In July 1971 the Coventry Spartacus League held a meeting on unemployment and urged the setting up of a Claimants Union. Within several weeks membership of the union had grown to around 100 including pensioners, single parents and a large proportion of unemployed workers.Shortly before the strike of Coventry toolroom workers the Union became Alvis workers discuss with C&UWU militants the Claimants and Unemployed Workers Union and during the strike we issued a leaflet explaining strikers' rights and denouncing the press campaign against the toolroom workers. At the beginning of the Miners strike this year the C&UWU provided similar information to the miners from the local pits and militants from the C&UWU were active throughout the strike in assisting the miners to organise and win benefits.
Throughout this year, while unemployment continued to rise, the C&UWU has developed links with trade unionists in the city. We have received support and assistance from the Trades Council and in particular from local branches of A.U.E.W. (T.A.S.S.). We have now begun a campaign of unemployed factory-gate meetings to bring home to rank and file trade unionists the reality of unemployment and the need to take decisive action to fight against it. Last week a leaflet was distributed at the labour exchange and at the Social Security offices pointing out the real causes of unemploy ment i.e. the recurring crisis of the capitalist system and the attempts of the capitalist class to solve their problems at the expense of the working class. While claimants and unemployed workers have no economic power, employed workers do have the strength to fight for higher wages, higher pensions and more jobs. Thus the C&UWU supports the struggles of the employed workers and insists. that they take action to reduce unemployment. A similar leaflet was distributed at the Alvis works point out that unemployment is a part of a broad offensive to weaken the military of the working class. We stress that it is absolutely necessary both to defend trade union rights against the Industrial Relations Act and to resist the employers attempts to maintain their profits at the expense of the workers' living standards. The labour movement must refuse to accept any redundancies, stop all overtime working and fight for increased basic rates to cover loss or earnings Further demands to create more jobs and secure adequate incomes should include a shorter working week with no loss of pay and guarantees of five days work or five days pay. It is of no interest to class-conscious workers that such measures would cut into profit margins; the crucial point is that only such measures will solve the problem for the working class. These demands must be the basis of a real fight against unemployment. Organised workers must take action in this way to reduce unemployment and to defend the old, sick, etc. who can't fight alone; they must act in their own interests and in the interests of the whole working class. Such action would help to win the support and sympathy of all working class people for all the struggles of the organised la bour movement.
Following the distribution of these leaflets militants of the C&UWU went to the Alvis works on Friday lunchtime with posters and slogans putting forward the above points. A meeting was held at the gates and two union members addressed a crowd of about 200 Alvis workers. After these speeches several lively discussions developed with groups of workers and C&UWU militants which continued up to the end of the lunch break. This was an excellent start to our campaign which will include similar meetings at many of the large engineering and auto works in the city once a fortnight until September.
In fact, the response to this first meeting was so good that we were almost caught unprepared. Not having had any previous experience to guide us we had not adequately prepared the C&UWU militants to address a mass meeting. Also, we felt that it was a mistake to have let the crowd break up into smaller discussion groups as many of the points raised here could have been made to the whole meeting by taking questions and answers from the platform. Finally we missed the opportunity-which had never occurred to us until we saw the responsesupport the funds and activities of the C&UWU. Having learnt these lessons the C&UWU is confident that the continuing campaign will develop and future gate meetings will be bigger and even more effective than the first. Unemployed IMG militant (active in Coventry C&UWU).
Just under a year ago, the workers of UCS in Scotland carried out an industrial action from inside rather than outside the factory gate. Since then, the occupation tactic has been used up and down the country in an increasing variety of-circumstances and with increasing sophistication. UCS was not the first time that British workers have used the tactic. The staydown strikes in the Welsh coalfields in the Thirtles, And Austin Longbridge in 1962, are past examples. Furthermore, the working class has, in the past, gone beyond simple occupationsand created mini-soviets in which workers took over and organised certain cities in the midst of national strikes;Liverpool, for example during the 1911 Railway strike, and Newcastle during the 1926 General Strike. By and large, these examples have been erased from the memory of British workers. The mass occupations in France during 1968 or the student occupations in Britain, have not made any deep impression on the trade unions in Britain. Workers now using the occupation tactic, usually trace it back to UCS. It was this struggle which broke ideological inhibitions about the law of trespass,property rights ete, and led workers struggles over the threshold of the factory door.
