Peter Fryer

WSITVIOOS 8 0 i 311X V 8 3HX

 By th e sam e author

H ungarian T ragedy
H ungary and th e C o m m u n ist P arty
THE BATTLE FOR
SOCIALISM

Peter Fryer

SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE

 First published 1959

The copyright of this book h vested by the auth

in the Socialist
Labour League

Printed in Great Britain by the Plough Press Ltd. (TU),

High Street, London* S.W.4 186 Clapham
I express my thanks to the comrades who have helped me in
writing this book: either by reading all or part of it and suggesting
improvements, as Michael Banda, Brian Behan, Gerry Healy,
William Hunter, Patricia McGowan (who typed it all out twice)
and Brian Pearce have done; or by making the rich experience
of the American Marxists available to us in Britain who are
following in their footsteps, as James P. Cannon has done.

July 1959 P-F.

V
 t

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

PART ONE
CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE

l. The World We Live In 7

The Turn to Violence 8
The New Awakening ‘ 11

•2. The Two Nations 15

3. Hard Times Ahead 25

4. Towards a Slump 29

5. The Growth of Unemployment and Short-Time Working 35

The Tories Arc Guilty 39

6. The Hydrogen-Bomb and theThreat ofWar 43

7. Oppression in the Colonies 54

8. A System in Decay • 61

9. The Socialist Solution 66

10. Class Struggle the Only Road toSocialism 70

 PART TWO
LABOUR AND LEADERSHIP

1. The Crisis of Leadership 79

Labour in the Doldrums - 80
Leaders Who Will Not Lead 86
What It Leads To * 92

2. The Labour Bureaucracy 99

The Betrayal of the Workers 101
The Witch-Hunt 105
The Deception of the Workers 107

3. Centrism 111

4. The Communist Party 116

PART THREE
THE MARXIST MOVEMENT

1. What Is Marxism? '131

2. The Evolution of British Marxism . 144

3. Marxists and the Labour Party 150

4. „Marxists and the Trade Unions 157

The Employers’ Offensive 157
The Workers’ Counter-Offensive 163

5. Principles and Programme of the Marxist Movement 170

Transitional Demands 172

6. The Marxist Press 177

7. Towards a Revolutionary Working-Class Party 181

Index 187

viii
 INTRODUCTION

M illio ns of working men and women in Britain today are fearful

of the future. They want a better life for themselves, their
children and their children’s children. But they do not know
how this better life is to be attained. They are disillusioned
in the ‘Welfare State’, for they are not finding it easy to manage
bn their wages, and they laiow that wage increases are not
obtained merely by asking for them. They are worried about
the danger of losing their jobs, or of being put on short time,
as so many have been. They hear a great deal about radio­
activity in the earth’s atmosphere and the effect this has on the
health both of people now alive and of future generations. They
hear that British scientists at the Porton (Wilts.) germ warfare
establishment are working on the production of botulinus, a toxin
so deadly .that eight and a half ounces of it, suitably distributed,
could wipe out the whole human race. They feel they are being
deceived; that either scientists or politicians or both are not giving
them all the facts. They hear of rocket bases being built in
Britain from which nuclear missiles would be sent to bomb
Russia; and they wonder just how much chance of survival
we should have in this country if Russia retaliated in kind.
Over and over again in the lifetime of each of us we have
heard the politicians make many fine promises. Once it was
‘a land fit for heroes to live in’. Now it is either a ‘doubling
of our standard of living in twenty-five years’, or the glossy
future ‘Labour Offers YOU’. Plenty of high-sounding phrases.
But somehow the reality never seems to match up to the promises.
Jobs; living standards; workshop organization; the peace of the
world: all are menaced today, just as they were in the thirties
—despite all the suffering and sacrifice of yet another ‘war to
end war’. There are now at least one million families in Britain

1
.I

whose bread-winner is either out of work or on short time. Once

again the dole queue is becoming a familiar sight in our cities.
Many of the older generation well remember the hardships and
social conflicts of the hungry thirties and the stormy twenties.
They remember how the workers and the masses of unemployed
had to struggle bitterly to keep every inch of ground against
such eniploying-class weapons as wage cuts and the means test.
Today the employers and their government are attacking the
workers again. They are aiming to thrust the burden of their'
economic difficulties on our shoulders. They are aiming to solve
their problems at our expense. And again the workers will
have to tight, as they did In the General Strike and the hunger
marches, if they are to maintain anything of the enhanced
prosperity their industrial strength has won them since the end
of the second world war.
This book makes no promises. It offers no easy road. It is
written in the belief that big clashes between Capital and Labour
are unavoidable. It seeks to show workers that they can fight
and win; and to suggest how their fight can best be conducted,
led and carried through to a successful conclusion. We who
are Marxists in the British Labour movement do not come
forward with any short cuts or magic formulas. We say to the
workers: ‘Your future lies in your own hands.’ But we add:
‘I» your struggle is to be victorious you need the ideas of Marxism,
which are the quintessence of the experience of the working-class
movement throughout the world over the past 150 years. These
ideas will help you to hit back at the boss, blow for blow.
And they will help you to beat him.’
Those who hold Marxist ideas are associated in a Marxist
movement, the Socialist Labour League, which tries to sec the
workers’ struggles, not as just a series of isolated, sectional fights
against particular employers, but as one indivisible class struggle,
industrial, political and ideological: against the employing class;
against its government and the rest of its State machine; and
against the illusive ideas with which its spokesmen seek to deceive
and split the workers. For an industrial worker the beginning
of wisdom is when he becomes a militant, takes an interest in
the affairs of his factory and industry, and takes a stand against
the boss. But this is only the beginning of wisdom. The more
experience militants gain in struggle, the more they realize that
their strength lies in joining forces, on as wide a scale as possible,
with others of like mind. Individuals scattered all over the
country on building sites, down the pits, in the workshops, in
the trade union branches, can do much to help their fellow-
workers in struggle. But a movement, knit together by common
working-class, socialist aims, by voluntary discipline and
theoretical understanding, with its Press and its common strategy,
vision and purpose—such a movement can lead the working class
not only to partial victories in sectional battles, but to the
conquest of power.
And that is the aim of those of us who are building a Marxist
movement—State power in the hands of the working class, so
that poverty, unemployment, exploitation and war will be swept
away, and a society constructed that is based, not on private
profit, but on people’s needs.
This can be done. It must be done, if mankind is to be saved
from the evils born of a decaying social system. Marxists see in
capitalist society only one social force which can make the
necessary changes. On this social force, the working class, they
pin all their confidence. Not because they want to glorify the
workers or flatter them, but because the workers alone are, by
the very process of capitalist production, brought together, welded
into a class, disciplined and thrown on to the arena of social
struggle, as the one force whose interests are at every point
diametrically opposed to the interests of the employing class.
Because of their position in society workers can find no final
solution to their problems short of the overthrow of the employing
class altogether. All partial, stopgap ‘solutions' only postpone
this linal reckoning.
Of course the workers’ awareness that they have it in their
power to put the capitalists out of business, and to run society
themselves in a rational, planned way, does not come in one day,
nor yet in one decade. But every working-class defeat and
every partial and provisional victory enriches the understanding
of some at least of the participants. Every struggle is a school.
And however harsh the repression, however enduring the period
of reaction and seeming apathy, the socialist movement never
falls back quite to its point of departure. Slowly, but with all
the inevitability of a natural process, there are assembling the
workers who have learned in the school of class struggle the
need for a Marxist leadership. Today Marxist ideas are gripping
the minds of industrial militants with all their liberating,
enlightening and mobilizing force, and this fact is striking fear
into the hearts of big business men and their agents in the Labour
movement. For the future belongs to this irresistible combination
of Marxist ideas and the industrial rank and file.

3
 PART 1

CAPITALISM , SOCIALISM AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE

5
 1. TH E WORLD WE LIV E IN

T hanks to the antics of John Foster Dulles, ‘brinkmanship’ is

now a commonplace expression. But the sober truth is that the
world is close to the abyss. Twenty years ago Marxists proclaimed
that ‘socialism or barbarism’ were the alternatives before mankind.
Today ‘socialism or annihilation’ would be nearer the truth.
Economic crisis with all its attendant misery looms ahead, mocking
the prophets and soothsayers who have claimed to see fundamental
changes in the nature of capitalist society since the second world
war. Weapons of mass destruction exist whose mere testing
poisons the atmosphere with a cumulative effect that is yet
uncalculated, if not incalculable: their use would destroy
civilization. Humanity seems poised on the edge of disaster.
Yet the situation is full of irony. The modern productive forces
which are being utilized in the scramble for profits that leads to
slump, and in the arms race that leads to holocaust, could “be
utilized for a truly colossal enrichment of men’s lives. In the
whole span of human history there has never been such a poignant
contrast between possibility and actuality. Automation and atomic
energy could bring happiness, leisure and abundance on a scale
that would far outshine the glittering Utopias of imaginative
writers. But as long as capitalism holds sway, inventions,
discoveries and improvements in technique are to a large extent
perverted to destructive ends; or are a source of enormous profit
for a handful of idle men—while millions in the USA and
elsewhere are thrown on the streets, also idle, but in poverty
and hunger; and in the colonial countries millions die of starvation
and disease every year.
It is this contradiction which in the last analysis chokes each

7
Jrv^a+ive by each capitalist statesman to put his own bit of the
world to rights. In such a world as this no nation can hope
to solve its problems except by encroaching on the ‘rights’ and
‘interests’ of other nations. And the capitalist class as a whole
cannot hope to solve its problems except through an attack on
the working class and the colonial peoples.

The Turn to Violence

The year 1958 saw a remarkable turn to violence and reaction
throughout the capitalist world, sure evidence of capitalism’s
inability to go on governing in the old way, and of ever more
rapid and thoroughgoing changes in its political superstructure.
There is alarm on the Right: ‘At times this year it has seemed
that hardly a week has gone by without political power in some
capital or other being seized by some general or other’1—and
on the Left: ‘It has been a disastrous year for democracy.’2
The scale, speed and violence of the turn from ‘democracy’ to
one or other form of open dictatorship by the capitalist class,
or some section of it, can be compared only with the rise of
fascism in the thirties. The focal point of this turn to reaction
has been the advent to power of de Gaulle in France, which has
heartened and spurred on reactionary forces all over the capitalist
world. Well may one Tory weekly gloat over the counter­
revolutions of 1958, which it sees as ‘a sort of 1848 in reverse’,
adding: ‘Having seen generals come to power all over the Middle
East and Asia—and not only there—there is a natural temptation
for other generals to follow suit.’8
The temptation has not been resisted very hard. In Burma
power has been transferred to the Army’s supreme commander
and ‘democracy [has been] apparently put to sleep for its own
good’.4 In Pakistan another supreme commander, General Ayub
Khan, has assumed the powers of president and ‘democracy [has
been] declared bankrupt and put on the shelf for what seems
to be an indefinite period’.3 ‘Now the sword is naked, and
unashamed,’ wrote the Economist of Ayub Khan’s assumption
of all powers, over which he ‘scarcely bothered even to draw
a veil of good manners’.0 In India people are asking: ‘Could
it happen here?’ ‘There is widespread recognition that many
factors which contributed to the upheaval in Pakistan are present,
at least potentially, in India also.’7 Democracy in Ceylon has
been ‘confined within a straitjacket of emergency powers’8 and
an ‘essential services order* has forbidden strikes in all the island’s
ports. In Siam yet another supreme commander has staged an
‘anti-communist’ coup, proclaimed martial law throughout the
country, dissolved the National Assembly, abrogated the con­
stitution, closed down eleven newspapers and periodicals and
arrested over 100 Left-wing deputies. (But the Bangkok
correspondent of The Times wrote that ‘western observers are
frankly sceptical whether there was in fact a communist plot’.9)
In Laos the Prime Minister, ‘citing the example of President
de Gaulle in France’,10 has demanded and obtained from the
National Assembly exceptional powers for a period of twelve
months.
At the end of October and the beginning of November there
was an outbreak of imperialist violence in Aden. Two journalists,
who had made accusations of corruption against government
departments and the courts, had been jailed for three months
for contempt of court. Police fired on a protest demonstration,
killing five and injuring eighteen. The situation, said Lennox-
Boyd, the Colonial Secretary, in the House of Commons on
November 3, had been ‘handled with great skill and expedition’.
When the Aden TUC called a general strike 560 persons were
arrested and 240 were deported.11
♦ An army coup d'Etat in the Sudan on November 17, directed
by the Commander-in-Chief, overthrew the government. Political
parties were dissolved, the constitution was suspended, and a state
of emergency proclaimed under which the security forces were
given the right to censor mails, the right of entry, search and
detention without a warrant on suspicion, and the right to prevent
the import of any books or leaflets considered subversive. One
early measure was the arrest of leaders of the Anti-Imperialist
Front (an organization of Sudanese Marxists) and the Sudan
workers’ trade union federation; seven of them, tried in camera
by a military tribunal, were given prison sentences. Six days
after the coup one correspondent in Khartoum was reporting
that ‘British residents . . . appear to take pride in the overthrow
of democracy in the Sudan because of the calm and very “ British”
way it was managed’.12
At the end of 1958 there were mass arrests of communists
in Egypt and Syria. A printing press was seized and three Left-
wing publishing houses were closed down.
The use of torture by French troops in Algeria against national
liberation fighters was graphically and convincingly described by
Henri Alleg in his book La Question™ More recently, Cardinal

. 9
 Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyons, has publicly accused ‘certain
members’ of the Lyons police of having tortured Moslem socialists
in order to provide support for allegations against priests charged
with sheltering Algerian liberation fighters. The police resorted,
he said, to ‘violence and the most serious torture’.14 A medical
examination made by Professor Roche from the Lyons Faculty of
Medicine revealed on October 30 that two of the Moslems who
had laid charges had, in fact, been subjected to violence and
brutality.15
Following the mass arrests in January 1958 of people accused
of trying to reconstitute the banned Communist Party of Spain,
there was a fresh wave of arrests in the last three weeks of
November, when police took into custody between eighty and
a hundred workers, students, lawyers, doctors and scientists
because of ‘social-democratic activities’. Trial follows trial in
Spain. On November 15 a military tribunal in Madrid imposed
sentences ranging from six months to twenty years on twelve
men, alleged to be ‘communist agitators’, who promoted strike
movements.10 On December 15 another six Spaniards were
sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from three to fifteen
years for distributing leaflets. A week later a further thirty-one
—men from the Asturias coal-fields—were sentenced to terms
ranging from two to twenty years by a military court on charge*
of organizing communist groups in the pits. And on December 31
sentences of up to fifteen years’ imprisonment were imposed on
nineteen more people accused of taking part in strikes.
Tn Portugal mass arrests followed the presidential election last
summer—the first since Salazar’s rise to power in which there was
an opposition candidate.
In west Germany, where anti-semitism is reappearing, the
fascist traditions are being kept green. At the opening of the
new Bundeswehr staff college, on October 29, Herr Strauss, the
Defence Minister, warmly praised the German General Staff and
the Prussian tradition. General Heusinger had earlier said that
the great successes of Hitler’s army were largely due to good
leadership, had been criticized for this and had had his remarks
‘clarified’ ,in the Bundestag. Now Herr Strauss recalled the
foundation of the Prussian officers’ academy and said that German
soldiers need not be ashamed of tradition.17
The dynamiting of the Jewish Reform Temple in Atlanta
(Georgia) and destruction of a high school at Clinton (Tennessee)
in October brought the number of bombings, or attempted
bombings, of schools, synagogues and houses in the South of

10
the USA to sixty-seven since the beginning of 1957.
The shocking thing is that up to now in every case the criminals have
gone scot-free. . . . The South today, angered and frustrated by the
Supreme Court’s order to end racial discrimination in the schools, is
fertile soil for fanatics. . . . Defiance of the law has been preached
by many who have sworn to uphold it and crimes against Negroes
have gone unpunished.18
In all these places, as in Cyprus, Notting Hill and Nottingham,
the forces of reaction have raised their heads; the pattern is plain
and ominous.
Yet the comparison made above with the rise of fascism in
the thirties should not be pressed too far. The balance of class
forces is not the same as it was a quarter of a century ago; the
base of world capitalism is far narrower and its reserves far
weaker, thanks to the loss of eastern Europe and China from the
capitalist orbit^ and the struggle of the colonial peoples is at a
far more advanced stage. All in all, world capitalism faces
opponents, in the metropolitan countries and in the colonies alike,
who are able to fight back much more effectively than was the
case in the thirties. Even as reaction scores new successes, there
are signs of a new awakening on the part of the common people
in many parts of the world.

The New Awakening

An outstanding example is the magnificent struggle of the
women of South Africa against the government’s policy of issuing
them with identity books, called ‘reference books’. Though
hundreds were arrested and fined, though police used tear-gas,
batons and light canes against the women demonstrating outside
the court, and were seen hitting some women with handcuffs
as they ran away,19 the spirit of the women was unquenchable.
They sang and danced as the police vans drove up to remove
them. They turned up in court with their babies strapped to
their backs, and almost all chanted ‘Asinimali’ (‘We have no
money’) when offered bail of £2. ‘The African women concerned
are practically insisting on being arrested and put into jail,’
reported one British correspondent.20 'They are fighting back
like tigresses,’ wrote another, telling how in one month in Cape
Town alone police dragged 2,800 women from their homes when
they could not produce passes; how those arrested were made to
strip and were searched; how one woman, six months pregnant,

11
 was punched in the eye and knocked down by police who
hammered on her door at six in the morning, demanding her
pass.21
There is a similar awakening elsewhere in Africa. What the
Salisbury correspondent of the Manchester Guardian called ‘a
new phenomenon in Southern Rhodesian racial relations’ occurred
on October 23, when 200 African children at an Anglican mission
struck for better food, throwing the contents of their ration bowls
on the floor and declaring that the mealie meal was coarse
and inferior. Six days later armed police were called to the
government-controlled Zulu training school on the‘ south coast
of Natal when African students staged a mass walk-out in protest
against the expulsion of twenty fellow pupils. The peoples of
Africa are on the march. j
So are the Arab peoples. Iraq has succeeded in shaking off
an oppressive regime that was backed by British imperialism.
In Oman an effective guerrilla is being carried on from the
mountains against the Life Guards and other British troops and
collaborators under British regular officers; a British blockade
has been unsuccessful in spite of what The Times called ‘heavy
bombardment by the R A F .22 Throughout the Middle East the
defeat of British and French intervention in Suez at the hands
of the Arab peoples and the British working class will not soon
be forgotten.
The peoples of Asia too, are on the march. The Indonesians
have delivered powerful blows against Dutch imperialism. In
Japan, on November 5, 10,000 police tried to restrain masses
of demonstrators marching with lanterns on to the parliament
buildings to protest against a Bill giving wider powers to the
police, while strikers picketed government offices and military
headquarters. The Prime Minister declared that he would insist
on the passage of the Bill ‘no matter what the sacrifice’—but
a fortnight later bowed before public opinion and the power of
the workers and agreed to withdraw it.
Latin America with its twenty republics and population of
over 100 million people was for long a wide-open playground
for imperialism. When Spanish rule ended, imperialist hegemony
in most areas of the continent passed to Britain, who was only
displaced finally by the USA at the end of the second world
war. For a decade or more U.S. imperialism has been the
main bastion of support for brutal dictatorships and military
juntas throughout Latin America. Recently, however, and
particularly in the past year, the people’s movements against

12
imperialism and for economic independence have scored a number
of important successes. Dictatorships have been overthrown and
replaced by more popular regimes committed, at least formally,
to the protection of national resources against the depredations
of the U.S. monopolies. The victory of Fidel Castro’s forces
in Cuba is only the most recent in a series of events which has
included the ending of dictatorships in Peru and Colombia and
the overthrow of the hated Jimenez r6gime in Venezuela. Today
only three thoroughgoing military dictatorships remain — in
Dominica, Nicaragua and Paraguay—and while there is nothing
like a workers’ government in power elsewhere, nevertheless there
are great mass movements afoot which have won the first victories
against reaction and in some cases, notably Chile, are moving
forward into a direct fight for socialism.
Despite repression, torture, reactionary legislation, the rigging
of elections and the use of armed force against them, the workers
and the colonial peoples are beginning to feel their strength.
World imperialism knows this, and prepares new repressions,
which are the measure of its desperation and its bankruptcy.1I

1Max Beloff in the Daily Telegraphy December 29, 1958.

aNew Statesman, December 6, 1958.
*Spectator, November 21, 1958.
* The Times, November 3, 1958.
'Ibid.
*November 1, 1958. Another British Tory writer warned the General
that ‘he must remember that the zeal and fondness for authority now
displayed by his junior martial law officers might degenerate into petty
tyranny’ (Sunday Times, November 9, 1958).
TThe Times, November 3, 1958.
I Ibid.
’ November 5, 1958.
wObserver, January 18, 1959.
II Cf. ibid.: ‘Politically the British are supporting in the [Persian] Gulf
the kind of regimes that are sitting ducks for Cairo sharpshooters.
Justice is the personal dicta of the sheikhs. . . . Financial inequality
. . . is appalling. “Where are the British principles that we learned
about?” a young Bahreini asked me. “Do the British approve of all
this? When a sheikh does something you don’t like, you throw him

13
 out. You don’t care what he docs to uj." . . . Nowhere is there any
whiff of popular rule.’
K Observer, November 23, 1958.
” English translation, The Question (1958).
MThe Times, October 25, 1958.
**The Paris correspondent of the New Statesman wrote on December 27,
1958: *M. Gaultier, the public prosecutor, refused on technical grounds
to give details of the nature and degree of violence employed. Nor
was any member of the Lyons police force arrested or charged, although
the charges against the two priests were not withdrawn. In Lyons and
in Paris, attempts were made to hush up the whole affair. . . . It would
. . . seem that for some considerable time the Cardinal had been
receiving reports from the Abbe Magnin about tortures practised by
the police, at their Rue Vauban station.’
“ A statement issued by the Socialist International on December 7, 1958,
complained of brutal treatment of those arrested and said some of them
had been held incommunicado since September without any charge
having been preferred.
1TThe Bonn correspondent of The Times wrote: ‘A young soldier tends
to be confused when he is told that Hitler was a criminal, but that
General Speidel, General Heusinger and most of the other generals
who served Hitler faithfully were fine soldiers* (October 30, 1958).
* Economist, October 25, 1958.
lvThe Johannesburg correspondent of the Observer reported: ‘The crowd
into which the police squad charged like a Rugby scrum was composed
mainly of women, many with babies tied to their backs. There had
been no hostile demonstration by the crowd. . . . Several policemen
carried thin canes with which they slashed at the backs of the running
women. Others whipped the women round their buttocks and legs
with leather pistol lanyards. . . . Other policemen took their handcuffs
from their belts and lashed out at the fleeing crowd* (November 2,
1958).
•'Pretoria correspondent of The Times, October 29, 1958.
:1 Daily Herald, December 1, 1958.
MNovember 1, 1958. Tf [the rebel] Talib is to be finally defeated, it
looks as if British intervention may well become necessary again,’ the
‘Thunderer’ added.
 2. THE TWO NATIONS

P rim e M inister Harold Macmillan went to Sunderland in January

1959, on a Meet-the-People tour. He had been an MP for that
constituency for eighteen years. Yet when he went to the ship­
yard he was
baffled by a sudden change in the behaviour of the workmen when
the hooter gave its bronchial blast. At one moment, they were standing
about . . . watching him watching them. At the next, they were
flooding around and past him and out of the shipyard gate. His
eyebrows twitched in surprise and he muttered something to his wife.
Lady Dorothy was quicker on the uptake. ‘When the whistle blows,’
she explained, ’they all go off fdr their luncheon.’
So many details of ordinary life appeared to be mysterious to
the Tory Prime Minister that ’the impression given was of a
distinguished, polite foreigner being steered round the backwoods
of some remote colony’.1
The word ‘foreigner’ is apt. There are still ‘two nations* in
Britain. In spite of the higher standards enjoyed by sections
of the British working class since the end of the second world
war there is still a great contrast between the wretched lives of
the poor and the luxury enjoyed by the very rich. There is
still a ‘submerged fifth’: the lowest-paid workers; the unemployed;
the old age pensioners; disabled persons, including the victims
of two world wars; the chronic sick; mental defectives; young
widows with large families. These people live for the most part
in squalor and misery. Many of them experience grinding poverty
every day of their lives. Many of them are mocked by increases
in pensions or other benefits given with one hand and taken away
in means test fashion with the other if they happen to be able

15
to earn a little money. At the other pole of society there is
still a minority which produces nothing, yet wants for nothing.
The poor have to work hard all their lives only to be thrown on
to the social scrap-heap, unwanted and neglected, when they can
work no longer. The rich do not work, yet they enjoy every
kind of luxury.
Stories about the high wages enjoyed nowadays by workers
are belied by the official figures, which show that high wages
are the exception. In the last pay-week in April 1958 the average
weekly earnings of all British workers were £10 14s. 2d. A
considerable number earned less than this; for example, workers
in the food, drink and tobacco trades averaged £9 6s. 8d.,
workers in national and local government service £9 2s. 3d.,
textile workers £8 6s. lOd. and clothing workers £7 3s. 3d. Women
engineers averaged £7 Is. 8d., women chemical workers £6 8s. 3d.,
women clothing workers £6 7s. 2d. and women workers in national
and local government service £6 Os. 2d. per week.2
Out of 21 million people receiving incomes of £180 a year or
more, 19 million get less than £1,000 a year. About 1,750,000
get between £1,000 and £5,000 a year. And 64,000 get over
£5,000. Of these 64,000, the richest 2,500 get £20,000 a year
or more. It is sometimes argued that income tax and surtax
tend very much to level down these discrepancies. But even when
these taxes are taken into account the contrast is still a striking
one. When the average income after tax of these groups is
examined, it is found that the 64,000 whose gross income is
£5,000 a year or more receive an average of £3,520 a year after
tax—more than eight times the average received after tax by
the 19 million whose gross pay is under £1,000. Moreover the
number of very rich people has grown rapidly under a Tory
government: the number of those with incomes of over £6,000
after tax has gone up twenty times in five years—from 36 in
1951-52 to 700 in 1956-57.3 These figures refer, of course, only
to the taxable incomes of the rich. They have all sorts of ways
of adding to their incomes and evading taxation: for instance,
the huge expense accounts of company directors, the profits made
from speculation on the stock market, and the formation of limited
companies in order to avoid death duties on their fortunes.
For many workers, a recession brings the dole and a big
reduction in living standards. The rich, however, have continued
to prosper. Share values have soared in recent months. So
have profits. It is simply untnle that the rich have been taxed
out of existence. ‘The paradox of 1958,’ wrote the Observer, ‘is

16
that industrial equities have achieved a greater advance than in
any previous year since 1945, against a background of falling
industrial production and rising unemployment.’4 During the year,
newspaper shares rose by 79 per cent., tobacco and paper 50
per cent., building materials 49 per cent., banks 43 per cent.,
food 42 per cent., radio and television 40 per cent., investment
trusts 39 per cent., chemicals 35 per cent., motors 32 per cent.,
breweries 30 per cent., engineering 25 per cent., steel 21 per cent.,
shipping and electrical equipment 17 per cent., textiles 15 per
cent., oil and shipbuilding 9 per cent. By January 28, 1959,
the daily share index of the Financial Times, covering a represen­
tative cross-section of the industrial market, had risen from 162.6
a year before to 214.6, a rise of almost 32 per cent, to the highest
level since the middle of 1955. The Financial Times profits
analysis for 1958 showed that the 2,758 industrial companies
which issued their reports during the year made a total profit
of £2,225,642,000, an increase of 6.2 per cent, over the previous
year. These same companies’ ordinary dividends increased by
6.8 per cent. Chemicals, engineering, food, iron and steel, motors
and aircraft all achieved substantial increases. Of special interest
is the way the Rent Act is bringing great benefit to property
companies. The total revenue of twenty companies listed in
Labour Research increased from £7,800,000 to £8,900,000 and
fourteen out of the twenty increased their dividend payments.5
Motor and aircraft firms made profits of £172 million in 1958,
an increase of 26 per cent., and iron and steel firms £144 million,
an increase of 18 per cent. ‘This rise in profits may appear
surprising against the sombre industrial picture presented by 1958,’
commented the Financial Times*
The prospect for 1959 was one of tough opposition to wage
demands by the workers coupled with still bigger profits and
more handsome distribution of dividends for the shareholders:
The fact that weekly wage rates rose in 1958 by only 3J per cent,
compared with 51 per cent, in 1957 must be accounted a step in the
-right direction. . . . A period of falling production and under-employed
‘ resources has . . . a~few; modest merits. . . . Of those merits the most
important is the chance it normally offers of checking the momentum
of wage increases. . . . The chance of really checking the spiral ought
to be still better in 1959 than it was in 1958. It would be hard to
exaggerate the benefit to be got from a year of standstill/
So much for wages. What of profits and dividends? The fore­
cast about these is a very different one: ‘We may be entering
a phase in which profits will begin to turn decisively upward. . , .
Dividend payments . . . are absorbing well under two-fifths of

17
available earnings, and if profit prospects begin to improve there
will be ample scope for higher distributions.’8
Figures published by the Inland Revenue of estates valued for
death duties show that the richest one per cent, of those paying
death duties own nearly a fifth of the wealth thus accounted for.
VALUATION OF ESTATES FOR DEATH DUTIES, 1954-55»
Number Net value As percentage of total
(£m.) Number Net Value
£2,000—£5,000 41,320 137.0 53.5 16.1
£5,000—£10,000 # 17,989 126.7 23.3 14.9
£10,000—£25,000 11,846 182.9 15.3 21.5
£25,000—£50,000 3,914 142.4 5.1 16.8
£50,000—£100,000 1,449 101.8 1.9 12.0
£100,000—£500,000 654 121.2 0.8 14.3
Over £500,000 28 37.5 0.03 4.4
An example of the enormous private fortunes that the rich are
able to amass under capitalism came to light in October 1953,
when the gross estate of the Duke of Westminster, a private land-
owner, who had died the previous July, was provisionally valued
at over £10 million. Educated at Eton, the Duke liked yachting,
fishing and hunting, and for relaxation would often take a pack of
200 hounds and twenty horses to France for a wild boar hunt.
According to the Financial Times10 banquets have become
popular again in the City of London. They cost anything up to
£50 per head, for which sum the diners eat such delicacies as
peacock, each spending in one night up to twenty times what a
single old age pensioner has to live on in a full week. What
incomes do the captains of industry receive to enable them to live
at this rate? The 1,100 directors of the United Kingdom’s 100
largest companies receive on average between £8,000 and £9,000
a year. It is thought that the chairmen of some of the largest
British companies may earn gross salaries of up to £40,000 a
year.11 The following table shows what the directors of a number
of British firms receive on average each year:
AVERAGE ANNUAL EMOLUMENTS PER DIRECTOR12
£ £
E. S. and A. Robinson 29,499 Tube Investments 13,163
Turner and Newall 27,522 J. Lyons 12,240
Shell Transport and Tate and Lyle 11,745
Trading 22,867 Guest Keen and
Dunlop Rubber 20,423 Nettlefolds 11,392
ICI 18,316 Ford Motor 11,043
F. W. Woolworth 18,196 Great Universal Stores 10,919
British American Tobacco 17,884 Imperial Tobacco 10,836
Gallaher 17,690 English Electric 10,772
BMC 17,633 Esso Petroleum 10,619
Unilever 17,045 Associated Television 10,610
Lewis’s 15,133 British Electric
Spillers 14,282 Traction 10.572
J. and P. Coats 13,642 Distillers Company 10,505

18
 When big business men give up their jobs they are richly
rewarded, unlike workers who retire or are made redundant.
When 63-year-old Sir Frank Spriggs relinquished the post of
managing director of the Hawker Siddeley group he was paid
£75,000. Bernard Dixon, former chairman and managing director
of Flowers Breweries, Luton, got £40,000 when he left the board.
And when Maurice Baron resigned from the board of Carreras,
the tobacco manufacturers, he was given £29,237 as compensation
for loss of office as manager.
The rich are spared the worry and insecurity *of poverty, can
enjoy luxuries of many different kinds, can afford to dress well,
to live in comfortable, spacious and well furnished houses and
to employ servants. They can afford highly efficient means of
transport, and some of them even choose to adorn their motor
cars with gold. They are able to spend large sums of money
on the education of their sons and the securing of suitable
husbands for their daughters. The thirteen leading public schools
charge between £354 a year (Wellington) and £474 a year (Eton)
in fees for board and tuition. School clothing may cost about
£100 at first and about £35 a year thereafter. ‘Altogether, the
cost of five years at one of the leading public schools inclusive
of extras could be of the order of £2,500.’13 The very minimum
cost of ‘bringing out* a daughter properly—i.e., of launching her *
into ‘Society’ and finding her a husband—is estimated at £1,000
for the ‘season’, but most rich families spend very much more.
The Countess of Listowel gives the following as the budget for a
‘de luxe deb’ (as distinct from a ‘shoe-string deb’, who can do
it on £713): mums’ luncheons, £100; dinners, £600; deb’s teas
etc., £50; mum’s dresses, £500; Ascot tickets, £14; hairdressing,
taxi etc., £250; deb’s four cocktail frocks, £200; seven evening
frocks, £450; two Ascot frocks, £120; six pairs of shoes, £60;
four handbags, £25; twenty-four pairs of nylons, £12; suit, £48;
coat, £50; evening wrap, £30; five pairs of gloves, £16; cocktail
party, £600; dance, £5,000. ‘All this,’ writes the Countess, ‘is a
framework—built up with . thoughtful,: loving care by mothers
anxious to give their daughters the best possible start in social
life.’14
The condition of the 4,500,000 old age pensioners in Britain
provides a shameful contrast to the junketing and extravagance
of the rich. These are old workers who, after a lifetime of toil,
having had all their labour power squeezed out of them, are
cast aside by a system which does not really care what becomes
of them. The basic old age pension is 50s. a week for a single

19
person, 80s. for a married couple. Many pensioners have only
14s. a week or less to spend on food, compared with the 28s. 9d.
which is the present cost of the minimum diet laid down as
adequate by the Nutrition Committee of the British Medical
Association. When pensions were increased by a few shillings
a week in April 1955, those on national assistance received
nothing, for the whole of the increase was deducted from their
national assistance. The Tories care nothing for these old people;
the purpose of their latest pensions scheme is ‘to relieve the
burden of taxes, not the poverty of the aged’.15
There is evidence that many pensioners live in conditions of
near-starvation. In August 1953 the Medical Officer of Health
in Kensington said that some of the conditions under which
old people were found to be living were reminiscent of the Dark
Ages. They had been found in indescribable conditions of neglect
and squalor. Reporting on thirty-nine cases of malnutrition
admitted to hospital in Liverpool, two doctors said thirty-three
of them were over 60 years old, and on average they spent
12s. 2d. a week on food. Seventeen had ‘developed scurvy
because they could not afford vegetables and fruit’, and most
had skin which was ‘dry, loose, scaly and atrophic—changes
which recur in most reports from famines’. The article went on:
Some seriously ill patients in advanced states of semi-starvation presented
a typical appearance identical -with that seen among prisoners at the
Belsen camp. They lay curled up on their sides and were entirely
unconcerned about activities in the ward. . . . Today grave malnutrition
is not uncommon and often goes unrecognized.”
According to a Manchester official ‘it is no uncommon thing
to find old coats and even odd pieces of old carpet as the only
bed covering’ of old people.17 According to an official in
Edmonton (Middlesex) ‘some of them cannot afford more than
a bucket of coal a week, so that they have a fire just on Saturdays
and Sundays’.18 Professor C. Fraser Brockington, ProTessor of
Social and Preventive Medicine at Manchester University, told
a recent conference that a study of people over 80 years of age
revealed serious deficiencies in feeding: ‘Quite a number of the
old people had no hot meals at all, and only half of the total
had one hot meal each day.’19
During the 1955 General Election a Conservative who had
been canvassing in the Lancashire town of Beswick wrote:
What remains most clearly in my mind is the case of Miss Annie Walsh.
Her pension has recently been raised by 7s. 6d., but she was able to
inform me that her national assistance had fallen by the same amount.

20
 She showed me her weekly budget and these are the figures:
Expenditure Income
£ s. d. £ s. d.
R e n t.............. 9 7 Pension .............. 2 0 0
Coal ... 7 0 National Assistance . 7 0
Gas ... ■
4 0
Insurance 2 3
Clothing Club 8 0
Newspapers £ 0
Food 14 2
£2 7 0 £2 7 0

Most of us, I suppose, spend about 2s. on a meal at midday. Miss

Walsh is able to allow 2s. per day for three meals. ‘I’m not so badly
off as some,* she told me. Tve only been on since 1952. I’ve seen
others going downhill for years. They don’t get enough to cat. Could
you do it on 14s.?* . . . I should like to know how to answer her.”
The callousness with which capitalism treats old workers has
been demonstrated in three recent cases. Horace Holford, a
76-year-old widower and ex-seaman, whose total weekly income
was 50s. pension and 7s. 6d. national assistance, was fined 20s.
in November 1958 for stealing half a pound of tea and a pound
of sausages worth 5s. 3d.21 He said:
I hadn’t eaten for a whole day. I wandered into the store for
somewhere to go. Normally I don’t look at the food. 1 find it too
mouth-watering. But something came over me. I’d never felt so hungry
before as I felt then. . . . I took them because I was starving. I am
very sorry I , did it."
Harry Shaw, aged 68, was awaiting a presentation clock after
forty-five years’ service as a guard on a goods train. But six
weeks before the end of his service he received a letter which
said: ‘Because of the redundancy in goods guards it will be
necessary for you to retire. This will, of course, prevent you from
completing forty-five years’ service and you will not be entitled
to a clock.’23 On retiring after fifty-one years as a fitter and
turner with an engineering firm, John Tillett, aged 65, also
expected to receive a presentation clock. But because he had
spent two years on the dole in the 1920s the firm held that he
had not completed the necessary fifty years of ‘working’ service
to qualify for a clock. A spokesman said: ‘We must stick to
the rules. We cannot make exceptions.’24
Old age pensioners, unemployed persons and other recipients
of very low incomes are sometimes said to be not so badly
off as it would seem, because they can draw national assistance.
Working-class pride, coupled with memories of the treatment

21
 workers received under the means test before the war, prevents
many of them from applying for this help except as a last resort.
In any case the benefits are extremely small. According to the
National Assistance Board’s annual report, 978,000 recipients
of retirement pensions were in December 1957 receiving national
assistance benefits averaging 16s. 8d. a week. Of these 69,000
received 5s. or less, 214,000 between 5s. 6d. and 10s., and 228,000
between 10s. 6d. and 15s. Thus over half received 15s. or less.
Who are the unfortunates to whom these paltry sums are doled
out? ‘The great majority of these people are elderly or sick or
are women with dependent children, and they are all, to a greater
or lesser extent, dependent on the board for their livelihood. . . .
They have nowhere else to turn.’*5
Rich and poor: they live in different districts, speak with
different accents, send their children to different schools, lie in
different wards in the hospitals. Many of the rich spend a large
part of the year abroad: many of the workers take no holiday
at all. In 1957 an estimated 47 per cent, of the population stayed
at home for their holidays, and the majority of these—they
included 70 per cent, of Britain’s agricultural workers—did so
because they could not afford to go away.20 Lastly, not the least
contrast between the two nations is that a child born to an
unskilled worker is twice as likely to die in the first year of its
life, and nearly four times as likely to die between the ages of
four weeks and one year, as is the child of someone in the group
designated as ‘higher administrative etc.’.27
It is not always realized how closely organized as a class are
the rich, being linked through kinship, marriage and membership
of the same public schools and clubs. T. Lupton and C. Shirley
Wilson investigated the social background and relationships of
six categories of ‘top decision makers’: (A) Cabinet Ministers
and other Ministers of the Crown, (B) senior Civil Servants,
(C) directors of the Bank of England, (D) directors of the ‘Big
Five’ banks, (E) directors of ‘City’ firms (i.e., of fourteen merchant
banks or discount houses) and (F) directors of eight insurance
companies. Only three of the 529 people whose backgrounds
were examined were known to have gone to a State elementary
school only. Clubs most frequently represented were the Carlton,
Brooks’s, White’s and the Athenaeum. Extremely close connexions
by kinship and marriage were demonstrated. And, except for
category (B), about a third of the ‘top decision makers’ in each
category went to Eton.28
Rich and poor are not two separate and unconnected

22
phenomena in capitalist society. They are two sides of the same
coin. A minority is rich, and goes on getting richer, through
the exploitation of the majority, which produces the whole of
the product that enables society—rich and poor alike—to live.
Capitalist society is based on robbery. The capitalist class owns
the means of production: all the workers own is their labour
power. The workers create by their labour far niore than they
receive in wages, and this surplus is appropriated by the capitalists.
It is the source of their profit and makes possible their leisure
and their luxuries.
The capitalists are so far removed from the workers that they
have more in common with people of their own class in other
countries than they have with the greater part of their fellow-
countrymen. Rich people of all nationalities mix freely. They
entertain one another socially; they marry one another; they
invest money in one another’s enterprises. From time to time
they fall out, when imperialist rivalry leads to war. At such
times the capitalists tell the workers that their worst enemies are
the people of some foreign nation, and great efforts are made to
arouse the most ignorant prejudices and traditional misconceptions
about the ‘enemy’. ‘National unity’ becomes the order of the
day. But in fact there is no such thing at any time as ‘national
unity’. A great gulf separates the employing class and the working
class. The workers of all countries have more in common with
each other than each working class has with its employing class.

'Spectator, January 23, 1959.

3Ministry of Labour Gazette, vol. Ixvi, no. 9, p. 330, September 1958.
1Calculated on the basis of figures published by the Inland Revenue,
January 30, 1959.
‘ December 28, 1958.
* Labour Research, vol. xlvii, no. 12, p. 184, December 1958.
* January 3, 1959.
1 The Times, January 29, 1959. The editorial from which these sentences
are taken was entitled ‘Small Mercies*.
*Financial Times, January 17, 1958.
‘ Source: H. J. D. Cole, Facts for Socialists (Fabian Research Series 184,
1956).
“ November 10, 1958,
 11Ibid. November 19, 1958.
iaSource: ibid.
u Ibid. December 6, 1958.
14Toiler and Bystander, vol. ccxxviii, no. 2961, p. 76, April 9, 1958.
16New Statesman, November 1, 1958. Existing old age pensioners get
nothing from the scheme, and men and women earning £9 a week or
less (i.e., about one-third of the working population in 1961) will get
no increase either.
18H. Fuld and K. V. Robinson, ‘Malnutrition in the Elderly’, Lancet,
October 24, 1953, pp. 862-4.
11News Chronicle, November 23, 1953.
“ Ibid.
l*The Times, January 23, 1959.
“ Manchester Guardian, May 24, 1955.
a Rather less in value, no doubt, than the gold-plated hot dog presented
to the British sausage manufacturers on October 21, 1958, by the
Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture on behalf of the
meat packing industry of the USA.
" D a ly Herald, November 14, 1958.
"Ibid. September 25, 1958.
54Daily Telegraph, December 2, 1958.
” Report of the National Assistance Board (Cmnd 444, 1957), p. 25.
“ See L. J. Lickorish and A. G. Kershaw, The Travel Trade (1958).
21See The Registrar General’s Decennial Supplement, England and Wales,
1952, Occupational Mortality, part ii, vol. i, Commentary (HMSO, 1958).
The following figures are given there for infant mortality per 1,000
live births in 1949-53:
Under Under 4 weeks
one year 4 weeks one yea
All groups 29.5 18.6 11.0
Higher administrative etc 18.7 14.0 4.7
Skilled workers 29.6 18.5 11.1
Semi-skilled workers 34.8 20.2 14.6
Unskilled workers ... 40.8 22.8 18.0
* “ The study appeared in the January 1959 issue of The Manchester School,
published by the Economics Department of Manchester University.
Extracts were printed in the Manchester Guardian on January 20 and
22, 1959. The following table shows the percentage in each category
that went to one of the six leading public schools—Eton, Winchester,
Harrow, Rugby, Charterhouse or Marlborough—the percentage that
went to Eton and the percentage that went to Oxford or Cambridge:
(A) (B) (C) (D) (c) (F)
Went to top six
public schools 50.0% 19.2% 66.6% 48.0% 43.0% 47.0%
Went to Eton ... 32.4% 4.1% 33.3% 29.7% 32.7% 30.9%
Went to Oxford
or Cambridge 71.5% 68.5% 50.0% 50.0% 34.6% 38.3%

24
 3. H A R D TIMES AHEAD

C a pitalist production is production for profit, not for need.

