wilson attacks wages by BRIAN HERON fectively been served a weeks notice to come up with a voluntary agreement to comply with the ten percent limit on wage increases in the next round, Foiling that the Government intends to make its proposals statutory." (Financial Times, July 2, 1975.) It seems the speed with which the TUC rushed to comply with the government proposals was not wholly sufficient. The July 10 Financial Times reported, "there will almost certainly be reserve statutory powers on employers backing up the TUC's voluntary scheme, " although the government may not move immediately to pass legislation. On July 9 the TUC had voted 19-13 to accept the government wage proposals. Despite appeals by the TUC to suspend price increases during six month intervals (a retreat from their previous position demanding that the prices of certain key commodities should be frozen indefinitely), at the moment there appears to be no government proposal to curb prices any more than has been normal (some goods have had government subsidies to prevent price increases). Even "cosmetics" (like the TUC demand that no one earning more than 7, 000 a year should receive any increases for as long as the measures are in effect are being resisted by the government and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Up to now, the real wages of the working class have been rising at about 6% a year, taking into account the 25% rate of inflation. The new proposals, if successfully implemented, will reduce the standard of living of the working class by about 15% a year if the current rate of inflation is not reduced. (And that figure does not take account of reductions in social services.)
The piper calls the tune Despite some appearances to the contrary, this wage restraint attempt bears only a passing resemblance to the previous attempt of the 1964-70 Wilson government. The most obvious difference is that the economic situation is far worse, combining inflation with recession and unemployment. Despite the improvement of the balance of payments caused by the precipitous decline of the exchange rate of sterling in world currency markets, no export-led revival of investment is occurring. A recent survey conducted by the Financial Times commented, "industry sees .. investment declining for at least another year ahead, " As for exports: "the larger companies are.. hopeful about stepping up their export sales. " (Financial Times Survey of Business Opinion, June 2, 1975.) Industry consistently complains that its extra capital is soaked up by increased costs in Britain (mostly on the wages front) and by interest on loans that have been necessary to avoid massive cutbacks in production. But the source of these loans is now in considerable danger. The run on the pound (whose exchange value had declined a record 28.9% since December 1971) threatened to create a real flight of capital from London, thus eroding the basis for any further subsidies to industry and undermining the government's ability to maintain its huge deficit (now running at an estimated E9 thousand million per year). While Wilson was talking of the folly of acting in haste, a situation was developing that threatened to precipitate a sudden collapse of the British economy. The demand of the 260,000 miners for wage increases of 64% (a basic rate of E100 per week) appeared to indicate that the situafion for British capital was rapidly worsening. In an atmosphere of near hysteria induced by the economic sit-
"absolutely basic policies of the government" went crashing down one after the other and the proposed measures found little immediate opposition within the Parliamentary Labour party and only slightly more inside the TUC, Lead-up to the proposals The political and social instability of British society accentuated by the fall of the Heath government in early 1974 - essentially as a result of industrial action and the threat of extension of that action - reinforced working-class combativity, created uncertainty and political paralysis among sections of the ruling class, and welled over to affect the stability of the parliament. The minority Labour government and the politically decentralized character of the Tory party are both reflections of this crisis. But the campaign around the recent Common Market referendum and its result offered the ruling class the possibility of emerging from its paralysis and thus represented a limited defeat for the working class. The explanation of this defeat lies in the contradiction between the lineup of social forces on the one hand and the absence of a clear class-based political alternative on the other hand. All the mass organizations of the working class favored
British withdrawal from the Common Market, just os they had opposed the Heath government at the time of the miners' strike and the introduction of the three-day week. Such on intense period of class struggle occurring at a time when the economic basis for far-reaching reforms did not exist could not fail to find a deep echo within the Social Democracy. Tied hand and foot to the trade-union bureaucracy, the Labour party left made its political debut as a potential leadership of the working class during the referendum campaign. It was, however, shackled from the beginning. Even though it had all the legitimacy of the Lobour party behind it, even though it was defending posifions that had been approved by the congresses of the party and the trade unions, and even though it had behind it majority votes of the Labour executive and the TUC, the Labour left voluntarily refrained from throwing all its resources into the balance and from utilizing the whole apparatus and all the financial resources of the party, a generosity the Labour right surely would not have displayed had the relationship of forces been the other way around. This was not a matter of polifical stupidity or lack of character. Rather, if was a deliberate and debilitating choice, a result of the special position the Labour left occupies in the British social and political scene. Seeking to win the leadership of the Labour party as the political expression of the trade unions, the Labour left is not at all interested in stepping beyond the traditional reformist framework that identifies the "struggle for socialism" with the "conquest of a majority in parliament." Hence, it finds itself doubly handicapped from the beginning. On the one hand, it must avoid a deep split in the Labour party, which from its standpoint would destroy any possibility of winning a parliamentary majority in the short or medium term. On the other hand, it has to avoid any exacerbation of the