Weekly Worker 423 (14/3/02) - SA Trade Union Fractions Needed

Weekly Worker 423 - Towards a Socialist Alliance Party!

In this week's Weekly Worker, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain;

Socialist Alliance Trade Union Fractions Needed

By any reckoning this weekend?s Socialist Alliance conference is a 
significant event. Over 1,000 union activists from a host of unions will 
gather on Saturday March 16 in the largest unofficial all-union conference 
for a quarter century.

Concretely posing the question of the relationship between New Labour and 
the unions by focusing on the political fund, privatisation and job cuts has 
tapped into a rising mood of disaffection with Blair?s rabidly anti-working 
class, pro-business programme. Expectation, but also a degree of impatience, 
is quite palpable. Not surprising when any sleazy capitalist gangster has 
more influence with Blair than the entire trade union movement.

It is unfortunate that another union conference and a Communication Workers 
Union rally are scheduled on the same day. The Morning Star-backed Liaison 
Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions event looks as though it might 
have been a spoiler attempt. The LCDTU was asked by the SA to combine its 
conference with ours, but declined. The CWU rally was a hastily arranged 
affair and seems to have been designed by a limp leadership to fob off its 
own militants with a ?Well, we tried? excuse for inaction. Hopefully CWU 
activists will outperform the CWU bureaucrats and then come on to the SA 
conference.

As significant as I think this conference is, we must be careful to avoid 
either being swept up in a tide of euphoria or of running too far ahead of 
the broad masses. A sober and calm analysis is essential. A recognition of 
what the current state of working class organisation is and how it got that 
way; an understanding of where it ought to go, how it is to get there and 
what role we must play. In other words we must have a strategy for advance.

Having suffered a strategic defeat epitomised by the miners? Great Strike of 
1984-85, but also involving defeats for dockers, printworkers, engineers, 
steelworkers and others, the mass of rank and file unionists remain 
atomised, apathetic, and loyalist (that is, by nature conservative). The 
oft-predicted crisis of expectations just did not happen. It is not 
happening now. Attendance at most union branches is extremely low. Many 
workplaces have difficulty filling branch positions and electing stewards. 
In many cases there is a divide between a layer of activists who keep the 
unions functioning and a silent, inactive membership.

We have yet to reach the working class as a class. What is occurring is 
dissatisfaction with New Labour including within the union bureaucracy - not 
only leftwingers like Bob Crow, Mick Rix, Mark Serwatka, etc, but 
yesterday?s ?new realists? such as John Edmonds and even John Monks himself 
have expressed doubts about the New Labour project. Added to this are a rash 
of spontaneous defensive struggles by workers now under threat from New 
Labour privatisation. This opens up opportunities to engage politically with 
already committed trade unionists. However, we must be careful to avoid 
substituting the easier task of engaging with leftwing office- holders for 
the much harder task of winning the rank and file - of educating, agitating 
and organising them. Winning resolutions and union positions whilst the 
great majority remains inert is to build on sand.

We need to promote a theoretically well founded political process that 
actively involves the rank and file in favour of independent working class 
positions, and gives substance and backbone from the bottom up - ideas 
guide, the masses decide. Winning union positions (often through apathy), 
staging coups by this or that political cabal, getting resolutions through 
an almost inquorate branch or at a national conference (by delegates elected 
by small minorities) - all these can be reversed by rightwing 
counter-measures (always assisted by ruling class propaganda) unless we have 
mass active support. The crucial task is to build bottom-up democratic 
self-activity and militancy. It is to this task - promoting and leading the 
movement of the rank and file - that revolutionary socialists and union 
activists should devote their energy.

A significant proportion of union members are so disenchanted with the whole 
political system that they do not pay the political levy - a trend 
engineered by Thatcher and enhanced by Blair. Substantial numbers of workers 
do not vote in elections. Those who do still pay the levy and who do vote 
stick with tradition - there is as yet no mass alternative party to Labour.

In this situation frustrated and short-sighted calls to ?break the link? - 
disaffiliate from Labour - are mere empty exaltations. In many cases a flip 
from auto-Labourism to auto-anti-Labourism. A mechanical and easy substitute 
for a real political struggle - a struggle, on the one hand to show workers 
concretely that New Labour is a class enemy, and on the other to 
differentiate and win over the pro-working class forces that undoubtedly 
still exist within the Labour Party. Such a political struggle should also 
be conducted as the best defence against a re-invented Labour left wing 
designed to divert or contain rising rank and file militancy - a reflex 
reaction that we have seen so many times before. In present circumstances 
straightforward disaffiliation from above would most likely lead to further 
depoliticisation below.

The FBU judged it right when by a slim majority it opted for the 
democratisation of its political fund to be put at the top of the agenda - 
the Socialist Alliance?s Matt Wrack providing the correct formulation and 
tactical lead. The Socialist Alliance needs to help build a rank and file 
movement that insists on agreement by trade union-sponsored Labour MPs to a 
series of basic demands which are transparently in the interests of workers 
as a condition of further funding. This maintains a collectivist approach to 
independent working class politics - as distinct from a liberal pick?n?mix 
system advocated by George Monbiot and even Richie Venton in the Scottish 
Socialist Party, where funds could go to charities, the liberals, the local 
church and even the odd conservative or fascist.

