employing opportunities between the workers? Services Black workers forwhere anti-racist rhetoric. In Hackney, more between battles 7000) Sandringham Road Per cent at the Town of total workforce 4.8 8.6 13.3 detection 23.0 4.6 19.0 18.4 put it recently, were no back December 1982). Unable to could really ease groups in between of Three quarters borough. ship/Urban of black groups, the councounwas a co-operative Nor has it got any of repair. blacks, including positive discrimination in employment and housing.

found the answer. Tony Prescott investigates.

Police-community dialogue in progress outside Hackney police station Yet, there is a logic to the council's as elsewhere, the local political establishment was forced to pay attention to race relations when riots broke out on the streets. Pitched black youth and the police in Dalston in the summer of 1981, the emergence of a local 'no-go' area in - and other manifestations of social tension - caused alarm Hall. The council's first priority was to affirm its support for the forces of law and order: The Labour Party supports the police wholeheartedly in its major function of prevention and of crime' (Hackney Council's draft election manifesto 1982).

But it also recognised the urgent need to win some backing for the civil power inside the black community itself. As Kendall the patience of black people has been tried in this borough and is running out (Hackney Gazette, 3 provide the things that black people's frustrations, the council has opted for the alternative of giving at least some local blacks a stake in the system. The £1.5 million it paid out to black community 1982 and the extra €1.25 million scheduled for 1983, come with numerous strings attached. The recipients of these hand-outs have to submit detailed job descriptions for official approval, make repeated representations to the council and compete with scores of other applicants. No grant is guaranteed beyond one financial year, to allow the council maximum control in circumscribing the activities of any one group.

The council helps those...

Most of the money made available is obtained from the Government's Partner- Programme fund. When Hackney first became a Partnership authority in 1978, there were only a handful mainly based around Hackney Commission For Racial Equality

SATURDAY 26 MARCH

Demonstration: Assemble 11am Hackney Town Hall, Mare Plus Conference and Benefit Hackney's Labour Party The Labour Party is committed to a policy of equal opportunities for But it is even more committed to rescuing British capitalism from its crisis - which means fewer jobs and homes to go round. How can one thing be reconciled with the other? Hackney Council thinks it has - itself highly dependent on the council for funding. Today, there are 42 ethnic organisations vying minority cash. They include not only black and Asian groups, but also Turkish, Cypriot and Jewish organisations which stand to than £800 000 receive more them this year. The council has also made effective use of Section 38 of the Race Relations Act and Section Local Government Act (1966) respectively to advertise and finance a number of 'ethnic minority' posts. All this investment reaps dividends in more wavs than council with an election purposes, and it binds a layer of black activists closer to the local state machine. It also helps provide local services on the cheap. Known as 'pumppriming', the practice of injecting small amounts of money into voluntary organisations to stimulate 'self-help' schemes is warmly approved by the Department of the Enviroment. Tory minister Sir George Young congratulated Hackney endeavours in this field recently.

£1.25m budgeted for 1983 is expected to provide in training workshops, cultural centres, 18 social work schemes, five creches and a new church. All will be staffed by very cheap labour, operating from converted, disused No wonder Kendall says 'my premises. plea to black organisations is involved from the outset' in the council's self-help schemes. They are helping him shift the burden of providing essential social services away from onto the backs of the working class.

A lot ot workers in recognise this and are suspicious of the council's 'Hackney goes local' campaign the title Kendall has plans for decentralising council responsibilities into the voluntary sector.

trade unionists rightly see the campaign as a smokescreen for attacking council jobs and breaking down workplace organisation by using volunteers as scabs.

'MAKE HACKNEY INTO A REAL ANTI-RACIST ZONE'

No race checks in doles and hospitals Smash the Nationality Act Police out of Hackney Organised by East London Workers Against Racism equal opportunities priming', Town Hall 28 new conditions Kodikara Philio Wolmuth take. Hackney middle which include for state Labour department gainst militants between 11 of the the It provides the about it anti-racist image for white workers Cous cynical equal its The black groups nine 21 educational and • no cuts voluntary or • no redundancies • no rent or rate rises with the council, the borough to his given Many redundancies. Third, fascist harassment. Street works Nor 'prevent people labour Labour's role for blacks But the political confusion bred by the policy has made it difficult to resist the process. Every time an objection is raised to 'pumpthe council can claim it is only trying to help blacks help themselves.

Things have gone even further inside the When

NALGO

stewards raised objections to the manner in which managerial for posts minorities had been created without adequate consultation over their pay and of service the council wheeled out its heavy artillery, , prominent black councillor Patrick Kodikara.

provided a smokescreen for the council's sham anti-racist policy by screaming racist at anybody who opposed it. When sackings have been justified on the grounds that the individual is out of step with the council's equal opportunities policies, the unions have been split over what attitude to is fast discovering that invoking 'equal opportunities' is a power ful way to divide its workforce and that class black politicians dIe ver useful allies. It has already embarked on a series of attacks on council workers • sacking 300 workers from the Direct • instigating disciplinary proceedings a- • refusing to honour negotiations over reducing the working week • breaking down accepted agreements.

Now it has a new weapon in its arsenal.

For all its breast-beating "self-criticism', council in fact accepts no responsibility for racial discrimination in the borough. If it did, it would do something instead of demanding that sacrifices. should make Real equality of opportunity is not about of workers giving up the little they have to 'help the less fortunate'.

It is not about levelling everyone down to the same depths of poverty.

Fight racism, fight Labour But what is the alternative to Labour's opportunities exercises? How can we fight racism at work and on the estates in a way that unites rather than divides workers? Hackney Workers Against Racism has begun to show how.

First, we place the blame for racism back where it belongs - on the council.

We demand of Hackney's Labour Council and an expansion in jobs and housing to meet the needs of all workers in the borough, black and white.

Second, we take direct action to deal Ine labour movement Where council employees are known to pursue racist practices, or where as at Millfields dust depot - NUPE members operate a virtual colour bar, it is up to take disciplinary

CULOUS

measures. Active racists should be ousted from their positions of responsibility or even expelled from the union. But under circumstances should the council be asked to sack them. We are not in the business of helping our employers make we mobilise against police and Few black families make use of the council's racial harassmonitoring system' because it hand-in-glove with the police. have much faith in the they council's new police committee, which is more concerned with helping the police defending black crime than from police brutality. Local movement organisations should refuse to cooperate with these quangos and defend the black community instead.

SUBJECTIVE, UNSAVOURY

AND UNSISTERLY...

DIVERSIONARY DIVISIVE

AND SECTARIAN...

VANGUARDIST

BULLYINe... One symptom relationship between Kate Marshall reports. ON ONE SIDE stands Beatrix Campbell; on the other, Barbara Switzer.

is well known as a feminist journalist on the London trendy listings City Limits and as co-author (with New Statesman deputy editor Freedom, a of Sweet best-seller on the history of the women's movement in Britain. known that she is a member executive committee of the Communist Party - she introduced her contribution to a large Socialist Society meeting during the. South Atlantic war as the women's slot', not as the policy of the Communist Party (CP). Campbell is a leading representative of the fast declining Eurocommunist faction in the party.

Barbara Switzer is national organiser for the white collar section of the enginworkers' union Although a long-term fellow traveller with the CP she was recently the left's candidate for one of the token women's seats on the national executive of the Labour Party. In the role of women in the unions Switzer stands up for that section which identifies its interests trade union bureaucracy. also backs the Soviet. Union against all comers (including the peasants of Afghanistan and the workers of Poland). And its supporters despise the feminist Eurocommunist elements within the CP with the sort of hatred Stalinists usually reserve for those who challenge them in the name of the working class.

