Fighting for a workers' government 'WORKERS ACTION THE MISSING LINK

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the Soviets" during the 1917 revolution "How are the different demands and forms of struggle to be harmonised, even if only within the limits of one city?

History has already answered this question: through soviets.

These will unite the representatives of all the fighting groups •.. Soviets are not limited to an a priori party programme. They throw open their doors to all the exploited ... All political currents of the proletariat can struggle for leadership of the soviets on the basis of the widest democracy. The slogan of soviets, therefore, crowns the programme of transitional demands"

(Trotsky, Transitional Programme).

"What then are 2L000 revolutionaries? labour To put forward in the programme for the beginning of the socialist transformation of society...

2) To crown that programme with the call for the creation of a workers' government which will at least fight for the immediate interests of the working class, breaking with the bourgeoisie where necessary and to the extent necessary ...

We agitate and make propaganda for the specific measures and demands of the action programme, fighting to commit the organisations of the labour movement [our emphasis to struggle for them..

In Britain there is already in existence lour emphasis, SP] a vast network of factory committees which could expand their activities and functions to the point of being dominant over the organs of the bourgeois state and, even before creating soviets, could be the basis of a decisive struggle. (...) the working class must, in the course of the struggle, learn confidence in its own democracy and in the potential of its own existing factory organisations lour emphasis, SP] to expand into a framework of working class self-rule in the whole of society ...

We point to the need to renovate, reorganise and reconstruct the existing Lour empha sis, SP] labour movement as an essential prerequisite: for a workers' government, a goverment essentially different from the bourgeois Labour governments of the 'past...

We pose as a central task of the period a head the creation of Action on the question unity of the forces of revolu- workers' government. tionary Marxism around this perspectiye: of a serious and to the fight to build new, allrealistic orientation to the polit- em bracing independent ical and trade union wings of bodies-soviets-to bring the labour movement, and to together the political movethe work of organising the ments, trade unions and other forces of Marxism within the various organisations of the only mass labour movement working class in a united which exists [our emphasis, SP] challenge to the power of the in this country" capitalist state.

(Workers Action, articles on worker:s' government, No's 174, states that:

175).

their appearance, the Soviets, acting as a pivot around which millions of toilers are united in There is clearly a yawning their struggle against the exploi gulf between the formulations ters, become competitors and opponents. of local authorities of Trotsky in the Transitional Programme and the above and of central government.

quotations taken from a major series of articles in Workers creates a dual power in the facRussian workers carry the slogan "All power to tory, then the soviets initiate a period of dual power in the Trotsky specifically directs country."

Yet the extracts from Workers Action show a very different emphasis. Far from stressing the need for new, independent organisations to unite and mobilise the various struggles of the masses, the perspective offered is one of reshaping, rearranging and TenoThe Transitional Programme vating" the existing, limited organisations of the working "From the first moment of class.

Dual power Trotsky's "crowning call" for soviets is replaced by Workers Action's "crowning call" for a "workers' governIf the factory committee ment"

And the Transitional Pro2101 gramme's focus on the question of dual power is replaced by Workers Action's stress on the view that only a central government can carry the programme through"

The counterposition of organs of workers' power to the centralised authority of the capitalist state is indeed the crucial element omitted from the Workers Action perspective for a workers' government.

So exactly what kind of government does Workers Action have in mind?

To answer this question it is necessary to look more closely at the Workers Action analysis of the present stage of development of the crisis in the Labour In their view, the entire complexion of this 75 year old reformist party has been fundamentally changed by the decisions of last year's Labour Party conference at Brighton:

... it was necessary ...for the political wing of the labour movement to begin (it is as yet no more) to change-and to begin to change sufficiently for it to be now not fantastic to set as a goal its transformation (at least partially, and on condition that further changes are pressed through) into a real instrument of the working class.

The decisions of the Brighton conference, if they are pushed through and consolidated to make the Parliamentary Labour Party accountable and therefore more or less controlled by the Labour and trade union movement, open up a new perspective... Delegates to All Russia Congre It is not necessary that the Labour Party becomes a revol.. utionary party-or that one should think it can or will become that The Brighton decisions areor rather can be made to bethe beginning of a process of the labour mode ment in alt its wings and sections, from shop stewards' committees through to the Parliamentary Labour Brighton demonstrates that transforming the political wing of the labour movement is a possibility, and thus that it is possible to raise the transitional demand for a workers' government in Britain, where in the initial stages such a government would inevitably have the Labour Party as its major or only component".

We will leave aside, for the purposes of this article, Workers Action's extravagant view of the impact of the Brighton conterence decisions on the Labour Party, and their conception of the reformist party being in some way "transformed" into "an instrument of the working class"

• We do not share their views on this, and these questions will be dealt with in a further article.

The point to be made here; however is that everything in these passages points towards the fact that the Workers Action version of a "workers' government" is essentially little more than a Labour government which arises from the struggle for accountability within the Roundabout Is this not a more roundabout way of calling for a left Labour government'-in the time-honoured manner of the Communist Party and others?

