Mass Action, Not State Bans to Fight

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repressive fist of the bourgeois class struggle might just as well state substitute for the struggle.: be on another planet!

the state the means with which grounds that the NF prefer to repress the labour movement. 'violence to democracy'.

racists turned to the labour the status of the bastion of all movement on April 21 for freedoms they inevitably support. embark on that same slippery For the woolly liberals of track which took the popular the ANL, however, petrified by frontists in Spain to their desSuch a messianic notion of the role of the revolutionary party is totally divorced from the reality in which revolutionaries in each country have to fight in practice for the building of Marxist parties, in conflict with the existing trade union and spontaneous consciousness of the working class, and in conflict with opposing political tendencies that appear to offer easy shortcuts to revolution.

Untrue

It is quite simply untrue, despite the document issued during the election that the programme of the Workers Party is close to becoming the immediate demands of the working class.

Including, presumably such obligatory incantations as the 'nationalisation without compensation under workers control of all financial, agricultural, and commercial capital apart from small family-run business and farms.' It is very easy to proclaim in ringing tones, as we find the same document that 'If a revolutionary party cannot organise independently and carry• into practice its own programme, then it cannot develop revolutionary theory and tactics or develop leadership and authority.

PHOTO: John Sturrock, Report Callaghan The more serious question is how a few dozen, people can counterpose themselves to the rest of the working class, declaring themselves to be the revolutionary party and expecting the masses to follow automatically.

Rejection

And this goes together with the explicit rejection of any conception of finding a bridge between the daily struggle of the masses and the objective necessity to develop these lowards the struggle for power.

A few months of harsh practical experiences in the class struggle will soon deflate the Workers Party's bluff arrogance. We hope the resulting disillusionment will not lead to its obvious end in pessimism and cynicism.

Five years of practical struggle on our programme and perspective in the working class has convinced us that the only way to accumulate a serious Marxist cadre capable of mobilising workers in struggle is not by simply proclaiming ourselves as the revolutionary party but through the fight in practice, day in day out in the workers movement for a system of transitional demands-the approach put forward by Trotsky for the small forces of the early Fourth International.

Inflict defeats

Our fight in Cowley is living proof that such patient work even by a small number of members can actually inflict defeats on the reformist and Stalinist bureaucracy , by winning broad and solid support within the working class.

Elsewhere in the labour movement, too, our method of struggle has been shown to attract the most serious and determined class fighters, and to offer. the only consistent political challenge to the We must hope, that the Workers Party comrades are not so. firmly attached to the abstract propagandist method of Healy that they will remain blind to these strengths and to the gains that can and must be made through such work if a Trotskyist party is to be built in Britain as part of a reconstructed Fourth International.

According to the Surrealist Andre Breton, co-author with Trotsky of the "Manifesto, for an Independent Revolutionary Art', there is a great deal to be learned from what he termed 'objective chance'.

Basically, this is a series of coincidences which combine to point in a particular direction.

Reading 'Support the Leicester 87' you couldn't help but agree with him.

Here we have a stunning coincidence of dates which ought properly to have large, red ANL arrows affixed saying "This way out-please adjust your politics."

On April 21 thousands of anti-racists mobilised in Leicester in an attempt to prevent the National Front's St, George's Day march. The ANL, enjoying the brief luxury of a leftward lurch in order to cover the SWP's embarassment after the stitch up with the police at Winchester, dropped their plans for a timid counter-march and proceeded to pelt the NF with stones in lieu of any struggle to actually mobilise the strength of the labour movement.

'Victory'

The SWP immediately declared this a victory in the spirit of Lewisham and a return to , the real struggle. As we pointed out at the time, however, this was merely the other side of their opportunist coin in entering the ANL popular front.

In was hardly surprising, therefore, that on July 21 they decided to boycott the demonstration called in support of the 87 anti-racists charged following the April 21 events, declaring it an 'ultra-left' diversion.

The next step hardly required an Agatha Christie to complete the plot, and duly, on August 21, the ANL rump of SWP/IMG found themselves lined up behind 'Support the Leicester 87', an account of the Leicester events so politically compromised and confused that it deserves sympathetic reviews in Newsline and Morning Star.

Clearly, talking of 21sts, the SWP have come of age as the tame houseboys of liberal protest.

Repudiation The original purpose of the pamphlet was, according to the Defence Committee, to take the important lessons of Leicester out to the widest possible audience in the labour movement and mobilise concrete support for the Leicester 87:

So much for theory. In practice, what we have instead is a repudiation of every lesson learned by anti-racists and antifascists over the past 50 years and a barely concealed attack on the politics upon which the 'No platform' mobilisation on PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Rees ZONAL FRE Fascists march under state pr April 21 and the subsequent July 21 demonstration were called.

If anything can be dredged from this verbal swamp it can only be as testimony to the total political bankruptcy of the authors.

Rubbish The pamphlet begins with two quotations.* One is from Leicester's Chief Constable, the other from that well known anti-racist activist Arthur Latham MP who states, "Mr. Rees (yes! the ex-minister of torture himself) should tell chief constables that British soldiers did not fight two world wars so that Nazis could march in Britain.".

This zenophobic rubbish is printed without comment or criticism and sets the tone for the whole document.

Essentially, the authors take to task 'the authorities empowered to ban the Nazi demonstration' for not having considered the costs to the public in terms of inconvenience and damaged race relations before coming to their decision to allow the march.