Unsisterly exchanges Campbell opened the latest episode in a long-running feud between feminists trade union bureaucrats Stalinist camp with Guardian last August. She condemned unions and trade trade sexist and asked in effect - what use are feminists? unions for reasserted her widely publicised demands for positive discrimination within the bureaucracy and for a feminist incomes policy (9 August). replied in the Morning Star on 7 Septof her ember: the essence was the question inists to the trade unions? She heaped scorn on feminist proposals for positive action in favour of female officials and upheld the CP's traditional allegiance to free collective bargaining against incomes policy of any sort. A rancorous debate has raged ever since in the Morning Star's women's page and correspondence columns. Campbell and Switzer themselves set the tone of the discussion.

KROM

of the advancing disintegration of the Communist Party of Great Britain is the debate currently raging in its ranks on the feminism and the trade union Campbell the lads; of weekly camp Anna Coote) Although recent radical of bastion party It is less well of the might previously have sympathiser Judith orthodox the GLC payroll. letters women

AUEW-TASS.

position. sectarian article was condemnation pompous, controversy Over of the CP with the This faction The feminists are that the trade petit-bourgeois to women. article in The unionists as Campbell bureaucrats for women to make Switzer response What use are tem equal pay, Campbell sneered at

PRRRRIPP

bureaucracy. 'token women who'd rather be one of Switzer jibed at a point of view that can help the anti-trade union Thatcher and Tebbit'. The feminists came off with a bad mauling.

Today Marxism the last Eurocommunism the - gave some support,

ONWO

letters in the Morning Star took Campbell's side. Significantly, no trade union women backed her. The only one who been expected to side with Campbell - Eurocommunist Hunt has been squeezed out of Switzer's union by its Stalinist leadership and has had to join all the other displaced radicals By contrast, 17 and five articles by prominent bureaucrats backed Switzer's When Campbell criticised left/ trade union officials, her greeted with a barrage of as diversionary, divisive and sectarian; it was slammed for being self-righteous and full of obscure formulations' - it was also both 'reactionary' and 'ultra-left.

Both sides made some valid points.

right to point out unions have failed to advance the interests of women. It is true that unions do not organise their meetings and activities to allow for the full participation of women workers and that union policies do not appeal much hand, On the other the bureaucrats are correct to maintain that feminism seeks to reinforce, rather than overcome, the division between men and women workers in the unions.

Divide and rule Both sides, however, in their promotion of a narrow sectional interest, miss the point. Trade unions cannot defend women workers because their leaders are imbued with reformist politics. The union the existence of assume capitalist society in perpetuity and try the best of it. Hence they accept that women have to do the housework - and that they come second when it comes to jobs, wages and conditions.

At the same time, union leaders recognise that women workers now make up more than one third of the workforce and they are keen to recruit them to their declining ranks. Hence they are prepared to make ringing declarations of support for opportunities equal and equal rights. The limit for the bureaucrats is what the capitalist system can afford: in today's recession that limit is soon reached. When women keep on demanding their rights, the bureaucrats say Women and the trade unions Stalinists fall out

LEFT SECTARIAN

TRADE UNION OFFICIALS

WHO WOULD RATHER BE

ONE OF THE LADS

"be realistic - the country can't afford it.

When all workers' jobs and conditions are threatened, the itional response is 'women first'.

Both Stalinist factions state to advance the interests of women workers. Both uphold the official labour movement's 'alternative economic strategy as the way forward for the working class. The disagreement over a feminist incomes policy arises from a difference of emphasis within the reformist countercrisis programme. Indeed debate mirrors a division labour movement as old as incomes policy itself. There are those (usually on who explicitly uphold the the right) principle of wage restraint. are those (usually on the left) who vehemently oppose incomes policy' in the name of free collective bargaining, but always settle for the same thing wrapped up as 'the planned growth of wages, 'the Social Contract', or the 'national economic assessment'. Campbell is in revolt "macho-militancy' of unionism just as many public union leaders used to resent the 'industrial muscle of their colleagues in manufacturing unions. Campbell looks to the state for a reform of industrial action' to redistribute income in women; she offers government regulation of wages as the solution to the problems of low pay. Switzer defends the exisiting which trade union order in negotiate wage rises for their members without direct government interference.

But the union leaders depend on the state for almost everything - to consult with them, to appoint them to a thous and quangos, to subsidise their educational work, even collect to in many sectors. The bureaucrats both the Eurocommunists and the tra- Stalinists itional rely to implement their alternative economic strategy of reflation, import controls. Hence, whenever state has seriously pressed the leaders to agree to. an incomes policy they have accepted of bureaucrats crumbled, The manoeuvres of Switzer's boss (the CP's leading trade union figure AUEW-TASS general secretary Ken Gill), in securing the TUC's full backing for the last Labour Government's Social Contract, reveal that the just as dependent on the state as the feminists. neither incomes In reality, nor free collective bargaining can defend women workers' wages. the state to hold down men's wages and allow women's to rise. The only possible result of this strategy could be to undermine resistance to state attempts to cut the wages of all workers and to divide women even further from men. Switzer's position is equally reactionary. Another leading CP woman bureaucrat, Tobacco tradbureaucrats' look to the 28 December) bargaining the current within the logic, the argument to And there very many began to bite. against the traditional trade service workers tains no element of favour crats. leaders rich is now linked democratic from their dues Second - and things are on the state devaluation and of women'. the union and the opposition like Switzer has rapidly erentials are greater Stalinist bureaucrats are knees before to and the policy Campbell invites women's rights nurseries, difficulty Women Workers' Union deputy general secretary Terry Marsland, expanded her argument in defence of free collective bargaining: "All of the traditional trade union arguments in bargaining become irrelevant. No account is taken of the profitability of the enterprise and the contribution the workers have made the employers success." (Morning Star, If the firm is doing well, free collective allows umons to negowale a good deal. If it is doing badly, by this workers should take their share in their employer's failure and accept a wage cut. This is by no means to reduce an absurdity this conclusion has been imposed on workers (and especially many women workers) through the reformist logic of their leaders since the recession A different approach Campbell's feminist attack on the trade unions is full of the usual ideological preoccupations (the sexism of individual and officials) and the usual organisational solutions (positive discrimination, women-only meetings). It conof any strategy to defend women against the bosses or even against the betrayals of the bureau- Switzer's defence of the unions is a defence of the status quo in the official union movement. Switzer herself boasts of the very tradition' of 'democratic practices' the British labour movement.

NIne tradition of the union with which she the AUEW - Is sC excluded that it womer membership until the end of the War. Switzer World But for better. She always getting writes of the 'progress' made over the past ten years: 'Many unions have taken positive steps to improve the position This simply is not TrUe In many respects the position of women is worse today than it was a decade ago As a result of the recession and the failures of the unions more women are now out of work, women's wage diffand access to abortion and nurseries has been reduced.

The defence of women workers dedifferent from mands a strategy quite either Campbell's or Switzer's. As a first step, we need to get the unions off their the state and force them stand up and fight the employer government, behalf of al of their members. If unions fought for to work, to abortions they would have less in getting women to part icipate in their activities. Both the feminists and the. bureaucrats are a barrier to this approach because they both begin from what is possible for women when capitalism is in crisis, instead of from what is necessary for the working class.

the next step, February 1983 17

Women and peace

GREENHAM COMMON

tranquility of the British way of life depends.

barbarism in today's world ment. However, field. Leo Abse

(LABOUR PARTY)

'It is through such demonstrations affirming the importance of life that we may be able to ensure the continuance of the family.

