[Di Parkin concludes her two part series on…]

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Di Parkin concludes her two part series on the fi period of Wilson government, and assesses some the movements that originated in that period. ed as an power The first of these articles scribed how the 1964-70 Abour government confronta deepening capitalist crisis the post-war boom came to end.

Faced with inflation, financial instability and falling profits in private industry, the Wilson government saw their task not in implementing socialist policies but managing capitalism - with the gloves off.

DEVALUATION

The devaluation of the pound, stoking up further inflation, added to the pressure from the banks for the government, jointly with the lUC, to enforce wage restraint upon the working class.

The Trotskyist weekly paper of the time, the Newsletter, published by the Socialist Labour League, summed up the political situation in this way:

'The Tories were relying on a thing Selwyn Lloyd and Reginald Maudling were unable to do tie the trade unions closer to the state under some form of agreement in order to prepare to crush working class militancy".

"This is not the Labour government that millions of workers thought would act in their interests. It is a caretaker government that is kept in power by the bankers until it puts down legislation against the unions."

While the boom had enabled apitatism to expand and develo he forces of production. at the same time it had strengthened grave-diggers of capitalism -A neutal state was he claimed controlling more and more private enterprise, and those sections still in private hands were apparently run by managers no longer devoted to "crude profit maximisation' There was thus, according to Crosland, a 'growing irrelevance of ownership OI the means of production', class struggle had all but disappeared, and it had become "manifestly call MaCCUTaLe Britain a capitalist society"!

Now it is of some interest to consider these statements twenty years later.

When the capitalist press describe him as a brilliant theoretician' this incredible rubbish was the best he could produce.

Those social democrats who sneer at some of the inaccurate predictions made by marxists were utterly deceived by surface impresssions that thev faled to see the basic remaming contradictions of capitalism.

Little wonder Crosland called only for comprehensive schools, some slight redistribution of wealth, 'participation' tervention in the economy tha now seems normal.

In those halcyon days, Crosland centralised wages policy" to be and unwise"

This great 'socialist' intellectual also proposed better street lighting, late-night opening of pubs, and a whole series of other similar central demands lor Ine welfare of the working class which only a great intellectual of his calibre enviseage.

Go The facts that for 19a4 or which Crosland was a member the reality was what lay beneath the First of organised working class.

Whole new sections of women and immigrant workers had been drawn into the labour market. But at the same time full employment enabled workers to demand and force wage increases.

STEWARDS

Shop floor power grew with the control of wage bargaining in the hands of the shop stewards movement which consistently extended its influence.

Each victory on wages strengthened further the move towards organisation and the determination of the working class as a whole.

It was for this reason that the Wilson government set its sights first of all on enforcing wage controls using the support of the TUC.

But as it became more apparent to Wilson that, despite the collaboration of the bureaucracy, the trade union movement was not a creature to be led by the nose, the resolve strengthened within the government to attempt to impose anti-union laws.

This was spurred on by the awareness that new and drastic measures had to be taken to drive up productivity and exploitation if British capitalism was to remain profitable.

• The Devlin report on the docks, the huge rationalisation of mines and railways, the attempts to impose Measured Day Work within the motor industry, all called for a weakening of the shop-floor strength of the working class.

And while the class remained strong, a fight to prepare a politically conscious leadership to resist these attacks was being led by the surface.

Capitalism was still a system that drove for profits and involved crisis in its very development. Class war still stares the Labourites in the face and those who once denied its existence are its most active proponents - on the side of the capitalists!

Though a Minister in all the Labour governments and 'shadow' cabinets since 1960, Crosland did not play a central role in planning economic policy.

However he did plan the strategy on the Housing Finance Act, refusing to sanction in any way defiance against it. Here once again, he found common ground with the Tories.

At the same time he began, when Minister concerned with Local Government, to embody in his notorious 'the party's over' statement, the first step on the slippery slope of cuts in the welfare services.

He introduced a Rent Act which by bringing down rents while refusing to make any state takeover in the private sector simply allowed private rented accomodation to disappear altogether - a perfect example of the results of reformist compromise.

As Foreign Secretary he was a willing tool of US imperialism in Zimbabwe and elsewhere.

Unlike the capitalist press, we will not mourn the passing of a man such as this.

•The 'overwork' that struck him down was not in the interests of the working class or socialism.

Neither of these causes will be served unless Crosland and his sort are thrown out of the leadership of the labour movement. Socialist Labour_League, beginning with the Oxford Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, and leading into the All Trades Unions Alliance - each with a considerable base of rank and file The Donovan report on the trade unions failed to draw the conclusions the government wanted. Concretely they were searching for a pretext to outlaw unofficial strikes, institute compulsory strike ballots, and "cooling off periods"

The replacement of Ray Gunter by Barbara Castle as Minister of Labour (now retitled "Employment and Productivity") marked an attempt to soft-soap the trade union movement into acceptance of a legal noose around their necks.

