BUILD COUNCILS OF ACTION! Lesson of strike committees

Scan page 8

Haulage drivers' picket line in Manchester Oxford Council of Action supporting hospital ancillary workers strike The lorry drivers' strike has brought the employers another vivid glimpse of the potential power of 'the organised working class.

Though TGWU officials are now labouring might and main to tame the struggles of their own members, Tory politicians, the press and the media ring out continuously with abuse aimed against the power of the lorry drivers' strike committees and picketing in general.

One Tory MP last week in Parliament even likened the strike committees to the soviets that sprang up in the struggles prior to the October 1917 Revolution in Russia. His attack contained more than a germ of truth.

Spontaneous

The soviets were committees of workers spontaneously created in the struggle against Tsarism and capitalism.

They drew together representatives of every militant section of workers-trade union bodies, political parties, unemployed representatives, even delegates from meetings of unorganised workers.

They were joined delegates from committees rank and file soldiers, Soviets were thus altembracing bodies representing the toiling masses-and provided an arena for political debate and discussion.

In this respect they were far more developed than the lorry drivers' committees.

But they were also bodies that, as they grew, and were given revolutionary leadership, began firmly to assert the control of the working class over society-and emerged as a rival authority, a rival power to that of the capitalist state.

In this sense when, we look at the power of the lorry drivers' pickets and the challenge that they represent to the power of the capitalist class, we can see a connection to those Russian soviets.

Unite struggles

And when there are simultaneous struggles taking place in the public sector unions, on the railways and elsewhere, the obvious necessary step is to unite these struggles and link them to the local labour movement as a whole through the formation of soviet-type bodies -councils of action.

Such councils of action were formed on a widespread basis in the 1926 General Strike.

Since the 1926 General Strike there have been few occasions where an upsurge of working class militancy seemed to offer the possibility of going beyond the limits of trade union struggle to the point of directly confronting government.

The degeneration of the British Communist Party has meant that that the revolutionary strategy implicit in the call for councils of action has now become the property not of a mass party but of the limited forces adhering to the Trotskyist programme.)

Correct conditions The demand for councils of action, however, even if advanced by small forces, can under the correct conditions, win substantial support from militant trade unionists, Labour Party members and other working class organisations.

Such was the case in the mass struggles against the Heath government in the summer of 1972. PHOTO: John Sturrock. Report The working class had shown from the very outset its willingness to fight-the Tories-who had been elected to office in the wake of the treacherous Wilson governments of 1964-70.

Huge demonstrations and protest actions had taken place against the hated Industrial Relations Bill, though at each point the TUC leaders, backed up by the Communist Party, fought to confine these actions to peaceful protests aimed at "changing the line" of the Tories rather than bringing them down.

Miners' 1972 saw a national miners strike force back the Tories hard line on pay.

But the implementation of the Industrial Relations Act against dock pickets attempting to prevent container firms using non-registered labour was the basis for the biggest single confrontation between the working class and the Tory After the leaders had succeeded in holding back workers' anger at the levying of fines on the TGWU by the National Industrial Relations Court, five dockers were jailed in July for "contempt of court" when they continued to picket a non-registered container firm.

The response was immediate and enormous. Hundreds of thousands of workers in almost every section of irdustry stopped work.

Dockers, print workers, engineers and thousands more joined huge demonstrations to Pentonville jail where the five were being held-without the slightest official lead from the union bureaucracy.

The TUC leaders were so alarmed at the dimensions of the mass movement that they were pressed into tentatively calling for a one-day general strike.

• Despite the fact that it was the height of the holiday shut down period in industry, resolutions from union bodies were flooding in to show that with or without this call a general strike movement was on the way.

Councils of action

It was, under these conditions that the Trotskyists of the Socialist Labour League took up the call for the formation of councils of action to offer an arena within the growing mass struggle within which revolutionaries could fight for the acceptance of their programme.

Yet it was not until the confrontation was past its peak -13 Police escort scab that such demands began to bear fruit, and councils of action were set up in several areas where the SLL had trade union strength -in particular in Oxford, in Lambeth, and in North London.

In Oxford the initial resolution for a council of action was passed by the local Confed, and subsequently endorsed by the Trades Council, as well as a number of car workers shop stewards committees and union branches.

