The miners have accepted the latest pay offer by the National Coal Board, an offer which everyone recognises to be outside the Labour Government's social contract. Only one year ago, the Tory Government was putting the country on a three-day working week and causing millions of pounds in production to be lost, in an effort to put an end to the struggle of these same miners for a claim which was outside the terms of Phase 3. The Tories hurled all their resources against the miners, failing, despite economic sabotage and 'taking the miners to the country' in a general election, to stop the strike which was to bring down Phase 3 and the Tory Government along with it. By contrast, Wilson's Labour Government meekly capitulates to the miners without the slightest sign of a fight.
The bureaucrats at Congress House and Transport House will continue to insist for some time to come that the miners will prove to be nothing more than a 'special case', leaving the social contract intact. But this fiction will become less and less credible in the coming weeks. As leading right-wing trade union bureaucrat Frank Chapple put it when speaking of the current wage claim of his own union members: 'We shall want —no, we shall insist on exactly the same interpretation of the social contract [as the miners]'. Frank Chapple doesn't want to 'welch' on the social contract like Mr Scargill, but he knows full well that the working class are going to take Scargill's advice ('We have smashed the social contract...other trade unionists should press through the breach'. The miners are not the first group of workers to break the contract, but they are the first of the big battalions to do so. Obviously Labour's social contract awaits only its official death certificate.
1974 —DEFEAT FOR CAPITALIST STRATEGY
The political consequences for the capitalist class of their defeat at the hands of the miners in 1974 were extremely severe and far-reaching. As we explain in detail in this issue of International, their victory signalled the end, not just of one Tory administration, but of the whole strategy articulated by Heath for dealing with the fundamental structural difficulties of British capitalism. Heath attempted to give a long and dangerously overdue boost to the fortunes of British industrial capital —at the expense of the financial wing of the British bourgeoisie— by leading Britain into the EEC and turning to a frontal assault on the organisations of the working class in an effort to decisively drive down workers' living standards. The project came to grief in the face of the immense organisational strength of the trade unions, a strength consolidated over the course of twenty-five years of full employment. The Government fell, leaving the Tory Party in pieces, and leaving the bourgeoisie with no coherent policy and no viable instrument for challenging and defeating the working class.
The consequences of this year's miners' victory for the Labour Government and its incomes policy are no less severe. Certainly the Government is not about to be overthrown. But the breakdown of the social contract and the search by the Government for an alternative policy to curb the working class —accompanied by the public promptings of Prentice and others— signal a sharp acceleration of a crisis which is already shaking the Labour Party to its foundations. For the Labour Government finds itself in a situation where to meet the immediate needs of either the working class or the bourgeoisie tears the Labour Party apart.
When Wilson was catapulted to power in February of last year, he had no choice but to orient the Party toward meeting —with some notable exceptions— the most immediate demands of the working class movement. The left wing of the Party was placed in charge of dismantling the machinery of confrontation left over from the Tories —the Industrial Relations Act and the pay laws. Concessions over rents were made, and the left were promised a referendum on the EEC and an opportunity to nationalise profitable firms. The successful upsurge of the working class against the efforts of the Tories to construct a strong state machine, inevitably shifted the policy of the Labour Party to the left, placing in the ascendancy that wing of the party which is prepared to break with the immediate interests (although not the historical interests) of the bourgeoisie.
But this implied going against the burning need of the ruling class for an effective form of pay restraint. Ever since the 1960s, the 'voluntary' incomes policy —under which the trade union bureaucracy carried out pay restraint by a combination of pressure and repression of their own members— has proved singularly ineffective. The economic crisis had become too deep and the combativity of the working class too high to allow the bureaucracy to effectively contain the struggle. Wilson knew the social contract could not hold up for long. But Wilson had no other choice. The working class had just smashed a Government whose main plank was confrontation. It would not tolerate a similar course being taken by Labour. Moreover, Wilson had learnt a lesson from his brief turn to confrontation with In Place of Strife in 1969: unlike the Tory Party, the Labour Party, even though it represents the historical interests of capitalism, is based on the organisations of the working class. So long as the strength and combativity of those organisations remains intact, a turn to confrontation threatens to bring a Labour Government down.
But it is not possible to ignore the most vital needs of the ruling class for long, without either provoking the ruling class to overthrow the Government or running into a revolt by the right wing of the party —the Callaghans, Jenkinses, Prentices and Healeys who are in favour of obeying every day to day diktat from the Bank of England and the international Monetary Fund. Sooner or later Wilson must turn to some form of statutory pay restraint. If he does not, then the right wing of social democracy will come out in open revolt. On the other hand, a move in this direction will inevitably lead to a revolt by the left. Either way Wilson faces the prospect of his Cabinet being shattered, his Government falling, and a prolonged internal crisis in the Labour Party.
