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Communist New Realism (Comment/ COMMENT IS a new feature in the Militant International Review where space will be devoted to a critical analysis of the programme and perspectives outlined in the publications of the various trends of thought within the labour movement, from journals such as Marxism Today and New Socialist to the latest publications from the Labour Party Head Office or the Campaign Group of Labour MP's. We begin this new feature with a review by Bill Boyle of the latest pamphlet by the 'Communist' Party's Industrial Organiser, Peter Carter, Trade Unions: The New Reality.
READING PETE Carter's pamphlet is like attempting to examine a cloud under a microscope. What seems substantial from afar all but disappears upon closer examination. Despite its contention to be ...over 60 years of the successor to "
struggle and strategy" in reality the pamphlet more closely resembles Eric Heffer's "...a repudiation of the description, previous 60 years of Communist Party strategy"
The pamphlet is nothing new, notwithstanding its grand claims to the contrary. It abounds with phrases which would not be out of place in a sociology text book. What, for example, does the following sentence actually mean: ...For the trade unions to rise to the 66 challenge of New Technology and industrial restructuring, a profound shift is required towards a much more strategic outlook."? What "industrial restructuring"? What new strategy? This is never stated. His statement that a "... much " is needed is an excuse broader vision...
to leave out any demands upon either the right wing or left trade union leaders. Carter's main contention is a familiar one; that "Thatcherism" is a completely new phenomenon which has swept the political hinterland like a virulent plague infecting all and sundry; working, middle and ruling class alike. Like his compatriot in the 'Communist' Party, Eric Hobsbawm, he believes that Thatcherism has moved the working class decisively to the right in its political attitudes. This, of course, is nonsense. It is true that, given the nature of the sharpness of class conflict in the post miners' strike era, the leadership and a layer of lay representatives of the trade unions, have decided to lay low and await the next Labour government. This is easier than fighting not only the Tories but, as the A ddenbrookes. Newcastle Central Office CPSA, and Barking disputes have shown, 26 your own leaders as well. The political fund ballots are another indication of this turn by workers to the political plane, the desire to see the end of the Thatcher government and the growing expectation of a Labour government. The local elections are a further sign, particularly the results in Liverpool.
But, as the Silentnight strikers have shown, where workers are prepared to struggle and have leadership they will do so. There is a preparedness to go into battle when there is no other alternative. Even the Financial Times has recognised this. In an article in the FT of 24 September 1986 it points to a number of bitter struggles, citing the three-month old dispute at Paxman Diesels, the action being taken by white-collar staff at Lucas Industries, the overtime ban and strikes being mounted by the NUM to win backdating of its 5.9 per cent pay deal and concludes that: 'The unions are not yet A 'new Broad Left'?
Unlike Eric Hobsbawm, who was able to say in Marxism Today, April 1985, that a Labour government "
horizon'; • is not on the ... nobody believes that socialism is on the immediate agenda of the movement..." Pete Carter's pamphlet was written late enough for reality to have caught up with him and the CP for certain modifications to be made to the Hobsbawm line. Carter concedes that unless the labour and trade union movement leadership throw it away, then the return of a Labour government is now definitely on the agenda of the movement and not relegated, as Hobsbawm did, to the dim and distant future of 50 years Carter condemns two "harmful" currents in today's labour movement—1) The hard left (which he classes as the Campaign Group of Labour MPs, the CP Campaign Group and the Morning Star according to Carter, on some issues lines up with the Militant!) and 2) the right wing. He then says that " Broad Left of British trade unions needs to assert itself above these tendencies by creating a shift in the politics of the labour movement which allows a unified approach." What he really means is... a shift to the right!