The occupation tactic needs to be popularised tactics and techniques which remain unexplored so far in practice but which have been tried and tested abroad, and would aid enormously the various struggles in Britain if they were applied. But constructing a manual of tactics is not all that productive. What the conscious workers need to concentrate on at the moment is not in refining their tactics in the plants- although that is useful - but in developing a political perspective in the trade unions. The organisational details and practical tasks of occupations depend entirely on the context in which they occur. The function of an occupation can vary enormously — as an efficient tactic to gain unionisation and union-recognition (c.g. Flint sit-down strike in 1936), as a weapon in struggles against redundancy, as a refinement of the strike tactic in pursuit of a wage claim, or as a para-military base in a conflict with the State, e.g. a general strike, At present the real value of occupations is not that they provide a straight line to the revolution. So far, for example, the State has not physically intervened in British occupations and therefore the question of the State is not raised by the occupation tactic. Their real value now is that they provide a much needed base for political agitation within the labour movement in favour of perspectives for the movement as a whole. From the point of view of workers gaining valuable organisational experience as to how to fight the State and the bourgeoisie, the occupations so far in Britain have remained at the rudimentary level. This will probably continue to be the case until the trade unions take initiatives against the employers on a broad scale in which occupations may or may not be used, But a good tactic must not be confused with a political perspective.
What needs to be discussed is the meaning and significance of the wave of occupations which has taken place over the last twelve months, that is, what it reflects about the state of the class struggle in Britain today. In the course of initiating such a debate, the possible scope of the occupation tactic can at least be suggested. The occupations which have taken place so far, have dancy (UCS, Plessey, Fisher-Bendix etc), and the second is the wage claim. Occupations in support of wage claims have been exclusively undertaken by the engineering unions in the course of their present national claim.
STRUGGLES AGAINST REDUNDANCY The UCS struggle was not strictly speaking an occupation, but a work-in. This tactic had not appeared before and has not appeared since (although the Communist Party has tried to popularise it among students without much success - e.g. a work-in has occured at Newport art college). Its lack of effectiveness is quite obvious, and this is demonstrated by some of the features of the settlement at UCS. The flaw in using the work-in as a weapon to fight redundancy, is that it holds no power of sanction for the workers involved. This rapidly became obvious at UCS. The Liquidator installed by the Government to supervise the completion of contracts and sale of plant, was perfectly happy to see the men working-in. After all, the men finished the remaining ships well on time, and with no labour disputes! In the meantime, men who became technically redundant were paid by the labour movement to carry on working. The men themselves could see no reason why the work-in should be effective, and since it was perfectly obvious that merely to carry on working did not automatically guarantee one would be working in future, the whole experience was demoralising for many of those involved. What the leadership of the struggle were depending upon was the false belief that if the workers demonstrated that they were 'efficient workmen, they would persuade the Tories to reverse their decision in the face of public outery over their "butchery" etc. Tory bashing was the sole content of the agitation carred out by men like Airlie and Reid, the two leading stewards at UCS. In fact, the struggle seems to have been conducted as a kind of "demonstration'-of the need to bring back a Labour Government. UCS was a case of wrong tactics and wrong politics. All the stewards had to brandish at the Government was rhetoric. This did not disturb the Government in the least. They had never counted on being popular when they decided to carry out the "lame duck' policy, the Industrial Relations Bill, entry to the Common Market, cuts in social services etc. Unpopularity in itself was no threat at all, and the labour movement appeared to them to be unable to launch any sharp threat to the social order given their Labourist politics.
The Tory Government knew that the men at UCS could be easily defeated. There was no strike, therefore orders were safe. No equipment was threatened. There was no attempt to spread the struggle beyond the yards. This could have been a real possibility for the UCS men. In the West of Scotland, the unemployment rate stood at 10%, and a further 8000 men unemployed would have affected the future of every worker in among British workers. There are many potential Scotland. More redundancy in the supply industries to UCS would have followed and a chain reaction set in. Under these circumstances, the labour movement in the West of Scotland could have embarked on a regonal struggle, with its central focus the question of unemployment. Scottish miners for example, were prepared to strike in solidarity, and current rent struggles could also have been utilised. In the event, this type of perspective was not carried out. In many ways, the tactic of the work-in even cut across this directly - given the state of inter-union hostility in the British labour movement, asking workers to strike in sympathy with workers still being paid is only to put additional obstacles in one's path. Since the struggle was confined to the yards, the general social and political balance of forces in the region was not upset by any generalised conflict. More important,perhaps, the failure to extend the fight over redundancy to more than one group of workers at a time, simply reinforced the lack of perspective for dealing with this question in the British labour movement. No perspective can arise out of one occupation. This can more easily arise out of a series of simultaneous struggles, since this poses the problem in its proper context -not at the level of this or that management of an individual firm, but at the level of the economy as a whole. Conversely, of course, the absence of any political perspective in the first place, makes it difficult to actually extend the struggle beyond the yards or plant into a mass movement. We will return to this later, because, this limitation applies to occupations as well as work-ins. But it should be noted for the time being, that such a movement would have forced the Government to make broad concessions in an attempt to prevent a movement with some perspective reaching revolutionary conclusions.
