Overestimating the Downturn

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'The Tories have not inflicted a decisive die freart" except wait for an improvement in the economy. A good example of this tendency is the Socialist Workers Party.

In their press Lindsey Greig' argues that "Many organised workplaces to ay are little better than the unorganised shops of a few years agro" The job socialists is io rebuild workplace organisation by agitating round issues such as asbestos and screwing up the courage to cross picket lines "to salvage somethine from a disastrous position"

Tony Cliff quotes the Communist Party leader of the 1920s, J.T. Murphy, "you can't have a rank and file movement if the factories are empty" ', to draw parallels with that period. Jack Robertson, reviewing Richard Croucher's book 'Engineers at War"? draws from Croucher's description of the '20s and '30s "lessons those of us faced with a new slump and a new downturn need to remember."

The SWP stare reality in the face so intensely that it becomes distorted in the process. They end up studying the evidence we have looked at, but only seeing one side of the coin.

But something will turn rp. SW tells us "Several things can create such a change of mood. An expansion of the economy can by reducing unemployment marginally and making workers feel their jobs are no longer at stake if they strike.

Alternatively, the Tories may lose their nerve or the workers may take to the streets. "Periods of defeat and demoralisation like the present do nut last for ever. One or other of these developments is inevitable in the not 400 distant future." (SW, 6.11.82).

breeds paralysis and a position not much different from that of Len Murray!

That this approach distorts and exaggerates the problem can be seen by looking' at what was happening on the shop floor in the '20s and '30s, and at Croucher's book.

Unemployment soared from almost nil in early 1920 to over 2 million by the summer of 1921. By 1924, as the unions pushed back in a series of long and serious defensive battles, they shed more than a quarter of their entire membership. The unions faced straight wage cuts, and the employed deserted in droves.

After the decisive defeat inflicted in the 1926 General Strike, the employers had an even freer hand. Union membership — over 45% of the labour force in 192 — had declined to 33% by the early '30s. During the '30s there was not one national strike.Croucher gives the flavour of those years, "After this disastrous thirteen week lock out (in 1922) substantial wage cuts were inflicted and AEU membership dropped by 25% on the 1920 total. Effective shop steward activity was largely extinguished as the lockout provided the employers with an ideal opportunity to reemploy selectivity...

'Life on the shop floor had become extremely difficult by the end of 1922 and the defet of the General, Strike made it even harder. It was a brave man indeed who would try to negotiate under the circumstances and the atmosphere in the workshops was one of fear • To be known as a steward - some tried to operate secretly just collecting subscriptions and fighting quiet rearguard actions in a whole range of subterranean ways - was to court dismissal"

In certain shops every AEU member left the union. In other shops there was minority membership but no stewards, no negotiations, no day to day representation. Engineering workers were often hired and sacked within the day, unable to keep up with the pace required by a driving management.

It was only by 1941 'that fur the first time in some 20 years engineering workers did not have to go in fear of losing their jobs to the daily stream of unemployed calling at the office in search of work." These extracts give us a vivid glimpse of what the depths of a depression really looked like (SW's description of today).

It not Is obvious that we are 1 this situation here ana now 1ow. But the SWP's analysis is wrong not only because it is one-sided but because it focusses only on the trade union struggle, which it confuses with the class struggle.

This is a vital point. If we are to understand what is happening in the class struggle we cannot, as we have done until now, simply focus on developments in the unions vital as these are. The SWP, because it sees moves forward or back, left or right, largely in terms of strike statistics, misses the point.

Undoubtedly some sections of workers are demoralised and cynical and can see no way forward. Some have moved to the right. But the Tories have been unable to inflict a decisive defeat on the unions. At the same time there has been a limited but substantial politicisation as many other workers, faced with the impasse on the industrial front, are turning to wider solutions, solutions which focus initially on the election of a Labour government.

Even if it is in a limited and distorted way, they see that the framework of economic struggle is too narrow.

Consequently there has been a ferment in the political party of labour which has created a limited dislocation of right wing control.

We talked earlier about the immense task Thatcher has on her hands in rescuing capital trom its predicament. The margin for error is slim - and the dislocation in the Labour Party punches holes in the bosses' safety net - the assurance that a 1974 style Labour government is available to take over from Thatcher as it did from In big but Heath. 1970-74 there were industrial struggles, no comnlementarv upsurge in the Labour Of course we must not overestimate the fight in the Labour Party. It, is increasingly coming up against the limitations of the left in the unions. But socialists, unless they are incorrigible sectarians, must be involved in it, seeing the burning necessity to integrate the union struggle with the Labour Party struggle.

The SWP abstain from it. They can't see it at all. Their only scenario for a move forward is direct struggles like 1972-74.