Pete Carter does not explain in a scientific way what he means by the term 'Broad Left'. He apparently means an alliance of those on the left combining to fight the common enemy of the Tories and the bosses and their agents in the movement, the right wing. He laments "the failure to revive Broad Lefts has led in recent years to their becoming platforms for the ultra-left." However in his report to the CP Executive Committee, printed in the 20 September 1986 edition of 7 Days, which purports to analyse the TUC conference and "the challenge before the left," he says "A difficulty here is the absence of any coherent grouping on the left in the unions. The TUC's adoption of centreleft policies provides the opportunity for a genuine broad left involving trade union leaders well beyond those traditionally seen as 'left'." Yet, later in the same article, he is able to say "The Broad Left has got a lot of work to do now in installing activity from below and some real life into this new alliance of Labour and the unions". From nothing to something via wishful thinking!
Let us remind ourselves of the words in Pete's pamphlet about Broad Lefts ... have degenerated into narrow which "
left machines mainly concerned with the election of officers". In reality, if anything can be made of his position, it is that he does not believe that a genuine but broad left movement exists as yet, that there is a possibility of a broad left coalescing around the "Left" general secretaries.
He cites examples of this emergent 'new Broad Left'
as—the Labour Co- Rodney Committe, ordinating Bickerstaffe, Tom Sawyer, Jimmy Ken Livingstone and David Knapp, Blunkett. Yet all of the above have, in the recent past, gone over openly to the right wing or, as in the case of Bickerstaffe and Knapp, have allowed witch-hunts to develop in their own unions. They may be the better of the "Left" trade union leaders but it is to mislead the most conscious workers for the CP to fail to point out that unless these leaders adopt a socialist programme, based on a worked out Marxist perspective, they will inevitably retreat in the face of the stormy struggles of the future. As Trotsky pointed out: " in reformism is betrayal". Unless the trade union leaders are conscious of their role and tasks they will measure up to Does the CP not remember the revolutionary rhetoric of some of the leaders of the working class in the past? Even such a militant fighter as the miners' leader Arthur Cook, a giant bearing no comparison to today's leaders, still colluded in the TUC General Council's cover-up of their betrayal of the 1926 General Strike. These leaders may be forced to lead battles against a future right wing Labour
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government and thus gain enormous illusions in their 'left' credentials. But will their subsequent actions match up to their words? Do these leaders have the perspective of leading the working class to the socialist transformation of society or not? Or will they, as Hugh Scanlon said, lead the class to the brink of the abyss, look over and then retreat? The question to ask is—do these leaders have Marxist perspectives? That is the benchmark to use when defining 'left' leaders and then by their actions to judge them, not by their words. As stated before Carter continually bemoans the alleged 'shift to the right' taking place in the trade union movement, a process which, he argues, began in 1979 with the election of the Tory government. there is a socialist fly in Carter's reformist soup, in the shape of John Macreadie, newly elected Broad Left general secretary of the CPSA. How does this equate with a rightward drift in the trade unions? Had the CP not split the CPSA BL John Macreadie would have won by a large majority. Live Aid Carter attempts to use the election of John Golding and Bill Jordan of the National Communications' Union and the Amalgamated Engineers' Union respectively as reasons for his claims without, in an honest way, explaining the other factors in both those elections. For example, in the NCU, this year was the first year of operation of the 'individual ballot" which produced the same initial rightward drift in the CPSA, but which has since resulted in the election of Left NECs and John Macreadie. In the AEU John Tocher came the closest any left candidate has come in that union in recent times to winning a major election. Had it not been for the CP legacy of secret broad lefts (which Carter now mildly condemns) the Broad Left candidate in the ABU may well have won. And where do the political fund ballots fit into Carter's rightward drift? As a result of the Tories laws at least three unions which did not have political funds now have them because of the ballots forced upon In probably the most far-fetched of all arguments in this document he throws his lot in with the General Secretary of the G&MBATU, John Edmonds, who in the September 1986 edition of Marxism Today says that: "
...one of the saddest events in the recent history of the labour movement.." was its refusal to get involved in Live Aid or Band Aid. The ...labour movement was just not part • • of it at all". But Mr Carter went further. He saw it as "
... a measure of the movement's isolation... why should it be left to Mars to organise the marathon, or a national distillery company to sponsor the This not only evades, but totally misunderstands the role of a trade union which is not to substitute itself for big business sponsorship (who only do it for anyway) but to mobilise workers, industrially and politically, against the exploitation of labour by capital. No doubt Mr Carter sees this as a rather 'old fashioned' view of trade unions, but it is a Marxist one. We will leave Mr Carter to drag the aging carthorse of the CP over the Grand National course to... the knackers yard! Workers are not disillusioned in the unions because they do not organise pop concerts, but they can become disillusioned if the union leaders fail to offer a way forward on the problems they face. How many privatisation battles have the unions won? What has been won in recent years for the low paid women workers who, John Edmonds bemoans, need to be won Of course, they can be won back but only by a class conscious trade union movement armed with the realisation that no one section of workers alone can break free from the chains of exploitation and low pay without a General Staff of the whole movement elected, accountable and willing to lead to the end of the road. This was the main lesson of the miners' strike. The miners were left isolated by the complete incapacity of the trade union leaders to mobilise the clear support for the miners amongst the rank and file of the movement.