There is no question of planning the whole of production rationally
under capitalism; it is the sovereign right of each firm or combine
to decide what commodities it considers profitable, to produce
them in such quantities as it considers salable, and to adopt such
technical improvements and discoveries as will prove remunerative.
Each separate firm, or combination of firms, plans its own
activities, of course; but production as a whole is anarchic. There
is a constant scramble for the highest possible profits, and every
capitalist must take part in this scramble or go under, in this
‘dog eat dog’ society. To this end, the productive forces are
developed and production is expanded; but the mass of the people
do not receive enough in wages to buy back all they have
produced. Sooner or later the upshot is a crisis of over*
production. ‘The last cause of all real crises/ wrote Marx, ‘always
remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses
as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop
the productive forces in such a way, that only the absolute
power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit.’1
-Some writers, such as Strachey and Crosland, have said that
Marx is out of date. They have claimed that production would
go on expanding and full employment would continue. But this
dream world was shaken rather badly in the second half of 1958,
when it became obvious that the British economy was entering a
‘recession’. How serious the fall in production and the growth
of unemployment would become, and how long the ‘recession’
would last, none of the experts was prepared to forecast. But
by the beginning of November only the Daily Express was still

25
telling its readers: ‘The future . . . can be approached with
immense confidence.’2 All responsible capitalist commentators,
such as the Governor of the Bank of England and the Financial
Times, were viewing future prospects with perceptible anxiety,
not to say gloom. The former ‘doubted whether some of the
boom talk heard recently in the City was well founded’.3 The
latter wrote:
Exports to the overseas sterling area have now started to fall off
noticeably, and even engineering exports are less buoyant than they
were. Both at home and abroad order books are still shrinking, and
there is little doubt that industry is in for a difficult period over the
next few months.4
In recent months it has become clear that what we are facing is
primarily a recession in heavy industry . . The question is how much
further the movement will go.®
In 1958 there was a drop of 28 per cent, in the area of factory
space in plans approved by the Board of Trade. An index of
the state of the economy and of ‘business confidence’ was a survey
conducted by the Federation of British Industries among business
men: 27 per cent, said employment in their firms had gone down
in the period November 1958 to February 1959; 55 per cent,
said it was the same; 35 per cent, said their order-books had
declined and 36 per cent, said they were the same.
Despite fluctuations and temporary ‘recoveries’, British
capitalism is in fact entering a period of economic difficulties,
and is doing so in a far from healthy state.0 In 1870 Britain
produced one-third of the world’s manufactured goods, and three-
quarters of the world’s exports of manufactured goods were
British. But by 1951 the one-time ‘workshop of the world’
produced only one-tenth of the world’s manufactured goods and
her proportion of world trade had shrunk to less than one-fifth.
Referring to the assumption that ‘our society is built on stable
foundations—that this plateau of relative prosperity can be
indefinitely maintained’, the New Statesman observed: ‘The
foundations have begun to decay. Britain is falling behind her
competitors—already Germany has pushed us out of third place
in production—and we have yet to feel the staggering impact
of communist economic expansion.’7 Between 1953 and the
third quarter of 1958 industrial output per man-hour increased
by 41 per cent, in France, 37 per cent, in Italy, 32 per cent, in
west Germany, but only 11 per cent, in Britain. For the first
time in history Britain has been relegated to third place behind
Japan and Germany in the list of the world’s principal ship­
building nations.8

26
 Britain’s total exports have been falling at £n increasing rate.
Between January and September 1958 the fall was 4 per cent.,
both in value and volume, compared with the corresponding period
of 1957; but in the period June to September alone the fall was
6 per cent. By 1958 west Germany had overtaken Britain to
become the second largest exporter of manufactured goods in
the capitalist world.
Capitalist Britain is in poor shape to meet a new crisis of over­
production, for she is no longer the dominant imperialist power.
She is beset by imperialist rivals and increasingly squeezed out
of her traditional markets by the USA and other competitors.
She has been weakened in two world wars and deprived of some
of her most valuable colonial possessions. Her foreign investments
and financial reserves have dwindled. Although she is now a
debtor nation, instead of a creditor as before the first world war,
she is still forced to import 50 per cent, of her food supplies and
most of her raw materials.® Moreover her capitalist class is now
less able than before to cushion the effects of d depression by
increasing colonial exploitation in various ways.
So the capitalist class is thrown back on the ultimate remedy:
to reduce the wages of the British workers, so that Britain can
undercut her competitors in the world’s markets.10 This is the
real motive force of the present employers’ offensive. The recent
move towards convertibility means an intensification of the trade
war, makes financial crises more likely and heralds new attacks
on the working class. What must be burned into the consciousness
of every active worker is that the battles we have experienced
[n the past two years are only a prelude to struggles on a scale
quite unprecedented in Britain, which will transform the whole
industrial and political scene. Capitalism faces desperate
problems, and is willing to try desperate remedies.1

1Capital, vol. iii (Calcutta, 1946), p. 386.

1November 4, 1958.
1The Times, October 17, 1958.
*Financial Times, September 26, 1958.
*Ibid. November 12, 1958.
‘ Note in this connexion Andrew Schonfield’s warning in the Observer
of January 11, 1959; ‘The truth is that even if we do enjoy a moderate
industrial revival next spring or summer, the recession will have left

27
 some permanent marks1; and the Financial Times editorials of January
30, 1959: ‘One does not have the feeling that the sharp rise from the
bottom in the American economy is being mirrored over here’; February
7, 1959: ‘The recovery in basic industry has . . . not yet occurred and
indeed could not yet have been expected’; and February 13, 1959: ‘It
may take a fairly long period ,for the recession to be overcome.’ The
annual report of the Organization for European Economic Co-operation,
discussing (December 8, 1958) the economy of the United Kingdom in
the eighteen months which ended in the middle of 1958, said there
was ‘some possibility’ that total demand might decline still more in
the early part of 1959 and recovery in output might be further
postponed. Cf. also the Financial Times editorial of December 5, 1958:
‘Does the liquidation of excess stocks of finished goods mean that
output will now recover? Unfortunately, there can be no guarantee
of this. . . . It has always been difficult to find any rational justification
for . . . optimism in the current conditions of trade. . . . Most of the
capital goods industries have only begun to cut production to any
noticeable extent in the last few months, and as their order-books
continue to shrink they will probably reduce output still further in the
early part of next year. Recovery here may be delayed until the latter
part of 1959, or even later.’
TNovember 1, 1958.
1Financial Times, February 18, 1959, citing summary of merchant ships
launched in 1958, published by Lloyd’s Register of Shipping.
•Every time there is an improvement in Britain’s balance of payments
this is announced with pride by government spokesmen as a sign of
economic health. But the official journal of the Institute of Export
calls the balance of payments ‘that hoary old delusion’, adding: ‘A
favourable balance earned by one country in its international trading
necessarily implies an unfavourable balance for another. . . . Britain’s
“favourable” balance has been obtained because the trading accounts
of some other country or countries have ended up “in the red”. . . .
Those countries are becoming short of British currency . . . and . . .
will be compelled to cut down their purchases from us’ (Export, vol.
xviii, no. 1, p. 5, January 1955).
10Up to now the employing class has striven to keep wage increases as
low as possible in preference to a frontal assault on wages. Increases
negotiated in 1958 averaged about 4 per cent., a smaller increase than
those of previous years. For the first ten months of 1958 the Ministry
of Labour Gazette listed only 10 million workers who got wage increases
of £3 million a week, compared with 11,750,000 who got increases of
£5 million a week in the same period of 1957. Macleod boasted at
the 1958 Tory Party conference that the year’s wage settlements had
been slower as well as lower. Although production per worker had
risen by 25 per cent, since the beginning of the year, compared with
a 7 per cent, rise in wage rates and a 20 per cent, rise in real earnings,
The Times of October 17, 1958, summarized the employing-class view
thus: ‘What is needed stands out . . . clearly: restraint of wage
increases.’ Any kind of wage freeze while prices rise means, of course,
a cut in real wages.

28
 4. TOWARDS A SLUMP

Lin us examine more closely the indications of the developing

economic crisis.
One of the earliest and most characteristic signs of slump is
a fall in world prices. Taking 1952 as 100, the world commodity
price indicator had fallen to 85 by mid-1958. At the beginning
of February 1959 fibres were at 74.6, metals at 75.8 and food
at 84.3. At the beginning of' November cocoa was over £100
a ton below the year's peak prices, and coffee prices had fallen
by about one-fifth. Despite some rallying of raw wool prices,
they were about 30 per cent. lower than a year before, and 40
per cent, lower than in May 1957.1
Capital investment in Britain, according to T. Barna, assistant
director of the National Institute of Economic and Social
Research, is on a plateau: ‘there is no evidence of. continuing
progress.’2 Gross fixed investment in manufacturing industries is
expected to fall by £135 million, or one-sixth, this year. The
level of investment will be only 10 per cent, higher than in 1950-52,
‘and, unless excess capacity is greatly diminished in the course of
the year, there may be a further fall in I960’,* while ‘the present
demand for industrial capital investment remains disturbingly
low.’4
A striking feature of the fall in production in Britain during
1958 was the rapid acceleration of this fall. Over the first
six months of the year production, in real terms, was one per
cent, below the 1957 level. In the second quarter alone, the
rate of decline doubled to 2 per cent. A revised production
index drawn up by the Treasury shows that production had
started to fall behind in May. By September industrial production

29
 was about per cent, below the previous year’s level. The
corresponding figure for October was 3£ per cent., but the October
1957 figure had been ‘exceptionally low because of the epidemic
of Asian ’flu’ and ‘a better indication of how far *production
has fallen this year is provided by comparing October with the
September peak last year. On this basis the fall is a little less
than 5^ per cent.’5 The 1958 slackening of industrial production
took place mainly in the basic materials and capital goods
industries, as the table opposite shows.
The acceleration in the decline of production was especially
marked in steel. In the first quarter of 1958 the level was one
per cent, below 1957, in the second quarter 10 per cent, below,
in the third quarter 16 per cent, below. ‘A frightening
progression,’ said the Economist.7 In the fourth quarter the
decline was 19 per cent., in December alone 21 per cent.
Apart from sheet and tin-plate, almost all sections of the industry
are alfected. One-quarter of Britain’s steel capacity was unused
in the last three months of 1958, and in mid-October Scottish
steelworks were producing at less than 50 per cent, capacity.®
Though consumption goods industries, including cars, were in
December using about as much steel as a year before, mining
and railways were buying 30 per cent, less, shipbuilders and
constructional engineers 20 per cent. less. Home consumption
altogether was running at some 10 per cent, below the anticipated
trend and exports at 1 million tons a year below.® The British
Iron and Steel Federation’s annual review warned that ‘the present
underemployment of capacity of the steel industry cannot leave
the industry’s long-term development unaffected’.10 The Federation
pointed out that its target of 29 million tons by 1962 was based
on the assumption that production throughout British industry
as a whole would rise by per cent, a year from 1954 onwards.
In fact it has gone up by just over one per cent, a year.
Despite a largely deliberate fall in the production of coal by
some 6,600,000 tons in the first nine months of 1958, and despite
a falling demand, undistributed stocks rose from 8,700,000 tons
to 18,900,000 tons between November 1957 and November 1958.
By the beginning of December, when the announcement was made
of the decision to close thirty-six pits, undistributed stocks held
by the National Coal Board were worth £70 million.
What a writer in the Daily Telegraph called the ‘worst slump
since the early 1930s’11 has hit the shipbuilding industry. The
president of the United Kingdom Chamber of Shipping disclosed
on October 15, 1958, that 1,250,000 tons gross of British shipping

30
 PATTERN OF UK P R O D U C T IO N , 195 7 -5 8 •

Basic Materials and Production Change

Capital Goods Period 1958 1957 per cent.

... •. • Jan.-Dec. 208.7m. tons 216.9m. tons -3 .8

Coal ..............
Jan.-Nov. 18.0m. tons 20.1m. tons -10.4
Steel .............. Ml

Jan.-Oct. 10.9m. tons 12.0m. tons -9 .2

Pig-iron
Jan.-OcU 9.5m. tons 10.0m. tons -5 .0
Cement ... «•• ...

Jan.-Oct. 5,360m. 5,801m. -7.5

Bricks .............. • ••

.,. •• Jan.-Oct. 227,588 250,934 -9 .3

H o u ses.............. •

. •. Jan.-Sept. £63.7m. £71.2m. -10.5

Machine tools ...
Commercial vehicles . »• |«• Jan.-Nov. 276,404 257,339 + 7.4

Consumer Goods
Jan.-Nov. 961.000 770,000 + 24.8
Passenger c a rs ..........................
R efrig erato rs.......................... Jan.-Sept. £19.6m. £14.2m. + 38.0
Washing machines .............. ... Jan.-Sept. 580,300 494,700 + 17.3
Television se ts.............. Jan.-Sept. 1,303,000 1,251,000 + 4.1
Radios and radiograms ... Jan.-Sept. 1,293,000 1,344,000 -3 .8
Gramophone records ... Jan.-Oct. 57.0m. 62.7m. -9.1
Motor cycles .......................... Jan.-Sept. 99,440 140,200 -29.0
Bicycles ... ••• ... Jan.-Sept. 1.57m. 1.84m. -14.6

oj
were lying idle and that there were a further one million tons
gross for which orders had been placed or berths reserved and
which would almost certainly come to nothing. ‘Orders . . . have
dwindled almost to nothing.’12 At that time, of forty small
shipbuilding firms half had their last launch scheduled for 1958
and the remainder for 1959.13 Sir Charles Connell, of the Ship­
building Employers’ Federation, told a conference of the British
Employers’ Confederation of the impending plight of his industry’s
building and repair sections. Britain’s share of new tonnage
had declined from 38 per cent, in 1950 to under 16 per cent,
in 1957.M In 1958 British shipyards had the lowest number of
orders for new merchant ships since 1949, and over the year
cancellations of orders already placed were almost equal, in gross
tonnage, to the total of new orders. The Financial Times writes
that the shipbuilding returns for the last quarter of 1958 ‘present
a gloomy picture’ and that ‘no real recovery in orders for ship­
building seems likely much before the beginning of 1961’.15
The Lancashire cotton industry was described in September
1958 as ‘an industry in decline’.1* Production of cotton cloth
had declined from an average annual rate of 2,070 million square
yards in 1950-53 to an annual rate of 1,560 million square yards
in the first seven months of 1958. The underlying cause was
stated to be the gradual loss by the industry of the world markets
which it held for so long as the first large-scale cotton textile
industry to be established, ‘ft is amazing that Lancashire survives
at all,’ wrote the Economist.17 Between 1955 and August 30,
1958, 399 mills were closed, and the number of workers employed
in cotton fell from 300,500 to 257,500.18 Last year cotton mills
closed in Lancashire at the rate of two a week. The chairman
of the Cotton Yarn Doublers’ Association told the Restrictive
Practices Court on November 14 that the immediate outlook for
his section of the textile industry was very serious. There was
only about 50 or 60 per cent, of the spindlage running, and a
great deal of short-time working, sometimes only three days
a week.19
There has been a steady shrinking of the machine-tool'industry’s
order book. It fell by £1,200,000 to £64.300,000 during July
1958, and again to £63,150,000 in August, compared with £88
million a year before. Both home and export deliveries dropped
substantially.20 ‘The latest machine-tool figures make depressing
reading,’ said an editorial in the Financial Times on December 6,
1958. ‘Compared with this time last year, export' orders are
down by 25 per cent, and home orders by 30 per cent., and even

32
 /

at present output rates the orders outstanding are only enough

to keep the industry operating for about eight months.’ A slight
improvement in home orders during October was not maintained
in November.21
Two other industries in difficulty in the latter half of 1958
were the cable industry and the building industry. The former
has been experiencing great difficulties . . . and it is far from certain
that prospects for it will improve in the near future. . . . The recession
has caused a sharp fall in home demand. Moreover, exports during
the first seven months of 1958 . . . were more than 30 per cent, below
those during the same period of 1957.*1*345
Of the building industry, the Financial Times wrote on August 27,
1958: ‘It seems likely that conditions in the industry are likely
to get worse before they get better’; on November 27: ‘Work
on new industrial building has continued to drop’; and on
December 11: ‘Orders are still falling and the backlog of work
is shrinking as output is being maintained and consistently exceeds
the amount of new work commissioned. The value of new orders
placed with the construction industry fell to £301 million during
the third quarter—£40 million less than a year earlier.’
Our analysis of the present state of the British economy does
not rule out the possibility of some measure of recovery in this or
that sector. What is certain is that the period of capitalist
expansion, made possible by war-time destruction and the sub­
sequent rearmament programme, has come to an end. As was
pointed out in the political resolution adopted by the inaugural
conference of the Socialist Labour League at Whitsun 1959:
‘Whatever zigzags there may be the economic difficulties of
capitalism will persist and very likely get worse. At present the
capitalist economy is neither in a boom nor in a slump, but in a
state of stagnation that could be the prelude to still steeper
economic decline.’

1‘It would be a bold man who would predict that the wool market has
taken a turn for the better* (Economist, October 25, 1958).
3Financial Times, January 16, 1959.
'Ibid.
4Ibid.
*Ibid. November 29, 1958.
•Source: ibid. December 22, 1958.
TOctober 11, 1958.

33
 *The Times, October 17, 1958. Compared with 1955, exports of British
cutlery in 1957 were down over 20 per cent, to Australia, 18 per cent,
to New Zealand and 30 per cent, to India. Exports to India for the
first six months of 1958 amounted to only £10,830 compared with
£187,125 during the equivalent period of 1957. (Cf. Financial Times,
October 28, 1958).
*Sir Robert Shone, executive member of the Iron and Steel Board,
Financial Times, December 15, 1958.
’’ Quoted in the Observer, January 11, 1959.
"October 21, 1958.
1! The Times Annual Financial and Commercial Review, October 27, 1958,
p. xvii.
n Financial Times, September 27, 1958. Three weeks later this paper
added that the outlook for many British shipbuilders was regarded in
the industry as ‘disquieting’; a number of builders specializing in dry
cargo vessels or the smaller types of merchant ship had only about
six months’ work in hand. (Ibid. October 22, 1958).
u The Times, October 17, 1958.
“ January 21 and January 13, 1959.
“ Ibid. September 29, 1958.
” October 25, 1958.
u lbid. The mills ‘can never be reopened. The looms are going as scrap.
“And so arc the weavers,” said one man. You can see the big, gaunt
buildings standing motionless and still, huge grey mausoleums of metal.
. . . Some still shudder and rattle in their last few months of life. . . .
One man, “an above-average weaver”, burst into tears at the mere
mention of his plight. He was 50, and all his life had been a weaver.
At one time he had had his whole family working with him. Next
month he was to start a new life. How? Where?—and the tears
streamed down his face. “There’s nothing left but the gas,” he said*
(Daily Telegraph, December 17, 1958).
18Manchester Guardian, November 15, 1958.
30Financial Times, October 11, 1958. Despite two substantial orders from
China in November, ‘manufacturers remain generally cautious about
the outlook for the industry’ (ibid. December 6, 1958).
” Ibid. February 7, 1959.
22Ibid. October 3, 1958.
 5. THE GROWTH OF UNEMPLOYMENT AND
SHORT-TIME WORKING

T he immediate effect of the fall in production has been a steady

stream of ‘redundancy’ dismissals from factories in many parts
of the country, bringing real anxiety and insecurity to working
men and women for the first time in two decades. ‘Workers who
have known security of employment for twenty and more years
are profoundly . . . unnerved by the local onsets of unemployment
well above the national average,’ wrote one political correspon­
dent last autumn.1 ‘Millions of people/ echoed another, ‘are
deeply disturbed and are now fearful that they may lose their
jobs/2
By mid-January, according to official figures, there were 620,000
out of work, or 2.8 per cent, of the working population. This
was a higher figure than in any other month since the end of
the second world war, except for the fuel crisis months of
February and March 1947. The increase of 88,000 between
December and January was described by the Financial Times
as ‘alarmingly large’. It added: ‘It cannot be taken for granted
that we have yet reached the peak/8

GROWTH OF UNEMPLOYMENT *
Mid-November, - Mid-November, Mid-November,
1956 1957 1958
Total unemployed ... 264,578 316,523 536,027
Percentage rate of
unemployment 1.2 1.5 2.4
Men 18 and over
unemployed 162,071 211,325 363,115
Total unemployed for
more ,than 8 weeks 99,458 119,317 237,718
l
35
\
 SH O R T T IM E IN M A N U F A C T U R IN G IN D U S T R IE S 5
Week ending Week ending Week ending
November 24, November 30, November 22,
1956 1957 1958
Number of workers
on short time ... 72,900 59,100 147,800
Aggregate number
of hours lost ... 659.500 664,100 1,384,100

To complete the picture revealed in these tables, it should be

noted that the number of unfilled vacancies notified to Labour
Exchanges has dropped from a monthly average of 444,000 in
1955 to 252,000 in November 1957 and 159,000 in November
1958. So that there are—according to the official figures—four
people unemployed for every unfilled job. But it should also
be noted that the official figures are incomplete and therefore
misleading. For one thing, they do not take into account
unemployment among portworkers. This incompleteness was
pointed out in a letter to The Times by H. A. Turner, of the
Faculty of Economic and Social Studies at Manchester University:
Employment has certainly declined further since the August figures
were collected. And if this fall had been wholly expressed in registered
full-time unemployment (instead of unregistered unemployment, reduced
working hours, involuntary retirements, postponed entries to the labour
market etc.) the official unemployment percentage would be already
around four—equivalent to nearly a million people. . . . If we
ascertained our unemployment level by direct survey, as do the
Americans, we would probably find it much closer to theirs than
we think.*
Two break-downs of the unemployment figures are of interest:
by area and by industry.
From the tables it will be seen that though the unemployment
percentage in the Midlands is below the national average,
unemployment there has doubled in twelve months; that there has
been a rapid rise in Yorkshire aqd the north-west; and that the
two pre-war black spots, Scotland and Wales, again have the
highest percentage of registered unemployed. ‘The problem of
the depressed regions is getfing worse. . . . In some areas
unemployment seems to have become chronic.’10
The discrepancy between Scotland and the rest of the country
‘seems to be getting more marked, and a further worsening is
anticipated in the next few months.’11 Compared with the official
national average of 2.8 per cent., Greenock and Port Glasgow
have 8.4 per cent, unemployed—nearly a quarter of the dockers
in Glasgow were without work at the end of October—while in
 UNEM PLOYM ENT BY R E G IO N S 7

Mid-November, 1956 Mid-November, 1957 Mid-November, 1958

Percentage rate Percentage rate Percentage rate
Number of Number of Number of
unemployed unemployment unemployed unemployment unemployed unemployment
r
London and
South-Eastern 47,070 0.9 56,534 1.0 82,009 1.5
Eastern 11,250 0.9 15,365 1.3 21,223 1.7
Southern 8 11,672 1.! 14,695 1.4 18,825 1.8
South-Western 8 16,968 1.5 22,167 2.0 31,051 2.6
Midland 20,758 1.0 21,766 1.0 41,574 1.9
North-Midland 9.353 0.6 13,540 0.9 25,256 1.7
East and West
Ridings 14,583 0.8 18,225 1.0 44,739 2.4
North-Western 40,517 1.3 47,652 1.6 96,910 3.2
Northern 20,184 1.6 21,987 1.7 40,360 3.1
Scotland 50,819 2.3 56.443 2.6 94.823 4.4
Wales 21,404 2.2 28.140 2.9 39.257 4.1

UNEMPLOYMENT IN SOME TOWNS 9

December, 1956 December, 1957 December, 1958

Liverpool .............. 12,046 14,816 21,265
Dundee .............. 2,702 3.499 4,269
Aberdeen .............. 2,827 3,060 3,754
Plymouth .............. 2,075 2,681 3,418
Greenock .............. 1,880 2,390 2,807
Birkenhead .............. 1,467 1,733 2,618
Blackburn 592 491 2,302
Paisley .............. 1,073 880 2,283
north Lanarkshire the figure is 8.6 per cent. In Greenock,
‘pawnbrokers said business had trebled. The WVS could not
cope with demand for children’s clothes; shops in working-class
districts said their turnover had fallen by from 10 to 40 per
cent.’12 In Scotland as a whole there are eight men and women
competing for each vacancy. In Wales there are five unemployed
boys and three unemployed girls for every vacancy.
Lancashire now has 90,000 unemployed, of whom 20,000 are
textile workers.
On Merseyside forty-five in every thousand workers are without work,
a rate twice as high as the national average. . . . There is a genuine
anxiety as the bad days have run into weeks and, for many men, into
months. . . . 1 spoke to a mill worker who has been without work
for nine months. He supports a wife and seven children on £6 17s.
a week. ‘Being unemployed is; common enough here,* said the Rev.
Leslie H. Drage, senior curate of Liverpool Parish Church. . . .
‘If anyone tells you the working classes are well off, don’t believe it.
Even the people who try to save have all their money gone.* . . .
Where last year at this time about 700 boys and girls were without a
job the total is now 1,200 and it is expected to rise.1*
Perhaps 200,000 of the 700,000 young people who leave school
this year are destined to start life as unemployed persons.
‘Vacancies for school-leavers are at rock bottom.’14 In December
15,700 school-leavers failed to find jobs. The annual report
of the West Riding youth employment service (November 1958)
stated that the level of unemployment and short-time working
among young people in the Riding would seriously affect the
prospects of 6,000 additional school-leavers at Christmas. Young
people in the area had drawn £16,537 in dole or national assistance
in the past year, compared with £6,245 in the preceding twelve
months. In Coventry, long-term prospects for school-leavers are
the worst since the war.13
The following table shows the total number registered as
unemployed in certain industries:
UNEMPLOYMENT BY INDUSTRIES1R
Mid-November, Mid-November, Mid-November,
1956 1957 1958
Metal Manufacture ... 4,197 8,110 26,004
Engineering,
shipbuilding etc. ... 17,970 21,732 47,341
Vehicles .............. 7,662 8.403 14,558
Textiles .............. 9,917 11,234 37,990
Clothing .............. 6,711 8,011 14,143
Building a n d con­
tracting .............. 29,375 40,110 65,168
Distributive trades ... 25,781 30.582 48,998
 Unemployment in the building industry is running twice as
high as two years ago, although during that period 40,000 men
have left the industry. In the machine-tool industry, it was
stated at a conference pf shop stewards and officials of five unions
on October 4, 1958, the falling-off in orders had caused 6,000
to lose their jobs and brought widespread short-time working.
The Merseyside district secretary of the Boilermakers’ Society,
whose members have decided to ban overtime to try to stop
sackings, has stated that one out of every five of his Society’s
members on the repair side of the industry was on the dole.17
Almost the same percentage of unemployment is now regular
on the docks, where some 15 per cent, of portworkers are without
work each week. ‘In one union view, it is the worst since the
1930s,’ wrote the Manchester Guardian.1*
We have considered the growth of unemployment statistically
and impersonally, rather than from the point of the hardship and
suffering life on the dole entails. It is perhaps enough to point
out that unemployment benefit for a man in 1959 is a smaller
percentage of the average earnings than it was in 1938. The
average earnings for men over 21 are now 253s. per week.
Unemployment benefit for a single man is 50s. (19 per cent, of
average earnings) and for a married man 80s. (31.6 per cent, of
average earnings). In 1938 the comparable figure for earnings
was 69s. and unemployment benefit was 17s. for a single man
(24.6 per cent.) and 26s, for a married man (37.6 per cent.).19

The Tories Are Guilty

While it is true that the ruling class in Britain fears an
uncontrollable economic crisis, and that its anxiety has been
reflected in such stopgap measures as the decision to bring hire
purchase restrictions to an end and the unexpected cut in Bank
Rate in November, it is beyond question that it welcomes the
development of a pool of unemployment which would permit it
to attack wages and working-class organization. It does not want
unemployment to rise so quickly as to alarm too many Tory
voters in the next General Election; but it wants big enough
dole queues to enable it to ‘discipline’ the workers. There are
indications of divisions within the employing class on this question;
but it is becoming increasingly evident that the view put forward
by the Economist as early as the beginning of 1956, that ‘a
moderate increase in unemployment is the only way through

39
which the country can hope to secure greater stability of prices’,20
is now shared by the Tory leaders. On November 3, 1958, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer blurted out in the House of Commons
his opinion that the level of unemployment (then about 2.2 or
2.3 per cent.) was ‘excessively’ low. True, he changed the word
to ‘extremely’ when Labour MPs challenged him, but his
observations were greeted with Ministerial cheers, and a few days
later the Economist was echoing him: ‘As regards unemployment,
Britain’s general unemployment ratio . . . is still . . . excessively
low.’21 ‘Employers’ warning to government: “overfull unemploy­
ment must not return” ,’ was the headline The Times gave on
December 3 to a report of a speech by Sir William Garrett,
president of the British Employers’ Confederation. His Con­
federation felt it was important in dealing with the present
employment situation that the government should not recreate
the acute shortage of skilled labour which ‘has so long bedevilled
our efforts to increase efficiency’. He added:
I think the facts show that these arc not times for drastic measures,
and it is most important that the government should not bring about
again that situation of overfull employment which has been the cause
and accompaniment of the inflation to which we have been subjected
for the last twelve years.
The Tory government, it seems reasonable to suggest, is guilty
on two counts when it allows its spokesmen to make such on
the whole reassuring statements for public consumption as
Macleod at the Tory Party conference: ‘It would be dishonest
not to recognize that the unemployment figure might go somewhat
higher’;22 or J. E. S. Simon, Financial Secretary to the Treasury
(October 16): ‘Unemployment is likely to rise slightly until the
end of the year in accordance with the seasonal influences’; or
Hailsham (October 25), forecasting ‘some slackening of the
employment situation here, at any rate during the more difficult
winter months. . . . We believe that . . . we can handle the
situation efficiently’; or Amory (November 8): the current
unemployment problem was a ‘relatively short-term’ one. They
are guilty, in the first place, of veiling for political reasons the
real thinking of the class they represent, which welcomes the
growth of unemployment for the reasons we have given. They
are guilty, in the second place, of seeking to minimize the dangers
of a runaway slump that their own surveys and panic measures
alike prove them to be well aware of. It is the view of the
Financial Times that the only possible reason for a further cut
in ,Bank Rate last November was that the authorities had

40
become increasingly concerned about the immediate development
of the recession. The authorities seemed to feel that the optimism
of the industrial market was exaggerated. ‘With unemployment
already rising, and with extensive under-employment, particularly
in the docks and in the coal-mines, the recession could indeed
become considerably sharper in the winter. . . . The real point
about this measure is . . . that it is a sign of anxiety.’23
When there is a steep rise in unemployment, as there was
between December 1958 and January 1959, the authorities and the
capitalist Press make light of it by citing factors such as the
‘seasonal nature’ of the rise, the ‘exceptionally bad weather’ on the
day the higher figure was calculated, and so forth. When, on the
other hand, there is a moderate fall in the official figure, this is
given great prominence and hailed as an indication of rapidly
returning prosperity. They cannot have it both ways. If there
were anything at all in the arguments explaining away the very
large increase at the beginning of this year, clearly a fall of some
sort was to be expected. What the most recent figures available
at the time of writing do seem to show is that the growth of
unemployment has been temporarily halted. Whether this is a
feature that will persist for weeks or months remains to be seen.
There are no indications whatever that a way has been found of
preventing a rise in unemployment in this period of capitalist
stagnation.

' The Times, October 27, 1958.

3Observer, November 2, 1958.
3February 9, 1959.
‘ Source: Ministry of Labour Gazette.
5Source: Ministry of Labour Gazette.
* The Times, November 19, 1958. This correction seems to have been
accepted by Harold Wilson, who said in Manchester on November 29,
that Britain’s unemployment figure was much nearer one million than
the official figure of about 500,000. Hidden unemployment is also to
be measured by the drop in overtime. In the second quarter of 1958
the miners lost about 10s. a week on average in earnings.
1Source: Ministry of Labour Gazette.
*Dorset (excluding Poole) was transferred from the S. to the S.W. region
on May 12, 1958.
"Source: Financial Tithes, February 6, 1959. These are towns in
the new scheduled areas where unemployment is at 4 per cent, or
over. ,

41
10Financial Times, February .11, 1959.
” Ibid. December 17, 1958.
19Daily Telegraph, December 16, 1958.
11Manchester Guardian, November 25, 1958.
u Daily Herald, January 19, 1959. 1
13Ibid. December 4, 1958.
“ Source: Ministry of Labour Gazette.
" Daily Worker, October 30, 1958.
“ November 7, 1958.
1BThe purchasing power of unemployment benefit today is only a few
pence higher than it was in 1938.
“ January 14, 1956.
11November 8, 1958.
“ My emphasis—P. F.
n Financial Times, November 21, 1958. Cf. ibid. November 8, 1958:
T he prospects for heavy industry remain obscure*; Roy Harrod, ibid.
November 21, 1958: T he British boom pushed industrial investment
up from 1953 to 1957 by 39 per cent. Have we to expect a downturn
to the pre-boom level? If that occurred, it would mean a decrease
in demand of some £750 million (at current prices). Such a decline
would entail a great increase of unemployment. . . . Recent British
experience in the matter of machine-tool orders points to . . . a down­
turn of investment, still to come, of £750 million’; editorial, ibid.
December 10, 1958: there was no ‘reason to suppose that the
deterioration in industrial conditions will soon come to an end’.

42

»
6. THE HYDROGEN-BOMB AND THE THREAT OF WAR

N ot only have our rulers entered into a conspiracy to drive

down wages and smash workshop organization; their continued
manufacture and testing of hydrogen-bombs and construction of
rocket bases also amounts to a conspiracy—against world peace,
against the health of the British people today and of their children
yet unborn, against the homes, lives and happiness of millions
in this and other countries.
The hydrogen-bomb is supposed to be a ‘shield’ defending
Britain against Russian attack. It is supposed to be a ‘deterrent’.
In fact it is nothing of the kind, but an instrument for national
suicide.1 In any war in which thermo-nuclear weapons were
used this small island with its comparatively dense population
and concentrated industries would be much more vulnerable to -
H-bomb devastation than either the USA or Russia. In all
probability Britain would be knocked out of the contest at an
early stage, her cities reduced to heaps of radio-active rubble
and ashes, millions of her people killed and millions more burned
or poisoned, her ‘civil defence’ services completely unable to
deal with the havoc, her medical services powerless to assuage
more than a tiny fraction of the agony and suffering. As soon
as rockets with nuclear warheads were launched from rocket
bases on this island against targets in Russia, we should be
inviting swift and deadly retaliation from a country which, by its
sputniks, moon rocket and other scientific advances, has shown
that it is not backward in the skills that are needed to be successful
in modern warfare.2
And indeed, the theory of the ‘deterrent’ is now widely
challenged by strategists and scientists whose thinking is far

43
 from Left-wing. ‘Mystique of Our Deterrent’ was the title of a
recent article in a leading Sunday newspaper which questioned
the very basis of the theory:
Defence, in the sense of preventing the arrival of the weapons, is
admitted to be impossible. Civil defence, in the sense of making the
successful delivery of even a small proportion of the threat tolerable,
is probably technically possible, but would so distort the national
life of the population as to be impossible in practice. We have therefore
had to accept the novel, at least on the scale of national existence,
strategy of deterrence. . . . In the past the deterrent strategy of the
west has been absolute because it represented a one-sided mortal threat
to the homeland of the USSR. Its absolute validity is already suspect
and the next two to three years will see its unsoundness generally
recognized. . . . There may be historical instances of nations committing
suicide through lack of foresight or excessive trust or laziness or
degeneration, but none springs to mind of national suicide as a result
of deliberate and considered judgment. The task of making the United
Kingdom deterrent politically convincing may be at least as great as
that of making it militarily daunting. . . . Do we have the bombs?
. . . A recent estimate was that we have ‘fewer than five H-bombs’.
Even if this estimate is out by a factor of five we would have only
twenty bombs. If the estimate is correct the British public has been
subjected to one of the most dangerous and cruel leg hauls in history.
In neither case could we honestly claim to be posing a truly deterrent
threat to a country so dispersed and resilient as the USSR*
The defence correspondent of The Times has written that there
is no evidence that the civil population of this country could be
well enough defended to guarantee that casualties could be kept
down to a tolerable level. A ten-megaton bomb, typical of today’s
thermo-nuclear weapons, would be 666 times as powerful as the
atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which destroyed 4.7 square
miles and took a toll of 70,000 killed or missing and 70,000
injured. ‘No civil defence system can guarantee to keep casualties
down to an acceptable level. . . . It is virtually impossible to
shelter the inhabitants of large cities effectively, and the cost
of trying to do so would be prohibitive.’4
The obvious question arises: if the ‘deterrent’ effect attributed
to these weapons is a ‘mystique’, if their use would be tantamount
to national suicide, then why does the British capitalist class
continue to manufacture the H-bomb, and to bamboozle people
into believing that this is a sound thing to do? The answer is that
these weapons are not intended to defend the British people at
all; they are part of the preparations of British and American
imperialism for war against the Soviet Union. The real intentions
of British imperialism were blurted out by Randolph Churchill
in a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in London:

44
 * “Even we Limeys can knock down twelve cities around
Stalingrad,” he said with a touch of pride, “and another twelve
in the Crimea from Cyprus” .’5
"The danger of war comes, not from any mythical ‘communist
aggression’—whatever one’s criticisms of the Kremlin regime and
of the new seven-year plan in Russia it is clear that such a plan
is impossible of fulfilment if Russia were preparing or contem­
plating an attack on the west. The danger of war comes from,
the drive of imperialism for new spheres of investment, markets
and sources of raw materials. As long as capitalism exists, there
is a danger of new wars for the redivision of the loot that
the capitalist States possess, or for the reconquest by world
- capitalism of some of the territories that have passed out of
the capitalist compass. The consideration that the destruction of
Russian cities by ‘Limeys’ would entail the destruction of British
cities too was airily dismissed by the Home Secretary, R. A.
Butler, in a television broadcast on October 16, 1958, when,
appealing for recruits to the ‘civil defence’ services, he said:
There is no horror that doesn’t grow less as you face up to it.’
As Dame Kathleen Lonsdale afterwards observed, this could be
true of nuclear warfare only if people faced up to it with eyes
tightly shut: many of the remedial actions taught to civil defence
workers entailed the use of water to wash things with or electricity
to run vacuum cleaners which could remove radio-active dust;
things like these would not be available if H-bombs were dropped.*
Such a responsible scientist as Professor C. F. Powell, of Bristol
University, estimates the horror of a world nuclear war in these
terms: it is likely that the total population of the northern
hemisphere, and perhaps that of the southern hemisphere, would
be wiped out.7 Against this terrible prospect the advice of the
Home Office and Central Office of Information pamphlet The
Hydrogen Bomb (1957), with its ‘chatty little piece’ about the
dangers of heat and its ‘beautiful bit about how you should take
down your lace curtains’ is indeed a '‘farce, and a macabre farce
at that’.8
But the danger in the H-bomb is not confined to the devastation
that would accompany its use; the testing of these weapons has
already poisoned the earth’s atmosphere to an extent which is
a matter of dispute among scientists, but which seems clearly
to have increased the radio-active content of certain foods and of
children’s bones. And what the biological effects of the tests
already carried out will be is simply not known. The adjacent
table, (aken from the Daily Telegraph of October 31, 1958, shows

45
\
 w

& the number of A-bombs and H-bombs of all sizes tested up to

that date.
Colonel Geoffrey Taylor, former professor of medicine at
Lahore Medical College, told the Liberal Assembly last year that
the number of people, mainly children, dying from these nuclear
tests which the USA, Russia and Britain had already made was
®TvL ‘between thousands and up to 120,000 a year’. In the wetter parts
! of Britain the dangers were four or five times greater than the
average, because the rain brought down a greater quantity of
radio-active poison. The number of people at that moment dying
or about to die from symptoms aggravated or mainly caused by
nuclear tests numbered 200 in the south-west of England and in
Wales. At this rate Britain, the USA and Russia would kill
an estimated 10 million people during the next five or six
generations.10 Ritchie Calder has said that no one knows what
the biological reaction to nuclear weapons is going to be. We
knew their effects included bone cancer and leukaemia, but we
did not know the effects on future generations. Biologists had
been kept out of all discussions on the development of the bomb.
We were proceeding in criminal ignorance of the consequences
of nuclear tests.11 Professor Linus Pauling, of the California
Institute of Technology, has tried to estimate the extent to which
the testing of nuclear weapons will conduce to an increase in
the number of defective children born; he has drawn attention
in particular to the radio-active isotope carbon 14, formed by
neutrons from nuclear explosions, as a long-term radiation hazard.
His conclusion is that long-term genetic effects from carbon 14
are likely to be some seventeen times greater than those from
fission products.12 Dr S. G. Burgess, scientific adviser to the
London County Council, reports that dust from distant nuclear
explosions is now a regular component of London’s atmospheric
radio-activity. The dust contains some long-lived components
which, by direct inhalation and by deposition on the ground
and subsequent incorporation in food, can be assimilated in
the body.13 Two U.S. government scientists reported last October
that some foodstuffs had shown a ‘statistically significant increase’
in radio-active contamination since the beginning of nuclear tests.
This was especially true, they said, of many samples of tea
which had been found to contain strontium 90 in excess of the
§ present tolerance for human beings. There had also been
significant increases of radiation in some sea foods, in cheese
and in milk in various forms.14 Dr Loutit, director of the Radio­
biological Research Unit at Harwell, told the Australasian

46

■Si*
 NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS SINCE 1946
(Tests announced or detected individually)

1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958
USA 2 0 3 0 0 11 9 11 3 15 10 24 30
Britain — — — — —
—
1 2 0 0 6 7 5
Russia — — —
1 0 1 0 3 3 6 7 9 23
Total 2 0 3 1 0 12 10 16 6 21 23 40 58

Totals 9 Source
USA 130 U.S Atomic Energy Commission
Britain 21 British Official Figure
Russia 53 U.S Atomic Energy Commission
Grand Total 204
conference on radiation biology in Melbourne: ‘There is now
abundant evidence that exposure to ionizing radiation does induce
an increased incidence of leukaemia.’ The world could expect
a gradual rise in the level of external radiation and increased
exposure to internal radiation.15
No wonder there is widespread public anger about fall-out,
anger which ‘will not be dispelled until bomb tests stop’,16 and
widespread public anxiety, which reached the dimensions of a
city-wide scare in Los Angeles after local health officials had told
the mayor that radio-activity in the air was ‘greater than the
maximum permissible level’.
One prominent scientist, Dr Paul Saltman, professor of bio-chemistry
at the University of Southern California, refused to join the pacifying
chorus. 'I would like to say something,’ he announced, ‘to relieve
the public mind. . . . But 1 can't say it. Radiation exposure is a
cumulative thing. . . . Radiation that has begun today stops with us
—almost for ever/11
Even the science correspondent of the Daily Telegraph can
scarcely conceal his alarm:
Although some bombs arc dirtier than others, no bombs are completely
clean. . . . The two long-lasting radio-active products of fission,
strontium and caesium, arc falling out steadily onto the soil and into
our bodies. As yet the extent of this danger is not known. . . . The
health authorities have stated that . . . the premature death warrants
of thousands of people have already been signed by the 204 tests. . . .
More bombs arc being exploded every year. In a short time France
will be ready to fire one. Switzerland has stated her intention of
being equipped with nuclear arms. Sweden is debating the point. Other
countries will surely follow. . . . The whole question of radiation effect
is obscure and long-term. The Japanese authorities stated recently
that sixty-five people from Hiroshima have died this year as a direct
consequence of the explosion there in 1945.”
The tests go on week after week. ‘Almost every day now/
wrote sixteen women prominent in British public life, in a letter
to The Times, ‘a cloud coils upwards, poisoning the air we breathe
and the food we eat. This is because we failed to respond directly
to the suspension of tests by the Russians, and because they
failed to wait for our appointed terminus. We know that the
tests will cause suffering and death for our children and for
future generations. . . . Vain exchange of offer and counter-offer
assumes a hideous frivolity.’19 This letter appeared the morning
after the USA had made five such tests in one day—part of a
large number of tests which the Americans and the Russians
were staging while bickering over whether to stop testing for

48
 *

a year or stop for good. The Anglo-American offer to suspend

tests for one year was described by the Observer as ‘slightly
fraudulent’.20 ‘The outlook/ observed the Economist, ‘seems
thick with dust and doubt.’21 How thick with radio-active dust
was revealed in The Times of November 20, which reported a
‘remarkable increase in radio-activity’ during October, attributable
to nuclear explosions carried out by the USSR between August 1
and October 31, and comparable in scale to between one-fifth
and two-fifths of all previous tests. On October 17 radio-activity
in the atmosphere above Sweden was estimated to be five times
greater than the largest figure previously measured. The research
teams of Professor Rolf Sievert, the Swedish expert in radiation
hazards, have found that elks grazing on land near Stockholm
showed an increase of 200 per cent, in the amount of radio­
activity in their bones during the past year.22 Macmillan
announced in the House of Commons on May 5, 1959, that the
fall-exit of strontium 90 over Britain had doubled in the past year.
The Observer of May 24 reported that radio-activity in west
German rain-water in January was sixty times the maximum
permissible concentration for drinking water prescribed by
Euratom; and quoted from a report in Nature the previous day
that sixteen out of forty-three species of plants growing on the
three Marshall Island atolls most affected by fall-out after the
1954 Bikini H-bomb tests showed some kind of abnormality,
including ‘mistletoe-like abnormal growths’. And so the poisoning
of our air, our water and our food goes on.

