[The 1980 TUC Congress is beginning as we…]

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The 1980 TUC Congress is beginning as we go to press: but even now it can be recorded as a wash-out for any workers looking for a fight against the Tories.

Thatcher's unprecedented anti-working class offensive and unparallelled post-war unemployment figures are to be met by undisguised cowardice and unequalled treachery from TUC leaders who have no intention of lifting a finger to defend their m. embers.

The only vague hint of füght against the anti-union Employment Act-a Bakers Union call for the expulsion of unions that accept Tory cash to run postal ballots-was dropped ten days before the Congress started.

Vague and empty The composite resolution against the Act is so vague and empty that even the reactionary AUEW leadership feels able to lend it unanimous support.

And while Moss Evans made hypocritical sabre-rattling statements about unions being prepared to picket as necessary defiance of the new Act, TGWU members at Adwest on strike for 15 weeks in a bitter union recognition dispute have been told they are to receive no official backing.

The fact is that-as the AUEW leaders have explicitly stated-union officials are preparing to accept the terms of the Tory Act, just as they have accepted the public spending cuts, acceptea the closures and mass redundancies, and accepted cash limits on pay in the public sector.

The keynote for the TUC attitude to the Tory government emerged during the steel strike earlier this year when the opening existed for a General Strike to bring down Thatcher.

Instead the TUC General Council intervened to crush a General Strike movement in South Wales, and union leaders in the public and private sector fought tooth and nail to preserve the isolation of the steel strikers by sabotaging simultaneous pay strikes and even solidarity blacking action.

Snivelling

Now we have the other side of the refusal to bring down the Tories: the snivelling appeals from Len Murray and co. to be allowed an audience with Margaret Thatcher to discuss unemployment-at which they will once again argue for their so-called "alternative economic Instead of resolutions offering a strategy for action by the workers' movement to halt the cuts, occupy threatened plants and defend all jobs, workers are confronted with an absurdly irrelevant carnival of evasion, hot air and empty protestcoupled to efforts to advise the Tories on the best way to run capitalism!

Trade unionists must demand that the TUC visit is cancelled.

The fact is that it is the capitalist system itself and its insoluble crisis which are the objective basis of the surge in unemployment and the Tory offensive on the unions.

Yet by their commitment to seeking no more than piecemeal reforms within the capitalist system the union leaders and their Labour co-thinkers are incapable of seriously challenging it or offering any socialist alternative.

Privileged The balance of forces between the rank and file movement on the shop floor and the power of the capitalist class has for decades been the basis on which the union bureaucracy has consolidated itself as a privileged layer of mediators and negotiators.

Feeding off the strength of the workers movement, they nonetheless owe their power and privilege to the continued existence of capitalism.

This is why the TUC bureaucrats fear above all an independent movement of the working class which could disrupt this balance of forces, confront the capitalists directly, and defeating the Tories, begin to sweep aside the parasitic trade union and Labour bureaucracy.

The fight to stem the Tory offensive, the fight to defend the most elementary trade union rights and working conditions therefore poses before workers the necessity to build a new, revolutionary léadership in labour movement, committed to the independent WE