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What follows is the complete, unexpurgated statement by the Political Committee of the SLL entitled "A Political Challenge" which appeared in Workers Press No. 21, Saturday October 25, 1969.
"Behind the strike wave
A POLITICAL CHALLENGE
A Statement by the Political Committee of the SLL.
The massive wave of strikes now engulfing British industry is the beginning of a major change in the class struggle in Britain.
At the same time it is necessary to stress that these strike struggles are only the first skirmishes in a conflict which can be resolved only by the taking of power from the capitalist class.
All the Labour, trade union and Communist Party leaders conceal from the workers that this is what is at stake.
The Socialist Labour League, with its daily paper, the Workers' Press, devotes all its efforts to the recruitment and training of the forces to achieve this revolutionary task.
Miners, motor car workers, dustmen, steel-workers, engineers, dockers, women workers in many industries, have all been thrown into struggle within days of each other.
These struggles take the form of wage demands, unprecedentedly high ones, because millions of workers and their wives are feeling, two years after devaluation, they can no longer live on the standards at which they are being kept.
It is no longer a question of separate and consecutive struggles, but of the world crisis bringing together the fight for living standards of all sections of the working class.
* * *
These effects of the world crisis - the threat of further unemployment, price rises, curtailment of investment, entry into the Common Market, speed-up and rationalization by the big monopolies helped by state finance - now begin to weld together the working class as a fighting force.
The Labour government's attack on the trade unions and the Tory Party's plans to go even further in these attacks, are both reflections of the world economic crisis and at the same time accelerators of the process of facing the working class up to the political character of its struggle.
Whatever the form taken by the strike struggle - against unemployment in the car industry and in GEC-EE, for parity with the best-paid motor industry areas, for the eight-hour day in mining, for equal pay for women, for substantial pay increases for the dustmen - the content of them goes very deep because whole sections of the class are acting independently of their leadership in response to the deeepest crisis of the system.
It is in such a situation that the dustmen's strike for £5 a week increase has had such a big effect, from the mining industry to the teaching profession.
The strength of the organized workers in these strikes can and will force certain concessions from the employers and the government which supports them.
* * *
But the government and the employers will continue to press forward, in whatever ways they can find, with exactly the type of policy which has produced higher prices, cuts in public spending, reduction of credit [p. 83] and deflationary policies; all of these will continue.
Jenkins and Wilson have accepted the dictates of the international bankers and monopolists: they have promised the International Monetary Fund a payments surplus of £300 million annually for the next ten years.
The slight progress which they have begun to make is a result of cut-backs in credit, higher prices and fewer jobs, which have caused the present strikes.
The resulting decline in investment will soon destroy any temporary gains in the balance of payments, and worse attacks will follow.
The Tories and the right-wing Labour leaders can only go on by provoking the severest clashes.
In the service of these same bankers and monopolists they must attack the unions, to weaken the working class.
Imports will be further reduced to cut consumption of the workers and their families.
The so-called 'shift of resources into export industries' is again to cut the amount for consumption on the home market.
Wages must be kept down. Speed-up and closures - so-called rationalization - are the only way capitalists can restore their rate of profit on return from international trading. And so disputes over redundancy, short-time working and Measured-Day Work will grow.
The government's policies and the employers' plans are one and the same thing.
* * *
By stopping the Labour government's plans for laws against the unions, the working class has left itself with the ability to wage the strike struggle against the employers.
Jenkins has made it clear that the credit squeeze, the cuts in consumption and the whole 'deflation' package will continue.
This is why the bankers are so enthusiastic about Wilson's government, even if the motor manufacturers are fearful of the effects of the credit restrictions on their sales.
Finance and heavy industry always win out against the manufacturing industrialists in such critical periods, and the manufacturers, like the motor industry, then take advantage of the repressive and right-wing policies imposed on their workers.
That was the situation before Hitler's rise to power in Germany.
The capitalists know very well that the present strength of the working class is the one great barrier they must overcome.
They hope that entry into the European Common Market will give them both the economic market and the political strength to expand industrially and at the same time a reinforced political strength to control the working class.
Already the Common Market authorities predict, for example, 200,000 increase in unemployed in coalmining and 400,000 in textiles in the immediate future.
Without a shadow of doubt, speed-up, closures 'rationalisation' and drastically reduced living standards would result from entry into EEC.
* * *
That is the purpose of 'entry' and it is the reason for unanimity on the question between the Tory, Labour and Liberal parties.
The Communist Party is now modifying its opposition to the Common Market because it knows Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe is working for new types of collaboration with the West European capitalists, in order to 'stabilize' the position in Europe, i.e. to keep down the Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Rumanian, Bulgarian and Soviet [p. 84] working classes.
Leadership can only come from a Marxist party which is independent of all plans of the capitalist class and the Stalinist bureaucracy, just as the working class must fight against them in order to survive.
* * *
That is the lesson for the working class of the whole of Europe as well as Britain.
When the working class in any country enters struggles which raise the question of power, one of the most important factors for the outcome is the international relationship of forces in the class struggle.
Here a complete change has taken place since the 1920s and 1930s.
The workers of every European country are thrown into great strike struggles by the effects of the same crisis which is producing the strikes in Britain.
This strength of the working class, reaching its high points in France and Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Italy and Germany this year, is both an indication of the depth of the struggles in Britain and a major factor for their success.
The Labour government has shown in Northern Ireland that it will use troops to defend a reactionary Tory government and the employers who stand behind it.
