Alf Jennings and Bob Williams explain why the politics of Scanlon and the Communist Party leadership are leading engineering militants into a dead end
On the 7 December, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) was fined £50,000 by the National Industrial Relations Court for refusing to obey previous NIRC orders. A Mr. James Goad, a quality-inspector at CAV's, Sudbury, had successfully managed to get the NIRC to declare him a member of the AUEW, against the wishes of the local branch and had ordered the branch to admit him to its meetings. The fine has sparked off massive strikes by AUEW members all over the country. These actions are continuing, the latest being planned for Merseyside on 19 January.
This struggle is extremely important. It is a struggle to defend the AUEW, but it is also the second great upsurge of workers against the Act, and a test of the Scanlon leaderships' policy for fighting the Act.
At the very moment when the strike wave successfully freed the five, the House of Lords changed the law in order to prevent such a confrontation being repeated. Their decision that the union, rather than the individual steward, was liable in law, was an attempt to get back to the original aim of forcing the trade union leaders to discipline their own members. The Government placed its hopes on a prediction of how the trade union leaders would behave when faced with the choice between leading a struggle to bring down a piece of legislation passed by Parliament (and therefore most likely the Government too), and turning their guns on their own members. Jack Jones proved the Government right, reluctantly paying the fines while making every effort to get the dockers to call off the struggle. Following that, the TUC has allowed unions to attend the Court to defend themselves, thus capitulating in practice to the authority of the Act.
Scanlon and the AUEW leadership, however, have stuck to the old line of the TUC: 'no recognition'. Of course they have been right not to attend the Court, but this only has meaning if they are prepared to mobilise against the Act.
SOLID
The Goad case boiled up in October. The first fine made on the AUEW was on 8 November: £5,000 for not appearing in Court to defend itself. The Court ruled that Goad was a member of the union and that the Sudbury branch could not refuse him admission to its meetings. When he was excluded on December 1st, the NIRC then imposed a £50,000 fine for contempt of its ruling.
From December 7 onwards, district organisations of the AUEW all over the country took the initiative in calling local strikes. These strikes were very solid. On Monday 18 December for example, thousands of engineers in London, Oxford and Sheffield struck, and on the Wednesday, engineers in Hull, Merseyside and Manchester came out. In London and Liverpool, dockers and other workers struck in solidarity. At the same time, resolutions were passed in many areas calling strikes for various days in January. On the 1st January, 13,000 men came out in Leeds, on the 5th 13,000 in Swansea, on the 8th 20,000 in North Wales and 10,000 on Tyneside. Merseyside is planning to take a further step by calling an area general strike on the 19th.
FRAGMENTED
This impressive series of strikes was marred however by its fragmentation. This flowed from the lack of any commonly understood policy among those taking action. This became painfully clear in the case of one of the most militant centres of working class struggle: Glasgow. Here, the district leadership had called a strike for the 18th, but then reversed its decision because it felt that local stoppages were not going to give results, and called on the Executive to organise a national stoppage instead. Several areas passed similar resolutions. Most surprising of all is the case of the Sudbury men themselves. They struck on the 11th, thus taking the initiative nationally. But just as other areas were responding and getting their one-day stoppages organised, Sudbury voted to return to work on the 15th.
This reflects not so much the work of the organised right wing in the union, but a lack of a clear line from the leadership and therefore confusion and uncertainty. Of course, the right wing were organising. In Coventry, many workers voted against strikes and for a change of union policy. Nevertheless, it is only since the first wave of strikes that the right wing in the union have felt able to step up their offensive and change the course of events, catching hold of criticisms of the leadership and partial demoralisation and turning them against the struggle.
A PARALYSED LEADERSHIP
The cause of the confusion and disorganisation was the paralysis of the AUEW leadership. What has just taken place is a tragic example of the useless line of non-recognition. The leadership was faced with a choice between leading a struggle against the Act and the Government or being fined. The response up until the imposition of the fine on 7 December was to hope that the Court could be prevented from collecting the money from the Bank. But the Court had overruled the distinction between 'protected' and 'unprotected' funds. When Hill Samuel, the union's bankers, paid up, the AUEW sacked them. But this was really little more than a demagogic move. They hoped Goad would be discouraged from trying to attend the branch meeting at Sudbury on December 1st. Unfortunately he tried to attend, hence the £50,000 fine. Throughout this period, the leadership refused to attend the Court or to pay the fine. But it did absolutely nothing to prepare the AUEW membership or the rest of the working class for a struggle against the Act. It refused to recall its NC to change its policy, but it made no plans for action. The first fine went by without any hint of preparation for a battle.