What can be done to stop the manufacture and testing of

nuclear weapons? i
It is important to understand that the manufacture, testing and
use of the hydrogen-bomb are as much part of the capitalist
system as are exploitation and unemployment. On this question
Marxists take issue with the leaders of the Labour Party, with the
leaders of the Communist Party, with the leaders of the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament and with the pacifists in the Direct
Action Committee Against Nuclear War.
It is one of the biggest condemnations of the Labour leaders
that they have failed to organize any kind of campaign against
the H-bomb. Gaitskell and Bevan bear a full share of the
responsibility for fall-out and all its deleterious effects. They
49
 were members of the Labour Cabinet which voted the appro
priations for the Aldermaston atomic energy war research
establishment. Now Bevan says he wants to stop the tests—but
keep the H-bomb, of course. Gaitskell wants to ‘suspend’ the
tests—but keep the bomb. Neither of them will fight, either now
or when in office, against Wall Street’s war preparations. Neither
of them is prepared to frustrate the imperialists’ war plans by
leading a determined struggle for socialism, which is the only way
to end the menace of nuclear war. Neither of them has a shred of
confidence in the power of the working class to do away with the
capitalist system, which needs the bomb as the ultimate protection
for capitalist property relations against the socialist revolution.
The Labour leaders’ attitude is a betrayal of socialism, of the most
shameful and odious kind.
The leaders of the Communist Party have no more desire for
mass working-class action against the H-bomb and the class whose
weapon it is than have the social-democratic leaders. They are
in fact in favour of Britain retaining the bomb. To them the
important thing is that a Britain armed with the H-bomb should
be allied with the Russian leaders. This betrayal of the class
struggle goes by the high-sounding title of ‘peaceful coexistence’.
In place of the socialist principle that the way to end capitalism
and war is to wage the class struggle against capitalism, the
Russian leaders pin their hopes on ‘agreement’ among statesmen
to get rid of the bomb. That was why the British C om m unist
Party turned its back on the 1958 Aldermaston march (though,
through its ‘British Peace Committee’, it made an attempt in 1959
to jump on the band-wagon). The Stalinists beg the question.
No power on earth can persuade American imperialism to give up
the powerful weapon it has brought into being in order to protect
its profits and its dominant position in society. Only one force
can end the H-bomb, by ending imperialism altogether. That
force is the working class. Stalinism has neither the will to
mobilize this force, nor the intention of mobilizing it, since an
aroused international working class would inevitably come into
conflict with the anti-democratic, anti-socialist and anti-communist
regime which rules the USSR.
Lack of confidence in the working class is also responsible for
the shortcomings of the official Campaign for Nuclear Dis­
armament, the horizons of whose middle-class leaders are bounded
by the road from London to Aldermaston and back again, and by
public meeting-halls. To these leaders the annual march is some­
thing of a yearly catharsis for the middle-class conscience, an act
of ritual mortification and sacrifice. They hope that one day the
✓

50
 *

rulers of Britain will somehow be convinced that it is wrong to go

on making the bomb, or will be somehow compelled by the over­
whelming force of public opinion to see the error of their ways and
mend them. The CND leaders insist that the bomb is not a
political question, that the campaign must be nop-political—
regardless of the fact that war preparations are a fundamental
part of politics, and that opposition to war preparations, even do-
good middle-class opposition to war preparations, is a kind of
politics, and class politics at that, since it is the capitalist class that
is carrying them on. The CND leaders’ apolitical shibboleths have
led them to view the Labour Party with some hostility, lumping
together rank and file and leaders, failing to see the Labour
Party, despite its bad leadership, as the political expression of the
organized working class; failing to see the need for a serious
approach to the working class, whose active opposition to the
manufacture of nuclear weapons and refusal to have any part in
their manufacture are the only real guarantee of success in the
struggle against them. These class blinkers that the CND leaders
wear have led, despite the spectacular nature of the second
Aldermaston march, to a certain loss of momentum in the cam­
paign between these annual demonstrations, and to a total failure
to rouse the working class behind the anti-H-bomb campaign.
The predominantly middle-class character of Aldermaston 1959
shows the blind alley into which the do-gooders have led their
followers.
The merit of the Direct Action Committee, as against these
others, is that it has made some attempt to rouse industrial
workers against the H-bomb. But the pacifists who faced the
police and went courageously to prison in Norfolk deny emphatic­
ally that they were thereby challenging the capitalist State
machine. They express horror at any suggestion that the over­
throw of the capitalist system will be necessary in order to do
away with the bomb. Side by side with their objection to
‘violence’ goes a reluctance to see the connexion between the
workers’ struggles on other social problems, such as unemploy­
ment. and the struggle against war preparations.
The Socialist Labour League holds that all four schools of
thought in practice hinder the struggle against the H-bomb. The
Labour leaders hinder it by putting forward the slogan ‘End the
tests’, which is meaningless unless it is backed by a determined
struggle of the working class for the overthrow of the capitalist
system that is responsible for the H-bomb. The Communist Party
leaders hinder it by putting forward the slogan ‘Ban the bomb’,
which presupposes that imperialist statesmen are willing to ‘ban’

51
 their most powerful weapon. The CND leaders hinder it by
canalizing it into the cul-de-sac of marches and counter-marches.
And the pacifists of the Direct Action Committee hinder it by
refusing to face up to the logical implications—the revolutionary
implications—of their direct action.
Now the Socialist Labour League does not minimize the
difficulty of arousing industrial action to ‘black* the manufacture
and testing of nuclear weapons and the construction of rocket
bases. But it holds that the object of any serious campaign to
end the bomb must be the mobilization of the one social force
whose fundamental class position and class interests are in
diametrical opposition to those of Macmillan and his class.
Never a day passes without some section of the working class
challenging the class that makes and owns the H-bomb, on
bread-and-butter questions such as sackings, the wages fight,
the defence of workshop organizations and so on. The same
Tory government that places humanity in jeopardy by making the
H-bomb and building rocket bases is playing a full and active part
in the employers’ offensive against jobs, wages, workshop con­
ditions and shop stewards. To the extent that workers come into
conflict with the system which takes away their livelihood they are
also fighting the hydrogen-bomb. Every trade unionist who takes
part in the class struggle is thereby weakening imperialism and its
ability to wage nuclear war. Patient work within the mass
organizations pf the working class to convince their members that
a successful struggle against war preparations is both possible and
necessary; that the struggle to abolish the H-bomb is a struggle
for a socialist programme—a struggle to take out of the hands of
the capitalist class the means of making the bomb, with
nationalization of the basic industries under workers’ control as a
central demand: work of this kind is the only road to effective
mass struggle against this terrible, terribly wasteful and terribly
profitable weapon.1

1Even in peace-time the permanent carrying of H-bombs by American

patrols in British skies is a constant danger to life. On October 31, 1958,
an American master sergeant went mad, and locked himself in a building
at the H-bomber base at Sculthorpe (Norfolk), armed with a pistol.
Five days later an American Air Force bomber carrying a nuclear
bomb crashed in flames near Abilena (Texas). If a pilot of a plane
carrying an H-bomb went mad, it is reasonable to suppose that there

52
 would be some danger of a crash, or even the possibility of his deciding
to bomb a Russian city.
"Khrushchev claimed at Leningrad on November 3, 1958, that Russia
had ‘achieved an increase in the power of our nuclear weapons’ after
resuming tests a month before. On December 1 he told Senator Hubert
Humphrey that Russia had an inter-continental ballistic missile capable
of delivering its warhead more than 8,000 miles away and a small,
compact, five-megaton nuclear bomb.
*Observer, December 7, 1958. Cf. New Statesman on ‘Britain’s Fake
Deterrent’, December 13, 1958: ‘The case for the British deterrent . . .
rests entirely on grounds of prestige. . . . It is not convincing—and
therefore does not deter.’
*The Times, October 15, 1958.
5Manchester Guardian, November 14, 1958.
9Ibid. October 18, 1958.
’ Speech at Central Hall, Westminster, September 22, 1958. A report
by the American Rand Corporation estimates that in a ‘medium’ nuclear
attack on 150 American cities 160 million out of 175 million people
would be killed and 14 million of the 15 million survivors would die
from the effects of fall-out.
* Mrs Amabel Williams-Ellis, at north-west regional conference held by
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, October 25, 1958.
• ‘These figures do not agree with the yearly tally, and the grand total
may well be larger than 204* (Daily Telegraph, October 31, 1958).
19Manchester Guardian, September 19, 1958.
" Speech at Manchester, October 25, 1958.
11See The Times, December 12, 1958.
*“ London County Council Public Health Department—Scientific Branch,
Annual Report of the Scientific Adviser for the Year 1957 (Extract from
a Report to the County Medical Officer of Health), p. 27.
14The Times, October 16, 1958.
13Manchester Guardian, December 16, 1958.
i9Ibid. October 7, 1958.
17Ibid. November 1, 1958.
n Daily Telegraph, October 31, 1958.
u The Times, October 30, 1958.
90Because ‘everyone knows that Britain and the United States, having just
completed a long series of tests, would be prepared to suspend further
tests for twelve months without any agreement in order to digest and
make use of the data already obtained. (Russia did this last March
and got no thanks for it from the west.)’ {Observer, November 2, 1958).
11November 1, 1958.
n Observer, December 14, 1958.
 7. OPPRESSION IN THE COLONIES

On the first day of his visit to Moscow Macmillan told the

Russian leaders: ‘Imperialism is an episode in history. It is no
longer a present reality.’1 To the Tory Prime Minister and those
in the Labour movement who think like him imperialism means
the age of Britain’s unchallenged dominance—an age when most
of the map was coloured red and it was boasted that for the
first time in history there was an empire on which the sun never
set. It was the age when a recalcitrant native chieftain or a
rebellious petty king could be silenced by the dispatch of a gunboat
and a company of marines. It was the age of Kipling, the
remittance man and Britain’s almost total monopoly in the
ruthless exploitation and no less ruthless repression of African,
Asian and other colonial peoples. That age is ended for ever.
But imperialism is very much a present reality, and a reality
essential for the continued existence of the class Macmillan
represents. For imperialism is an economic system with monopoly
capitalism as its core: a system in which industrial production
is concentrated in the so-called advanced countries, while areas
inhabited by the immense majority of mankind are mere sources
of raw materials and market outlets for manufactured goods
and exports of capital: The political form—Crown Colony,
Dominion or sovereign independent State—may vary from territory
to territory and from one period to another according to the
resistance imperialism encounters and the general requirements
of the imperialist ruling class.
In the twentieth century the British Empire is collapsing as a
political structure. The rise of imperialist rivals, Germany, Japan
and the USA, started a process which is being completed by

54
 the resistance of the colonial peoples themselves. With the
October revolution in Russia at the end of the first world war
and the Chinese revolution after the second world war a huge
part of the globe was closed to economic penetration by the
imperialist powers. The colonial peoples elsewhere have been
inspired by these revolutions to intensify their struggle for self-'
determination. British imperialism is beset on all sides. Its
policies are determined by the need for increased economic
exploitation of the reduced area remaining to it and the prevention
of further break-down. It grants spurious ‘freedom’ where the
people’s struggle looks as if it might win total separation from
the Empire, as with India, Malaya, and now Cyprus. Where the
national liberation' movement is not so strong, however, or where
general strategic reasons demand it, there is mounting oppression
which continues ruthlessly until the moment when it no longer
pays. The first signs of ‘nationalism’ that imperialism seeks to
suppress are the basic economic struggles of the colonial workers.
Trade unions and other workers’ organizations are always the
first target.
. When Nigerian coal-miners, most of them earning 3s. to 4s.
a day, struck in 1949 for a basic wage of 5s. lOd. a day, twenty-
two of them were shot dead by the police. When workers in
Freetown, Sierra Leone, earning from £1 to £2 10s. a week, took
strike action in February 1955 in support of their demand for an
increase of lOd. a day, seventeen people, including a woman and
five school children, were shot dead by troops and eighty-four
people were injured. When dockers in Mombasa, in March 1955,
demanded an increase of 2s. a shift to bring them to the level of
7s. 6d. paid at Port Tanga they called off their six-day strike
‘a few hours after British troops had marched with fixed bayonets
through the Mombasa streets. . . . As the soldiers marched
through the troubled areas Lincoln bombers droned overhead’.2
In Southern Rhodesia proscription of the African National
Congresses and widespread arrests followed the strike for higher
wages of 6,600 African workers at the Kariba Dam site in
February 1959.
As the colonial struggle develops political demands for indepen­
dence begin to grow louder. They are usually led in the first
instance by representatives of the native capitalists, who also have
cause to resent foreign oppression. In Cyprus such a struggle
led to British imperialism’s launching what amounted to war
against the Cypriot people, a war characterized by acts of the
most bfutal savagery on the part of young Britons in uniform.

55
Angered by the murder of a British woman, British troops took
a violent revenge on the population of Famagusta. They frightened
a child to death, smothered a man in the back of a lorry, and
beat a great number of others, one of whom died from his
injuries. ‘When the arresting really began it was done with
considerable violence,’ wrote one British newspaper correspondent.
He saw broken car wind-screens and shop-windows and over­
turned hawkers’ barrows.
The 65-year-old man to whom I talked that Friday evening in Famagusta
Hospital looked considerably more than 65 after the troops had finished
with him. Many other elderly men were lying injured in the corridors.
. . . I now understand that the number of arrests were in the region
of 4,000—or virtually the whole male population of Greek Cypriots
in Varosha above the age of 14. . . .
If'you determine to fight a whole people, which is what in effect the
British are doing here, you must in the end be utterly ruthless or
give up*
That utter ruthlessness was indeed the intention of the British
military authorities was shown when Major-General Kenneth
Darling, ‘Director of Operations’, addressed his troops.
‘I am not interested in live terrorists. I am only interested in dead
ones.’ They must all lcam to ‘shoot fast and shoot straight’, he said.
‘I am issuing orders that everyone who carries a gun, including the
butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker, must make himself absolutely
proficient with it We damn well mean business. . . . If terrorists
have the impertinence to attack us then we are going to be so alert
and so efficient with our guns that they are going to get real stick
from us. Go to it. Give them stick.*
Though Lennox-Boyd had told the House of Commons on
November 4: ‘I am satisfied that . . . some use of force was
inevitable’, the Coroner who conducted the inquest on a Greek
Cypriot youth who died from head injuries suffered during the
Famagusta incidents said in his summing up:
It is obvious from this inquest that during the arrests or thereafter
there was used on some of those arrested a degree of force that would
appear to be entirely unjustified. People were so assaulted and beaten
that doctors were fully occupied at Karaolos camp and general hospital
tending the wounded all that evening. One can fully understand the
horror, disgust and anger that filled the minds and hearts of everyone
on that day, but nothing can justify the assaults on persons who had
done nothing to warrant them.5
The British government has refused to hold an inquiry into
what happened at Famagusta.8 There is little doubt,’ writes
one journal, ‘that the wretched position [British troops] now

56
occupy in Cyprus is having a brutalizing effect.’7 ‘What can we
teach the world,’ asks another, ‘when we have achieved the
negation of government in Cyprus?’8 What these commentators
do not understand is that the imposition of military dictatorship
over subject peoples, the brutalizing of soldiers, and the hushing
up of1 the results of this process, are inevitable consequences
of imperialism.
Every retreat by imperialism or phony ‘settlement’ in one
colonial territory is followed by the bursting forth of the colonial
revolution at some other point. No sooner was a patched-up
agreement arrived at with the leaders of the Cypriot people than
central Africa was aflame. The people of Nyasaland rose in
revolt in March 1959 against a plan to impose apartheid on them,
to consolidate the rule of a handful of white landowners over
millions of Africans. In the course of putting down this revolt,
the ‘security’ police shot African prisoners in the knee, burned
down Africans’ huts, and killed forty Africans. The imperialists’
excuse for these murders was that the African liberation move­
ment was planning a ‘massacre’ of Europeans. For this tale there
was no evidence. The only massacre was of Africans. Scarcely
had the Nyasa people buried their dead when from Kenya came
a further indication of the brutality of imperialism: the admission
that eleven prisoners in the Hola concentration camp had been
beaten to death.t At first it was said they had died after drinking
contaminated water. Eventually the truth came out.
The truth always comes out in the long run. Yet the imperialists
never learn. Bastion after bastion of empire crumbles. Govern­
ment spokesman after government spokesman gets up in the
House of Commons and heaps slanders upon the colonial peoples,
only to eat his words in some later statement. The tide of
colonial revolution rolls on. And the price the British workers
have to pay for failing to come to the aid of the colonial peoples
is the brutalization of their own Sons, in military operations
intended to do the impossible—maintain imperialist rule.
This use of British workers in uniform against colonial workers
should be unreservedly opposed by the working-class movement
in Britain. To allow young British workers to be used as the
instruments for fastening the grip of imperialism on the colonial
peoples, to allow them to be turned into brutes and thugs with
coloured people as their victims, to allow them to think of these
people as inferior: this is the road, not merely to racial riots
such as those at Nottingham and Notting Hill, but also to the
future yse of British troops against British workers in struggle.

57
 It is in this light that we should examine the events in Notting
Hill: the violence, inspired and led by a variety of fascist
organizations, against coloured immigrants; the murder of a Negro
by white youths. Imperialism is the basis of racial prejudice.
When race riots occur the moralizing hypocrites of the capitalist
Press, radio and Church deplore them. But imperialism qrimost
daily demonstrates in deeds that colonial peoples are regarded and
treated as inferior. Numbers of young people, already trained or
soon to be trained to solve imperialism’s problems by hunting and
shooting coloured people, find it logical to seek a solution to the
problems of poor while communities—underpaid, unemployed,
badly housed and at the mercy of racketeer landlords—by hunting,
beating and knifing the coloured people who have come to live
among them.
The fascists are busy propagating this ‘solution’ and inflaming
white youth against coloured immigrants, not because a colour
bar is an intrinsic part of fascist policy, but for two other reasons.
First, colour prejudice and racial tensions divide the working
class and hinder their common action against the employing class.
Secondly, a future fascist movement can cut its teeth in ‘nigger­
hunting’ activities, training what it hopes will one day be an army
of scabs for use against the organized Labour movement in
industrial disputes.
Three important lessons for the whole British working class flow
from the Notting Hill events, and these lessons will be reinforced
in the course of the anti-fascist fight that these events have
rendered imperative.
First, the protection of coloured immigrants is the responsibility
of the organized Labour movement. This is not a matter of
charity, but an elementary matter of working-class self-defence
against fascism. The beating of coloured workers in the streets
of London today is only a prelude to the beating of white trade
unionists by fascist thugs tomorrow, unless the Labour movement
takes the necessary steps to crush fascist activity with an iron
hand. The Socialist Labour League has proposed the setting up
by the Labour movement of defence committees and defence
squads, consisting of white and coloured trade unionists, to carry
out propaganda among white youth in answer to the racialists’
lies, and to protect the persons and civil liberties of the racialists’
victims. The building of such united defence committees and
defence squads would be a great practical lesson to both coloured
and white workers in working-class internationalism.
Secondly, the police force of the Tory government cannot fight
the fascist menace or make the streets safe for coloured people

58
 to go about their business. The organizations of Africans in
Britain have said that coloured citizens in Britain have lost
confidence in the ability of the police to protect them. Not only
is the police force open to fascist ideas and fascist influences; it is
a part of the capitalist State machine, which has no intention of
dealing with fascism as an enemy of workers’ organizations and of
their interests. Fascism is the reserve weapon of big business, the
weapon it uses when its domination is seriously menaced; the firm
measures that are needed to crush fascism can never be taken by
a big business government. The fight against fascism will be a
big practical lesson to both coloured and white workers in the
nature and role of the capitalist State.
Thirdly, workers in Britain and workers in the colonies
oppressed by British imperialism have a fundamental identity
of interests. Coloured immigrants come to Britain because of
intolerable conditions. The Labour movement is disgraced by
those in its ranks who advocate the banning of immigration.
Instead of splitting the working class, the Labour movement must
show coloured and white workers the need to fight in unity against
a common enemy, imperialism; and to carry that fight through to
the overthrow of imperialism and the freeing of the colonies. This
will be a great practical lesson to both coloured and white workers
in the nature of imperialism and the way to fight against it.
There are, however, voices in the Labour movement which,
while condemning the more brutal examples of colonial repression,
ask: ‘Would not British workers be worse off if we were to give
freedom to the colonies?’ To put the problem of working-class
internationalism in this form is to distort and conceal its entire
meaning. The Right-wing Labour leaders who talk in this way
have no intention offending capitalism and therefore they cannot
contemplate real opposition to imperialism. They merely want to
patch it up and make it more palatable. But colonial peoples are
not mere oppressed victims to whom freedom is magnanimously
offered or mercilessly denied. They are fighters battling with
increasing success for their freedom — a freedom they will
eventually win, whether or not they are helped by the Labour
movements of the imperialist countries. The real question is:
‘Where do the interests of British workers struggling for socialism
lie? With the imperialist ruling class which oppresses British
and colonial workers alike, or with the colonial workers?’ To
ask this question is to answer it. Every blow struck by the
colonial peoples is a blow against the same ruling class which
is now mounting its offensive against British workers. The sooner

59

i
this class is smashed by the joint action of the metropolitan and
colonial workers, the sooner can socialism be won—and with it
a rational distribution of the world’s resources and a rational
division of the world’s labour which will immeasurably advance
the standard of living of all mankind.

1Speech in Moscow, February 22, 1959.

9The Times, March 9, 1955.
*Observer, October 12, 1958.
*Evening Standard, October 22, 1958. On November 8 this same officer
declared that British civilians in Cyprus who wanted guns could have
them; the army was willing to give training in the use and maintenance
of arms; if there was any shortage of arms they should be taken from
the soldiers and given to the civilians.
*The Times, December 4, 1958.
•The Cyprus government announced on October 4 that a full investigation
of the incident had begun; but the Colonial Office said later that the
findings would never be published.
1Economist, December 6, 1958.
9New Statesman, December 6, 1958.

>
60
 8. A SYSTEM IN DECAY

A system where men too old to work any more are thrown
on the social scrap-heap while others live in luxury all their
lives. Yet it was the labour of those who are now old, hungry
and unwanted that made this luxury possible. A system where
millions are out of work and millions more never get enough
to eat. Yet the mighty new productive forces could, if rationally
utilized, guarantee plenty and happiness for all mankind. A
system where ‘defence’ means national suicide and ‘deterrence’
means the poisoning of the air we breathe and the food we eat.
Yet the forces being harnessed for war preparations could lighten
human labour immeasurably. A system where young workers
of the metropolitan countries are used to keep colonial peoples
in servitude. Yet the metropolitan workers and the colonial
workers are exploited by the same capitalist class. Such a system
is bankrupt.
The bankruptcy of capitalism is shown in other, less obvious,
ways. Here are three: the killing and maiming of men in the
course of the production process; the character of much of the
‘entertainment’ provided on television; and the growth of crime.
Side by side with great scientific progress—digital computers,
automation, and trunk dialling, for instance—the deaths of scores
of building workers and miners every year are taken for granted.
On building sites each year there are some 16,000 accidents,
about 80 per cent, of them due to men falling from scaffolding or
ladders, or to materials falling on those working at lower levels.
In 1957, 185 building workers were killed in accidents. The
report for 1957 of the chief inspector of mines and quarries
said the circumstances of some accidents in the pits showed ‘quite

61
deplorable rashness or carelessness on the part of officials who
should have known better’. The accident figures—395 men killed
and 1,918 injured during the year in coal-mine accidents, compared
with 328 and 1,748 respectively in 1956—suggested ‘no general
improvement’ in safety.
* • •
Much so-called ‘popular’ entertainment is characterized by a
debasement of artistic standards and an emphasis on the passive
contemplation of other people’s activities rather than on personal
creativeness.1 Commercial television keeps people amused and
relatively content; it implants false values in their minds; it ‘plugs’
the merits of various commodities, thus helping to make profits.2
The commercial television companies are making efforts to capture
as large a children’s audience as possible. ‘You have to stun
them to catch their attention,’ observed one supervisor of children’s
programmes.3 According to Christopher Mayhew, MP, the bad
children’s programmes exploit the child’s natural suggestibility
and violate every principle of conduct towards immature minds.
‘Exploiting a child’s suggestibility in order to sell commercial
products is surely one of the lowest forms of activity one can
indulge in.’4
One critic objects to the ‘extreme silliness’ of some television
programmes;5 another documents the way Independent Television
‘wallowed’ in violence on one single night, when it offered ‘a
hectic three hours of sustained thriller material’. His conclusion
is: ‘None of these entertainments was flagrantly offensive. . . .
What can be questioned is their concentration in the home so
long sustained on a single night. They had nothing to say of the
sources of violence or how violence may be controlled. They
wallowed in it.’u One of the conclusions of a recent survey was
that there ought to be fewer programmes of crime and violence
at limes when children are watching, and that there ought to
be far more supervision of the vicious, though often short, episodes
of violence and aggression.7
The television cult of violence dovetails too well with the turn
to violence throughout the capitalist world for us to ignore the
inner link between these phenomena: they are both symptoms
of the decay of capitalist society. We may expect more of such
symptoms as the fabric of this society crumbles and only the
working class is left to champion humanism, optimism and the
dignity and worth of the human individual. All historically out­
moded societies rely on two functions to prolong their existence:

62
the function of the hangman and the function of the priest. They
rely on violence and the He. By the He we mean not only the
direct deception of people by various forms of political
propaganda, but also the diversion of their minds from awareness
of the truth by ignoble means. A child of fourteen was paid
to take her clothes off for people’s entertainment, in London,
in 1958. This, like subliminal advertising, is frowned on by the
authorities.8 But these things are done. Corruption of one kind
or another clogs every pore of social life.
* * *

According to a writer in the Times Literary Supplement,

capitalist society ‘has created an army of psychopathic offenders
which shows no signs of growing less’.0 There is in fact now
half as much crime again as before the war. Last March the
prison population was nearly 25,000, the highest ever known in
British history.10 Crimes of violence in England and Wales have
risen from 2,773 in 1938 to 10,960 in 1957. Yet, according to
Butler in the Commons on October 31, 1958, ‘we have never
had so many policemen as today’.
Criminal Statistics, published on October 1, 1958, showed how
sleep was the rise in crime, particularly among young people.
The 1956 figure was 9.5 per cent, up on 1955; the 1957 figure
showed a 13.7 per cent, increase on 1956. The number of boys
between 14 and 17 found guilty of indictable offences increased
during 1957 by about 21 per cent.; for the 17-21 age group the
increase was 26 per cent. And the increase continued in 1958.
In the first seven months of the year convictions for indictable
offences in London exceeded by 19 per cent, the figures for
the same months of the previous year.11 Having reared the
‘delinquent’, the ‘social misfit’, the ‘Teddy boy’ and the ‘criminal’,
having trained them to kill in world wars and colonial wars,
capitalist society can do nothing but lock them up and virtually
starve them, or end their lives—or flog them. Among the Tory
MPs there is a section, headed by Cyril Osborne and Sir Thomas
Moore, which sees in the birch and the whip the most effective
means of cowing young people whose frustration, aimlessness
and lack of creative outlet for their energies lead them into various
forms of protest.
* * *

The capitalist social system is obsolete. It has no more

possibilities for development. It is in its death agony; and it
will not scruple to drag down to destruction the whole of

63
civilization if the working class is not soon mobilized to end this
system and all the evils for which it is responsible and by means
of which it perpetuates its life.

1 Recording that there was one television parlour game to be seen every
night of the week except Saturday, at peak hours, a writer in The Times
(October 22, 1958) described these games as ‘amateurism rampant,
motivated by what a cynic would call organized greed’, and added:
‘Watching other people play games is a drably stultifying activity unless
they are expert: when they are not, and moreover are rewarded out
of all proportion to performance, it becomes a habit not easy to defend
on any grounds.’
2 After their early losses, the commercial television companies are now
making huge profits for themselves too. Advertising revenue rose from
£13 million in 1956 to £32 million in 1957 and was running at an
annual rate of £49 million in 1958. Associated Television Ltd had lost
£602,000 by April J956, but in the next year it made a profit of £438,000.
By April 1958 its profits had shot up to £4,053,000. ‘Considering that
its share capital amounts only to £1,813,000 the shareholders will be
getting a fantastic return on the money they originally put in’ (Labour
Research, vol. xlvii, no. 11, p. 173, November 1958).
* Miss Mary Field, quoted Daily Telegraph, October 15, 1958.
*Manchester Guardian, October 16, 1958.
5Ibid. October 30, 1958. He wrote: ‘I do object violently to the mood
of mental abasement which is invited when we are called on to admire
a youth because he learnt to read at school. But this is, in fact, the
level of much television, and it is a pity the BBC should encourage i t ’
* The Times, October 2, 1958. Here is what viewers saw on the evening
in question (September 27, 1958): ‘Just before 9.30 Highway Patrol
ended with the shooting of a criminal. During the break shots were
fired in the trailer of Dial 999. . . . Dark Passage . . - offered the
following: blows on a face in close-up (9.40 approximately); references
to throwing a bread knife and being “slugged on the head with an ash
tray” (10 p.m.); close-up of a bandaged face after plastic surgery
(10.10); reference to a head smashed in (10.15); the line “hell get
the gas-chamber” (10.25). This film drew to its end with a fight
between the hero and a degenerate blackmailer, followed by the
spectacular fall of a murderess out of a high window (11.5). After
advertisements, including one for a product which claimed to “calm
your nerves”, Dial 999 was launched with an allusion to the Tower of
London where the little princes were “murdered while they slept”i
Apart from routine fights between detectives and criminals a flat was
broken into. Its female occupant had her arm twisted to release the
telephone and later was hit in the face. The direction, not the impact,
of the blow was seen, followed by a scream. . . .’

64

i
 THilde T. Himmelweit, A. N. Oppenheim and Pamela Vince, Television
and the Child (1958).
"The Daily Herald, October 11, 1958, revealed that a British ITV company
was flashing subliminal messages—‘Keep watching’—on the screen even
during children’s hour. An official was quoted as saying: ‘The message
is a simple promotion film which lasts three seconds/ Richard Hoggart
and others wrote to the Manchester Guardian, October 16, 1958: ‘The
experiment seems to us an experiment in the reduction of a fundamental
human right—the right to consider and reject . . . the very medium
itself. . . . It can only help to undermine those qualities in individuals
that make for a civilized democracy—discrimination, the overcoming
of passivity, inquiry and independence.’ According to the Observer,
October 19, 1958, ‘the government is worried by the revelation that
subliminal advertising has been tried out’.
•October 24, 1958.
,rtOf these, 5,925 were sleeping three to a cell on November 18, the
House of Commons was told by Mr D. L. M. Renton, Under-Secrctary,
Home Office, on December H, 1958. This overcrowding was due to
‘a large and sharp increase in the prison population over the last two
years’. At Dartmoor prison, according to a later reply on the same
day, the cost per head of the prisoners’ food is only 12s. 2d. per week,
including Is. a head on fresh meat.
11 Figure given by the Home Secretary, House of Commons, October 31,
1958.
11One other symptom it is not surprising to find in a decaying society
is the increase of alcoholism. Figures published by the Home Office
on November 13, 1958, showed that in 1957 there was an increase
of more than 11 per cent, in the number of proved offences of
drunkenness. This increase was particularly marked among young
people under the age of 21.
PROVED OFFENCES OF DRUNKENNESS
Year Total Under 18 18—under 21
1955 ... ... • «• 54,210 669 3,748
1956 ... ... 60,182 933 4,452
1957 ... •i r • •• 67,002 987 5,208
Whereas the total increase between 1955 and 1957 was 25.4 per cent,
the increases in the two under-21 age groups were 47.5 per cent and
38.9 per cent, respectively.

>

65
 9. T H E SO C IA L IST SO L U T IO N

W e have drawn a picture of a disintegrating society, enmeshed in

contradictions, unable to guarantee even the physical survival of
those who produce all the wealth. Our picture has been largely
based on facts and figures provided by spokesmen, official or
unofficial, of the capitalist class itself. If what they are able to
recognize, despite their preconceptions, were all that could be
said on the matter, the outlook for mankind would be very
gloomy indeed. There would be much to be said for the opinions
of certain aged and pessimistic philosophers who see in mankind
a ‘herd*, actuated by greed, envy, malice and ‘aggressive instincts’,
busily and blindly compassing its own self-destruction. Fortunately
there are forces which the class position of the apologists of
capitalism renders them unable to take into account. The death
agony of capitalism creates the conditions for its overthrow and
for the construction of a new society, where those who work—
i.e., the whole of society—will own the means of production, will
carry on production for use, not profit, and will dispose collectively
of the whole social product instead of being robbed of the full
fruits of their labour.
Marx and Engels emphasized over and over again that, in
contrast to their Utopian predecessors, they were scientific
socialists. Not for them the drafting of blue prints setting forth
the happy life that future generations would enjoy. Not for them
the provision of solutions to problems which mankind had not
yet set itself. They limited themselves to describing, with a
wealth of detail, the developments actually taking place in
capitalist society: the process which would end with the defeat
of capitalism at the hands of its grave-digger, the modern industrial

66
working class. To them socialism was not the dream of gifted
men ahead of their time, but the scientific study of the inner
workings of capitalist society and the demonstration that it would
be destroyed by those who would reshape society in their own
image. Marx and Engels turned socialism from a dream into
a science.
Thanks to this reticence, self-imposed in the interests of scientific
truth and rigour, Marxism provides the workers with the only
coherent account of how a new society can be built and what
it will look like when it is built. Ownership by the whole of
society of the means of production will replace their present
private ownership. This will do away with certain freedoms at
present enjoyed by the owners of capital at the expense of the
rest of society. Above all, it will do away with freedom to
utilize property in the means of production for the purpose of
making profit out of those who do not own such property.
Socialism will not permit the exploitation of man by man—the
enrichment of some men by the labour of others. It is not a
question of ensuring ‘social equality’, as some would have it.
Men are not equal, in their needs, tastes or abilities, and socialism,
far from reducing them to one grey level of conformity, will
stimulate the fullest and freest development of the individual’s
creative powers, so often stunted or warped in capitalist society.
The workers, through their own State that will be but the
expression of their collective will and consciousness, will own,
control and run the whole of production. The productive process
will be geared to the needs of/ the associated producers, not to
the extraction of profit from them. This will make possible the
rational planning of production in the interests of the whole of
society. Workers’ representatives, with the aid of economic,
technical and scientific experts, will first draw up a draft plan for
a given period. This comprehensive plan will not only be
submitted for the broadest public discussion and, if desired,
controversy; it will also be broken down so that every factory
and every department knows exactly what work it is asked to
perform and can freely agree to this stated portion of the social
task or increase or reduce it.
Democratic planning of this kind, under workers’ control, will
set free the springs of social enthusiasm and initiative. It will
eliminate over-production, unemployment and poverty in the midst
of plenty. It will lay the basis for such an immense abundance
of both necessities and luxuries as will make it possible, ultimately,
for people to take out of the social pool just what will satisfy

67
 their material and cultural needs.
Such a state of abundance and unrestricted access by the
individual to the social product imply, of course, a community
where the mode of life, degree of civic responsibility and level
of consciousness are very different from those we are accustomed
to. But the necessary re-education of men and women, so that
they will instinctively think first of the interests of the community,
will be attained in the course of the struggle against capitalism
and the struggle, under a workers’ State, to wipe out all remnants
of selfishness and other traits that for thousands of years have
been fostered by the division of society into classes.
The manifold distortions that have accompanied the construction
of a planned economy in Russia, China and eastern Europe—the
usurpation of the workers’ power by a caste of bureaucrats, and
the consequent degeneration or deformation of the workers’ States
—have fed popular prejudice against socialism, and, among
socialists themselves, have tended to diminish confidence in the
possibility of achieving a communist distribution of goods. But
Marxists see the thirty-five years of Stalinist annihilation of
workers’ democracy as a temporary phenomenon, which the
Russian workers themselves will overcome; and they see the
advance to communism, not with the eyes of Utopians or idealists,
but as the logical outcome of the entire course of social develop­
ment. The present capitalist relations of production—the owner­
ship of the means of production by the capitalist class—no longer
correspond to the productive forces as they have developed within
the framework of capitalist society. Technical improvements like
automation arid atomic energy have thrown into relief the most
contradictory feature of the production process under capitalism
—its socialization. Not merely does modern industry draw
thousands of men into a collective labour process under one roof,
but each single branch of modern industry is to the highest degree
dependent on the labour of millions of workers, supplying raw
materials, tools, machines, replacements, fuel and so on. Such
highly advanced productive forces can no longer be rationally
utilized under capitalism. They cry out for socialist relations
of production—the social ownership of the means of production.
Only by replacing capitalist ownership by socialist ownership can
men eliminate the contradiction, between socialized production
and the private appropriation of the product, which underlies
economic crises. Socialist relations of production alone correspond
to the advanced productive forces mankind now has at its disposal.
Under socialism the products of a collective labour process will

68
 be the property of the whole of society and will be distributed
so that no one need go hungry—and, eventually, so that everyone
may fully satisfy his needs. Only under socialism can modern
machines and techniques be utilized in a planned way. Only
under socialism can scientific research be rationally planned.
The achievement of world socialism will not only do away
with economic crises and all the misery that goes with them; it
will also do away with wars. Socialism is the only final alternative
to imperialist wars waged for markets, spheres of investment and
sources of raw materials. With the overthrow of the capitalists
who compete for these, with the ending of the division of society
into classes, so there will disappear the economic motives that
under slavery, feudalism and capitalism have driven successive
exploiting classes to go to war—using, of course, the masses of
the exploited as cannon-fodder. Instead of being utilized for
vdestruction and slaughter the great discoveries of modern science
can then be put to peaceful use, to make people better off in
every way.
For this socialist solution to become a reality there are, broadly
speaking, three necessary pre-conditions. First, the productive
forces must be sufficiently developed. Without this basic material
prerequisite socialism can be only a dream. Secondly, there must
be in existence a class big enough and influential enough by virtue
of its position in the economy to impose its will on society.
These are the objective factors. They have already matured.
Thirdly, there is the subjective factor, which is not yet present.
The class that is to remould society (and so in the long run abolish
all classes, including itself) must understand its position in society
and the historical role it is called on to play. It must be equipped
with an adequate scientific consciousness of the laws of social
development and the revolutionary strategy and tactics flowing
therefrom. It must also possess an organization of vanguard
fighters, which can bring this scientific consciousness to the workers
in the shape of socialist theory, enrich that theory in accordance
with the lessons of the class struggle, and link scientific socialist
ideas with the mass movement of the working class. This
organization will thus provide the necessary leadership to the
working class, showing the connexions between the sectional
struggles and preparing and mobilizing the workers for the over­
throw of capitalism and the achievement of working-class power.