In support of this reactionary argument stolen from the handbook of Stalinist popular frontism they draw our attention in a section headed 'The Costs' to the fact that "city centre traders found that their trade for the day had fallen by at least two-thirds of its usual figure" , that "people were subjected to the inconvenience of traffic delays' and that "25 policemen needed hospital treatment" . The lesson from all this, no doubt, is that the authorities should be. less thoughtless in future.

Whining apology

This whining apology for politics is completely at odds with the principled position put forward by the Leicester AntiRacist Committee in calling for the April 21 mobilisation.

Having consistently opposed the ust of state bans they raised the demand 'No Platform for Fascists'.

As Trotsky pointed out in 1938:

«Workers cannot let the FRO rotection through Leicester that they must wage through their own organisations."

To do so is merely to give That is why Leicester's antiine return or a right wing racist Tory government, there is nothing wrong in bleating about state bans.

For them, the state is not "the form in which the individuals of the ruling class assert their common interests as Marx claimed, but rather some impartial god-like referee dispensing judgements iof Solomón on the conduct of the class struggle.

Thus, the authors claim, with their usual mole-like perception, that the actions of the police at both Leicester and Southall could not have been predicted.

This nonsense, written seven years after the death of Kevin Gately, a year after the savage attacks by the SPG on the Grunwick pickets and in a situation of continued harassment of black youth under the SUS laws and Irish workers under the "Prevention of Terrorism' Act would be better placed in a collection of modern fairy tales.

As the Defence Committee leaflet drawn up largely by WSL supporters for the July 21 demonstration correctly stated:

"The massive police mobilisation on the 21st was a planned provocation."

There is, as the leaflet pointed out, no real confusion about the role of the police.

"The police and the SPG are increasingly no more than a paramilitary force used for smashing strikes and breaking up labour movement demonstrations."

For thousands of black youth, Irish militants, picketing strikers and anti-fascists this is a political fact of life.

But for the authors of 'Support the Leicester 87' this ABC remains unlearned. The ATONA Thus, their objection to the National Front is presented not class terms but on the By elevating 'democracy' to truction at ine nanas ot rranco di-- La an a el _ I C. and the Spanish ruling class.

American Trotskyist in the 1930s, pointed out in a pamphlet entitled The People's Front-The New Betrayal' published in 1937:

"A programme for the defence of capitalist democracy represents merely the extension of one type of bourgeois ideology into the ranks of the working class.".

By separating the world into violent fascists and peace loving democrats the anti-Marxist chameleons of the ANL actually line themselves up with Callaghan and Healey in prostrating themselves before the reactionary Thatcher government's 'democratic' right to rule.

Revolutionaries have no such qualms about bourgeois democracy. As Burnham, in' the same article pointed out:

"The basic conflict in modern-capitalist-society is the conflict between the bourgeoisie ano the proletariat. There is no basic conflict between bourgeois democracy and fascism."

Fascism is the mailed capitalism.

To confuse the nature of the state under capitalism, i as the authors of 'Support the Leicester 87:. consistentl y do, serves only to disarm the movement and open it to immediate danger at the hands of the state.

It was precisely this understanding which Trotsky fought for against the Stalinist theory of the popular front. As he said, "Only adventurers with no • thought other than for the needs of the moment would fail to heed such a danger."

But so infatuated are the ANL protesters with the surface illusions of bourgeois society that they totally fail to recognise this.

Instead, everything is sacrificed in a desperate pursuit of that myth of the Tory media, 'public opinion'.

The vital class. questions raised by the growth of fascist groupings throughout Europe are abandoned in favour of page after page or moral indignation.

For this reason, while anti-racists are gaoled, the authors decline to make any attempt to: draw out the class nature of the courts which are imposing such vicious sentences.

'Unfairness'

Despite the jailings of the Pentonville 5, the Shrewsbury 2 and the attacks on trish militants through the PTA the pamphlet is at pains to confine its comments to the 'unfairness' of the sentences handed out.

"'Our cause here is not to question the operation of the magistrates court system," the authors cheerfully proclaim, "but to expose the way in which these courts are being used to make scapegoats of anti-racists"

And what is the key to this? No, it is not the fact that the courts are part of the repressive apparatus of the state ... the fault lies, they suggest, with the 'attitudes of the magistrates' and the 'dubious prosecuțion evidence' supplied by the police.

Presumably, if the police evidence was truthful in their eyes and the magistrates judged 'fairly' on the evidence presented these liberal dogooders would have no objections.

One might ask precisely how these buffoons would go about mounting a defence for those members of the Irish liberation forces who actually do resort to armed struggle against the British State.

The final logic of this position hardly needs spelling out.

Having abandoned the class perspective "which guided the April 21 mobilisation and led the organisers of the July 21 demonstration in their leaflet to attack "naked class justice"' in Leicester the authors of 'Support the Leicester 87' end with a plea for "all those who support the cause of antiNazism and justice" (sic) to join their campaign. No prizes for guessing whose 'justice' they are talking about.

Helpless

As a consequence of its crushing inadequacies the pamphiet may well become vital reading matter for all those seeking a revolutionary perspective for the fight against Here, laid bare, is the real politics of the motley assembly of organisations which make up the ANL.

Unprincipled, uncomprehending. and unarmed they stand helpless before a Tory government not imbued with their touching naivety.

in a future article we wilt review a further account of the Leicester events produced by the minority on the April 21 Defence Committee and discuss the way forward for anti-racists.

immediately, however, all anti-racists and ANL supporters should demand to know: Where do the IMG and SWP stand on the question of state bans? Where does the ANL stand on the question of 'No Platform'?

*The authors have belatedly withdrawn this quotation from Latham, perhaps because it was a little too blatant

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No such qualms As James Burnham, an