LABOUR'S TEST
Wilson finds himself in this near impossible position for good reason. For this particular Labour Government [illegible] is precisely why [illegible]. All previous Labour Governments have come to power [illegible] of working class defeat, or in periods of relative economic upswing. This time, precisely the opposite conditions apply. The combativity of the working class is high, and, as we argue in this issue of International, the economic plight of the ruling class is sharper than at any time since the 1920s and 1930s. The Labour Party is therefore being subjected to a rigorous test by the working class.
Furthermore, the position occupied by the Labour left is more central than at any time since the War. On this occasion, left wing social democrats are integrally involved in the day-to-day running of the Government itself. This is one of the 'fruits' of the industrial upsurge of the last ten years, an upsurge which has resulted in the left shifting its power base away from the declining constituency organisations to the trade unions. This is a different internal structuring of power in the labour movement from that [illegible]. This means that as well as [illegible] social democracy and its political formulas are also being tested in a quite particular way.
This situation undoubtedly opens up new opportunities for revolutionaries in Britain. But first it is worth looking at the special significance of many of the political issues [illegible] around which [illegible] (of which the conflict between left and right in the Government is a pale reflection) is developing.
THE POST-WAR 'CONSENSUS'
What is significant about the developing struggle between the masses and the Government is not just that the level of struggle — measured both in terms of the number of days lost in strikes and the amount of political opposition from within the labour movement— is higher at the beginning of [illegible] present regime than it was at the end of his last. [illegible] is also important is that many of the issues over which [illegible] affect [illegible] certain long-term 'guarantees' [illegible] at the end of the last war in an effort to ensure class peace. In other words, they affect the central pillars of the post-war 'consensus' between the [illegible] British worker. [illegible] still, sections of the working class are fighting these issues out in a way which objectively [illegible] the traditional line of struggle urged by social democracy.
Firstly, the ruling class pledged that there would be no return to substantial levels of unemployment following the experience of the 1930s. Yet today levels of 1½ million unemployed are openly contemplated. Furthermore, the working class responds by taking over factories and either setting them to work through experiments in self-management and demanding their nationalisation, [illegible] workers co-operatives, or demanding their nationalisation to ensure jobs. Despite all the attacks on picketing, the police and the courts are neither physically nor politically strong enough to reverse the trend.
Secondly, the ruling class had also submitted to demands for a welfare state. Yet among the first groups of workers to fight the Government were the nurses and ancillary workers of the NHS. They threw into relief the real material decline of the health services and the accompanying resurgence of private medicine. The health workers have not stood idly by and allowed this 'social' issue to be dealt with by Parliament alone. Many have taken the very advanced initiative of placing embargoes on private hospital facilities.
The crisis of the welfare state as a whole interlocks with the strains and pressures to which the working class family is subjected by the general social crisis. The bourgeoisie promoted the idea that the individual worker and his family should be able to enjoy the benefits of increased consumption. Shorter working hours and increased leisure time therefore implied that the state should take over part [illegible] tasks —care of the aged, for example. The deterioration of the welfare state throws these [illegible] is also the most vigorous promoter [illegible] and morality'. And all this takes place at the same time as increasing [illegible], whose oppression within the family has gone [on] for so long, are beginning to become more and more involved in a fight for equal pay, nurseries, [illegible] contraception facilities.
Thirdly, mass struggles have continued to break out against the consistent attempt of the bourgeoisie to dismantle bourgeois democratic liberties. These reactionary moves have not been halted by Labour's presence in office. The state has been strengthened at the expense of the workers movement, both with and without the help of the Government. Attacks on picketing have continued. Labour's refusal to release the Shrewsbury Two [illegible] giving the judges a [illegible] ten more building worker pickets in Newcastle. Army-police exercises continue, and Labour has introduced the Prevention of Terrorism Act (which will be applied to far wider groups than Irish exiles in Britain), emphasising once again the centrality of the Irish struggle in Britain's affairs. Nor has the Government done anything to stop the growth of the fascist right, whose racism, sexism and anti-Irish chauvinism threaten to gain some purchase on the working class.
[illegible] most [illegible] of all [illegible] the immediate period the issue around which the confrontation between the left and the right is shaping up: Britain's entry into the EEC. For this shakes up some of the [illegible] basic ideological formulas in which [illegible] on democratic liberties (the 'sovereignty of parliament'). The consequences of Britain's entry will go beyond the formal outcome of the referendum. For [illegible] British worker, that its adherence to the traditions of 'national class unity' is a pretence; secondly, that the British [illegible] dump the 'democratic' [illegible].