Castle had already made her mark in tea-time chats with striking Ford sewing machinists demanding equal pay. But her key role was in drawing up one of the biggest legal assaults on the unions ever attempted by a Labour government 'In Place of Strife' INTERVENTION Central to this document was the concept of the intervention of the law into industrial relations. No longer were workers to be free to negotiate and fight for wages directly with the employer.

"Unconstitutional" strikes were to be attacked by the impiementation of a 28-day "cooling off" period.

In certain cases unions were required to hold ballots. And the whole process of bargaining was to be hedged around by legal procedures and structures.

The most obvious response of the TUC leaders to this attack was not to launch an all-out opposition to it, but to disaffiliate Lambeth Trades Counci for organising a lobby of Parliament against the anti-union laws!

It was not the TUC but notably the All Trades Unions Alliance which spearheaded demonstrations and strikes against the government's plans -. culminating in the hundreds of thousands who struck on May Day 1969.

PRESSURE Under these conditions the TUC despite its eagerness to shackle and control the shop floor and the rank and file, recognised that the pressure was such that some show of opposition to the government's plans had to be made.

Scanlon and Jones went so far as to argue that legislation against unofficial strikes "would lead to greater and irresistable pressure to turn unofficial action into officially recognised disputes"

Finally Wilson and Castle had to hand over the task of disciplining the rank and file to the trade union bureaucrats themselves.

'UNCONSTITUTIONAL' "For good or ill, we had accepted the views of the TUC but only because they had accepted responsibility for dealing with unconstitutional strikes in situation where the shop floor was becoming increasingly militant and determined."

The TUC leaders signed binding agreement that they would police the rank and file.

Then as now, they were the key agents attempting to restore capitalist profitability.

We have focussed on the key issue facing the Labour government in this period: its relationship with the working class at home and its attempt to break the independence of that class.

However, industrial relations are but one aspect of the relationship between social democracy to the workers movement.

The Wilson government also had its role to play in preserving British capitalism's waning imperialist power.

Many of the themes of the 64-70 government are revealed once again in the current period. It was the Wilson government which sent troops into Ulster and introduced the racist Immigration Act.

And in Rhodesia Wilson capitulated and acquiesced to the UDI move by Smith in November 1965.

Committed above all to the maintenance of British imperialist interests, Wilson could no more contemplate than can Callaghan now, unleashing and supporting the revolutionary African forces which alone could overthrow Smith's racist rule.

Social Democracy may pay lip-service to opposition to racist or right-wing rule; but for reformist leaders such regimes are a lesser evil than any threat to private property.

For similar reasons the Wilson government supported the policies of American imperialism its vicious assault on Vietnam and the rest of South East Asia.

Wilson's policies led in Britain to the development of a mass protest movement of students and others.

This moyement allowed various groups on the left (notably those who were eventually to group themselves into today's International Marxist Group) to set themselves on the diversionary track of seeing students and others as. the main focus of revolutionary action and to turn their back on the working class.

In doing so they assumed, as they do today, that the working class was somehow not prepared to struggle.

The lessons they should have learned over the explosion of militancy against In Place of Strife seem still unlearned.

The SLL alone turned the orientation of the anti-war movement into the labour movement and were the first to move beyond empty slogans concerning "peace" or Bring the Troops Home to calls for the victory of the NIF.

It has been suggested that the SLL played no role in the struggles in Britain against the Vietnam war.

PREVENTED

Far from it. The Newsletter published the complete text of the letter from Bertrand Russell which founded the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign but when that movement physically prevented the SLI from voicing criticisms of Stalinist policies (going so far as removing the microphone from SLL General Secretary Gerry Healy) they withdrew from the VSC.

However, the weakness of the SLL was in then adopting a rigid blinkered viewpoint, failing to realise that the Vietnam issue had radicalised whole sections of the population and that a mass movement existed.

They did not participate in its demonstrations - under their own slogans.

Instead they stood aside and missed many opportunities for giving direction and orientating that movement into the working class.

This left the VSC arena free as a hot house for all the diversionary ideas of that era - from "flowerpower" to meditation, ideas of student "red bases" and the cult of Che Guevara.

In the latter period of the Wilson government students occupied colleges; the events in France in May 1968 and Czechoslovakia in August 1968 had a great impact and protests continued against the Vietnam war.

CLASS But at the base of all these movements, however, was the movement of the working class and the government's battle with the working class - a battle which prepared the ground for the Tories.

Social democracy set itself against all these movements and left the door wide open for a Tory victory in the 1970 election on the basis of mass abstentions: But the Heath government that followed Wilson was also unable to defeat the working class and was itself swept aside by the miners in 1974.

As Today the Callaghan government engages in a wretched re-run of all Wilson's most treacherous policies, the lessons of that last Labour government must be brought to the fore - as the unbroken strength of the working class reasserts itself once more.

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