After the second fine, Scanlon felt forced to take a public position. He was busy with metaphysics at this time. No, he wasn't disobeying the law of the land. He was defending the constitution of the union. Then on 10 December, Scanlon called on the membership to 'defend the policy of the union'.
But what was the policy of the union? This was never made clear and led to the fragmentation. Was the policy to initiate a struggle to bring down the Act? Or was it to make some localised gestures of protest against the fines and nothing more? Or was it to bring pressure to bear on the government via expensive strikes hitting a crucial sector of the economy? Nothing was made clear. The membership was left in the dark.
SCANLON
Throughout this entire experience, Scanlon has acted as a trade union bureaucrat. Rather than give a strategic line for the working class, he tried simply to defend the narrow corporate interests of his own union. His own position was indistinguishable from most other EC members. He therefore took the position that he was neither for nor against the strikes. Neither forward or back. But once the money had been taken by the Court, what other issue was there left but the Act itself?
Even before the Goad case blew up, Scanlon was only 'left' in the sense that he had not shuffled to the right like the rest. He had not moved away from a position which was useless anyway: non-recognition. But part of the confusion among the rank and file was caused by their looking to him especially for a lead. After all, he had called one day strikes against the Industrial Relations Bill before it became law. The Communist Party also gives Scanlon much support, refusing to criticise him even when he behaves in the same way as other bureaucrats, as he did during the Ford strike of 1971 for example. The revolutionary left has been warning against an uncritical attitude to Scanlon for a long time. His rhetoric about 'shop floor power' and leaving everything up to the democratic initiatives of the rank and file sounds very nice. But this was all very well in the Sixties when the tactic of local bargaining made sense because unemployment was low and the national attacks on the unions were only just starting under Labour. But in the engineering dispute of last year, leaving everything to local initiatives was just a get-out for the leadership, and it led to disaster. The Goad dispute is the same. When national leadership is needed, it is left to the localities to take uncoordinated and sporadic action with no clearly defined policy.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY
The Communist Party refuses to point out these simple truths. For example, once it became clear that the leadership had no plan of action whatever, the CP tried to cover up this inactivity. The editorial of the Morning Star, following the EC meeting of the 19 December at which resolutions for national action were not even discussed, said that the workers were "making it clear that the Industrial Relations Act will cost the employers far more in lost profits than opposition to it will cost the unions in fines". This is a very dangerous rationalisation. The engineering employers are not going to put pressure on the Government to "retreat". The CP line implictly reduces the struggle to the issue of the fines against which only protest is possible rather than the Act. It is not, for the ruling class, a matter of short-term cost, but a question of how to achieve the long-term aim of defeating the opposition of the unions to the Act. The CP were throwing their weight behind localised initiatives which inevitably lead to demoralisation if no national focus is created.
Instead of proposing extending the existing struggle through a rank and file lead, they urged "the EC to bring pressure to bear on the TUC General Council to call for a one-day stoppage as a signal to a serious campaign to get rid of the I.R.Act and the Tory Government..." (Morning Star 2.1.73) In other words the AUEW EC was right not to call any action and should call on the TUC. Vic Feather should then call a one-day stoppage which would be the signal for a "serious campaign". In the meantime, continue the protest strikes indefinitely and hope that the TUC can be won back to a 'left' position at some time in the future.
This attitude on the part of the CP urgently raises for militants the question of what its basic basic strategy is.
COMMUNIST PARTY POLICY
The basic strategy of the Communist Party in the fight against the Act has been twofold. It has said that it is necessary to struggle now against the Act using the industrial strength of the working class. Secondly it has argued that there must be a simultaneous fight inside the Labour movement to get 'left' policies adopted, and to replace the right wing in the TUC General Council and the Labour Party leadership with 'left' leaders like Scanlon. But the Goad case (and many other incidents in the past) has brought to light a problem: this 'twofold' policy turns out to be two alternative policies: one – that of the militants, who put first the urgent needs of the workers to smash the industrial relations Act: those who vacillate on that must be replaced by leaders who will stand firm, even if the ditherers happen to be the official union leadership and if they happen to have a reputation as 'lefts' on the General Council. And the other possible policy – that of the CP leadership – is to give first place to unity with Scanlon and the official leadership, even when it means allowing militants to be caught off their guard by the bureaucracy's total lack of preparation for a struggle.