The deep crisis of international capital and the special crisis of British capital will mean conflict with the next Labour government as it finds that its programme of limited minor reforms are impossible within the confines of British capitalism. The unions must be armed with open democratic broad lefts in every union and industry demanding the regular election of leaders, their full accountability and the perspective of the trade union movement mobilising as one entity. Unless we do this we shall continue to see isolated groups of workers picked off one by one. It is this need for unity which the class instinctively feels especially at times of crisis, which the trade union leaders are cynically using to stifle all opposition to the right wing programme of the next Labour government.
Carter skips all of these problems, all of these questions, instead chasing down the familiar cul-de-sacs of Green Peace, the Green Party, etc even urging the CP to chase "..apolitical" birdwatchers and those who watch TV nature programmes. The CP is chasing butterflies when it should be chasing socialism! It is this general analysis, if it can be honoured with such a description, which leads Carter to his statement that the Broad Lefts, as presently constituted, MIR Autumn 1986: Comment have become " ... platforms for the ultraleft". There appears, on the surface, to be a contradiction between the "unified approach" advocated by the pamphlet with the need to pull together all strands of opinion on the "left", as he puts it, including such as Tom Sawyer and Ken Livingstone but, on the other hand, to steer clear of open democratic Broad Lefts such as those under the umbrella of the Broad Left Organising Committee. It is presumably under this "much broader vision" that the CP led the walkouts from the NIPSA and CPSA Broad Lefts in 1983 and 1984. It is, of course, the difference not between what the CP says but what it does in practice. Is it the CP in the NUM who are organising the first open democratic Broad Left? End of consensus Marxism is a science. Any application of the Marxist method to British society will show that the nature of class relations has sharpened over the past seven years and not been blunted. The miners' strike, as we have pointed out in the past, was thẹ begining of future titanic battles to come. The approach of the Thatcher government is not fundamentally new but is conditioned by the need of the capitalist class in deep crisis to reclaim more of its profits from the wages of workers. The nature of the sharp class battles at Orgreave and Wapping do not prove the weakness of the trade unions but the opposite-their latent strength. The Tories could have been toppled by the miners' strike. But the bourgeoisie knew what kind of leadership the trade union movement had—one which still fundamentally lives in the consensus era of the 1950s and '60s. Those years have gone forever. Capitalism has no great booms ahead of it, only terminal crisis relieved by tiny "boomlets". But that crisis can last almost as long as the vacuum amongst the workers' leaders. No-one can seriously say that the unions have been smashed by the Tories-they remain intact, slightly fewer because of mass unemployment but largely intact. Thatcherism is only a slightly different type of medicine to that meted out by Baldwin in 1926. But because of the political, theoretical and organisational degeneration of the CP this new onslaught of capital is seen not as a new higher stage in the class struggle but as a convenient opportunity to ditch all of its Marxist baggage. Rather than holding a loaded theoretical pistol to the head of British capital Mr Carter has slapped the bourgeoisie in the face with a wet fish. The spectre of the Communist Party, which once haunted the ruling class, now haunts only the Communist Party itself.