Given all these political shortcomings, the Tories knew that they had the tactical superiority to win. They broke the power and prestige of the stewards by forcing them to back down on been sparked off by two issues. The first is redun- their demand that all jobs should be guaranteed in UCS. The Tories had refused to do this, and the new company they created - Govan Shipbuilders - covered only three yards, leaving the Clydebank yard to be closed. The method of forcing the stewards to back down on their demand was simple enough. It consisted in removing the work necessary for the work-in. Orders already placed with the yards were suspended by the Government. They then told the stewards that they would only renegotiate these orders if the stewards recognised Govan. If they did so of course, they would be accepting the principle that not all jobs would be guaranteed, but if they continued to refuse recognition and negotiation with Govan, the orders would be lost altogether. This trick worked, the customers showing no signs in the meantime that they were taking their orders elsewhere (since the Government had no doubt dropped a word in to their ear). From that point on, the stewards have been forced to yield considerable concessions (no-strike clauses, productivity concessions, long term pay deals and lower average wages) to make Govan viable. More redundancies have been announced recently. The remaining yard, Clydebank, has been saved by the unions turning to the American- bourgeoisie who expressed interest because of the newly-developed need for oil rigs for the North Sea oil fields.
Since the workers had applied no sanctions, the Tories could deal with the situation by playing at "business" with the unions. The peculiar character of the UCS struggle was produced by two factors. The Communist Party who led the struggle, saw it as a step along the electoral road, and as a means of increasing its popularity with the labour left etc. It saw itself as an electoral vanguard and not a revolutionary vanguard. The work-in was also symptomatic of the British trade union movement responding to a new situation in an old way. Forced to go beyond a stay-outside strike because of the threat of the yards being dismantled, but unable to conceive of a full-scale strike occupation of four shipyards and all the para-miltary organisation that would imply, a compromise was reached-the work-in. But the fact that the CP, which had the organisational leadership, settled on a work-in for its own reasons, meant that the very fruitful debate among the workers to which the compromise tactic would have led, never took place (except in the pages of the "ultra-leftist" papers like The Red Mole).
PLESSEY, FISHER-BENDIX ETC.
Bendix (Kirby), that occupations of a kind more traditional to the workers movement have months, was at Plessey. Overshadowed by UCS, this developed as a response to an attempt to close the factory, leaving 700 men unemployed in an area of nearly 15% unemployment. Plessey had bought the factory in May 1970 (it was the Royal Navy Torpedo Works) for the purpose of doing away with a competitor and to make a profit from selling part of the equipment and transferring the rest to the cheap labour zones of South Africa and Portugal. They were given £3 million by the Labour Government to assist the initial takeover. Fisher-Bendix is similar in that it was taken over from Parkinson-Cowan in 1970 by Thorn Electrical Industries, again with the intention of transferring profitable lines abroad - this time to Spain. Unemployment on Merseyside hovers around 10%. The purpose of these occupations was two-fold. First, to prevent these two multi-nationals from taking their machinery out of the plant, and secondly to force the management to bargain jobs in return for the machinery. This is a very different Workers are occupying the Stanmore Engineering factory in West London over the nationa response to that at UCS. As the convenor of Plessey remarked: "We're no employees, we're trespassers".