social crisis to the point that a significant wing of the trade-union bureaucracy might line up in the camp of the "defenders of the traditional order. Now, a total mobilization of the resources of the Labour party to win a victory for a "No" vote in the EEC referendum inevitably would have provoked both this split and an institutional crisis. From the standpoint of the Labour left, there was even a serious risk that a majority in Parliament (all the MPs of the bourgeois parties plus the Labour right) would have refused to abide by the verdict of the voters, which would have provoked an extremely serious crisis of the legitimacy of parliamentary institutions. In order to avert all these risks, the leaders of the Labour left refrained from any initiative aimed of mobilizing the masses against the Common Market. They lined up on a narrow nationalist opposition platform that had no chance of being considered as an alternative closs policy by the masses of workers. They thus courted certain political defeat, which they undoubtedly preferred to the risks that a victory would have entailed. The probing of the class relationship of forces in this
BRITAIN complex political issue and the public examination of of the strength of the Labour party left that the EEC referendum entailed created some of the preconditions for the launching of an all-out attack on the working class on every field. Undoubtedly, what scared the majority of the TUC into supporting the Wilson measures was the threat that if Wilson did not have their support, or that of most of the lefts in the government, he would have been forced to rely on the votes of the Tories and Liberals in Parliament to push the measures through against the Labour left. That would have created a new de facto majority in Parliament composed of the Labour right, the Conservatives, and the Liberals, with all the attendant dangers of an open split in the Labour partyThe specter of a "new 1931" was not an idle threat on the part of the Labour right. But under present condifions, an open split in the Labour party would have disastrous consequences for the British bourgeoisie. It would practically hand the Labour party and the trade unions over to a leftist leadership, which is considered incompatible with the normal functioning of the parliamentary system under conditiors of aggravated social and economic crisit. in addition, it is not likely that Wibon would enter o government of national union, for 1f would mean abandoning the Labour party to Wedgwool Bean, He still has various alternative solutions, for Instance abandoning the government to the Tories, as Atlee did in 1951. But insteod of forcing Wilson 1o picy that sort of hand, the Labour left scurried to capitulate, and Wilson's bluff succeeded - at least for the moment. Wilson, who is undoubtedly an extremely clever maneuverer, has engaged in a textbook application of the salami tactic. The Labour left in the government was taken on and isolated around the referendum campaign: The trade-union bureaucracy accepted the fate of the lefts, even telling Benn (who had been minister of industry) not to resign from the government when he was "reshuffled" to a less important cabinet post. The trade-union bureaucracy did this on the basis that a new social contract would be negotiated and that they would not find themselves facing a statutory wage freeze supported in Parliament by Tory and Liberal votes, which they would have had no choice but to oppose. Now Benn and the left are partially neutralized; the trade-union bureaucracy, judging that it was inopportune to fight against the attack they foced, has been drummed into line: The bureaucracy will foce the burden of hosfility from the rank and file for accepting these measures. If further attacks come from the government, the bureaucracy will oppose them from a greatly weakened position. The proposals The form taken by the Wilson proposals is important. Some sectors of the ruling c loss based exclusively or mainly on finance capital would have preferred a clas-
14 sical deflationary policy, with massive factory closings, the loss of a part of the productive apparatus (in any case considered worn out and noncompetitive), and massive unemployment (2 or 3 million) in order to break the strength of the trade unions and slow down or halt the rise of nominal wages. Instead, Wilson acted in accordance with the interests of the sectors of industrial capital that want to avoid such drastic measures, for reasons that are as much political as economic. Nevertheless, the proposal to place the burden of maintaining the wage norms on the individual employers is bound to lead to a weeding out of the financially least viable firms and thus to increase the number of unemployed. Its central purpose, however, is to make the package as a whole more acceptable to the trade-union bureaucracy by ruling out fines and imprisonment against trade unionists. At the same time - and this is important for the Wilson government - it decentralizes the focus of attack for those who will struggle against the new pay norms, thus allowing the Wilson government to defuse any centralized offensive against the pay norms as a whole. Despite the uneasy acquiescence of the trade-union bureaucracy and despite the temporary neutralizofion of the left in the government, Wilson wants to avert any possibility of a united offensive against his proposals. Further, the notion of the fixed amount for possible wage increases (E6) cuts against the traditional wage differentials in the trode-union movement. Most of those bureaucrats who voted against the Wilson proposals in the TUC did so on the basis of opposing the erosion of pay differentials within the same industry and between sectors. Such an approach is not best designed to unify all workers around those who might go into struggle against the norms. Perspectives and the left Ar the moment it seems that the section of the left of the Labour government tied to the trade-union bureaucracy will swallow the measures whole. Benn summed up this position and the reasons for it in a speech to the miners conference on July 9, reported in the Financial Times: *The failure of the 1970 Labour Government lay in the separation of the Labour Government from the Labour Movement. The key to the future ,.. lies in the development of relations between the Trade Union Movement, the Labour Party and the Labour Government." In other words, Benn and his cothinkers will not make a move against Wilson except at the behest of the trade-union bureaucracy. Whateve immediate opposition that emerges in the Parliamentary Labour party to the Wilson proposals is more likely to come from those sections of the left that are based on the constituency parties than those that are linked to the trade unions. Even so, it is unlikely that exactly the same pattern of struggles as took place auring the 1960s (unofficial rank-and-file fights opposed by most of the bureaucracy and the government) will simply repeat itself. The consequences of the struggles against Wilson's measures are for more grave than those of the struggles of the
