[The emergence of compulsory wage controls under the…]

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The emergence of compulsory wage controls under the Labour government, and rising working class hostility to the Phase 2 pay limits, in particular from the end of 1976, created the general conditions in which revolutionaries again needed to look at the question of councils of action.

With the government hanging its whole existence on the perpetuation of wage control, and with the whole TUC apparatus throwing its weight in with Callaghan-Healey, a major challenge to the 5% Phase 2 limit inevitably meant a confrontation with the whole bureaucracy, raising the question Alternative The WSL pointed out that should such a struggle erupt, the mood in the working class made it possible that a strike movement could quickly grow among other sections of workers, creating a situation similar to the May-June events in France in 1968.

Under these conditions we began to draw attention to the councils of action demand, in order to be able to offer workers an alternative leadership and organisation, independent of the direct control of the TUC This long-term perspective was confirmed by the rapid growth and implications of the Leyland toolroom strike which in March 1977 led to the brink of a national engineering strike against Leyland's sacking threat.

These events brought the downfall of the Labour government and the emergence of the Lib-Lab coalition, since when every key wages battle in defiance of government pay limits has implicitly included a threat to the very life of the government.

This was particularly true of the firemen's strike. As the 48,000 firemen went out, 1 million local authority workers were pressing their claim for a 30% pay increase, and 250,000 miners were pursuing their demand for a £135 a week wage.

The fight to mobilise these workers on their pay claims alongside the firemen was essential if the pay policy was to be defeated in the public sector.

But the official leaders of both sections were dedicated to preventing such united action-and were assisted in each case by the Stalinists.

The Workers Socialist League, therefore, combined the demand that these leaders call action with agitation on a local level for councils of action to be established, bringing together firemen and delegates from other union branches in order to broaden the action and mobilise these other sections.

While in Sheffield the Stalinist-led AUEW District Committee was able to ignore a demand by shop stewards for a council of action, in North London a council of action was established, embracing the firemen, the trades council and the local The predominance of Stalinist influence on this committee, combined with the FBU bureaucrats' moves to wind up the strike, meant, however, that the Camden preservation of government pay dictates, the council of action demand retains its general relevance for workers' struggles.

But as the Transitional Programme points out:

"Soviets can arise only at the time when the mass movement enters an openly revolutionary stage".

We cannot artificially create councils of action at a point where major class battles are not in process, and we do not seek to do so.

Essential step

But we retain the conviction that the formulation of such bodies is an essential step in the struggle of the working class for power.

"From the first moment of their appearance, the soviets, acting as a pivot around which millions of toilers are united in their struggle against the exploiters, become competitors and opponents of local authorities and then of the central government... Two regimes, the bourgeois and the proletarian, are irreconcilably opposed to each other. Conflict between them is inevitable ... In the case of victory, the power of the Soviets, that is the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist reconstruction of society, will arise."

In preparing for such a level of struggle we must continue to spell out the need for councils of action, alongside our programme of demands on jobs, wages, workers' control and