Rance houses into a single state bank under the control of the working ClaSS.
In the fight for the right to work, occupations have time and again been shown to be the most effective way to resist redundancies. Many unions even have this written into their policy, and the recent London Labour Party Conference pledged itself to promote and support such actions.
These leaders must be forced to turn their words into action - starting with the policy of many unions for a 35-hour week which should be coupled with a ban on overtime with no loss of earnings. Against useless pleas for the Government to save jobs, it is the workers themsel ves who must produce their own of pay and nationalisation prepared books.
If the majority of Chrysler stewaras nad acted on the report arawn up by workers at the Whitley research plant, a very different outcome to Varley's 'rescue' deal would have been possible. The activity of the Open the Books Committee at Leyland's Cowley plant, which has won increasing mass support through its exposure of the workers participation in speed-up' proposals of the Ryder Report, is an example to be generalised to every factory.
at the Assembly is the breaking of the trade unions and Labour Party at every level from the policies of the Wilson Government. paign for recall TUC and Labour ALL CUTS through the opening of the companies' imum forces to be grouped in opposicollaborators in the TUC. ing of the books.
Another vital task facing militants The camand the cuts. the labour movement.
Her capitalism. Party conferences will allow the maxtion to the Wilson Cabinet and their At a local level, action committees and right to work committees can help to centralise opposition to unemployment. Even working on the information available to existing stewards' committees, the plans and intentions of managements for redundancies can be exposed and powerful propaganda made for the openThere should be a fight for the maximum involvement of Labour MPs in sponsoring such committees - particularly in committing the lefts to them. policies of nationalisation under workers control, as well as continually fighting to force them to support every struggle against unemployment The fight for the right to work of women workers is of major importance given the astonishing rate of increase of unemployment among women compared with men. This potentially dangerous rift in the labour movement can be overcome through the rejection of any policies of 'women out first and a struggle for all the rights of women.
This means in particular a campaign for the implementation of TUC and Labour Party conference policy of free contraception and abortion on request; and a continuing fight for the adoption and implementation in full of the demands of the Working Women's Charter by In the struggle against the effects of inflation, the number one demand that the Assembly must adopt is the rejection of any incomes policy undThe t6 limit - for which Hugh Scanlon has now admitted his.support - has contributed more than anything else to the sharp decline in living standards.
The Labour Government was also responsible for the abolition of threshold payments, which at least gave some protection to wages ag ainst inflation. Automatic cost of ane creases bused one rude lon The Assembly could be the ideal launching pad for the construction of a class struggle left wing in the labour movement around such a fighting programme. But even though it won't live up to this task, it will bring together many of the militants who can play a central role in building a permanent labour movement opposition to the Labour Cabinet and the traitors in the trade union bureaucracy who support Similar assemblies in local areas, cuts committees and right to work committees will be an essential part of this process of challenging the right wing for the leadership of the labour movement. No amount of 'pressure', no amount of talk about the issues being politics not personalities from the Communist Party and the Labour lefts can hide the fact that you either fight for leadership or end up surrendering to the In calling for this new class strug gle left wing, Red Weekly does so in the traditions of the early Minority Movement before its sectarian degeneration. With one sixth of the present claimed membership of the Communist Party, the CP of the early 1920s was able to build a National Minority Movement with supporters in every major union, and hold regular national conferences with representation from up to a quarter of all trade unionists. It is that sort of movement, which clearly cost of living index for all wages, pensions, grants and social service benefits is the only way to defend workers incomes against price rises. The building of a national day of action will be an important part of the fight for alternative policies to those of Wilson in the labour movement. Already the one-day general strike in Dundee and the planned three challenged the right wing tor leadership, that we must strive to build now.
Demands and campaigns for the recall of the TUC and Labour Party conferences allow the right-wing leaders to be confronted and the maximum possible forces assembled in opposition to them. Even at the present time a national conference of all Constituency Labour Parties and trade union bodies in favour of recall conferences to break with Wilson's policies would be a tremendous step forward in the fight against the right - and towards a class struggle left wing.
In local action committees, individual factories, unions and Labour Party branches a common, but not linked, fight is going on against the right wing. Newham North East is only the proud tip of a larger iceberg. The welcome decision of the Institute of Workers Control to set up a commission to investigate the car industry, for instance, extends the fight already started by the Open the Books Committee in Cowley.
An enormous range of initiatives leading towards a class struggle left wing are already being taken, and many more can and will be. Indeed as with the Minority Movement in the 1920s, it is only through the development of all these struggles and campaigns that such a movement can be built, It is to this task that militants must turn themselves after the Assembly.
hour strike against the cuts in Glasgow have opened the way here. By "naming the date' for national strike action against the cuts, the Assembly could provide a powerful focus for all the fragmented struggles occuring at the present time - and pre pare the way for national industrial action to force the withdrawal of all the cuts.
Organisational Principles and Internal Regime =8 Party/Faction Over the last three weeks Red Weekly has been looking in detail at the ditterence between a revolmonary party and factions within such a party. We have drawn the historical lessons of Lenin's struggle against the revisionists in the Second International and of Trotsky's struggle against the Stalinists.
In both cases what emerged is that neither launched a new party until both the social democrats and tne Stalinists had passed definitively into the camp of the counter-revolution - the former by their support for their 'own' fatnerlands in the First World War, the latter by their disastrous policy in Germany, which allowed Hitler to come to power in 1933 without a shot being fired. Until these actual historic class betrayals took place, both Lenin and Trotsky fought for the existence of factions within the same party to hammer out political differences.
we followed unis up last week by snowing that the 1953 split in the Fourth International was a split not into two world parties, but into two public factions. Because no historic betrayal of the interests of the working class had taken place, it was possible for a principled reunification of these two factions to take place in 1963 - a reunification involving tne majority or bot the International Comm ittee and the International Secretariat. REMAIN OUTSIDE Gerry Healy, leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the so-called International Committee ova, cmose to romam oursae me rcunnica inter national in 1963. Instead he maintained and devel:Red Weekly 18 March 1976 The first result of Healy's allegation that the "Pabloites" crossed the class Rubicon in 1953 was the systematic lying and misrepresentation of his opponents' views. For if the Pabloites were responsible 1o1 world historic betrayals, then Healy had to prove it - and, inevitably, show that such betrayals would continue and get worse. (This is something very different from arguing that gross errors have been developed, revisionist ideas advanced, and even totally wrong positions taken on major questions. Even if true none of these would justify a split into anything more than two factions.)
Lacking the necessary facts, Healy was forced to justify his position through systematic lying. To lie that the International Secretariat did not support the 1956 Hungarian revolution; to lie that Cuba is not a workers' state; to lie that the United Secretariat did not intervene in and even publicly attack the line of the Ceylonese section before a majority of it joined a bourgeois coalition government in 1964; to lie concerning the line of the French comrades in the May 1968 General Strike; to lie today on virtually every major issue of the world revolution.
To justify the creation of a separate party from the "Pabloites", when in fact the conditions for such a definitive split did not exist, the SLL/WRP was forced to turn its organisation and publications into one of the greatest storehouses of falsehood and dishonesty in the labour movement. Lying and falsification is not accidental, an 'excess' of Healyism, but sometning wnien became a necessary part or us pouncal line when it maintained its separation from the Fourth International.
But such a sustained campaign of falsehood has its own inevitable effects. Firstly, there is a deadly danger Healy lied over line of French comrades in May 1968 General Strike In the period leading up to 1953 and since, have the International Secretariat and later the United
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plans for worksharing with no loss PENSI NERS