Swp Turns Its Back on Rank File Organised!

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THE pressure of the economic slump, and the aggressive stance of the Tory government, have made the last three years tough going for trade unionists. And top TUC leaders, wedded to the idea that mass struggle is too risky, have blocked all moves for a But this year's union conferences have shown that determined resistance is growing among the rank and file. 'Health Workers for the Full Claim organised the biggest fringe meeting ever at the NUPE conference.

New Broad Lefts have been established in the NUR and COHSE. Broad Left groupings in the TGWU are becoming more active and coordinated.

The Broad Left in the tax workers' union IRSF is fighting moves by the union executive to victimise its leaders. In the CPSA the Broad Left bas regained a These Broad Lefts are not like those of the füs. totally dominated by the Communist Paris. be: te more left-wing and less bureaucratic.

In BL over the past year the Legiaod Actor Coesmittee has been more actire than ever before.

Yet this is the time chosen bs the Socisi Workers Party (SWP) to scrap the rank-and-file tracie union groups which it has built or encouraged over the past ten to fifteen years. The SWP leadership has directed SWP trade unionists to turn, not to broader left groupings, but to strictly 'party' activity.

Stan Crooke and Ian MeCalman report.

Socialist Organiser Alliance SOCIALIST Organiser fights to act as a real SOCIALIST Organiser fights to i act as a real campaigning paper which can organise campaigning paper which can organise workers in the struggle for new leadership. workers in the struggle for new leadership.

To do so we need consistent support and To do so we need consistent support and money. Socialist Organiser Alliance groups Why not join with us? Supporters are asked to. undertake to sell a minimum of 6 papers per week and contribute at least £1.50 If there is no group in your area why not casident workers, and the in mat is what a swe machinery was down- ing class has collapsed. LAU YUILITIAN leadership ment in one vincial union conclude that the worksoggle was generalised That is what the SWP's played. The result was The molecular processes fightback. majority on the national executive. "YOU don't get letters saying, 'Where is the Carworker?' or 'Why don't the dockers publish the Dockworker? Nobody asks for these papers," reports SWP leader Tony Cliff in the May/June edition of the SWP's magazine Socialist Review.

Cliff concludes: 'The downturn means that we must relate politically to everything, not just our own little patch."

Translated into plain English, this means scrapping all the rank and file organisations sponsored by the SWP and relating to struggles by attempting direct recruitment into the SWP. "If we stop pretending that we are something bigger than we really are, we will actually become more enthusiastic socialists and better mninminta ITHA concludes.

The shift is of some importance. Since the late 1960s - when the SWP launched its first rank and file trade union grouping, among teachers - the rank and file groups have been presented by the SWP as a key element in their strategy for socialIn the early seventies they claimed on the strength of these grouDs. to be the organisation of the Left with the most serious orientation to, and coplantation in, industry.

Cliff's explanation runs as follows:

•'For rank and file movements you need three cogwheels: the tiny cogwheel « the party, the middle cog obeel of the Rank and File od the biggest cogwheel of bass trade union membersip."

•We were able to build it the Rank and File organisDon) because there was a maca movement of self... We had always wanted to build it but couldn't until the struggle was very highly generalised."

'There is always conflict between the rank and file and the bureaucracy, but unless it can be generalised, you can't have the three cogwheels."

What was forgotten With the slump this has become impossible. "I saw the problems staring me in the face... in November 1977 ... to me it was absolutely clear by January 1978 that we were wrong," Cliff writes.

The evidence was provided when 520 delegates at an SWP-sponsored Rank and File conference voted for a one-day strike (VecemDer 1, 1911 ın support of the firetighters) - and no-one came out on strike.

"On December 7, the penny dropped. Nobody came out on strike! How did we make this mistake? ... We forgot that the job of the party is to generalise."

The explanation hardly helps. What was "forgotten' in 1977 was not 'the job of the party is to generalise' but a sober. realistic approach to the official labour movement.