$9
10. CLA SS S T R U G G L E T H E O N L Y R O A D T O SO C IA LISM

G iven the three pre-conditions for the building of a new society

that we have just outlined, the working class is faced with a
supreme political task. The main barrier to the reconstruction
of society along socialist lines is the possession of political power
by the capitalist class. To safeguard its grip over society the
capitalist class makes use of a skilfully-fashioned and powerful
instrument of class rule—its State machine. The essential com­
ponents of the capitalist State machine are organs of repression,
whose purpose is to prevent the overthrow of capitalism: bodies
of armed men, places for locking people up, means of inflicting
pain and death and means of swaying people’s minds. The armed
forces, the police, the law courts, the government apparatus and
the BBC: this is the State machine which the working class has
to smash and replace if it is to take command of the economy.
And it must smash it and build a new, workers’ State: it
cannot, as some self-styled ‘Marxists’ have suggested, take over
the existing State machinery and adapt it for its own purposes.
This has been proved by every major revolutionary crisis in
the past ninety years—since the Paris Commune first established
workers’ power for a brief period. The capitalist State machine
has been developed in the interests of an exploiting class; it has
no interest in ensuring the participation of workers in the day-by­
day administration of affairs. But a workers’ State must from
the very moment of its birth draw the common people into
all the different branches of State administration and train them
to do without any special corps of professional administrators.
The process by which the working class takes political power,
smashes the capitalist State machine and brings into existence its
own workers’ State, is the socialist revolution.
>
70

<
 The conquest of political power by the working class is a
very difficult task, for which extensive and patient preparation
is necessary. It is difficult because the capitalist State machine
exists to prevent just such a decisive political step on the part
of the working class. This State machine is a bludgeon to be
used in case of need against revolutionary workers. There can
be no serious struggle for socialism without a struggle, on the
political arena, to strike this bludgeon out of the hands of the
capitalists and then to equip the victorious workers with their
own bludgeon— their army, their police, their courts of law—to
prevent the overthrown exploiters and their hangers-on from
making a come-back.
Two of the most important effects on the British State of the
transition to monopoly capitalism have been the strengthening,
extension and centralization of the State machinery and the
incorporation into it of reactionary trade union officials and
Right-wing Labour leaders. At the same time the State machine
has become more and more an instrument of the numerically
tiny, but immensely powerful, monopolist section of the capitalist
class.
Since the beginning of the second world war there has been
an unprecedented growth of the bureaucratic and military
apparatus. British expenditure on arms has gone up from 4.9
per cent, of the national income in 1938-39 to 8 per cent, in 1957;
from 25 per cent, of total government expenditure to 31.9 per
cent.; from 2s. Id. per head of population per week to 11s. 4d.
In the first half of this century the strength of the non-industrial
civil service increased eight times to about 500,000; and one-third
of these (except for those in the Post Office) now work in various
departments concerned with war and war preparations. The
Ministries of Defence and Supply and the Air Ministry have been
created. There has been continual expansion qi the police force
and the BBC.
Parallel with the growth of its State apparatus, the British
ruling class has delivered a series of attacks on democratic
liberties: the Police Act (1919), the Emergency Powers Act (1920),
the Official Secrets Act (1920), the Civil Authorities (Special
Powers) Acts (Northern Ireland) (1922 and 1933), the Incitement
to Disaffection Act (1934) and the Public Order Act (1936).
There has been a spread of the witch-hunt, an increase of police
spying on working-class organizations1 and many other infringe­
ments of civil liberties.2 The monopoly capitalists and the Right-
wing Labour leaders are increasingly afraid of even the narrow

71
 and restricted degree of democracy and liberty that the workers
have won for themselves under capitalism. They dread a
conscious, active rank and file—because the political understanding
and militancy of the rank and file are the strongest antidote to
their poisoning of'people's minds and the surest guarantee that
their grasp on State power will one day be loosened. That is
why they tend to resort to fascist methods. By the very logic
of their class position they are impelled to turn against democracy.
In 1953 we saw what happened when a socialist government
in a British colony tried to carry out the programme on which
it had been elected. In the first elections under a new constitution
which had ended property qualifications for voting, the People’s
Progressive Party of British Guiana obtained fifteen times as
many votes as its nearest rival and an absolute majority of all
the votes. In its six months in office it carried through moderate
reforms against the resistance of the Governor and the obstruction
and interference of officials. Two days after it had launched a
petition asking for a revision of the constitution so as to end
the Governor’s veto and the system of having civil servants in
the Cabinet, the British government sent a cruiser and two frigates
to the colony, occupied it with British troops, suspended the
constitution, dismissal elected Ministers, prorogued the Legisla­
ture, banned meetings and arrested the leaders of the People’s
Progressive Party. It was an open armed assault on an elected
majority and on democratic institutions. ‘Her Majesty’s Govern­
ment,’ said the then Colonial Secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, amid
the cheers of the Tory Party conference, ‘are not going to
allow a communist State to be organized within the British
Commonwealth.’8
In fact there was no question of the establishment of a
‘communist State’, but of the mildest, most constitutional and
law-abiding reforms. Vet the British government, though
passionately in favour of ‘free elections’ in many parts of the
world, opposed them in territories under British rule as long
as there was any chance of a socialist party winning. The report
of the British Guiana Constitutional Commission made this quite
clear: ‘So long as the present leadership and policies of the
People’s Progressive Party continue there is no way in which
any real measure of self-government can be restored in British
Guiana without the certainty that the country will again be
subjected to constitutional crisis.’4
Lyttelton’s dictum is the most concise expression of what might
be called latter-day Carsomsm—the right claimed by a ruling

72
class to overthrow the will of elected majorities by armed force.5
It recalled Baldwin’s prediction that ‘if a party majority were
ever to play with the idea of forcing on the country their will,
before the country as a whole approved of that, we might find
ourselves near to revolution [i.e., counter-revolution] more quickly
than you [the Americans] would’.0
But Lyttelton’s statement was not a faint echo of Baldwin’s.
On the contrary, where Baldwin was vague, Lyttelton was quite
clear, concrete and explicit. He declared in effect that if the
British electorate were to return to power a majority pledged
to destroy the power of the capitalist class and substitute for it
the power of the working class, then the capitalist class would
not respect the will of the electors. The ‘Liberal’ News Chronicle
similarly advocated capitalist resistance to the will of the majority
when it wrote: ‘Even when communism comes to power by
democratic means, it is the enemy of democracy and must be
treated as such.’7
The Right-wing Labour leaders’ agreement with these threats
is not merely tacit. Hugh Gaitskell, asked his attitude ‘if a
Communist Party was in a position to take power by the ballot’,
replied candidly:
4

My own opinion is that if a Communist Party is near to taking power

—and you know what the result of that will be—the democratic parties
are entitled to stop it by suppressing the Communist Party. In other
words, democracy can work only if all parties observe what are called
the ‘rules of the game'. . . . It may be necessary to deprive some
people of freedom in order to preserve the greater freedoms of society.*
Thus Gaitskell would by the ‘rules of the game’ deprive the
British workers of freedom to elect the government of their
choice, in order to preserve the ‘greater freedoms’ of capitalist
exploitation and capitalist rule. Carson in 1913, Baldwin in the
thirties, Lyttelton and Gaitskell in the fifties: the words chosen
to clothe the idea have a different flavour according to the period
and the personality of the speaker. But the essential ring is
identical: bourgeois democracy is all very well so long as the
continued rule of the bourgeoisie can be guaranteed by ‘normal’,
‘constitutional’, ‘peaceful’ means. But as soon as that rule is
seriously challenged the velvet glove comes off and the mailed
fist of bourgeois dictatorship is revealed.
This is why a programme for ‘peaceful transition’ to socialism,
as put forward in the Communist Party’s programme The British
Road to Socialism (1951; revised edition, 1957) can never be
realized. This programme is remote from the class realities of

73
 present-day Britain, where each partial struggle is a microcosm
revealing on a small scale, but often in brilliant detail, the balance,
disposition and temper of the social forces. The recent dispute
on the South Bank building site was just such a model of the
bitterly-contested battles that are going to mark this new period
of class struggle. If 400 foot and mounted police are used to
break a struggle for trade union principles, what lengths will the
employing class not go to when not just one employer but the
whole capitalist system is seriously challenged? The South Bank
experience made it much harder to suppose, that a peaceful,
parliamentary transition to socialism is possible.
The working class must be organized for power. The workers
must be prepared for the struggle for power through clear, honest
and sober analysis of every partial struggle. They must be
separated politically from the capitalist class and from the agents
of that class inside the Labour movement. They must be separated
from the institutions set up to bridge the gulf between the classes
in the employers’ interests—the negotiating bodies, arbitration
tribunals and courts of inquiry. Workers’ leaders who collaborate
with the employers, and organizations which give formal
expression to that class collaboration, cannot help the working
class to go forward. The way to win strikes is class struggle,
not negotiation. The way to win socialism is class struggle, not
parliamentary debate and manoeuvre. In each case the outcome
of the fight is decided by the strength of the contending forces,
the workers’ morale and combativeness, their ability to impose
their will on their enemies, and the calibre of their leaders.
Of all these factors, none is more important than the last.
Leadership is the lever by which the great power of the working
class can be brought into play; but there is at present no sign
of this lever being used by Labour’s leaders.1

1Questions in the House of Commons in June 1957 revealed that telephone

tapping was being practised in this country and that transcripts had
been passed by the Home Office to the Bar Council. A report by a
committee of Privy Councillors (October 1957) sought to justify the
practice of telephone tapping and opening of mail if done in the
interests of security and the detection of serious crime.
*Two recent instances are: the refusal by the general purposes com­
mittee of Westminster City Council to allow the Movement for Colonial
Freedom to hold a meeting about Cyprus in Caxton Hall on the ground

74
 that ‘there was considerable risk of disturbance and consequent damage
to the council's property’ (The Times, December 6, 1958); and the
rejection by the advertising department of the British Transport Com­
mission of a poster for a meeting called by the Civil Service Alliance
to protest at the Treasury’s attitude to a pay claim, on the ground that
its wording was ‘politically controversial’ (Manchester Guardian,
December 6, 1958).
3Oliver Lyttelton, October 9, 1953. On October 22, 1953, he repeated
this statement in the House of Commons.
4 Report of the British Guiana Constitutional Commission (Cmnd 9274,
1954), p. 70. The Manchester Guardian (October 10, 1953) said it
might be assumed that ‘a political boundary to constitutional develop­
ments in the colonies’ would be incorporated in future Orders in
Council setting up colonial constitutions. The Colonial Office had
started ‘surveying with minute care the economic and political conditions
in other territories which may claim constitutional advances’, in order
to avoid in future ‘so embarrassing an electoral result’.
1Expressed with classical simplicity by Sir Edward Carson on September
7, 1913; ‘I do not hesitate to tell you that you ought to set yourselves
against the constituted authority in the land. . . . We will not allow
any individual or any body of men, whether they call themselves a
parliament or a government, to take away what we consider essential for
the carrying on of our rights and privileges.’
4Speech in New York, August 16, 1939.
’ October 8, 1953.
*Ceylon Daily News, March 12, 1954. Cf. Christopher Mayhew’s
declaration as Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs: ‘When
I say a country is a democracy, I mean that it is not a communist
country’ (News Chronicle, December 31, 1948).I

• 0

75
 P A R T II
I
LABOUR AND LEADERSHIP
 1. THE CRISIS OF LEADERSHIP

T he old parties. Conservative, Liberal, Labour and ‘communist’

alike, have nothing to offer the working people of Britain.
The Tory Party is the party of big business. Though among The
more backward workers there are to be found Tory voters—and
even that curious exhibit at Conservative Party conferences, the
Tory trade unionist’—the bulk of the organized workers are not
deceived. No amount of publicity work by Messrs Colman,
Prentis and Varley to ‘plug’ Macmillan—‘sell him like a detergent’,
it has been said—can succeed in building up ‘an “image” of the
Tory rank-and-file members as being ordinary men and women
rather than exclusively Colonel Blimps and Top People’.1 The
‘image’ of the Tory Party that is in the minds of most workers
is of a party with three characteristics which make it impossible
for them ever to look to it for leadership. First, it is the party
of the employing class, dedicated to the preservation of private
ownership of the means of production. Secondly, it is not a
democratic party. Its annual conferences are not democratic
decision-making and policy-making bodies. They are called
together to ratify the decisions already taken, and the policies
already adopted by the (non-elected) leaders and the ‘Leader’.2
And thirdly, there is a widespread fear that the Conservative
Party is becoming over-fond of violence as a means of settling
political disputes, both domestic and foreign—a tendency which
is all of a piece with the general turn to violence and reaction
throughout the capitalist world. One well-known Conservative
journalist has written: T h e image of the Conservatives as a party
of violence could be forming now. . . . The Conservatives should
do all in fheir power to remove the two most unattractive
 features in the public image of their party. They are the leer
of violence and the grin of irresponsible wealth/8
All the Tory Party has to offer the workers is hunger, poverty,
dole queues and imperialist adventures like the Suez affair.
Profiting by middle-class disillusionment in the Tory Party,
the Liberal Party has managed to increase its votes at some recent
by-elections. Its social basis is mainly among the small capitalists
who are opposed equally to the big monopolies that menace them
and to the working-class struggle for socialism. This party is
an anachronism, and the organized workers will never look to
it for leadership.
Our fundamental criticism of the present leaders of the Labour
Party, and of the trade union leaders, is that they lack at once
the will and the ability to lead their members in any serious
struggle. They have no strategy of resistance to the employers’
offensive. They neither prepare for struggles that all can see
beforehand are inevitable nor draw the necessary lessons from
such* struggles. They advocate a policy of tinkering with capitalist
society instead of putting an end to it and building a socialist
society. Again and again they have failed to mobilize the workers
in support of a particular section under attack. Again arid
again they have openly betrayed workers in struggle. They act
as a dam, stemming the rising flood of working-class militancy.
They are frightened of militant activity on the part of their
members, as of some elemental and uncontrollable force of which
they have no understanding at all, except as a continual menace
to their own positions and privileges. Hence their fear and
hatred of rank-and-file movements; hence the slanders, expulsions
and witch-hunts against militants.
Though the Labour Party has failed the workers, though its
leaders have ceased to be socialists as the pioneers of the British
Labour movement understood the term, the fact remains that the
majority of the British working class give their allegiance to this
party, consider it theirs, and see it as the only alternative to
Toryism. We must therefore inquire more deeply into the present
condition of the Labour Party, and examine the political com­
plexion of its leaders.

Labour in the Doldrums

The day after the Labour Party leaders put out their General
Election policy pamphlet, The Future Labour Offers YOU, there

80

N
was a by-election in Shoreditch and Finsbury. The poll in this
solidly working-class constituency was the lowest recorded in
any general election or by-election since the war. The Labour
vote dropped from 25,500 in 1955 to 10,214. The Labour majority
dropped from 16,284 to 6,995. There were, it is true, propor­
tionately even more abstentions by the small number of Tory
supporters than by the mass of Labour voters; but this was
small comfort for the leaders and members of the Labour Party.
It was
not so much a by-election as a mass abstention. . . . Only one in
every four voters . . . took the trouble to make their simple cross on
the ballot paper, and it is impossible to imagine that either the
two candidates or their party organizations will be able to find one
crumb of comfort or satisfaction in this contemptuous return for
all their efforts. . . . Here arc Labour challenging the government
for office, launching the greatest national campaign, so they say, that
they have ever had, and their thousands of supporters in Shoreditch
could not care less.*
By-elections are not the only, nor the most important, barometer
of working-class confidence in a working-class party. But the
Shoreditch result was only the latest in a series of by-elections in
which—despite popular dissatisfaction with Tory rule—Labour
had for the most part not succeeded in winning any of the ground
lost by the Tories. A week earlier, at East Aberdeen, the Labour
vote had fallen from 8,543 to 7,986, and ‘the Labour performance
brought no joy at all for the party leaders’.5 Ten days before
that, at Pontypool, the Labour vote had fallen from 26,372 to
20,000, and the majority from 16,572 to 13,727. At Southend
West, at the end of January, the Labour vote fell from 8,866 to
5,280 and Labour came bdlow both Tory and Liberal, at the
bottom of the poll. During the years 1955-58 there were in all
forty-two by-elections, with the results summarized in the
table overleaf.
Thus in the second half of 1958, for the first time, the
percentage of votes lost by Labour exceeded the Tory loss. Why
was this so? Because the Labour leaders’ abandonment of
socialism has led to a widespread apathy and frustration among
the mass of Labour voters and supporters. Few of these, except
at moments of unequivocal national betrayal, or when they have
directly experienced the selling out of some struggle in which
they themselves have been engaged, are yet able to crystallize
their feelings into a comprehensive criticism 'of their leaders’
policies and actions. But there is no doubt that since the electoral
defeat of 1951 Labour’s rank and file have viewed with increasing

81
00
ts>

BY-ELECTIONS, 1955-58

LABOUR VOTE TORY VOTE

At At Percentage At At Percentage
General Election By-Elections Change General Election By-Elections Change
1955-56 .................................. 275,160 227,528 -17.3 291,872 203,886 -30.1
Jan.-June 1957 175,412 171,009 -2.5 236,332 170,733 -27.7
June-Dee. 1957 ....................... 84,350 68,551 -23.0 103,530 63,226 -38.9
Jan.-June 1958 ....................... 174,126 137,456 -21.0 183,214 93,452 -48.9
June-Dee. 1958 ....................... 85,155 60,396 -29.0 98,179 70.887 -27.7
 disquiet their leaders’ failure to take the offensive against the
Tories and the employers. One of the younger theoreticians of
the Right wing, said to be a close confidant and adviser of
Gaitskell,6 has summed up their feelings like this: ‘No one who
has observed the party since 1951, furiously searching for its
lost soul, can have failed to sense a mood of deep bewilderment.’7
In the opinion of a more recent observer the party has ‘lost its
sense of purpose and direction’;8 another points to the party’s
failure to win young people, the decline in the number of youth
sections in the constituencies and the ‘painfully small’ number
of speakers under 30 at the 1958 annual conference;9 to a third
‘its long-standing difficulty is that it is a party of the Left which
has sought but has not found a convincing programme of
reform’;30 a fourth writes that ‘nobody really knows what the
magic is which would revive the party’s old confidence and
convince the electorate’;11 while a fifth asks whether young people
should' support ‘a party whose leadership and policies fill them
with disquiet . . . whose image is one of . . . blatant oppor­
tunism’ and the main object of whose parliamentary strategy
has seemed to be ‘reassuring the middle-class voter’.12
In fact, of course, many among the rank and file of the Labour
Party are well aware of what is needed to reawaken enthusiastic
mass support for Labour, galvanize the members and sweep the
party to power: a fighting socialist policy. This is the ‘magic’
that is lacking. In August 1958 a Gallup poll found six Labour
supporters saying that the party would be more attractive to them
if it moved to the Left for every one who said it would make
it less attractive.
The current Gallup poll shows a low level of Labour enthusiasm
for Labour's present policies. . . . Critics within Labour’s ranks are
overwhelmingly of the opinion that Labour policy needs to become
‘a more definite. Labour policy’. . . . The . . . poll provides no evidence
that a Right-wing Labour policy would be successful with the un­
committed voters. . . . If Labour is to win the election, by virtue of
a positive appeal, the party has to turn to the Left and establish an
image that is distinct from that of the Conservative Party.*
The Labour leaders do not agree. They have set their hearts
not on mobilizing their traditional supporters, but on making an
‘agreeable’ impression on the hesitant middle-class voters.
Respectability at all costs is their watchword.14 Traditional
socialist policies and attitudes have been jettisoned. GaitskelPs
strategy is ‘first to avoid alienating moderate opinion’—with the
result that the, party’s parliamentary leadership is ‘as reverberating

83
as a soggy pancake’.15 When Labour leaders appear on television
they speak, not to the industrial workers who created the Labour
Party to serve them in struggle, and who so urgently need leader­
ship, but to the middle class. And it is not of socialism that
they speak.18
The paradox of a working-class party with leaders who have
abandoned socialist aims and policies was clearly summed up on
the eve of the 1958 party conference by the organ of one Con­
stituency Labour Party:
Support for the Labour Party is on the wane. . . . People everywhere
are both puzzled and concerned at the miserable political performance
of the Labour Party. . . . The greatest single handicap to our party
at the moment is lack of leadership. . . . What little policy that
we do possess is only a watered down apology for socialism, and
the mere mention of that word sums up the reasons why the Labour
Party lacks appeal in its approach to the public—wc are lacking in
socialist policy and ideals.11
The national executive had in fact been ‘slipping out of some
of the old clothes of socialism’.18 In an orgy of ‘new thinking’,
spread out over three years, it had produced some 730. pages of
policy, in the shape of a series of statements ‘all bearing the marks^
of Mr Gaitskell’s personal influence’.18 Instead of a clear-cut
anti-capitalist programme, Labour came forward with half-baked
schemes for ‘expansion’, ‘fair shares’, ‘freedom, security and
equality’. Instead of the extension of public ownership, the State
was to acquire shares in big business. Instead of constructing
a socialist society, Labour was to ‘plan for progress’—and run
capitalism better than the Tories. Instead of a socialist policy
for agriculture, Labour was to ‘prosper the plough’ by leaving
the land unnationalized—including that 61 per cent, of it which
is in the hands of landowners who do not farm it themselves.20
Instead of abolishing the ‘public’ schools for the training of rich
men’s sons—bastions of class discrimination in education—Labour
was to ‘learn to live’ with them.21 With one or two narrow
escapes, the executive received conference backing for its policies
—though, according to one observer, ‘there were misgivings.
Constituency delegates still hankered after a clear-cut alternative
(and socialist) policy capable of rousing the country. . . . The
old brave socialism . . . had to give way to expediency. . . .
This was distressing for the . . , party workers who still hope
to make a classless society in their lifetime.’22
A few weeks after the conference, Gaitskellism found its finished
expression in The Future Labour Offers YOU, a glossy, multi­
coloured, easy-to-read pamphlet, prepared with full attention to

84
all modern principles of advertising, complete with thumb-index
and eye-catching typography—but lacking in any socialist challenge
to the Tory government or to the capitalist system. Nowhere
in the capitalist Press was there the slightest tremor of alarm
or apprehension; for the Labour leaders had now shed their
‘socialist garments' once and for all, and were putting forward
a policy scarcely distinguishable on any essential point from the
promises of the Tory government itself. One capitalist newspaper
found the pamphlet ‘comfortable and reassuring’, another ‘sensible,
moderate and intelligent*. Many stressed its appeal to the middle
class.23 Amid these sighs of relief, it was significant to find two
rather more far-sighted newspapers warning the Labour leaders
not to go too far to the Right. Thus The Times suggested that
the paucity of Labour’s rethinking was all too apparent, and this
‘is not something to be welcomed*.24 The Financial Times
expanded on this theme:
For the most part, the policy-makers seem to have decided, their
proposals should be restricted to matters about which there can be
no real difference of opinion and the poverty of their programme
concealed by the glossiness of its cover. This may pass for a short
time longer. But if Britain suffers in the long run from her lack
of an effective radical opposition—and nations have suffered from
such a lack in the past—it is the present leaders of the Labour Party
who must shoulder the blame.*5
‘The two parties are now so close to one another,’ wrote the
political correspondent of the Observer, ‘that a famous Tory
argued the other day that the next election would turn on two
letters of the alphabet. The Tories would be accused of deflation
and the Labour Party of mflation.’26
The character of Labour’s policy calls in question both the
party’s ability to win the next general election, and even the
desire of its leaders to win it.27 To woo the middle class by
looking like the Liberals or the Tories is to run a very big risk
of losing working-class votes, without gaining any substantial
body of middle-class support.
As has been pointed out, elections are seldom won by an
opposition which claims it will genuinely do what the government
is pretending to do.28 The uncertain electoral prospects have
engendered a mood of pessimism (if not quite a ‘mood of
despair’29) that no amount of Dally Herald jubilation over The
Future Labour Offers YOU can dispel. In private, Labour Party
leaders are not so sanguine about their chances of winning the
General Election as they are in their public utterances.30 Hence
the extraordinary sequence of stunts in the House of Commons,

85
the logical outcome of the abandonment of socialism and of the
refusal to wage war on the Tories industrially and politically.
Neither the fiasco of the alleged Bank Rate leak, nor the stunt
on the misuse of official labels, nor the T spy strangers' stunt could
arouse enthusiasm and a fighting spirit among workers whose
livelihood is menaced by slump. None of them was any substitute
for a determined resistance to the Tory offensive—a resistance that
would make the continuation of Tory rule impossible. These
stunts, carried out in the unreal atmosphere of the House of
Commons (where only 100 or so MPs turned up in the Chamber
on December 17 to debate such a grave problem as unemployment)
reveal how pitifully threadbare is Gaitskellism, in theory and
in practice.

Leaders Who Will Not Lead

As in the political field, so in the industrial. The employing
class is attacking; the workers see the need to fight back or go
under; but the trade union leaders have no countervailing strategy.
All the great class conflicts of the past few years—the Briggs
dispute, the 1957 engineering strike, the London bus strike, the
South Bank lock-out and the BOAC dispute—have found the
workers virtually leaderless at anything above steward level.
Indeed, the national paid officials have not scrupled to stab
their members in the back in the middle of a struggle.
The crisis of leadership does not find its only expression,
however, in the refusal to lead workers into a fight and give free
rein to their energies, or in the open selling out of strikers. It
is just as demoralizing for men to be brought out on strike,
take on single-handed the whole might of the capitalist class and
its State—and then find that their leaders will not extend the
strike in order to win it, but are willing to take their members
back with less than the original demand for the sake of which
workers have been making sacrifices and enduring hardships.
During the 1957 strike of engineering and shipbuilding workers
the leaders adopted the ‘snowball’ technique of striking by stages,
thus showing their fear of bringing the full might of the workers
into play, their fear of the forces they were unleashing and of
their members’ firmness and fighting power, and their hope of
compromises. They shied away from the political implications
of the struggle, and said the challenge was not a challenge to
the Tory government. The Labour Party leaders failed to go
*
86

.M t» a L i- 4 «■ • - v
on record in support of the strikers, and the party’s main spokes­
men in the Commons sought a ‘statesmanlike’ solution. Finally
the union leaders capitulated and accepted a court of inquiry,
under conditions no better than those when the strike began.31
In May 1958 Frank Cousins, general secretary of the Transport
and General Workers’ Union, led the London busmen into a long,
hard fight. From the start it was evident that the busmen could
not win alone. The Tory government had given clear warning
of its intention to isolate the busmen and smash them. The day
the strike began the political correspondent of The Times wrote:
Tt is important to the government that the bus strike should
remain isolated from the dispute over railway pay.’32 A concerted,
planned strategy jvas in operation. One thing alone could have
brought speedy victory to the busmen: the extension of the strike
in order to meet the Tory challenge with an overwhelming show
of strength—first of all by bringing out the drivers of oil and
petrol tankers. The government was fighting with skill and
determination. Not to hit with every weapon the trade union
movement had in its armoury was plain treachery to the busmen.
Cousins went to the General Council of the -Trades Union
Congress and asked for help. The General Council refused.
What happened has been summed up complacently by the leading
newspaper of the employing class: ‘The danger of the most serious
struggle since 1926 was apparent, but the TUC General Council
drew back. At a crucial meeting on June 4, they decided almost
unanimously to advise the union against any extension of the
stoppage.’83 The General Council, in its report to the 1958
TUC, has given its reasons for this betrayal.34 It was an act
worthy to rank beside the betrayal of the miners in 1926.35 The
leaders of the movement’s political wing have abandoned socialist
principles; the leaders of its industrial wing have abandoned
trade union principles.
It would be idle to dwell now upon what Frank Cousins should
have done, and what might have happened if he had acted
otherwise. By failing to appeal to trade unionists on the railways
and in the electricity power stations over the heads of the General
Council, by failing to call out his own members who were in a
position to give direct help to the busmen, by failing to expose
the General Council’s treachery, he paved the way for an uneasy
and unhappy compromise. The readiness of the rank-and-file
busmen to continue the struggle was shown in the vote against
a return to work on terms tantamount to a surrender. Through­
out, the busmen were solid and full of fight. What was lacking
was leadership.
The capitalist class is well aware of the services rendered to
it on this and other occasions by the General Council. The
Economist writes of ‘the present General Council . . . of decent
trade unionists’,3*1 and Macleod, at the 1958 Tory Party Con­
ference, congratulated the TUC leaders, paying a ‘forthright tribute
to the “realism and responsibility” of the TUC’: 87
We might note the wisdom and coolness shown in much more difficult
and important wage negotiations by, for example, the leaders of
the miners, the leaders of the engineers, and over most of the industrial
held. We should appreciate too, the blunt realism that was expressed
in some of the speeches on economic affairs by, for example, Mr Birch,
Mr Cooper and others.3*
When Tory spokesmen talk in this vein, workers who remember
the purpose for which the trade unions were founded may well
begin to ask themselves whether the officials whose salaries they
pay are doing the job for which they are paid. The purpose of
trade union officials, in the eyes of the rank and file, is not to
earn praise from the Tories for their decency, realism, respon­
sibility, wisdom, coolness and caution, but to fight the employers.
Thanks from the employing class to the? union officials for
their help was a feature of the South Bank dispute which aroused
the disgust of building workers and militants in other industries.
Soon after Sir Robert McAlpine and Sons had dismissed 1,250
workers for the purpose of weeding out active trade unionists
(a process described as ‘rephasing’) the London district council
of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers issued
a statement urging building workers not to apply for jobs on
the South Bank site until all the dismissed men had been
re-employed. Whereupon the AUBTW general secretary,
Lowthian, rebuked the district council and declared publicly:
‘The position is, as far as this union is concerned, that there is
no dispute and the job is open to members of this union to
apply for re-employment.’3" Next day H. E. Matthews, national
industrial officer of the National Union of General and Municipal
Workers, said; ‘It should be made perfectly clear that there is
no official dispute and there never has been on this site. The
job has never been “ blacked” by the unions and it is certain
that it never will be “blacked” for this purpose.’ Men reporting
for work were not acting as blacklegs but were supporting the
trade union movement.40 The grateful employers had these words
reprinted on large posters, which were soon pasted up all round
the §ite. And they thanked the union leaders profusely; one

88
 spokesman was quoted as saying: ‘Statements by trade union
leaders have been most helpful.’41 The dismissed stewards at
South Bank had recruited hundreds of men to the trade unions;
yet the trade union officials not only would not lift a finger to
help them, but actively collaborated with the employer to smash
their resistance—and resorted to a vicious witch-hunt, including
the expulsion of militants.
Again, during the strike of 4,000 BOAC maintenance engineers
at London Airport, Jim Matthews of the NUGMW, secretary of
the trade union side of the National Joint Council for Civil Air
Transport, distinguished himself by his consistent hostility to the
strike and to the shop stewards. Though his union had only
seventy-four members among the 4,000, he denounced ‘some
individuals who, whatever machinery there is, will always try
to go on without it and break it’, while ‘when one goes on the
wrong track the rest follow, like sheep’.42 The employers had
refused to meet the union leaders, even for exploratory talks, or
to confirm a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ on wages as a basis for
resumed negotiations. Nevertheless Matthews found it possible
in a BBC broadcast (October 17, 1958) to imply that the unions
might consider the proposals made by the employers for amend­
ments to the working agreement—amendments which would have
seriously crippled the shop stewards’ movement at the airport.
Matthews’s colleagues from other unions criticized him bitterly
for not making it clear that he was not speaking for all the unions.43
Two other activities of this official during the dispute aroused
the strikers’ anger. At one stage he gathered a small group of
men who wanted the strike to be called off and arranged to
meet them before one of the meetings. The idea was that they
would then go in a body to the meeting to vote for a return to
work. This scheme was considered imprudent and abandoned.
And he wrote an article in the Daily Mail threatening a witch­
hunt against the BOAC shop stewards, who were wielding too
much power and could openly challenge ‘official’ trade union
policy if they so decided. The article rebuked the employers
for allowing the stewards to call mass meetings in working time
and have spacg on official notice boards, and for failing to
discipline the stewards. It advanced the demand: ‘Clip the wings
of the unofficial shop stewards’ committee NOW.’44
It was small wonder, then, that at a strike meeting on October
14 Matthews was booed and someone shouted: ‘Why don’t we
get him out?’; that on October 16 his appeal for a return to
work was greeted with cries of ‘traitor’, ‘Quisling’, ‘coward’ and

89

0
‘go home’; that on October 20 there was a shout of ‘get rid
of him then’ when the convener criticized his activities;45 or that
on October 21 the strikers passed a resolution censuring Matthews,
describing his conduct as ‘without precedent in any previous trade
union dispute’ and calling for his immediate removal from the
position of secretary of the trade union side of the National
Joint Council.1®
Soon after the BOAC strike ended new evidence came to
light, and was published in Tribune, of Matthews’s quaint concep­
tion of the responsibilities of trade union leadership, ft was
the report, marked ‘secret and urgent’, of a discussion between
Matthews and the Chief Personnel Officer of British European
Airways on the subject of the ‘Peters case’.47 This discussion,
which had taken place on December 23, 1954, was in effect the
submission of an intelligence report by Matthews to the employers
on how various trade unions would act if stewards were sacked.
Matthews approved the action taken by BEA in the dispute; agreed
that certain men were guilty of ‘grave industrial misconduct’; and
gave his views on the likelihood of joint action between the
Electrical Trades Union and the Amalgamated Engineering Union.
He was asked: ‘Do you feel that if BEA should decide to take
action against certain shop stewards, the former will retain the
widespread public support they enjoy at present?’ He replied:
‘I am doing what I can. . . . It is vitally important to get the
provisions of the NJC agreement across to your men.’ He was
asked: ‘Should BEA decide to take action against certain shop
stewards, if the Press were to ask you if you felt that BEA
were justified in refusing to take back certain men who had been
guilty of grave industrial misconduct, what would your answer
be?’ He replied: ‘I would tell the Press that in my personal
opinion BEA were justified in not taking certain men back. I
have expressed the personal view to BEA that such action at
this time in the circumstances surrounding the discharge of 315
men may be unwise. T would not, of course, say so to the Press.’48
Matthews set the seal to his activities during the BEA and
BOAC disputes when, about the time this revealing document
was published, he joined the red-baiting and ^anti-trade-union
organization known as ‘Common Cause’.
Jim Matthews is only one individual trade union leader. But
his attitude towards his responsibilities as a leader, as summed
up in this document and in his activities during the BOAC strike,
are only the logical extension of the attitude and practice of all
too many national paid officials. Matthews was not the only
*

90

_ s-
trade union leader who opposed the BOAC strike. It should
not be forgotten that it was the decision of the AEU leaders
on October 20 that they would under no circumstances make
the dispute official or give strike pay which ‘dashed the hopes
of the more militant unions’49 and led to the stewards’ recommenda­
tion for a return to work. ‘It is now clear,’ wrote the Manchester
Guardian, ‘that the turning-point in the BOAC dispute came
. . . when the executive of the Amalgamated Engineering Union
decided not to make the strike official. . . . Mr Carron and
his colleagues eventually put their feet down, and in the process
trod heavily on the shop stewards’ fingers.’50
Militants are entitled to call their leaders to account. They
are entitled to ask how many confidential talks have been held
during major disputes, behind the backs of their members, by one
official or another, in a way that could only help the employers
to carry out their aims. They are entitled to ask also why the
national executive of the Labour Party seems content to see
one of its members disgracing the party in this way.
For all the ‘honours’ that the ruling class bestows on Labour
leaders who thus prove themselves ‘constitutionalists’, it views
them with contempt and- frequently treats them like dirt. The
union leaders were not consulted about the sacking of 1,250
building workers at South Bank, nor about the sacking soon after­
wards of 240 men working on the Belvedere power station site.
They were presented with an accomplished fact. About Matthews’s
performance during the BOAC strike the Financial Times wrote:
‘All this . . . has its elements of farce . . . above all, the
spectacle of Mr Matthews as an honest and ineffectual broker,
blowing hot and blowing cold, and apparently unable to control
the men he represents.’51 The contempt of the employers and
their government for the union officials was symbolized during
this dispute by the way they kept them hanging about at the
Ministry of Labour one day from 10.30 a.m. till nearly 1.30 a.m.
the next morning. By the end of fifteen hours, consultations had
taken only forty-five minutes. The union leaders had to ask
journalists what was going on; at one point they nearly staged
a walk-out ‘but no one’, wrote Trevor Evans of the Daily Express,
‘took the lead’. Evans was moved to warn Macleod that these
leaders—‘potentially they are your best allies’—believed that he
was treating them ‘like a lot of petty delinquents in a badly
organized provincial police court because you have ganged up
with the top men of the airlines to “ treat them rough” He
added: ‘Remember, Mr Maitland is as much a nuisance to many

91
of the trade union leaders as he is to Sir Gerard d’Erlanger.
That seems to have escaped your notice.’52

What It Leads To

Their fear of the rank and file, of its energy and initiative,
has prevented the Labour leaders from waging any kind of effective
campaign outside the framework of local and national elections.
Even where campaigns are undertaken, they come to nothing.
The hydrogen-bomb campaign is a case in point. There was one
moderately successful meeting in Trafalgar Square in the spring,
then—silence, until the platform at the 1958 annual conference
secured adhesion to ‘a policy with only little difference from
that of the government’.54
The crisis of leadership has a still more disastrous effect in
helping fascism and reaction to gain ground.
One of the factors responsible for the racial outbreaks in Britain
has been the failure of the Labour leaders to take the movement
into a decisive fight against the Tory government on issues such
as unemployment, better housing conditions and colonial liberation.
In the course of such a fight white workers would have seen their
identity of interests with coloured workers, and young people
would have been educated in the basic principles of working-
class internationalism. No pious statements professing racial
toleration can remedy Labour’s failure to win young workers
away from the appeal of fascist slogans. Only by means of an
uncompromisingly socialist policy, a policy of root-and-branch
opposition to imperialism, can Labour capture the imagination
of young workers, show them the real class role of fascism and
racialism, and imbue them with respect for socialist traditions
and socialist aims. That Labour MPs are permitted without
repudiation to advocate such reactionary solutions as restrictions
on immigration; that no consistent propaganda is conducted against
racialist lies; that no clear demand is made for the outlawing
of the colour bar and of fascist organizations and propaganda;
that no attempt was made to unite white and coloured trade
unionists in active defence of the homes and persons of the victims
of racial persecution: these defects of Labour policy and practice
stem from infirmity of leadership. The fascists take full advantage
of them and will continue to do so.
The victory of de Gaulle in France is a striking analogy. It
was .made possible both by the whole post-war record of French

92
Stalinism and by the class collaboration policies of Gaitskell’s
opposite number and the other leaders of the French Socialist
Party. A heavy responsibility lies on these men’s shoulders.
Instead of arousing the French workers against the imposition
of an anti-working-class regime, they paved the way for it, thus
adding one more to the long series of sordid betrayals over which
the parties of the Second International have presided since the
outbreak of the lirst world war. By helping de Gaulle to power
the socialist leaders sacrificed the elementary interests of the
French workers. They preferred the comfort of parliamentary
negotiations to the class struggle. They were more frightened of
the workers getting 'out of hand’ than of de Gaulle getting ‘out
of hand’.
This choice is always the one made by social democracy. It
pays lip service to ‘democracy’. But in the last analysis it would
rather have military dictatorship than workers’ power. Who
believes that Gaitskell and those around him would act differently
from Mollet? It is by no means fanciful to suppose that Gaitskell
will have such a choice thrust upon him by history. Since 1945
the British employers and Labour leaders alike have been able
to stave off a decisive clash between the capitalist class and the
working class. A decade of more or less full employment, of
rising production and relative prosperity, have made this possible.
But in 1959 the working class still faces—often in a graver
form—all the fundamental problems it faced fourteen years ago.
Now the capitalist class is on the offensive; and in the ranks of
the Labour movement there are stirrings of revolt against the
leaders* passivity and treachery. As one Tory commentator has
acutely observed: ‘Labour may faithfully obey the Gaitskell edict
to appear responsible, constructive and moderate in attacking
the government’s policies, but deep down there is a hankering
for a rollicking, storming, anti-Tory campaign.’34 This desire
‘deep down’ to get to grips with the employing class, to settle
accounts with them, will not be satisfied with parliamentary
formulas or parliamentary fireworks. Sooner or later the new
mood of combativeness will sweep across all the artificial barriers
set up by the ‘constitutionalists’. In particular it will smash
through the barrier between ‘industrial’ and ‘political’ action. The
independent political activity of an aroused working class,
determined to have it out with the Tories, will put on the agenda
the question of working-class power and complete the exposure
of Gaitskell, Matthews and their colleagues begun in the small-
scale encounters of the past few years.

93
1 E c o n o m is t, O c t o b e r 2 5 , 1 9 5 8 .