To carry this out, considerable organisation was required. At Plessey, the workers removed the management, and set up barbed wire around the factory, setting a 24 hour guard on the gate in case of a police attack. When a man from the 600 Metal Group came along to remove plant for the scrap yards, the men refused him entry. They agitated for finance, food, and physical support among the local labour movement. They had decided on a policy of passive resistance should the police launch an attack, but once outside the plant, they had made preparations to carry out mass picketing, and reckoned that they could get 7000 men for this purpose, many from the Labour Exchanges round about. This idea of a mass picket was put forward before the It is at Plessey Alexandria in Scotland, and Fisher-time of the miners strike. At Fisher-Bendix, the Liverpool Trades Council, who saw Fisher-Bendix as a detonator which could launch a general strike taken place. The toughest of the two, lasting five to bring down the Tories, had plans to organise mass picketing in the event.of a police attack this time with the purpose of preventing the police from getting anywhere near the plant gates This was just prior to the Saltley events, Both these occupations also had the support of other workers in the same firm, and agreements were made to black goods etc. Their outcome was successful. The Plessey site is now being developed as a new industrial estate, and Fisher-Bendix gained a reprieve. These two experiences were followed by a rash of smaller, and less publicized, occupations in the NorthWest, over redundancy. Almost all of these have been successful in gaining reprieves or alternative investment.
ENGINEERING DISPUTE their kind in Britain. They were made absolutely necessary by the fact that the employers
CE 171 had organised more strongly than ever before against the engineers. Individually, most of the occupations occurred in response to lockouts by the management. These lock-outs followed after the men had applied the rather effective tactic of banning piece-work in pursuit of their claim. Lock-outs have become more common over the last year, particularly among engineering employers who can withstand long stoppages of production because of the very depressed state of the capital goods market. The lock-out gives the employer the upper-hand in negotiations. The lock-out means that he takes the initiative, the men having to approach the employer to end the dispute rather than the other way around. The occupation reverses this.
In an occupation, the employer has to approach the men from a position of weakness, since he cannot make threats about transferring production, bringing in non-union labour etc, and has to bargain with the men to retrieve his plant.
In the Manchester occupations the advantages of the occupation over the strike became clear.
It is absolutely impossible for the management to shift production, bring in scab labour, carry out maintenance work etc. This in itself gives the men either prevent an arrest, or to protest against a big psychological advantage, since the anxieties a trial of trade unionists, the type of agitation over these matters experienced on the picket-line and organisation required could well involve are removed. But the occupation creates a great deal of solidarity among the men. Rather than being dispersed to their homes as in a strike, with with which the workers are negotiating not often only the leaders having to operate picket lines under uncomfortable conditions, the men are inside the plant. This creates solidarity among the law as it were, as a bargaining counter men who have probably exchanged few words with one another throughout their working lives.
Greater participation in decision making is possible, and greater tactical flexibility is usually achieved. Furthermore, the mere fact of having occupied the bosses property itself creates greater confidence in future struggles. These features are common to all occupations.
The Manchester struggle however occurred within a context which illustrates the lack of leadership within the trade union movement. Occupations took place because the-workers were confronted directly with the sort of strength which led their leaders to back down nationally on the engineers pay claim. This has been analysed by us before (see The Red Mole, 39). The rank and file of the union were left to fight at plant by plant level, when only the national power of the union would have been adequate to force a major defeat for the employers. Many of the plant actions which have taken place have included occupations. The latest of these has been in London, at Stanmore Engineering Limited in West London, where 130 black workers have occupied their plant on the claim for the last six weeks. The stewards here knew that striking would be ineffective, since in a previous strike, the management had brought in trainees to do their work, and this broke the strike. The occupation has meant that mangement can't shift the aluminium dies with which the men there produce carburettors. The effectiveness of the sit-in was clear to the stewards, and one of them generalised this by saying, "Forget about striking completely. Strikes are a thing of the past". Occupations in Britain are not yet a habit of mind among trade unionists. Hopefully they will become so. British workers are only beginning to break with legalism. At Stanmore the police broke in to the factory immediately after the workers had barricaded the management out. They did not have a court injunction, the action being designed to intimidate the men into leaving the plant. The only excuse the management could find for this action, was that the men had been damaging machinery. On the contrary, no such thing has occurred, either at Stanmore or in any other of the occupations. The Stanmore workers simply informed the police that they had no intention of leaving.
