went wrong!
Since those days we haven't scen action on such a scale, inspired independently of the official trade union leaders, because the CP have chosen to cut the cloth of the LCDTU to the measurements demanded by the left' trade union leaders like Hugh Scanion and Jack Jones. Divorced from any independent mass actions, attendances at the LCDTU have slumped. ACTION It's not that the Communist Party or the LCDTU have a fetish against "unofficial' action. While everyone, the IMG included, would prefer official action anytime, the CP, through the LCDIU, have in their time org anised massive actions independent of the union chiefs.
When Bernard Panter, a leading CP figure in the AUEW in Manchester, said at least week's LCDTU in reply to the cat-calls from the delegater of the International Socialists"It's not a question of official or un official action. It's a question of action' he was quite in line with the policies of the Communist Party. To see it all in simple terms of 'official" versus "unofficial action with the Stalinists always firmly in the camp of the first is to misunderstand the real reasons why the politics of the CP betray the struggle over key issues such as Shrewsbury.
At the root of things is the political strategy of the Communist Party: For the CP, socialism will be achieved by the successful struggle for democracy inside all the organisat Jons the ruling class uses to maintain capitalism and stay in power -what Marxists call the bourgeois state.
To put it in the words of Bert Ramelson, Industrial Organiser of the CP. "As far as I am concerned, a working-class Commissioner of Police sitting in New Scotland Yard is a smashing of the bourgeois state. For the CP, it will be possible to overthrow capitalism by getting the right faces into Parliament and into Whitehall. The first major obstacle will be breached when a left' Gorernment is elected based on a Partjamentary majority of left' and CP MP's and receiving mass support. Only then, according to the CP, can the real work of organising socialism begin.
Looking at the present composition of the Labour Party, it's not hard to see why the CP believe such a prospect is a long way off. For the time being the purpose of all poutical work, whether it's mass action in the factories and streets ('official' or "unofficial") or trade union or local and Parliamentary elections, is to increase the number of left' MPs and trade union leaders who support the CP's broad policy at each point in When it comes to working out how the greatest possible unity and support of the working class can be won in the fight over a political issue in the trade urions, such as the froeing of the Shrewsbury pickers, the conclusion is simple. Since Parliament. the Goverument und the TUC are where the reul power lies for taking the first steps towards socialism, the movement must go step by-step to get ever-widening support in Parliam ent and the TUC from the lefts". When enough of these people have been won on an issee, then the right wing in the Cahinet and the TUC will see that resistance will cost them only eight of these were women workers. Yet in February 1969, the LCDTU pulled off a strike of 150,000 against Labour's In Place of Strife Bill and later one of 250,000. In 1970, the LCDTU was once again responsible for the huge unofficial strike on 8 December against the Tories Industrial Relations Act. In 1972, it was LCDTU spade-work that played an emportant part in building the massive wave of unofficial strike action to force the release of the five dockers from Pentonville Prison. So what Last month's conference of the LCDTU.
The first since the election of the Labour Government, it was also the worst attended for more than 5 years.
Inset: Bemard Panter, leading CP militant in Manchester engineering. as Sid Easton (TGWU Region 1. CP and ex-bodyguard of Harry Pollict said to the LCDTU last Kinds of people than we do. In support of the social contract. Scanion and the rest of the left' and Jones owe their present positweek: They have their problems and work amongst very-different other words, while the entire trade union bureaucracy is so united in don't want to get out on a limb by But there's also a deeper reason why the CP are left holding the baby by these erstwhile "lefties". Scanlon ions to their espousal of shop floor Then. these lefts will need an alternative to the policies of Labour which can be implemented as a com prehensive answer to the crisis. Such an alternative prograrme could not wail for the long struggle to people Parliament and the TUC with nice "lefts". It would depend on the strength and orginisation of the working class in their own organisations. It would lead to a direct confrontation with the state. It would threaten the very interests Scanion and Scurgill have in keeping the mass movement within strict limits. No longer could they balance between the Government and their memhers er than Pentonville —and it would have meant flying in the face of the precious left trade union leaders with independent actions they would have been forced to back before they were ready PARLIAMENTARY ROAD The vast majority of the relatively tiny number of delegates at the LCDTU clearly did believe in the parliamentary road to socialism. They may have worries about the Tow profile of the LCDTU as it languishes without the close coupelation of Scanlon and Jones, but, on the whole, the delegates backed