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Three of the seven dockers tried on conspiracy charges in 1951 workers and trade union militants no such use of the "law' is made to deal with the agents of the state who murdered Blair Peach.

Similarly, while the print unions are hauled before the courts for supposedly 'coercing' their members into strike action on May 14, no such use of the 'law' is made against _torture chiefs like Mason, Jenkins, Whitelaw and Atkins who officiate over the systematic use of the most barbaric forms of physical brutality and coercion against Irish prisoners of war.

And finally, while the courts 'and the threat of imprisonment are used to bludgeon Granada television into revealing who passed on documents exposing the sinister role of the government during the steel strike, no action will be taken against the spies and provocateurs who are constantly infiltrated into the ranks of the labour movement and amongst those waging a struggle against imperialist domination.

That is the reality: a class law designed to produce naked class justice. For the bourgeoisie the law is in essence no more than a weapon to be shaped and honed for use against its class enemies-the organised labour movement.

In practice the ruling class operates and sees itself as safely above the law.

Occasionally, buffoons like Richard Nixon blow the gaff on this by foolishly stating it in the open.

Then, in order to perpetuate the vital myth of justice, these ruling class mouthpieces have to receive a ceremonial smack on the wrist from their accomplices -before being let loose in public once more. Richard Nixon was never jailed for his crimes against the American and Vietnamese people; Des Warren got three years for picketing!

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(above) TUC leaders emerge after betraying the 1926 General Strike: (below) TUC leaders on March 9, 1980, fighting to prevent a General Strike to defeat the Tories.

hich two pickets were shot dead by troops. are carried from the court after their acquittal. Wednesday If capitalism has a long history of attempts at state suppression of trade unionism, the working class has an equally long history of struggle to defend its right to construct independent class organisations in the workplace.

No-one reading the history of the early trade unions, or of the 'new' unions in the 1880s, could doubt the willingness of the working class to fight in defence of its basic rights against the bourgeoisie.

There has, however, almost throughout, been a secondary problem confronting the working class.

Organs of Not only has it been obliged to defend the very existence of the trade unions as class organisations against the employers and the state; it has also consistently had to defend them as organs of class struggle against its own official leadership within the trade union bureaucracy.

Thus, saddled with a reformist leadership, the working class has, for the past hundred years, been fighting on two fronts.

Every attempt to smash the unions by the state has evoked a massive response within the working class.

But at the head of these movements there has remained a leadership dedicated to the preservation of the power and property of the very class which launched these attacks.

At every stage, therefore, instead of spelling out clearly the class implication of these vicious anti-union attacks, the reformist bureaucrats within the TUC have sought to limit actions to protest with a view to negotiating a deal within the framework of the capitalist system.

Prepared attack

We see this clearly in the case of the 1926 General Strike.

Faced with a deliberate, well prepared attack on the mine workers designed to drive down their wages and smash their power as a militant, organised section of the working class, Arthur Pugh, Chairman of the TUC calmly informed the Tory Prime Minister on12 May, 1926, nine days after the start of the strike, and with more workers coming out each day:

"We are here today, sir, to say that this general strike is to be terminated forthwith, in order that negotiations may proceed."

That the cancellation of the strike spelt automatic defeat for AT the miners mattered these traitors.

For, as JH Thomas, leader of the railwaymen had remarked nine days earlier:

"I know the government's position. I have never disguised that, in a challenge to the Constitution, God help us unless the Government won."

Clearly, a leadership which begins from the necessity for its own members to be defeated is hardly the best equipped to defend the rights of those members.

Because these leaders identify themselves and their futures with the continuity of capitalism they are totally incapable of representing the independent interests of the working class within a capitalist system wracked by crisis.

As the dying hulk of capitalism staggers from crisis to crisis, from war to war, these reformist traitors are always ready with yet another transfusion of fresh blood to keep the corpse up on its feet.

But it is the working class which is • bied white in the process.

For Trotskyists, therefore, the understanding of the struggle to defeat the attempts of the state to dismantle the trade unions is two-sided and contradictory.

