Social Contract Social Con-trick

Scan page 9

Leyland workers at Longbridge. The 'nationalisation' of Leyland under the Ryder plan was a cover for wholesale rationalisation and speed-up, while private shareholders reap the increased profits. industries while leaving the reins of management firmly in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state.

Under such conditions, massive rationalisation schemes have been. carried hrough at the cost of thousands of jobs in transport, mining and other industries.

Another manoeuvre by the reformists in government to give an impression of "nationalisation" while serving the intach massive salite investState invest. ment and subsidies into companies that remain privately owned-the clearest examples being British Leyland and Chrysler.

Collaboration

Leyland, trading on its "nationalised" image has been able to exploit to the full the collaboration of the trade union bureaucracy, while functioning, in the words of leading management spokesman Alex Park as a "joint stock company" in which the state acts alongside individuals as just another shareholder. phony "nationalisation, such must stress that the struggle to expropriate particular groups of employers or industries must not rest on the dubious goodwill of the Parliamentary Labour Party, which has again and again supported such schemes.

The fight must draw on the strength of workers themselves, exercised through factory occupations, with committees to open the books of the bosses and unmask the business secrets of the giant monopolies and petty exploiters.

Through such struggles workers will see the need not only. for nationalisation extending far beyond the particular workplace involved, but also for a break from the parliamentary charades of the Labour that coalition and throw their weight behind the independent struggles of the working class is important in the fight to expose the impotence of these 'lefts' and the necessity for a revolutionary leadership.

For us, therefore, the call for nationalisation .. of particular firms and branches of industry is not an abstract call restricted to general propaganda: it is an agitational slogan designed to organise NEB strategy. and to lead the working class.

Trotsky spells out this approach in the Transitional «The necessity of advancing the slogan of expropriation in the course of daily agitation in partial form, and not only in ou propaganda in its more comprehensive aspects, is dictated by the fact that different branches of industry are on different levels of developmace in the life of society, ment, occupy a different and pass through different stages of the class struggle.

"Only a general revolutionary upsurge of the proletariat can place the complete expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the order of the day. The task of transitional demands to prepare the •proletariat to solve this problem."

----- pull-quotes -----

PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Heffer - staunch defender of