Workers Action of course denies this, and struggles heroically but unsuccessfully to draw a distinction between their

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30 July 1980 Page 7 The storming of the Winter Palace 1917 Mass demonstration in Petrograd two weeks before 1917 revolution Wednesday Colin Morrow in Lis er of Soviets, June 1917 slogan and such a perspective.

"We avoid like the plague delusory generalisations like 'Labour to power with socialist policies." (...) A government will be a workers' government even in a minimal sense, only if it really lights for these demands [Workers Action's Action Programme], going as far as necessary in a break with the bourgeoisie. We explain that in the light of all experience such a government would have to support or perhaps (less probably) initiate working class action to disarm the state forces, or major sections of them, and to begin to build a counter to them"

But Workers Action fails to couple this evasive passage with any explicit call for the independent construction of the workers defence squads or localbased workers militias that would be needed to "disarm the state forces" though there is elsewhere a passing reference to the idea of defence squads in their Action Programme.

No exception Instead, the initiative on this matter is left in the hands of the central government "support" or "(less probably) initiate" , working class action.

This is no exception: all three Workers Action articles, for example, fail to link up the demand for nationalisation of basic industry with any call for workers to organise independent trade union committees and councils of action to coordinate factory occupations and open the books of the employers, preparatory to a socialist plan of They likewise fail to spell out the kind of independent organisations and actions needed to halt the public spending cuts and launch the struggle for a programme of public works under workers' management.

And on international questions, too, the crucial element of securing workers' control over blacking and solidarity actions is left out, while the Action Programme calls vagely for "a state monopoly of foreign' trade" without in any way explaining how workers are to influence this new state of affairs.

When the Workers Action Action Programme declares in general terms thererore that "Revolutionaries fight for a state based on workers? councils"-it does so without offering any suggestion as to how such councils might actually emerge in the course of an intensified class struggle.

Instead, much of the Workers Action perspective for a "workers' government" is based on the supposition that it would be an elected, Parliamentary government:

"Even it resting on a farlamentary majority (which is the most probable variant, at the beginning) [it would base] itself on the working class, and rely on its mobilisations in the struggle against bourgeois resistance"

What tangible form could such reliance on the working class take, in the absence of any organs of workers' power capable of challenging the centralised power of the capitalist state? Workers Action's perspective hangs in a political limbo, vehemently denying that it offers a Parliamentary road, yet falling to spell out and insist upon the vital extra-Parliamentary support which alone could offer an alternative.

All this is very different from the approach to the demand for a workers' government in the Transitional Programme:

Far from suggesting that revolutionaries should simply support such a government and await its initiatives from above, Trotsky spells out a dynamic strategy in which revolutionaries fight to drive forward the class struggle under such a government in order to expose the reformist and Stalinist misleaders:

"Of all parties and organisations which base themselves on the workers and peasants and speak in their name we demand that they break politically from the bourgeoisie and enter upon the road of struggle for the workers' and farmers' government.

On this road we promise them , fusupport against 11.- ... capitalist reaction. At the same time we indefatigably develop agitation around those transitional demands which should in gramme of the workers and our opinion form the farmers' government'. • •.•In any case, one thing Is not to be doubted: even if this highly improbable variant somewhere and at some time becomes a reality and the workers' and farmers' government in the above mentioned sense is established in fact, it would represent merely a short episode on the road to the actual dictatorship of the proletariat"

But what for Trotsky is a "short episode" on the strategic road to proletarian revolution appears to be portrayed by Workers Action as the end of the route!

By leaving out the perspective of developing soviet-type organs of workers' power in the struggles ahead, and leaving out the question of arming and organising the workers' militia, Workers Action winds up capably explaining its readiness to defend a Labour government against reactionaries but offering its readers and supporters not the slightest hint of how it would see the process of political development passing beyond the stage of left reformism.

Theses

• The first Workers Action article for instance quotes from the Comintern Theses of 1922, which declare that:

•The most elementary tasks of a workers' government must consist in arming the proletariat in disarming the bourgeois counter-revolutionary organisations ...

Can Workers Action seriously enviseage even a totally "renovated" Labour Party supervising the arming of the working class? Is the tragic example of Chile already forgotten?

If not, what course of action do Workers Action propose to the working class when the Labourites refuse to carry out this elementary step?

The silence on this-as so many similar questions-is an eloquent testimony to the fact that the entire trajectory of the Workers Action "workers' government" articles is in fact towards a leftward-moving parliamentary government, which they enviseage being driven on in spite of itself by the objective forces of the class Of course it is true that the 1922 Comintern Theses on the workers' government sloganquoted in the first of the Workers Action articles-include a passage stating that:

"Thus the revolationaries are prepared, under certain conditions and with certain guarantees, even to support a merely ostensible workers' government (naturally only insofar as it represents the interests of the workers)"

But it is absolutely clear from both the Comintern Theses and the Transitional Programme that Marxists could only support such an "ostensible workers' government" critically, while maintaining the struggle for the independent development of organs of workers' power around a programme of action.

