"too Busy" to Fight Crime

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Of attenders or other Red faces could be seen under blue helmets as the news spread of the controversial speech ten days ago, by former Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Robert Mark.

He blew the gaff on the old fairy story that the police force exists primarily as some kind of benevolent force to "fight crime" and help the "public"

The belief that the state can-or even wishes toprotect people from burglary and theft should be abandoned, said Mark.

Why? Because "inadequate numbers" of police have other and more demanding priorities," declared Mark.

"Responsibility for safeguarding property must now rest with the individual," he went on.

What are these "more demanding priorities" which prevent the "crime fighters" fighting crime?

Lavish protection

course regular at the Grunwick strike picket lines -where police have never been in short supply-or at anti-fascist mobilisations, in which thousands of police willingly sacrifice weekend leave to give lavish protection to handfuls of National Front thugs, should be able to answer the question at once.

Computer

The new police computer on which only a token handful of files will relate to criminals, but 1¼ million files will be Special Branch dossiers on trade union and left wing militants, also gives us a fair clue.

Trained thugs

The top priority for the police, as the over-paid armed repressive force of the capitalist state is what it has always been-the maintenance of the capitalist system, and control of the working class.

The Labour leaders, supervising the creation of the Special Patrol Group as specialised squad of trained thugs for use against picket lines, know this full well.

But it is bad public relations form for Mark to go blurting out openly.

So when the new Metropolitan Commissioner, Sir David McNee was invited to speak to the Police Federation last week, he went to some trouble to dissociate himself from Mark's comments.

To listen to him, one might almost think that the police are on our side!

Of course the police care, and want to preserve eir "special relationship" th London's public, he announced.

"People's police"

"We are the people's police," went on this persistent advocate of extended police powers including the power to detain "suspects" for up to 72 hours without charge, the power to enforce mass fingerprinting, and a drastic extension of the right to search.

But Mark has spilled the beans. These powersalready used illegally by police every day-are only incidentally for use against criminals.

They are also extremely valuable in carrying out their "other and more demanding priorities": the harassment and intimidation of the working class, and in particular the unemployed, the black and Asian communities and the youth.

A workers' government would make a priority of disbanding the policewhich is no more than a reactionary: and corrupt crew of professional scabs, tinks, narks, anti-communists and fascists.

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Chinuad marlors unto for strike artion• nationalisation under ment from early "free enter- isation.

integrated of formally recognised free management. burdensome and "Capitalism in its imper- speed up and redundancies. harnessed to the drive for ialist stage leads right up to profit. the most comprehensive poly capital flows out of the Lenin took up Marx's concept of demands that lead beyond workers' immediate struggles A socialist planned As a result, as previous socialisation of production; economy is not a pipe articles on nationalisation it, so to speak, drags the dream for wide eyed have shown, whole sectors capitalists, against their will idealists, nor is it a base- of industry are producing and consciousness, into below capacity and laying some sort of a new social less abstract theory. off workers at a time of order, a transitional one Over the last 200 years world-wide want and from complete free comthe contradictory develop- poverty, and mass unem- petition to complete socialployment. prise" capitalism has led to the emergence of huge, Enrich social, but appropriation multinational • monopoly remains private. The social corporations, and immense The expropriation of means of production remain banking and insurance con- such burgeoning multi- the private property of a glomerates, whose efforts at national giants as Unilever, few. The general framework clanning of production ted Shell, Courtaulds, Lucas or ICI would offer workers the competition remains, but investment ofter workers a opportunity to step almost the yoke of a few monoready made starting point at once into the control of polists on the rest of the for the application and productive forces which, if population becomes development of socialist set free from the narrow hundred times heavier, more constraints of capitalist The obstacle that profitability, could intolerable" prevents the advanced tech- dramatically improve and nology, the gigantic produc- enrich the lives of millions changes and planned tive forces and these massive of families throughout the production techniques that concentrations of capital world. the monopolies now introwealth from being utilised Lenin wrote in Imperial- duce serve not to benefit for the benefit of the popu- ism, The Highest Stage of the working class, but lation as a whole is the fact Capitalism: further to exploit and that they remain shackled oppress workers through to private ownership and system of free competition.

As each individual employer fought against his rivals for a greater share of the unplanned free market, he found himself driven to introduce the latest, most advanced technical innovations in a bid to cheapen •Production becomes his commodities against those of his rivals.

Unable to compete

As this process escalated, and production techniques became increasingly sophisticated and expensive, new would-be producers found themselves unable to set up on a sufficient scale to compete with the established firms; and individual firms began to band Indeed such technical together through mergers or take-overs in order to finance new techniques and economies of scale that would strengthen their hand against their opponents.

Power of banks

The emergence of mono- This same process can be traced through in any of the major industries-whether it be cars, . computers, construction or chemicals. But another aspect of the growing scale of investment necessary to maintain profitable production is the rising power and size of the banks, and their interconnection with industrial capital.

Just as industrial concerns have grown and developed with the expansion of the productive forces, so the banks, initially merely the middleman in money transactions, have taken on an enormously increased significance as the creditors of all firms large and small.

