strike should begin - although of course in certain situations, like the arrest of the five dockers, it is necessary to place the emphasis on demanding that the strike should start immediately without delay.
PRACTICAL STEPS.
But simply to issue calls for organisation and to pass resolutions through union branches on general strikes is not enough.
It is necessary to know what practical steps must be taken to bring about the necessary organisation.
Some revolutionaries say that the imemdiate immediate answer is setting up Councils of Action, that is local bodies with elected representatives of shop stewards committees, trade union branches, tenants, students and so on. Is this policy correct? The answer is that it depends on the relation of forces in any given area. In a real mass upsurge a Council of Action is an absolute necessity, but to play any useful role it must be deeply rooted in the masses. Nothing is more useless than a tiny handful of people declaring themselves to be a real Council of Action and claiming that they lead the working class in an area. But if a Council of Action with real roots in the class in an area can be established then it should be set up without delay. The first and simplest step is the organis. ation of conferences in areas to discuss the struggle against the freeze and against the government. These should draw in the widest possible layers of trade unionists, tenants, students and so on. Some first steps along these lines have already been taken. The Ford shop stewards asked health workers and others in struggle to their national meeting to discuss their pay claim. Various elected committees of gas workers have tried to work out how to involve other sections. Health workers organisations such as the London Alliance of Shop Stewards in Health have called for conferences to discuss joint ways of fighting, and conferences have taken place or been planned in Manchester and Rotherham. The Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions Conference on 31 March could he a step forward - although unfortunately here the Communist Party's refusal to practise working class democracy will probably prevent as much being achieved as could be. At the very least, however, ad hoc committees for the planned strike on May Ist can be established.
These and similar conferences can and should be called throughout the country as an immediate step. They can be used to lay the groundwork for any future steps in organisation. In some cases it may be possible to establish permanent organisatson at once out of such meetings. In most cases it will not. But at least the question of decisive working class organisation for struggle will begin to be raised in the minds of militants.
COMING STRUGGLES The next decisive steps forward in the struggle for organisation can be taken during the big strike struggles which are coming. Already round local struggles various groups have taken initiatives. In the case of the CAV struggle attempts were made to organise real solidarity conferences. A national conference of solidarity was held for Fine Tubes, During the miners's strike solidarity between all sorts of social forces was established on a big scale. In East Anglia, for example, miners, other workers, unemployed and students organised picketing, accommodation, watches on the ports and other forms of solidarity action. Such moves must be made on a far bigger and more organised scale during any future big struggles.
In every big national or local strike all social groups and organisations should come together to pursue the struggle. A conference or support committee organised in an area can organise trade unionists to carry out blacking and solidarity strikes, students and tenants to provide accommodation, unemployed to picket, law students and claimants unions to deal with the police and social security, and so on. The response to the legal attacks on Briants where thousands of trade unionists demonstrated and students picketed round the clock shows the way here. Once again such immediate steps can begin to raise the question of organisation for big and decisive struggles. It is these practical and to the point measures which aid the present struggle and prepare future ones which now flow from the general slogan of organising for a decisive clash with the bourgeoisie. This is what real practical and decisive preparation for a Communist League rally at Paris Sports Palace "For revolutionists, there is only one road to socialism. The bourgeois state must be destroyed and the dictatorship of the proletariat established ... For the first time, thanks to 1968, the question of power is posed."
With these words, Alain Krivine opened the election campaign of the Ligue Communiste (French section of the Fourth International) at a meeting in Paris on 7 February. Seven thousand people packed into the Palais des Sports to hear the speakers put forward an alternative to the "common programme" of the Party, Socialist Party and the Left Radicals) A tremendous ovation was given to the Isst last speaker, Ernest Mandel, who had once again defied the entry ban imposed on him by the regime in 1968 to speak for the Fourth International at the meeting.
AGREEMENT The Ligue is running 92 candidates in the elections, on the basis of an agreement with the Lutte Ouvriere (LO) group whereby the two organisations will not run candidates against each other. As a result there will be a candidate exposing the "parliamentary roadism' of the Union of the Left in 263 out of the 487 constituencies. In the first round of voting, on 4 March, the Ligue is calling for a programmatic vote, i.e. a vote for the revolutionary candidate or abstention where none is standing. In the second round, however, on 1l March, it will call for support for the candidates of the Union of the Left - but purely on the basis that a success for the coalition would be a setback for the bourgeoisie which would strengthen the confidence and combativity of the working class in its struggles.