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Economic Notes
By Bob McKee
The US
economy-a
'growth
recession"?
THROUGHOUT September, share prices and the value of the US dollar plummeted down in tandem. On one day. Thursday 11 September, the values of stocks and shares on the Wall Street Stock Exchange in New York fell by 4.6 per cent in one session-a downturn not matched since the Great Crash of 1929.
The crisis for the dollar reflects the rising panic among US capitalists about the state of Reagan's American economy, and it prompts this column to return to a familiar theme developed in previous issues of the MIR. The economic boom in the United States has now lasted 45 months-a record period outstripping the average of previous booms of 33 months. But this column has argued that the recovery since the depth of recession in the winter of 1982 has been founded, not on the expansion of industrial investment and production, but on military spending and a flood of imports. As a result, the boom is an artificially induced one, preparing the way for a disastrous crash in US prosperity with serious repercussions for the world economy.
Huge deficits
The massive arms spending has run up a Federal budget deficit of over $170bn and the need to maintain a flow of goods and services to meet the demands of government and consumer spending has created a deficit on trade which will reach $175bn in 1986. This has been financed by high interest rates attracting Japanese and European investors. In other words the US boom has been supplied by West Ger-
28
Texan oil fortunes have been hit man and Japanese manufacturers and financed by the profits of these capitalists lent back to the US government and stock exchange.
This huge borrowing has to be paid for in the end by increased production from US capitalists, and corresponding purchases by Japanese and European consumers, or by severe cuts in the living standards of American workers or both. But there has been no boom for American industry. High interest rates have stifled investment and by forcing up the value of the dollar have allowed cheap (in dollar terms) Japanese and European imports to destroy home markets.
The stagnation in manufacturing production and investment eventually began to affect the whole economy. The rise in gross national product fell from over 4 per cent in 1984 to 2.3 per cent in 1985, and by the end of the first half of 1986 growth was just 0.6 per cent at an annual rate.
A meeting of US state governors in August estimated that 31 of the 50 states were now offically in recession, with investment and production still heading downwards. In the industrial heartland of the mid-West, hundreds of manufacturing
by the collapse in oil prices. firms have been driven into bankruptcy, including the steel giants of LTV Dallas and even US Steel itself (forced to restart with debts wiped clean under the name of USX). Agricultural production has similarly been decimated —for the first time in 27 years the USA is importing more farm produce than it exports.
It had been hoped that low commodity prices and the collapse of oil prices would reduce costs for industry and stimulate a boom. But the slump in prices has only damaged the mining sectors and the oil rich states of Texas and • Louisiana.
Banking crisis
Famous tycoons like the Hunt family who based their wealth on oil and metals have been driven into liquidation- JR Ewing is in trouble!
Financial and service sectors are ultimately dependent on a thriving industrial sector for prosperity, whatever some economists may be arguing these days. That truth has been borne out as bank after bank in the USA has been closed by an avalanche of defaulters from farming, industry and oil. The first major bank to suffer was the Continental Bank
of Illinois which eventually had to be bailed out (i.e. in effect nationalised) by the government's Federal Reserve Bank and other major banks. More recently the First Bank of Oklahoma was taken over by the government for $130 million to save it from collapse, and on the horizon is the probable collapse of the Bank of America which used to be the world's largest, weighed down by unpaid debts from Californian farmers and Latin American governments.
What a comment on the American economy that bastions of finance capital have to be nationalised by the Reagan government to maintain the channels of credit for US capitalism.
The Reagan government has desperately been trying to avoid the disaster ahead, while continuing to puff and huff about the boom lasting indefinitely. It laid its hopes on the 30 per cent devaluation of the dollar helping home industry to compete with imports, while demanding at this year's Group of Five meeting of major capitalist economies that Japan and West Germany cut their interest rates and spend more so that markets would be opened up for US goods.