This affects their analysis of what is going on. Really they only look at half of the screen.

They have, of course, always fatally underestimated the question of politics and government. The SWP first derided the importance of the developments in the Labour Party - an argument contradicted by the intensive coverage of the Labour Party struggle in their press - and then after the reverses at the last Labour Party conference, just as the fight reached a new tempo, they claimed that the left was already defeated.

The fact that the SWP blind themselves to the fact that the future of the working class is bound up with what happens in the Labour Party as well as the unions puts their analysis of what is happening on the wrong tracks.

Chapple, Duffy and Evans are more clear than Tony Cliff. They see how clearly the question of union democracy, of who controls the basic organisations of the working class, is bound up with the question of who controls the Labour Party. They see how clearly in the last three years the fight in the Labour Party has become intertwined with the fight in the unions.

But even in focussing solely on the unions, the SWP have always underestimated such issues as who controls the unions. They have always focussed far too narrowly on • the workplace. They fail to see that, particularly in period of downturn, the fight cannot be just to buila, control, link up workplace organisation. This has to be part of a fight to take control of the union machines.

We need to go across and up the unions, linking the struggle against the employers with the struggle for a new union leadership in the context of democratising workers' organisation.

In this context "the bureaucratisation of the shop stewards' movement' is double-sided. When stewards lose their roots in the membership, and are unable to mobilise, that is fatal. But the greater integration of stewards into the unions has the potential of focussing a fight for control of the machines, a fight which is ever more necessary in the face of the centralisation of capital and the growing role of the state.

To combat modern capitalism, workers need strong centralised organisations transformed and democratised.

The SWP, however, focuses on workplace organisation explaining the downturn almost exclusively in terms of organisational weaknesses, the sectionalism of stewards, the growth of full-time convenors, etc., at the expense of an examination of the problems of rank and file consciousness - of which these organisational problems, important as they are, are - - 11an expression and a reinforcement.

The SWP's failure to confront the problems of the political consciousness of the rank and file means that they see more and more militancy generalised to more and more workers combined with. abstract arguments about how good a socialist society will be as sufficient. They completely misunderstood the need for socialists to fight in struggle with the rank and file to develop • and transform their existing consciousness if we are to move towards that society.

Some on the left make the apparently opposite mistake of viewing too optimisitcally the state of the struggle. This mistake produces different consequences, but is rooted in the same soil as the SWP's: a failure to understand the problems of political consciousness. This kind of analysis has been brought to bear to explain recent failure in the NUM.

It is based on the idea that the main explanation for setbacks is that the workers are only too willing to fight, but tricked by the press or their full time officials.

Unlike the SWP's, this kind of explanation has a strong element of truth in it. There is a crisis of leadership in the working class movement. Struggles are sold out by full-time officials.

But it underestimates the depth of the problem facing the left, tending to see it as somehow external to the movement. Trickery and tactics are after all much easier to set right than a crisis of ideas amongst the rank and file. Often a wrong emphasis ensured that if there was to hs a otrilo the mamharo strike members would know clearly what it was all about. I think that is a first principle of strike strategy, and as the Kinneil situation shows the question of closures could not nave been any more immediate.

But even if we concede that the closure question was a tactical mistake its explanatory value is slender, in my view.

Another explanation has been the power of the press. Peter Heathfield, North Derbyshire NUM ягея secretarv. Asked in Socialist Challenge, 'Why do you think the executive lost the ballot?" gave as the only reason "... the kind of propaganda campaign that the tabloids especially conducted. I can't recall an occasion when papers like the Sun, Mail, Express have devoted pages to persuade miners not to support their trade union. The propaganda war was won by our enemies."

Peter's memory is faulty. If he wants examples of vicious press campaigns, what about the miners strikes of 1972 and 1974? The point is that in those years the membership rejected the information and views of the Sun and Express not to strike and not to continue the strike. They came out and they won.

Every big strike with minor exceptions produces a press offensive. Why it works in one case and not in another is the question.

Did the miners' leaders wage a better campaign against the propaganda of press and employers in ,1972 and 1974 than they did last year? Far from it.

Scargill - and to give them their due, the executive as a whole - fought to build industrial action in a way unprecedented since the days of A.d. Cook. I 1972 and 1974 the right wing leadership gave • no lead and ran no campaign. In 1974 Gormley manoeuvred to the last minute against the strike.

Of course there were inadequacies, of course there could have been improvements. :But to explain the failure to get a yes vote in terms of the weaknesses the campaign - or the intensity of the press offensive - is to severely •underestimate Arthur Scargill, and to see his members as gullible idiots.

Continued next week