The biggest and most open discussion ever organised in defence of basic democratic rights.* This was how Workers Prets, the daily paper of the Socialist Labour League, heralded last Sunday's Conference of the All Trade Union Alliance in Manchester.
All too often in the past, conferences of the rank and file have promised so much and yet realised vory little. The Socialist Labour League has been amongst the most vocal crities, for instance, of the Liaison Committee for the Defence of the Trade Unions for its failure to prepare the rank and file to assume the leadership of their own struggles. They have consistently attacked the policy of the Communist Party whose eternal alliance with the "left" trade union bureaucrats has prevented the LCDTU from really developing into the strong, fighting organisation of the working class vanguard that it could. So much so in fact, that they have even boyootted these conferences.
OPPORTUNITY The 4,000 trade unionists, youth and housewives who crowded into King's Hall, Belle Vue Park for the ATUA Rally and Conference fully appreciated that here was an excellent opportunity to break with the past and map out practical measures for the way ahead. Indeed, there were some very positive featutes to the Conference: all the delegates saw the importance of the decision by the AUEW to break away from the TUC-Government talks, many talked of the consistent campaign on this question they had been waging inside their umions, and they were unanimous in their tocal opposition to any form of incomes policy. delegates saw too the absolute necessity of holding the line against the ruling class offenave, both in the factories and through the courts, in preparation for the big struggles to come, and Dave Jackson, a guest speaker representing the North Wales building workers on trial in Shrewshury for picketing got especially enthusiastice applause when he called for the setting up of committees to defend the Shrewsbury 24 in every area.
Finally, in the struggle against the ruling class and the Tory government, everyone understood the need to build a leadership that could go beyond the collaborationist policies of the trade union bureaucrats. And yet, some of us must have left the conference unconvinced that it was the historic step in the construction of this leadership that its organisers claimed it to be.
The scene in Bedle Vor bit Sonday Red Weekly B July 1973 Page 2 BASIC CONCEPTIONS What lay at the root of these doubts was really the basic conceptions underlying the conference, the lessons of the LCDTU had, alas, not. been fully learnt. The building of this leadership was not seen as developing the independent and democratic orpanisation of the working class vanguard with a coherent plan of practical measures for preparing and leading in struggle the broadest possible layers of the whole class. Kather we were told that the means of building follow at which speakers from other unions this leadership was, to quote the conferenoc resolution. to lilt for the transtormation oi the Socialist Labgur League into the revolutionary party by engaging in a campaign of discussion and acowty To recrut large numbers of new members to the Socialist Labour League, to expand the circulation of the Workers Press in the factories and work places as well as union branches, bulld new branches of the ATUA and expand existing ones and ensure the success of the Founding Conference of the revolutionary Party on November 4th 1973.
This served to obscure the issue for delegates rather than to clarily it. The test of their activity, they were told, hinged on the success or fallure of recruiting into the SLL: from the demand that the TUC call a general strike to kick out the Tories (which it sarely should) to the call for a Labour Government to adopt Socialist policies (which it surely won't); from the boycott of the Liaison Committee for the Defence of the Trade Unions to the committed building of the All Trades Union Alliance, the solution to all the problems of the vanguard and of the mass of the working class was to lie in the transformation of the SL.L into the revolution ary party.
Such a policy will find little echo in the ranks of the vanguard outside the ATUA. But it also serves to disorient those inside the ATUA und the SLL. One delegate from a factory called Sovex said that the only guarantee of bringing down of the Tory government was the building of the Socialist Labour League and its transformation into the revolutionary party, whilst another delepate went further still - It was the only means of preventing the Tory government from introducing fascism and the corporate state. That this was the continuing theme of the conference is all the more unfortunate. Such policies cannot guide the activity of militants in the factories, in the unions and amongst the broader vanguard: they can only lead to the isolation of these militants, and to the creation of an organisation with little or no influence, Bob Murphy OF WANDSWORTH 3 Fiye months after the incidents for which they are alleged to be solely responsible, the Wandsworth Three' teachers Eric Porter, Fred Scott and David Whitely - have finally been called for friat at the headquarters of the National Union of Teachers, Hamilton House, Mabledon Plice, London W.C.1. next Saturday, Up the