A collectivist, independent working class policy provides the means by which 
to win back workers to the necessity of voting for working class candidates 
and paying into a democratised political fund that aids them, not bosses. 
This active political engagement with Labour, together with offers to 
recommend voting for Labour candidates who will openly support union 
demands, can help isolate Blair and attract workers and activists to a 
fighting SA banner.

As more workers come under attack and spontaneous struggles rise, we will 
have to confront the crippling effect of the anti-trade union laws. It is no 
longer correct in my view to refer to these laws as Tory anti-trade union 
laws - they are unquestionably now New Labour anti-trade union laws too. 
Again, it is through a democratic process that workers will learn concretely 
how these reactionary laws limit their ability to act, whilst giving 
employers a whole arsenal of weapons to delay, prevent or outlaw strike 
action. Not crude calls to simply defy the law - it is not our job to create 
martyrs - but building a mass movement to render these laws redundant.

At the moment there is no programme drawn up for action after the March 16 
conference. There is no plan for coordinating the work of our supporters. 
Firstly then, all SA union activists should be organised by the SA, so that 
we can intervene consistently and effectively on the basis of agreed goals. 
At the moment we have fragmentation - a host of separate political fractions 
and sectional papers galore. There is nothing wrong in principle with these 
SWP, AWL, Workers Power, etc, groups and publications - apart from their 
amateurishness and wastefulness - but we must aim in the future to act 
together, generalising and learning from the experience of others in order 
to develop unity in action across the unions.

For the SA to organise collectively in this way would not only strengthen 
the alliance, but could also invigorate broad lefts, rank and file and other 
such formations outside the SA, as effectiveness and experience is acquired 
and a common approach developed. It is a hypocritical sect mentality that 
argues for sectional papers and fractions within the unions - but against 
the notion of the SA itself organising within and across all the unions and 
cohering and generalising all struggles through a Socialist Alliance paper.

This is doubly important when we consider the current period. We have almost 
an entire generation with little or no experience of effective mass 
industrial action. Apart from a few sectors where strong trade union 
experience and tradition prevails (eg, rail and postal workers), we have 
either unions hit by the decline of particular industries or sectors new to 
such struggles. Even in the more or less intact sectors the low level of 
activity for many years has taken its toll.

There is a wealth of experience possessed by comrades who lived through 
struggles in more combative times; there are the histories of great 
victories and terrible defeats - all of which contain lessons for us now. 
Yet we make the same old mistakes. We need to educate ourselves in the art 
of organising for battle.

Having endured such a long period of relative working class inaction, the 
whole of the left is ill prepared for the tasks that confront us. Too often 
there is a tendency to act as mere supporters and cheerleaders, simply 
reacting to spontaneous developments. We need to adopt a more conscious, 
programmatic approach and begin to actively initiate and lead struggles. 
This March 16 conference opens up opportunities for us to begin to 
reorganise ourselves in order to do just that.

Alan Stevens

Also in this issue;

'Paper Launch' - Cameron Richards welcome the launch of Welsh Socialist 
Voice.

'AWL Conference: Workers' Party or Sect' - Peter Manson and Danny Hammill 
report of the recent meeting of Alliance for Workers' Liberty members.

'Executive: Progress and Five Options' - Marcus Strom attended the recent 
meeting of the SA execuitve.

'Stalinism and the 'Return of the Repressed'' - Martin Thomas of the 
Alliance for Workers? Liberty replies to CPGB criticisms of the AWL?s 
refusal to join with us in launching a Socialist Alliance paper.

'Trade War Call to Action for Workers' - The looming conflict over steel 
demands a proletarian response, argues Maurice Bernal.

'Launch Pad for Women's Rights' - The recent Irish abortion referendum shows 
the weakness of the working class, writes Anne Mc Shane.

'The Right to Offend' - Establishment darling Joan Bakewell has fallen foul 
of the blasphemy laws. Eddie Ford calls for their abolition.

'Communists Reject Election Fraud' - The situation in Zimbabwe is 
'explosive'. Peter Manson spoke to the International Socialist Organisation.


And Letters (Beds SA, Israel/Palestine, StW Demo, Abortion, SWP), SA 
Round-Up (Teeside, Hackney), Fighting Fund, and Action.

This edition can be read at http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/423/index.html
For more information and sub details, go to http://www.cpgb.org.uk , email 
office@xxxxxxxxxxx , phone 020 8965 0659, or write to CPGB, BCM Box 928, 
London, WC1N 3XX, quoting 'e-ad'.

The Communist Party of Great Britain is a supporting organisation of the 
Socialist Alliances in England and Wales and the Scottish Socialist Party. 
Please visit
http://www.socialistalliance.net
http://www.welshsocialistalliance.org.uk and
http://www.scottishsocialistparty.org

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