*The women who were demonstrating were bringing to our notice the moods that they share privately: a capacity to nurse and nourish, to care, tolerate, imand preserve prove demonstrate a set of values contrary to the machismo of men now insanely conquering outer space phallic warships and preoccupied with phallic missiles. Too often men have no time for the interior life - the inner space that is the creative centre of women. These women show fullness, warmth and generosity, which are analogues psychic woman in pregnancy, childbirth and lactation. who present such are far different from the Prime Minister. The women at Greenham Common reaffirmed family values. The self-image is not that of an Amazon Queen, which is how most people see the Prime Minister.' (Hansard, 17 December 1982) 18 the next step, February 1983 Women and peace Today's women's movement has become closely identified with the cause of peace. But what sort of peace does it want? The 'peace' of the world as it is today minus a few American cruisé missiles and perhaps without a few other nuclear weapons? For Britain that means a 'peace' that allows it to carry on its war against the Irish people, to send its gunboats off to the South Atlantic or anywhere else where British interests are threatened and to continue the exploitation and oppression of millions of people at home and abroad on which the Or does the women's movement want to see the sort of peace that could only come through the overthrow of the forces for militarism and - the capitalist class, in particular our own especially rapacious section in Britain? The time for a choice is approaching and the omens are not good. Women's organisations have opposed wars from the First World War right up to the present.

But they have often tried to stand aside from the violent clash of conflicting interests and proclaim an autonomous, pacifist, commitwhen war breaks out class forces polarise and everybody has to take sides - there is no autonomous position on a battle.

When it comes to this critical choice the women's movement has a bad record. Its domination by the outlook of the middle class has led it, for the most part, to take the side of the capitalist class whether in Britain and Germany in 1914 or in Ireland today. The women of Greenham Common show every sign of following their feminist predecessors into supporting imperialist war.

On Greenham Common: is now Imperialism of the this! Only by by only and an revolutionary role. in their sons: Take it ledge brothers, the done in of a and as Women aspects the bourgeoisie own pious wishes, bourgeoisie"' ament" 1916, VILenin

(BOLSHEVIK PARTY)

*The whole of social life being militarised. fierce iS struggle of Great Powers for the division and redivision will world.. How proletarian women oppose cursing all war and everything military, demanding disarmament? The women of oppressed and really will class never accept this shameful They will say to • "You will soon be grown up. You will be given a gun.

and learn the military art properly. The proletarians need this knownot to shoot your the workers of other countries, as is being the present war, the traitors to socialism are telling you to do. They need it to fight of their country, to put an end to war, and not by but by defeating and disarming the (V I Lenin, The "disarmslogan, October Collected Works, Volume 23, pp98-99) Greenham gals go round the outside NOBODY FROM Greenham Peace Camp or its supporters challenged Leo Abse's characterisation cause it is in line with their own message: •We are for peace because we are women; we are excluding men because they are violent. In reality however there is no natural connection between gender and violence. Women and peace - no link If 'war is the continuation of politics by other means women will tend to be absent from it.

The exclusion (in general) of women from military service countries has more to do with their exclusion from political life and confinement to the family than with any biological abhorrence of war. Where women have become involved in politics strikes, revolutions or national liberation struggles - then they have automatically got involved in violence.

In most capitalist countries bourgeois and middle class women, except for the odd 'Amazon Queen', are mainly preoccupied with looking after their families.

This experience conditions their attitude to war. Many see it as irrational: they have created life, and the slaughter of their offspring in wars seems a cruel and Women have te Namibian women can't camp out for peace: they have no choice but to fight imperialism unnecessal) of their campaign bedifferent view. can scab. then it follows that imperialist not fight. - I1 individuals CaSs conflicts consequence ol over which they have no control.

Working class women tend to take a Workers do not have the luxury of abstaining from any conflict. They are forced to take sides. In a strike they can fight the bosses, or they In imperialist wars women workers can only defend themselves by fighting a war against the ruling class. In anti-imperialist wars working class women support the forces fighting for national liberation. Working class women do care about their children, but they don't want peace at any price. In the coming wai women will not be able to stand on the sidelines and say, 1 am neutral: I will Feminism and pacifism - true allies There is a natural connection, however, between the women's movement and the peace movement. Both are led by middle working class politics and working class violence: revolution. Pacifists are people who say 'I don't want to die, for they have no great cause to fight for. Trapped between the violence of the picket line and the violence of the baton-charge, they express the isolated petit-bourgeois view of the future. Feminists have a similar outlook: I am a unique individual, with my own

take sides too personal experiences which rated by men. Feminisation 'feminisation' of CND reflects the The - in of the petit bourgeoisie on itself. The liaison reflects the weaknesses rather than the strength of the two move- For the three years, ments. last women's movement has lacked a unifying Now it has found cause and direction. a receptive audience amongst those concerned to rid Britain of American missiles.

the process the women's movement has come full circle in its approach to bourgeois morality and the family. Ten years ago it was clenched fists, YBA wife badges and burning bras. Now feminists the fences of Greenham common with teddy bears, baby clothes photographs. Adding their and family own distinctive emphasis - that cruise and Trident are phallic symbols, 'toys for the boys, and that nuclear war is the logical extension of the age old problem of male violence - feminists have breathed new life into an ailing CND. The campwas barely ticking over from one aign annual, national demo to the next. But the women's movement has done something more for CND than merely liven up its image. Left out From their tents in Berkshire, members of the women's peace movement have become national celebrities. Their recent fortnight in prison, for refusing to be greeted as a heroic bound over, was GLC rolled out the martyrdom. he red carpet, built a statue and provided wigwams in its own front garden. Labour MPs raised emergency motions in the House, and the media lapped it up. The women put themselves forward as the true upholders of law and order. Their of the base occupation because they were trying to prevent the crime of genocide being committed. Far breaching the they from peace, maintain it. And they were trying to motivated by the highest principles - to save the lives of the Queen, the judiciary and humanity. The British establishment are undercould easily tolerate this sort of stuff.

reactionary Despite the the Greenham protesters - pro-law and order, pro-Britain and many on the British left have interpreted the rise of feminism in CND as a shift towards militancy. In fact, the opposite is true. At the 1982 CND conference in the Sheffield, every motion from the radical left, whether it called for a general strike or for opposition to British imperialism wherever it strikes next, was defeated.

The cretinous 'peace canvass', which the left opposed, victory for the left only commitment to getting Britain out of NATO - was passed very narrowly and will have no effect on an autocratic leadership which is resolutely to it. Throughout the conference, Greenham were loudly applauded whatever girls garbage they uttered. For tolerating the physical discomfort of camping out for a year, they were rewarded with seats on the national committee of CND. Wellknown left wingers from the Labour and Communist Parties were turfed out to accommodate them. CND has succeeded in presenting a lawful were

WORLD WAR I

TODAY

THE

the united against Germany. movement is peace by women alone. parade': a

WPP

militant image techniques politics of pro-family peace movement, favour of some This is where the the Labour was passed instead. The winning generals. seven percent opposed allowing middle By acceptable bounds. of strategy within respectable limits: American feminists carry the stars and stripes to a peace congress during the First World War Feminists at war International sisterhood' proved incapable of withstanding pressures of national chauvinism.

major European countries split between large majorities who took the side of their national bourgeoisie and small minorities who opposed the war from a working class point of view. The division in Britain between the suffragettes who pinned white feathers of cowardice on objectors to the war and the few women who followed Sylvia Pankhurst's anti-militarist stand is fairly well known (see Real freedom, p 101). Here we look at the impact of the war on the feminist movements of America, Germany and Russia.

women's of movenient Europe is united against the USA; during pants First World War American feminists Feminism and pacifism linked up in the Women's Peace Party, led by Jane Addams and Crysta Eastman: by 1915 it had 25 000 members eat Eastman argued that women 'are mothers, or potential mothers, and therefore have inist an intimate sense of the value of human life' (W L O'Neill, Everyone was brave: the rise and fall of feminism in America).

Another leader argued that the existing over-masculined; I entered think it would be an excellent idea to have the next demonstration conducted Pacifism to patriotism Given the late entry of the US into the war (1917), it was possible for pacifist sentiments to survive in the USA long after the war began in Europe. But by June 1916, the atmosphere had changed.

