the profits of British capitalism and the necessity to extract a greater rate of surplus value are dissolved by appeals to everybody to play fair. This is underpinned by the classic reformist position that a rise in productivity will enable profits to recover. *..... Labour believes that there is scope in an expanding economy for rising money wages and, too, that rising money wages and expanding profits can coexist. Only one sixth of the fall of profits since 1964 have been due to stagnation. The reformist position is therefore not valid. Finally the document tries to persuade trade unionists that Labour has learnt the lesson of In Place of Strife. The Labour Party will abolish the Industrial Relations Act. In its place will be a voluntary system. But it is the sub-clauses and not the declarations of good intent that are significant. *The extent of government intervention will have to depend on how successful voluntary efforts are." ELECTORALISM The leadership's job in Blackpool was to channel the anti-Tory mood of the Labour movement back into an electoralist strategy. The conference should be given the illusion that what was said would matter and that democracy was an integral, living reality in the Party. On the Common Market, the nationalist fervour should be given its head but a proper room for manoeuvre should be left to the leadership so that it could fairly easily renege when in government and thus meet the needs of big capital. If possible the leadership should be given a mandate to prepare an incomes policy. Overall, the Labour leaders had a successful conference. The central debate was clearly whether or not to withdraw from the EEC. It is equally clear that this is not the central issue for the working class. Socialists must be opposed to the capitalist Common Market, but this can only be answered by a socialist Europe and not by the twilight fantasies of chauvinism. The AUEW resolution had to be defeated if Wilson was not to get into severe problems when he changed course in the future, and, to audible sighs of relief, it was voted down by a narrow majority. By a series of tricks the largest majority was accorded to the ambiguous National Executive statement. Jack Jones played an important role in this as virtually Wilson's closest ally. The Tribune view of the whole messy business was one of extraordinary illusion and naivety normally only found among those tourists who are in the habit of buying Nelson's column or Buckingham Palace. 'The debate was wound up in a low-keyed but skil ful speech by Harold Wilson. He was clearly determined to ensure that the Labour Party would move gradually and gently into outright opposition to the Market.
The debate on the Industrial Relations Act was an opportunity for a lot of old style resolution calling for the repeal of the Act. Jack Jones listed the iniquities of the Act; it had brought the law into disrepute, lost more working days in one year than were lost in all the years of the Labour government, and enabled small irresponsible employers to undermine industrial relations. In this woolly atmosphere, dominated by the concept of the electoral return of the Labour Party to solve the problems of the working class, the real struggles such as Saltley and the docks strike appeared to be insubstantial phantoms. But the leadership's real bonus in the industrial debates was the successful resolution moved by the Transport Salaried Staffs Association which called on the Executive and the TUC to collaborate on a prices and incomes policy. This is one conference decision that most probably will be applied. LIMITED RESPONSE t would be wrong, however, to merely write off the series of leftish resolutions by referring to the tricky footwork of Wilson. It does represent a response to the radicalisation of the working class over the past period. Labour Party membership has marginally but significantly increased. The move towards the right in the constituencies in the late fifties and early sixties has been, at the very least, halted. The votes received by three professedly 'Marxist' candidates in the NEC elections were significant. But at Blackpool, as at every other Labour Conference, the strategic line of the Labour Party was necessarily counter-posed to the deepening of the actual class struggle of the workers. In the end this party must try to reduce the working class to a claque applauding the electoral fortunes and the titanic Parliamentary melodramas of the Parliamentary leaders. This Parliamentary aim rouses so little enthusiasm in a working class that has lived through the 1964-70 debacle, that Benn in his final speech to the conference went so far as to flirt with the politics of independent class struggle: he suggested that print workers might take direct political action and censor the anti-Labour press. Benn clearly feels that only such anti-Parliamentarist demagogy can ensure the Parliamentary success of the party.
The only real solution to the needs of the working class can be found through organised action absolutely independent of all reliance upon the machinery of the state, including its Parliamentary coat-tails. Such action can only be organised through the committees for the defence of trade unions, Councils of Action and other such formations which are able to transcend trade union sectoralism and unite the whole class and its allies in the struggle for political objectives which smash the attacks of the capitalist class.