1A t the 1958 conference the Tory leaders carried out ‘delicate preliminary
work on the selection of motions. To qualify for debate these had
both to be acceptable to the government and capable of gathering all
likely variations of opinion into the same corral’ {ibid. October 18,
1958).
*Henry Fairlie, Daily Mail, December 8, 1958. Fairlie wrote in The
Times, November 4, 1958: ‘Many people are becoming increasingly
disturbed by the growing attachment to violence of a section of the
Conservative Party. . . . The feeling may well grow that the Conservative
Party, in its present composition, is not to be trusted in any question
which involves the use of force, whether at home or abroad!’ Cf.
Economist, October 18, 1958: ‘From all sides [the delegates to the
Tory Party conference] were being urged to take a firm grip on their
emotions, lest the television cameras should catch rows of middle-aged
women screaming for the cat to be used on sexual offenders’; Spectator,
October 17, 1958: ‘There lies perilously close to the surface in some
of the members of the Tory Party a layer of brutal, fascist thuggery
that breaks through at the sign of resolute disagreement’; Economist,
December 13, 1958: ‘Every time . . .'th at Tory backbenchers greet
any protests about alleged violence with hilarious cheers, every time
the government’s reaction seems stonewalling, evasive, or one of ill-
concealed sympathy with the mud-bath technique, the moral image
of Conservatism grows several degrees more unattractive.’
*The Times, November 28, 1958.
*Ibid. November 22, 1958.
*Sunday Times, December 14, 1958.
I C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (1956), p. 79. The approach
to a new policy, he added, was ‘fumbling and hesitant'.
*Manchester Guardian, September 29, 1958.
*‘The most compelling impression of all is that the socialists are an
aging party. The up-and-coming generation, which used to be their
pride and joy not so long ago, was little in evidence. . . . Labour is
still groping for new battle-cries to stir the imagination of young
minds’ {Sunday Times, October 5, 1958).
w The Times, October 4, 1958.
n Observer, October 26, 1958. Cf. ibid. December 14, 1958: ‘There was
Suez. There have been three economic crises. Unemployment is
rising. There is Cyprus. And yet, despite these failures, despite the
fact that the public would normally be longing for a change after
nearly eight years of Tory rule, the Labour Party is still losing ground.’
New Statesman, January 17, 1959.
II News Chronicle, August 25, 1958.
u ‘In the words of one experienced observer, Mr Gaitskcll now makes
an “agreeable” impression. This description riles Mr Shinwell. Since
when, he asked angrily at the party meeting, has it become the role
of the Labour leaders to be agreeable to anybody? Labour, he feels,
is becoming far too respectable; only a militant attack on the Tory
government can arouse a new enthusiasm for socialism in the country’
{Sunday Times, November 2, 1958).
■*

94
n The T im e s , D e c e m b e r 2 2 , 1 9 5 8 . f
‘•'The old-style socialism, as it has been known for the past fifty years,
has passed into twilight It is not merely that the old beloved words
are being translated into the modem idiom: a subtle change in emphasis
is developing and the old signposts are being pulled down. Here were
the elite of a future Labour government parading on the screens and
never once mentioning socialism in its old evocative terms. . . . The
new image of sweet reasonableness and responsible efficiency was
addressed primarily to the new middle classes. . . (Sunday Times,
November 30, 1958). Cf. Economist, December 13, 1958: ‘Mr Gaitskell,
though he could certainly never say so, has been trying to liquidate
and live down his party’s old dogmatic socialism.’
,TTavistock Trumpet, no. 2, October 1958.
**The Times, September 1, 1958.
10C. A. R. Crosland, Spectator, October 24, 1958.
10‘What is to be thought of Mr Tom Williams, openly arguing that the
nationalization of the land must be put aside, not because of its merits,
but because it might lose the election?* (Daily Telegraph, October 4,
1958).
aI The impact of these policy statements on the ordinary voters was
‘feather-weight* (The Times, November 24, 1958). As for the conference
delegates, most of them, ‘on the evidence of a private poll, had not
even read the policy statements that the party has been pouring out*
(Observer, October 5, 1958).
n Economist, October 4, 1958. Cf. Financial Times, October 6, 1958:
‘Under the veneer of unity deep divisions of approach still exist, from
foreign to educational policy.’
a 'It is comfortable and reassuring, with no dark hints that anyone
may be upset by what Labour does. . . . It steps back from "more
socialism” rather than forward to th at . . . Labour has learned a lot
since 1955, and little of its policy now has a nasty taste* (Manchester
Guardian, November 25, 1958). ‘Sensible, moderate and intelligent. . . .
Mr Gaitskell, in getting rid of the sillier ideas about mass nationalization
which still handicapped the party when he became leader, has also
got rid of that spirit of idealism and adventure which inspired the
old socialists in the constituencies. . . . There is a real risk that in
trying . . . to win the middle-class vote, the Labour Party may become
middle-class itself. Instead of skilled labour and unskilled labour, we
shall just have Gaitskelled Labour’ (Observer, November 30, 1958).
‘Labour used to stand for nationalization. It does so no more. Mr
Gaitskell’s first effort at setting his party free from this deadly
encumbrance was to trade it in for the fetish of equality. But the party
has thought better of that, too. . . . When all is said, this is at least
not a socialist programme—although the word is thrown in very
occasionally, like a kidney or two in a steak pudding. Something
is happening to the Labour Party. . . . The Labour Britain suggested
by most of the new programme sounds vastly more acquisitive and
less confiscatory than anything that the old socialists have ever
acknowledged before’ (Economist, November 29, 1958). ‘The fact
remains that the Labour Party’s proposals are dull and vague, and
won’t win them the election. . . . There is nothing left in the Labour

95
 kitty except this kind of tinkering on the one hand and the grandiose
1945-type scheme . . . on the other’ (Spectator, November 28, 1958).
‘On domestic issues [the Labour Party’s] pledges may seem too similar
to the professed intentions of the government to make the choice seem
very important’ (New Statesman, November 29, 1958).
u November 25, 1958.
“ November 25, 1958. This comment must be read in conjunction with
an editorial in the same paper on December 1, 1958. Discussing the
growth in influence of the Marxist movement, it warned the trade union
leaders: ‘Already the [Newsletter] Group seems to have acquired some
degree of influence. . . . The initial success . . . has only been possible
because of the growing weakness and lack of appeal of the official
Communist Party. This has created an ideological vacuum among the
militants in the unions. What is to bo hoped is that the moderate union
leaders will do more to fill it than they have hitherto.* Here are the
most intelligent and percipient commentators of the capitalist class,
aware of the cloud on the horizon in the shape of a nascent Marxist
movement, advising the Labour leaders not to neglect their task of
deceiving the workers and canalizing their militancy into manageable
channels!
” February 1, 1959.
17 'The most puzzling element in the political situation at the moment is
the lack of any sign that the Labour Opposition is as eager to get
office now as the Tory' Opposition under Sir Winston Churchill was
at any time from 1950 until it won power towards the end of 1951*
(Manchester Guardian, December 15, 1958).
“ ‘Labour could give the impression that it differs from the government
in detail rather than purpose—and elections are seldom won by an
opposition which claims it will genuinely do what the government
is pretending to do. In such cases, the government gets the benefit
of the doubt’ (New Statesman, November 1, 1958).
“ ‘The fact is that more delegates than would publicly admit it were
half convinced that the next election, is already as good as lost. . . .
It is the manifest failure of these [policy] statements which is the biggest
single reason for [the Labour Party’s] mood of despair’ (Financial
Times, October 4, 1958).
“ The Sunday Times, referring (November 23, 1958) to ‘the inferiority
complex which is affecting Labour's ranks', wrote: ‘One prominent
socialist was heard confessing the other day that the best the party could
expect was office without power.’ The same paper suggests that ‘if
the socialists were to lose three elections in a row . . . it would mark
the end of the Labour Party as we know it. The movement would have
to start from scratch, to discover a new mainspring.. . (October 19, 1958).
SI See Robert Shaw, ‘The Engineers* Strike 'and the Labour Movement’,
Labour Review, vol. ii, no. 3, pp. 76-81, May-June 1957.
“ May 5, 1958.
“ The Times Annual Financial and Commercial Review t October 27,
1958, p. xx.
“ ‘Most members [of the General Council] . . . were convinced, as was
Mr Cousins himself, that an extension of the strike whether initiated

96
 by the union itself or on the recommendation of the General Council,
would transform the strike from an industrial issue into a much wider
conflict with political implications. But they disagreed with Mr Cousins
in that they did not think that the wages and standards of living of
all workers in all industries depended on the outcome of the busmen’s
strike or that a determined effort to extend the strike would make
the government take a different attitude towards wage increases in
general. On the contrary they thought that an extension of the strike,
which would necessarily bring the unions concerned into direct conflict
with the government, would end in a failure which would be disastrous
for the whole trade union movement’ (Report o f Proceedings at the
90th Annual Trades Union Congress . . . J958, pp. 136-7).
33In The General Strike (1957) Julian Symons makes it clear that the
General Council had failed to prepare for the conflict or draw up a
strategic plan and that some of its members, especially J. H. Thomas,
from the start worked deliberately to betray their followers.
34September 6, 1958.
37Financial Times, October 9, 1958.
“ Cf. ibid. October 3, 1958: T he unions have been showing considerable
caution over the formulation of next year’s claims. There is some
hope, therefore, that by 1959 we may have succeeded in reducing
wage pressure to what can reasonably be afforded.’
wIbid. October 14, 1958. On October 22 the AUBTW executive council,
in a statement, placed responsibility for the stopping of the South
Bank job on ‘a small minority of men’. There is no dispute. . . .
Any attempts to create conditions of dispute and maintain pickets
are entirely unofficial and unauthorized and the executive council is
determined to take disciplinary action with those members who have
and are taking part in such unofficial activity.’
40Daily Telegraphy October 15, 1958.
41 The Times, October 16, 1958. Cf. Daily Telegraphy October 16, 1958:
"Happily, on the South Bank, the firmness of the union leaders is
having its effect*
i7The TimeSy October 15, 1958.
**'Confronted by his angry colleagues . . . later Mr Matthews expressed
his readiness to resign’ (ibid. October 18, 1958).
44October 20, 1958. This article also ventured into the field of red-baiting,
attacking the convener, Sid Maitland, with the words: Tm told he even
has his front door at home painted red.*
45Maitland described him as a person ‘attempting to sow discontent and
confusion so that some small fragment of you will crawl back to
work. . . . Some of the activities of our friend Mr Matthews have
been behind the back and contrary to the official policy of the trade
union side* (Daily Telegraph, October 21, 1958). At the Court of
Inquiry into the BOAC dispute Maitland remarked: ‘By unruly elements
Mr Matthews means member's who do not agree with him. By unruly
he means members that he cannot rule’ (The Times, November 1, 1958).
w‘The sight of this elder statesman of the unions being jeered throughout
the strike by the men he should represent was not a pretty one’
(Economist, October 25, 1958).

97
 * Peters was the stewards* convener at BEA’s London Airport maintenance
base. There was a dispute over the restrictions imposed by BEA on
his carrying out of his duties. The workers held a mass meeting
in working hours and 315 of them were dismissed and only re-engaged
after being required to sign a special document. Peters himself was
not taken back but re-employed at another air station after the
Amalgamated Engineering Union took up his case through a special
appeals arrangement
41Tribune, October 31, 1958. The whole of this document, which has
not received anything like the public attention it deserves, is worth
careful study.
"Manchester Guardian, October 22, 1958.
*• October 23, 1958.
"O ctober 17, 1958.
11Daily Express, October 20, 1958.
“ Daily Telegraph, October 4, 1958.
MSunday Times, November 9, 1958.

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98
 2. THE LABOUR BUREAUCRACY

As early as the middle of the nineteenth century Britain already

exhibited two of the main features of imperialism: she possessed
extensive colonies, and her capitalist class drew super-profits
from their monopoly position in the world market. This was
the economic basis for the emergence in the British Labour
movement of opportunist leaders, i.e., leaders who put the short­
term interests of a section of the working class above the long­
term interests of the whole working class throughout the world.
Out of their super-profits the British capitalists could bribe a
section of their own workers and, in particular, could buy the
leaders of the trade unions. On the basis of the ruthless exploita­
tion of millions in the colonies, the Labour leaders were induced
to enter into an alliance with the employing class. The transition
to the imperialist phase of capitalism at the turn of the century
both intensified this process in Britain and ensured its spread to
other imperialist countries.
There grew up a clearly defined opportunist ideology, the
political theory of social democracy. This ideology was at once
an accommodation to the pressure of bourgeois ideology, an
agreement to live with the capitalist class, and a reflection of
the Labour leaders’ ever-narrowing opportunist practice: first
elevating the immediate interests of the British workers above
the needs of the colonial peoples, then the immediate interests
of particular sections above those of the British working class as
a wholp, finally the interests of the leaders above those of any
section of their members.
The social expression of this opportunism is the emergence
of a parasitic^caste of officials, the Labour bureaucracy. These

99

>
leaders have crystallized into a caste over against the class they
lead. Their material interests are not those of the workers. Their
salaries are appreciably higher than the workers’ wages. They
have the use of motor-cars and other privileges. They move
in an upper-middle-class environment, mingle socially with the
capitalist class, have personal relations with its members and
imbibe attitudes that are quite alien to socialist principles. Many
of the Labour Party leaders and many of the Labour MPs arc
now middle-class in social origins.1 But Labour Party and trade
union leaders, whatever their social origin, are in fact middle-
class in their ideology, their material standard of living and the
position they occupy as an unofficial Civil Service within the
framework of the capitalist State.
The Labour bureaucracy is actuated by conflicting motives, the
resultant of which at any given time determines both its readiness
to enter a particular fight and the precise nature of each successive
compromise or betrayal. It must appear to serve the working
class—i.e., seek to better the workers’ conditions of life, either
by negotiations for wage increases or by legislation. It does not
want the working class to be driven back, for its own position is
involved. An intelligent parasite does not desire the weakening
of its host. But the bureaucracy’s own position, income, privileges
and way of life depend on maintaining the present class relation­
ships and the present system of more or less polite negotiations.
Therefore it is no less interested in preserving the capitalist system
than is the capitalist class itself. So it performs its function of
‘serving’ the working class strictly within the framework of
capitalist society, and suppresses or canalizes any manifestation
of militant sentiments among the masses of the workers. The
bureaucracy has agreed to the indefinite postponement of socialism.
It cannot help the workers to develop confidence in their ability
to transform society, for it lacks any such confidence itself. It
is far more frightened of independent working-class action than
of anything the ruling class may do, and it therefore seeks to
restrict democracy in the Labour Party and trade unions, so
as to forestall any serious challenge to its dominance.
As we have shown, the paid officials of the trade unions, tied
to the capitalist State machine, try to hold the workers back from
a determined struggle, because they fear the political implications
of such a struggle. More than anything else, they dread to unleash
the power of the working class. Where they call strikes they
always try to limit the scope of the battle and oppose solidarity
action. /

100
«
 In recent years there has been a steady increase in the powers
of officials as compared with those of elected committees. This is
especially the case since the employers have shown themselves
less willing to grant concessions, thus reducing the officials’
freedom of manoeuvre. In the aftermath of the 1926 defeat
the bureaucracy managed to tighten its grip on the trade unions,
utilizing such decisions as the York memorandum and the
Bridlington agreement to strengthen the monopoly position of
the large general unions. The attempts by the leaders of the
Transport and General Workers’ Union to prevent dockers in the
northern ports from joining the union of their choice, the National
Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers, and their attempts, when
dockers did so, to smash that union in those ports, are one
example of how the Labour bureaucracy tries to perpetuate its
domination.2
It has been suggested that the emergence of ‘Left’ leaders has
meant an important change in the character of the trade union
bureaucracy. This is not a tenable view. These leaders adjust
themselves to the mood and feelings of their members in order
to control them. .Their Left phrases cover up their lack of any
real policy for struggle against the employers and the Right wing.
The emergence of leaders of this kind does, however, heighten
the strife within the bureaucracy by encouraging the militant
demands of the rank and file.
So long as the Labour movement is controlled by this
bureaucracy, with its conservative interests, the workers will
experience setback after setback, defeat after defeat. The struggle
to end its power and privileges, and its domination over the
Labour movement, is inseparable from the struggle for socialism.
While conflicts are on such a scale and of such a nature that they
can be settled by ‘peaceful’ negotiations and compromises, the
Labour bureaucracy has a part to play. But the declaration of
war by the employing class, and the opening out of more bitter
struggles, are beginning to create more favourable conditions
for the fight against the bureaucracy.

The Betrayal of the Workers

We have an excellent illustration of the role of the Labour
bureaucracy in the record of the 1945-51 Labour governments
on the key issue of nationalization. Labour came to power in
1945 with vast popular support, A real socialist government
 that had chosen to make inroads into the power of the capitalist
class, and had mobilized the industrial workers behind a clear
programme for doing this, could have gone a long way towards
putting the employing class out of business. Yet only a few
months after the general election the capitalists were breathing
sighs of relief about Morrison’s nationalization programme. Thus
the Economist wrote: ‘There is no call for anyone who survived
without terror the shock of the election results to feel alarmed
now. If there is to be a Labour government, the programme
now stated is almost the least it could do without violating its
election pledges.’3
The nationalization measures in fact carried out by the Labour
government suffered from five grave weaknesses, which Clive
Jenkins has summed up in an extremely useful survey:4
(1) Excessive sums were paid in compensation to the ex-owners,
and this imposed crushing interest burdens on the corporations.
The assets of the industries about to be nationalized were
over-valued. At the end of 1955 the total liabilities for compensa­
tion in four important nationalized industries—coal, transport,
electricity and gas—stood at £2,089,800 million. They had also
piled up the total of £1,603,100 million in loans for development
and capital investment. In cash and stock the coal-owners had
received £370,707,683 by the end of 1955. The transport owners
received £1,201,620,621 in 3 per cent, stock plus £40,500,000
compensation in cash.
The 1945 Labour government’s nationalization programme . . . rescued
certain industries from bankruptcy, bailed some out and put others
on parole. By its over-generous compensation it saddled the new
public corporations with enormous liabilities and agreed on a ‘bygones
be bygones’ policy with the financial interests which had milked
certain industries of large profits and neglected to maintain an adequate
programme of reinvestment and research. It also gave a shot in the
arm to an ailing capitalist economy. . . . The act of nationalization
had side-products unforeseen by the rank and file of the Labour
movement*
(2) Representatives of great firms, banks and insurance
companies dominate the boards of the nationalized industries.
In March 1956 company directors had 106 out of the 272
seats in existence. These directors held among them 604 ‘outside’
directorships (excluding enterprises subsidiary to, or associated
with, the corporation board to which they were appointed).
Among the 106 were 49 representatives of insurance companies
and 31 representatives of eighteen banks, ‘It is realistic to

102
estimate/ writes Jenkins, ‘that the political views of these directors
will be, at the very least, those of the Establishment. Some of
them can be identified as active Conservatives and possibly
intrinsically hostile to nationalization.’" Regular officers held
5 seats, civil servants 15, managers 71,7 landowners 9—and
representatives of trade unions, Labour and the Co-operatives
only 47, or 17.2 per cent, of the total number of full-time and
part-time seats.
(3) Workers’ participation in management and control is
still-born.
(4) The salaries paid to members of the boards of nationalized
industries are inordinately high.
The chairman of the British Transport Commission gets £10,000
a year, the deputy chairman . £8,000 and the full-time members
£7,500; the chairman of London Transport £7,500, the deputy
chairman £5,500 and the full-time members £5,000. The chairman
of British European Airways gets £6,500 plus £1,000 expenses
and the chief executive £6,000; the part-time chairman of British
Overseas Airways Corporation £5,000 plus £1,000 in allowances,
the deputy chairman £7,500 plus £500 in allowances and the
managing director £5,000; the chairman of the National Coal
Board £10,000, the deputy chairman £8,000 and the full-time
members £7,500; the chairman of the Central Electricity
Generating Board £10,000, the deputy chairman £7,500, the full­
time members £7,000 and twelve area board chairmen £6,500;
the chairman of the Gas Council £8,500 and the deputy chairman
£7,500.
(5) The nationalization programme was not bold or far-
reaching enough. It left basic industries untouched, and gave
such a powerful section of the employers as the steel bosses too
much room for manoeuvre.
The fiasco of steel nationalization during the post-war term of office
surely proves that sweeping measures of social ownership cannot be
left in storage for years. In the period of waiting, the threatened
private interests, powerfully supported by the employers’ organizations
(FBI, Aims of Industry, Economic League) and by the Press, have
ample opportunity to feed skilful propaganda to [the] public. . . . If
steel had been taken over at the same time as the mines and railways
the success of the industry under nationalization, evident later for
only a brief period, would have become established; the Tories would
never have dared to pass it back into private hands.1
In short, nationalization was carried out in a bureaucratic way.

103
 Administrative measures in place of the mobilization of the
workers. The patching up of capitalism in place of progress
towards socialism. The creation of new privileges instead of
the extirpation of privilege altogether. And the recent policy
statements of the Labour leaders—Industry and Society and The
Future Labour Offers YOU—make it clear that these leaders have
no intention of undertaking any more major nationalization
projects. They are unwilling to challenge the capitalist class.
They want to avoid class struggle. Any substantial extension of
nationalization today can come about only through the action of
the working class as part of the struggle for socialism.
How susceptible the Labour bureaucracy is to pressure and
blackmail by the capitalist class is shown in Montgomery’s
recently published memoirs. They reveal that under the Labour
government he assembled the military members of the Army
Council ‘and asked them if they were all prepared to resign in
a body, led by me, if anything less than eighteen months’ national
service with the colours was decided upon by the government’.
They all agreed, and he notified Shinwell, the Secretary of State
for War. ‘He was a bit startled; he obviously had to inform
the Prime Minister that he was about to lose his Army Council.’
The eventual outcome was the Labour government’s agreement
to eighteen months. Montgomery points out that the Labour
government took this step ‘in the face of great opposition’ within
its own party, but ‘Attlee and Bevin pushed it through for us’.0
The Labour leaders have in short gone over to the other side,
accepting the titles the ruling class bestows on them, aping its
manners and even faithfully copying its attitude towards blacklegs.
The scene depicted in the Daily Mail of Lady Attlee greeting one
of the few London busworkers who scabbed on her workmates
during the strike, sums up an epoch in Labour history. Under
the headlines ‘Grannie the strike-beating clippie. . . . We’re proud
to meet you dear, they said’, the paper told how in a ‘lavish
hotel room’ Mrs Nancy Waymark, ‘the London bus clippie who
refused to strike’, was guest of honour at the Woman of the
Year luncheon.
Grannie Waymark didn’t know that women in high places were watching
her during those seven weeks when she reported for duty despite
the taunts and jeers of her workmates. She knew yesterday when those
same women crowded round to shake her hand and say: ‘We admire
your courage.’ . . . She knew when she was greeted by Countess
Attlee*
The caption to the photograph of this scene said: ‘In the green

104
and gold reception room Lady Attlee is waiting to shake her
by the hand.’
The place for a Labour leader’s wife is not in a lavish hotel
room fawning upon a scab, but out on the picket line giving
practical help to workers in dispute. Countess Attlee, however,
takes her stand alongside the General Council of the TUC, in
the ranks of those who stab the workers in the back, bring comfort
to their enemies and glorify traitors to the working-class cause.

The Witch-hunt
The South Bank dispute and the highly successful national
industrial rank-and-file Conference called by the Editorial Board of
The Newsletter on November 16, 1958, greatly disturbed the leaders
of a number of trade unions. Feeling their positions threatened
by these first intimations of a rank-and-file movement that meant
business, the Labour bureaucrats not only attacked the workers
who were defending trade unionism on the South Bank site; they
threatened members with expulsion for supporting the rank-and-
file Conference or even taking a leaflet about it into a branch
room. Soon Brian Behan, a member of The Newsletter's Editorial
Board, was expelled from the AUBTW (at one time looked on
as one of the more ‘progressive’ unions). Two other AUBTW
members were later expelled, and the leaders erf the union put
out statements condemning and slandering members who had
advocated a policy of resistance to sackings and other attacks by
the employers.
The essence of a witch-hunt is that people are punished, not
for anything they do, but for their ideas and asspeiations—that
ideas are fought not with ideas, but with punitive sanctions. The
Labour bureaucrats quite rightly see the spread of Marxist ideas
and of rank-and-file movements as a challenge to 'their own inept
leadership. Here are men who tell the workers that the job of
trade union leaders is to lead; that the job of the trade union
movement is to fight the bosses, not persuade them to give con­
cessions; that leaders who are prepared to let militants be sacked
rather than face the prospect of a determined struggle to protect
them—a struggle in which the whole energies and resources of
the union would have to be engaged—are betraying the interests
of their members. Incapable of answering those ideas with better
ones, the bureaucrats want very badly to isolate militants who
hold them before these militants have formed dangerously firm

105
 links with the working class and with militants in other industries.
The bureaucrats admit their bankruptcy by wielding the big stick
of proscriptions, bans and expulsions, and by howling ‘conspiracy’
and ‘plot’—a cry which is eagerly fastened on by sections of
the capitalist Press. According to the Economist of February 28,
1959, ‘the main concern of union executives tends to be . . . to
prevent [militants] from forming horizontal groups which might
rival the union’s own vertically organized power. In resisting
the growth of authority of such horizontal groups . . . the union
leaders have been remarkably (indeed ruthlessly) efficient.’
One of the reasons for the peculiar vehemence of the Right-
wing leaders’ anger against The Newsletter and the Conference
was that in the Charter of Workers’ Demands discussed and
adopted by the latter is the clear demand for the removal of the
material base on which the Labour bureaucracy rests: the demand
for modest wages and expenses for officials, the right of election
and recall and the use of loudspeaker vans instead of large motor
cars.11 The leaders see in such demands an open challenge to
their privileges and to the practices by which bureaucracy per­
petuates itself. They therefore take further steps to increase their
hold over the machine. But the bureaucratic method of trying to
silence critics by expelling them is a dangerous weapon to employ.
It tends to be a boomerang, since it brings the heretical views of
those anathematized to the attention of far more workers than
would otherwise have heard about them. It gives the expelled
members a ready-made platform in the shape of various kinds
of appeals procedure. It exposes the bureaucratic restrictions
on democracy in the organizations concerned. It starts members
discussing, thinking and studying—and a membership that
discusses, thinks and studies is not agreeable to Right-wing leaders.
Bureaucracy thrives on docility and apathy. Happily, the witch­
hunt is a powerful antidote to these.
The witch-hunt spread to the political wing of the Labour move­
ment in February 1959. Two Labour councillors in Birmingham,
members of a small organization of shop stewards which had sent
delegates to the national industrial rank-and-file Conference, were
expelled from the Labour Party. They ^ere given twenty-four
hours’ notice of the meeting that expelled them: the ‘evidence’
against them included allegations by a man whom everyone,
including himself, admitted to have been mentally unbalanced
when he made his accusations; the councillors were expected to
answer charges which were completely new to them, immediately
after hearing those charges read out; they were refused a written

m
copy of the charges; and they were refused a month’s postpone­
ment of the meeting to enable them to prepare their case. That
this was a conspiracy to gag critics of official Labour policy was
made clear in Morgan Phillips’s comment (quoted in the
Manchester Guardian of February 13, 1959) that, though those
expelled had the right of appeal, the national executive always
supported local parties in taking strong action. This, commented
the Guardian, looked suspiciously like ‘a quite gratuitous pre­
judgment of the appeal’.
Four weeks after the launching of the Socialist Labour League
on February 25, 1959, the League and its weekly journal The
Newsletter were proscribed by the national executive of the
Labour Party. The proscription has been condemned by many
local Labour Parties and trade union branches, by the executive
of Victory for Socialism and by Tribune. Two local parties in
south London have refused to expel some of their most active
members. In Leeds, nine alleged supporters of the Socialist
Labour League have been expelled by the executive, only to be
readmitted and charged afresh when the executive discovered that
it had acted unconstitutionally. There have been two expulsions
in Leicester and one in Finchley.
From the leaders’ point of view, the witch-hunt in the Labour
Party has been anything but a success. Two months after the
proscriptions, they can point to six expulsions. In that period
many more than six workers who support the aims and ideas of
the Socialist Labour League have joined the Labour Party. And
wherever the rank and file has been consulted the local parties
have refused to expel.
The methods adopted to prevent discussion of policy have
tended to stiffen the resolve of the rank and file that discussion
shall not be stifled, and that members’ democratic rights shall not
be taken away from them.

The Deception of the Workers

The bankruptcy of the witch-hunt as a method of disposing
of critics is matched by the bankruptcy of present-day social-
democratic theory. According to C. A. R. Crosland, ‘the business
of giving the Labour Party a policy attuned to mid-twentieth-
century condition's is more or less complete’ and ‘the new
emphasis, though still encountering some psychological resistance
amongst the local activists, is accepted not merely by the party
leadership but also by most . . . Left intellectuals’.12 (We shall

107
not dwell on the ‘psychological resistance’ to facts which makes
this theoretician airily dismiss the views of those who do all the
work in the local Labour Parties.13) Crosland’s The Future of
Socialism (1956) may fairly be said to reflect the thinking of
Gaitskell and his closest supporters. In this book Crosland did
the following:
(1) He argued that ‘the intellectual framework within which
most pre-war socialist discussion was conducted has been rendered
obsolete’.14 This was because the economy was growing at a
rapid pace, and because economic power was now arranged
quite differently. These two ‘fundamental changes . . . call for
a complete reappraisal of the socialist position’.13
(2) He held that Britain was no longer a capitalist country.
‘Does it make sense to go on speaking as though contemporary
Britain were still similar in kind to the society historically
designated by the word capitalism? Surely not.’1® Referring to
‘the growing irrelevance of the ownership of the means of
production’,17 he declared: ‘To the question “Is this still
capitalism?” I would answer “No” .’18 In short, ‘capitalism has
been reformed out of all recognition’.19
(3) He forecast that the years ahead were ‘more likely to be
characterized by inflation than unemployment’,20 and that ‘full
employment and at least a tolerable degree of stability are likely
to be maintained’.21
(4) He declared that the interests of Labour and management
‘may . . . coincide (as over higher productivity)’22 and that
industrial action to liberate the workers ‘clearly makes no sense
today’,28 and expressed surprise at ‘collective manifestations of
discontent’ in industry, ‘where they express themselves in unofficial
strikes, lack of co-operation, and a general atmosphere of
suspicious antagonism’. Were not industrial relations ‘worse than
one would expect, considering the absence of the normal economic
irritants’? There was a ‘curiously strong tendency within the
Labour Party towards a suspicious, militant, class-conscious
Leftism. . . . The persistence of so much political resentment in
Britain is surely surprising’ and to be attributed to a ‘failure
of social assimilation’(!). Opposition to class betrayal on the
part of trade union officials who became members of nationalized
boards or bought expensive cars was ‘absurdly irrational’ and
‘comical*.24

108
 (5) He opposed the extension of nationalization—‘wrong and
impracticable’ and ‘wholly irrelevant to socialism’25—in favour
of State companies competing with private industry, public share-
ownership and ‘my ideal . . . a society in which ownership is
thoroughly mixed-up—a society with a diverse, diffused, pluralist
and heterogeneous pattern of ownership’.26
It is hard to see which is more ‘thoroughly mixed-up’—Crosland
or the type of ownership that is his ideal. This hotchpotch which
does service for theory among the reformists, and which,
presumably, is intended to win people to the Labour Party and
educate its young members, is simply the ideological reflection of
the caste position, interests and privileges of the bureaucracy.
Respect for genuine socialist theory endangers them, so they
dub it obsolete dogma in need of revision. Why describe a society
in which they themselves enjoy distinct advantages, and in which
their battle for admission to the ‘Establishment’ has been won,
by such an unpleasant term as ‘capitalism’? Why talk of class
strife? All that kind of thing is too comical for words. And
if reforms are needed, let them be in the direction of a ‘diverse,
diffused, pluralist, heterogeneous’, thoroughly bastard economy.
So does the confidant and adviser of the leader of Her Majesty’s
Opposition and Her Majesty’s socialists usher in the era of class
peace and co-opcration, and bury the bogies of nasty, suspicious,
class-conscious Leftism with his pen.
Unfortunately for Crosland the capitalist system does not adhere
to the formulas sketched out in his reformist textbook. A theory
which is obsolete almost before the ink is dry on the paper is
not a reliable guide for Labour Party members. Capitalism,
unemployment, class struggle: these irrational prejudices
stubbornly refuse to be conjured away. Intoxicated by the fumes
of an approaching general election, the Labour leaders are blind
and deaf to the future that beckons if the workers are left
without leadership. But it is less and less possible to deceive the
‘local activists’ and other workers with tales of how capitalism
is no longer capitalism, exploitation is no longer exploitation aind
the class struggle is part of more or less remote history. The
ideological rearming of the working class has begun.1

1‘The Labour Party in the House of Commons is steadily being trans­

formed, shedding more and more of its characteristic elementary-school

109
 section. At the beginning of this third of a century over 90 per cent,
of the parliamentary party belonged to this section: at the end of it
little more than half did so. Whether this trend will continue remains
to be seen, but there is certainly no sign yet of any arrest in the process
it indicates. If it goes on, how far will it take the Labour Party7—
and what will be the effects on Labour policy and Labour prospects?
Here are some interesting questions on which to speculate’ (J. F. S.
Ross, Elections and Electors Studies in Democratic Representation, 1955,
p. 414). In the Pontypool by-election, according to the Observer
(November 9, 1958), some Labour voters had doubts about the
candidate’s being a solicitor rather than a local steelworker or miner:
‘Labour, it is suggested sadly, no longer wants the working man to
represent i t Look at Aberavon again, one is told, where a young
banister with fanning connexions . . . will inherit one of Britain’s
biggest steel constituencies.’
See William Hunter, ‘The Dockers and Trade Union Democracy’,
Labour Review, voL iii, no. 1, pp. 5-10, January-February 1958.
‘ November 24, 1945.
* ‘Retreat: the Labour Party and the Public Corporations’, The Insiders
(1958), Universities and Left Review, no. 3, Winter 1958.
*Ibid. pp. 44-5.
*Ibid. p. 45.
T'Most of them were highly-paid employees of the former owners or
actually held directorships in the firms taken over, which might have
tended to form their political views. All are certainly highly paid
now. Many are full-time board members receiving extremely large
salaries. . . . These managers have become corporate-rich’ (ibid.
pp. 48-9).
9
Mike Artis and Peter Sedgwick, ‘The Scope of Nationalisation*, ibid.
p. 39.
»The Memoirs of Field-Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. K.G.
(1958), pp. 479-80.
10
October 3, 1958.
11
The text of the Charter as amended and adopted appeared in The
Newsletter, vol. ii, no. 78, pp. 305-6, November 22, 1958, and in Labomr
Review, vol. iii, no. 5, pp. 152-4, December 1958.
USpectator, October 24, 1958. (My emphasis—PF.)
n
Cf. The Times, January 19, 1959: ‘Will the most zealous (and, therefore.
often the most extreme) workers be disillusioned rather than fired
by the lecture M r Gaitskell is reading to them?’
14
Crosland, The Future o f Socialism, p. 41.
15
Ibid. 1C
Ibid. p. 67.
11
Ibid. p. 68. *Ibid. p. 76.
Ibid. p. 517. *° Ibid. p. 95.
Ibid. p. 517. * ibid. p. 202.
n Ibid. p. 93. 14Ibid. pp. 193-203.
a Ibid. pp. 485, 496. 14Ibid. p. 496.

lie
 3. CENTRISM

W hat is generally called the ‘Left wing of the Labour Party* is

a political current—to be exact, a whole skein of journals,
individuals and loose groupings of various shades—intermediate
between Right-wing reformism and Marxism. Some of the most
prominent representatives of this Centrist trend are middle-class
intellectuals, and the trend as a whole displays many of the
distinguishing features of the middle class. It lacks any consistent
political line, policy, method or plan of work. It is consistent
only in being impressionistic, buffeted alternately from Right and
Left, at once half-attracted and half-repelled by the power of
the workers, vacillating from one extreme to the other. The
strength of Centrism at its best is its dislike of oppression and its
liberal regard for ‘fair play*, though there are many curious blind
spots in the Centrist’s field of vision. Its cardinal weakness
is political cowardice, sugared over with hypocritical phrases:
cowardice in the face of bourgeois ‘public opinion’, cowardice
in the face of Transport House decrees. The Centrist will often
protest', he will less often act; he is very ready to capitulate. He
wants socialism, but without class struggle.
This is the essential difference between Centrism and Marxism.
The former denies the connexion between the working-class
struggle and the achievement of socialism. From this flow two
basic weaknesses. First, it has no conception of building a
socialist leadership through conscious intervention in the class
struggle. And secondly, it substantially agrees with the Right
wing in accepting the supremacy and inviolability of parliamen­
tary institutions. For Centrists the test of a future Labour
government is not its policies, nor what it does, but whether or not
it includes ‘Left-wingers’.
 The rise and fall of ‘Bevanism’ shows very precisely both the
limits and the real nature of Centrism. This movement arose,
and obtained the support of most of the Labour Left, because
of the growing opposition of the mass of Labour Party members
to their leaders’ pro-capitalist policies. Its development reflected
a shift to the Left on the part of the rank and file. Such left­
ward movements tend to coalesce around the Labour leaders
who are most sensitive to mass pressure, however confused, woolly
and hesitant these leaders may be. These characteristics, indeed,
often reflect the confusions and hesitations of the rank and file.
In the long run the course of the struggle, inside and outside the
party, leads to relative clarity and firmness among a section of
the rank and file. But few of the Centrist leaders, if any, can
ever make the leap to a consistent working-class standpoint.
Some make their peace with the Right wing, as Bevan himself
did at the 1957 Labour Party conference on the issues of
nationalization and the hydrogen-bomb. Now, his political
degeneration completed, he has become ‘Mr Gaitskell’s right-
hand man’.1 Yet this turn full circle was implicit in the manner
and matter of his original revolt. Both the issue that Bevan
chose to make a stand on, and his whole subsequent evolution,
made it clear that his fundamental disagreement with the Right
wing was not on fighting communism and the colonial revolution,
but on how to fight them. His efforts were directed, not to
preparing the working class for power, but to convincing the
capitalist class that if it did not pursue a more flexible policy,
communism was bound to grow. His writings of this period
became a nine-days wonder. Today they are unread and forgotten,
while Bevan himself shows the crassness of all middle-of-the-road
attempts to criticize Tory imperialism by accusing the Tories
of a list of political arrests in the colonies which includes the
name of Nkrumah, who was in fact arrested by a Labour
government!
The refurbished Victory for Socialism organization has been
an attempt to fill the vacuum in Centrist leadership, at a time
when discontent was growing among Labour Party members over
the lack of a fight against the government and the lack of
constructive socialist policies. As soon as this attempt began
the Right wing threatened disciplinary action, and the VFS leaders
promptly disavowed any intention of forming a centralized
organization. The principal weakness of VFS is that it has
not turned its face to the industrial workers and the trade unions.
This is why it has conspicuously failed to galvanize the ordinary

112
members of the party, so that by the 1958 annual conference
the Sunday Times could write: T he most surprising feature was
the collapse of the Left. . . . Even the Victory for Socialism
group, which was to be the spearhead of the campaign for more
full-blooded socialism, seemed pretty ineffective.’2 It was ineffec­
tive, and will remain so, because it evades the questions of
working-class action and working-class power. Its leaders’
horizons are limited by Parliament, which is where they ‘fight’,
manoeuvre and guard against committing themselves on any
question of principle. Thus many of the ‘Left’ MPs agreed to
sponsor the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and to have their
names on its letter-heads. But when members of the Direct Action
Committee Against Nuclear War went to the Commons to ask
them to make a stand few Labour MPs were even prepared to
see them. ‘It is obvious,’ said one of the campaigners, ‘that
although we are prepared to go to prison they are not even
prepared to divide the House.’3 A ‘Left’ that is content to
be a ‘loyal’ Left, that fails to fight* that is silent on basic socialist
principles, is doomed to act as a Left cover for the pushing
through of Right-wing betrayals of the workers’ interests.
This is not to say that joint activity between the Marxists and
the Centrists is not possible or desirable. Indeed, one of the
reasons why Marxists are in the Labour Party is to conduct just
such joint activity, in the course of which they seek to bring
the Centrists as close as possible to a working-class outlook
and to give them an understanding of class realities and the class
struggle. But nothing is to be gained by minimizing the gulf
on all fundamental questions between even the most sincere
and thorough-going Left-winger in the Labour Party and the
Marxists. At one end of the Centrist spectrum there are many
socialists who, especially after the end of ‘Bevanism’ and the
abandonment of socialist policies by the Right-wing, can and
will be won, in the course of the struggles now unfolding, for
the Marxist viewpoint. The gulf between their thinking and that
of the Marxists will be narrowed, and finally bridged, as a result
of their own experiences. At the other end Centrism shades off
imperceptibly into the Labour bureaucracy, a part of whom, less
short-sighted than the rest, are always reluctant to lose touch with
the workers when a substantial movement to the Left is * er
way. But no type of Centrist can lead a struggle for power.
Fear of the workers’ independent activity is part of the ideological
baggage of Centrism. The most sharply the question of the
conquest of power comes to the forefront the more does Centrism
try to canalize the workers1 aspirations and activity into
respectable, harmless, peaceful and parliamentary channels—as
Bevan, for instance, advised road haulage workers not to challenge
by industrial action the Tories’ denationalization of their industry.
One other variety of Centrism is represented by the publications
New Reasoner' and Universities and Left Review. The latter has
been described by Crosland as ‘not a new development in Left-
wing thinking, but a last-ditch defence of the old ideas’.4
Unfortunately this is far from accurate. While many excellent
contributions to discussion among socialists have appeared in both
these journals, their main trend is away from involvement in
working-class struggles to a new, subtler form of Centrism. This
reflects the pressure of capitalist society on a layer of intellectuals
who arc would-be socialists—some even would-be Marxists and
would-be revolutionaries—but are too indecisive to manage it.
Uncertainty about whether anything can be done, and if so what
and how, is a characteristic of this trend. Others are its fear of
working-class action, its inability to see the possibility of a
working-class conquest of power, and, above all, its opposition
to the theory and practice of the Marxist movement as ‘sterile’
and ‘dogmatic’.

’ Observer, November 16, 1958. The personal tragedy of Bevan, the

aging prisoner of the Right wing, has been written about a good deal
lately. See The Times, October 4, 1958: ‘M r Bevan at party conferences
these days is a prisoner of his past. On the Tribune platform he
soliloquizes wistfully about the necessity of compromise and the
tarnished ideals of the party. But on the official platform the anticipa­
tion of the responsibilities of office and the discretion its achievement
imposes on him bind him securely to the other members of the
executive’; Economist, November 8, 1958: ‘The malaise of Mr Bevan.
. . . [His] speech, with its groping, dispirited manner, came across even
less effectively than it reads in print’; Daily Express, November 10,
1958: ‘What is the matter with Mr Bevan this session? Where has
the old ginger gone? He spends little time in the debating chamber.
He has contributed one listless, confused speech on foreign affairs’;
New Statesman, November 29, 1958: ‘Now Bcvanism is no more, and
Mr Bevan himself may be photographed from time to time sitting
amiably at the leaders* side’; The Times, December 8, 1958: ‘For
some reason, Mr Bevan, since he became the Shadow Foreign Secretary,
has lost the resilience, the buoyancy, and the superabundant vitality
that for so long marked his every political action. What might the
reason be? . . . He is the one man of stature in the party who has the
personal power to reconcile the Right and the Left wings, as they
✓
114
 were never wholly reconciled under the leadership of Ernest Bevin.
on a foreign policy that in practice can never be fundamentally distinctive
from Conservative foreign policy’; and Spectator, December 12, 1958;
'Since that terrible moment at Scarborough when I heard him refer
to his age for the first time in public, and a great gulf of yearning
and broken ambition seemed to open before him, Mr Bevan has, been
the Shadow of a shadow.’
1October 5, 1958.
*The Times, March 3, 1959.
*Spectator, October 24, 1958.

