Class Struggle Leaves Ing

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Hares jes history of their committee In looking at the record of the International Marxist Group in dealing with the recent toolroom strike it is clear that we are taking up not an isolated incident but a method.

Red Weekly did not report the four week long toolroom strikes in March 1976, the most important action against the f6 limit, until after they were over, and then only as a summary.

When the Rubery Owen strike took place in November last year, marking the emergence of struggle against Phase II of the Social Contract, Red Weekly did not mention it at all, commenting after the event on the resulting EETPU strike.

. The toolmakers' strike which started on February 18th this year was not mentioned in the edition of Red Weekly published on February 24th. The next edition centred on differentials and got even that wrong.

How can such an amazing position arise from an organisation considering itself Trotskyist? The arguments at the Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement Organising Committee over the draft resolutions for both the first conference and the recall conference provide a part of the answer.

Soon after the committee was formed in July 1976 WSL members on it advocated the convening of an Autumn conference on Wage Control and Union Democracy-a conference which would take up the cuts, unemployment and all attacks on the working class but essentially drawing the connection between bureaucratic abuse and the imposition of wage control from above.

The IMG opposed this perspective, arguing that the working class were in retreat, were not fighting on wages and therefore that we should direct our main thrust towards the social service cuts.

This resulted in the Workers Socialist League carrying through the first conference almost single handed with the IMG attacking it in their press and sending a token delegation.

NEW FORCES The conference, nevertheless, made an important contribution. It drew in new forces, discussed the problems of programme and leadership confronting the working class in this period and above all rammed home three points: that the working class had never accepted Phase Il but had it foisted on them; that struggles would emerge against wage controls towards the end of the year; that we had to prepare to fight for leadership and programme within these struggles.

This became the springboard for the recall conference. When discussions began last December wages strikes had broken out at Rubery Owen in Darlaston and Salisbury Transmissions in Birmingham.

IMG delegates said that we should not get too excited over "small strikes" and pointed towards the November 17 anti-cuts demonstration as the major development. They pointed to the fall in strike figures as evidence that the working class were in retreat.

WSL comrades pointed out that the class struggle cannot be measured in a crude émpirical and simply 'quantitative way. The form was a reduction in strike figures, the content was a political explosion beneath the surface EXPLOSIVE In proposing the conference resolution WSL comrades pressed for this explosive element to be its central direction and that programmatic proposals be orientated towards a rapid development of When the toolmakers struck against the Social Contract the IMG refused to recognise its importance.

In the pre-conference public meetings they presented it as "the beginning of a fight back"

Derek Robinson

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PHOTO: Inhn Sturrock. Report Inhn