In any serious struggle it is always necessary to know who the enemy is. Once that is known, then what is necessary is to organise the maximum possible force against that enemy. You do not have to be a great general to work out these simple rules of tactics and strategy. You just need to have the faintest glimmerings of common sense. Unfortunately the leadership of the Trade Union movement at present appear to be so blinded by the fact that there are 260,000 miners on strike they cannot see the wood for the trees. They are all rushing round making all sorts of statements and declarations but ignoring virtually every elementary rule of how to fight.
So far the TUC has failed even to identify the enemy correctly. It spends all its time talking about the National Coal Board, when it is perfectly obvious that it is the government which is actually taking all the decisions. It was the government not the Coal Board which took the decision to impose a 7% norm on wage agreements, as it was the government which defeated the Post Office Workers. Unfortunately the TUC in the past has not understood this lesson, and it does not seem to now either.
When the last Tory government was elected the TUC declared that "we shall continue to examine every question solely in the light of its industrial and economic implications". This statement was supposed to indicate the hon-political' nature of the TUC's actions and ideas. This was the policy it followed from 1951-1964 and the result was the defeat of the bus workers in 1958, the Selwyn-Lloyd pay freeze, and the beginning of Incomes Policy with the so-called "National Economic Development Council'. Under the 1945-51 Labour government the TUC pursued the same policy and the result was the wage restraint" policy of 1948, the wage freeze of 1949-50, and the attempted imprisonment of dockers leaders in 1950. Even under Wilson the same policy was pursued, leading to the crushing of the seamen in 1966, and the incomes policy and productivity deals offensive. Exactly the same policy is being carried out under this government and the results are equally disastrous, e.g. the public hounding of the power workers and then the defeat of the UPW. Surely it is time to put a stop to all this nonsense, stop pretending that politics can be kept out of trade unionism, and understand what the real situation is.
POLITICAL STRIKE STRATEGY FOR THE RULING CLASS.
It is unfortunately not the trade unions, but the employers and government who are the The Red Mole 7th Feb. 1972 Page 2 greatest experts on how to run strikes in this country. They know every trick in the book. Firstly they know that if you want to defeat a strike you must always ensure that the workers come out at the most unfavourable time possible. Last year for example coal stocks were exceedingly low. An all out strike by the miners would have had a great chance of success even carried on without support from other unions. Therefore at that time it was necessary to avoid a strike. This was done by making friendly noises to the leadership of the NUM. This year however coal stocks are far higher, and therefore the government wants to provoke a strike and can afford openly to kick the NUM leadership in the teeth by withdrawing any improved offer.
Secondly. It is necessary to decide exactly what you want to get out of the situation. In some cases all that is required is a compromise. In that situation it would be silly to shut doors for the future by needless provocations. For example, in the case of the police it would be quite unnecessary to have a confrontation on pay. They do not play any real role in thereconomy, and in any case are needed to deal with pickets, revolutionaries, the Irish ete. In the case of the police therefore large increases can be given (16 per cent last year). In other cases however it is necessary to go for the kill. Then all forces must be mobilised. In the case of the power workers last year, the entire press and publicity machine was called into action. In the case of the UPW no trick was too low. The tactic in these cases is completely to humiliate your opponents. To do this what is needed is not co-operation but open insults. Thus the miners" leaders who in earlier years were referred to as pillars of the community for allowing the loss of 400,000 jobs, must be offered insulting pay increases, which in any case are later withdrawn, and then ignored. The 'upstarts' of the working class must have it made clear to them precisely who calls the tune. Similarly, the leaders of the ETU, who accepted endless productivity deals, were dismissed without a word when it was necessary to go further than the productivity deals approach.
Thirdly and most importantly, it is necessary to divide off your opponents so that they can be lined up for the chop one at a time. Therefore when it came to the UPW it was necessary to separate them from the POEU and the railwaymen. If they had all struck together they would probably have won. Taken on individually they could all be defeated. Similarly in the case of the miners, at all costs they must be separated from the power workers, the dockers and the engineers. They can all be defeated individually, and the decisive defeat of the miners would by itself demoralise all the others.
It can therefore be seen that a huge range of tools are available to the government and the employer to defeat the miners. The key thing however is that they need a machine to coordinate and run the whole operation. That machine they find in the state and all its functionings. It is the civil service and staff of the nationalised industries who do the calculations which allow the government to know when is the best time to force a strike. It is the police who do the actual work of breaking up the picket lines so that the essential supplies of capitalist industry are kept moving. It is the enormous apparatus of government propaganda (politely known as "public relations') which ensures that the newspapers, radio and television continually keep putting out the right line, and that every sign of a crack in the strike is given massive coverage. It is the state controlled negotiators who stagger the length of pay negotiations and ensure that the unions' struggles do not coincide and therefore that solidarity is most difficult. Finally it is the state that decides what the limit of acceptable pay settlements The TUC may think that politics can be kept out of trade unionism; but the employers and the government know however, that it is the state, and therefore politics, which is the key weapon for defeating the trade unions. It may be possible to win strikes against isolated employers without taking politics into account, although even that is doubtful, but it is completely impossible to ignore politics when the entire policy of all major employers is co-ordinated and deterrhined by the state machine. The strategy of the TUC is rather like that of a man engaged in a fist fight who is suddenly faced with an opponent who threatens him with a broken bottle, but ignores the threat on the grounds that, according to the Queensberry rules of boxing, fighting with bottles is not permitted.
POLITICAL STRIKE STRATEGY FOR THE TRADE UNIONS.
The present policy of the TUC is producing absurdities. For example there are at present thousands of miners taken from every corner of Britain trying to prevent coal, oil, sulphuric acid, and a hundred and one other things being shipped into the power stations. This is having some effect, but at a tremendous cost in terms of effort. time and money. Meanwhile thousands of other trade unionis continue to work inside the Power Stations while their own pay agreements come up for negotiations.
The situation is completely ridiculous. To take just one example at Didcot power stati a tremendous collection of Warwickshire miners, students from Ruskin trade union college, and students from Oxford Universit have been trying to close down the power station by stopping oil going in. This mean carrying on a 24 hour picket and fighting all sorts of management tricks. Meanwhile members of trade unions, many of them in the same unions as the Ruskin picketers, continue to work inside. If the miners are defeated then the power workers can kiss goodbye to their hopes of a rise above the 7% norm, yet they are forbidden by their own unions from taking any solidarity action. The TUC simply sits by and watches this ridiculous situation.
It is in fact possible to defeat the governmen if every point of its attack is dealt with. 1. The government has picked a time when coal stocks are fairly high. This advantage ca however be wiped out by sympathy strikes in the Power Stations and blacking of coal in all other sections of the economy.
2. It is absolutely vital to the government that this strike be won and the miners be del eated. That is why they have put all their weight behind defeating it.
Equally however, the government prestige and policy would be in tatters if the strike were won. For this reason the unions must decide that nothing short of complete victor will satisfy them. 3. The way to defeat the government is not to allow the government to decide when the negotiations will occur and therefore when the strikes will occur. A committee should be set up to work out a joint programme of strikes in all industries in which negotiation: are pending. This means in the first place in the mines, the docks, the power industry an the engineering industry.
What is necessary for such a strategy however is to cease the pretence that the miners strike is not a political strike. Once this is done then the actual measures necessary to win are relatively simple to think of. Coordinated action by the entire trade union movement can destroy the economic policy of the Heath government. All that is needed is first to understand who the real fight is against.
-A. Jones
rents but a tenants association was formed to fight this. Anyway the rents tribunal came and the rents were frozen. The houses in the village are all owned by the N.C.B.