115
 4. THE COMMUNIST PARTY

T he greatest betrayal of the British working class since the end of

the second world war has been the policy of ‘Left-wing* leaders
of the National Union of Mineworkers towards the closing of pits
and the dismissal of thousands of miners.
Instead of mobilizing their members, who are the backbone of
the working class, in a determined struggle to prevent the growth
of unemployment in their industry, these leaders merely brought
train-loads of miners to London to march through the streets and
lobby MPs. Instead of organizing a campaign to prevent the
National Coal Board from solving its problems by throwing miners
on the scrap-heap, they acquiesced in the NCB proposals. Instead
of resisting this Tory blow at the miners, and through them at
the whole working class, they caved in, making it correspondingly
more difficult to resist future blows.
The names of these leaders are Arthur Horner (now retired),
Will Paynter and Abe Moffat. They are members of the so-called
Communist Party. We say ‘so-called* because this once revolu­
tionary party long ago abandoned communist principles. No
longer does it aim to lead a socialist revolution. Nor, despite
what is written in the witch-hunting Press, does it give Marxist
leadership to workers in struggle.
In the Standards strike, the Communist Party made a bloc
with the Right wing to secure a return to work on terms which
meant victory for the employers, the weakening of trade union
organization and the victiniization of militants. In the prolonged
strike at Nortons, the Communist Party members among the
Amalgamated Engineering Union officials tried to stop real help
being given to the strikers. In the BMC dispute the Communist

116
 Party joined with the Right wing to substitute the right of
consultation and the right to compensation for the demand of
‘No sackings', and the Daily Worker hailed the return to work
as a great victory. At Briggs, the line was to take the workers
back on a promise of negotiations over victimization. In the
1957 engineering and shipbuilding strike, the Communist Party
waged no serious campaign to resist the sell-out or to rally the
areas against it. In the South Bank lock-out, one union com­
mittee under Communist Party influence reversed its support for
the locked-out men and called for acceptance of the Conciliation
Board’s findings, while the Daily Worker ran the AUBTW’s
witch-hunting statement under the headline: ‘Keep union rules
or get out, trouble makers told.’1 This was the same word that
the employers, the Right-wing union leaders and the witch-hunting
Daily Sketch were using to describe the South Bank militants.
Over and over again Communist Party trade union officials have
acted as the loyal spokesmen of the Right wing and the bearers
of Right-wing decisions to end a strike on terms identical with,
or less favourable than, those offered by the employers when the
strike began; or have resisted every attempt to extend the strike
in order to win it more rapidly.
Since about 1935 the Communist Party leaders, far from
fostering militant rank-and-file movements in industry, have almost
always opposed them, despite the party’s advocacy of such
movements in earlier periods of its history.2
Large numbers of industrial workers who have joined the
Communist Party because it seemed to be the only organized
force helping the fight against the employer at the point of
production, have become very puzzled, and often disillusioned,
about the party’s zigzags on industrial questions, on such issues
as redundancy and the attitude to certain individual trade union
leaders. To R. Palme Dutt, the party’s vice-chairman, the
majority of the trade union leaders—the men who stabbed the
London busmen in the back—are ‘conscientious, serious, hard­
working’ men.3 Militants in the building trade are ‘trouble
makers’, but trade union bureaucrats are worthy of high praise.
But to serious workers the foreign policy of the British Com­
munist Party seems no less puzzling than its industrial policy.
The party’s attitude to the anti-H-bomb campaign has already
been discussed.4 The Daily Worker failed to utter a word of
protest against the arrest and imprisonment by Nasser of Egyptian
and Syrian communists—until Moscow had spoken. When the
Tory Prime Minister went to visit Khrushchev he was headlined

117
 in the Daily Worker as ‘MacMoscow’. And Ivor Montagu can
write an article on peace which lists the supporters of the World
Peace Council—some of them ‘top people’: ‘an uncle of the
last Emperor of the Manchus . . . elegant Indian Congressmen
. . . the Queen Mother of Belgium*5—without once mentioning
the working class, or any of its organizations, or the part it alone
can play in ridding the world of war.
What does it all mean? How is it possible that the party
which claims to be the heir of Marx and Lenin and to carry
forward their revolutionary ideas in Britain today is nothing more
or less than a Left Centrist group? How has the Communist
Party come to degenerate into a ‘Left’ cover for Right-wing
betrayals of the workers, consistent only in its defence of every
twist and turn in the policy of whichever Russian leader happens
to be in control at any particular moment?
The answer is that the Communist Party is no longer a Marxist
party at all. Its leaders are Stalinists, and Stalinism, though it
claims to be Marxist and adapts to its own purposes some of the
terminology of Marxism, is in fact an utter abandonment of
Marxist theory, method and practice.
Stalinism is the theory and practice of a specific Labour
bureaucracy, which arose in Russia under the pressures exerted
by world imperialism on the world’s first workers’ State. The
essence of Stalinist theory is an agreement to live with world
capitalism on the part of the caste of officials which arose in
Russia in the early twenties, and which succeeded in usurping
the power of the Russian working class because that class was
exhausted in bloody battles, and because the workers in other
countries had not succeeded in following the example of the 1917
revolution, but had left their Russian comrades isolated in a
hostile capitalist world.
Claiming to be acting in the interests of the Russian workers,
but in fact safeguarding its own caste position, privileges, and
interests, the Russian bureaucracy speedily abandoned working-
class internationalism. No longer was it the task of the victorious
revolution to arouse the workers of other countries. In place of
working-class internationalism the bureaucracy fashioned and
propagated the counter-revolutionary theory of ‘socialism in one
country’. The logic of this theory, which was completely alien
to everything Marx and Lenin had ever written about tjie socialist
revolution, was that the revolution everywhere else in the world
was to be postponed for an indefinite period. Meanwhile, the
workers of other countries and the colonial peoples were the
reserves of the Russian bureaucracy. The task of communist
118
 parties outside Russia was no longer to lead the workers in the
conquest of working-class power, but to act as the advanced
frontier guards of the Russian bureaucracy and to use the workers
under their influence as bargaining counters in Soviet foreign
policy. If the aim of world socialism was pushed into the
background, or abandoned, what need was there for a General
Staff of the world revolution? And, in fact, the communist parties
soon ceased to be revolutionary parties in any sense of the term;
the dissolution of the Communist International in 1943 was
merely the formal ratification of what had taken place many years
before.
The substitution of Stalinist theory and policy for Marxist theory
and policy generated a series of working-class defeats all over
the world. The 1923 revolution in Germany was defeated. The
1926 General Strike in Britain was betrayed by ‘Lefts’ as well as
Rights on the General Council of the Trades Union Congress,
the Russians failing to make a demonstrative break with these
‘1-efts’ (Purcell, Hicks and Swales), with whom they sat on the
Anglo-Russian Committee. The 1926-27 revolution in China was
defeated. Hitler was victorious in Germany in 1933. Franco
defeated the Spanish revolution of 1936-39. The communist
parties in France and Italy failed to lead a working-class revolution
in 1944-45, accommodations such as the Yalta and Potsdam
agreements confining the area where the capitalist class was
overthrown to eastern Europe, where the Stalinist bureaucracy
could control the new workers’ States and use them as its own
protective shield.
Another result of the victory of Stalinism in the international
communist movement was the murder of a whole generation of
revolutionaries. The Marxist opposition in the Soviet Union,
which strove for an internationalist, working-class approach to
questions, for free discussion, and for a struggle against the
bureaucracy, was physically annihilated. Its leader Leon Trotsky
was murdered in exile by an agent of Stalin’s. Something of
what happened in the 1930s in the Russian jails was revealed by
Khrushchev in his famous ‘secret’ report to the Twentieth Congress
of the Soviet Communist Party, in 1956. But Khrushchev lifted
only a tiny corner of the veil. Tito has recently revealed that in
the purges of the 1930s more than 100 Yugoslav communists
‘found death in Stalin’s prisons and concentration camps’; they
were innocent persons ‘killed by their own people as traitors
to the ideas for which they had fought all their lives’.** (The
murder of Imre Nagy in 1958 indicates that this feature of
 Stalinism in power is far from being a thing of the past.) But
in any case the most important of Khrushchev’s omissions did
not relate to the Stalinist terror; he omitted to give—because
he could not give—any Marxist analysis of the degeneration in
Soviet society, the Soviet State and the Soviet Communist Party
of which the terror was only the most heinous illustration. The
necessary Marxist analysis had already been given by Trotsky,
twenty years before, in his book The Revolution Betrayed, which
must be the starting-point for any real understandings not only
of ‘what went wrong’ in Russia, but also of how the degeneration
of the workers’ State there can be overcome and socialist
democracy and workers’ power restored.7
This is the background against which the degeneration of
the British Communist Party has to be seen if this degeneration,
and the practical consequences which flow from it, are to be
properly understood.8 This party claims to stand forth as the
only Marxist alternative to Right-wing Labour. But, in fact, as
early as the middle twenties Stalinism had turned the British
Communist Party from a fighting organization into a pressure
group operating on British capitalism and the British Labour
bureaucracy; from a revolutionary party into a mere appendage
of the ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. Again and again
this party has sacrificed the real interests of the British workers
to the narrow, conservative interests of the Kremlin rulers. Again
and again it has switched its policy in accordance with their
requirements; but its theoretical decay is so devitalizing that it
has never made any real examination or analysis of the line of
the preceding period. The leaders of the British Communist
Party, trained in the Stalinist school of falsification of history,
can neither learn from their mistakes nor educate their members
in Marxist principles on the basis of those mistakes. For new
members of the party the history of the organization they have
joined begins at the last ‘great turn’^ in policy. What happened
before then is a book that is closed, locked and sealed with
seven seals. To serious workers there is no less attractive feature
of the British Communist Party than its inability to write its
own history. To conceal past mistakes is to mislead and
miseducate the workers; it is a confession of bankruptcy. *
‘Socialism in one country’ is only one among a number of false
theoretical propositions which have led to the degeneration of
the Communist Party in Britain and to its failure to play a part
of any significance in British political life. From the abandonment
of revolutionary prospects, preparations and initiative flows the
A
120
 equally un-Marxist theory of ‘peaceful coexistence’. If the
principal task of the communist parties is to win friends and
influence people on behalf of the Kremlin, if the capitalist system
is going to ‘exist’ side by side with the USSR for decades, then
why struggle to overthrow the capitalist system? Why fight for
socialism? The task of these parties is reduced to working for
an alliance between their governments—regardless of those govern­
ments’ class basis or political colour—and the Soviet government.
The theory of ‘peaceful coexistence’ demands peaceful coexistence
between the working class and the capitalist class. It demands
the containment of the class struggle, the damping down of
independent working-class action, and the reliance on ‘broad peace
campaigns’ in place of working-class opposition to war
preparations.
‘Socialism in one country’ in place of working-class inter­
nationalism and ‘peaceful coexistence’ in place of class struggle
have in turn led to two other fundamental revisions of the
theoretical postulates of Marxism: the idea that a ‘peaceful
transition to socialism’ is possible, and the idea that the workers
can achieve power through Parliament, without throwing up their
own organs of struggle and power—soviets or workers’ councils.
The entire Marxist theory of the State, the proletarian revolution
and the dictatorship of the proletariat is twisted into an
unrecognizable form in The British Road to Socialism. The
leaders of the Communist Party do not consider that the working
class is capable of taking power. To them the workers are a
social force, certainly, but a force to be manipulated from above.
The party programme is not a programme for power, not a
revolutionary programme, but a reformist programme. In essence
it is no different from the Fabian conception of how socialism is
to be achieved. Someone else, not the workers, will do the
job: someone who knows better than the workers what is good
for them, who is cleverer and more astute than they, who will
legislate on their behalf. This is a mockery of Marxist leadership.
The Communist Party is not an independent Marxist party and
is not capable of waging the class struggle through to the over­
throw of capitalism.
To crown this policy of class collaboration in place of class
struggle there are sweet words for Right-wing Labour leaders,
or collaboration with them, in the hope that they can be persuaded
to come out in support of some aspect of Soviet foreign policy.
When the much-vaunted Communist Party ‘support’ for strikes
is examined, a curious pattern is found. The ordinary communist

121
militant on the job fights hard alongside his fellow-workers to
win the strike. The Daily Worker prints a news item, or several
news items, about it. But when it conies to getting solidarity
action from workers elsewhere, even workers under communist
leadership, all kinds of specious reasons are advanced by the
party’s industrial department for this being impossible, or
inadvisable, or unwise. Very often the kind of massive support
that would win a strike in a few days, and avoid a great deal of
hardship and sacrifice, is blocked by Communist Party officials,
and by trade union officials who are Communist Party members,
despite all their verbal support of the workers who are in the
front line. ‘Support’ boils down to mere propaganda support,
nicely adjusted to avoid offending Right-wing susceptibilities. But
news items are no substitute for far-sighted and careful strategic
planning, for sound leadership, for reliance on the rank and file.
The fact of the matter is that the Communist Party leaders
and industrial department are not really concerned about fostering
the creative energy, initiative and independent activity of the
rank and file. They are primarily concerned with winning positions
in the trade union machine. They are concerned with safeguarding
the offices they hold in the unions, and getting hold of some more,
not with mobilizing the workers to help sections engaged in
struggle.
The Communist Party makes many calls for ‘unity’. What it
fails to show the working class is that united working-class action
can come about only through destroying the influence of the
reformist leadership. This can be done only in an open struggle
against the Right-wing leaders, in which the workers, in the course
of their own experience, will see these leaders as they really are.
The Communist Party leaders rely, not on taking the workers
through experiences of struggle, but on various kinds of pressure,
manoeuvres, private arrangements and agreements, and the winning
of positions. Their strategic milestones are not major strikes, but
trade union elections. They say to the workers in effect: ‘Don’t
waste your time on rank-and-file movements. Elect enough of
us to leading positions in the unions, and all will be well.’
This conception leads to betrayal after betrayal. And the root
cause of these betrayals is that the fundamental purpose of the
Communist Party’s industrial policy is not to win strikes and
prepare the workers for the conquest of power, but to win allies
for the Kremlin. To this end the struggle for more militant
leadership is completely subordinated, though for tactical reasons
lip-service is still paid to it on occasion.

122
 To maintain their party as an instrument of the Soviet
bureaucracy, the Stalinists have wiped out all vestiges of working-
class democracy within it. This is not an abstract question. It
is not a matter of formal rights and constitutional guarantees,
of what is written in the rule book. It is a matter of whether
the members of the party can change its policy, or correct it on
the basis erf their own experience, or seek to return to a genuine
Marxist approach to the problems 'of the working class. They
can do none of these things, and any serious attempt to do
them is visited with expulsion, just as in the countries where the
Stalinist bureaucracy is in power dissidents are penalized in various
ways, from the loss of their jobs to imprisonment or death.
The suppression of independent and critical thinking inside the
party has not only caused large numbers of members to leave it
or to lapse into inactivity, especially since the Khrushchev
revelations; it has also been one* of the main reasons for the
party’s isolation from the Left in the Labour Party. A party
where critics and dissenters are unable to make their voices
heard, or are expelled, is not one that can have any appreciable
influence on the growth of a socialist movement among Labour's
rank and file. To conceal from its members the degree of its
isolation, and to assuage their anxieties, the party’s leaders repeat
monotonously that ‘without the Communist Party there can be no
Left’—occasionally varying aphorism with exhortation: ‘The best
way to transform the Labour Party is’—we wait agog for the
magic formula—‘to join the Communist Party and help to develop
its work and activity.’9 To buttress these high-sounding claims,
the party had to break its long silence about the existence of a
genuine Marxist movement with a series of attacks on The
Newsletter and the national industrial rank-and-file Conference.10
The tragedy of the British Communist Party born in a blaze of
revolutionary enthusiasm nearly forty years ago is that it has so
betrayed the interests of the workers it claims to lead that they
turn from it in disgust, all too often unaware that what they
are turning from is not communism or Marxism, but their complete
negation. The theoretical degeneration for which Stalinism has
been responsible has confused all too many line people, derailed
their thinking and destroyed them as working-class leaders. Of
all the crimes which history will lay at the door of Stalinism none
is more odious than the systematic miscducation of workers. A
whole generation of workers who wanted to be communists has
been skimmed off and stuffed with crude formulas which,
accordipg to the requirements of current policy, have done service

123
 for Marxist thinking. All too often these workers have gone
into the political wilderness, unlamented by leaders whose thought
starts, not from the need of the working class for leadership,
but from the needs of the bureaucracy whose outpost they are.
But this tragedy is only one side of the coin. One of the
most encouraging features of the 1956-57 crisis in the British
Communist Party, a crisis much deeper and more serious than
any previous one, was a great revival of interest in Marxism
among the party’s rank and file: both among those who resigned
or were expelled, and, though to a lesser extent, among those
who stayed in. This rebirth of Marxist thinking, which is still
only in its infancy, was powerfully stimulated by the discovery
that there existed a corpus of literature analysing the degeneration
of the Soviet Union from the standpoint of Marxism. Many
workers have been saved for Marxism by the existence of this
analysis. At the same time there is now within the ranks of the
Communist Party, despite all the bans and proscriptions, a growing
readiness on the part of industrial workers to discuss with Marxists,
read their literature and fight shoulder to shoulder with them
on the picket-line. The class struggle is breaking down many
barriers and will break down many more. Some thirty members
of the Communist Party defied their leaders’ injunction against
attending the Newsletter Conference.
Rank-and-file communist militants are aware that it is foolish
and short-sighted not to wage a united resistance to witch-
hunting attacks. Blinded by their hatred and fear of the rise
of the Marxist movement, the Communist Party leaders will not
engage in joint defence of witch-hunt victims. They will not
protest against the proscription of the Socialist Labour League
and the banning of The Newsletter by the Labour leaders.
Marxists believe, as a matter of principle, that joint work and
joint activity with Communist Party members are essential if
the witch-hunters are to be defeated. In the course of this joint
work and joint activity, which have begun, they hope to engage in
comradely and mutually beneficial discussions that will help
forward the working-class cause.

Many workers-will ask why we who now criticize the Communist

Party from the standpoint of Marxism did not criticize earlier
the abuses, crimes and betrayals perpetrated by Stalinism. Why
did it take the Soviet-Yugoslav rapprochement, or the Khrushchev
revelations, or the rehabilitation of Rajk, or the Poznan riots, or

124 \
 the Hungarian revolution—why did it take one or other of these
events in a foreign country to open our eyes to the true character
of the party to which we gave our allegiance?
In answering this question it is necessary to say first that those
members of the Socialist Labour League who left, or were expelled
from, the Communist Party in 1956-57 do not repudiate every­
thing they did in that party, nor everything the party did while they
were in it. The Communist Party has not become utterly black
for us now. We fought many fights, and took a stand on many
issues, where it was necessary to fight and right to take a stand.
We thought we were fighting capitalism, and very often we were.
But a closer examination of the history of the movement shows
that the way our party conducted the fight led to many of our
blows not landing on the target, but on honest communists. All
the time we wanted to get to grips with capitalism. We joined
the Communist Party to do this; we left it for the same reason.
It is precisely because we, unlike the breast-beaters of the
‘New Left’, are faithful to the best we learned in the Communist
Party that we have become Trotskyists.
Why did it take us so long to find out about Stalinism? There
are two sets of reasons: political and philosophical.
We believed in the socialist revolution. We still believe in it.
But we also believed, mistakenly, that the rulers of Russia were
the heirs of 1917 and were faithful to 1917. We identified the
working class with the Communist Party, and the Communist
Party with the leaders of the Russian State. Our illusions sprang,
not from excessive gullibility, but from our hatred of capitalism
and our loyalty to the working-class which had in one country
overthrown the capitalist class. To canalize this hatred and this
loyalty was the aim of a very great deal of work carried out
by skilled falsifiers of history. The history we learned—from the
lips and pens of men with records as working-class militants,
who had in the past been imprisoned and otherwise victimized
by the capitalist class—was a palimpsest (i.e., a document the
original writing on which has been removed to make room for
a second), in which facts were changed, names were obliterated,
other names illuminated, over and over again, till the latest
version bore little or no resemblance to the original events. But
the original events, and the Marxist books which were based on
these events, and which exposed the forgeries, were inaccessible.
Their inaccessibility was partly physical,' but primarily psycho­
logical. We were trained to regard these books as the work of
enemy agents in the working-class movement, as political

125

i
 pornography, consigned long before to the dustbin of history.
We were lied to by our leaders. The British working-class
movement has a long tradition of loyalty to leaders, up to and
sometimes even beyond the point at which their betrayals have
become a scandal. If we took somebody else’s word for it, on
matters where a huge and costly machine of vilification and
falsification was at work day arid night, then we were not by any
means alone. The Moscow trials, which were rigged especially
for the purpose of discrediting the Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism,
hoodwinked sections far wider than the ranks of the Communist
Party. Never has history provided liars at the head of a State with
such powerful means of getting their lies accepted, embroidered,
crystallized into myth and legend, turned into books, penny
pamphlets, syllabuses, study courses and newspaper articles.
No, we were not alone in being deceived. And tens of
thousands of Labour Party members are today equally deceived
about the nature of social democracy, for the lie is used with
equal cunning, equal tenacity, and a similarly lavish apparatus, to
blind the followers of the Right-wing bureaucracy to the true
character of their leaders, who for six years were directly
responsible for atrocious crimes in the British colonies.
To those who now reproach us for a certain . . . sharpness
in our criticisms of Stalinism, we reply: this sharpness is
determined by the intensity of the effort that was used to poison
our minds and misuse our loyalty.
The second set of reasons for our accepting Stalinism for so
long are philosophical; and these, it may be said, are the
fundamental reasons. We were trained to begin our analysis, not
from facts, not from the real position, needs and relationships
of the workers as a class, but from the current policies, ideas and
wishes of the Soviet bureaucracy. We were not philosophical
materialists, but philosophical idealists. Our method was a
travesty of the Marxist method, though we paid lip-service to
Marxism in every speech and article. Instead of ‘what is good
for the working class is good for the Soviet leaders’ it was ‘what
is good for the Soviet leaders is good for the working class’. This
philosophical error led to the most grotesque perversions of
Marxist science, to the most appalling rationalizations for crimes
and betrayals, and to the abandonment of international working-
class solidarity when it was a question of solidarity with the
workers of Russia and eastern Europe. For all this we must accept
full responsibility.
It is, perhaps, our recognition of this error on the philosophical

126
 /

plane that differentiates those of us who have remained Marxists

by becoming Trotskyists from those former members of the Com­
munist Party who have gone to the Right. We have learnt in
bitter experience that Marxists must look at reality as it is, at
society as it is, at the class struggle as it is, and from this begin
all their analysis and on this base all their activity. This is what
this book is attempting to do. Many ex-communists, by turning
their backs on Marxism, have exchanged one set of illusions about
the world for another set of illusions. They have also gone far
away from the shot and shell of the class struggle. That is
not our road.

1October 23, 1958.

*Sec Brian Pearce, ‘Some Past Rank-and-File Movements’, Labour
Review, vol. iv, no. 1, pp. 13-24, April-May 1959.
s R.P.D., ‘Notes of the Month’, Labour Monthly [vol. xl, no. 6], pp. 253-4,
June 1958. Cf. the Economist's description of them as ‘decent trade
unionists’ (September 6, 1958).
4See above, p. 50.
5 Daily Workert May 21, 1959.
'Speech in Belgrade, April 10, 1959.
1 The Revolution Betrayed was last reprinted in 1957. Other works of
Trotsky's on the rise of the bureaucracy in Russia and the effects of
vStalinism on the international communist movement include: The New
Course (English edition, 1956); The Third International After Lenin
(fourth American edition, New York, 1957); Germany— the Key to the
International Situation (Colombo, 1959). Less accessible, but useful, is
Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (New
York, 1938).
*No history of the British Communist Party from a Marxist point of
view yet exists. The following discussions of various aspects or periods
of its history will be found valuable;
General: John Daniels, ‘A Letter to a Member of the Communist
Party,’ iMbour Review, vol. ii, no. 1, pp. 7-13, January 1957; John
Daniels, ‘The Communist Party and Democratic Centralism,* ibid. no. 2,
pp. 46-50, March-April 1957.
1920-26: ‘Joseph Redman’ [Brian Pearce], ‘The Early Years of the
CPGB’, ibid. vol. iii, no. 1, pp. 11-22, January-February 1958.
1925-29: ‘Joseph Redman,’ The Communist Party and the Labour
Left, 1925-29 (Reasoner pamphlet, Hull, 1957); ‘Joseph Redman’, ‘British
Communist History’, Labour Review, vol. ii, no. 4, pp. 106-10, July-
August 1957.
1933-36: ,‘Joseph Redman’, ‘From “Social-Fascism” to “People’s

127
 Front’' \ ibid. no. 5, pp. 148-53, September-October 1957.
1936-38: ‘Joseph Redman’, ‘The British Stalinists and the Moscow
Trials’, ibid. vol. iii, no. 2, pp. 44-52, March-April 1958.
1939-45: William Hunter, ‘Marxists in the Second World War’, ibid.
no. 5, pp. 139-46, December 1958.
1956-57: ‘Hammersmith and After’, ibid. vol. ii, no. 3, pp. 67-70,
May-June 1957.
•John Gollan, Which Way for Socialists? The Case for the Communist
Party (1958), p. 15.
See The Newsletter Conference and the Communist Party. Two Attacks .
by Dennis Goodwin, with Replies by Peter Fryer (A Newsletter pamphlet,
1958). The full texts of the articles replied to were reproduced in this
pamphlet, in contrast to their author’s invention of eight alleged
‘quotations’ from The Newsletter.

128
 P A R T III

THE M A R X I S T MOVEMENT
 1. WHAT IS MARXISM?

T he crisis of leadership in the British Labour movement sets

before all serious working-class militants, as a matter of the
utmost urgency, this central task: to replace the present leadership
with one which will consciously mobilize the workers for struggle
and consciously prepare them to take power. Either a new,
revolutionary leadership is built, with deep and firm roots in
the mass movement and mass organizations of the workers,
participating to the full in all their experiences, supporting their
partial demands and struggles, seeking to raise their level of
consciousness and give them confidence in their ability to over­
throw capitalism and conquer State power —either this is done
or the working-class movement faces disaster.
In the long run such a new leadership can be provided only
by Marxists. All other trends in the working-class movement
have come forward with their various panaceas, and have failed
the workers in the hour of crisis. They have failed because
they did not rely on the workers and because they did not
set the achievement of working-class power as their goal. Only
the Marxists have openly blazoned this aim on their banner. It
was under the leadership of a Marxist party that the Russian
working class conquered power in 1917 and swept away the
aristocrats, landowners and capitalists. Now the time is rapidly
approaching when working people all over the world will begin
to look once more to Marxists for leadership. Here in Britain
the workers are beginning to seek leaders who ‘state that which is*;
who disdain to hide the truth about capitalist society and the
workers’ own tasks in relation to it; who say frankly that the
workers can find no final solution to their problems short of

131
the conquest of power. The construction of a Marxist movement
able to show the workers the way forward, mobilize them to
smash the capitalist offensive along the whole front, and educate
them in struggle, is an imperious task. The Marxists are as yet
few in number. Their responsibilities are very great and very
complex. But the task of building a Marxist movement must
be faced. t
‘The emancipation of the working classes, wrote Marx, must
b e co n q u e re d b y the working classes themselves.’1 To achieve
its emancipation the working class must build a revolutionary
leadership. How indispensable an instrument of emancipation
this leadership is has been shown by the experience of over a
hundred years of struggles, victories and defeats.
Why do we say this revolutionary leadership must be a Marxist
movement? How are Marxists distinguished from all other
socialist movements and parties?

First, they are guided by a scientific theory which explains

the laws of development of human society and, in particular,
reveals the inner workings of the capitalist system, showing how
that system can be ended and how a socialist system can be built
to replace it.
This theory is more than just an economic, political or
sociological theory. It is a coherent philosophy, which expresses
the world outlook, at once revolutionary (‘dialectical’) and scientific
(‘materialist’), of the working class. Marxist philosophy is
revolutionary because it lays great emphasis on change and
development, on the contradictions within processes, on the
immense transforming role of human practical activity and on
the key importance of the class struggle. It serves the workers
as a guide not merely to understanding the world and human
society, and their own place in them, but also, and primarily, as
a guide to their own action in changing them. Marxist philosophy
is scientific because it is based entirely on objective facts, as
revealed and tested by human experience and practice. Its
conclusions and generalizations are continually enriched and
developed by every new attainment of the natural and social
sciences, and by every new experience of the working-class
movement.

132 *

i
 Such a theory implies a distinctive method, a distinctive
approach to problems. As revolutionary socialists and scientific
socialists, Marxists proceed in all questions, not from their
subjective wishes, dreams or superficial impressions, but from
an analysis of the objective situation as determined by the class
relationships. On this analysis they base their programme, policy,
strategy and tactics. This is the fundamental methodological
premise of Marxism. All departures from Marxism, in theory
or in practice, have at their root in one form or another a denial
or abandonment of the class struggle. People who fail to base
their thinking on the real position and needs of the working class
are substituting fantasy for science. That is why their conclusions,
however superficially attractive or clever they may seem for a
time, are in the long run proved wrong in practice. Even the
naive idealization of the working class that is fairly often met
with in the socialist movement arises from incorrect method:
for Marxism starts, not from some fanciful abstraction, but from
the working class as it is, with layers moving at different speeds
and often in different directions and with sections that are back­
ward, ignorant, reactionary or brutalized by capitalism.
iRespect for theory and for method, then, distinguishes Marxists
from all other socialists. Without a revolutionary theory no well-
aimed, no well-organized or fruitful revolutionary activity is possible.
The political activity of the Marxist movement, and of each of its
individual members, is accompanied and guided by constant study
of philosophy, political economy and the history of the working-
class movement. Each new experience gained in the working-
class struggle is collectively discussed and the conclusions drawn
from it are added to the store of Marxist theory. No body of
people study so hard, so systematically or so consistently as do
Marxists, with the object of deepening their understanding of
events, focusing their activities more adequately and sharpening
their daily use of the Marxist method.
This respect for revolutionary theory and method springs from
an awareness that the working class cannot spontaneously arrive
at a scientific consciousness of its position and tasks in capitalist
society. The elaboration and creative development of a scientific
socialist consciousness is the work of the Marxist movement, in
which specialists in ideas have an indispensable part to play. This
movement is the organic link between Marxist ideas and the
mass movement of the working class. It is the living embodiment
of that ‘unity of theory and practice’ which is at the very core
of Marxist philosophy. Take away theory —the ideas of scientific

133
socialism—and the workers could neither shake capitalist ideas
off their minds nor the capitalist class off their backs. Take away
practice—the real movement of the workers—and Marxists would
be nothing but a sect of armchair theoreticians. The combination
of socialist consciousness and mass struggle breathes life into the
one, brings clarity to the other.

n
i
It is here that the second difference between Marxists and other
socialists is manifested. The Marxist movement would cease to
be a movement if it confined its activities to socialist propaganda
and education. A movement implies action: the constant
verification of ideas, theories and policies in practical activity.
We are not commentators and critics standing on the side-line
of the class struggle, but active participants in that struggle.
We try to convince the workers of the need to change things,
and of their own ability to change them. We try to mobilize the
workers as a class; to lead them in the day-by-day struggle for
economic and social demands; to co-ordinate this struggle as
much as possible with the political struggle for socialism; and to
prepare the workers to take power. By preparing the workers
for power is meant educating them in struggle on the basis of a
serious, thorough and fearless analysis of their experiences—an
analysis that draws the lessons from each victory and defeat and
from the treachery of those who want to keep the workers locked
in the cage of capitalist society.
The Marxist movement, by the truth and validity of its ideas,
attracts the most militant, class-conscious, devoted and far-sighted
members of the working class. It brings them together in its
ranks to pool their experience and unite their efforts in the highest
form of working-class organization, bound by a common under­
standing of events and of the workers’ tasks. This movement
sets out to infuse the whole working class with revolutionary
purpose. To do this it must all the time strengthen its connexions
with the working class, and prove itself the most active and vigilant
defender of the workers’ immediate interests. But it must not
only attempt to guide and co-ordinate all their struggles for
limited, short-term objectives, but also show the link between
these struggles and the long-term struggle for power, in every
strike the Marxist movement represents the future. Its task is

134
 to show the workers how today each partial, immediate fight
inevitably raises the question of power, of control, of who is going
to dictate to whom. Each partial demand is therefore not an
end in itself, but—potentially at least—a transitional demand:
part of a bridge to the conquest of power. The Marxist move-
ment alone can construct this bridge.
it cannot be stressed too strongly, however, that the leadership
of the working-class struggle is not a position gained by
declarations. It does not go to the highest bidder in the currency
of resolutions and imposing nomenclature. Much more than a
fistful of leaflets and a mouthful of ringing slogans is needed
to win the trust of the working class. The workers have been
fooled and betrayed too often to follow anyone automatically—
even new leaders from among their own ranks. They take no
individual or movement at face value. They judge by deeds.
A group of more or less like-minded people who affirm their
support for Marxism and publish a magazine or newspaper do
not yet constitute a vanguard. After testing revolutionaries in
combat, not once or twice, but many times; after subjecting to
the closest scrutiny their conduct in trade union branches, on the
picket-line and in the courts of the capitalist class; after seeing
how they measure up to the exigencies and emergencies of class
battles; after comparing their analyses and warnings with the
actual march of events over a whole historical epoch: then and
only then are the workers in a position to decide. Their con­
fidence, in short, has to be earned. And it is earned, neither
by incantations nor by flattery, but only in long, bitter and often
costly struggle on principles, against all kinds of external and
internal enemies of ideological clarity and firmness. Leadership
demands the very highest qualities of perseverance and determina­
tion. Building a movement capable of taking the lead, winning
mass support and going forward to the conquest of power entails
laborious preparation in which, under the pitiless triple pressure
of capitalism, Right-wing reformism and Stalinism, some are
broken, others tempered.
Marxists are fully assured that they will ultimately win the
confidence of the decisive majority of their class because their
movement is wholly based on the workers’ needs and interests.
Its members must soak themselves in the mass movement, so as
to wash away any traces of bureaucratism, routinism, conservatism
or sectarian arrogance, and acquire that combination of firmness
of principles and tactical flexibility that characterizes a real
revolutionary.

135
 Soaking oneself in the mass movement, however, does not
mean adapting one’s level of consciousness to that of the ordinary
worker. Marxists do not divide their ideas into two categories:
those fit for public consumption and those for private circulation
only, which the workers as a whole are ‘not yet ready’ to hear.
It is this which distinguishes them from Stalinists in the matter
of participating in joint activities with persons holding different
views. The common practice of the Stalinists is to strive to
appear ‘respectable’; they frequently put working-class demands
and working-class forms of activity into cold storage in order not
to offend the susceptibilities of religious and other middle-class
‘allies’ in ‘broad movements’. Marxists willingly fight side by
side with others for common objectives, but without either
abandoning their policies and their identity as a trend, or asking
those they march with to abandon theirs. This adherence to
principles has brought complaints that Marxists are given to
‘sectarianism’* ‘dogmatism’, ‘splitting’ and ‘disruption’. Criticisms
of this kind are most often made by people who have been trained
in Stalinist organizations to consider the winning for the party
of temporary ‘allies’—often of dubious merit—as a higher con­
sideration than the interests of the working class. Marxists do
not expect those with whom they enter into blocs and alliances
to put aside their own views on how best the common objective
is to be attained. Nor do they regard it as consistent with principle
or with the interests of the working class to evade the fact that
such objectives as the elimination of the hydrogen-bomb can be
attained only through the overthrow of capitalism, and that the
most effective way of fighting the bomb is by mobilizing the
working class against it and against the system that spawned it.
The communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for
the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but
in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of
the future of that movement. . . . The communists everywhere support
every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political
order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front,
as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what
its degree of development at the time. . . . They openly declare that
their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all
existing social conditions.1

Such a refusal, on the ground of principle, to adapt the con­

sciousness of the vanguard to the ‘average’ level, or to water
down Marxist ideas in the interests of expediency os sQme ‘get-
rich-quifck’ notion, by* no means implies either that Marxists

136
 intervene in the class struggle from outside or that their ideas
are held to be inviolable. Marxism is fundamentally hostile to
any kind of revealed truth or to any ‘authority’ higher than the
class struggle, in the crucible of which Marxists test all ideas,
their own included. It is not'enough to have more or less correct
ideas. The finest programme is relatively abstract, formalistic
and schematic to the extent that it is not taken into the workers*
movement, verified and corrected in the complex practical process
of class struggle. The Marxist movement does not come to the
workers as a dew ex machina with a ready-made prescription
that will solve all their problems. Its. policy and programme
are hammered out in the course of struggle, and are presented
for the consideration of the workers from within their own ranks.
To many groupings it is a far from pleasant prospect to launch
their frail craft on the storm-tossed sea of the real movement.
They prefer the comfort and family atmosphere of a propagandist
outfit to the hurly-burly of controversy. They hug their lovely
formulations, letter-perfect, to themselves, and the real movement
surges around and beyond them. The Marxists believe that they
have a good deal to learn from the workers, as well as a good
deal to teach them. They learn from the weaknesses of their
class as well as from its strength; from defeat as well as victory;
from the mistakes and shortcomings of themselves and others.
This alone is the road to assuming the unchallenged leadership
of decisive sections of the working class.Il

Ill

The third difference between Marxists and other socialists is

that the former are organized along quite different lines from
other movements, groups or parties. The Marxist movement is
neither a debating society, #or an electoral machine, nor an
apparatus for seizing positions in the unions, though propaganda,
electoral work and trade union work all play an important part
in its activities at various times. It is the leadership of the
working-class struggle for power, and its organization and methods
of work reflect this. They are designed to permit the carrying
out with the maximum unity of will of decisions reached through
the widest democratic discussion. Only a disciplined movement,
whose mejnbers loyally carry out an agreed policy, can provide
the working class with an efficient leadership -and serve it as an

137
 effective weapon against the enormous power of the capitalist
class.
The Marxist movement respects the personality of each
individual member, and tries to foster individual talent and ability,
so that each may make the best*, possible contribution to the
common work. But it cannot be a collection of individuals,
each marching in a different direction. It has to be an organized
movement. It regulates the mutual relationship of its members
with comradeship and understanding for the human problems
that life in a class-divided society engenders. But it cannot be
a loose grouping of friends. It has to be cemented by a discipline
based on political and ideological conviction. The capitalist class,
in their offensive against the working class, do not act as
individuals; they have a common strategy and class discipline,
which is seen the more clearly as their domination over society
is the more resolutely challenged. If this class is to be over­
thrown, an organized movement of those who see the need for
its overthrow and are determined to bring it about is an absolute
necessity, without which not a single real step forward is possible.
It is all very well to publish discussion magazines and run
discussion groups. But the title of Marxist is properly applied
only to those who act as well as discuss—and who act in an
organized and disciplined way, under the guidance of elected and
accountable leaders, with an agreed policy, a division of labour,
and democratically planned and centrally co-ordinated activities
in the mass movement. Just as the workers will combine and
fight hard, day in and day out, to organize a factory or to win
a strike, so they will display the same tenacity and fixity of
purpose in the conquest of power—provided those who lead them
know what they are about. A loosely-knit, amorphous, undis­
ciplined association cannot accomplish the task of leading a
revolution. A workers’ leadership cannot be a rabble, a coterie
or a mutual admiration society;.it must be a general staff.
Discipline within the Marxist movement—the subordination of
the minority to the majority and of lower leading bodies to higher
ones—is no blind, mechanical obedience, but a conscious,
voluntary discipline of like-minded men and women who have
freely joined forces to carry out a supremely important and
supremely difficult social task. This is the very opposite to the
automatic surrender at the dictates of some ‘higher authority’
of views and opinions sincerely held. It bears no resemblance
to a mindless and supple-spined reassessment of the needs of the
working class based on a ‘new line’ adopted by whoever happens

138
 (

to be in the control of the Kremlin. Every member and every

local organization of the Marxist movement has the right—and
the obligation—to take part in the fullest democratic discussion
of policy. The aim of this discussion is the formulation of a
policy which will be the basis for action by the movement and
by the working class. Once the policy has been arrived at by
majority decision, the minority loyally applies and carries out
the majority decision, while retaining the right to campaign within
the movement for its modification.
To refuse a minority these rights, as the Stalinists do, is a
negation of working-class democracy. To accord a minority the
right to refuse to apply a democratically adopted decision would
lead > a negation of the common action which is the very
purpose of the movement.
Similarly every member and every local organization of the
movement has the right to take part in the democratic election
of leading bodies, to choose those whose experience, skill and
political wisdom best fit them for positions of responsibility.
These leading bodies are collectively charged with the elaboration
and implementation of the movement’s policy; where differences
arise those leading bodies with less political responsibility abide
by the decisions of those with greater political responsibility until
the differences can be adjusted by joint discussion, by the education
of the rank and file, by the leadership’s proving it is right (or
being proved wrong) in the course of practical activity.
Democracy in discussion, in decision-making and in the election
of leading bodies is neither a concession to liberals nor a piece
of window-dressing, but an indispensable instrument of the
working class. It is impossible to construct a working-class
leadership without constant discussion, controversy, the cut and
thrust of debate, in the course of which each individual member
makes his contribution to the exchange of ideas and the working
out of policy, in the course of which the collective viewpoint and
'collective will of the organization emerges. This kind of discussion
is not an academic exercise. It is not a luxury. It is a necessary
part of the preparation for taking power.
And so the relationship of leaders and members in the Marxist
movement can be summed up as follows:1
(1) The leaders have the right to the unequivocal support
of the entire movement in carrying out the movement’s policies
They have the right to select personnel for specific tasks and
to remove those who do not do their jobs properly. Their day*

139
by-day implementation of policies is open to criticism, discussion
and rectification within properly established limits. The discipline
6f the movement is a common discipline, equally binding on
leaders and members: the leaders are not autocrats, but elected
leaders, subject to recall and replacement, who are answerable
to the mass of the members for their actions and who must
regularly and self-critically give an account of their stewardship.
They must set an example in their style of work and in their
devotion to the working-class cause. They must so co-ordinate
the work as to draw the best out of each member and help his
personal development as a revolutionary. The leaders are the
servants of the movement. They have no privileges.^
(2) The members have the right of free discussion, debate and
criticism, limited only by the decisions of the movement as a
whole. They have the right to choose their own leaders freely,
and to be consulted on all major questions where this is practicable.
They must loyally work for the programme and policies of the
movement, under the direction of the leaders. They must give
the movement financial help according to their means.
(3) The movement as a whole has the right to demand that
discussion be carried on in such a way as to improve the work
—that it should not be protracted to the point of .disorganizing
and disrupting essential tasks.
Clearly the interests of the movement necessarily impose certain
limitations on the freedom of its members. The freedom to
contract out of decisions, or to smuggle anti-working-class ideas
into the movement, is incompatible with the freedom of the
movement as a whole to require revolutionary discipline and
ideological clarity from it^ members. Workers join the movement
of their own free will, because they want to struggle for socialism
effectively. In so doing they voluntarily leave on the threshold
the ‘freedom’ to undermine it, to lead it off the revolutionary
road into the quagmire of class collaboration and political
opportunism. When the Marxist party was in process of forma­
tion in Russia, in a bitter fight against those who wanted to
reject the class struggle and substitute reformism for revolutionary
policies, and who demanded ‘freedom of criticism’ to enable
them to do so, Lenin wrote:
We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult
path, bolding each other firmly by the hand. We are surrounded on
all sides -by enemies, and are under their almost constant fire. We

140
 have combined voluntarily precisely for the purpose of fighting the
enemy, and not to retreat into the adjacent marsh, the inhabitants of
which, from the very outset, have reproached us - . . with having
chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And
now several amdng us begin to cry out: let us go into this marsh!
And when we begin to shame them, they retort: how conservative
you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the right to invite you
to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only
to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the
marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and
we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only
let go of our( hands, don't clutch at us and don't besmirch the grand
word 'freedom'; for we too are 'free' to go where we please, free
not only to fight against the marsh, but also against those who are
turning towards the marsh.*
By their class position most workers are more easily able to
grasp the need for discipline in the Marxist movement than are
people who come to the movement from the middle class. The
intellectual in particular often chafes at the need for discipline.
The word ‘intellectual’ is not a term of abuse in the Marxist
movement. Philistine anti-intellectualism is utterly alien to the
spirit of Marxism. The movement has great need of the contribu­
tions of specialists in ideas, for which no amount of devoted work
by industrial workers can be a substitute, since they lack the
necessary training, professional skill and technique. There is
therefore a welcome within the Marxist movement for intellectuals
who accept Marxism, and who are prepared to work under the
guidance of the movement. What is not acceptable is the attitude
of certain intellectuals, generally the least mature, that they have
a kind of divine mission to teach the workers—that the middle
class is the educated vanguard of the working class. The individual
intellectual is often taught to regard himself and those like him
as the real driving force of all progressive social movements. He
oftea. brings this attitude into the working-class movement, seeks
to impose himself and his talents, upon the movement, and becomes
preoccupied with ‘prestige’* and ‘authority’. The first thing a
revolutionary intellectual has to learn—whether he is working-
class or middle-class in social origin—is the need for a certain
humility before the working class. If he bases himself on the
real position and needs of the workers; if he seeks to serve
them in struggle; if he realizes that he has much to learn from
them as well as something to teach—then he will acquire genuine
prestige and authority among workers of a kind unknown in the
world of bourgeois values. Marxist intellectuals—philosophers,
economists, historians, scientists, artists, journalists—can learn

141
 from the workers discipline, endurance, determination, self-
sacrifice and the ability to work Ain a team. In turn they can
deepen the workers’ knowledge and class consciousness, express
their needs and aspirations and fire them with a vision of the
future. The coming together of intellectuals and workers in a
Marxist movement, helping and enriching each others’ work and
learning from each other, is a pregnant and powerful combination.

IV

We are now in a position to attempt to answer the question

at the head of this chapter, having considered the ways in which
the Marxist movement is different from all other socialist move­
ments: i.e., that its activities are guided by theory and method
at once revolutionary and scientific; that it is a movement of
action, whose aim is the conquest of power by the working class;
that it is a movement both democratic and disciplined, organized
to lead its class in the overthrow of capitalism. There are of
course many other differences—the internationalism of the Marxist
movement, for instance. But the three aspects we have dwelt
on are the most important because the most fundamental. None
\ of them taken separately is enough. Theory without action;
action without discipline; discipline without theory: each of these
tangential, one-sided developments can be seen in the British
Left today. There arc interminable discussions that go round
and round in ever more mystified circles. There are spasmodic
bursts of activity that die away like summer storms. There
are parties that cannot even begin to educate their members.
The Left is in crisis. More correctly, it is in travail; it is giving
birth to a new, powerful and resurgent communism, cleansed
of the shame and blood of Stalinism, destined to win the British
workers for Marxism and for working-class revolution.
Because this new communist movement combines theory and
action and discipline it alone is viable among the many rival
groups and grouplets, coffee and publishing houses, that effervesce
on the Left. Its enemies obscurely sense this, and hate the
Marxists and scoff at them: for their theory, which they call
‘dogma’; for their activities, which they call ‘futile’; for their
discipline, which they call ‘bureaucratic’. What they really hate
and scoff at is Marxism, which is neither theory, nor practice,
nor organizational forms, but the indissoluble unity of all three.

142
Marxism is the science of working-class struggle and working-class
power.
Like all definitions, this one is not wholly adequate. In a
certain sense, Marxism is much wider in scope than the problems
of twentieth-century mankind, for it subsumes within itself the
whole heritage of human knowledge. But since today all other
problems turn on the solution of the social problem, no one’s
claim to be a Marxist can be respected if he turns his back on
the present-day class struggle. To do so is merely to demonstrate
one’s ignorance of the very kernel of Marxist theory: that it is
a theory of human practice. For our generation that means
above all a theory of class struggle.
Like all sciences, Marxism has its body of theory, its practical
activity and its working rules. These together make up the
science of Marxism. These together determine the structure and
mode of operation of the Marxist movement.1

1 Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. i (1950), p. 350.