The government organised a 'preparedness counter-demonstration while marginalising the left. With its fondness for market research to test the opinions of its members, CND recently discovered that while only seven per cent want direct action to be the main priority for the 74 per cent are in form of 'non-violent, direct action' as one prong of its strategy.

women's movement comes in. It is officially empowered to organise a bit of emasculated 'action' on electoral the side, while the CND leadership gets ally on with the day to day plod to win over Party,

SDP

and the Liberals, the Tories, the vicars and the If CND had produced a deliberate policy to exclude from direct action that of its supporters who might be tempted to break the law, hit back at a policeman or pour concrete down the silos, it would have been criticised as authoritarian and undemocratic.

class feminists to police its protests, CND has ensured that peace token actions are kept well within men Excluding men is central to the CND keeping the direct action Women and peace the The women's movement in all the was violently attacked, and the participropaganda arrested. was banned, and the few who managed to resist the war fever laid low or helped out with civilian relief. Addams toured the country giving lectures on how to The cheaply and conserve food. majority, however, took a less equivocal position. Prominent Massachusetts fem- Mrs Glendower-Evans "suddenly discovered she had been pro-Ally in her heart from the beginning, even though she had only realised it when America the War'. O'Neill comments that most other women's organisations pledged their support to the government and that 'the war turned out to be enormously popular with middle class women'.

The government was swamped with requests for a role for women in the factories, hospitals and administration to aid the war effort. American feminists went so far as to call for a complete mobilisation of men so that all women could get the chance to do their bit. *As far as many women are concerned, the connection now between maleness and violence is so ineradicable that if men 'do something' for peace, it is likely to lead to war with the forces of law and order. (New Statesman, 3 December 1982) A war with the forces of law and order is the last thing that CND wants. It would lose its treasured support in the churches the media and the political establishment.

Worse, it might further embarrass the prospects of CND's closest - the Labour Party. For women who really want peace, however, a war with the forces of law and order in Britain is inescapable, for they are also the forces of militarism. There is nothing progressive about the Greenham Common protest. It celebrates a view of women which derives from the inferior position of women in the bourgeois family. It presents a view of peace as the status quo of a viciously militarist society. Working class women have nothinto gain from supporting CD and its Their place is alongside camps. fighting British organisations oppression and militarism - • whether it is in Brick Lane or Brixton, the Malvinas or the Six Counties. Kate Marshall the next step, February 1983 19

Women and peace (continuted from page 19) Other American feminists took their patriotism to its logical, racist conclusions.

The National Association Suffrage Associations became notoriously anti-immigrant. Mrs Catt 'did not hesitate that loyal Amercan women, given the vote, would more than counterthe disloyal and balance elements'. Before te war, American tem maintained that, as women, mitment to human life was sacred. When the USA joined the war, however, they discovered an even higher commitment to the American ruling class.

justified their mitment approval of the destruction life on an unparalleled scale. It was the same sad story in Europe.

Fatherland - and motherland German imperialism weaker positon unan right at the centre of inter-imperialist rivalry in the pre-war years, and as a consequence, nationalism and chauvinism had been extensively cultivated by the ruling class. A strong women's movement did arise, but it had a tradition of adapting popular prejudices to family, foreigners and abortion. time Germany went to war, the women's movement was right behind it.

The women's movement came under concerted right-wing pressure 'Anti-League'. Composed of a number of reactionary political white collar unions worned about the threat of women taking their jobs, campaigned against women's ation. It opposed feminism on the grounds that it divided the German nation and that it was led by foreigners, especially Jews. One of its leading members put it like this: We meet Jewry everywhere in the women's The Womens Social scale Jewry; these four are intimately related to one another, they are international and work in an anti-national spirit.' (RJ Evans, The feminist movement in Germany, 1894-1933) In response attack, increasingly vociterous in its detence of family. the increase the birth rate and it dedicated itself to uniting the nation. Denouncing the militant wing of the movement for women's emancipation became the key way in respectability 1n

SOCCE

When the war broke out, only the tiny Women's Suffrage League condemned the German invasion of Belgium: it lost members as a result. The rest of the mass German the war effort. The unconditional backing of the helped the government to suppress the small number of pacifists, whilst it drew many education organisations. opposition to the war was marginalised as a result of the grip of chauvinism on the mass of feminists and social democrats. However, it was a different story in Russia. Just as in Germany, the feminist current in Russia was dominated by the intelligentsia. powertul women's emancipation. the movement on the eve of war. Feminist leader, Tsar, would weaken western democracy and таке Menshevik

WUHICH

patriotism Only future Bolsheviks Zelkin, Balabanova and Kollontai took a position of opposition to the war and chauvinism. At the same time they upheld the necessity for class violence against the Russian ruling class. With the support of Lenin, called an erence of Women in 1915. Their aim was to build on anti- 20 the next step, February 1983 conference oi women's if pro-German view internationally. their comdenouncing the receptive to This comwholehearted of human directly than was in a much America. It was amongst the ruling class. about the By the the from the solutions. organisations an a emancipthe movement, and • Demoerac heckling, women on the march political views can Russia ala in the eyes of German working class and the United States. fighting a Were ment in gandists amongst classes ing women. ism The editors factories, ising action and its war masses organisation, these International Conf- Berne in March war sentiments amongst women workers and turn these towards revolution. The and many who was small. attended - including the entire English delegation - were not prepared to back the Bolshevik line of civil war and revolution. They simply wanted to denounce the war. Nevertheless the Bolshevik women used the conference to publish their Kollontai went on a speaking tour of Europe in late 1915, war in four languages. Her slogan was 'the enemy is at home?.

Working class women in Russia were Bolshevik politics. The working class in Russia one-third was female in 1914; by 1917 women made up half of the proletariat. Their wages were much lower than men's and they faced the problem of rampant inflation more the men. Spontaneous food riots during 1915 and 1916 came increasingly under Bolshevik influence.

In 1917 Bolshevik women were calling for an end to the war and for the release of jailed workers. They began to agitate troops demanding that they stop tiring on demonstrating workers, and use their weapons against the In response to this upsurge of working class women, the feminist movement was revived in an attempt to contain it. As women began to see that revolution was only answer to their poverty and oppression, the feminists intervened to lead them towards bourgeois democratic They launched a new organisation - the National Council of Women - which called for a democratic republic, and for the continuation of war until March 1917 bourgeois feminists right to vote. A female militia led the 40 000 strong march, carrying banners proclaiming: 'A woman's place is in the One Bolshevik was beaten up were reported to be sympathetic to their anti-war slogans.

The Bolshevik approach to peace The evolution of the international women's movement during the First World War reveals much about the nature of feminism. So long as an all-class women's movement is under little pressure, diverse co-exist within it. Once it comes under pressure in the form of war or revolution, such a movement will either split along class lines - as it channel - or serve to women to the side of reaction - as it did in Germany, Britain At least in Russia the forces of reaction losing battle. Stiles argues (in The women's liberation move- Russia 1860-1930) that it is clear that the Bolsheviks never had any real competition as organisers and propaof the lower women in 1917: The Bolsheviks published a paper - Rabotnits with a circulation of 50 000, aimed at work- Their propaganda work, which continued right up to the revolution, was fiercely polemical against feminand other movements which had fostered chauvinism in the working class.

It sought to build up the anti-war sentiments which were spontaneously supported by proletarian women and organised women to take the future in their own hands. The Bolsheviks organised women to oppose the high prices in the shops and the appalling conditions at work.

of Rabotnitsa spent most of their time amongst the women in Through laundries and shops. combining propaganda work with organagainst the ruling class Bolsheviks recruited the their working women while the feminist movement stagnated. The Bolsheviks' approach to the questions of women's liberation and war was one of the reasons why the working class made its first successful revolution in Russia. We should emulate them in the course of making the second.

Kate Marshall

IRELAND

their imperialist paymasters.

