"incomes Policy, Legislation, and Shop Stewards"

reviewed by Tony Topham This 136 page booklet by Tony Cliff and Colin Barker, published by London Industrial Shop Stewards! Defence Committee, provides a wealth of background material on the underlying purpose of the present drive for ‘Incomes Policies! i.e. the drive to render capitalist economies stable and competitive, without the need to revert to classical deflation and unemployment. The authors have assembled an impressive array of information on profits, prices, taxation, the Balance of Payments, military expenditure abroad and capital export strains, ete. The factual material is made readily assimilable by careful presentation and the avoidance of economists’ jargon. Effective opposition to the current myths and pseudoearguments which defend the incomes policy can be greatly strengthened by a reading of these sections. Chapter 7, on Shop Stewards and unofficial strikes, is also a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the shop floor situation, as is the Chapter on Anti-Union Legislation. The treatment of the Labour Movement, and of the socialist politics which should arise from opposition to the incomes policy, is much less satisfactory. The analysis of Trade Union "bureaucracy" is over-simplified and sociologically unsound. Of course much of what is said concerning the TUC leadership is correct, but there is a strong tendency to sweep up the whole structure of trade unions from branch level to executives into the single category of stateintegrated bureaucrats. According to their approach, the transformation of the NUS executive from its 1960 position to that of today, would h,ve been impossible. The consciousness of the labour movement at all levels is a much more complicated affair than the authors allow for. Without specifically calling for it, the implication of much of the pamphlet's final section is that the shop stewards must break away from the "dead weight of bureaucracy" and form an alternative to trade unions. This is defeatist and self-defeating counsel. Alongside their failure to distinguish different strands and pressures within the labour movement, there is an accompanying simplicity in their characterisation of "reforms All reforms, according to their thesis, are "reforms from above" = snares to trap the true militants. No inkling of the potential importance of the build-up of demands for anti-capitalist reforms, from below, working through a politically conscious shop stewards' movement, and concentrating pressure into a positive socialist programme, is to be found in these pages, In essence, the comment in Reg Birch's introduction to the booklet sums up the reservations expressed here. He writes: "I do not accept that the extension of shop stewards' organisations, their increase in numbers, will automatically lead (my emphasis - T.T.) to the development of a Socialist Movement. There needs to be politics = working class politics. This is not a question of being militant on economic demands within a factory or place of work alone, or of taking one's politics from the policies or utterances of the 'politicians', whether of left or right, but of the development of political aims by the working class, and of insisting that it is not a case of our supporting or adopting the 'policies! of political parties, but of their supporting the aims and aspirations of the working class," This review is necessarily short and incomplete; more thorough treatment is necessary to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the Cliff/Barker approach, and it is hoped to arrange for a longer review to appear shortly. Meanwhile it would be valuable if the shop stewards! seminar at the Workers' Control conference next month were to take up some of these themes. (Copies of the booklet are available at 2/6a each, plus 6d postage on orders of 6 copies or less, from C. Davison, 83 Greyhounds Road, London, N.17.)