[TIM SHALLIS is co-author of a book to…]

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TIM SHALLIS is co-author of a book to be published tomorrow. In this guest article he writes of some of the dangers to the working class described in THE TECHNOLOGY OF POLITICAL CONTROL by Tim Shallis, Carol Ackroyd, Karen Margolis and Jonathan Rosenhead, (Penguin, £1.25).

PART TWO OF OUR SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT'S LOOK AT HAZARDS OF NUCLEAR ENERGY the 1972 miners' strike. Faced by a demonstration in which the miners' own flying picket was supported by mass solidarstopped attempts to boost the dwindling fuel supplies of the Saltley coke depot.

Would the result be the same if a similar situation were to occur, say, in February 1979 under another Tory government?

The response of such a government is likely to be very different. The miners' strike of 1972 caught the capitalist state relatively unprepared.

The police force was fragmented and had learned nothing from the Army's vast colonial experience in controlling opposition. The events following internment in Northern Ireland in 1971 had shown that the Army by itself was too crude an instrument for performing this function within a 'liberal democracy' PREPARATIONS Saltley, though, acted as trigger for the state to begin major preparations for dealing with internal dissent.

They went into operation for the only time so far in the second miners' strike of 1974, with the lerting of the alternative government that will take over Britain in an 'extreme national emergency' with the secret bunkers which will house the regional seats of government being prepared and with the regional commissioners who would run them being put on standby.

At the local level, in places such as West Yorkshire and London, extensive riot-control equipment was made available. If the experiences of previous Labour governments are any guide, the present one, tar trom dismantling the Tory Civil Service plans will even have improved them.

In 1974 mass picketing was not the strategy the miners used. There were no occupations, no major confrontations with the police or Army. So riot control did not become an issue.

The left has therefore tended to concentrate on the above organisational changes by the state, and not on its new technological repressive potential, another aspect of the Army's counter insurgency experiences.

Traditionally, the horse, the truncheon and the bullet have been the methods of physical repression available to the ruling class faced by militant working class action.

Today the alternatives are vastly greater. Take riot control' thenew euphemism for physical strikebreaking.

SOPHISTICATED

The Irish war has left the British security forces. highly sophisticated in the use of water cannon, CS gas, the Sound Curdler, and. the Squawk: box available.

And for the future, as Congressman James Schuer (a Kennedy liberal Democrat) said approvingly of the USA today:

"As a result of spin-offs from medical, military, aerospace and industrial research . . . we can tranquillise, impede, immobilise, harass, shock, upset, stupefy, nauseate, chill, temporarily blind, deafen or just plain scare the wits out of anyone the police have a proper need to control and restrain"

And that of course, such techniques would be a crude tactical mistake on the part of the capitalist class; it would just generalise working class solidarity.

It indeed is likely to, but their technologies are designed to produce the maximum of repression with the minimum of backlash.

By 1979 seven years further into a long wave of economic crisis from the 1972 miners' strike, the British capitalist class will probably be forced to accept escalations of class conflict in the hope of inflicting bigger defeats on the working class.

Even over the last three months we have seen concerted drives by the ruling class, the union leadership and the media to break the seamen's strike and then the toolmakers' We have had increased creeping renression in the exnulsion of Agee INFINI and Hosenball, the charging of left wing journalists under the Official Secrets Act, attempts to gag the already one-sided coverage of the press and TV's coverage • of the Irish war.

All this has taken place under a Labour government containing figures as supposedly dedicated to civil liberties as Michael Foot. And a Thatcher Tory government would be much more likely to adopt a policy of confrontation with union militants. counter a mythical 'terrorist threat' Of all the forms of the technol ogy of political control, I have selected rot control, seemingly tne one of most direct relevance to miltants.

But it is only one of the technological means that the captialist states now have available to widen the range and flexibility of their repressive response.

Other available technologies include those for the surveillance of political and industrial militants and the monitoring of strikes and demonstrations-both at present very costly to the state in time and money-and in more extreme situations, of interrogation, and prisoner control.

In all cases, the new technologies are designed to appear as innocuous as possible to all. except to their immediate victims.

How much easier it is to see that electric shock to the genitals is torture than hooding someone, playing loud monotonous sounds into their ears, keeping them in a fixed position and depriving them of sleep-the British method.

In The Technology of Political Control we deal with all these technologies and how they would fit into future operations by the security forces.

More importantly, it attempts to

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ity action of thousands of Midlands workers, the police