ELECTORALISM At the same time, though, there will be no letting up in the denunciation of the electoralism of the Union of the Left. As Krivine put it at the Paris meeting: "The components of the Union of the Left think social institutions are neutral; they want to build socialism by using the present structures. It's like giving a drinking straw to a fireman and thinking that that makes it a fire extinguisher." Already the 'common programme' is being presented less and less as a path to socialism, and the leader of the Socialist Party, Mitterrand, is adamant that the coalition wants to retain Pompidou as President, despite the latter's veiled hints at a coup d'etat if things go too badly for the bourgeoisie. Just where such an electoralist perspective leads has already been demonstrated by the S.P. secretary, Chevenement, who proposes to prevent a sudden outflow of capital by guaranteeing its profitability in France. In others words, by guaranteeing the continued and increased exploitation of the working class as that to decentralise the police force! LO's under a government of the Union of the Left.Marchais, leader of the CP has promised too that there will be fewer strikes if the coalition wins.
The whole campaign of the Ligue Communiste has been centred around the need to destroy illusions that a victory for the Union of the Left can substitute for the independent struggle of the working class and its allies to overthrow capitalism in its entirety. Such a struggle, the Ligue emphasises, will involve illegal methods and the use of violence to achieve its purpose.
ILLUSIONS Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the other major "Trotskyist groups taking part in the elections. The OCI-AJS, followers of Pierre Lambert and formerly part of the SLL's the working class or the bourgeoisie - is Union of the Left. (coalition of the Communist International Committee, initially agreed to join the Ligue and Lutte Ouvriere in dividing up the constituencies, but has now decided that the Ligue and LO candidates are crypto-Stalinists pushed by the bourgeoisie". So instead it will vote in the first round for the candidates of the Communist and Socialist parties, and against those who stand on the basis of rejecting reformism. Moreover, this goes hand in hand with the peddling of the most amazing illusions in what such a government could do. The Lambertists first note that "none of the elementary and basic demands of the proletariat and the youth, of the masses, are realisable under the decadent capitalist system" ... and then go on to conclude that, "To the question, What Government can satisfy their demands? there is but one answer: Only a government of the big workers' parties, a government set up by the SP and the CP."! In other words. somewhere along the line, this government is going to overthrow capitalism! As an article in the Ligue's newspaper, Rouge, commented: "This is no longer opportunism; it is servility." One wonders why the OCI-AJS should even bother to put up the 19 candidates it is running.
LUTTE OUVRIERE L utte Ouvriere, too, while correctly stressing the altogether moderate and ambiguous nature of the social measures contained in the "common programme", also manage to sidester the most important question: how the working class is going to destroy the domination of the bourgeoisie and frustrate its counter-revolutionary violence, in order to impose any demands it might False.
Instead, LO have tended to concentrate on raising "more revolutionary" demands than those of the Union of the Left - a 30 hour instead of a 40 hour week, a minimum wage of 1,500 instead of 1,000 francs a month, etc. etc. This is combined with two proposed alterations in the state power: "A closer control by the voters over those they elect"; and "The decentralisation of power and decision-making centres. But nowhere is the class content of this power specified. This inevitably leads to what are not only confusing but positively dangerous demands, such "Programme of the Revolutionists" has this to say: "We are told that the police are necessary, even indispensable, for the protection of the citizens. Fine! But then let's put them at the disposal of the citizens, that is, of local institutions of power".
This actually ignores the fact that the police are an instrument of bourgeois rule; that an integral task in the struggle of the working class has to be the disarming of the armed bands of the bourgeois state, and their replacement by armed workers organised in self-defence committees. Instead, the workers are supposed to put their trust in some classless police force under the control of some classless "citizens' in a situation from which the most vital element - the question of who rules, totally omitted. Thus LO, despite its critique of the Union of the Left, finishes up on much the same terrain, BOURGEOISIE If most of the left prefers to skirt around this problem, however, the bourgeoisie has no such illusions about its lack of importance. For them the question of state power is absolutely fundamental, as has already been shown by its use against the revolutionaries in the election campaign. In several constituencies, candidates of the Ligue and LO have been harassed and arrested by the police in manufactured incidents. More seriously, the Ligue has been refused time on TV; the number of candidates it is putting forward entitles it to seven minutes, but the State authority claims not to have received the necessary official forms. The Ligue was not informed of the meeting at which this was decided, and LO found out about it only three hours before it took place.
Further, LO has been refused the use of the Palais des Sports for a meeting on 26 February. Attempts to find an alternative hall have at the time of writing met with rebuffs from all the municipal authorities approached.
The bourgeoisie recognises the importance of who holds the State power, all right. It intends to use it, too. But the left for the most part absolutely refuses to face up to this question. The importance of the Ligue Communiste's campaign is that it alone has stressed as the central task the independent organisation of the working class and its allies to break for ever the hold of capitalism.
John Marston Hear ALAIN KRIVINE of the Ligue Communiste (French section of the Fourth International) speak on: 'THE FRENCH ELECTIONS AND THE TASKS OF THE LEFT' Wednesday, 7th March at 7.30 p.m. Old Town Hall, Hampstead, N.W.3. (nearest tube: Belsize Park)
Meeting organised by London IMG