1960s. Those, like the Internationa/ Socialists, who so far project a simple syndicolist line in response to these attacks misestimate the situation. From the start the struggle against Wilson's policies will be integrally bound up with the development of the left in the Social Democracy. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the trade-union bureaucracy was shifted left during the struggles of the 1960s, It is deeply divided, with the engineers, miners, public employees, the locomens unions and others voting against the Wilson proposals in the TUC. The position of the bureaucracy as a whole is for less stable than it was during the early 1960s. At the least, the section of the bureaucracy that favors the government measures needs time to conduct a fight to bring the others into line. But time is precisely what they lack. The TUC national congress is scheduled for September, and there will be virtually no opportunity to heal the rift before then. The miners! wage claim will be presented around Christmas, and most economic indicators suggest that the situation will be worse by then, thus requiring even more drostic measures. Second, there has been an important series of social struggles. Unlike the struggles against nuclear weapons or the war in Vietnam, these struggles have shown a real involvement of the trode-union movement from top to bottom. In some cases these fights have been around direct political campaigns: on the abortion issue, for example, there have been struggles against recent attempts to make reactionary changes in the law; there have been fights around the defense of jobs, with foctory occupations and demands that the government nationalize the oiling concerns; other struggles have been waged in defense of the health service and agoinst cuts in public expenditure. This last fight was reflected in the motivation of Alan Fisher of the public employees union in his vote against the Wilson proposals, when he pointed out that there were no guarantees against further social service cuts. All these struggles have involved sections of left Social Democracy and will not disoppear with the implementafion of the Wilson wage proposals. More likely is the development of centralizing tendencies within these movements against the Wilson leadership of the party. In the context of a Labour government, the ploce of the left Labourites in these struggles has direcred the attention of the participants toward the national political scene and toward the question of the role of the Labour partyThird, we must expect a reasonably vigorous struggle within the Lobour party itself. The division between the party rank and file and the government is now deeper than at any time since the second world war. The difference is that some political life is now beginning to emerge in and around the Labour party at the base. Most observers note a small upturn in party membership and activity compored with the previous period. This is yet another indication of the differences between the situation during the 1960s and the situation today. One strik-
Ing feature of the Labour party the last time it held office for several years (1964-70) was the massive and continuous decline in working-class membership and participation in the party. Finally, the possibility that the wage norm now being introduced will simply be a prelude to more drastic measures later this year or early next year is a prospect that will strike the Labour party to its roots if it becomes a reality. Such a situation would inevitably provoke the explosion of some form of mass struggle and thereby implies a head-on collision with the trade-union bureaucracy. The Labour party would be electorally annihilated if it tried to go to the country on the issue of defense of its anti-inflation measures against the line of the trade unions. Such a conflict, the germs of which are already contained in the divided TUC vote on the Wilson measures, would provoke intolerable tensions within the Labour party. It seems clear that under such conditions the ruling class would prefer to bring the Tories back to power (whether in alliance with the Liberals or not) rather than socrifice the major political trump card represented by o mass party of the working class under a moderate -and controllable leadership capable of politically channeling the combativity of the working class into paths compatible with the survival of the capitalist system. Early elections leading to a bourgeois majority would be preferable to a 1931-type coalition in which a marginal fringe of right Labourites would remain in Parliament and the Labour party as a whole would be handed over to the Labour left. For Wilson, even having to wage o fight against the left from a weokened position would be preferable to purely and simply abandoning the party to Wedgwood Benn. But whatever happens, a higher-level class confrontation is in the cards. A Wilson cobinet compelled to take further measures attacking the living standards of the working closs would place o question mark over all the basic elements of the present two-party system. The question of various sorts of coalitions, of right or left splits in the Social Democracy, would be posed in such a situation. It is extremely unlikely that all this will fail to have an effect on struggles that erupt. Workers who go into struggle against the Wilson proposais will from the outset understand some of the stakes of their struggle, remembering what circumstances caused the collapse of the 1970 Labour government. In other words, the basic trade-union struggles of the next period pose the question of whether the government will continue in its present form. Under those circumstances the workers will pay the greatest attention to the policy and action (or lack of it) of the leadership of left Social Democracy. Thus, the preparation for such a confrontation must involve not simply a beefing up of the trade union struggle, but a political line of march thai is capable of dealing with all the questions posed, all the dimensions of the attack. The most important immediate step is to centralize the struggle organizationally and politically.
