By Bruce Robinson

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CP heads for crisis Congress teachers have taken extremely militant action against 'givebacks' and for substantial pay increases in their forthcoming contracts. In Oakland, on the West Coast, a massive ballot vote for strike action by 2,500 union members was greeted by loud cheers from a teachers' rally and followed up by mass pickets, while a mere 250 scabs attempted to keep schools open.

As in Boston, the class confrontation at workplace level is supplemented in the USA by legal moves designed to undermine the unions.

Specialist firms of lawyers have been established in various cities to advise employers on how to use the law to bust unions. And there is a wealth of legislation and other techniques that can assist them.

Bankruptcy

Workplace ballots are often required to secure union recognition: but recall ballots can be forced, under conditions created to benefit the employers, and 'decertify' unions prior to contract negotiations.

Alternatively, bankruptcy laws, takeovers, mergers, or the iclosure and removal of plant and equipment by 'runaway' firms can be used to tear up existing union contracts or dispose icheaply of militant and well-organised workers.

One firm on the west coast moved its entire operation to another plant 80 miles down the road in order to cut wages and bust the Electrical Workers' union. In Seattle, a combined force of engineering employers deliberately provoked strikes by the Machinists' union, IAM, having prepared a body of scabs to come in and maintain production.

Six months later it seems unlikely the strikers will get their jobs back. what he caned then ind sare provision in anti-strike legislalion restricts legal picketing. Construction sites by law have iwo gates - one for union members, and one for non-union members. The law presumes ¡hat the construction unions will act together - and allows a imited number of workers to picket only the non-union gate.

Since in practice construction anions all too often instruct their members to cross picket lines of other construction unions, the outcome can be union members working side-by-side with non-union scabs to break strikes.

'In some areas, a militant resistance to this is being waged by carpenters' , painters' and other unions, conducting raass pickets and organising drives on construction sites in defiance of anti-union laws.

In Southern California carpenters have been leading a militant struggle in defence of a master contract stipulation that only union subcontractors be hired on union siteds. The carpenters - who make up over haif of unionised building workers in the USA - won substantial solidarity action from other construction unions.

But elsewhere setbacks are occurring as employers seize the opportunity to divide and break the unions.

Another crucial way in which the law assists the employers is in the form of the legally enforcible three-year contracts which are the most common pay deals in the USA. Among other advantages, these contracts offer the employer virtual immunity from spontaneous unofficial strike action during the life of tne contract - thus making it easier to victimise individual militants.

The enly standard trade union comeback against such victimisations is through the National Labour Relations Board.

Unlike the toothless industrial tribunals in this country, the NLRB has been known on occasion to secure the eventual reinstatement of victimised militants.

But the process takes months or years and successfully diverts altention away from the need for immediate shop-floor strike action into a long-drawn-out succession of legalistic wrangles.

Similarly, almost any other grievance arising during the life of a contract - be it speed-up or bealth and satety - has to be taken up by the unions in the absence of strike action, thus staching the odds in management's favour.

But the pattern of struggles outlined above shows that despite the odds the organised US working class is ready and able to fight back for its rights.

The central problem to be confronted is the construction of a leadership rooted in the rank and file, offering an independent political line and programme for the battles to come.

THEN IT'S ADEAL.

YOU PROMISE TO CUT AND WE PROMISE EVERY Congress the Communist Party brings further evidence of its decline and crisis.

Party membership, the readership of the Morning Star, industrial influence - all have spiralled downwards.

Since the last Congress in 1981 CP membership has dropped from 18,458 to 15,691 -many of whom are inactive. The Morning Star faces bankruptcy and the Young Communist League has 623 members!

The 'Parliamentary Road' also looks black: a mere 11,598 votes were cast in June for CP candidates - a fall in most areas.

And - horror of horrors, as one contributor to the conference discussion puts it, 'in a number of unions we have been reduced to junior partnership with a mish-mash of Trotskyites"

According to various factions, the CP is too pro-Moscow or not pro-Moscow enough; has abandoned the industrial working class or not taken seriously enough the 'broad democratic alliance' with other social forces; has become 'revisionist' or still remains 'sectarian' As the crisis goes on, the factional warfare becomes more intense. This November's conference faces the deepest divisions since 1977 when the pro-Moscow New Communist Party split away.

Factions Two main factions have emerged. The present majority leadership takes the Eurocommunist line and interprets the 'Broad Democratic Alliance' to mean that the CP should no longer focus particularly on the labour movement but take more seriously the women's movement, peace movements, etc., and 'all those' opposed to 'the main enemy, the Tory government" (who do you think they could mean?)

