SWP tail ends reformism

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Rally in support of victimised Derek Robinson: rank and file militancy sabotaged by trade In one fell swoop the SWP lets the bureaucracy off the hook, and heaps the t lame for the present situation heads of its prime vic ims-the working class!

Defeatist

This defeatist and one-sided analysis is backed up by a double-barrelled historical falsification.

It is simply not true that "ten years ago picket lines were respected"

There was no such golden age' of trade union solidarity in which workers obeyed picket lines without a struggle-or there would have been no need to picket!

The history of trade union organisation is the history of bitter-often violent-struggles for such basic discipline against the individualism and backwardness of blacklegs.

What is true is that it was in one sense much easier to mobilise struggles at a trade union level ten or more years ago, before the full impact of the capitalist crisis made itself felt in industry.

At a point where capitalism still appeared to be in a period of boom' and healthy expansion, strikes over wage increases or improvements in working conditions could be carried through with most workers confident of eventual success-or union bureaucrats that at very worst they would face a temporary loss of earnings.

Yet in today's crisis, the slightest move towards strike action is met by a barrage of employers' and government propaganda about the threat to "viability" , the prospect of closure, or, in the public sector, incessant talk of cash limits.

To strike today over wages or working conditions means for many workers to gamble on possibly losing their jobs altogether at a time of mass unemployment.

Where they are denied a clear political perspective and policies to oppose such threats and to fight factory closures and redundancies, workers are therefore understandably more hesitant before embarking on all-out action.

Leftward

Indeed the fact that they continue to do so, under far harsher conditions confirms the leftward movement of the class as a whole!

In failing to understand the material basis for workers' confusion in the present period, the would-be revolutionaries' of the SWP wind up simply tail-ending the most demoralised trade unionists, offering not a shred of political direction in the fight against the sabotage of the trade union bureaucracy.

Instead they turn workers back on themselves, to seek answers at an individual and rank and file' level:

"We must rely only on ourselves, our rank and file organisations and strength... Even it you don't care about your fellow workers, pure self interest should make you an active trade unionist."

The harsh fact is that without a political grasp of the role of the trade union and Labour bureaucracy, and without an understanding of the material impact the economic crisis and bosses' offensive are having on workers' thinking, "rank and file" organisations must wind up simply reflecting the very confusion that the SWP claims to be combatting!

We in the Workers Socialist League do not blame workers for the sabotage and scabbing of their officials; we do not accomodate to the weakest and most pessimistic layers of former militants.

In our view, the task of revolutionaries is to mobilise the growing militancy on the shop floor around transitional demands that lead workers beyond simple trade union militancy.

In this way we struggle to expose and defeat the reformist bureaucracy and thus politically prepare the working class wage the struggle to bring down the Tories and establish a workers' government.