The statement about UCS by John Davies,
Minister of Trade and Industry, in the House of Commons on 28 February, represented a complete shift of Tory Govemment policy. According to press reports, this change in policy was arrived at only after a sharp struggle in the Cabinet.
This climb-down, closely following the surrender to the miners (which also involved accepting the principle that the Government would assist an unprofitable industry for "social reasons'), has upset some of the Government's warmest supporters. The Economist of March 4, was bitter: "This featherbedding is the third very bad economic mistake" (the other two being the 'unimaginative fixing of exchange rates and the climb down in face of the miners) "made by the Heath Government in the past 10 weeks". The journal considers that these mistakes have jeopardised the "good chance of at last going for mach higher growth, and thus of mopping up unemployment" The Morning Star, of course, took a very different line: "UCS fight forces a Tory Retreat" was its headline on 29 February. It went on to quote, without comment, the statement of the chairman of the UCS shop stewards co-ordinating committee: *This is a welcome first stage toward the retention of all four yards and the jobs, as demanded by shop stewards, unions and workers. Of course our basic position remains unaltered. We will only give full co-operation to Govan Shipbuilders Ltd. when there is a definite guarantee on the future of the Clydebank Division. We are hopeful that such a guarantee will be forthcoming shortly in view of the new situation." The paper's editorial, in the same issue, ended: "The workers at UCS and in the pits have shown the way forward, and the urgent need now is to carry their fight on to get rid of the Tory wreckers, and to install a Labour Government committed to Left policies opening the road to Socialism."
issues involved What are the issues involved? Is The Economist right in saying that the new Tory policy will actually make unemploy. ment worse? Or is the Morning Star correct in seeing the struggle of the UCS workers (firmly under the leadership of well-known Communist Party members) as having struck a decisive blow against unemployment?
Firstly, what is involved? The answer is very straightforward: the conflict between the "lame duck' policy and the policy of giving government subsidies to industry in trouble is the conflict between two rival capitalist strategies.
The so called "lame duck' policy is just a
gimmicky way of describing a basic mechanism of capitalism: that of allowing market forces to eliminate inefficient and backward sectors of industry. The arguments of the Tories and others who support this policy are as follows: to make British capitalism more competitive, investment has to flow from those sectors which are outmoded to those which are most modern and which, therefore, make higher profits and are expanding. Subsidising loss-making industries or services, so the argument goes, merely holds back the modernising of industry. Hence, the argument continues, although featherbedding may appear to solve unemployment it merely meets the immediate problem at the expense of bringing about long-term trends which make Britain less and less competitive. This, in turn, leads to balance of payments problems, stop-go, deflation, and hence more unemployment. Of course, not even the present PROTEST atavistic Tory Government could fully operate this policy. Indeed, the policy is quite inappropriate to modern capitalism. It belongs to the era of laissez-faire capitalism and is only viable in a strong, dynamic and growing economy. This is hardly the situation British capitalism finds itself in. Today industry is so inter-related and inter-dependent and the amounts of capital needed to start (or modernise) branches of industry so large that continuous government intervention is necessary no matter how committed to private enterprise it might be.
fear of militancy Moreover, such is the strength of the working class and its organisations that Governments have constantly to be on guard against policies which engender militant action. The present Tory Government is no exception to this rule. It allowed Rolls-Royce to go bankrupt but had second thoughts and stopped short of cancelling the RB 211 jet, giving Rolls-Royce £200 million to complete the engine. Some £15 million has already been given to two other shipyards: Cammel Laird, Yarrow, and Harland and Wolff, Belfast. Development grants worth t4% million have been given to machine tool companies.
Quite apart from this, the lame duck' argument falls down completely on another score. The type of investment taking place today is over-whelmingly capital intensive (i.e. employing large amounts of capital in proportion to labour-akin to Marx's concept of the increasing organic composition of capital). Therefore there is a built-in tendency for this policy to increase unemployment unless working hours are reduced or the increase in production keeps pace with the ncrease in productivity. Again, the latter conditions hardly apply to British capitalism.
ments of the lame-duckers' -economic policies have to be considered as a totality Feather-bedding'-for no matter what reason, e.g. to keep a 'vital" industry going or to avert repercussions like a growth in militancy -iocreases the general tendency for inflation and falling rates of profit. Government subsidies come from taxation. Taxation on business profits narrows profit margins and when applied against the working class increases the pressure for larger wage claims (when British capitalism was rapidly expanding more funds from taxation came from the same level of taxation on a greater amount of production). So whilst a decision like that on US will prevent a given amount of unemployment, other things being equal it does this at the expense
of increasing inflationary tendencies and/or pressure on profit margins.
Of course these are surface phenomena and the underlying cause of unemployment is to be found in the nature of the capitalist system, and, in particular, in the contradiction betwen the increasingly social nature of production and social relations based upon production for profit.
