Make the 'Lefts fight

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Delegates at the LCDTU conference-arena for lefts 'Left' Dennis Skinner-wheeled out by When Harold Wilson said that 'Labour is now the natural party of government' he was sified since the mid 1960s, the reformists have become the main agency for the maintenance of bourgeois rule in Britain.

Since Labour came into government in 1964, it has dealt with the working class through a series of wage freezes and by deliberately induced unemployment.

Collaboration These policies have won increasing support from the trade union bureaucracy and have been responsible for the first falls in workers' living standards since the 1930s.

The short period of Tory rule in the early 1970s showed many sections of the capitalist class the necessity for the active class collaboration of the trade union and Labour leaders and convinced them that the policies of confrontation could only lead them to disaster.

Leeds, This period has also shown clearly the immense strength of the working class.

It was the action of the working class which in 1969 defeated Labour plans to shackle the unions contained in the notorious In Place of Strife White Paper.

Successes

It was the action of the working class which forced back the anti-union legislation of the Tory administration of 1971-4, and it was the strike of the miners and the support they secured that forced the Tories out of office in 1974.

These battles have won unprecedented successes for the British working class.

They have been accompanied by unprecedented betrayals by their leaders and the growth of 'participation' and class collaboration of a particularly vicious kind.

The successes of this period of class struggle and the gains which have been made as a result of the mobilisation of the working class, have not caused large numbers of workers to turn away from their traditional mass organisations.

Centrist organisations like the Socialist Workers Party which offer themselves as 'the alternative' to social democracy have failed to pick up any substantial numbers of workers as their membership shows, or even widespread support, as can be seen from their votes in byVery limited This should not come as a surprise. As Trotsky put it in writing on The Class, the Party and the Leadership:

"Workers in general do not easily break with the party that awakens them to conscious life... (It is not) as if the proletariat was in a well-stocked shoe store, selecting a new pair of boots. Even this simple operation, as is well known, does not always prove successful. As regards new leadership, the choice is very limited. Only gradually, only on the basis of its own experience, through several stages, can the broad layers of the masses become convinced that a new leadership is firmer, more reliable, more loyal than the old."

The overthrow of capitalism will only be carried out by a revolutionary party which can take the working class through these 'several stages'.

Verbal At this point within the British working class, as workers move into struggle they come up against the 'left' wing of social democracy which expresses verbal support for struggles against the right wing, but works ceaselessly to tie the working class to reformism.

In every great battie of the working class-from the miners strike to Grunwicks ILliINd and the firemen's strugglethe 'left' MPs are to be seen doing their regulation stint on the picket line in front of the TV cameras, abetted by the Stalinists, who constantly reiterate the opinion that there is no further need to develop any struggle against the bureaucracy because of the fact that 'somebody up there loves you'.

The Stalinists and left reformists insist at every turn that workers do not need to be further mobilised, to go beyond spontaneous struggle, to break with their misleaders because, they claim, there is another way forwardthrough appeals to the lefts'.

These phenomena are of central importance in the development of the class The lefts' provide the main ideology and leadership for rank and file L abour Party members, as ' voting results from the constit uency parties for the Labour NEC will show.

"Unmasking'

The left' provides at the same time all the excuses for those who can see no way to oppose the Lib-Lab coalition and the policies of the right wing.

The 'lefts' pose as an alternative, but provide none.

And just in case the workers become disillusioned with the empty words of the 'lefts', then there will be an article or an interview in the Stalinist Morning Star which will try to bolster the 'lefts' as supporters of action and militancy.

For all of these reasons it is essential to develop an orientation towards exposing the "left' wing of social ganda and denunciationthough of course there must be some of this.

To leave it at that is the method of sectarian blockheads, who aim simply to convince themselves, while leaving the masses under the tutelage of their preseni leaders.

This is why it is necessary for revolutionaries at this stage to place demands on the "lefts' as part of the struggle to expose them before the masses, to bring workers one step nearer breaking from their present leaders and espousing the independent revolutionary leadership essential for their success.

Exposure

While explaining the treachery of the 'lefts', we in the Workers Socialist League at the same time fight alongside those workers who continue to place confidence in them, by demanding that these 'lefts' vote against the Lib-Lab coalition; that they themselves take part in mobilising the working class against wage freezing and unemployment; and that they launch a fight to drive out the right wing Healey-Callaghan clique.

Only by the fight on these policies and the exposure of the refusal of the 'lefts' to carry out such a struggle will workers in the Labour Party and elsewhere who retain confidence in the 'lefts' be convinced of the need to make a definitive break from reformism.

Only such a break will make it possible to confront the struggle for power.

Retain confidence

It cannot be seriously said that to place demands on the "lefts' ', to demand that they should be as good as their word, is to place any confidence in them or to support them as against the right.

So long as they retain the confidence of any sections oi workers, it would by wrong not to place demands on the *lefts because this could simply be to leave these workers with their illusions and to accept their argument:

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expressing in his own way the truth that as the capitalist crisis has inten-

PHOTO: John Sturrock, Report PHOTO