PHYSICAL FORCE OF THE STATE The Stanmore example illustrates something about it is often said that the occupation of factories the behaviour of the British bourgeoisie which so far has meant that, from an organisation point of view, the occupations in Britain have remained of a rudimentary kind. This is the lack of direct state intervention in the form of armed forces. It should not be assumed that the British bourgrois state machine is exceptional in this respect. The miners strike has already shown this. And the innovation of the miners strike, the mass flying picket, in which mass pickets of industries not directly involved in the dispute takes place, is perhaps as important an innovation as the occupa tion. But in general, the bourgeoisie in Europe, the USA or Japan, are more ready to intervene physically when the workers physically seize their property, In France, the riot squad, in Italy the fascist squads, and in Canada the "ton-ton -matraques, have all recently intervened in such struggles. In the USA during the Thirties, the motor bosses were faced with mass sit-down strikes, the most famous of which is the Flint sil-down. In response to this, the bosses mobilised not only the armed cops, but also organisations like Du Pont's Black Legion which assaulted and often murdered trade unionists, and the National Metal Trades Association which supplied labour "spies' and armies of strike-breakers.
The British ruling class has not gone to these lengths so far. They are fully aware that, while they may undercut the working class economically with relative safety, any move to bring in the armed forces of the state in a big way would start to shatter the respect for bourgeois democracy and bourgeois law among the British labour movement, and this is a very valuable asset. This became clear during the present dock dispute. That safety valve of the legal system-the Official Solicitor- moved in to reverse Donaldson's decision at the last moment, and averted what would certainly have developed into a mass battle with police if the tipstaff had tried to arrest the three dockers' leaders. On the other hard, such a physical clash is inevitable sooner or later, and this raises the question of occupying places of work for reasons other than preventing scabbing or removal of machinery. If running battles betsveen workers and police take place, it is often necessary to have a physical base from which this can be organised and conducted. In a struggle to occupations of factories or even whole towns. In such a dispute it is the organs of the state with employers, In such circumstances, it is often necessary for workers to 'confiscate for the release of leaders. This involves driving the law out of a given area. The most recent example of this was in Sept-lles in May of this year. Sept-lles, a steel town in Quebec, was taken over completely by the workers during a general strike in protest against the jailing of union leaders under Bill 19 (see The Red Mole, 43). Radio stations were also seized and occupied, control of the media being taken over by the workers. The media is in fact one of the best organising bases for the workers during a general strike, or any extended action of this kind.
If the British bourgeoisie has not gone to the lengths that those of other capitalist countries have gone in trying to physically repress the actions of the workers, British workers have not yet applied a tactic equally common in other capitalist countries. They have held and seized plant for ransom, but not the managements themselves. Several examples of this occurred at the beginning of May 68.
At the Sud-Aviation plant in Nantes, 20 members of management were detained for over a fortnight. At first, the aim was to enforce a quick settlement of the workers' demands, but as.the strike movement spread, they held the management as a symbolic action.
In any wave of occupations, particularly autocratic managements can expect this kind of thing. Some workers who have worked under exceptionally degrading conditions on the shop floor, take great delight in subjecting their captives to similar punishments. At Sud-Aviation for example, managers had to get permission to go to the toilet, and could do so only under escort. In general, such activities, while very gratifying, can become counter-productive (although they can produce instant results as well!). They can easily get out of control and provoke police assaults before the workers are prepared for them.
But their most negative feature is that they reinforce the false idea that the management is individually responsible for the problems of the workers. This responsibility lies with the way in which the whole economy is organised.
RUNNING THE FACTORY In judging the political significance of the recent occupations, in terms of ideas in people's heads", raises the question of the workers managing the factories and running the economy. This may be true in the sense that it provides an opportun- Similar points can be made about the struggle ity for propaganda about socialism. However, the question arises in a practical and therefore real way, only under conditions very different to anything experienced in Britain so far. Within the general strike situation, the question of the workers running their factories, organising supplies and transport and so on, is posed as a practical necessity (although this is not the same as workers running the economy). In France, during May 68, for example, the Chevire electricity plant continued production under workers management during the strike in order to provide necessary electricity supplies to hospitals but paralysed all local industry. At Nantes, workers took over the organisation of food distribution, established links with the agricultural workers, supervised price control, transport and public services. This isolated example points the way forward to the creation of dual power in society. Production of hospital equipment, walkie-talkies etc, needed in the fight against the armed forces of the state, also point in the direction of the type of organisation needed to carry out armed struggle by the workers against the State. But in France this did not reach even the embryonic stage. Even where workers occupying factories were under attack from the riot squad, the idea of creating armed militias was not taken up. largely because of the reluctance of the Communist Party.