*Ibid. pp. 60-1.
* V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement
(1950 ed.), pp. 17-18.
 2. THE EVOLUTION OF BRITISH MARXISM

The Marxist trend in British socialism is a product of the entire

history of the British Labour movement. British Marxism arose
as the natural and inevitable continuation in a new historical
period of the revolutionary struggle waged by those who fought
capitalism in its infancy, before there was a material basis for
Marxist ideas. It continued the struggle of the Chartists, inherited
their traditions and carried them forward. The Russian Revolution
of 1917 and the founding of the Communist International by
Lenin and Trotsky gave a tremendous impetus to the development
of British Marxism. In 1920-21 the various Marxist groups came
together in the Communist Party of Great Britain. Despite the
sectarian legacy bequeathed it by its predecessors, and despite
its inexperience,' this party made an important and positive con­
tribution to the wording-class struggles of the early twenties. Its
Stalinization at the hands of its leaders—i.e., its transformation
from a revolutionary party into a docile instrument of the Russian
bureaucracy—was a major blow at the British Marxist movement,
a blow from which it has taken a whole generation to recover.
From various opposition groups which arose inside the Com­
munist Party in the early thirties, and from groups of Marxists
inside the Independent Labour Party, there emerged a number
of organizations which kept the Marxist tradition alive in the
thirties and early forties. The great achievement of these
organizations was that in a period of reaction, under exceptionally
difficult conditions, they brought the Marxist critique of Stalinist
.theory and practice and the Marxist alternative to Stalinism to
the attention of enough working-class militants to ensure the
movement’s continuity. Without doubt these Marxist groups had

144
 grave weaknesses. The communist opposition from which they
emerged and in which they were cradled inherited some of the
less happy features of Comintern line and language during the
so-called 'third period’ of Left sectarianism. The Marxist groups
could not but bear the stamp of the Communist Party from
which they sprang; could not but share its virtual isolation from
the mass movement, its tendency to adventurism and the harshness
of its language towards political opponents, particularly those
who were relatively close to its own point of view.1 To these
sectarian features the Marxist groups added an often fierce
internecine war, in which the clash of incompatible personalities
seems to have caused almost as much rancour as differences erf
principle.
It is too facile, however, to note the shortcomings of these
pioneers without noting also the objective reasons which gave
rise to them. These groups were tiny, practically penniless,
hounded by the capitalist State and the Right-wing Labour leaders
and subjected by the Stalinists to a sustained campaign of slander
and persecution without equal in the annals of the British working-
class movement. Year in and year out they were called ‘fascists’,
their literature sellers were physically assaulted and the minds
of Communist Party rank-and-file members and of workers under
their influence were systematically poisoned against them. That
in such unfavourable circumstances there was a certain tendency
to turn inwards, or that jargon and sectarianism tended to flourish,
is scarcely remarkable. What is surprising is that these groups
survived at all. It is less important to criticize their defects than
to pay tribute to the fortitude of their members, who carried the
torch of Marxism through, more than a decade of darkness. It
often flickered; it never went out. We shall always be in their debt.
At a conference held on March 12-13, 1944, the Revolutionary
Communist Party was formed as a fusion of the Revolutionary
Socialist League and the Workers’ International League. This
step forward at the height of an imperialist war enraged the
capitalist class, whose Press and police attacked the Marxists
furiously. Four of their leaders were arrested under the Trade
Disputes Act.2 Roy Tearse and Heaton Lee were sentenced to
twelve months’ imprisonment, Jock Haston to six months’ and
Ann Keene to thirteen days’ for helping apprentices to fight the
Bevin ballot scheme. The convictions were quashed on appeal,
after widespread protests in the Labour Party and trade unions.
At a time when the Communist Party was calling for a govern­
ment of national unity, including Churchill, Eden and ‘progressive

145
 conservatives’, the central slogan of the Revolutionary Communist
Party was ‘Labour to power’, with the idea of putting the Labour
leaders to the test. A substantial body of opinion inside the
Revolutionary Communist Party doubted the wisdom of main­
taining at that stage of the class struggle an independent Marxist
party, of necessity isolated from the mainstream of the British'
Labour movement. For reasons set forth in the next chapter, they
argued that for a long time to come the place of Marxists was
inside the Labour Party, where, in the course of the workers’
experiences and struggles, a revolutionary movement of con­
sequence might be built. Both Labour’s great electoral victory
in 1945 and the conduct of the Labour government added weight
to these arguments, and in 1949 the Revolutionary Communist
Party was dissolved, its paper Socialist Appeal was discontinued
and Marxists began work inside the Labour Party.
For some years their work was concentrated round a new
paper. Socialist Outlook, which brought together Marxists and
other Left-wingers in a continuous discussion on policy. This
paper played a notable part in a number of important struggles;
politically, it contributed to the thinking of the Bevanites and
gave militant leadership on such questions as the Korean war.
The policies for which Socialist Outlook fought won substantial
support in the Labour Party, as was shown by the vote of
1,728,000 for industrial action at the 1952 annual conference.
It was this support which caused the national executive, in August
1954, to declare ineligible for membership of the party persons
‘associated with, or supporting’ Socialist Outlook.3
Almost the entire independent Labour Press went on record
against the ban and sixty-three Constituency Labour Parties and
twenty-eight local Labour Parties protested. At the 1954 annual
conference there was a vote of 1,596,000 for the reference back
of the ban.4
The manifold valuable experiences gained by the Marxists in
the Labour Party enabled them to react with speed to the crisis
in the Communist Party and find a road to the rank-and-file
members of that party who were thrown into tumult by the
Belgrade declaration, the Khrushchev revelations, the Poznan
riots, the Hungarian revolution, the fall of Molotov and the
murder of Nagy. For years it had been impossible for Marxists
to discuss political questions with the members of the Communist
Party, from whom they were separated by an impenetrable barrier
of suspicion and hatred. Now discussion was both possible and
fruitful. Opposition movements of various kinds developed inside

146
the Communist Party. ‘Socialist forums’ sprang up at which
members and ex-members discussed the whole basis of their views
and activities. And as shock followed shock the membership of
the Communist Party dwindled, despite the leaders’ successive
efforts to console their members with the idea that although
‘violations of socialist legality’ had been committed in the past
all had now been put right.
Different layers in the Communist Party—the intellectuals, the
youth and the workers—reacted to the crisis in different ways
and at different speeds. The most instructive experience was
gained by those who, instead of resigning in disgust, remained
inside the party to fight the leaders’ Stalinist policy and were
sooner or later expelled. The ‘oppositionists’ soon came, to under­
stand from their struggle and its outcome how the Marxist method
had been perverted by Stalinism and what the lineaments of a
genuine Marxist movement should be.
These ‘oppositionists’, together with many of those who had
resigned, and a section of the ‘socialist forum’ movement, joined
forces with the Marxists—generally after a period of discussion
and joint work, in which suspicions and misunderstandings could
be ironed out. They were a substantial accretion whose effect on
the movement was algebraic rather than arithmetical. From the
Marxists the dissident communists, intellectuals and workers alike,
derived theoretical clarity and perspective; from their new forces
the Marxists acquired new influence both in the universities and
in industry. The merging of the streams led to the launching of
a new theoretical journal, Labour Review, and a weekly paper,
The Newsletter, whose tasks are discussed below. These organs,
together with the impressive body of Marxist writing that could
be put into the hands of workers who wanted to be revolu­
tionaries,5 laid the basis for the national industrial rank-and-file
Conference of November 16, 1958, for the launching of the
Socialist Labour League, and for the inevitable future advances
that will bring British Marxism to a position of unparalleled
influence and strength.
The movement has taken shape, not yet definitively, but already
in such a form as to cause concern to capitalist Press com­
mentators.6 To be sure, the image of the Marxist movement to
be observed in this distorting mirror tells us more about the
plans and fears of the capitalist class than it does about the
Marxist movement; the movement does not measure its success
by the number of column inches about it in these papers. For
this barometer of its influence it has nothing but contempt. But
its small successes in 1958-59 have undoubtedly cast a faint but
disagreeable shadow over the councils of the employing class
as they plan their offensive strategy. For as long as the Marxist
movement grows and develops there will be a voice warning
the workers and rousing them to action. Those who heed that
voice will, in the not-so-distant future, be numbered in hundreds
of thousands. The Marxist movement now in the course of
construction will present a formidable challenge to British
capitalism.

1In the 'social-fascist* terminology of the 'third period* the Comintern

was deliberately cultivating and inflating tendencies always present
in a militant Left-wing organization subjected to constant pressure
and persecution. It should be addedt, however, that the extravagances
of the 'third period*, in Britain at any rate, were distortions of a
necessary turn in policy, for from 1925 to 1928 the Communist Party,
even during the General Strike, had been tailing disastrously behind
the Centrists in the Labour Part)'.
’ One of them was described by J. R. Campbell in the Daily Worker
(which supported the arrests) as a second-rate shop steward, and this
drew a protest from the workers in the engine shop at de Havillands*
where he worked.
*The witch-hunt had begun in May 195 1"T Following an anti-war con­
ference attended by 450 delegates representing thirty-two Constituency
Labour Parties, twelve trades councils, seven trade union district com­
mittees and ninety-four trade union branches, which passed a resolution
calling for the withdrawal of British troops from Korea, immediate
freedom for the colonies and a break from capitalism at home and
abroad, the NEC which had given approval to Gaitskell’s £4,700 million
arms budget placed the Socialist Fellowship on the list of proscribed
organizations. The Socialist Fellowship was an association of Labour
Party members under the chairmanship of Tom Braddock, who had
been in the party for forty years. Its national committee included
prospective Labour candidates. Labour councillors and many officials
of local Labour Parties.
4The 'information* on which the witch-hunters relied in pushing through
the ban on Socialist Outlook was provided by one ‘Barry McKaig*
in two articles in the Communist Party weekly World News: 'The
Origin of Trotskyism’, vol. i, no. 11, pp. 218-19, March 13, 1954;
‘Background to "Socialist Outlook*’,’ ibid. no. 12, pp. 233-4, March
20, 1954.
*Some of the books which helped the re-education of ex-Communist
Party members were so rare that the copies passed from hand to hand
until they fell to pieces.
•See, e.g., Financial Times, October 30, 1958: ‘The new militant Left-
wing movement . . . could conceivably develop into quite an important
industrial irritant . . . The weekly Newsletter . . . now wields con-
j

148
siderable influence’; Sunday Times, November 9, 1958: ‘Not only the
Labour Party and the trade unions but the government, too, will be
foolish if they belittle as theatrical nonsense and irresponsible vagaries
this new development’; Economist, November 22, 1958: ‘Six hundred
members may not sound much, but, strategically placed, they can
do a great deal of damage. The leading lights of the movement,
moreover, are practised political and industrial agitators.’

149
 3. MARXISTS AND THE LABOUR PARTY

M arx ists have not learned the ABC of their science if they do
not face the mass organizations of their class—the trade unions
and the Labour Party—participate in their activities, and in so
doing test their own policies, learn something and teach something.
The building of a new revolutionary leadership will be a thousand
times more difficult if the revolutionary movement does not
have roots in these mass organizations. This is not to say
that workers coming into a struggle are necessarily going to
place their trust in reformist policies and reformist leaders. Indeed
only a minority of them are likely to want to join the Labour
Party. But all their political demands during a whole period of
struggle will be addressed, directly or obliquely, to the leaders
of the Labour Party. This is as true of those who have shed their
illusions in social democracy or who never had such illusions,
as of those who still entertain them. At a stage when the
Labour Party appears as the only practicable alternative to
Toryism, a slogan like ‘down with the Tories’ can only mean ‘for
a new Labour government’. Needless to say, Marxists cannot
rest content with this abstract demand: it is necessary to specify
what kind of a Labour government, what policies it should carry
out and so on. But these are matters that cannot be determined
without internal struggle in the Labour Party. Therefore, for
several years at least, workers who enter the political arena are
unlikely to bypass the Labour Party, in the sense of showing
no concern for the struggle within it. On the contrary, the struggle
within it is likely to concern them very much, and the Marxists
have to engage in that struggle with their distinctive policies and
programme if they are to be taken seriously as an alternative
leadership.

150
 The treachery of the Labour Party leaders has made no
difference to the essential character of the party they lead. It is
the mass party of the organized working class, created by the
trade unions to represent Labour in Parliament. Without doubt
it is a reformist party. But to repeat over and over again that
it is a reformist party gets no one a whit nearer understanding
it. For it is not only a reformist party, but also the political
expression of the trade unions. The leaders of the Labour Party
follow the pro-capitalist policies of the Right-wing trade union
leaders—but the party they lead is rooted in the working class.
Through it the mass of the workers assimilate their political
experience, irrespective of whether they become individual
members of it. In the mid-twenties it was remarked that the
opposition of the Labour Party to the Conservative Party was
not a question of rivalry between two parties but of the destiny
of two classes. This is still true today, and will remain true
as long as the bulk of the workers regard ‘Labour’, with all its
defects, as ‘theirs*.
It is no good turning one’s back on the Labour Party because
its leaders are reformist. Before the workers will accept Marxists
as political leaders they have to test out various charlatans and
demagogues. While they are doing so it is worse than useless to
build one’s own pure ivory tower of immaculate ‘Marxism*.
The place for Marxists is the class struggle—and that includes
the class struggle going on in the Labour Party.
Not that the struggle of Left wing against Right wing in the
party reflects the class struggle automatically. At present, for
instance, the Centrists are deliberately holding their fire for the
sake of winning a general election (though it is far from clear
how the Labour Party’s chances can be improved if the call for
more socialism is muted). Nevertheless the Left wing contains
the majority of the active rank and file of the party. Ultimately
the development of the class struggle presses it forward and
makes it bolder in its attacks on the Right wing—so bold some­
times, as to surprise itself. Despite the vacillations of various
temporary leaders, despite patched up truces at the top, the
class struggle of Left against Right in the Labour Party can only
grow sharper in a period when the working class is moving
forward and its class consciousness is growing.
The main political work of the Marxist movement is therefore
concentrated in the Labour Party, so long as the following factors
hold good: (1) the British ruling class is in crisis, and is less and
less able to rule as in the past; (2) the majority of the working

151
 *

class is organized, in some form or another, in the Labour

Party; (3) the Right-wing leadership is in crisis, and the majority
of the party’s active rank and file want a more Left-wing policy;
(4) the revolutionary vanguard, though growing, is a very weak
minority. These four premises determine the relationship of
the Marxists to the Labour Party: they work within its Left wing
to strengthen the fight for a new leadership and new policies,
and to push the Centrists as far to the Left as possible; they go
with the workers through their political evolution and experiences,
whether those experiences are assimilated slowly or rapidly.
Marxists are not members of the Labour Party because they
entertain any illusions about its leaders or about its possibilities
as an instrument of working-class power. They have no such
illusions. They are members of the Labour Party because within
it are concentrated the' political life, political experiences and
political consciousness of the decisive sections of the working
class. Their activity in the Labour Party is wholly based on
the contradiction between the ever more pressing needs of the
working class and the incapacity of the reformist leaders to fulfil
those needs. They therefore fight in the localities and at con­
ferences for the fundamental interests of the rank and file, seek
to give the Leftward-moving members leadership, programme
and policies, and in the process assemble the forces for the
building of a mass revolutionary movement.
But there are not lacking those who cry that to do this is
to foster illusions in the Labour Party and its leaders. On the
contrary it is the most effective way of dispelling such illusions.
Coexistence with the Right wing in a common organization
for a certain period can heighten the struggle against that Right
wing and, step by step, expose its treachery before the workers
in practice—not by abstract denunciations from without but by
concrete demonstration from within of the lessons of each struggle
and each betrayal. This does not imply the concealment of the
Marxist banner. To work in the Labour Party is to show the
workers who are still under the influence of social democracy
the Marxist banner inside their own party, and help them break
from social democracy by placing demands on their leaders and
seeing what happens. To fight for a real socialist policy within
the Labour Party is to educate, by degrees, the workers who
sincerely believe that the Labour Party can do the job.
Marxists aim to be seen as the most energetic, reliable and
consistent fighters for socialist policies. They do not seek to
‘capture’ the Left. (This would be short-sighted, for to dominate

152
 a movement by winning positions in it artificially is the swiftest
way to forfeit the confidence of its members.) They do not
adapt themselves like chameleons to the political tints of the
Centrists or disappear into the protective cover of the Left wing
with a sigh of relief at this escape from the witch-hunting
proclivities of Transport House. Their activities, policies and
conduct in the struggle are determined solely by their own analysis,
their own assessment of the relationship of forces. They are
at pains to preserve their political and programmatic independence.
The employers’ offensive and the renewed industrial struggle
have now brought to the forefront the need for a new kind of
work in the Labour Party. In the past the Left has conducted
its main struggles through strictly party channels, campaigning
for resolutions, organizing protests against Right-wing policies,
leading delegations and the like. All these forms of activity
remain as important as ever. But it is becoming increasingly
important for local Labour Parties themselves to become campaign
centres in the industrial fight, to become organs of struggle, to
help and lead the embattled workers. The development of a
mass movement of resistance to sackings and victimization will
more and more force on the attention of local parties the need
to break completely away from the old stereotyped view of these
parties as electoral machines and nothing else. The time is coming
when they must intervene in every strike with practical help on
the picket-line, with posters, typewriters, duplicators, strike
bulletins, loudspeaker vans, house-to-house and other collections,
the loan of party rooms as strike headquarters and the issuing
of public statements associating themselves with the strikers. A
tradition should be established of local parties sending their
active members down to every strike committee to say to the
workers: 4We are from the Labour Party—what can we do to
help you?’ This should not be something exceptional, but a
matter of regular practice. Local Labour Parties should moreover
take the lead, in the most forthright and militant way, in the
fight against higher rents, in physical resistance to evictions, in
the campaign against the hydrogen-bomb. Labour councillors
should become tribunes of working-class discontent, repudiating
utterly the Right-wing conception of local councils as adminis­
trators of government policies, inflaming the people with hatred
towards the Tories and determination to smash them.
By these and similar means two vital objectives can be attained.
First, the Left in the Labour Party can be turned very much
more toward^ the industrial workers and their needs and problems.

153
r

For too long the Left has fought most vigorously of all on
foreign policy at the annual conference of the Labour Party.
There is no question about the need for a sturdy fight on foreign
policy; but the time has come to fight with equal vigour, and
with some audacity, on the day-by-day problems of the industrial
workers. The time has come, in fadt, to transform the annual
conference into a battleground on such questions as unemploy­
ment, the need for industrial action against sackings, and the
need for a socialist policy of nationalizing those industries that
are unable to provide work. Marxists seek by every means at
their disposal to force such problems into the heart of Labour
Party discussions, nationally and locally. They seek to rally a
Left wing that will put a barrel of dynamite under the Labour
bureaucracy—that will challenge their complacency on industrial
problems with workshop trenchancy and in workshop language.
Secondly, the participation of local Labour Parties in industrial
struggles will lay a sound basis for the recruitment into the party
of a certain number of industrial militants who will help to
strengthen the fight for Left-wing policies. Some will join as
individual members: others will begin to take part in Labour
Party work as delegates to Constituency Labour Parties. These
militants will make full use of the available machinery for having
their trade union branches represented in the Labour Party and
will attend the appropriate meetings to join forces with the
Left wing, improve the local parties’ industrial activity and drive
careerists and Right-wingers out of the leading committees.
Developments of this kind, based on the upsurge of mass
industrial and political struggles, will go far towards breaking
through the purely factitious barriers which the Right wing has
sought to place between industrial action and political action.
The fight to carry the industrial struggle into the political wing
of the movement goes hand in hand with the fight for Left-wing
policies inside the trade unions. The first is the fight to galvanize
the Labour Left and bring it into the sharpest possible conflict
with the Right wing. The second is the fight to bring rank-and-
file trade unionists into political activity under a socialist banner.
The basis for the successful prosecution of both these struggles
is the simultaneous linking of local Labour Parties with the
industrial struggles going on in their areas, and of trade union
branches, district committees, shop stewards’ committees and other
factory organizations with their local Labour Parties. Such links
are not forged by passing resolutions. It is in the course of
struggle that they will appear and become durable.

154
 It would be surprising, to say the least, if activity of the kind 1•
it
described here met with no resistance. For one thing, there
are the natural inertia and conservatism of workers, inside and
outside the Labour Party, to whom these ideas are so novel as
to be disagreeable. Two things will overcome their objections:
patient and painstaking explanation of the need for an effective
working-class counter-strategy to the employers’ attacks; and their
own experience of the humbug, chicanery and treachery of mis-
leaders who try to keep the Labour movement’s industrial and
political wings in water-tight compartments. Then we can expect
desperate resistance from the Labour leaders, on the specious
grounds that industrial militancy, especially if associated with -• -A

the l abour Party, is an ‘electoral liability’,1 that it ‘plays into

the Tories' hands’.2 Part of the answer has been given by
-
Michael Foot, writing in the Daily Herald’. ‘The trade union ••*'•*■'
movement does need a new industrial and political strategy. . . .
The new strategy is required to fight the old enemy—those who
wish to continue exploiting the workers who produce the wealth
by trying to keep them disunited, unorganized and, therefore,
powerless.’3 There is no doubt that the course of the struggle i, • '*
•T 1 >

will convince layer after layer, section after section of the working
class that it cannot by keeping one hand tied behind its back
fight an enemy who uses without scruple every weapon in his
armoury. There is neither security nor peace of mind for workers
till the Tories are beaten back and crushed. Efforts to link
political and industrial action, to reanimate the Labour Party ' r.
so that, at the local level at least, it becomes a weapon in the
workers’ fight, are an essential ingredient of any serious anti-
Tory strategy.
Marxists do not waste time speculating about the future of
the Labour Party. They try their best to end the present Right-
wing domination and policies, which have plunged the party
into a crisis of inaction, impotence and indecision from which
not even a general election fund of £750,000—ten times what
the party spent on losing the last general election—will suffice
to remove it. One thing is clear: the crisis will come to a head
after the next general election. If Labour is not returned the
rank and file will want to know why. There will be a calling to i
iK i
account. If Labour is returned then the Right-wing leaders will * t , t

have to grapple with the workers’ demands for higher wages, for
nationalization, for an end to sackings, for the protection of
stewards and other militants. In either case the Right wing will
be faced with grave problems and its grip on the party will be
 by no means so secure as it has seemed since the 1958 annual
conference. Either set of circumstances will be conducive to
the maturing of the Marxist movement and to a new gathering
of forces on the Labour Left.

1'Union leaders are well aware of the disservice that too much militancy
did to the Labour Party's political fortunes in 1958. In the probable
election year of 1959, they will not want to play into the Tories’ hands
with another episode like the bus strike’ (,Economist, December 27,
1958).
‘ T h e more percipient of the Labour Party leaders . . . have noted
with satisfaction a couple of hints of a toughening attitude among trade
union leaders towards the industrial militants who are such an electoral
liability’ (Manchester Guardian, October 23, 1958).
•November 28, 1958.

■ i
 ij

, *
4. MARXISTS AND THE TRADE UNIONS

The Employers' Offensive

How to break the power of the working class? How to alter

the balance of forces in the factories? This is the chief problem
confronting the British capitalist class today. This class is meeting y -J;
fierce competition on a shrunken world market from capitalist
nations whose technique and productivity are in many respects
more advanced than Britain’s. In order to compete effectively
British capitalism is impelled to try to lower labour costs. It can
do this only by creating a reserve army of unemployed as a
condition for cutting real wages.
But the employers are not dealing with a working class new
to industry, with little experience of class struggle. They are
facing a powerful and experienced working class, one which
enjoys a higher standard of living than that of the workers in
many other countries. Whenever the employers try to carry
through their chosen solution they come up against the power
of the organized working class.. In particular they find their
plans checked by the vigilance of the shop stewards, who are
the guardians of working-class rights and of the fruits of past
victories, and whose organization is the direct expression of the
workers’ industrial strength at the base.
The growing economic difficulties, the high degree of working-
■i ■ ]
class organization in major industries and the workers’ resistance
to attacks made on them: these together have led to the elabora­
tion by the employing class and its government of a more or 1
t
less conscious and comprehensive strategy. In a series of probing 4

attacks in the period 1955-58 the employers have been finding r *‘

■431 *•

out how far they could go at any particular stage and in any

157
particular industry. They have also been discovering to what
extent they could rely on the trade union leaders to curb or
crush their members’ militancy. These battles were the preparation
for large-scale struggles that are now looming up. They were
dress rehearsals for a show-down between the classes which will
have more far-reaching implications than the show-down of 1926,
thanks to the rich political experience gained by the working
class in the last third of a century.
The main strategical method of the employers is now quite
clear; it is to challenge the working class section by section,
isolate each section in turn by various means (including, if need
be, trifling concessions to other sections) and so impose their
will on the workers and defeat them piecemeal.
The employers’ main strategical aims are threefold. First,
they want to bring about a high enough rate of unemployment
to permit them to drive down the price of labour power and
hold the threat of the sack over the heads of militants and
potential militants. Secondly, they want to cut real wages. This
has virtually become a condition of existence for the British
capitalist class. Wage increases are to be kept to the minimum
and, where possible, refused. And thirdly, they want to destroy
the power of the shop stewards, cripple workshop organization,
snap the links of solidarity between workshop and workshop,
and so undermine the workers’ will to resist. These aims, which
can be separated only on paper, are not dictated by the nostalgia
the capitalist class feels for the ‘good old days’ when it ruled the
roast in industry and starved recalcitrant sections of the workers
into submission. The need to drive the workers back economically
and organizationally to the ‘hungry thirties’ is dictated by the
most peremptory economic necessity.
Nowhere have the first and second of these strategic aims of
the employing class been put with greater frankness than in
the February 1958 report of the Cohen Council, which openly
declared that unemployment should rise;
[Unemployment] has still only gone a short way. . . . No one should
be surprised or shocked if it proves necessary that it should go some­
what further. In our opinion it is impossible that a free and flexible
economic system can work efficiently without a perceptible (though
emphatically not a catastrophic) margin of unemployment of this kind.1
The so-called ‘three wise men' set as a desirable objective a
decline in total demand, so as to promote unemployment and
cut real wages: ‘We believe that the decline in the intensity of
demand will tend to moderate the insistence with which wage

158
claims are pressed.’3 Six months later, in their second report,
they added:
We should . . . think of this year’s relatively low level of increases,
not as an exceptional event, nor as an acceptable long-term minimum,
but as a stage in the process of getting the trend of wages better into
line with the trend of productivity. It is highly desirable that the
process should continue next year.1
There have been many statements by big business men and
their journals echoing these views. The employers frankly insist
on sacking whom they please when they please. ‘We feel that
something is going to happen now and there will be more
unemployment/ Mr B. Macarty, of the Engineering and Allied
Employers’ Federation, told the conference of the British
Employers’ Federation last autumn. ‘In the end the final decision
must always be that of the employer/4 Sir William Garrett,
president of the British Employers’ Confederation, said on
December 2, 1958, that the government should not recreate the
acute shortage of skilled labour ‘which has so long bedevilled
our efforts to increase efficiency’. He added: ‘It is most important
that the government should not bring about again that situation
of overfull employment which has been the cause and accompani­
ment of the inflation to which we have been subjected for the last
twelve years/5 The Economist, which was the first ruling-class
journal to call openly for higher unemployment/ continues to
speak of ‘the needed reserve pool of labour’.7 It is also the
frankest about the effect of unemployment on wages/ Elsewhere
the need to ‘stabilize costs and prices’ in British shipyards is
frequently stressed.9 One paper sums up the employers’ stand­
point tersely: ‘What is needed stands out . . . clearly: restraint
of wage increases/10 Another declares that a wage increase in
1959 of ‘even 4 per cent, would certainly be too much’.11 One
of the best and most authoritative summaries of the wages strategy
of the government and the employers appeared in The Times
Annual Financial and Commercial Review:
During the past twelvfe months [i.e., up to the end of October 1958]
the trade unions have come nearer to direct conflict with the govern­
ment over wages than they have for thirty years. The long struggle . . .
may perhaps be said to have ended in a draw. Wage increases have
been smaller and later than in other recent years. . . . A year ago
. . . the government, thwarted during the previous twelve months by
the economic consequences of the Suez crisis, were evidently more
determined than ever to bring about greater stability of wages and
prices. The financial crisis gave added force to this determination.
The increase in Bank Rate, restrictions on credit, stabilization of public

159
 investment and other economic measures, combined with intensified
international competition, were tending to create conditions in which
employers would be reluctant to grant increases in wages. The govern­
ment for their part repeatedly emphasized that they were not prepared
to finance inflation. . . . The government would not provide the money
to meet inflationary wage increases in the publicly owned sector of
the economy, and they specifically mentioned the British Transport
Commission. . . . The result of the determined action by the govern­
ment and some employers has been that wage increases have been
slower and later than in recent years.”
In January 1959 came the first cut in money wages for two
decades, when the leaders of the National Union of Hosiery
Workers agreed to a 12 per cent, reduction in the wages of
10,000 of their girl members. ‘We believe this is a move in
the right direction,’ said the labour relations adviser to the
, employers’ federation.18 In March there was an equally savage
cut in the wages of male hosiery workers.
To add force to the employers’ strategy the government decided
last October to abolish the Industrial Disputes Tribunal—a change
for which the employers had been ‘clamouring for a long time’.14
This change meant the use of the big stick in preference to
negotiation. Under the old pattern the trade union leaders asked
for an increase, the employers offered a smaller sum and a bargain
was struck somewhere in between. Such bargaining was of course
a camouflage for the trade union bureaucracy, which could point
to the gains it had secured for its membership without taking
them into a fight. Now, however, the growing economic
difficulties of British capitalism have narrowed the basis for this
manoeuvring. The employers regarded the compulsory procedure
as weighted against them and it had to go, despite the lamentations
of trade union leaders. ‘Some unions . . . will feel uncomfortably
naked’, wrote The Times:1* The general secretary of the National
and Local Government Officers’ Association let the cat out of
the bag in a letter to the Economist: ‘NALGO has never had a
strike in its fifty-three years’ history. . Is it “good riddance”
to deprive responsible trade unionism of the basis of confidence
upon which its responsibility rests?’18 But the discarding of
arbitration was the logical outcome of the earlier veto by the
Minister of Health on an ‘agreed’ rise for National Health Service
clerks. The whole well-tried system of class conciliation had
collapsed. One of the main props of the Right-wing trade union
leaders had been knocked from under them. Henceforward the
workers would have to rely on their own strength.
The core of that strength lies in the shop stewards' system,

160
which is now under fire, both in well-publicized statements by
employers’ spokesmen and in all kinds of little-reported attempts
to get rid of workers who are trusted by their workmates as
champions. The views of an important section of the employers
were set forth on November 27, 1958, by Mr C. S. Garland,
retiring president of the National Union of Manufacturers. Shop
stewards, he said, were ‘an excrescence on the trade union move'
ment\ He went on:
The shop steward system as it has developed is thoroughly bad. It
is one of the greatest menaces that we employers have had to face.
. . . It is essential . . . that the government and the trade unions
should . . . work out a solution to be expressed in legislation to restore to
the trade unions their responsibility for what goes on in the shops
in which their members work. This is a thorny problem but it must
be grasped.”
It is in the highest degree illuminating to list some of the
other hostile references to shop stewards made during 1958. In
a scries of three articles in February the Economist attacked
spare-time union officials who ‘make a good thing for themselves
. . . in terms of creature comforts, if not of hard cash. . . .
The descent from a partly politically inspired movement into
a plain and powerful racket can be made in easy stages, especially
when the words “ union solidarity” can be used as a holy cloak’.18
The year 1959 might be the essential year in which to take the
first steps to legislate against the ‘standing national scandal’ of
local trade union power.19 In June a number of Conservative
lawyers published a study whose aim was clearly to smash the
power of trade unions and make ‘unofficial’ strikes liable to civil
or criminal proceedings. It suggested restricting certain legal
privileges to trade unions registered with the Registrar of Friendly
Societies, who would be empowered to make conditions, that must
be obeyed by the rules of all trade unions accorded the privilege
of registration. These new powers of registration should be used
directly to limit strikes, in such a way that ‘unofficial’ strikes
would be virtually prohibited.20 In its comment on this document,
the Economist was absolutely frank: ‘The need is for what union
leaders will no doubt call, indignantly, a charter for blacklegs.’21
According to the Financial Times the aim of the McAlpine
lock-out on the South Bank was to re-employ ‘a slightly altered
labour force from which the worst militants have been weeded
out’.22 In innumerable articles in the Daily Telegraph the word
‘indiscipline’ is used as a synonym for ‘a strong shop stewards’
organization’,2? This paper cries out for ‘resolute action’ against
*

161

*
 shop stewards.24 The document submitted by the employers to
the unions during the BOAC dispute included an attempt to
have the existence of the jpint shop stewards’ committee at
London Airport ruled contrary to the spirit of the constitution and
harmful to the conduct of the affairs of the national joint council
for the air transport industry. This plain attempt to smash the
shop stewards’ organization, as the BOAC strike committee called
it,25 was hailed with approval by the capitalist Press:
It is becoming increasingly common in industry to find effective control
passing from union officials to shop stewards, and it is a thoroughly
unhealthy trend. . . . It is intolerable that the operations of London
Airport should be at the mercy of a group of irresponsible agitators.
. . . BOAC . . . deserves the support of the unions.”
There has been a great deal of loose talk about a show-down. It is time
for the unions to have one with the strike leaders.”
[Employers] may find that an irresponsible workers’ leadership has
got beyond official union control and has established a domination
which can disrupt their whole organization. In time this becomes
intolerable and there is a fierce struggle to restore law and order. . . .
Communists and other ‘militants’ have built up a close and powerful
organization, within the airport, ready to challenge at any time both
the management and the official union leadership. Now at last the
management of BOAC have grasped the nettle. . . . They aim . . .
to end the domination of the shop stewards’ committee. . . . A trial
of strength must always be costly, but it may prove that the employers
have not chosen their time badly.”
At the root of it all is the lack of authority of the union leaders.
. . . They see the real power, without responsibility, concentrated
in the militant shop stewards’ committee.”
These unions profess to concentrate power at centre, but in fact they
have let it slip into the hands of local stewards. This has meant
that London Airport hangars have become a private empire of a
group of industrial and political troublemakers. [Managements in civil
engineering objected to giving shop stewards] an authority wrested not
only from the employers but also from the trade union officials.”
When the court of inquiry into the BOAC dispute came down
heavily on the side of the employers and against the stewards
in its report, and threw in a portion of aMi-communist witch-
hunting for good measure, the employers’ Press was quite naturally
jubilant and outspoken:
It was a familiar story of extremist agitation. . . . Where is the sense
in having rules if they can be flouted by every little c o m m ie who
waves a red flag? What use is the enormous power of the unions
if it cannot preserve their authority? . . . They could, If they wished,
stop all this unofficial, unconstitutional business. . . . The TUC are
meeting next week. . . . We beg them to assert their authority.”
I| is essential that [shop stewards] should not be allowed to usurp

162
 the authority of the trade union officials. It is plain from this and other
recent industrial disputes that something must be done to curb their
power. In many cases the employers could do more by exercising
proper discipline.*2
To curb the stewards is the course upon which BOAC, with the court’s
approval, is now plainly bent. . . . The report has thrown light on
yet another dark corner of British industry where shop stewards had
gained the upper hand of management. . . . Where rule by stewards
does exist it is a complete barrier to economic progress. To get rid
of it is worth almost any number of strikes.91
What the Economist means by ‘economic progress’ is, quite
simply, unemployment. In its view ‘Britain’s half a million jobless
are performing a service for the community’.84 There can be
no understanding of the present relationship of class forces in
Britain, or of the tasks of the working class, without an under­
standing of the present thinking of the employing class: it has
reached a point where to be able to sack stewards, build a
reserve army of unemployed and cut labour costs ‘is worth
almost any number of strikes’. The Engineering and Allied
Employers’ National Federation openly declared in February 1959:
Twice in four years the federation had been prepared to ‘fight it out’
with the unions. Clearly, the unions’ capacity to pay strike benefit
was limited. Such a course, involving, as it would have done, the
virtual closing down of the industry, might have been a worthwhile
calculated risk. It was no occasion for the kind of compromise which
would inevitably emerge from a court of inquiry.2* '
To fulfil these aims, to win these projected strikes, to be victorious
in its offensive, the employing class will bring into play its State
machine. It will deploy police against pickets, as at South Bank,
where according to the chief steward there, Hugh Cassidy, ‘I saw
pickets kicked and booted by police as they lay on the ground.
When I protested to the officer in charge, he said he did not
see a thing’.80 It will send militants to prison, as Brian Behan
and Matt Lynch were sent to prison for six weeks and two
months respectively, for refusing to concede to the police the
right to lay it down that only two pickets were afiowed on one
gate. The employing class, in short, is well aware that it must
fight a class struggle in deadly earnest. It is well equipped to
fight. It has a plan of campaign. It has no scruples.

The Workers' Counter-Offensive

The fact must be faced that the workers are not yet nearly
so well equipped to wage this struggle as the employers are. This

163
is not to say that there is anything wrong with their mood. In
general, morale and combativity are high. Over years of full
employment the workers have built up reserves of strength and
self-confidence. They do not have to be beaten down to the
conditions of the thirties before their fighting spirit is aroused.
What is lacking is co-ordination among the various sections. The
main immediate task of Marxists in industry is to foster among
the workers the awareness that the fight of each particular section
is a matter of direct concern to the whole working class, that
the powerful weapon of solidarity action must be employed in
today’s struggles if the whole class is to be saved from disaster.
‘If we let the others go down in defeat it will be our turn
tomorrow’: this is the feeling that has to be spread, with concrete
examples from recent industrial history, so that each partial attack
brings down on the employer who dares to sack or to victimize
a vigorous counter-offensive that immobilizes his goods, deprives
him of raw materials and other supplies, cuts off his electricity
and so paralyses all his factories until he comes to terms. The
employers mean business. The workers too must be resolute
and well organized, or they will go under. And as the workers
taste their power they will begin to appreciate both the need to
challenge the entire capitalist system and their own ability to do
so successfully.
What is necessary, then, is a united fighting front of the whole
working class to meet and beat back the employers’ offensive
with crushing counter-blows and advance to the overthrow of the
capitalist system. Only the Marxists can build this, for they
alone have the requisite confidence in the power of the working
class. The achievement of 100 per cent, trade unionism on
every job; the interweaving of the wages battle with the battle
to defend jobs; the exposure of the Right-wing trade union
leaders in the course of the struggle; the fight against the bureau­
cratic machine, for rank-and-file control over all major decisions,
for the regular election of all officials and for their payment at
the average rates earned by their members; the elaboration and
implementation of carefully thought-out strike strategy and tactics;
the development of all forms of solidarity action; above all, the
creation of a powerful network of rank-and-file committees linking
job with job and breaking down the barriers between the workers
of different industries: these are the questions of the hour. All
these things must be accomplished if the workers* counter-offensive
is to l>e mounted with the urgency that the situation demands.
There js not a militant in industry today whose struggle would

164
not be helped if there existed rank-and-file bodies in all key
industrial centres ready to give help and advice to workers the
moment a dispute broke out. These bodies would be ready­
made strike machines, able to mobilize fraternal pickets, spread
information to other workers about the causes of the strike and
the conduct of the police, give advice on all legal aspects of
the struggle and collect financial help. But the construction of
these links, so elementary, yet so vital if isolation is to be over­
come, is proceeding with painful slowness. Part of the reason
is the opposition of the Communist Party to this form of working-
class activity. But this is only part of the reason. The need
to prepare strikes properly, to have a skeleton organization
mapped out beforehand, is not yet widely realized. Nor is the
need to extend strikes if they are to be won—to secure the widest
possible industrial and political support for workers in struggle.
Yet we are now entering a period in which strike after strike
can easily be lost (so ready are the employers to hammer the
workers into submission) unless there is adequate strategy before
and during each struggle, at every level. A crying need, for
instance, is the calling of local and national conferences of unions
which are involved in struggles on wages and jobs, to plan how
the full power of the organized Labour movement can be brought
to bear behind the workers’ demands. This conception of the
whole Labour movement fighting against sackings, and not just
the workers whose jobs are menaced, has to be campaigned for
incessantly: union leaderships must be compelled by the clamour
of their members to recognize immediately all strikes against
sackings. Moreover the political implications of all such struggles
must be driven home: the need for the nationalization under
workers’ control of industries unable to guarantee jobs to those
who work in them.
Tn the course of this preparation for the coming struggles
two principles need stressing again and again: that no strike
should be called off on terms less favourable than the original
demands until the workers concerned have fully discussed the
matter and voted on it; that unions should immediately give full
protection to all stewards and other militants dismissed or
threatened with dismissal, and refuse to permit the victimization
of rank-and-file leaders.
At the same time, it would be harmful if illusions developed
about the efficacy of official recognition. Every militant knows of
occasions when the leadership has recognized a strike, taken
control of it put of the hands of the men’s own rank-and-file

16S
 committee—and sent the workers back no better off than when
they came out. Official recognition can be of real advantage
only if rank-and-file control is maintained, and if the strike
committee, with or without official permission, continues its
efforts to secure solidarity action.
Two criticisms of Marxist policy and activity in the trade
unions are sometimes made.
First, it has been suggested that the building of rank-and-file
movements is a kind of ‘anti-union’ activity, and that it would
be far more constructive to concentrate on utilizing the existing
trade union machinery to the full in an effort to change the policy
and leadership of the unions and restore trade union democracy.
This is a false antithesis. Rank-and-file movements are not
‘breakaway’ bodies, but movements of active trade unionists
dedicated to the observance of trade union principles. Nor do
Marxists turn their backs on the fullest possible utilization of
the existing machinery. The outstanding lesson to be drawn,
however, from the history of British trade unionism and from
recent struggles alike is that the trade unions can be turned into
organs of class struggle, and the fight for trade union democracy
carried forward, only if the rank and file-are drawn into activity
and their initiative is unleashed. Only by developing rank-and-
file movements based on class struggle policies can the workers
hope to win the coming battles, raise their consciousness and
fighting ability, and build a leadership which will lead a struggle
against the employers and the Labour bureaucrats. Only through
the formation and extension of rank-and-file committees of all
kinds—and at every level from ad hoc inter-union defence
committees on specific issues up to an eventual national rank-
and-file movement with regular conferences, its own journal and
full-time organizers—can the rank and file end its present exclusion
from effective control over the unions and the framing of their
policy.
We strive, not to take the workers out of the unions, but to
build within the unions a new, militant leadership, free from
any tendency to compromise with the employers. This will be
a leadership, not of job-seekers, but of workers who reject outright
the material gains which the Right wing views as the natural
rewards of office. This leadership will thus make the sharpest
possible break with, and stand out in the strongest possible
contrast to, the corruption and class collaboration of the Labour
bureaucracy. It will return to the probity, not to say austerity,
that characterized the leaders of the trade union movement in

m
 the pioneering days, when trial, imprisonment and deportation,
not knighthoods, fat salaries and other ‘honours’, were the rewards
to be expected from the capitalist class for trade union activity.
The second criticism made of Marxists in the trade unions is
that they ‘use’ the workers and ‘cash in on strikes’. This
accusation collapses when it is set beside the industrial record
of the Marxist movement. Marxists scrupulously refrain from
foisting on the workers any preconceived form of organization,
and from laying down any conditions for the help they and their
Press give to workers in battle. The relationship of Marxists
and workers on strike is one of mutual confidence and respect
between those fighting a common enemy. Unlike the Stalinists,
the Marxists do not seek to use industrial struggles as a means
of advancing their own movement artificially. They do not grub
or intrigue for positions. But at all times they do seek to impress
on the workers the need for organization, for building rank-
and-file movements, for relying on their own strength and for
preparing for later, decisive struggles against the whole capitalist
system.
Marxists participate in the struggles of their fellow-workers in
order to help them win, and in order to prepare them for their
future historical tasks. Whoever claims to be a Marxist and
does not do this is a fraud and a cheat. The future will not take
care of itself: it has to be prepared for now, in the womb of
the present, while there is yet time to capture the workers’
imagination for the struggle for socialism and weld them into
a formidable fighting force. In present conditions, amid the
exigencies of present strife, we have to build a rank-and-file
movement that with the future sharpening of the class struggle
will cease to be merely defensive and will challenge the capitalist
class for control of the factories. We have to construct organs
of struggle that are also potential organs of power, that are
capable of carrying the workers’ struggle under certain circum­
stances beyond the limits of capitalist power. Here is the task
to which revolutionaries have to set their hand if they are real
revolutionaries and not braggarts, phrase-mongers and impostors.
The fundamental aim of Marxist activity in the trade unions is
to restore the unions to their original purpose, break the hundred
and one threads that tie them to the capitalist class and its State
and transform them into organs of struggle for working-class
power.