Combativity

On the one hand there is the tremendous combativity which exists inside the working class. This was the unequivocal fighting strength which in 1942 forced the courts to release miners' leaders at Betteshanger colliery and'to drop the fines imposed on a further 1,000 miners.

That same resolute determination led to the withdrawal of anti-union Order 1305 in 1951 as a national. docks strike swelled up around the attempts to jail dockers' leaders.

That same class solidarity in 1972 compelled the Tories, through that shadowy figure 'the official solicitor' to release the Pentonville 5' as the demands grew among rank and file trade unionists for a general strike which would have challenged not only the 1971 Industrial Relations Act but-as the miners did two years laterthe very existence of the Tory That is one side of the picture.

On the other hand, in sharp contrast to this fighting capacity of the working class as a whole, we have the cringing, class collaborationist record of the union leaders.

Time and again they display an absolute willingness to sacrifice members' jobs in steel, BL, shipbuilding and textiles before the high altar of capitalist "viability"

They are willing to trade the hard-won rights of their members for a few seats around the negotiating table.

And they remain eager to take over the job-as outlined in the 1969 'In Place of Strife' and the Concordat of 1979of policeman of trade unions. No laws! they plead. We'll do it voluntarily! And they do.

Witch-hunts

The witch-hunts of militants in the TGWU, as in the Cowley 9 case, the AUEW leaders' collaboration in the sacking of Derek Robinson from his post as Combine Convenor in BL, and the attacks on militant trades councils, as most recently at Tameside, ail bear testimony to the value of the union bureaucracy to the bourgeoisie as pawns of the capitalist state.

It is also a measure of the total political bankruptcy of this 'official' leadership. As any militant well knows, union rules today are not a means for organising action but for shackling those who would argue for it.

The struggle to defend the trade unions as independent class organisations must, therelore, be consistently tought on two levels.

Firstly against any attempts by the state to incorporate them or govern their activities through repressive laws and the • Secondly, in each and every one of these struggles, against the wavering capitulationist leadership of the unions at both national and local levels.

The demand for a General Strike, as during the steel strike, or over the anti-union laws, poses sharply this question.

Democratise

Thus, the struggle to defend the unions against Tory anti-union laws goes hand in hand with the struggle to democratise the unions.

That means transforming the unions into fighting organs of the working class, directly accountable to their members and controlled at local level by those members.

It also means breaking the strangle hold of the existing leadership in the unions through the construction of factory committees, combine committees and councils of action which can effectively mobilise and unite the militancy of the rank and file in action against the bosses, around an independent class programme.

The trade union bureaucrats will no doubt resist such steps, just as they resist every other step along the road mobilising the mass movement.

But it is precisely in such confrontations with the existing reformist leadership that a new, revolutionary leadership is constructed.

The construction of independent militant organisations corresponding more closely to the tasks of the mass struggle against bourgeois society is therefore central to the fight against both the Tories' anti-union laws and the trade union They give an organisational expression to the tasks of the labour movement.

They also prepare the basis for the development of Councils of Action (Soviets) as direct organs of workers power.

If the factory • committee poses the question of challenge to the power of the employer in one firm, the Council of Action does so for an entire town.

It is the workers' answer to the bourgeois parliament with its phony democracy, sterile debates and clientele of time-servers and businessmen. Councils of Action, drawing delegates from every section of the labour movement, constructed on a national scale, are the historical successors to that parliament.

The sharp tasks posed before the working class by this Tory government demand that preparations made immediately for the coming struggles.

If trade union rights, jobs, living standards and services are to be defended then the emphasis must be firmly on preparation for an all out struggle to bring down the Tory For this reason, the Workers Socialist League fully supports the Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement's conference on July 5 in Birmingham.

This conference, under the title After steel and BL-new leaders needed to defeat the Tories' can provide a powerful forum for all those militants engaged in struggle both against the employers and the Tories and against their own trade union leadership.

In forging a fighting class programme for the coming period the CDLM Conference can be an important step torwards the construction of new, revolutionary leadership in the labour movement which begins not from the interests of capital but from the independent interests of the working class.

We urge all our readers to attend and win support for the conference in their trade union branches, stewards committees and trades councils.

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