The opposition consists of two groups. Firstly, there are those who share to a greater or lesser extent the uncritical pro-Moscow views of the NCP but remained inside the CP in 1977.

They remain vocal but lack the numbers or prestige to represent much of a threat to the leadership.

A second group has now emerged around Mick Costello, unti recently CP Industrial Organiser, and Tony Chater, editor of the Morning Star, both of whom were until recently in the leadership group.

Their opposition has its origins at the 1981 Congress, where secretary Gordon McLennan backed a resolution criticising the Morning Star for insufficiently reflecting the Eurocommunist line of the CP.

This split was fought out publicly earlier this year at the time of the AGM of the 'People's Press Printing Society' the front organisation which is responsible for the management of the Morning Star.

Rival slates After arguments about the appointment of Costello as a journalist and over the degree of fictional (or was it factional?) autonomy the Morning Star should have from the CP, two rival slates were put up for the management committee.

One was supported by the CP leadership, and the other (consisting of the retiring memRo General Secretary McLennan bers plus some trade union leaders) by Costello and Chater.

Both sides mobilised CP members to attend the AGM, which resulted in a victory for the Costello-Chater slate.

Costello's main criticism of the Eurocommunists is that they have given up a serious industrial focus for their work.

In addition, he makes a bid for the old-style Stalinists' support by accusing the leadership of saying "nothing positive" about the "socialist countries' (The 'hard' pro-Moscow faction, however, do not trust Costello, who was previously a major exponent of the CP's policy on Poland and Afghanistan).

Much of Costello's argument relates to the way he has been treated by McLennan.

It could hardly be otherwise, as until very recently he shared central political responsibility for the way the CP has developed, and therefore has an interest in not looking too closely at the past.

The forthcoming. Congress will not resolve any of the problems of the CP.

Most of the documents are bland and make no attempt to analyse the CP's crisis. The only one dealing with a controversial question - the relationship between the Morning Star and the CP - is contradictory and unintelligible.

On the one hand, "It was always agreed that it [the Morning Star] would continue to express the policy of the Communist Party" •and "Attempts. to change the paper's éditorial policy will not succeed in the future"; on the other hand, 'there is no conflict between the democratic right of the Communist Party to express its views and the democratic right of shareholders to accept or reject them". In other words, you have your democratic rights for as long as you agree with the CP!

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The indications are that the Costello-Chater group will be heavily defeated at the Congress, probably losing any positions on the Executive Committee.

They will still retain control of the Morning Star, however, and a further battle, which might prove fatal to the whole enterprise, is likely as the CP leadership tries to assert its 'democratic rights'.

The CP Congress is also incapable of solving the political problems which lie behind the organisational decline and fragmentation of the CP.

The move to the left in the Labour Party after 1979 left the CP as an insignificant group well to the right of Labour's hard left, whom they now describe as 'Labour sectarians" for rejecting alliances with the SDP, 'progressive Tories' in CND and so on.

Even for those who agree with the woolly ideas of 'Marxism Today', there is little appeal in joining • a marginalised and chronically declining group, tainted with an openly Stalinist past.

Far better to join the Labour Party, where the path to advancement and influence over such prominent supporters of 'Marxism Today' ideas as Neil Kinnock is much surer.

Thus, while a more or less clearly identifiable Stalinist trend grows as a result of the demoralisation and retreat of the Labour left, the CP reaps none of the dividends, apart from increased circulation for 'Marxism Today' - a recent issue of which included a 'Gramscian' analysis of the role of the Women's Institute!

In the unions, the CP are caught by a rightward lurch of the union bureaucracies, who increasingly feel that the CP, weakened by the decline of the stewards' movement, cannat provide the support and 'left' cover which they once offered, and are a political liability in their quest to become respectable talkers with the Tories.

The Broad Lefts, for long' regarded by the CP as reliable electoral machines and nothing else, have largely escaped their control as active militants have turned them towards practical struggles against the employers and the union leaderships.

Neither Costello's call for more industrial work, nor the hard-line Stalinists' call for a return to the good old days of pro-Moscow monolithism, pose an alternative strategy to get the CP out of its terminal illness:

The Eurocommunist leadership has merely drawn out the unpalatable conclusions of the' class-collaborationist 'British Road to Socialism' which the CP has followed since 1952.

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no.152 Disc JOHN HARRIS ng Brigh

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