[The hard fought and protracted struggle at Grunwick…]

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The hard fought and protracted struggle at Grunwick has always been an important test of strength for the trade union and labour movement. As the messages of support, resolutions and mass pickets continue to demonstrate, solidarity for the strikers immense and widespread.

Yet for the strike to be successful this solidarity has always required a leadership to direct it into the correct channels; key sectors of the working class must be led to black all services and supplies to the company.

Recoiled

Without exception the trade union leaders have stubbornly recoiled from mobilising blacking action and refused concrete support to the mass pickets.

This comes as no surprise to us. It only serves to illustrate once again the total bankruptcy of the union bureaucracy which is chronically incapable of ensuring even the most elementary trade union rights.

The mobilisation of whole sections of workers behind the Grunwick strike would at the very least challenge the reactionary policies of this government and would probably place the whole future of the Lib-Lab coalition government in the balance.

Swept aside

The 10% pay straightjacket and 12-month rule, both concocted by the coalition and bureaucracy would be swept aside by such a mass upsurge of militancy and the role of the 'lefts' in and out of Westminister would be spotlighted for all to see.

But the fight at Grunwick has also put the plethora of radical left groups on the spot.

During the last few weeks , couple of pamphlets on Grunwick have appeared: one from the self-proclaimed "Trotskyists" of the International Marxist Group (IMG) the other from the "rank and file" specialists of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

To read the IMG's offering, Battle of Grunwick, is to learn something of the IMG's headlong dash towards centrism.

When Trotsky was attempting to give a general characterisation of centrism he made the point that, due to its formlessness, it could only be positively defined with great difficulty. What one could say with certainty, though, was that it was theoretically eclectic and *played with all the colours of the rainbow'-in a nutshell it was 'nothing more than crystallised confusion'.

The guiding thread of confusion and accomodation to the bureaucracy is woven right through each of the IMG pamphlet's 13-odd pages of type.

IMG method

Rather than go through each of its 20 ditterent, and largely unconnected sections, the method of the IMG will emerge more clearly from looking at a couple of points.

At the outset the pamphlet sets itself the task of 'mapping out the path ot victory' (Page 3). For the lead in the sathe direction ass lea in tne same relon as the strike committee's, it follows it inch for inch.

The section entitled 'Support. Committees-the example of Manchester' demonstrates this perfectly.

The IMG was lyrical over the role of their only selfinitiated support committee (which to all extents . and purposes is now defunct). This has continually tailended the strike committee and uncritically reprinted and distributed its bulletins.

Quite wrong

They are quite wrong lo assert that we have not hidden our differences with the strike committee' (Page 3), since apart from the IMG's demand for nationalisation, they have not had any differences.

The results of this method leads them to the disastrous statement that 'were lucky in great deal of he Jack Dromey'!

Spelling Quite what form this *help' took the IMG prudently avoid spelling out. In fact Dromey's role has been just the opposite.

He has acted consciously to constrain and limit the strike.

At key moments such as on the publication of the Scarman Report, when he should have initiated a break from the bureaucracy and fought for the independence of the strike committee from the APEX leadership, mobiising whole sections of the working class behind the call for blacking action, Dromey manoeuvred to head off any such moves.

So adamant was Dromey that these policies wouldn't even get a hearing, let alone be fought for, that he attempted to. have the WSL banned from the strike committee headquarters!

More confused The IMG's section on Scarman is even more confused. In the past, rather than call for a boycott of the enquiry, the IMG remained silent. When it was published, they actually called for the implementation of its findings.

As we have made clear in past issues of Socialist Press, these findings served to create a cover behind which the bureaucracy could manoeuvre in their bid to sell out the strikers. In themselves the report's proposals mean only sackings and no union recognition.

Through the distorting glasses of opportunism, though, things appear differently.

The main thrust of this the St receiving recI P fr PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Jack Dromey section of the IMG pamphlet is to argue that in failing to accept Scarman's findings George Ward only proved himself a tyrant. The IMG view Ward consequently not primarily as a capitalist but as a chaotic despot. This tinpot employer is then seen as the main obstacle to reinstatement.

Follow this line of thinking a little bit further and you end up with the abstract demand for "nationalisation under workers' control" touted by the IMG.

Little It is tempting to believe that the IMG, in giving little space to the question of nationalisation the pamphlet, had begun to see the diversionary nature of this demand at the time it was raised.

More likely, though; it raised barriers in their moves to build an unprincipled; shapeless, anti-Trotskyist 'Socialist Unity' bloc.

After all, the IMG's latest bedfellow, Big Flame stated openly in last week's issue of Socialist Challenge that they want to produce the kind of publications that "even W.H. Smith would find hard to resist stocking".

Whereas The Battle of Grunwick does contain an interesting chronological table of events and a useful section on the laws of picketing, the Socialist Workers Party booklet-titled simply Grunwick-contains absolutely nothing to recommend it to anyone-apart perhaps from the price.

For the SWP, mass picketing has always been the key to winning this dispute, and has always provided fuel to inspire Socialist Worker reporters.

Rather than seeking to draw out the lessons from the mass pickets, highlighting the role of the police and emphasising the need for political preparation and organisation, the pamphlet remains trapped in the grip of sensationalism with Councillors "white and drawn" , police "having more fun beating up pickets and their supporters", MP's shouting "animals" to the police and pickets being "dragged off by the hair" (Pages 8-9).

Sabotage.

Of course the pamphlet's main purpose is to propagandise the SWP's so-called rank and file' tactics. Seeing the union leaderships woodenly as 'right wing and ready to 'sabotage the strike' they believe the answer hes in organising workers outside of and away from the bureaucracy and the official labour movement.

That this sectarian policy has some resonance amongst sections of the working class is without doubt.

But the signal lack of success of the SWP or its 'Rank and File' front organisation in disputes during the last period demonstrates that it offers no real answers.

As Trotsky said, *a conscious striving for unity on a revolutionary basis Is peculiar to the vanguard of the proletariat." (Crisis of the French Section, p. 65).

Lead vanguard

The task of Marxists is to build and politically lead the vanguard of the proletariat. That is a political task shirked by both the IMG and SWP.

The questions of leadership, programme and theoretical clarity are as absent in Grunwick and The Battle for Grunwick as they are from any issue of Socialist Worker or Socialist Challenge you may pick up

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Pitchad hattle hetween strikers and police in Minneapolis