terest is paid on the money raised for the purchase; and the price of the goods or services provided is subject to the market (in the case of the docks the handling charges would be pared to keep the export prices competitive). As the industry still runs for profit - the fixed interest on the loans-workers' conditions of employment are still determined by the market. In the case of the mining industry this has meant expense of real wages, they spoke of a "wagewidespread redundancies due to rationalisation and unfavourable productivity deals. The only conclusion to any examination of nationalisation is that it would not solve the problems of the workers even if it was granted. The Communist leadership of the shop stewards movement put a better position than the party itself, They put forward the dem and for "nationalisation under workers control". This demand attempts to deal with the probiems which Labourite nationalisation won't come to grips with. Full workers control means workers determining their own conditions in place of the market. There is another problem. Who is the demand put to? In the case of the CP pamphlet this is quite clear. The demand is one for the Labour Party to implement. Yet Labour's type of nationalisation offers no solution to the problem. If by nationalisation the CP means nationalisation under workers' control, then Labour would not be prepared to carry it out anyway. The CP's position hides the inevitability of the anti-working class nature of Labour policy and creates illusions in the possibility of reforming the party. It does this by suggesting that "It is a disgrace that the Labour Government did not nationalise the docks". We want a government which will guarantee workkers" control, and must argue for one consistently, even if there is no immediate prospect of one emerging. The central demand raised must be for the trade unions and shop stewards committees to advance the struggle, by organising to control the allocation of work, redundancies, etc. rather than placing demands which tend to suggest the diversion from the existing activities of the working class back into the now deserted constituency Labour parties for a fight for socialist policies.
The first of the slogans- that for straight nationalisation -is pointless. The second is a confusing amalgam. Nationalisation merely hides the current tasks. It can even suggest nationalisation as a pre-requisite for the establishment of control. Now while control over conditions can only be established fully when generalised through the economy and guaranteed by a workers state, steps can be taken now.
The existing joint control system which controls the size of the register of docks workers is a very partial defence against the threat of redundancies. The existence of the "pool" or unattached register makes it possible for the employers to escape the effects of a really effective veto. The men on the unattached get only £20 a week fall back money. This is not paid by the last employer but by the employers collectively. In addition the divorce between the right wing bureaucrats who make up half the board, and the men, has traditionally been large in the docks. It would not have resulted in a rupture between them during the boom, when the scheme operated in the interests of the employers. Now, however, there will be increasing opportunities for a breach between social democratic trade union In the 1950s bourgeois economists thought up a new name for the class struggle. They called it cost-push inflation. Instead of saying that capitalists were out to increase profits at the price spiral". For a time it worked. By the 1960s even some self-styled and "eminent" Marxists were taken in. But however obscure the euphemism, and mystifying the analysis, sooner or later mality had to stand out. The drastic increases in unemployment shook to the cote a complacent and ill-prepared working class. No other single factor has been more significant to the increased radicalisation among workers, than this fear of a return to the ThirNor is the response merely local. The media has carried the danger signals into every home, and productivity bargaining has taken it into every industry- All workers feel affected. Instinctively they identify this or that "sit-in" as part of a more general struggle, and thereby extend the limits of their hitherto fragmented consciousness well beyond the hopes of Old and New Left alike. Politics have entered the arena not as a result of the conscious will of revolutionaries, but because international competition has forced the British bourgeoisie to attempt to reduce wages, and rely once more on the discipline of a reserve army of unemployed. All the time that hard-fought wage demands were met out of high priced exports, inflation at home was no real problem to Capital. But once Europe's post-war economic miracles induced a squeeze on profits, carefully planned manoeuvres were designed to cut back earnings. Each one, a test of resistance. First, a wage-freeze; then speed-up and measured day work, and with them, the disguised and systematic attack on shop stewards; then unemployement and legislation syste matic attack on shop stewards; then unemployment and legislation against militants; and finally, a small number of isolated, but strategic defeats of the unions, culminating, in due course, in a major confrontation with key sections of the working class.
Humberside has a long tradition of class solidarity. When Ben Tillet visited Hull in the January of 1891 he was able to declare that, "no Party careerists-coincided with increased mitown stands higher in the ranks of trade unionism". Addressing a mass meeting of striking dockers he went on to say that not a "single blackleg (discovered during the strike) had come from the Hull area", so that the port employers .. had to scour the scrap heaps and bring them from a distance". The port was undoubtedly the best organised in the country. Moreover, nowhere was a greater proportion of the unskilled unionised. These two facts were intimately related. Hull's trade union movement came to be dominated by dockers, who immune from the influence of middle-class intellectuals, led most of the political struggles as well.
Until recently this situation had changed dramatically. First, there was the break in the organisational hold of the Labour Party. Like everywhere else, the sharp recognition that Labour Governments were fundamentally no different from the Tories, resulted in a mass exodus from the Constituency Parties. For so long these had been an important integrating factor in the city's labour movement, because they imposed fewer restrictions on the number of delegates that could be represented at any one time, than for example, did the Trades Council. In addition, there was an immediate organisational link-up of struggles other than those at work, so that Tenants" Associations and local Labour Wards, usually contained militants who were also busy organising on the docks and in the factories.
CONT
2M00 for new. Container technology amounts to an enormous rationalisation and economy of transportation. Container facilities can, and are, being developed inland. There are depots at Coatbridge, Aintree, Urmstrom, Leeds, Birmingham, Stratford and Barking. Ships need no longer go where the cargo is, since the container has become an extension of the ship. This therefore means that only one or two ports need accommodate the larger vessels now being built specifically to deal with the massive containers. Hull dockers have good reason to be anxious about these developments because the inflated cash value of the cargo they handle, in