BRITAIN The question of program Wilson is perfectly capable of posing the continued existence of a Labour government around the success or failure of these measures. Indeed, the government will not be able to continue in its present form if the measures are quickly and decisively defeated, In this light, the attitude of the left within the Labour party is suicidal. By not taking up the fight against Wilson both inside and outside the Labour party, they offer no leadership to the workers going into struggle and thereby create the possibility of condemning themselves, their party, and the whole working class to a significant deFor millions of workers the continuation of the Labour government is not an idle question. In the absence of a clear alternative, Wilson's demagogy will have an impact. No group of workers will want to take the responsibility for unseating the government; but the logic of their struggle might very well lead to that result. The alternative to the present government cannot be abstract. Given the depth of the present crisis, no alternative will convince anyone or stimulate struggle unless it comes to grips with the basic organization of capitalist society. The program of the left Social Democrats, even if they were to take up a wholehearted struggle for its implementation, is hopeless. It contains a mixture of utopion economics and dangerous political formulas. Plans for massive increases in investment with capital gained through the state takeover of some banks and insurance companies are all very well, but in the absence of a general takeover of industry and an assault on the political and state power of the ruling class, they will lead to nothing. An investment strike, a flight of capital, and economic sabotage will undo their effects, as has been shown by the examples of Portugal and Chile, among others. Import levies are useful only if there is "a higher a monopoly of foreign trade and if capital exports are controlled. Otherwise they simply lead to shortages, a black market, and accentuated inflation. Without the development of a convincing alternative program, confusion and disorientation will set in among the workclass conf ing class. Not for the first time, the basic trade-union strength of the British working class will not be enough. In order to utilize that strength, the workers need to concentrate is in the ( and direct it against the correct target. The central slogan of the International Marxist Group (British section of the Fourth International) to meet this problem is that the left must unite and organize to smash Wilson's capitalist policies. Unity in action must be forged with all Those inside and outside the Labour party on the basis of defeating Wilson and his supporters in the government. Within the Labour party we should demand the removal of Wilson, Healey, and their supporters. Other demands and forms of action then fall into place: 16
*Opposition to any form of incomes policy, statutory or voluntary, under capitalism. Solidarity with all workers opposing the norms. End the TUC-CBI-government talks on incomes policy. * Automatic increases in public expenditure to compensate for inflation and protect the value of the "social wage." A sliding scale of wages. *Opening of the capitalist books and Imposition of workers control of industry to enforce work-sharing with no loss of pay instead of redundancy. *Nationalization of the banks and finance system to create conditions for control over industry and destroy the currency speculation. Abolition of capitalist defense expenditure and confiscation of all income over
£10,000 a year to release resources for investment. *A massive program of public works to soak up inflation, nationalization without compensation of all firms creating redundancy, and development of an economic pian to expand production based on the takeover of the leading industrial and financial firms. *Free abortion and contraception on demand, equal pay for women, free 24-hour community-controlled state nurseries, *Opposition to all forms of racism. *Immediate withdrawal of troops from Ireland. *Solidarity with the Portuguese revolution and with the workers struggle in Spain. In addition to these demands the IMG is also putting forward proposals for immediate action that include recalling the Labour party and TUC conferences, estaber-level lishing links between all the rank-and-file workers organizations for united action against the Wilson proposals, and calling local conferences of the Labour movement to build local committees to coordinate the struggle. frontation The overall character of the capitalist crisis to which the Wilson measures are designed to respond actually requires a global response. These measures simultaneously e cards» involve on attack on living standards and initial steps toward an assault on the political independence of the working class and on those forces within Social Democracy representing the most immediate threat to the established leodership on a whole series of issues. The stakes of the struggle are decisive; the workers movement in Britain stands at an important tuming point. July 11, 1975
in the