UNITY
The CP leadership tries to argue that those who want to publicly criticise Scanlon are splitters, people who want to break the unity of the working class. In fact, the very opposite is the case. If it was proposed to exclude bureaucrats from the struggle on the basis of their past mistakes or failings, that would indeed be a splitting policy.
But what has been at stake is not an attempt to exclude Scanlon and the official leadership from participation in the struggle against the fines and the Act. The real issue for militants has been whether the development of that struggle should take second place to the CP leadership's desire to unite with the official leadership. For the consequences of that unity with the official leadership has been to allow the leadership to fragment the unity in struggle of the engineering workers. For the fact cannot be hidden that the response of the engineering workers
so far has been disunited, without a clear lead of any kind.
Of course, the CP leadership does not clearly and unambiguously endorse every move that Scanlon makes. Instead it operates a similar tactic towards the trade union bureaucracy to the tactic that the trade union bureaucracy takes towards the Act. Scanlon tries to avoid the issue of a fight with the NIRC and the Act. The CP leadership tries to avoid the issue of a fight against the Scanlon leadership for an alternative leadership. But in both cases, in the end, avoidance means acceptance. Because the CP has avoided the task of spelling out the crippling weaknesses of the Scanlon leadership in the past, the militants were forced by the CP to accept the fragmentation which the executive's policy produced. The CP refused to build an alternative centre that could guide the engineering workers' upsurge and broaden the struggle throughout the working class.
At first sight it is difficult to grasp why the CP refuses to present a clear cut alternative to the politics of the trade union bureaucracy. It would be tempting to say that Gollan has simply made a tactical mistake, that he has misjudged Scanlon and will put things right next time. But in fact such 'tactical mistakes' have taken place time and again over the last years in such a way that they quite clearly form a consistent pattern – a strategy. And when we look at the basic strategy and programme of the Communist Party we can see that the leadership's refusal to break with the Scanlons of the labour movement is based on a fundamental political agreement on aims and methods in the class struggle.
Both the trade union 'lefts' and the CP leaders want to fight for socialism. But they believe that the struggle for socialism can be victorious under the leadership of the Labour Party provided only that control of the Labour Party falls into the hands of its left-wing which in turn allies itself with the CP. The meaning of such a strategy is that it is possible to use the Parliamentary system to introduce socialism: in other words, there is no need to aim for the smashing of the institutions of capitalist rule: all that needs to be done is to change the personnel and put pressure on these institutions in order for the working class to achieve its aims. The mass movement is necessary, but only in order to exert pressure along a path of gradual change towards socialism. There is no place within such a strategy for the idea that the working class must organise its struggle on the basis of complete independence, on the basis of a complete refusal to trust in forces tied in any way to the preservation of capitalism. The CP leadership denies a truth shown repeatedly in the class struggle: that the working class can and must use forces like the trade union bureaucracy, Parliament etc., but for its own purposes, and it must never depend on them in order to achieve its goals. Instead the militants must continually bear in mind that one day, in order to carry the mass struggle even one inch further forward, such forces which are dependant in one way or another on the maintenance of the capitalist order must be pushed aside and defeated.
In the struggle of the engineering workers against the Industrial Relations Act it is urgently necessary to free the membership from reliance on the old policies and leadership in order to unite the movement and carry it further forward. The policy of the Executive of telling members to 'do their own thing' in each locality must be replaced by national strike action. Pressure must be stepped up on the executive to adopt such a policy. But at the same time every effort must be made to establish national links at a rank and file level so that the fate of the struggle against the Act does not depend entirely on a change of line by the executive. Pressure must be stepped up for solidarity from other unions in the common fight against the Act, but at the same time every effort must be made to establish such unity at a rank and file level. The protest strikes must be supported but a battle must be started to change the aims of the movement from that of protesting the fine to forcing an end to the Act, though that means taking on the government in a showdown and the other instruments of class rule. Only such a fighting policy will guarantee a victorious struggle against the Act. And such a policy involves breaking from the tactics and strategy of the Communist Party leadership.