THE WOMEN'S PEACE Movement was born out of one of the most harrowing tragedies of the Irish War. On 10 August 1976, unarmed IRA volunteer Lennon was shot dead at the wheel of a car, after a chase by the British army through West Belfast. Out of control, the car careered into Anne Maguire and her four children. She was badly injured and three of her children killed; by the car or by stray British bullets never became clear. Anne's sister Mairead Corrigan and another West Belfast Catholic Betty Williams immediately launched the Rise and fall The cry for peace found a ready response in the Catholic ghettos of the Six Coun ties. They had been ravaged by seven years of army repression, and by a wave of sectarian assassinations, carried out by Loyalist paramilitaries. Within days thousands of people, predominantly and children, joined mass demonstrations for peace in Belfast, Derry and Dublin.

But within weeks the mass support of the nationalist people melted away. Only days after the Maguire tragedy, soldiers shot 12-year old Majella O'Hare in Armagh: the Women's Peace Movement silent. remained killed 14-year old Brian Stewart in the Turf Lodge district of West Belfast, a few weeks later, the peace women refused to condemn the army. They had to be escorted out of an outraged meeting of local residents which mother, a former peace marcher.

The Women's Peace massive publicity and the support of the British establishment because it defined peace as a British victory. Its pleas for - and its condemnations pedce directed exclusively at the republican movement. Peace meant the IRA laying down its arms - not the British troops getting out of Ireland. The peace women won the patronage of the international ruling class. The Norwegian government gave them £200 000; American backers still sustain the token community work of the movement to the tune of £25 000 a year. In 1977 Corrigan and Williams were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize they pocketed £37 000 each. The Lon don police opened Trafalgar Square long banned for 'Irish' demos - to the peace women and Joan Baez sang pacifist feminist praises to the the embrace of the establishment only increased the estrangement of the peace women from the Irish people. When the Peace women call for peace on British terms What price peace? In 1976 the Women's Peace Movement (later the Peace People) in Ireland attracted widespread support in Ireland and Britain. However, the evolution of this movement showed that women who want peace cannot escape the harsh choice posed by every war - peace on whose terms? The peace women's choice of Britain's terms ditional surrender of the republican movement - ensured their rapid loss of support in the nationalist community from which they came.

Before their demise, however, they performed some useful service for royal yacht to Danny sealed. already

WOLC

British When troops of the entire population.'

movement from included Brian's Tory ation. Movement won were

OYCE

ment uggle has similar fate. campaign. But in a war. the uncon- Queen invited them for drinks on the during her Jubilee trip 'the province' their fate was Less than six months after the launch of the Women's Peace Movement it had outlived its usefulness to the British ruling class, as the Observer noted: It is a telling paradox that both the movement and its leaders receive more recognition Ine rurtner they are Irom Norter treland ghettos, where they are viewed with increasing cynicism if not downright detestation.' (2 Yet, in those few months, women played a useful role for the real The supervisors of British terror in the movement welcomed the peace women's outspoken denunciations of the their encouragement to Direct congratulated them and explained their "They have shown the way. It requires courage to speak out, to accuse... The terrorists can only be beaten with the cooperation The British Government saw the Women's Peace Movement as a campaign they could use to isolate the republican the nationalist popul Irish spokesman Airey Neave claimed that recent events have shown that there is massive support in Northern Ireland from both Catholics and Protestants for a determined antiterrorist campaign'. His conclusion was that 'the time is ripe to smash the Provisional IRA. When Roy Mason took September 1976, from Kees 1r he claimed that the IRA was 'reeling', citing as evidence the mass movement for peace indicated by public demonstrations in Ireland and Britain.

Fortunately, the Women's Peace Movewas a flop. The liberation strproved more durable than both the movement's corrupted leaders and their British backers - Neave was executed by the INLA in 1979 and Mason is still in hiding, lest he share a But the Women's Peace Movement still stands as an example of the consequences of women using the slogans of peace to conceal taking sides Niamh Eardley

Chris Harman, The lost revolution, Bookmarks, London, 1982, pp326, pbk £4.95.

TWO events shaped the course of working class history in the twentieth century: the victory of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 defeat of the German revolution and the between 1918 and 1923. Communism aborted The defeat of the mass insurrection of German workers in the Ruhr and Saxony in the summer of 1923 marked the end of the post-First World War revolutionary upsurge in Europe.

The working class vanguard had already been crushed in Hungary, Austria and Italy. Now the most powerful section of the European movement had been neutralised. The Bolsheviks were relying on the German revolution to break the isolation of the Soviet Union and assist in construction. The events of 1923

SOGPLENT

dashed these hopes. In the Soviet Union the revolution fell prey to the bureaucratisation of its leadership under Stalin. And Stalin's clique took advantage of the climate of confusion and recrimination following the German defeat to consolidate its domination over the Communist International. Although the Comintern leadership bore considerable responsibility for the Ruhr and his faction heaped the defeat, Stalin blame on the leadership of the German Commthe KPD. They ousted Heinrich unist Party, Brandler and installed Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow as the new leadership.

two years earlier the world's The KID, biggest communist party with 360 000 memwas effectively destroyed. However, as bers. the only alternative to the discredited Social Democratic Party (SPD), the KPD retained working class support. simply readers followed the Moscow line - with disastrous consequences as the fascist movement grew in strength in Germany. The crime of opportunism The defeat of the German working class resulted from the immaturity of its leadership. The merit of Harman's book is that he approaches the issue from this angle and attempts to trace the failures of the revolutionary left between 1914 and 1923. The lost revolution makes a refreshing change from the superficial vulgarity of much left-wing history of the working class movement. It is well researched, interestingly written and tries to account for the tragedy of the German revolution by a careful study of events. However, Harman falls short of identifying the real political problems that prevented the establishment of a competent revolutionary leadership in Germany. Harman begins to grapple with the problem by pinpointing crucial weaknesses in politics of leading German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. He recognises that her unwillingness to break with the SPD and form an independent revolutionary party before 1919 undermined the revolutionary movement. The lost revolution the tragedy of the German concludes that revolution was that a party capable of harnessing and coordinating (workers) energy did not come into existence until it was too late. So far so good. But what Harman cannot explain is why Luxemburg compromised with the reformists, and how an independent party could have been formed. The fact that Luxemburg and Liebknecht did not break from the SPD during the First World War, as Lenin advocated, was a symptom of their lack of political independence from the reformists. Harman's inability to perceive this is no doubt a result of his own leading role in an organisation which has also proved incapable of building a party politically independent of reformism the Socialist Workers Party. His account of the early KPD thus remains empirical and inconclusive.

Pacifism Although she possessed a genuinely revolutionary spirit and a class hatred for the SPD's underestright-wing leadership, imated the impact of the First World War on the German working class. She failed to develop a clear strategy for forging a new working class leadership. On the most crucial political issue of the time - the question of imperialist war - Luxemburg sought compromise with the left wing of the SPD. The Spartakusbund, the organisation she formed together with Karl Liebknecht in 1915 to put forward anti-militarist propaganda, was a step forward. It was a break from the chauvinism of the SPD leadership. But instead of advancing the revolutionary policy of turning the imperialreviews Lessons unlearnt Karl Liebknecht - German revolutionary murdered by social democrats in 1919 ist war into class war against the bourgeoisie at home, Spartakus adopted the pacifist slogans of the radical peace movement. By calling for a "negotiated peace without annexations, Spartakus effectively separated the question of peace from the question of class power.

The sigthe Spartakusbund's failure nificance of • to advance a coherent proletarian opposition to the war escapes Harman. Indeed he apologises for their compromise with the pacifists, using the familiar opportunist argument that Spartakus was isolated. However, the events of 1918 and 1919 prove that this faint-hearted approach held back the with fatal consequences for the movement - German working class. Instead of giving a revolutionary direction to the growing movement of workers and soldiers against the war, and Liebknecht lagged behind.