But
would
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MIR Autumn 1986: Economic Notes
massive readjustment of trade and production in the
world economy if the US
government was to have its
way. To close the US trade deficit, West German and Japanese capitalists and consumers would have to raise their purchases of US goods at twice the rate they spent on them in the last two years. And they see no reason why they should expand their economies and risk new inflation in order to buy US goods. As it is, the slowing of the US economy has already affected Japan's industrial growth rate which is actually falling, at 3.5 per cent a year at present.
The devaluation also appears to have failed. The dollar may have fallen against West Germany and Japan but compared to other important importers like Canada and South Korea, there has been little change. So imports are still beating US manufacturers - in July the annual rate of imported
UK poverty
HOUSE OF Commons statistics now estimate that
11.7m people in the UK are living on incomes equivalent to the supplementary benefit level, which is £29.80 a week plus rent for a single person and £48.40 per week for a couple.
This is a sharp increase in the numbers of poor from 6m when the Tories came to power. If you add in those who are near the supplementary benefit level then a new estimate (by the Social Democrats!) shows that there are 16.3m in poverty, a rise of 47 per cent since 1979 and making nearly one in three people poor.
Of the near 12m at benefit levels, there are two million actually living below those levels. Half of these are pensioners, but nearly 700,000 are people working a full week but earning less than the state benefit minimum!
And the Central Statistical
motor vehicles reached a record 3.3m, while US car manufacturers continue to slash production and prepare to move out of the USA. No wonder some US economists are calling the current economic climate a "growth recession'" - a somewhat black joke for millions of US industrial workers and farmers.
Trade barriers
Interest rates remain doggedly high and most observers do not expect any further falls - quite the contrary. So investment will remain stagnant. The Reagan government is thus preparing for major cuts in government spending and new taxes totalling over $30bn which must further hit the markets and profits of US industry.
As a result, US industrialists are increasingly clamouring for tariff barriers and other measures to be
Office has more information which adds to the misery. The poorest 20 per cent of households in the UK earned only 0.5 per cent of total household income while the top 20 per cent took 50 per cent. After taxes and benefits this huge inequality was slightly ameliorated; the bottom 20 per cent receiving 6 per cent and the top 20 per cent getting 41 per cent.
Employment
depends on manufacturing
A STUDY by the OSG private research group on employment refutes the arguments from Tory ministers and bankers that service industries can compensate for the decimation of UK manufacturing employment. According to the study, 16 per cent of service industries directly depend on trade with manufacturers and the proportion is rising.
erected against Japanese and European competition. The US government has passed on these calls as threats to other capitalist nations: "I must frankly tell you that protectionism in the USA is not dead" said Trade Secretary Baker to a meeting of the OECD countries a few months ago.
And already a prolonged stagnation or even fall in world trade has been forecast by the world trade body GATT in its recent report-if countries persist in creating barriers to trade by bilateral 'favoured trade' agreements with certain countries: "To continue down the road of managed trade and market sharing can only invite prolonged stagnation-or decline-in world trade."
At the GATT conference the US representative threatened that if there was no agreement, the USA may have to take its own individual action." This 'you
scratch my back and I'II scratch yours' policy of bilateral agreements rather than free trade is increasingly reducing overall trade expansion. GATT predicts only a 3.5 per cent growth in world trade this year, the same as 1985. And this before protectionism has really got a hold in the world's largest economy, the USA. If that happens the world economy must spiral into a recession matching the 1930s.
The fall in Wall Street and the dollar is the first sign that speculators no longer believe the fairy stories of permanent growth espoused by the Reagan administration and are beginning to see that the wild share price rises of the past based on merger mania and foreign purchasers only disguised the prospect of the world's most important economy crashing down into a severe recession that will spread throughout the world.
SEASONES
Cold
kills
KONIN
the
old
Over a million pensioners live below the supplementary benefit level.
Moreover much of the increase in employment in service sectors has been through the transfer of jobs from manufacturing, by taking jobs like cleaning, research, finance, and catering out of in-house departments in manufacturing firms, councils and na-
tionalised industries and handing them to subcontractors.
There is an obvious limit to service job expansion in this way and new service jobs at the expense of productive industry cannot relieve the unemployment problem.
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