Tribune's opportunistic dead end PHOTO: Mike Tomlinson, IFL

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End of de Bo The dead end futility of the evolutionary road to socialism peddled by Labour 'Lefts' is plainly illustrated in the latest edition of their shabby weekly journal Tribune.

Contrasting the depth of the capitalist crisis with the fortunes of the 'left', the 'What Tribune Thinks' column bleats plaintively 'Why is not the Left in the ascendancy everywhere?'.

Deliberately ignoring the Stand by to shed a tear for ex-NUR President.

Dave Bowman.

Up till last week he had all the trappings of his £4,000 a year union post, plus the prestige of an 'important' job.

In short, a man to look up to.

And this week? Well, things are not quite so hot for this loyal servant of the trade union movement.

As his job came to an end he looked forward to his reward.

Nothing too grand. Just a simple management job in the =2:sonnel department, seeping strikes and keeping * wages, the kind of .: i he was used to.

Bat for some inexplicable .:=:. ne has been scorned * management colleagues -re sent him back to = te footplate of a Line Sundar : cd think I could do . = = •he Board i eatOns. It seems Tribune meeting reactionary policies vigourously pursued by social democratic parties in almost every country on the globetheir collaboration with wage cuts, job-cuts, speed up; social service cuts and anti-union laws and their involvement in bourgeois coalitions- Tribune gropes around for another answer.

'Is it possible', the column continues, 'as some on the ultra-Left argue that it is all a that someone in the Department of Transport does not want my expertise... As it is I have already been measured up for an engine driver's uniform".

The Express felt sympathy for poor 64 year old Bowman who will spend all of three months on the footplate.

"Mr Bowman, a lively and cultured man, who can recite the Robert Burns epic poem To a Haggis in dialect, was formerly a member of the Communist Party and fought seven elections on its behalf.

But he resigned from the Communist Party in 1970 and is now regarded as far from being a trouble maker"

It is not just indignity of a former Communist Party member having to go back onto his job. At £47 a week the pay is so lousy!

One reason why the FBU leadership needed a week's grace before the recall conference was to give the press time to do its job. matter of 'leadership'. If only the working class is given the paper 'leadership' then all will be different?' Such a view would mean that the grovelling reformists that swell the ranks of the Parliamentary Tribune Group cease to troop into the lobbies time and again to support the Lib-Lab Coalition.

Obligation

It would mean them accepting their obligation to break the Coalition and fight for the removal of the Callaghan/Healey leadershipputting forward a socialist alternative to wage controls and mass unemployment.

This is too much for Tribune to swallow. Dismissing all thought of a fight for principles the editorial goes on to point out the yawning gulf between left reformist theory and practice that renders them impotent.

"To put it very bluntly the left has its utopian vision and its very proper analysis of capitalisms' failure, but its concept of transition from one to the other The moment the Executive sellout became known the strike went into the past tense in the newspaper columns and Parry and his Executive were elevated to the status of statesmen.

But the Sunday Timesresolute with support for wage cutting policies-was not having any of this soft talk. The promise of pay next year outside the planned 5% limit was too much to swallow.

'It is right to be pleased that the firemen's strike looks like ending, but not with the way it has been resolved...

Even as Ministers are themselves warning that yet another phase of pay restrictions will be needed, they are working out special exceptions' The solution? the unions want to avoid wage control they must learn to control their wage claimsusing the Basnett formula of Perm arent wage controls.

PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Heffer incoherent'.

For these cynical opportunists this is simply a roundabout way of saying that there should be no fight now for socialist policies. But Trotsky showed in the Transitional Programme the real nature of such 'socialism'.

Two parts •Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism [the nineteenth century | divided its programme into two parts independent of each other: the minimum programme which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum programme which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future.

Between the minimum and the maximum programme no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechirew Wiard, Report Callaghan fying...

Insofar as the old, partial, 'minimal' demands of the masses clash with the destruction and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism-and this occurs at each step-the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime.

Superceded

The old 'minimal' programme is superceded by the transitional programme, the task of which lies in systematic mobilisation of the masses for the proletarian (Transitional Programme Folrose Ed. pp8-9)

What alternative do the Tribune opportunists have to offer to this clear perspective?

They blather about 'capturing the minds' and appealing to 'reason and intelligence' , characterising the fight for socialism as a grand armchair debate in which the best arguments will win out.

Gradualists

Like the gradualists of the little-known Socialist Party of Great Britain, who believe in doing nothing until a majority of the whole population has been won to its ageing banner, Tribune virtually announces that its tacit support for Lib-Lab policies will continue indefinitely:

'In political terms that means the Left working hard to convert the majority to its policies. There is no other way. No little band of theorists provides an alternative'.

Alternative?

Two million unemployed and fifteen million workers suffering wage cuts at the hand of the Callaghan-Steel government will wonder whether Tribune offers an alternative.

No self appointed 'leadership' will be able to lead where the majority will not follow, blusters Tribune:

But neither can the "majority' follow unless a 'minority' is prepared to come forward and give a clear lead. Tribune has openly scorned such a task, thus ramming home the need for a Trotskyist leadership cased on the method and demands of the Transitional Programme:

To build such a leadershi is the task undertaken S! te Workers Socialis: League.