Luxemburg Eventually they were overtaken by a mass movement that broke through the barriers put up by reformism. But the masses found the leading German Marxists of the day unprepared for battle. Radical reformism, 1916 In 1916, under the •pressure of mass strikes and demonstrations, the left wing of the SPD broke away to form the new Independent Social Democratic Party (USD). These radical reformists sought to distance themselves from the openly chauvinist SPD leaders. The consequence of their radical demands was to contain, rather than lead the movement. The USPD called for an early peace settlement - a demand which expressed disgust at. the hardships of war and fear of defeat, not a class perspective for destroying the causes of war and oppression. Instead of challenging this reactionapproach Spartakus chose not only to ary remain organisationally part of the USPD but to hide its political differences with the left reformists. A crucial opportunity to fight the betrayers of the working class was wasted.

Harman misses the significance of these developments. When the working class was breaking with reformism in action, the actions of the potential leaders of the labour movement served to dissipate this challenge.

The consequences were disastrous. In 1918 and 1919 the USPD mediated between the revolutionary workers' and soldiers' councils and the counter-revolutionary SPD government under Friedrich Ebert. Given the confusion reigning among the more advanced workers, Ebert was quickly able to move in and annihilate the movement with the aid of the imperial officer caste and monarchist paramilitaries.

Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered in January 1919, only weeks after the German Communist Party (KPD) was finally born.

Workers disarmed Most accounts of the German revolution underrate its potential. Academic historians argue that it came to nothing because the workers wanted only peace - not a social revolution.

This interpretation is belied by the resonance the revolutionary slogans which Spartakus eventually adopted in late 1918 received among -and by the long and bitter the workers struggles spanning the period up to 1923. It is true, however, that due to the lack of leadership there was no focus for the struggle for The independent working class objectives.

social force that was able to define the horizons of the movement was the petit bourgeoisie: peasants, lower officers and other middle class layers - above all, the labour bureaucracy. Their aim was to establish a bourgeois democratic regime which would provide them with greater stability and material security - not to smash capitalism. This crisis of leadership overshadowed the formation of the KPD. Whilst it broke organisationally with the SPD, it never followed up its break with a thorough critique of re formism and an honest appraisal of the defeats of 1918 to 1919. Harman, however, takes the of the

KPD

organisational independence at face value. He does not examine the party's programme or the strategy of its leadership to see whether it had really broken from reformism. Hence his account of the subsequent development of the KPD, although rich in historical detail, misses the essential point. The KPD never completed politically its break from social democracy. Blaming the workers Moreover, Harman adopts the view established liberal and Stalinist historians, that the by problem with the KPD was ultra-leftism. This misconception mars his assessment of the founding conference of the PD in early January 1919. The formation of the KPD was not the result of a conscious political strategy. It was only after the USPD had refused to hold a national emergency conference, to clarify the perspectives for the revolution, that Rosa Luxemburg decided to establish an independent party. At its first conference, Luxemburg and Liebknecht correctly argued that the fledgling National should use the impending Assembly elections as a platform for elaborating the party's programme and cohering its supporters, But the impatience of the majority of delegates - the natural response to the immediate experience of violent upheaval in the preceding two months - carried the day.

Luxemburg and Liebknecht were defeated.

The conference decided to boycott the elections and failed to adopt a clear programme. For Harman, the problem with the conference was the 'putschist" mood of the left wing.

Putschist moods' are of the essence in revolutionary situations. With good leadership much revolutionary impatience can be given positive direction. In January 1919, when social democratic ministers were organising the workers, it was massacre of revolutionary not surprising that the spontaneous response of militants was to blow up parliament, not campaign lor seats in it. lo persuade ten that the fragility of leadership and objective circumstances necessitated a period of conand perhaps, a tactical retreat, solidation, required a leadership far-sighted enough to unite the party around a coherent set of medium-term objectives. Luxemburg and Leibknecht failed the test and, as Harman's account of the conference proceedings illuminates, they gave up fighting for their line, abdicating the responsibility of leadership. It was the vacillation of the leaders - not the mood of the rank and file - that betrayed the German revolution.

The tragedy of the German working class is of far more than merely historical interest. To active workers today it is a warning of the consequences of failing to make a resolute break with left-wing reformism.

it is not surprising that The lost revolution avoids drawing out these political lessons. They are an indictment of the opportunist tailing of Labour Party that is the substance of the SWP politics today. Sabena Norton Groping in the dark The longest war: Northern Kevin Kelley, Ireland and the IRA, Zed press, 1982, pp364, pbk £6.95. THE LONGEST WAR is a book the Troops Out Movement would have been proud to have written - if only they could have got it together to write it. Although Kevin Kelley is an American his book bears all the hallmarks of the radical British liberal.

Kelley's detailed account of Ireland's struggle for freedom. - particularly the last 13 years — is marred by his inability to explain what social forces are at work in Ireland. Thus he explains important events in recent Trish history, not by analysing the conflict between British imperialism and the Irish people, but with superficial and subjective generalisations A good example of Kelley's approach is the way in which he attempts to explain the that have developed periodically

TENSIOTS

within the republican movement. When Britain partitioned Ireland in 1921, the decision on whether or not to approve the new Free State' led to a split within the republican The Free Staters compromised movement. with British imperialism, took their seats in the Dail, and launched an offensive against the anti-treaty forces of the IRA. To Kelley, these developments were the results simply of a conflict between the 'moderates who had gone too far to turn back' and the defend ers of Wolfe Tone's republican ideal. Kelley fails to expose the class interests that lay continued on page 22 the next step, February 1983 21

continued from page 21 behind the 'moderation' of one side and the "idealism' of the other. The Home Rule struggle suited the Irish national bourgeoisie whilst it provided elbow room for its own capitalist inclinations: when it came to the crunch they preferred to compromise with Britain rather than back a volatile military struggle against the imperialists. The failure of the anti-Treaty forces to sustain a consistent resistance to the British solution right from the start reflected their own petit-bourgeois social basis. Although more radical elements invoked some of the Pearse and even Connolly to justify Tone, their opposition to the Free State government, most made their peace with Britain's stooges within a decade of Partition. The key problem of 1921 was not Collins' moderation or de- Valera's idealism, but the weakness of the Irish working class, socially and politically: Similarly, Kelley's assessment of the most recent major split in the republican movement (in 1970) demonstrates an equally simplistic view. In his account "socialist' ideas surfaced in the minds of IRA leaders imprisoned for their part in the failed bombing campaign of the late fifties. These ideas solidified as the "stages theory' and appeared to offer a way out of the impasse which the movement had reached. Kelley is right - the border campaign did fail, the IRA did reach an impasse and the military struggle was downplayed. But why?

the answer lies not in the subjective Again, inclinations of Cathal Goulding and the proponents of the stages theory, but in the changing class structure of modern Ireland. Growing in size and becoming more organised, particularly in the South, the working class in the 'sixties became - at least potentially - the decisive force in the anti-imperialist struggle.

This potential was never realised - not because of the dogged determination of the militarists as Kelley suggests - but because the republican leadership was still dominated by the petitbourgeois outlook of traditional republicanism.

The stages theory was not a collection of ideas from the heads of a few "socialist individuals.

In the classic Stalinist mould, it provided the manipulate justification for opportunists to the anti-imperialist aspirations of the nationalist community for their own reformist aims.

Kelley's approach prevents him from conclusions about the reaching any clear prospects for victory for the Irish people in the war. This is most obvious when he addresses the question, Why does Britian stay?" Groping in the dark, he comes up with four possible explanations — all wrong. First, a British withdrawal would mean the loss of trade with the Twenty-six counties; second, Britain would lose profits from the Six Counties - remember John Zachary DeLorean? Third, Kelley turns to the insidious threat from the Kremlin.