The Comintern indeed explicitly states that a left Labour government along the lines implied by Workers Action's "workers' government" formulation would be:

"not a revolutionary workers' government, but a disguised coalition between the bourgeoisie and anti-revolutionary groups. Such workers' governments are tolerated at critical moments, by the weakened bourgeoisie, in order to dupe the workers as to the true class character of the state or with the aid of the corrupt leaders to divert the revolutionary onslaught of the proletariat and to gain time".

It is obvious that such a desperate tactic on the part of the capitalist class in the face of workers' struggles would open up enormous opportunities to further the revolutionary mobilisation of the workers' movement.

But such mobilisation must be fought for independently of the "ostensible workers' government" itself, and by no means depend on the government's willingness to arm the workers!

Independence

For revolutionaries the task would be to consistently fight for the political independence of the working class around a programme of class demands which were counterposed to the vacillations and compromises of such a government, bogged down in reformist: parliamentarianism'.

Thus, as with the Bolshevik demand in 1917 that the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries should take the power, the exposure of the ostensible workers' government could then become a means to precipitating the destruction of bourgeois power.

Yet the failure of Workers Action to spell out any such independent road for the working class makes it plain that their conception is very different from that of Trotsky and the Comintern.

Overstating

In response to our critique it is of course possible that Workers Action might accuse the Workers Socialist League of arguing an ultra-left OI maximum programme.

After all, the Transitional Programme's section on Soviets from which Socialist Press quotes extensively in this article, does declare that:

«Soviets can arise only at the time when the mass movement enters into a revolutionary stage"

But if anything it is Workers Action that is overstating the development of the political situation. The first of the three articles in question begins with their stark analysis that:

"A catastrophe threatens the working people of Britain....

The ruling class can settle for nothing less than a decisive defeat, perhaps a fundamental and crushing defeat of the working class...

The prospect ahead is one of bitter class struggle. To imagine that in the next period the class struggle will not escalate is to imagine that the working class will bow down before the lifedestroying Tory offensive and accept : defeat peacefully. Nothing in the post-war history of the working class suggests this is even a possibility...

It is probable that the 1980s will see either the conquest of power by the British working class or the destruction of the British labour movement by the forces of capitalist reaction"

If these are not conditions in which revolutionaries should spell out a perspective for the emergence of Soviet power in Britain, and make clear the centrality of councils of action to the fight for what Workers Action calls "an immediate socialist solution" , then perhaps Workers Action could inform us what are?

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Tor the purpose oniy or peace- nis employer from which ne fully persuading any person to works or from which his work is work or abstain from working. administered.

PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report GARNERS WORKERS GARNERS.

If the hydra head of revolution lurks potentiallly within the bosom of every strike then nothing expresses this challenge to the rights of property as forcefully as a picket line.

The employer frequently perceives this threat with a far greater consciousness than the average trade unionist. 'The bought-and-paid-for scribblers in Fleet Street and the licensed wind-bags in Westminster defending the same social system share this alarm and critical times for employers such as today will find these individuals expending much energy and ingenuity in emasculating labour's capacity to defend itself against the rapacious, insatiable demands of capital.

The picket line must be a prime target for such individuals. So it is not surprising that the press and all the media unleash a campaign whose Current law:

It shall be lawful for one or, more persons in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute to attend at or neara) a place where another person works or carries out business; or b) any other place where another person happens to be, not being a place where he resides, for the purpose only of peacefillu ahtsinina ne rammininst. ing i information or peacefully persuading any person to work or abstain from working. ON STRIKE 4r Prior's law:

1) It shall be lawful for a person in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute to attenda) at or near his ówn place of work, or b) if he is an official of a trade union, at or near the place of work of a member of that union whom he is accompanying, 2) If a person works or normally worksa) otherwise than at any one place, or b) at a place the location of which is such that attendance there for a purpose mentioned in sub section (1) above is impracticable, his place of work for the purposes of that subsection shall be any premises of workers who according to Prior have no right ta be there, the workers from a local plant of the same company and the local trade unionists not employed by that company who turned up in solidarity.

2) Let's suppose this illegal picket line reduces its numbers (and therefore its effectiveness) to bring. it in line with the proposed Tory law. Would it then be legally entitled to stop all supplies and movement of goods?

The answer is no-only goods directly affected by the dispute. So even a lawful picket meeting all Prior's restrictive criteria would be ruled unlawful Prior rig workers in the North Sea or workers who work at more than one place or who don't work at a place that is owned by their employers) can picket the Council of the local authority or Wimpeys offices appropriate.

5) A trip to Italy (provided the committee can get through customs) would be legal-but it would be quite unlawful to ask Dock workers, railway workers, or lorry drivers to black any goods.

Can't picket

Picketing the docks is in any. case illegal as the Dunlop workers don't work there; but the dockers cannot black . the