The official movement should not be superstitiously worshipped. It is often ramshackle, passive, and even partly hollow. Yet it remains immensely powerful. It cannot be by-passed. Attemnts hv small groups of left-wingers to hurl calls efor action over the heads of the official movement are no substitute for a fight to transform, invigorate and ranow the laarorahin nf Cliff: back to square one experience proves. 'Each sectarian wants to have his own labour movement.

By the repetition of magic formulas he thinks to force an entire class to group itself around him," wrote Leon Trotsky.

Nothing is gained if the SWP replaces the 'magic formula Rank and File with the formula Party. Indeed, much is lost. Serious work done by trade unionists in and around the SWP will be disrupted. Instead of the faults of SWPsponsored rank and file groups being corrected, the whole enterprise of grouping militants for the immediate struggle against the bureaucracy, without sectarian preconditions of political affiliation or across-the-board political agreement, is to be abandoned.

Real political

processes Cliff faile to analves vull iano w analyst lt simplistic anti-bureaucracy approach of the Rank and File groups. Unofficial strike action was always fetishised by the Rank and File groups and involvemont in thn affinial often that, apart from barracking from the back of meeting, the union bureaucracy was given a free hand to carry on its betrayals whilst the Rank and File groups attempted to mobilise phantom armies to tilt at windmills.

The actual political processes in the labour movement were ignored, as if strikes, sit-ins, and picket lines existed on a different planet and were enough in themselves to provide an answer to reformist illusions.

Broader political questions - workers' alternative plans for production, such as the Lucas plan, or policy documents by trades councils' conferences on the Alternative Economic strategy - have been ignored either as a diversion or as an unwelcome intrusion into the 'real" class struggle of strikes and sit-ins.

Sectarian

towards Labour Of late in particular, the Rank and File groups have found themselves victims of the SWP's sectarian attitude to the Labour party. When the question of affiliation to the Labour Party has become a fairly Darty hoo hannmo a fairlar major issue in a number of unions - like EIS, CPSA, NALGO, - the Rank and File groups, paralysed by the SWP's sectarianism, have found themselves standing on the sidelines.

In other unions they have passively ignored battles relating to the fight for Tahara Deuter damanana, Labour rary utmucracy .

And the result of the SWP's blinkered exclusive focus on direct action is that when reformist illusions and reformist leaders stymie, the action, they Norember Jýmorement failed by which alternatives to the existing leaders develop, and through which future explosions are prepared, are dismissed by the SWP as 'resolutionmongering". The role of leadership is minimised.

Thus in recent issues of Socialist Worker Tony Cliff puts all recent working class defeats down to deepseated "sectionalism'. Solidarity has to be rebuilt brick by brick, starting with 'the minorities of workers who are ready to fight" and "tasks which are genuinely achievable"

Lindsey Greig argues that: "Many organised workplaces today are little better than the unorganised shops of a few years ago." Even 'the principle of not crossing a picket line" often has to be sacrificed Orga have been established in most big towns.

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help us to build one?

To 'Get Organised", write to us 28 Middle Lane, London N8.

Name Address to "salvaging something from a disastrous posttion".

So the job is to rebuild the labour movement from the ground up, not to redirect and revive it by organising the left. The task of the day is not mass struggle but individual propaganda.

A revolutionary organisation maintains its vitality by relating to class struggle. But the SWP's self-denying sectarianism has already led to a serious case of emaciation.

First of all the SWP wound down the Anti-Nazi League. Then Women's Voice : was reduced to the women's appendage of the SWP. Involvement by the SWP in international solidarity A lI campaigns remains nodexistent. And the SHP's sectarian attitude to the struggles in the Labour Party reflects a skewed view of the whode deredopment of the Brist inbac movement.

Rank is 0=15T = Icl TIE = SENT LATI sect 5 SO SEEI ONE IT FIT FT -which = SE left in Brise= The Dead i TEEsE De Left in the 7s E fie won't disappes: see the SWP has rati g from the job, socis Cri aniser certaint are : wak away from it.

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›cialist Organiser no.95 August 12 1982. Page 12