Finally, unperturbed by the fact that no evidence exists for any of his explanations, Kelley comes up with a fourth - Britain stays lest the British working class pick up seditious ideas of its own' from the example of its deteat by urban guerillas in Ireland. This point at least has the merit of seeking an explanation of why Britain stays in the consequences of a British withdrawal in Britain itself. The victory of the Irish people would mean the disintegration of the United Kingdom and the destabilisation of the state that enforces capitalist relations throughout Ireland and Britain. That is why Britain stays. But the Irish people will not win without the seditious' assistance of the British working class - that sedition will have to be spread at home first before it can be reinforced from Ireland. 22 the next step, February 1983 reviews all British liberals, Because Kelley, -uKe cannot work out why British imperialism stays in Ireland, he cannot identify the social forces vital for removing it - the working class. Faced with the question of how to speed the defeat of British imperialism in Ireland, Kelley can only urge British socialists to apply pressure on behalf of a British troop withdrawal'. But where? And how? For Kelley, as for the Troops Out Movement, the working class in Britain has no role to play in the fight against imperialism. Readers new to contemporary Irish history will find The longest war interesting by virtue of its factual content, but those expecting an anti-imperialist analysis will have to wait for the Irish Freedom Movement handbook.

Guy Ross The writer as witness Victor Serge, Midnight in the century, Writers and Readers, 1982, pp242, pbk £6.95.

ON 17 NOVEMBER 1947 Victor Serge died in exile in Mexico. Born in Brussels on 30 December 1890 into a poverty stricken family of exiled Russian anarchists, he records that from an early age he felt he was living in a 'world without possible escape.' As a young man in Paris his friends were the Bonnot Gang', the Tragic Bandits: young anarchists who inverted Proudhon's dictum that property is theft' by robbing as many banks as possible. Within a year most were dead in shoot-outs or on the guillotine. Serge himself endured the French prison system for five years as a political prisoner.

Testament to revolution During the First World War he took part in the Barcelona insurrection, but it was the Bolshevik changed his life. By 1923 revolution that of the Left Opposition he was a member Between 1923 and his death, he never capitbureaucracy and he never reulated to the jected the Bolshevik revolution. Four years his death he wrote the following before TesTamen. I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twent books On several occasions a press I own nothing. with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a several victorious revoluton gone astruy, abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet. Let me be done with these digressions; those were the only roads possible for us. I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before. Serge regarded his career as a creative writer as an enforced one - enforced by his exclusion from political activity. It was nevertheless a political task to chronicle the heroic struggle of the working class. His political outlook determined both the subject and the form of his work: the class struggle is its content, his style is determined by the urgency of that struggle and the uncertainty of ever being read.

I asked myself every day, without any particular feeling, but engrossed by the problems of rent, my wife's health, my sons education, whether I would be arrested in the night. For my books I adopted an appropriate form: I had to construct them in detached fragments which could each be finished sep.

arately and sent abroad post haste; which could, if absolutely necessary, be published as they were, incomplete, and it would be difficult for me to compose in any other form' Revolution betrayed Midnight in the century is perhaps Serge's best novel. It bears witness to the individual members of the Opposition - men such as Ryzhik, a member of the Control Commission, and Elkin, ex-president of the Kiev Cheka, who are disdainful of the mediocrity of their jailors. Both men preserve their pride as individuals no longer as part of a cohesive soc ial force. The men of 17 and 20 will never seem emasculated enough for them. They have seen the promised land, tasted of fire, hunger, and conviction: of the truth. These have marked them forever. The book is also vivid with ironic detail of the bureaucracy's inability to plan, and its effect on both individuals and stultifying society. The engineer Botkin is successful and smug, so successful that he is fortunate enough to be selected for a foreign trade mission; unfortunate enough to come across a Bulletin of the Opposition in Paris. He finds it compelling reading not because of its working class politics but because its technical critique of industrialisation corresponds exactly to his trained notion of inefficiency. Botkin fails to destroy his notes and ends up in the Gulag.

the Bulletin from memory and He dictates so it reaches the exiles in Siberia.

Midnight in the century provides much more than pathos and historical irony. Rodion is imprisoned, not for being a member of the Opposition, but because as a worker he questioned the day to day workings of the bureaucracy in his workplace. His file reports him dangerous demaas a pernicious agitator, gogue, Trotskyist. Knows how to make the masses listen to him.' Rodion is not a naive worker counterposed to the tired and cynical intellectuals: he is the embodiment of revolutionary energy. It is he who answers their question, What is to be done if it is midnight in the century?' He simply says, 'Midnight's where we have to live then.' He alone is not ready fatalistically to see himself as a man of the past. Rodion's allegiance lies with the working class and a new revolutionary party - not with a memory: History is something we make, we are historical too, like all the poor devils...There is no certainty that this machine will stop and crumble one day by itself. It must be destroyed. Another revolution. We will make Concentration camp in Siberia one, and in a very different way. I don't know how, but it will be very different. But first, escape from them. Victor Serge may have returned to the theme of 'a world without possible escape', but in Rodion it is an exemplary theme. He begins his task with words whispered to a woman "Listen, he said worker on a building site: softly 'do you know what we are? Have you ever thought about it?' In this book, Serge has captured Rosa Luxemburg's ringing call to struggle: "Every revolution is destined to failure, except the last one.' Alan Harding A protegé of Stuart Hall Paul Gilroy and others, The empire strikes and racism in 'seventies Britain, Hutchinson, 1982, pp234, pbk £5.95.

FOUR

YEARS AGO sociology professor Stuart Hall wrote Policing the crisis, a book which won considerable influence in academic and reformist circles. Hall's thesis was that the crisis had provoked trends towards increas ing state authoritarianism in Britain which existing means created problems for through which the ruling class won popular consent for the existing social order. Hence the state sought to re-establish consensus through manipulating news and information and creating 'moral panics' around issues such as mugg ing", 'crime", "law and order".

Bad news As a former editor of New Left Review and close sympathiser with the Eurocommunist trend within the Communist Party, Hall is a veteran of ideological struggles disembodied anti-capitalist political activity. from any The consequence of his intervention in the battleground of ideas around the emergence of the strong state' was to encourage a series of reformist academics to undertake studies of the permeation of the bourgeois media bourgeois prejudices. Hall's work also by provided reformist politicians with some theoretical justification for their strategy of 'struggle within the state for accountability and community control. The politics of Hall's esoteric theorising became clear in the post- 1981 riot controversy about policing. The response of his acolytes to police repression was not to attempt to mobilise against it, but to plead for the restoration of non-coercive forms of capitalist domination. Through Labour's police committees they offered their services in the task of restoring public confidence in the police.

Paul Gilroy, the main contributor to the latest collection of essays from the Birmingham Contemporary Cultural Studies, Centre for personifies the consequences of Hall's approach - the book is replete with sycophantic Centre's former acknowledgements to • the director. Gilroy is adept at the radical posturing which his and academic obscurantism • for master is renowned; he is also a paid employee of the GLC's police committee support unit.

Gilroy introduces the book some theoretical points: "The class relations which inscribe the black fractions of the working class function as modality in race the relanons....kace which class relations are experienced

Whatever this means, it is not explored further.

The main concern of the book is not racial ideology of racism. It oppression but the proceeds to examine "schooling in Babylon', racist ideologies, 'ethnicity 'commonsense studies', etc. The preoccupation of this group of middle-class academics with the finer points of dub reggae and Rastafarian dress stands in

A RO

Hackney: black youth confront the police black people about the impossibility of getting work and the certainty ol pollce narassment on the streets. Anti-working class One theme unites Hall and Gilroy: their pessimism and their lack of confidence in the capacity of the working class to fight racism in Britain. Both view the working class as being spontaneously nationalist and chauvinist; they see the racism of the trade union and Labour Party leaders as something they are constantly pushed into by their working class members.