The alternative, socialism or capitalism, does not present itself at the level of whether workers can manage production better than the bosses, but at the level of the organisation of the economy as a whole. Workers management presents itself as a practical task under certain circumstances — general strike, civil war, capitalist sabotage etc. In general, outside a revolutionary situation, revolutionaries should not advocate self-managed enterprises. Again, it is not the individual manage ments who are responsible for economic failures in enterprises. Replacing the personnel in the manager's office does nothing whatsoever to change that. The problem cannot be solved at the level of one plant. The most to be hoped for here is a temporary reprieve or alternative finance. But the aim of individual occupations carried out against redundancies, should always be presented not as a 'solution' to redundancy but used by the workers as a concrete illustration Tor agitation for a perspective for fighting the capitalist class as a whole on this and other questions. Until the British trade union movement adopts an offensive national strategy for dealing with this question (although it will not be solved within capitalism, then many more Fakenhams will no doubt take place (where workers set up their own firm, and are raising money to buy the plant). Such a perspective might involve as a minimum, a struggle for a shorter working week with no loss of pay, re-employment of the unemployed, full maintenance for the unemployed, the power of veto over redundancy etc. It is only when the trade unions launch mass struggles to gain objectives such as these on a national basis, that occupations will be placed in perspective - that is as a tactic within a struggle rather than the only possible means of struggle.
LESSONS OF THE PRESENT SIT-INS In a historical sense, this wave of occupations would signify a new phase of class struggle. But their meaning for the working class as a whole, has to be determined within the overall political context in which they occur. It does not at all follow that because workers are exploring a new tactic, that the workers as a whole are conducting a more effective fight against the bourgeoisie. The occupation as a tactic to fight for redundancy, illustrates this. Holding machinery and forcing the management to 'buy" it back in return for promises of jobs, should not be seen as a substitute for a political perspective of struggle by the labour movement. The British trade union movement has avoided this question. Trade union leaders during the Sixties signed one productivity deal after another, contributing directly to the present redundancy and unemployment. As a result, they provide no leadership at all, or else gesture in the direction of say a 35 hour week in one industry. Needless to say, no action is taken in pursuit of this. They refuse to co-ordinate the whole movement to conduct a struggle for the type of measures we suggested above. Consequently, as closures and lay-offs continue, isolated groups of workers are thrown back on tactical refinements. The union leaders look to the bourgeoisie for the solution to the problem - "reflate' the economy etc., while understanding perfectly well that the ruling class will only gain the business confidence to reflate once the trade unions have been defeated. This is what explains the disorientation often experienced by isolated groups of workers occupying over redundancies. On the one hand, they believe that they are taking big steps forward in militant action: on the other, Labour politicians like Wedgewood Benn and Wilson, extend what appears to be a very sympathetic hand to those involved.
over wages. For the last two years, union after union in the public sector has fought big pay battles with the Government. The trade union leaders refused to co-ordinate these claims, even though it was perfectly obvious to everybody, that the Government were using the public sector unions to force down the general level of wage settlements. It took a tactical innovation by the rank and file - the mass flying pickets of the miners - to inflict a defeat on the Government. The miners took the verbal support of the trade union leaders, and posed the need for actual support from other trade unionists by picketing industries other than the mines. But quite clearly, what was lacking in the public sector before the miners put an end to the charade of defeats, was co-ordination by the union leaders of their claims. After all, if the Government is using the public sector to drive down wage settlements, the beginnings of a correct response would have been to have formed a common front, and fought collectively for a national minimum wage in the public sector. This is precisely what the unions in Quebec put into practice by torming the Common Front and conducting a national strike for precisely this demand. What has been lacking in the way pay claims are conducted, is not primarily more militant tactics, but a correct perspective.
The job of revolutionaries is not to uncritically cheer the class struggle on from the side lines. To do that is equivalent to saying precisely that it is more militant tactics that the workers need to solve their problems, and not a perspective for smashing the ruling class. In this sense, the Communist Party were correct to use the UCS struggle as a base from which to agitate politically among the labour movement. The only problem was however, that they put across the wrong politics - so wrong in fact that they also adopted completely ineffective sactics in the occupation! But so far, the occupations which have occured have not led to any degree of programmatic clarity among trade unionists, although they are big steps forward in themselves. The significance of the present wave of occupations is thatit demonstrates on the one hand, a great willingness among the rank and file workers to conduct a fight; on the other hand, the lack of a programme is only too clear. The creation of rank and file organisations in the trade unions which can thrash out these programmatic questions facing the working class, is of ever increasing urgency. A.E.Jenning.
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The present Manchester occupations in support of wage claims (see The Red Mole, 39-43, and page 10 of this issue) were perhaps the first of