Tribune, Militant offer no socialist proaramme

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One side effect o f the 'election that never was' has come out in Newham North East Thinking the hour of reckoning had finally come the local Executive Committee realised that it would need an election address.

Mr James Dickens, prospective Parliamentary candidate for the Constituency following the defection of Prentice, and a member of the left' Tribune group, promptly put foward proposals for its contents.

Currying favour

Having already been a failed MP once, he is obviously desperately keen to curry favour with the Callaghan leadership as rapidly as possible before the onslaught of old age makes his political insipidity even more obvious.

As a result, what he offered as an election address was so far removed from socialism that even the most degenerate Tribune hacks in Newham felt uneasy.

Consequently the Executive Committee accepted certain amendments, including some from the fake-'Trotskyist' Militant tendency.

The meeting of the General Management Committee to approve an address came on September 12 and was presented with the completed abortion.

Contusion

The fact that such document could be treated seriously at all reflects the enormous theoretical confusion that is the hallmark of British social democracy.

The document called for nationalisations and socialism.

It also called for greater investment in manufacturing industry.

It opposed racialism. But it supported import On top of this mess of contradictions it noted the 'positive' (!) aspects of the Callaghan government.

Fortunately for Dickens it was now clear that there was no election and therefore less urgency.

His supporters managed to win a move not to discuss the policies the manifesto should contain that night.

However a serious blow was struck at the development of a manifesto which answered the basic questions facing the working class with socialist policies when a resolution was accepted declaring that all proposals must be within the confines of Labour Party Conference policy.

A supporter of Socialist Press on the General Management Committee spoke against this, pointing out that this meant a fight with hands tied behind one's back.

Callaghan's election campaign would not be based on Conference policy and the government had ignored completely even those progressive measures that were advocated by conference.

Not abstract It was not an abstract question of who had decided the policies, or which method of arriving at policies was the most 'democratic'-Labour Party Conference hardly being the height of workers democracy anyway.

What was at stake was the fight for policies which were the correct ones.

Prentice It is clear that Dickens in no way solves the problems that caused Newham North East to fight Prentice.

It remains the task of genuine socialists in the Labour Party to expose his ilk and consistently explain that the fight for socialist policies and even for those policies favoured by Conference and the NEC in words, involves the ousting of the right wing traitors in the Labour Party and the building of a new principled leadership in the working class.

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This is partly due to the tests during 1973, to have competitive weakness of the high levels of lead in their British motor industry and blood.

of component suppliers like local people, Lucas replied Lucas. with statistics, 'expert In 1951 51% of all opinions', , and appeals to British trade went to workers to go on using exiscountries in the British ting changing and washing 'empire' and only 10% to facilities.

countries. told of many other Chrysler workers protest at sackings in attempt to improve exports and cut the balance of payments deficit.

The motor industry has been one of the main ingredients of the so-called 'Brazilian miracle' which has had a very heavy toll on the Brazilian working class. The "miracle" has brought the highest rate of industrial fatalities in the deaths of the under fives for malnutrition.

The story is the same the world over. Tens of thousands of workers are laid off at the slightest downturn in the market; hundreds die every year inside car factories; and with only minimum amounts spent on medical care, millions of pounds are spent each year on getting the maximum amount of effort for the minimum amount of pay.

All this goes on while Henry Ford II alone gets four million dollars a year in salary and dividends.

Even companies in financial difficulties are not as badly off as they would have everyone believe.

In the latest financial report from British Leyland a substantial "loss"| recorded.

However, before interest repayments and money set aside for the closing down of the Speke factory were taken away, Leyland made the substantial profit of £56 million.

But a cool £58 million was repaid to their bankers as interest repayments! So, where does this money go?

Whose hank account does the money eventually and in? The maninulation of the books is the stock-in-trade of the accountants in the motor industry. The avoidance of taxation, slush funds to bribe small-time middlemen, the movement of profits from one country to another, selling between subsidaries at inflated prices to give false impressions of profit and loss, are all jealously guarded secrets of the owners and management of the motor industry.

They know how much or how little is spent on new developments, how much is spent on raising the productivity of workers, how much on providing free cars for managers, and how little is spent on medical care for the workforce.

Thats why they absolutely refuse to open the books of motor manufacturers on the pretence that all their business secrets would be revealed to the competitors.

Kept in dark

But all these things are known to other manufacturers. The only people kept in the dark are the workforce.

Component suppliers to car makers often try to give the impression that they are the poor relations in the notor industry, that they are completely at the mercy of the big carmakers.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Year in, year out come boom or come slump, component producers have continued to make profits.

They henefit from «4LTJ monopolies in certain „ALMAAT spheres; they are supplying many different companies. and they have also diversified into other industries such as aerospace.

Recessions and a consequent expansion in the used car business enable component suppliers to weather the storm, cashing in on the increase in the demand for spares for second hand cars.

Cutbacks

Nevertheless, there nave heen erhotantial rutharke in this side of the motor indietrat / in Rritain in the MUUSHY I DUCALI WI LIO past few years.

also to the overall strategy the six common market production line at Halewood But as the 'empire' broke up in the 1960's,, the empire trade declined rapidly-to only 17% of exports in 1974-whilst trade to the Common Market rose to 29%.

Add to this the strength of European car producers and the larger market and it is easy to see why Lucas for example is prepared to invest and expand on the continent and make thousands of workers redundant in Britain.

Much of the investment on the continent has been not just to get near to a larger market, but also to duplicate work being done in Britain so that they can provide car producers with dual-sourcing for components which stops car producers going to other suppliers because of labour problems.

The component industry is just as labour intensive as the car industry itself and the suppliers are just as insensitive and uncaring toward their labour force.