In reality it is the labour bureaucracy which is the agency for disseminating reactionary ideologies in the working class. For the past century the leadership of the labour movement has identified its interests with British imperialism and its state. The Labour leaders and the union bureaucrats have always backed Britain against foreign armies, foreign imports — anc immigrants. Rank and file workers have often followed this chauvinist lead. But they at least have the potential to take an anti-racist stand. As the response of some workers to the introduction of the new race checks in the hospitals and dole offices shows, some workers appreciate that they have more in common with black people than they have with the British state. Gilroy rejects the white working class.

But he is happy to take a job under the patronage of the party that has disgraced the British working class through its consistent support for immigration controls and its endorsement of police terror against blacks in Britain. County Hall provides a comfortable seat from which to moan about the racism of the working class and to patronise the resistance of the black community.

Joan Phillips Hitting out at the hardcore Robert Taylor, Workers in the new depression, Macmillan, November 1982, pp212, pbk £7.95, hbk £20.

ROBERT TAYLOR,

labour editor of the Observer, has assembled a mass of information on unemployment and the labour market. His object is to assess the various ruling class British capitalism strategies for restoring to prosperity. He is clearly a concerned man since he spends large chunks of his book unemployment, pay inequalities at work. This effusive humanity, he places at the service of a more hard-headed and partisan concern. This is made clear when he states that inequalities *constitute a massive barrier to social cohesion and justice as well as an incalcuable obstacle to the creation of a more dynamic and prosperous society. His 'key objective is to target for attack those groups of workers in the core of the labour market' - public sector workers and those who make use of their craft skills to defend themwho are insulated from 'the harsh serves reviews prosper while everyone else has to suffer?

Target: workgroups Ever since the Second World War the growing complexity of British industry has required the devolution of bargaining authority from the central union bureaucracies to the shopfloor and has allowed workplace organisation to pass outside their formal control. The employers have gone along with, and even encouraged, this such an extent trend to that a 1978 Warwick University survey found number of stewards working full-time the on trade union business paid for by their employer was far higher than the size of the full-time union bureaucracy. Indeed many employers were happy to see closed shops established and themselves took on the responsibility for collecting union dues under the 'check-off' system. The corollary of these developments has been a loss of direct control by the unions themselves which is a source of potential instability and makes it more difficult for the government to influence work practices in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole. This underlies Tebbit's softening of his anti-union rhetoric and Thatcher's marked reluctance to crow over her victory in the NHS dispute: the Tories are well aware that the authority of a compliant TUC was the crucial factor in derailing the train drivers and the hospital workers. The real battle for the employers now if they are to raise productivity and cut wages is not against the unions as such but against workplace organisation.

Taylor sets up the target carefully: "the trouble lies not in trade union restrictive power but in the tenacity of the work group?.

Five years ago, in happier times, Taylor wrote a celebration of the status of trade unions in British life entitled The fifth estate.

Today, like many of his colleagues in the liberal middle class, he is not only concerned but deeply troubled. He despairs of the Labour Party, correctly observing that it has been taken over by public service trade union leaders and middle class constituency activists. He is concerned, not that the Labour Party has become useless defending the working in class, but that it has become so feeble that it can no longer contain it. Taylor is deeply pessimistic - the only hope for British capitalism is an incomes policy but the Labour Party is too weak to deliver labour movement support for it. "The future looks bleak" is the theme with which he concludes virtually every chapter. When the future looks bleak to a professional exponent of class collaboration in industry turned advocate of state attacks on sections of the labour movement, it must hold something positive for the working class.

Gareth Evans Letters Due to lack of space we have been unable to print letters from our readers in this issue. Tell us what you think of the next step. Write to RCP, BM RCP, London WCIN 3XX. Bukharin's road to socialism Richard B Day (ed), N I Bukharin: Selected writings on the state and on the transition to socialism, Spokesman, 1982, pp416, hbk £20.

BOOKS ABOUT Nikolai Bukharin, the principal economic theoretician of the Bolshevik Party, always raise two questions. First, what was the significance of his role in the debates on Soviet industrial policy in the 'twenties? Second, do his theories of capitalism and the state give us any insights into the workings of capitalism today? The publication of this book is to be welcomed for making available in English for the first time many of Bukharin's most important articles. supporter of Lenin's New Economic Policy.

growth of the private market in the Soviet the shattered economy. However, for Bukharin, through a policy of conciliation towards the neglected in Bukharin's scheme, but it depended on the development of peasant agriculture: occurs in our peasant economy, the more domestic industry. This policy ignored the backward state of much a lack of demand as an inability to supply the requisite goods to the market.

Unless a more direct policy to develop industry Preobrazhensky and the Left Opposition - increasing peasant demand could only exacerbate shorttraders and precipitate a breach in the Soviet Government's monopoly over foreign trade Bukharin glossed over the growth of capitalism in the countryside which would accompany his slogan to the peasantry: enrich yourselves, develop your farms. Instead, accumulate, he fostered the illusion that, by having some control over the provision of credit, the Soviet state could rely on peasant self-interest to overcome private property relations and engage them in the struggle for la classless, communist society. Tragically these mistakes, embedded in the policy of the Soviet regime under the dual control of Bukharin and Stalin, had catastrophic consequences. While Bukharin was writing lyrically about the Road to socialism and the worker-peasant alliance' in 1925, and at the same time, assisting in the crushing of the Left Opposition under Trotsky, a serious crisis was brewing. This came to a head at the end of 1927. The failure to develop industry to an adequate degree forced on a grain procurements crisis: the peasantry, angered at receiving insufficient industrial goods in exchange for their produce, began to withhold their output from the market, threatening starvation in the cities.

This signalled the end of the policy of conciliation - and the end of Bukharin's pre-eminent role in the Soviet leadership.

As the leader most identified with the policies which had strengthened the kulaks (the more peasants) and thus endangered prosperous the regime, Bukharin had to go. The bureaucracy, under Stalin's control, initiated forced collectivisation, the liquidation of the kulaks Bukharin in 1925 as a class' and the industrialisation programme of the first Five Year Plan, begun in 1929 Thus emerged the foundations of the Soviet regime we see today. Contrary to the views of Bukharin's political biographer, Stephen Cohen, Bukharin's ideas for the development of Soviet society, far from being a 'communist alternative to Stalinism', in fact prepared the way for Stalin's repression.

From 'state capitalism' to reformism Bukharin's errors of economic policy were based on his revisionist economic theory. His contribution is summed up in his work "state capitalism'. Generalising from the on experience of war, particularly in Germany, Bukharin formulated the theory that a new of capitalism had arrived, where the stage state had merged with the major capitalist corporations and had taken control of the national economy. As a result, the 'anarchy absence scale, and capitalist compention came t 1915, Toward a theory of the imperialist state, permeates all Bukharin's later works.

While it was a striking formulation - and that competition - based on the existence of private property - was only modified and More importantly, however, Bukharin's the impossibility under capitalism of maining the relation between production and consumption. In fact, such disproportionalities were secondary in Marx's theory. If anything, Marx saw such disproportions in the market as permanent features of the capitalist market system which, when they reach serious degrees.

are a consequence rather than a cause of the crisis. The capitalist crisis is generated through the accumulation process. Continued accumulation leads to a fall in the rate of profit and then an interruption of investment which halts capitalist growth. For Bukharin on the other hand, once crises were abolished in the national economy, through state planning, the only obstacle cap italism then faced was a possible economic breakdown owing to the burden of war prod.

uction. Capital accumulation would encounter no inherent barriers if the 'problem' of market demand was overcome by the state. This superficial analysis underpinned his view of the development of the Soviet economy.

Bukharin's work deserves close attention Not because Bukharin was a great revolutionary theorist - he wasn't, despite his stature in the Bolshevik Party - but as a reminder that 'economics' is no technical or academic concern cut off from reality. From Soviet economic policy in the 'twenties to reformist alternative strategies in the 'eighties, Bukharin's theories have exerted an important influence. This book is expensive at f20, but the cost of Bukharinism in practice is higher still.

Tony Allen the next step, February 1983 23

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