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From International Socialism, No. 62, September 1973, pp. 5–6.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS do not claim that we alone are going to be able to provide the sort of alternative leadership to Jones and Scanlon that workers are likely to need during Phase Three. Although our organisation – and in particular its factory branches – has been growing rapidly in the last six months, we are still small fry when compared to the 20 million industrial workers, the 10 million trade unionists or the 250,000 shop stewards in this country.
But within the working class generally, there do exist the militant elements in every factory, mine and dock, who could begin to constitute the alternative.
In one important respect, the experience this year has been quite different to the last time wages lagged behind prices, in the period after the postal workers’ dispute of 1971.
The postal workers were out without strike pay for six weeks and at the end returned to work without any significant gains. They had used their industrial power to the full and found that it did not have the desired effect. By contrast, although the million or so workers who were involved in the struggles of the spring of this year eventually accepted the government’s norm of £1 plus 4 per cent, they did not do so after all-out struggles. The union leaders had carefully restricted the actions they allowed members to take. The hospital workers were told to engage in selective strikes only, although half of them had voted for an unlimited strike, and the teachers and civil servants were not allowed even that leeway. In every case, the unions ended the actions rather than clash with Phase Two of the government’s law.
As a result, living standards have been hammered, but workers do not feel, by and large, that they have been defeated. If anything, potential militancy at the base has been growing. Large numbers of workers now see the need for strike action against the freeze. And many see that existing union leaders are only going to initiate such action under pressure from below.
The major union conferences this year have seen the emergence of a current of opinion among a minority of delegates – in some cases a quarter or more of the delegates – to the left of the traditional Jones-Scanlon axis. This left has not been organised or clear on all the issues. But it has shown itself to be a force of some significance. Certainly the trade union leaders who are meeting Heath are only too aware of the pressure that could build up.
Success in defeating Phase Three will depend very much on the extent to which it is possible to organise this militancy independently of the ‘left’ leaders. The key to many of the battles in the period ahead is going to be the development of rank and file organisation, in which militants can hammer out seriously the tactics they need.
What such rank and file organisation should not be is shown by the sorry history of the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions.
Here was a body that had the credibility and the base to organise, independently of the trade union bureaucracies, in the confrontations of the last 18 months. But it failed to intervene in the struggle to free the dockers last summer, the strikes against the fine of the AUEW in the winter, or the Phase Two struggles of the spring. The reason is not too difficult to see. At its last conference one of the keynote speakers was Bob Wright, of the engineering union. Soon afterwards Wright excelled himself by lying to Perkins, Peterborough, workers to get them back to work and by using redbaiting tactics against workers who tried to argue with him at a mass meeting. To intervene effectively in the struggles ahead, the LCDTU would have to denounce the Bob Wrights, not provide them with a platform.
Socialists in some industries and unions have already begun in recent years to build rank and file organisations of a different sort, based upon drawing shop floor activists together round principled, militant programmes for struggle against the employers and the government and for democratisation of the unions.
But this work will have to be extended to new areas and co-ordinated as between industries and unions if it is to have a decisive impact in the struggle ahead. That is why the International Socialists are organising a large conference of industrial members and contacts at Belle Vue, Manchester, on 11 November, at which it hopes to discuss many of the problems involved in fulfilling such tasks.
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