Just as workers who live around the Leyland Assemblv Plant in Cowley receive rate rebates because of the paint and fumes that effects their daily - lives, workers who live alongisde the Lucas Formans Road battery factory suffer from fumes from lead power and acid liquids used in the factory.

Children who live by this factory, (which received the Queen's Award for industry in 1973) choke when they try to sleep at night, suffer from headaches and dizzy spells.

Thece children and the children who attend Leys erhan which harke nntn VALAO VILLU the factory, were found in In reply to protests from Similar stories can be factories.

Like the Great King Street factory where they use a mineral based lubricating oil in the machine shop.

Mineral based oils are the kind most likely to cause skin cancer when workers are in constant contact with it.

There are alternative lubricants which are supposed to be less likely to cause skin cancer, but they are not used because they slow down production and reduce the life-span of tools.

The picture is the same wherever you care to look in the motor industry.

The drive for profits forces the private owners of the motor industry to attack the workforce continuously to force up pro: ductivity, to increase exploitation by holding down wages, and to make sure the costs of recessions and slumps fall squarely on the shoulders of the working class.

The world over they base themselves on bribery and corruption, not just of small scale middlemen, but whole governments.

They support every anti-working class and anti-trade union regime because they offer the cheapest labour and highest productivity.

They ignore completely the social consequences and the cost in human terms of their actions.

Pollution, industrial diseases, the hundreds of deaths each year in car factories are all brushed aside with euphemisms like 'the price of progress' and 'necessary evils'.

The whole story can never be told in articles like this and many other people could no doubt give many more horrifying details about the private production of motor vehicles, but there are certainly some people within the labour movement who know more than they are prepared to tell.

These are the trade union bureaucrats who live on the backs of workers and who seek nothing better than to pick up the crumbs from the capitalists' table.

• These people aid the employers in their drive for profits by misleading with employers in speed-up and sackings.

They sit on joint union/ management committees like the now infamous participation committees in British Leyland.

On the top level committees the employers reveal a lot more to trade union representatives than they normally would, but only to enlist the support of the bureaucrats for their plans.

Instead of using this information to raise workers' consciousness and militancy the bureaucrats take a kind of oath of allegiance, and swear themselves to secrecy.

Collaboration

The task facing car workers is the removal of this kind of leadership, which collaborates with capitalists at every level from Parliament down to local factory, and the building of a revolutionary leadership for the working class.

What is required is leadership that will not hold back or mislead workers in their day-to-day struggles with employers, and which will open the road for the working class itself to take the revolutionary measures necessary to solve their problems and the problems of society as a whole.

Truly revolutionary socialist measures are the only answer to the anarchic methods of production used by the private owners of the motor industry.

Such policies offer the only way to remove exploitation and all the misery, suffering and death that goes with exploitation.

The nationalisation of the whole motor industry, its complete removal from private ownership and therefore the removal of POLICY rage / profit as the motive for production would open up the road to take the measures necessary to produce motor vehicles for the good of society rather than as simply commodities for sale in the capitalist market place.

When we talk about thel motor industry we must mean exactly that. There is little point in nationalising the car builders, the government taking majority ownership, just to leave them at the mercy of the component suppliers.

Two thirds of a British Leyland car, for example, is manufactured outside of Leyland.

Once nationalised, control of the industry must rest with the labour force in order to facilitate the introduction of further socialist policies and democracy within the industry.

Shop-floor control would take the form of elected committees starting at factory level with all delegates responsible and answerable to the workforce and recallable at any time.

Such committees would control the industry, enlist the help of sympathetic technicians, accountants etc., and have the power to vote any decisions, until such time as the workers themselves are in a position to manage the industry.

Workers' living and working conditions would be protected by the introduction of the sliding scale of wages and hours.

Elected committees would be responsible for keeping a check on price rises that affect the workers' spending power and wages would be periodically adjusted accordingly.

The amount of work available would be assessed by the committees, shared out amongst the labour force and full wages would be maintained, so ending the capitalist system of simply discarding workers according to sales and profits.

Of course, just as it is impossible to build socialism in one country, it would also be impossible to build socialism in one industry.

The motor industry would have to become a part of a fully planned socialist economy.

When planning within the motor industry many external matters have to be taken into consideration including the transportation of goods, the kinds of public transport available and enviromental factors.

Because of over-capacity it is likely that some motor factories may switch to producing other products, but it is only within this planned context that all the advances of mankind, scientific and otherwise, can be introduced into production without a detrimental effect on the working class.

While the daily struggles of the working class must go on to protect living standards and working conditions, it is only after the socialist revolution that the motor industry can be transformed from what it is today-an industry producing commodities for the benefit of a minority of society-into its opposite, an industry beneficial to the whole society and contributing to planned

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"To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outburts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc-to imagine all this is to repudiate social .. The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and discontented elements.

Inevitably, sections of the petty bourgeoisie and of the backward workers will participate in it- without such participation, mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is possible-and just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their prejudices, their reactionary But objectively they will attack capital, and the class conscious vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of a variegated and discordant, motley and outwardly fragmented, mass struggle, will be able to unite and direct it, capture power, seize the banks, expropriate the trusts which all hate (though for different reasons!) and introduce other dictatorial measures which in their totality will amount to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the victory of socialism,. which however will by no means immediately Sinn Fein demonstration against internment fantasies, their weaknesses and errors. 'purge' itself of petty-bourgeois slag."

Lenin, Critical Remarks on the written in July 1916, P.146-7 National Question PROMENINAL SUNIFAN LON PHOTO: Mark Rusher, I'L

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CAP IN HAND THE CHRYSLER

world, worsening living con- ditions, and seven out of ten

workers, selling-out struggles, and collaborating