They will not stand back and watch the development of the struggle in Britain and political preparation is necessary against them.
That is why the All Trades Unions Alliance has such an important role; its aim is to build alternative socialist leadership in the unions.
The monopolies in Britain have been helped by the state to prepare attacks on the working class.
* * *
British-Leyland announces a £70 million investment programme at the Cowley plant, and immediately before short-time and redundancy.
£90 million is being invested in containerization in the Merseyside docks alone.
GEC-EE received gifts from the Labour government of £31 million to proceed with their merger and the thousands of sackings which follow.
Now Benn is in charge of the nationalized industries as well as being the government's liaison officer with the monopolies.
The unions, the carworkers, the dockers and the GEC-EE workers are involved in a political struggle against the overall plans of the state, the banks and the monopolies to impose the burden of the crisis on the working class.
Alongside them in the political fight are the miners and all the lower-paid workers battling against the incomes policy.
The emphasis is on exports and the government aids to investment all make the state a direct factor in the wages and productivity struggle in all these industries.
The struggle against unemployment can therefore only be won in a fight against the state, which is the instrument of big business.
The present wave of strikes is an essential preparation for the struggle against unemployment, because these strikes accelerate the unification of the working class.
Most essential is a socialist policy and leadership to direct this strength.
As the Tory Party prepares new attacks, protection for non-unionists and new laws against the unions, what is the role of the union leaders in these strikes?
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* * *
Whilst union leaders were negotiating for a 15s. increase, the dustmen won, by unofficial action, £2 10s.
In the mines, Sir Sidney Ford announced himself 'surprised' by the NGB's [sic] granting the full wage claim of 27s. 6d., but the men stayed out on strike and the strike spread.
The resignation of Ford, Daly and the NUM executive has been demanded all over Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and they have lost the confidence of miners everywhere.
The strikes in motors found Scanlon and Jones, after all their 'left' talk, paralyzed.
Jones actually sat with Feather, Hayday and others in a joint committee with the Confederation of British Industries and signed a report announcing an 'agenda for action' to resolve the problems of 'industrial relations'.
This, described by the employers as 'a break-through in employer-union co-operation at national level', was done on the weekend of October 18 and 19, when the miners strike was at its height, the motor industry was over-run by disputes, and low-paid workers in bakeries and other industries were preparing new strikes.
This attempt at an agreement with the employers follows the failure of the Labour government to impose its legislation and the blastfurnace-men's successful killing at one blow of the TUC's proposals for settling disputes.
The trade union bureaucracy is only carrying forward logically its reactionary policy of the June special TUC conference.
Their answer to government intervention in the unions is not to fight the government, but...to get closer to the employers!
From the union leaders, right and left, the workers can expect only that they will go more surely into the camp of the employers as the struggle builds up. So it was in 1926, so it is today.
We appeal especially to all members and supporters of the Communist Party in the trade unions.
* * *
The presence of Jones' signature on the agreement with the CBI, the lining up of Daly with the right wing of the NUM, following as they do the wage-cutting agreements of McGarvey, the desertion of Paynter, and the record of Scanlon from the engineers' deal in 1968, through the fight on the Ford penalty clauses and the fight against anti-trade union legislation - surely this experience settles the disputed questions of leadership in the unions.
The line of 'left unity' with so-called 'progressive' union bureaucrats has helped these same 'lefts' to carry out their betrayals.
The essential question is to build an independent Marxist leadership.
In 1964, the working class elected a Labour government. In 1966, the majority of that government was greatly increased.
But Wilson and the government have ruthlessly carried out the plans of the bankers and monopolists and betrayed the working class.
Since the seamen's strike of 1966 and especially the dockers' strike of October 1967, the working class has turned away from the Labour Party towards the economic struggle.
The Tories and the employers hoped that this would lead to their return to office in control of a disillusioned working class.
But this 'economic' struggle already has major political effects.
It threatens the Tories with defeat, because it brings the working class forward in independent political action.
Great caution is necessary at this point. The temporary voting swing back to Labour reflects the great and growing feeling in the working [p. 86] class against the employers.
But the plans of the employers have actually been implemented by the Labour government and will continue to be so.
The recent improvement in balance of payments figures has been achieved only by major restrictions on investment.
* * *
Instead of the predicted 10-15 per cent increase in investment this year, there was only 5 per cent.
That means a worse crisis in balance of payments is being inevitably prepared because economic growth falls behind.
Further and more severe attacks on the working class would follow.
The essential question is to build political leadership in the working-class movement.
In and around strike struggles, a new revolutionary political leadership can be built from all the most advanced workers through the Young Socialists, the All Trades Unions Alliance and the Socialist Labour League.
The Workers Press is the instrument of building this alternative leadership.
The British working class will not stay at a purely economic level in its strikes. It already raises the question of the leadership of the unions, the political character of that leadership and its relations with the employers and with the Labour government.
It seeks ways of hitting at the Tories politically as well as the employers economically.
* * *
The working class is strong, buoyant and resolute.
In such a situation, the expansion of the circulation of the Workers Press, its close relation to the struggle of the working class, and the building of an alternative socialist leadership - all of these can and will be accomplished.
The road now opens for the building of the revolutionary working-class party which every worker is beginning to recognise is needed.
The Socialist Labour League, recruiting hundreds of new members and building new branches, supported by the Young Socialists and the All Trades Unions Alliance, calls upon all workers to join with it in the task of constructing that party.
Friday, October 24, 1969."
All emphasis in original.