As noted before, no government could today fully operate a policy of allowing market forces to determine the pattern of industry despite the brave words of The Economist. What the Tory Government did (and still loes) is to allow a limited operation of this cendency to rationalise British industry more rapidly. Some of the decisions taken in this field are, no doubt, connected with Britain's forthcoming entry into the Common Market. The capitalist class does not want to take into that community further spare REDUNDANCY capacity in such industries as steel, coal, shipbuilding, etc, all of which are already facing recession in the Six. Neither for that matter are the ruling classes of the Six anxious for this. tory retreat Just how much the Tories have retreated on UCS can be gleaned from a few facts: last summer the Tories were adamant that UCS must close; whilst the company's management asked for backing so that a £6 million loan could be negotiated from banks. The Tories turned this down flat and instead put up ES million to wind up the consortium. Now they announce that they are to pump in £35 million and have given broad hints to Marathon Manufacturing (which has expressed interest in buying the fourth yard not covered by the Tories proposals, Clydebank) that more money will be available to assist its take over.
Of course the Tory proposals fall far short of saving the 8,000 jobs which was the number of operatives employed when the crisis blew up. So far, only just over half that figure would be guaranteed.
How then do we assess the Morning Star's talk of victory? Undoubtedly, among big sections of the working class the news will be greeted with enthusiasm. It will seem to be vindication of the tactics of the shop stewards of UCS. In a certain sense of course, this is so—the workers at UCS refused to accept the principle of unemployment and have forced the Tories to retreat. However, this response contains a great danger: it can gloss over the class collaboration aspects of the CP-led UCS shop stewards attitudes and it can assist in spreading the illusion that Labour's alternative capitalist strategy is-to use the opening up the road to Socialism. There are however, more sinister implications. The about turn of the Tories comes almost immediately after its massive defeat at the hands of the miners. That defeat was inflicted on the Tory Government by massive class action. No one could say that the Tories are under the same kind of pressure from the UCS work-in. Why, at this particular time have the Tories come forward with their plan? A likely explanation is that it is part of a deal that will be proposed to the TUC leaders. The latter gentlemen are no doubt just as worried by the militancy of the miners as is the Tory government. The radicalisation of the miners and the example they set strikes a blow at the social basis of the trade union bureaucracy. There is an identity of interests between the Tories, the Labour leadership and the TUC leadersthey all fear, above all else, "chaos and uncontrolled violence", ie. workers" mass action. Vic Feather has said many times that he is willing to discuss with the Government cooperation to end inflation providing some gesture is made by the Tories. Could the UCS volte-face be such a gesture?
wilsonism The long-term effects of not understanding the real significance of the decision over shipyards is all the more dangerous. Wilson is projecting himself to the capitalist class as being better able to stem workers' militancy than Heath. Of course, he has some difficulty in doing this after the In Place of Strife fiasco. However, not even he had to make a humiliating climb-down a la Heath over the miners. Under these circumstances, as noted in the editorial of the last issue of The Red Mole, Wilsonism is an extremely dangerous trend designed to demobilise working class action and replace it with class collaboration. As the hatred of the Tories grows, the potential danger Wilson embodies increases. The only real counter to any scheme the TUC and the Government, aided and abetted by Wilson, are trying to arrive at is the independent mass class action of the workers. That is why the line of the UCS shop stewards substituting the passive work-in for straightforward occupation is so wrong. Of course, it will be pointed out to the 'utopian' revolutionaries that the work-in succeeded and that an occupation would probably have failed. This is half-true, an occupation by itself would have been doomed. But an occupation as part of an on-going militant strategy along the lines of extending the struggle on an all-Scottish basis would either have intimidated the Tories (like the miners did) or unleashed forces which would have set into motion huge mass struggles.
Those who are short-sighted enough to think that the concessions from the Tories plus promises of class collaboration are an effective policy against unemployment must study their history. They do not have to go back very far. The Fairfields experi-ment, which seemed to solve an immediate crisis, paved the way, just a few years later,. for the UCS closure threat. The long-term trends making for a decline in the basic industries of Britain and especially Scotland continue. This Tory about face, at best, will merely postpone a massive increase in unemployment in Scotland.
The Tory volte face on UCS is to be welcomed if the correct lessons are drawn and it is a stimulus to further struggle rather than a dampener. But the real example is that of the miners. A combination of the fighting spirit of the miners and the UCS workers' disregard for the sanctity of private property-which even now sets a positive example-could give us an explosive mixture which would engender mass struggles of a kind not seen in Britain for over 50 years.
-P. Peterson N.B. for an examination of the tactic of the work-in and other background material on the UCS affair see copies of The Red Mole issued at the beginning of the crisis in the shipyards and the special Red Mole UCS Broadsheet.
The Red Mole 13 March 1972 Pace 3