• Delegates The inaugural meeting at Transport House, Oxford drew over 60 delegates from 40 labour movement organisations including the Confed, the Morris Motors Joint Shop Stewards Committee, British Leyland Service Joint Shop Stewards, the two biggest TGWU branches in the town, several AUEW branches, the Communist Party; Labour Party Young Socialists, the SLL and other political groups.

After a battle with the Stalinists it adopted a polciy of fighting for the removal of the Tory government.

But the conditons for such a body to establish itself at the head of a growing mass movement were no longer present. driver in 1926 General Strike The Tories had been forced to use the pretext of the "Official Solicitor" in order to free the "Pentonville 5"-and were subsequently to shy away from such open confrontations.

The TUC leaders, thoroughly frightened by the scope of the mass movement that had erupted, did everything possible to defuse workers' militancy.

And with the easing of pressure, the Stalinists and 'left' talking elements that had been forced forward into the Oxford Council of Action breathed a sigh of relief, and began to do all they could to ensure its collapse.

So although the Oxford Council of Action lasted well into 1973, leading campaigns against the Tory pay laws and an important intervention attempting to mobilise housewives on the issue of pay and prices, it eventually faded from the scene.

Phase Two The emergence of compulsory wage controls under the Labour government, and rising working class hostility to the Phase 2 pay limits, in particular from the end of 1976, created the general conditions in which revolutionaries again needed to look at the question of councils of action.

With the government hanging its whole existence on the . perpetuation of wage control, and with the whoie TUC apparatus throwing its weight in with CaliaghanHealey, a major challenge to the 5% Phase 2 limit inevitably meant a confrontation with the whole bureaucracy., raising the question of government.

The Workers Socialist League pointed out that should such a struggle erupt, the mood in the working class made, it possible that a strike movement could quickly grow among other sections of workers, creating a situation similar to the May-June events in France in 1968.

Under these conditions we began to draw attention to the councils of action demand, in order to be able to offer workers an alternative leadership and organisation, independent of the direct control of the TUC This long-term perspective was, confirmed by the rapid growth and implications of the Leyland toolroom strike, which in March 1977 led to the brink of a national engineering strike against Leyland's sacking threat.

These events brought the downfall of the Labour government and the emergence of the Lib-Lab coalition, since when every key wages battle in defiance of government pay limits has implicitly included a threat to the very life of the This was particularly true of the firemen's strike. As the 48,000 firemen went out, one million local authority workers were still pressing their claim for a 30% pay increase, and 250,000 miners were pursuing their demand for a £135 a week wage.

The fight to mobilise these workers on their pay claims alongside the firemen was essential if the pay policy was to be defeated in the public sector.

But the official leaders of both sections were dedicated to preventing such united action.

The Workers Socialist League, therefore, combined the demand that these leaders call action with agitation on a local level for councils of action to be established, bringing together firemen and delegates from other union branches in order to broaden the action and mobilise these other sections.

While in Sheffield the Stalinist-led AUEW District Committee was able to ignore a demand by shop stewards for such a council of action, in North London a council of action was established, cioracing embracing the firemen, local Trades Council and the The predominance . of Stalinist influence on this committee, combined with the FBU bureaucrats' moves to wind up the • strike meant however, that the Camden Council of Action was relegated to the status of a strike support committee.

The Transitional Programme points out:

"Soviets can arise only at the time when the mass movement enters an openly revolutionary stage"

We cannot artificially create councils of action at a point where major class battles are not in process, and we do not seek to do so.

But we retain the conviction that the formulation of such bodies is an essential step in the struggle of the working class for power.

The lorry drivers' strike has shown how local councils of action could emerge as an organised base of workers' power, controlling the movement of essential supplies, organising supporting action for isolated sections of workers in struggle, and challenging the betrayals and manoeuvres of trade union officials.

As Trotsky writes:

"From the first moment of their appearance, the soviets, acting as a pivot around which millions of toilers are united in their struggle against the exploiters, become competitors and opponents of local authorities and then of the central government : . . Two regimes, the bourgeois and the proletarian, are irreconcilably opposed to each other. Conflict between them is inevitable.. In the case of victory, the power of the Soviets, that is the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist reconstruction of society, will arise."

In preparing for such a level of struggle we must continue to spell out the need for councils of action, alongside our programme of demands on jobs, wages, workers' control and

----- pull-quotes -----

OXFORD CARS CONUL -Unity is Strength OF CALEN

PENGTH BECAM MIATOR REGENT JIREET PIANIE TREND CHARING + FLEET S 1$70