Jobs axed by the hundred thousand

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Budget, the Tory government revealed that they are carrying out a further review of Civil Service staff levels designed to cut anything from 75,000 to 150,000 jobs over the next three years.

This is over and above the freeze on recruitment and promotion already in force, which is designed to cut 22,000 Civil Service jobs.

On top of this, Howe's Budget has now cut £300m from the local authority rate support grant-part of the money allocated by the Labour government to help defray the cost of the local government pay settlement.

This will herald a new round of cuts in the services provided by councilsbringing further job-loss and decline in the living conditions of the thousands of elderly, sick and others that depend upon local authority provision.

But of course the Tory war on jobs is not restricted to direct cuts in government and council pay rolls.

First taste The £1.5 billion spending cuts which Tories now say are only a first taste of what is to come will also hold up building work and other schemes: they will depress the entire economy. Supplier firms to the public sector will see orders cut, and seek to lay off workers.

But at the same time the Budget's simultaneous unleashing of inflation, raising of interest rates, and cutback in demand will have the effect of squeezing whole sections of less In each desperate employers profitable and small businesses out of the market altogether.

Small businesses will be unable to absorb the huge price increases they face in raw materials and services in the same way as their larger competitors: they will be nriced out of existence as ine slump gathers pace.

Those that gain from their failure will be the monopolies, the multinationals and the bankers who decide Tory policy.

Less profitable firms will be unable to afford the colossal 14% interest payments on bank loans, and will be hit by the overall fall in production and purchasing power.

Desperate case, increas ngly sections of will seek to vent their fury and solve their problems at the expense of their workforce-through sackings and speed-up.

Already it is forecast that the Budget measures will increase unemployment this year by at least 150,000.

But union leaders who seek only to win concessions from employers within the capitalist system will meekly accept each employer's insistence on preserving his "viability"

The reality is that as the slump gathers pace fewer and fewer capitalist firms will be "viable" at alland those that remain so will achieve this profitability only through drastically increased exploitation of the working class.

In fighting in defence of jobs in the coming period, workers, must start not from the problems of the employers-which are caused by the crisis of their anarchic capitalist systembut from the defence of their own independent class interests.

Employers', pleas of falling sales, empty order books and impending bankruptcy must be met by the demand that the firms' account books be opened to the inspection of elected trade union committees.

The figures revealed will show the connection between the individual firm and the major banks and trusts; the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing of capitalism; and the essential anarchy of the system which means that no jobs are safe.

Occupation

They will show the necessity for a struggle to defend all jobs and hard-won working conditions. Redundancies must be fought around the demand for work-sharing on full pay.

Threatened factories must be occupied by workers who otherwise face an indefinite future on the growing dole queues.

The fight must be taken up against the abject collaboration of union leaders with the employers and for the ousting of the Labour leaders whose own reactionary policies more than doubled unemployment, paved the way for the Tories' return, and now oppose their removal.

Only the nationalisation of major industry and the banks without compensation as part of a planned socialist economy under workers' management offers workers job security and the prospect of improved working conditions.

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"Many workers accept the socialist argument but have a healthy contempt for 'fringe groups'. ... It is true that the ideas of revolutionary socialism do attract groups of people who preach like the Dissenting religious sects of the last century. These people are inspired by the idea of a 'milennium', a sudden convulsive burst into the promised land. But they are terrified by the gulf between this 'promised land' and the stubborn refusal of workers to move towards it. They take refuge in their own smallness. They comfort themselves that one day the workers will move, and will look for leadership. And so they seek to build that leadership among themselves, a leadership which preaches at workers Their aim is theoretical purity - but theoretical purity without any contact with real life or real human conditions. So they turn in among themselves, purge themselves of deviants and pour oceans of bile on one another in order to prove their purity. They develop a language peculiar only to themselves which frustrates and embarasses workers who come in Be a Socialist, p 91. Our emphasis)

from on high.

The election of a Tory government presents a new situation for those seeking to build a revolutionary socialist party in the British working class.

In the first weeks of this government Thatcher, Joseph and company have shown us clearly that they intend to carry out a full-blooded attack on workers' organisations and standard of living.

Already the fake lefts in the Labour Party such as Benn have begun their moves to adapt to the anti-Tory consciousness of workers-all the better to defuse and derail the struggles, which will emerge.

Their fake "left" statements are peddled as good coin by the Stalinists of the Communist In the trade unions, bureaucrats fall over each other in the rush to talk to the Tories, in the vain hope that Thatcher can be persuaded to soften. her antiPaul Foot will continue to cause problems for the membership.

As the struggles mount in scale and complexity the SWP's many industrial worker members. Minimal programme PHOTO: John St Indeed all the self-styled revolutionary organisations grew during this period; but IS grew more than the others.

This was primarily because of its minimar trade. union militant programme which refused to struggle for the political development of workers; its populist denunciations of the evils of capitalism and its simplistic and unmarxist economic analysis which put the blame for the mounting crisis of British capitalism on "greedy bosses"

Future articles in this series will examine IS's economic theory, its attitude to building the party and its theory of rank and fileism.

What is important to draw out in this article is the fact that the opportunist political line peddied by Tony Cliff and

Natior

Rank and| DELEGATE CONFERENC ISMA MIAL RELAT

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contact with it." (Paul Foot: Why You Should