The banks are now the mechanism through which the small deposits of a host of individuals are channelled into the productive process through loans and investment.

Powerful monopolies Again Lenin as long ago as 1916 highlighted this process which has galloped ahead still further since then:

"As banking develops and becomes concentrated in a small number of establishments, the banks grow orpyura wurners vule jur sur from humble middlemen into powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of the money capital of all the capitalists and small businessmen and also the larger part of the means of production and of the sources of raw materials of the given country and in a number of countries."

"Single capitalist"

The concentration of capital in the banks means, shows Lenin, that scattered capitalists are transformed into "a single collective capitalist" , which then presides over and supervises the subsequent development and rationalisation of According to the bankers' judgement of prospective profits or losses, whole factories, whole sections of industry can find themselves either stimulated with new investment or summarily shut down. As Lenin points out, the bankers:

.. obtain the opportunity-by means of their banking connections, their current accounts and other financial operations-first, to ascertain exactly the financial position of the various capitalists, then to control them, to influence them by restricting or enlarging, facilitating or hindering credits, and finally entirely determine their fate, determine their income, deprive them of capital, or permit them to increase their capital rapidly and to enormous dimensions."

There are no business secrets, therefore, within the world of business-only secrets withheld from the working class.

Handful

And of course while the banking system is an enormously powerful control mechanism for the economy as a whole, it remains firmly dedicated to the interests of the capitalist class, which owns, operates and is in turn governed by it.

While a few enormously wealthy monopoly firms, banks and finance houses hold the key to possible future full employment, and they in turn are controlled by a handful of extremely wealthy capitalists, the working class as the propertyless class of society and the middle class-for all its delusions of "indepen6 3' DELUIGILL. dence" and self-help-form no more than the raw material for exploitation in the drive to accumulate capital.

Nor, of course, is this antagonism between capital and labour in any way abolished by the intervention of the state-whether through shareholdings or loans in ailing firms (as in the case of the National Enterprise Board), OI through "nationalisation" of sections of industry which cannot be operated profitably under private ownership.

In these instances the state machinery created by the capitalist class in the furtherance of its interests acts very much like a biggerthan-ever bank: it siphons off money through taxes on individual workers, small and larger businesses and other sections of monopoly capital; and it channels that money into financing the rationalisation and modernisation of industries which otherwise might fail.

Integral part

Whole sections of British industry have now been dealt with in this fashion, unable to compete against high technology rival firms in Germany, Japan and elsewhere.

Even in «nationalising" industries, however, capitalism takes care to ensure that the new concern remains an integral part of the system through which the private bosses accumulate profit.

Often the old capitalist owners stay on as managers. Sometimes they are replaced with new capitalist managers.

But never are the workers allowed access to the full books and accounts; never are they allowed to. control or to manage the newly "nationalised" firm, or a full insight into the way it is milked by profitable private suppliers and contractors.

But if workers in the advanced capitalist countries find every aspect of their lives determined by the decisions of bankers and tycoon monopoly industrialists, this is even more true of millions of workers in colonial and underdeveloped economies who find themselves subjected to imperialist exploitation.

The search by finance capital for the highest rate of return on investment, and the search of manucapitalism offers no relief from exploitation

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manufacturing industry, have been driven towards monopoly facturing industry for the cheapest sources of raw materials have forced the bourgeoisie in the major industrial nations to direct considerable portions of their domestic wealth into overseas holdings.

And the native population-whether they be Irish, Asian, African or Latin American-finds itself not only nationally oppressed but super-exploited as a source of cheap sweated labour while every natural resource of their country is plundered and its economy hopelessly warped by ravaging capital.

Crippling interest

After "independence" is granted, financial dependence often increases, with crippling interest payments owing to the imperialist banking houses.

As such monopoly capitalism has already led to countless bloody wars of national liberation, to countless millions of deaths through poverty and starvation, and in the scramble of the advanced imperialist powers to corner the lion's share of the markets and colonies, to two appalling world wars.

After World War 2 the globe was once more carved up between the rival imperialists. "Peace" seemed restored. But, beneath the surface, the contradictions of capital continued to disrupt the equilibrium of the post-war 'boom" , and with it the whole post-war balance of forces.

Now, with the latest plunge of the dollar bearing witness to the scale of the economic crisis that now plagues imperialism internationally, monopoly capitalism is already beginning to unleash yet further attacks on the rights, jobs, living standards and lives of countless millions of workers. If such attacks are not resisted, and if the working class in the advanced capitalist nations is defeated, the danger of a further imperialist war-possibly even a bid to reconquer the Soviet Union and the other degenerated i workers statesremains as a very real, horrific threat.

Monopoly capitalism thus tantalizingly shows to workers the power that could be theirs; and at the same time it menacingly shows and desperately uses its teeth as the system wracked by its own countless contradictions, confronts its death agony.

The task therefore is to mobilise the working class in the struggle for the expropriation of the capitalist class, both in Britain and internationally.

No more than a straightforward look at the scale of the wealth, power and privileges enjoyed by the capitalist class-even in the midst of . international poverty and unemployment -is necessary to reject out of hand the reformist illusion that an Act of Parliament would be sufficient to deprive them of their position.