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reland CRISIS PART 10 BRITAIN SENDS IN ГНЕ TROOPS Eamonn McCann after the Peoples' Democracy march from Belfast to Derry in 1970 The uneven developat of capitalism in and, which contrasted heavily industrialised • in the North-east of and with an agrarianed economy in the : of the country, was gradually alter after establishment of the rthern State in 1921. he decline of the itional Northern indusi (textiles, ship-building engineering) in the face ncreasing foreign compen continued throughout period, but reached a point in the late 'fifties n large scale lay offs of kers in these industries ted unemployment ng skilled Protestant kers as well as Catholics.

Subsidies it the same time the thern government was toning its traditional ectionist policy and iting a strategy of attractforeign investment ugh subsidies. • 1958 the Control of ufactures Act, which inteed that majority cholding in any panies should remain in possession of Irish capitalwas repealed. un Anglo-Irish trade agreeI was concluded in 1960. • development of major sment and trade between lin and Southern Ireland ei not only Britain's ude towards both Ons of Ireland, but bically changed the ions between North and h as well.

Opposed interests he crucial factor in the the Northern State in irs: place was the diametopposed economic esis of Belfast and bir. he the Southern native rals*s needed a protecsi policy (a major part of eL's and subsequent e Rule campaigns), such Is would have meant i seath for Northern s.:• wholly dependent I * or trade with -evelopments of the undermined this conflict of interest and a period of North-South economic cooperation began.

Talks between the two Premiers, Lemass and O'Neill began in 1965.

Reaction to these talks within the Unionist was extremely hostile.

Right-wing petty bourgeois elements led by the Rev. Ian Paisley used these talks as the platform for a campaign to remove O'Neill, who was regarded as being Paisley "soft on Catholics".

The actual progress of O'Neill's economic policies did not bear this out.

Like Lemass, O'Neill had since 1963 been wooing multi-national corporations to invest in Northern Ireland.

However, his policy of establishing efficient transport facilities to mainly Protestant areas in the East of the six-counties, rather than to the depressed Catholic areas, like Derry, demonstrated his continuation of the policy of discrimination in favour of Protestants.

Discrimination

Male unemployment in Derry and Newry remained at around 20%, whereas in the Protestant towns it rarely exceeded 3%.

Discrimination was also applied in housing. The existence of a housing qualification for local council elections meant that refusing a person a house effectively disfranchised him.

In places like Derry the Unionist Pa Irty only held control by gerrymandering the electoral ward boundaries (30% of the population elected 12 Unionist councillors, while 70% elected 8 anti-Unionists).

Homeless

Resentment among the Catholic community against this discrimination broke out initially over the question of housing.

A Housing Action Committee was set up in Derry agitating for homeless families to squat, and organising various protest activities.

However this was restricted to minor incidents such as blocking the road with caravans.

The Civil Rights Campaign only developed into a mass movement after the demonstration in Derry on October 5,1968.

Barricade

This march had been banned by the Home Affairs minister William Craig. Nevertheless the organisers ( ecided to proceed.

The 2,000 strong march was stopped by an RUC barricade about 200 yards from its starting point.

A police cordon moved behind the marchers and the police in front launched a baton charge.

This attempt to smash the Civil Rights campaign at its inception had the opposite effect to that intended.

A march over the same route on November 16, 1968 attracted between 15,000 and 20,000 people.

The crowa was only prevented from attacking the police barricade protecting the city centre by the intervention of the Citizens Action Committee, an organisation of middle class Catholics, whose role was to restrict the demands of the Civil Rights movement to the democratic ones of 'One Man -One Vote"

They attached themselves to the movement in the hope of attaining a share in the power of their Protestant better-half.

The other main demands of the Civil Rights movement, "One man, one job" and "One man, one house" showed its real content.

The aspirations of the Catholic working class were not for formal legal equality with the Protestants, but for an end to their economic deprivation.

The demand for 'One man -one house" got its sharp edge not from discrimination against Catholics, but from the fact that in 1967 no houses at all had been built in Derry!

The "One man, one job" demand derived its force from the increase in unemployment in Catholic areas.

While it was necessary for socialists to demand an end to discrimination and privilege, it was even more important to recognise that many Protestants had the "privilege" of living in 19th Century houses, which were unfit for human habitation, and the "privilege" of working for wages one third lower than that in the rest of Britain.

While many socialists formally recognised this, they failed to develop this recognition into a programme which could have provided a concrete alternative to the legalistic outrage of the Catholic middle class.

Demands for a programme of useful public works and for work-sharing without loss of pay could have posed solutions to the housing and unemployment situations which could have decisively broken from the endless protest demonstrations to pressurise the Stormont government to 'redirect investment' to Catholic areas.

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isolated their influence to the Catholic ghettoes.

The crisis of August 12, 1969-after the Apprentice Boys' march through the their paper Socialist Worker carried the astounding statement that:

«The intervention of the British troops only allows a Protestant working class and demanded their immediate and unconditional withdrawal.

The failure of the tiny group of SLL members existTWICE. WEEKLE ORGAN Of THE T TRAU COMMITTEE DF THE SOCALIST LABOUR LEAGUE karbum orth darre

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