THE LEFT AND THE EEC
It is in the struggle over the EEC that the crisis in the Government will come to a head. This is not at all accidental. Entry into [illegible] talists as a whole, via the Brussels bureaucrats, would be able to intervene against the Labour left's strategy of trying to use the British bourgeois state against employers in the field of economic planning. [illegible] the left in the referendum policy would therefore throw the left wing of the Government onto the defensive. It is perhaps Wilson's hope that a defeat of this kind would so demoralise and disorient the left that Wilson could then move in a decisive way to a statutory incomes policy —a tactic which, however, will only post- (CONTINUED ON PAGE 62).
[Editorial continued from page 2:] -pone but not avert the crisis which threatens to bring his Government down and tear the Labour Party apart internally.
But the crisis of left-wing social democracy is far from reducible to its being out-manoeuvred by Wilson, and it will continue irrespective of its fortunes in the present Cabinet. As the post-war 'consensus' begins to break up, the left, whether in the Cabinet or leading the opposition to Wilson in the ranks of the Party and the unions, will not find itself stuck for issues on which to pass resolutions. In fact it will continue to play a leading role in the labour movement. But because of this front-seat role, and because of the level and political range of the struggle on the industrial field, it will find its ideological and strategic formulas being repeatedly put to the test. For hundreds of thousands of politically organised and conscious workers, left social democracy symbolises a gradual transition to socialism through Parliament. Yet working class opposition to Labour's policies expresses itself increasingly via industrial action, as we have seen in the health service, over unemployment, and over Chile (an issue which in itself highlights the bankruptcy of gradualism and reformism). These struggles are extra-parliamentary, yet they often compel the support of left social-democratic leaders whose allegiance to Parliamentary legality is unshakeable. The left cannot help but be buffeted about by the dilemma; should the leaders of the working class base themselves on Parliament ('law and order') or on the extra-parliamentary struggle of the masses? Left social democracy affirms the former, yet it will be political currents to their left who will benefit politically from their dilemma.
[illegible] order will continue to decompose under the interlocking forces we have sketched out here. But there can be no room for any easy optimism about the outcome of the process. For this decomposition has contradictory implications. As long as the working class remains politically dominated by leaders who are reformist and class-collaborationist, the bourgeoisie will be able to put together at least some of the elements for a counter-offensive.
The political weaknesses of the workers' movement are being forcefully displayed, not only on the industrial field —where sectional trade union struggle and traditional reliance exclusively on annual wage claims against inflation are all too apparent— but on the most basic issues being debated in the parliamentary arena. The way in which the left social-democrats and the CP have taken up the question of the EEC does not augur well for either the outcome of the referendum, or indeed for the political future as a whole. For the left have campaigned against the EEC on a thoroughly nationalist basis. This has made it possible for them to form alliances between the labour movement and all manner of bourgeois and reactionary forces. It has also proved an opportunity to praise Parliament to the skies, thereby feeding bourgeois propaganda about the 'need to maintain law and order' and consolidating the parliamentary cretinism of the British working class. The revolutionary left has intervened to exclude Powell, the NF and other bourgeois forces from anti-EEC platforms in the labour movement, and has agitated against the EEC on an internationalist basis (for a 'United Socialist States of Europe') and has denounced Parliament in favour of a workers' democracy. But the weight of the revolutionary left is of course not yet strong enough to open up a breach in the chauvinist and parliamentarist ideology of the working class.
Chauvinism is so deep-rooted among British workers that it has been possible for British imperialism to carry on a war in Ireland for six years, without so much as a word of protest from the vast majority of workers' organisations. The Labour Government does not even have to apologise for its bipartisan agreement with the Tory Party, for the role of British troops in the Catholic ghettoes, or for the intervention of the British bourgeois state in Ireland. The loyalists are increasingly able to tip the balance of forces in their own favour, and it may not be long before a British Labour Government restores this reactionary bloc to power. The consequences stemming from working class indifference to the fate of the nationalist minority in the north of Ireland will be serious indeed for every worker in Britain.
The bourgeoisie will be able to utilise these political weaknesses to move back onto the offensive against the working class. At the moment, there are two chief contenders for the leadership of the anti-working class forces: the new right-wing leaders of the Tory Party and Enoch Powell.