And the Labourites and Stalinists who peddle this illusion have in reality abandoned any thought of establishing socialism.

Most people realise that the ruling class represent no more than a tiny minority of the population as a whole.

What is at stake is of course not the gesture of sharing out their ill-gotten gains among the oppressed masses, but the necessity to liberate the productive forces from their grasp and open up the possibility of production for human need, not profit.

To carry out such a fight workers need more than pious words offering the vision of "socialism" as something for the distinct future.

Action now is needed to begin the fight.

But trade . union militancy alone-which is almost invariably restricted to struggling to improve conditions under capitalism - is not enough either. For the working class, the propertyless class, to become conscious of the task that it must undertake -the conquest of state power, the seizure of the major industries, and the construction of a socialist planned economy-a revolutionary leadership must be built.

Such a leadership* must organise itself as the vanguard party of the working class-featuring in the forefront of every major and minor struggle workers undertake against the employers, and fighting to show connection between these struggles and the fight for socialism.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels described this struggle:

"The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement."

The Communist International, formed on the gains of the Russian October Revolution, put it this way:

"The revolutionary character of the present epoch consists precisely in this, that the most modest conditions of life for the working masses are incompatible with the existence of capitalist society, and that therefore the fight for even the most modest demands grows into the fight for communism." (3rd Congress: 'Theses Tactics').

The founding programme of the Trotskyist Fourth International spells out the same orientation:

"It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat."

(Transitional Programme)

Unlike those opportunists of the International Marxist Group who have thrown aside any thought of fighting for transitional demands in their search for "unity" with other 'left' groups; and the sectarians like the Workers Revolutionary Party who regard the struggle in practice for any demands that actually advance the consciousness of the working class as "reformism" , the Workers Socialist League adheres to the method of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.

We fight in the daily struggles of the working class for transitional demands which draw out the independent •class interests of the working class, expose the class collaboration of its traditional leaders, and 2000:: 33 19: 298383 * 052. 250311.

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SERGERO Banks, like direct workers even in partial struggles towards the forms of organisation that are needed in the struggle for state power.

Thus while opposing all redundancies and demanding instead that the work available be shared among the whole workforce, without loss of pay, the WSL at no point leaves this demand as simply a bland abstraction.

We spell out the necessity for workers to assert their independent interests in the fight to control the actions of management, as a preparation for full-scale workers' management.

Thus we link the 'work sharing on full pay' demand to the call for the election of trade union committees with the task of examining the books and accounts of the management-refusing to accept the bosses' pleas of "bankruptcy" or "empty order books"

books We call for action by the workforcestrike action or occupation -to force management to make this information available and to open all their books for inspection.

As Trotsky writes in the Transitional Programme:

"The immediate task of workers' control should be to explain the debits and credits of society beginning with individual business undertakings, to determine the actual share of the national income appropriated by individual capitalists and by the exploiters as a whole; to expose the behind the scenes deals and swindles of banks and trusts; finally, to reveal to all members of society that unconscionable squandering of human labour which is the result of capitalist anarchy and the naked pursuit of profits.

Should the committeeswith the help, where necessary of sympathetic professional workers-discover that a particular firm is, in fact, bankrupt, then this confirms not the need for workers to pay the price, but the necessity to struggle for its immediate nationalisation, without compensation to its parasitic owners, under the management of these elected committees.

Indeed, even it the firm proves to be "viable" in the capitalist sense, then the revelation that it has been seeking to lay off workers to further boost healthy profits makes a similar case for it to be nationalised, and highlights the necessity of driving back the attack on jobs.

In campaigning for nationalisation we do not call lor the workers concerned merely to lobby Parliament or write letters to local MPs: we insist that such a fight must centre on the occupation of the plant to prevent its sale or destruction by the existing owners, and a campaign throughout the trade union and labour movement for supporting action.

At the same time the 'open the books' committee would be drawing up proposals of useful public works which could be undertaken at the plant in order to guarantee the future of the jobs at stake.

In this way workers are shown-through demands which have a mass appealthe necessity to impose control over the management, shown their organised strength as a class, and prepared for the task of direct management of nationalised Marion men. it As their frightened "leaders" run from such demands, workers see exposed in practice the necessity of a new leadership that will fight for their independent interests.

And as monopoly capital's attacks on jobs and living standards escalate, workers' various struggles must be combined in each area through councils of action-drawing delegates from every labour movement body.

Such councils of actiongrowing in strength as the mass movement developswill provide an arena in which key issues of leaderslip can be fought out.

As the councils of action locked in struggle against successive attacks begin to exercise increasing control over production, transport and public services in each area, they will emerge as a rival source of power to the capitalist state.

An unstable situation of 'dual power' will arise, in which the revolutionary party will have the task of preparing and leading the working class in the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, the destruction of its repressive state machine, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and a planned, socialist From wages struggles to such a level of struggle is not an automatic evolution. In the fight, day in and day out, for the demands of the Trotskyist programme, the Workers Socialist League is thus opening the door from trade union militancy to the struggle for socialist revolution.

John