THATCHER'S TORIES
The bourgeoisie have by no means resolved the problem of formulating a new strategic policy following the defeat of Heath. That is why they do not make an immediate move to overthrow Labour. The Tory Party is still not able to give convincing guarantees of being able to take on the working class successfully. The absence of a viable strategy has produced a disarray among the Tories which was most sharply exposed in the October elections. A section of industrial capital switched their support to the Liberals, and in Scotland finance capital supported the Scottish Nationalists. In the north of Ireland, the Protestant population are no longer the passive followers of British Toryism. Enoch Powell has broken from the Tory Party and roused its petty-bourgeois base against the EEC. Sections of the ex-leadership of the military, encouraged by the fact that the British army is fighting 'at home', came out in favour of extra-parliamentary 'citizens' defence organisations'. Finally, the Tories, having for four years abandoned the 'peaceful co-existence' policy with the unions, lost a substantial part of the one-third of working class votes needed to keep them in office.
The election of Margaret Thatcher to replace Ted Heath as Tory leader in no way solves the problem of Tory Party unity and orientation. She is a good figurehead for the Party in an election, and may even win some support from women voters. Following Sir Keith Joseph, she is even able to campaign vigorously on a 'morality and decency' platform. But 'morality' will not solve the decisive problem of how to smash the organised strength of the working class. On this issue she can only vacillate between a re-run of Heath's policy or a policy of allowing unemployment to mount. But in the present situation, either would almost certainly fail. Massive unemployment under the Tories would only do its demoralising work if the working class had been decisively defeated in a confrontation first —otherwise it would most likely have the opposite effect of leading to militant factory occupations. But it is just such a confrontation which Heath has shown the Tory Party in office to be incapable of surviving.
Meanwhile, there are bolder forces at work. Enoch Powell has consistently moved with the grain of all that is most backward and dangerous in the working class. Against the immediate interests of big capital he has fought against Britain's entry into the EEC on a chauvinist platform which the left of social-democracy cannot help but applaud. On the question of racism, similarly, he has demonstrated his capacity in the past to make deep inroads into the workers movement —gaining industrial support for his policies in 1968 and again over the Ugandan Asian affair in 1972. Powell's latest return is even more ominous, for this time he brings the reactionary Loyalist cohorts with him, urging them to play a more direct role in British politics.
POWELL
Powell's objective is to be the populist leader, the 'strong man', of a government which cuts across traditional party lines and which rests on a mass reactionary base. His strategy is to split the working class politically, along the lines of its deepest ideological weaknesses, as a means of creating the conditions to mobilise the state to smash it organisationally. This particular strategy for a strong state is far more potent than anything Margaret Thatcher can produce. For Powell is willing to cut across both the immediate need of the bourgeoisie to reorient to the EEC (which Thatcher is not), and across parties too (precisely in order to establish virtual 'rule by decree'). In addition Powell has the support of the fascists of the National Front, who will complement the work of such a Government by reactionary mass mobilisations and selective street terror against the left.
But the bourgeoisie will be unable to organise itself coherently around any of the available alternatives unless the strength of the workers' organisations and their capacity to respond to attacks is shattered in some decisive defeat. At the present time, there is no force capable of inflicting it on the working class. The prospects in the intermediate term are therefore for a continuation of explosive mass struggle and a generalised political crisis for the whole of the bourgeois political order, including the Labour Party.
A WORKERS' OFFENSIVE
But for the working class to take advantage of this political disarray and assemble the political instruments out of the crisis for putting an end to bourgeois rule, requires much more than the flexing of its organisational muscle. Out of the upsurges which are inevitable in the next period, in which strike movements involving the whole of the working class are on the agenda, the working class must adopt the policies and forms of organisation which can undermine the bourgeois state and lay the basis for overthrowing it.
Consequently, the responsibility of the revolutionary left is very great indeed. It must constantly seek to unify its own forces along with the tens of thousands of militants who are breaking practically and ideologically with social democracy, to repeatedly intervene in the political crisis within the labour movement via a systematic united front policy. As against the traditional policy of relying exclusively on annual wage demands, and utilising industrial strength almost exclusively for trade union ends, it must promote within the unions a policy of fighting against all incomes policy under capitalism, of fighting for a sliding scale of wages, defence of the gains made under the welfare state, and for the unions to take up the demands of women workers and housewives. In the battles against unemployment, it must promote factory occupations and demands for nationalisation of companies creating redundancies. And it must vigorously take up the struggle against racism, chauvinism and dependence on parliament —in the immediate period within a workers united front against the EEC and within the growing movement for the withdrawal of troops from Ireland.
But within all these united fronts, from those on which only small forces within the labour movement are as yet mobilised to those involving the broadest masses, the decisive task of the revolutionary left is to promote the independent organisation of the working class —through strike committees, action committees, Councils of Action and other democratic forms of organisation— in order that as the political crisis matures, and as the working class upsurge throws up forms of organisation whose objective logic is to undermine the bourgeois state, there will be sufficient numbers of working class militants politically capable of leading the masses away from reformism and firmly on to the road of socialist revolution.