167
 1 Council on Prices, Productivity and Incomes. First Report (HMSO,
1958), p. 41.
3Ibid. p. 53. The report went on: ‘We would . . . hope that if any
wage increases arc granted in 1958, they will be substantially below
the average of the last few years. . . . In general, we think it important
that, in the occupations where productivity is rising fastest, wages should
not be allowed to rise in full proportion to the increase in productivity/
3Council on Prices, Productivity and Incomes. Second *Report (HMSO,
1958), p. 29.
*The Times, October 17, 1958.
9Ibid. December 3, 1958.
•See above, pp. 39-40.
TDecember 20, 1958. Cf. ibid. February 14, 1959: ‘Optimism about
a continued, though probably still mild, improvement in output over
the next few months carries no corollary assumptions that employment
need rise or unemployment fall correspondingly. . . . It might be
politically embarrassing if British industry manages to achieve a
significant increase in its output before it needs to take on many extra
men. But it will be economically scandalous if it cannot/
#‘It is hard to be dogmatic about the exact relationship between the
level of unemployment and the slackening of wage demands, but several
recent estimates at least agree that the relationship is a close one' (ibid.
December 27, 1958).
•See Financial Times, September 27, 1958: ‘There is no doubt that
UK shipyards will continue to lose contracts and customers unless
' something can be done to stabilize costs and prices’, and The Times
Annual Financial and Commercial Review, October 27, 1958, p. xvii:
‘British [shipbuilders] are being pressed for lower, and fixed, prices. . . .
There seems no modification yet in the view of labour that annual
wage increases are justified without any increase in output/
MThe Times, October 17, 1958.
11Financial Times, November 8, 1958. Cf. ibid. February 9, 1959: 'One
of the more satisfactory features of the current economic scene in the
UK is the comparative absence of major wage demands/
“ The Times Annual Financial and Commercial Review, October 27, 1958,
p. xx.
a Daily Mail, January 17, 1959.
3*New Statesman, October 25, 1958. The Economist wrote of this decision
(October 25, 1958): ‘Good riddance [to] that ill-conceived engine. . . .
Last year more than a hundred wage increases were churned out by
it. . . . The general public need shed no tears at its burial/
u October 23, 1958.
‘•November 1, 1958.
" Daily Telegraph, November 28, 1958.
u Economist, February 15, 1958.
19Ibid. February 22, 1958.
*° A Giants Strength. A Study by the Inns of Court Conservative and
Unionist Society (1958).
” June 14, * ’ 1958.
168
 >

” October 1, 1958.
“ This paper wrote of the South Bank dispute (October 14, 1958): ‘The
shock of discovering . . . that the sack could be the price of indiscipline
doubtless helps to explain the vehemence of their reaction. They have
persisted in their indiscipline by declaring the site “black" against the
wishes of the major unions.*
**October 22, 1958.
“ In a statement issued on October 17, 1958. It recalled that earlier
in the year BOAC had declared its intention of carrying through ‘a
massive redundancy*. As a result of the unions* policy to avert this,
the employers had decided they must smash the organization.
{Manchester Guardian, October 18, 1958.)
"Financial Times, October 16, 1958.
97Ibid. October 17, 1958.
" T h e Times, October 16, 1958. A few days later, however, The Times
was lamenting that it was ‘far from easy’ to dispose of ‘trouble-makers’.
Referring to ‘the damage that can be caused by a small number of
trouble-making shop stewards,' it wrote: I t is easy for shop stewards
to go their own way. . . . An employer who gives way to unconstitu­
tional local pressure . . . makes it very difficult for a union to maintain
discipline. . . . One of the problems facing an employer is what to
do about well-known trouble-makers. To dismiss them, sometimes
even to refuse to engage them, is bound to raise the cry of victimization.
'Ihe theoretical answer is that if a firm’s . . . will [is] firm, and if
the union leadership co-operate to ensure the observance of negotiated
agreements, the trouble-maker will get nowhere and will be moved
to some happier hunting ground. This can be put into practice, but
it is often far from easy’ {ibid. October 27, 1958).
“ Sunday Times, October 19, 1958.
MEconomist, October 25, 1958.
51Daily Mail, December 11, 1958.
**Observer, December 14, 1958.
* Economist, December 13, 1958. (My emphasis—P.F.) Cf. ibid.
February 28, 1959: ‘Where the stewards' power has grown beyond a
certain point, recent experience . . . shows that it is almost always
worth while to stand up to a stoppage in order to restore order.*
On February 6, 1959, the Jack report was rejected by a majority of the
trade unions concerned.
**Ibid. December 20, 1958.
,s Looking at Industrial Relations (n.d. [1959]), p. 40. This was described
by the Financial Times (February 2, 1959) as ‘certainly the most candid
declaration ever issued by an employers’ association’ and ‘uncom­
promising’. One Labour MP, Fred Lee. called it ‘deliberate provoca­
tion to the trade unions to resort to strike action’ (Daily Herald,
February 5, 1959).
“ Quoted in The Times, October 11, 1958. Cf. South Bank Special,
no. 2, published as a supplement to The Newsletter, vol. ii, no. 73,
October 18, 1958.

169
 5. PRINCIPLES AND PROGRAMME OF THE
MARXIST MOVEMENT

M arxists welcome into their movement all who want a new

society, all who are in struggle, all who are subjected to exploita­
tion and oppression—provided they accept the principles and
programme of the movement and are willing to support it
financially and to work in one of its organizations. Firmness on
principles and an absolutely clear programme are the indispensable
conditions for fruitful activity.
There are four principles on which the Marxist movement
considers it necessary to be quite firm—because abandonment
of these principles, or concessions to middle-class illusions and
prejudices in these matters, would mean that the movement
would no longer be Marxist, or indeed a movement.

(1) Independent Working-Class Action

Marxists recognize that socialism can be achieved only by the
action of the working class, and that this class must be brought
into independent anti-capitalist activity, without regard to the
interests or susceptibilities of other social classes. Marxists have
no other starting-point in their analyses and no other criterion
of their own and others’ activities, than the position, needs and
interests of the working class. They consider that the only effective
way to fight against war, the hydrogen-bomb or fascism is to
mobilize the working class to wipe out these evils and the system
that gives rise to them. They regard any attempt to hold back
working-class activity for the sake of influencing sections of the
middle class or of the capitalist class as a betrayal of the workers’
interests; in their view the only way to convince the middle strata

170
of society of the workers’ power and of their ability to achieve
socialism is to use that power to the fullest extent.

(2) Revolutionary Policy, Not Reformism

Marxists recognize that they must work, not to patch up
capitalist society, but to overthrow it; that their policy must
be revolutionary, not reformist, their demands such as will mobilize
the workers for the struggle to conquer power; that their strategy
and tactics must be based on the dynamics of the class struggle
and directed towards the conquest of power; that they must not
postpone talking about the socialist revolution until the workers’
consciousness has ‘matured’, but must bring the daily problems
of the working class to the attention of that class in relation to
the socialist revolution. Thus for instance the fight to deprive
the capitalist class of the right to put workers on the pavement,
the fight for the right to have shop stewards on a particular job,
are fights for power, no matter in how limited a way. The long­
term issues that such fights raise must constantly be explained
to the workers, as part of their education for the conquest of
power.

(3) Work in the Mass Organizations of the Working Class

Marxists recognize that they must work in the mass organizations
of the working class. This principle is based on the need to make
contact with the working class as it is. Marxists can advance
to the head of their class only to the extent that the workers
experience in life the treachery of the Labour bureaucracy and
clash with them more and more frequently and more and more
sharply. But this entails continual criticism of bad leaders from
within the mass organizations—‘a relentless criticism of all the
directing personnel of the British Labour movement . . . a day
in and day out denunciation of its conservative, anti-proletarian,
imperialistic, monarchistic, lackey-like role in all spheres of social
life and of the class movement’.1 Only in the course of such
criticism, carried out not in the abstract but linked closely with
the specific details of each struggle, can Marxists prepare them­
selves to lead their class.

(4) Working-Class Internationalism and Defence of the

Soviet Union
Marxists are consistent working-class internationalists: they

171
practise and campaign for solidarity with the workers of other
countries and with the colonial peoples, and they defend the
Soviet Union and other workers’ States against world imperialism.
What they defend in the Soviet Union is the heritage of the
socialist revolution of 1917: the nationalized economy. This does
not imply silence about the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy
which has taken into its own hands the power that rightfully
belongs to the Russian workers. Rather does it imply the sternest
criticism of those who have destroyed soviet democracy, and
support for the Russian workers in every attempt they make to
overthrow the bureaucracy. But just as a trade union in a
capitalist country, no matter how reactionary its leadership, must
be defended against attack—in a capitalist court of law, s a y -
so the degeneration of the workers’ State in the USSR, the decay
of soviet institutions, the warping of the entire political super­
structure, do not determine the attitude of Marxists on the question
of principle: defence of the planned economy, defence of 1917,
implacable opposition to any attempt to restore capitalist property
relations in those countries where capitalism has been overthrown.

Transitional Demands
In equipping their movement with a programme, Marxists do
not make the false and misleading distinction, beloved of the
Fabians and the Stalinists, between ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’
demands. ‘On the one hand’ there is the struggle for high wages,
against sackings, for better living conditions, and the demands
that go with this struggle. ‘On the other hand’ there is the
struggle for socialism, to be resolved through parliament. This
dichotomy is quite foreign to Marxism. As we have stressed
above, any serious struggle for partial demands raises in one
form or another, at one level or another, the cardinal question
of power. The class relationships in capitalist society today
force the working class to exert its full strength if it is going to
defend its past conquests (and to defend the relatively more
defenceless sections: the women, the youth, the aged, the
immigrants) against the attacks of capitalism. Rather than
separate ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’ programmes whose connexion
is nowhere apparent—and the first of which is shelved indefinitely
—the Marxists advance a programme in which the industrial and
political struggles are linked, in which the political implications
of industrial struggles and the need to bring the industrial strength

172
of the working class behind every political struggle are clearly
formulated.
The immediate demands of the Marxists are therefore
transitional demands: i.e., demands which correspond to the
present needs and consciousness of the masses of the people
and to the actual tempo of development of the struggle; and which
lead the masses forward to the struggle for power and mobilize
them in that struggle. These demands are revolutionary demands,
because they clearly raise the question of power; but they are
by no means abstract or remote from reality, because they are
based on the present problems and thinking of the workers. A
transitional programme is a bridge from the immediate struggle
to the socialist revolution, from the present to the future.
Marxists neither ignore the value of immediate, ‘partial* demands
and of struggles for their achievement, nor deny the necessity
to put forward these demands and wage these struggles. There
is no reason for continued misery if a fight can alleviate it—
especially since in the course of every partial fight the workers
in combat test their old leaders, parties and slogans, and see
more and more clearly how their fundamental interests cannot
be served without the conquest of power. Immediate demands,
tactical slogans and ‘partial’ struggles mobilize and educate the
workers. But by themselves they are inadequate. They are
subsidiary to the general strategy of the socialist revolution. It
is important to see this, because to fail to show the workers,
or at least their most advanced sections, that only the socialist
revolution can solve their problems is to tail behind the Centrists.
To bring transitional demands into the heart of the struggle is
to force the Centrists forward or, alternatively, to expose them
before the workers.
This conception of a transitional programme deliberately
abstains from imposing any preconceived framework of ‘stages’
on the living movement. No leadership has the right to decide
that the struggle must be confined within a parliamentary, ‘legal*
framework up to a certain date, on which the struggle for socialism
can at last begin. This Procrustean bed of ready-made formulas
and recipes has nothing in common with the dialectical method
of the Marxists, who try to seize those elements of the future
that already exist in the present and build on them.
The attitude of Marxists to immediate demands stands in the
sharpest possible contrast to the attitude of opportunists of various
brands. To opportunists immediate demands are ends in them­
selves, unconnected with the struggle for power; they are pretexts
 for shelving this struggle. To Marxists the illusions and prejudices
of the masses of the people are no obstacle to their taking action
which challenges capitalist property and the capitalist State in
the course of defending* their immediate interests. To oppor­
tunists the present period is an ‘intermediate stage’, of
indeterminate duration. To Marxists the present period is one
of preparation of the workers for future revolutionary tasks.
Marxists base their programme not on the idea of descending
to the level of the most backward sections of the working class
but on the idea of helping the workers to raise themselves in
struggle to the height of their historic tasks.
British Marxists advance the following major transitional
demands:
(1) Clear out the Tory government, For a Labour government
with a socialist policy.
To thos^ who ask whether Marxists advocate bringing about
the downfall of the Tory government by extra-parliamentary
action, we reply: the downfall of the Tory government through
mass action would be a great experience for the working class,
would heighten its confidence and set its feet firmly on the road
to. new victories.
(2) No sackings. For the sharing of available work without
loss of pay. For the protection of stewards and other militants.
The capitalist class and the Fabian ‘new thinkers’ have tried
to spread the illusion that full employment can be guaranteed
indefinitely in capitalist society. The recent experience of the
workers, however, proves that the right to a job has to be
fought for, and the employers’ right to hire and fire at will has
to be challenged, if workers are not to be thrown on the scrap-
heap. Marxists are opposed to demands such as 4 “nons” first’,
‘women first’, ‘foreigners first’ and ‘compensation for those
redundant’. These demands split the workers, accept the
inevitability of sackings and are a substitute for a real struggle.
The demand ‘spread the work with no loss of pay' prevents the
bosses from solving the problem in their way and challenges
their control of the factories. The need is to broaden every
such fight, both quantitatively, in the sense of pitting the full
weight of the organized working class against every employer
who sacks; and qualitatively, in the sense of demanding the
nationalization of the industries affected.
(3) For the nationalization. of all major industries under

174
workers’ control
As the struggle against sackings develops the necessity for the
removal of the industries affected from the hands of the
monopolists becomes more and more apparent. This demand
hits at the very root of capitalist ownership and the fight for
it is a fight about who is to control industry. The adoption of
this demand by local Labour Parties would help to link these
parties with the workers’ fight against sackings.
(4) For united working-class action behind all wage demands.
For a sliding scale of wages based on a cost of living index
compiled by the trade union movement, with a strictly guaranteed
minimum.
(5) For united working-class resistance to rent increases,
including mass action to prevent evictions. For the nationalization
of the land. the building industry, the joint stock banks and the
insurance and building societies as the basis for a socialist plan
to end the housing problem. For the confiscation of the mansions
of the rich to house overcrowded families.
In the fight against rent increases the emphasis should be,
not on petitions, resolutions and lobbying, but on militant working-
class action—a vigorous campaign, including industrial action,
waged by local campaign committees uniting tenants, factory
delegates, trades councils, trade union branches and Labour
Parties. Labour councils should go into deficit as an alternative
to increasing rates or rents, and Labour-controlled councils
should organize nationally to carry this policy into effect. Rented
properties should be municipalized, with compensation to be
decided by tribunals elected from the local Labour movement—
i.e., a means test for landlords.
(6) For the ending of the manufacture and testing of hydrogen-
bombs by international working-class action.
Marxists do not cry ‘socialism alone is the answer’ and leave
it at that. They point out that only the power of the working
class can disarm imperialism and ban the H-bomb; that there
is no substitute for the mobilization of the Labour movement
against ‘our own’ ruling class; that the key question is to ‘black’
work on the construction of rocket bases and the manufacture
of nuclear weapons.
(7) For a struggle against war and against the imperialist
system which breeds war.
Marxist? warn the workers to place no trust in meetings between

175

/
riders, to have no illusions in the peaceful intentions of the capitalist
class. They demand an end to secret diplomacy. They call
for Britain’s withdrawal from NATO and SEATO, the ending
of arms expenditure and the use of the money and labour thus
saved on the well-being of the people. They call for the ending
of all imperialist war pacts directed against the Soviet Union
ahd the colonial revolution. They call for the nationalization of
the arms industry under workers’ control and for the drawing
up by technicians, scientists and representatives of workers’
organizations of a programme of useful public works and a plan
for the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
Are Marxists opposed to summit talks? They do not condemn
the Soviet leaders for calling for conferences with the leaders
of imperialist countries or for attending such conferences. The
point is what policy the Soviet leaders put forward. The purpose
of the summit conference at present in prospect is to do a
deal at the expense of the colonial peoples and of the working-
class movement in the imperialist countries. The task of socialists
is to rouse the working class to an awareness that it alone can
resolve the issue of peace or war; that a meeting of Soviet and
imperialist statesmen can reach no lasting solution of humanity’s
problems; that any retreat by imperialism will result, not from the
clever diplomacy of the Soviet leaders, but from international
working-class action.
(8) For the right of self-determination of all nations, the with­
drawal of British troops from colonial territories, and unconditional
support for the struggle of colonial and dependent peoples.1

1L. D. Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going? (English edition, 1926), p. 169.

 6. THE MARXIST PRESS

T he most powerful instrument in the hands of the Marxist move­

ment for influencing workers, persuading them of the correctness
of Marxist ideas, and mobilizing them and educating them in
struggle, is the written word.
The Socialist Labour League has at present two regular
publications: Labour^ Review, a bi-monthly, and The Newsletter,
a weekly. There is* a clear division of labour between them.
Labour Review is a journal of theory and practice. Its material
on current political, economic and social questions can be longer
and more profound in its analysis, but of necessity cannot be
so up-to-the-minute, as that in a weekly paper. It must also
deal with less topical questions of theory, history, philosophy
and culture that are important for the clarification ‘of the move­
ment and of the advanced workers who are influenced by the
movement. The Newsletter, while it carries shorter articles of
a theoretical nature, gives week by week information of interest
to militant workers and comment on events from a Marxist
standpoint.
Both publications aim at putting before their readers a correct
and systematic interpretation and analysis of events. They are
an indispensable link between the movement and workers who
are looking for militant leadership—a means whereby the move­
ment tests its ideas by connecting them with facts and with
people's experience, so fertilizing and correcting the movement's
thinking. They are a means whereby the movement elaborates
its political and ideological platform and ensures that it is a
fighting platform, based on the workers* real needs and problems,
not on somebody’s preconceived notions of what these are.
The correct use of its Press enables the Marxist movement
 to turn outwards, enrich its thinking, organize its adherents,
recruit new ones, influence a growing number of workers,’agitate
among them for the movement's transitional demands, and win
them for Marxist ideas. The Marxist Press serves the working
class in struggle by giving accurate accounts of its battles and
drawing the lessons from them; at the same time it builds the
Marxist movement. ‘It provides the workers with a weapon—and
it gives the Marxist movement a voice.
Neither Ixibour Review nor The Newsletter is devoted
exclusively to articles that express the Marxist standpoint. Both
open their columns to contributions from Left-wing writers holding
other views, while making it clear that these writers speak for
themselves and not for the Marxist movement. This is done
not from any liberal considerations but because revolutionary
journals thrive on controversy. Marxists have nothing to fear
from a confrontation of ideas, which they believe can only educate
the readers of their Press.
Labour Review and The Newsletter were born out of the
1956-57 crisis in the British Communist Party and at first decidedly
bore the stamp of their origin. Their original purpose was to
act as a direct bridge between the Marxist movement and the
recent ex-communists and dissident members of the party. They
set out to reorientate, re-educate and regroup the most militant
and forward-looking of these. Through a discussion combined
with a firm editorial stand on questions of principle, they aimed
to show them the only possible road to the construction of a
Marxist movement. They set out to create a climate in which
the necessary theoretical generalizations could be drawn from
the crisis of Stalinist theory and practice.
In the main this task was carried out successfully. Despite
a number of weaknesses and shortcomings, it is to the credit of
Labour Review and The Newsletter that they saved many people
for Marxism, guided them out of the political wilderness and
brought them into fruitful activity in the class struggle.
For The Newsletter in particular the turning-point in its
development came with the London bus strike of 1958. A
Marxist newspaper meets its supreme test when it is called on
to serve the working class directly in struggle. The mass move­
ment tests everything and everyone: leaders, would-be leaders,
organizations, newspapers. It shows up every particle of inertia
or sectarianism or sluggishness or lack of response to the workers’
needs. It is a harsh and turbulent school. Into this mass move­
ment The Newsletter took a plunge when it produced during the

178
 whole course of the bus strike a weekly broadsheet written for
the most part by strikers themselves, and built its circulation
up to 20,000.
The idea was not to impose Marxist ideas on the strikers but
to give them a medium through which they could put forward
their ideas, at the same time seeing the relationship between their
sectional fight and the interests of the working class as a whole,
and becoming acquainted with the views held by the Marxists.
Similarly, during the South Bank dispute The Newsletter offered
half its space to the shop stewards’ committee to put their case
in a broadsheet which, distributed in thousands of copies, brought
news of the struggle and an appeal for help to workers on other
building sites and in other industries. This way of helping workers
in struggle is the very opposite of the ‘take it or leave it’ attitude
of publishing a news item and then asking workers to buy the
newspaper containing it. It gives strikers their own newspaper
to use as they wish, and at the same time helps their education
at the very moment when they are most receptive to new ideas.
Participation by The Newsletter in these disputes swept away
routine methods and conceptions, made possible a distinct improve­
ment in the paper’s work, and showed the way forward to an
eventual increase in its size. Above all it built up relations of
mutual confidence between supporters of The Newsletter and
the strikers.
As die Marxist movement expands and develops, so its
publications will have to expand, develop and improve. There
is great need to assemble around them a corps of both professional
and part-time writers and journalists utterly devoted to the cause
of the working class, trained to write lively, colourful and accurate
articles and news reports, responsive to events and to the needs
of those for whom they write. Such a team would study, critically
absorb, reshape and utilize for revolutionary purposes all that
is good in the technique of the bourgeois and Stalinist Press. It
would conduct an inquiry into the condition of the working class
in Britain, building up week by week, month by month, an
absolutely watertight and devastating indictment of capitalism,
showing how people are made to suffer and how they are fighting
back. It would carry on a ceaseless dialogue with the readers,
so that the latter would more and more feel a peculiar personal
pride in their paper—the paper which champions their demands,
shows them the gleam of a better future, puts into words their
anger, their hope and their resolution. The Marxist Press must
become a voice for the inarticulate, a tribune of the people

179
and a banner leading them into struggle.
A revolutionary newspaper or journal captures the minds and
hearts of a mass working-class readership only on two conditions:
first, that the objective situation is favourable; secondly, that
there exists a revolutionary movement which cherishes its Press,
writes for it, works for it, utilizes it to the full in all its activity
and fights for higher circulation. Both these conditions exist in
Britain today. The class struggle has become the air we breathe.
A real workers' weekly, full of campaigning zeal and with fire
in its belly; a .theoretical journal developing Marxism by applying
it, and dealing powerful blows at bourgeois, reformist and Stalinist
ideas—these together can clarify the thinking of a generation of
militants, strike deep roots among the working class, train new
theoreticians, organizers, agitators, propagandists and mass leaders,
and usher in the British‘Revolution.
 7. TOWARDS A REVOLUTIONARY WORKING-CLASS
PARTY

I n this book we have, first, considered the problems now facing

the British working class. Secondly, we have examined the
solutions offered by the workers’ present leaders and shown how
these leaders are refusing to fight. Thirdly, we have shown that
the essential difference between the Marxists and other leaders
and would-be leaders of the workers is that the former base their
organization, programme and policy on a- scientific appraisal of
their class’s historic needs.
Now we must ask: do Marxists consider it possible to lead
and carry through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society
while remaining within the Labour Party? Or will there come
a time when the political situation, the level of militancy and
consciousness of the working class and the nature of the struggle
will demand the building of an independent revolutionary party?
To answer this question it is not necessary to speculate about
the evolution of the Labour Party in the immediate or more
remote future. The basis for the future workers’ party which
will lead the British working class to socialism is now being
laid within the mass organizations of the working class. The
rapidity with which a revolutionary situation matures, and the
skill and assurance with which a Marxist party fuffils its vanguard
role and leads its class forward, depend more than anything
else on the patient work that is done now in laying the foundations
of that party and assembling the forces that will be its backbone.
This is slow, uphill work. Progress is measured in terms of
individuals won for the Marxist banner; many experiences will
have to be gone through, many mistakes made and many lessons
learned, befdre adherents are won in thousands and tens of

181
 thousands. Meanwhile the Socialist Labour League trains,
educates and tempers in struggle each one of its members,
painstakingly welding together the framework of the future party.
The movement is small, so small as to invite derision from those
of ‘Left’ and Right who lack understanding of the profound
currents now beginning to stir beneath the surface of social
events. Let them scoff as much as they like. History shows that
small movements grow quickly if their thought and activity,
their slogans and style of work, correspond to the realities of the
situation as it develops, and to the needs of the working class.
Of course this means that relatively raw and inexperienced people
are going to be thrust forward by events into positions of
responsibility. But nobody learns to swim by staying out of the
water. The only way to build a revolutionary party and to
make a revolution is to swim in the mass movement, acquiring
experience, wisdom and the power of independent orientation.
The mass movement alone will make a party out of the present
Marxist movement, and capable leaders out of the young people
the latter attracts and to whom it offers the only hope of achieving
real socialism in their lifetime.
There are now better opportunities before the British working
class to build a revolutionary party than at any time since the
early twenties. We must seize these opportunities if we are
to prevent the onset of a new period of reaction. Without a
revolutionary party serving and leading its class in struggle it
will prove impossible to beat back the capitalist offensive and
take power in the hands of the workers.
It will be asked what guarantees there are against such a party’s
setting itself above the working class, as happened in Russia
in the twenties. How can workers be sure that they, and not
officials, will reap the fruits of their struggles?
But the party that was known for ageneration as the ‘Com­
munist Party of the Soviet Union’ was not the party that Lenin
built and led. That party was destroyed by Stalinism; its leaders
were murdered by Stalinism; its traditions were hidden beneath
layer after layer of forgeries and lies. A river of blood separates
the ‘communism’ of Stalinist Russia from the communism of the
Marxists, to whom loyalty to the working class and loyalty to
its party are one and the same—to whom their party is the
brain, the honour, the conscience and the memory of their class.
The destruction of Lenin’s party by the Russian bureaucracy was
a terrible blow struck at the working class. The re-creation of
a Leninist party in the tradition of Bolshevik devotion to the

182
workers’ revolution will be the greatest service that Marxists
can perform for the workers. The workers need such a party
to lead them out of the appalling misery of capitalism in decay:
mere moral revulsion at the crimes of Stalinism is hollow and
stultifying if it is not accompanied by determination to redress
the blackest of those crimes by building a new Marxist party,
fortified by the lessons of a generation of reaction.
There is, needless to say, no hard and fast guarantee that the
Marxist party will be automatically and fully responsive to the
workers’ needs. To become a leader is not to become perfect.
Even the most advanced workers share to some degree the weak­
nesses as well as the strength of their class. They are subjected
to the innumerable daily pressures of a sick society. Their
weaknesses are ironed out in class struggle, and in the healthy
collective life of a real workers’ party, where, in the give and take
of discussion and criticism, each member is subjected to a constant
check on his methods of work and is constantly rearmed. In
class struggle and in collective discussion any tendencies to
arrogance or complacency are overcome. To Marxists, leadership
consists neither in laying down a line nor in acquiring fame
and prestige. Workers become real leaders to the degree that
they understand the problems facing the working class as a
whole, learn to link those problems with the whole past experience
of the working class, and learn to discern the elements of the
future that exist in the present and to build on them. From this
combination of theory, practice and imagination flows a leader’s
ability to inspire people, awaken the best ii^ them, unite them
into a team and utilize to the best advantage the forces at his
disposal. The party as a whole, through the democracy of its
inner life and its links with its class, learns how to combine
the strength and talents of its individual members.

All over the world the days of the Right-wing Labour bureau­
cracy and of the Stalinist bureaucracy are numbered- A new
revolutionary wave is rising, which will sweep them away and
create new Marxist movements. To Philistines whose whole
lives have been spent in the comfortable, tranquil and stagnant
waters of a reactionary epoch this prospect seems a dream, and
those who talk about it they dub revolutionary romantics and
idealists. JLess than half a century ago there was a crisis of

183
 working-class leadership no less acute than the present one,
when the leaders of the Second International supported ‘their’
governments in an imperialist war, and became recruiting sergeants
for the capitalist class. Only the Bolsheviks, a tiny, little-known
‘splinter group’, whose views and activities were held to be
offensively ‘dogmatic’ and extremely ‘futile’ by the Norman
Mackenzies of their day, held fast to Marxist principles. Scarcely
three years later they were leading the workers and peasants of
Russia to power.
Let the gentlemen of the New Statesman and the News
Chronicle, tfie captains of industry and their agents in the trade
union movement, the aging pundits of Transport House and King
Street—let them all take heed of history. Ii1 the present struggles
the first tiny seeds of the powerful revolutionary party of the
future are beginning to sprout. No matter how capitalism and
its defenders may manoeuvre, they cannot evade the fate that
history has in store for them. In the capitalists’ factories there
are produced, not merely inanimate objects, but also the
executioners of capitalism. Tt is the task of the Marxist party
to sec that these executioners strike hard and true, and bring
the whole rotten edifice crashing to the ground. This task
the Marxists propose to carry out. Today, as in 1848, the
workers have nothing to lose but their chains—and the world
that is theirs to win is a world of peace and joy that will make
the whole epoch of class society look utterly brutish. That
world is within their grasp. They have only to reach out their
hands and seize it. Sooner or later that is what they will
decide to do.
We who are Marxists have made our decision, in the teeth
of all the pressures, bribes, inducements and sanctions of capitalist
society. We have decided that we are with the working class
to the very end, because the entire future of mankind depends
on this class doing what it alone has the power to do: over­
throwing capitalism. For us this is the only road. In face of
the cataclysm that looms before humanity, individual prosperity,
prestige or position count for nothing at all. The only way
a conscious human being can live with himself, in an epoch
of H-bombs and sharpening class struggle, is to throw in his
lot unreservedly with the socialist revolution and devote all his
energies to its accomplishment. There is no guarantee that we
shall be successful in our own lifetimes. But ultimately the
success of the socialist cause is assured, Man must reach out
to the st^rs, and he can do so only if co-operation and common­

184
wealth replace greed and profit. If our work merely brings
nearer the victory of the workers over the profiteers, we shall
be content. And that victory may very well be much closer
than many people think.
 INDEX

ACCIDENTS, INDUSTRIAL 61 f. Braddock, T. 148n.

Advertising, subliminal 63, 65n. Bridlington agreement 101
Africa 1if., 14n., 54, 55, 57 British Empire 54ff.
Agriculture 84, 95n. British Employers’ Confederation
Aims of Industry 103 40, 159
Aldermaston marches 50, 51 British Guiana 72f., 75n.
Algeria 9f. British Iron and Steel Federation
Alleg, H. 9 30
Amalgamated Engineering Union British Peace Committee 50
90, 91, 98n., 116 ‘British Road to Socialism, The'
Amalgamated Union of Building 73f„ 121
Trade Workers 88, 97n.f 105, 117 British Transport Commission
Anglo-Russian Committee 119 75n., 103. 160
Anti-Semitism lOf. Building Industry 33, 39, 175
Arab peoples 12 accidents in 61
Arbitration 160, !68n. Bureaucracy 68
Artis, M. 1lOn. avoidance of class struggle 104
Asia 54 criticism of 171
Attlee, C. 104 in Britain 99IL
Attlee, Lady V. 104f. in Russia H8fF.
Australia 34n. privileges of 100, 106, 108, 166f.
Ayub Khan 8 susceptible to capitalist pressure
104
BALANCE OF PAYMENTS 28n. theories of 99, 107ff., 1181F.
Baldwin, S. 73 Burgess. Dr S. G. 46
Bank Rate 39, 40f., 159 Butler, R. A. 45, 65n.
Baron. M. 19 By-eleclions 80ft\, llOn.
Barna, T. 29
Behan, B. 105, 163 CALDER, R. 46
Beloff, M. 8 Campaign for Nuclear Disarm­
Bevan. A. 112, 114n. ament 49, 50f., 52, 53n., 113
and H-bomb 49f. Campbell, J. R. 148n.
Bevanism 112, 146 ‘Capital' 25
Bevin, E. 104 Capitalism Iff.
Big business men 18f. apologists for 66
Birch, A. 88 bankruptcy of 61ff.
Boilermakers’ Society 39 crisis of 25ff.
Botulinus 1 does it exist? 108f.

187
 Carron, W. 91 Nuclear War 49, 51, 52, 113
Carson, Sir E. 72f. Directors, company 19, 102f.
Cassidy, H. 163 Disputes
Castro. tF, 13 Belvedere 91
Central Africa 57 BMC 116f.
Centrism 1UfL, 127, 146, 151, 173 BOAC 86, 89fL, 97n. 162, J69n.
Charter of Workers’ Demands 106 Briggs 117
Chartists 144 Engineers 86ff., 117
China 11, 34n., 55, 68, 119 London busmen 86, 87L, 96n.
Churchill, R. 44f. 104f., 117, 178f.
Churchill, Sir W. 96n., 145 Nortons 116
Civil defence 44, 45 South Bank 74, 86, 88f., 91, 97,
Civil liberties 71, 75n. 105, 117, 161, 163, 169n.. 179
Class struggle 2f. Standards 116
and fight against war 50, 174f. Dividends 17f.
and Marxist movement 134ff. Dixon, B. 19
and socialist revolution 70ff. Docks 36, 39
in Labour Party 151 Drage, Rev. L. H. 38
Coal-mines Dulles, J. F. 7
accidents in 61f. Dutt, R. P. 117
closing of 30, 116
miners 61f., 116 ECONOMIC LEAGUE 103
Colonial revolution 1Iff., 54fL, 176 Eden, Sir A. 145
Common cause 90 Egypt 9, 117
Communist International 119, 144, ‘Elections and Electors* HOn.
145, 148n. Electrical Trades Union 90
Communist Party, British 1l6ff„ Employers’ offensive 2, 39, 43. 86,
136, 148n. 148, 157ff.
and H-bomb 50, 51f., 117 aims of 158
and rank-and-file movement^ method of 158
117, 122, 165 motive force of 27
crisis in, 1956-57 124, 146f., 178 Engels, F. 66f. See also: Marx
degeneration of 120, 123, 144 and Engels
falsification of history !25f. Engineering and Allied Employers*
foreign policy 117f. Federation 159, 163, 169n.
industrial policy 116f., 121f., Europe, eastern 11, 68, 119
167 Evans, T. 91
parliamentary road 73f., 121 Evictions 175
Connell. Sir C. 32 Exploitation 23, 67
Convertibility 27
Cooper. J. 88 FAIRLIE, H. 78f., 94n.
Council on Prices, Productivity Fascism 58f., 72, 92
and Incomes 158f., 168n. Federation of British Industries
Cousins, F. 87, 96n. 76. 103
Crime 63 Field, M. 62, 64n.
Crosland, A. 25, 83, 94n., 95n., Foot, M. 155
107ff.. 114 France 9f., 14n., 26, 48, 92f., 119
Cuba 13 Franco, F. 119
Cyprus 11, 55fL, 60n., 74n., 94n. Freedom 67, 140f. See also: Civil
liberties
‘DAILY WORKER* 117f., 122 Fryer, P. 128n.
Daniels, J. !27n. ‘Future lab o u r Offers YOU, The*
Darling. K. 56, 60n. 80, 84ff., 104
Death duties 18 ‘Future of Socialism, The’ 83, 94n.,
Debutantes 19 107ff.
De Gaulle, C. 8, 9, 92f.
Democratic centralism 137ff. GATTSKELL, H. 83, 93, 94n.,
Democracy, bourgeois 71ff. 1lOn. 148n.
d*Erlanger, Sir G. 92 and democracy 73
Direct Action Committee Against and H-bomb 49f.

188
 and policy statements 84 KARAOLOS CAMP 56
and socialism 95n. Keene, A. 145
Gaitskellism 84ft Kenya 55, 57
Garland, C. S. 161 Kershaw, A. G. 24n.
Garrett, Sir W. 40, 159 Khrushchev, N. S. 53n., 117, 119,
General Strike (1926) 119 120, 123, 124, 146
‘General Strike, The’ 97n. Korean War 146, 148n.
‘Germany—the Key to the Inter­
national Situation* 127n. LABOUR GOVERNMENTS OF
Germany, west 10, 14n., 26, 27, 49, 1945-51
54 blackmailed by Montgomery 104
Gollan, J. !28n. nationalization measures o f
Goodwin, D. 128n. 101ft
Labour leaders 80ft
HA1LSHAM, LORD 40 abandonment of socialism 80ft,
Harrod, R. 42n. 95n.
Haslon, J. 145 against workers’ power 93
Heathcoat Amory, D. 40 and capitalist State 71, 73
Himmelweit, H. T. 62, 65n. and H-bomb 49f., 51, 92
Hitler, A. 119 and imperialism 59, 99
Hoggart, R. 65n. and strikes 86t
Hola 57 attitude to race riots 92
Ilolford, H. 21 deception of members 126
Homer, A. 116 nationalization measures of
Humphrey, H. 53n. 101ft
Hungary 125, 146 policy statements 84ft, 95n., 104
Hunter, W. 11On., 128n. stunts of 85f.
Hydrogen-bomb 43ff. will not lead 80, 8 Iff.
attitude of Communist Party wooing of middle class 83, 85,
leaders to 50, 5If., 117 95n.
attitude of Labour leaders to Sec also: Bureaucracy, Witch­
491, 51, 92 hunt
attitude of Socialist Labour Labour Party 79
League to 49ft, 175 and strikes 153
campaign against 49ft. expulsions from, see Witch-hunt
‘Hydrogen Bomb, The* 45 in House of Commons 109n.
Left wing 11 Iff.
IMPERIALISM Marxists in 146, 150ft, 181
and colonial peoples 54ff. mood of rank and file 8 Iff.
and H-bomb 49ff. recruitment of industrial milit­
and opportunism 99 ants to 154
fight against 59f. votes for, in by-elections 80t,
Incomes 16 82
Independent Labour Party 144 workers and 150
India 8, 34n., 55 youth and 83, 94n.
Indonesia 12 ‘Labour Review’ 147, 177ft
Industrial Disputes Tribunal 160, Laos 9
168n. Latin America 12f.
‘Industry and Society’ 104 Lee, F. 169
Infant mortality 22, 24n. Lee, H. 145
‘Insiders, The’ 102ff., llOn. Left Opposition 119
Intellectuals J41f. Lenin, V. I. 118, 144, 182
Internationalism, working-class 23, on freedom and discipline 140f.
58, 118 Lennox-Boyd, A. 9, 56
Iraq 12 Leukaemia 48
Italy 26, 119 Liberal Party 79, 80
Lickorish, L. J. 24n.
JACK REPORT 162, 169f Listowel, Countess of 19
Japan 12, 26, 54 Lock-outs, see Disputes
Jenkins, C 102f. » Lonsdale, Dame K. 45

189
‘Looking at Industrial Relations’ j National Amalgamated Stevedores
163, 169f. I and Dockers 101
Lowthian, G. H. 88 j National and Local Government
Lupton, T. 22 Officers' Association 160
Lynch, M. 163 National Assistance 21 f.
Lyttelton, O. 72, 73, 75n. National Coal Board 30, 103, 116
National Industrial Rank-and-
MACARTY, B. 159 File Conference 105f., 123, 124,
Machine-tool industry 32f., 34n., 147
39, 42n. Nationalization 52, 95n., lOJff.,
Macleod, I. 28n., 40, 88 109, 174f.
Mackenzie, N. 185 National Union of General and
Macmillan, Lady D. 15 Municipal Workers 88, 89
Macmillan, H. 15. 49, 54, 79, 1171 National Union of Hosiery
Maitland, S. 97n. . Workers 160
Malaya 55 National Union of Manufacturers
Malnutrition 20 161
Marx, K. 66f., 118 National Union of Mineworkers
116
on crisis of overproduction 25 NATO 176
on emancipation of working ‘New Course, The’ 127n.
class 132 ‘New Reasoner’ 114
Marx and Engels ‘Newsletter, The* 96n., 105ff.. 123,
on socialist consciousness 136 147, 148n„ 177ff.
Marxism 2f., 66f., I l l , 120, 124, proscription of 107, 124
131ff., New Zealand 34n.
definition of 142f. Nigeria 55
method 126f., 133, 147 Nkrumah, K. 112
Marxists 96n.. 113, 131f. Nyasaland 57
and crisis in Communist Party
146ff. OLD AGE PENSIONERS 15,
and Labour Party 146, 150fl, 19ff„ 24n.
181 Oppenheim, A. N. 62, 65n.
capitalist Press references to Opportunism 99ff., 1731
147, 148n. Osborn, C. 63
evolution of Marxist movement Overproduction, crisis of 25
in Britain !44ff.
persecution of 145 PACIFISM 49, 51
See also: Socialist Labour Pakistan 8
League Paris Commune 70
Materialism, philosophical 1261, Party, revolutionary 69, 131,
I32f. 18 Iff,
Matthews, H. E. 88 and mass movement 134ff.
Matthews, J. 89ff., 93, 97n. democracy within 139
Mayhew, C. 62, 75n. leaders of 183
McAlpine’s 88, 161 organizational principles of
Middle class 5L 83f., 85, 170f. 137ff.
Middle East 12 Pauling, Prof. L. 46
Moffat, A. 116 Paynter, W. 116
Mollet, G. 93 ‘Peaceful coexistence’ 50, 1201
Molotov, V. M. 146 Pearce, B. 127n., 128n. '
Montagu, Hon. I. 118 Phillips, M. 107
Montgomery, Viscount 104 Philosophy 1261, 1321
Moore, Sir T. 63 Planned economy 67ff.
Morrison. H. 102 Police 70, 71, 74, 163
Morrow. F. 127n. Portugal 10
Moscow Trials 126 Poverty 15
Powell Prof. C. 45
NAGY, I. 119f. Power, political 69ff., 1131, 171
Nasser, G. A. 117 Production 25, 29ff., 68

190
 I

Profits 16ff. and mass movement I35f.

Public schools 19, 22. 24n., 84 and mass organizations of
working class 171
QUESTION, LA’ 9 defence of Soviet Union 17If.
discipline 137ff.
RACE RIOTS 11, 57ff., 92 freedom of members 140f.
Radiation dangers 1, 4511. ideological principles of 170ff.
Rajk, L. 124 launching of 107, 147
Rank-and-file movements 117, 122. leaders and members 139f., 183
164ff. organizational principles of
Rent Act 17 137TL
Renton, D. L. M. 65n. policy on H-bomb 51f., 175
Revolutionary Communist Party policy on race riots 581T.
145 Press 177ff.
Revolutionary Socialist League programme of 137, 172ff.
145 proscription of 107, 124
'Revolution Betrayed, The’ 120 theory and method of 132ff.
Rich and poor 15ff. work of, in industry 164ff.
Rocket bases 1, 43 •Socialist Outlook’ 146, 148n.
Ross. I. F. S. 1lOn. Socialist revolution 69fL, 1181’.
Russia 125, 171, 173
and H-bomb 43fL. 53n. South Africa Ilf., 14n.
bureaucracy in 68. ll8fL. 182f. Southern Rhodesia 12, 55
defence of Soviet Union 171f. Soviets 121
October revolution 55, 131, 144 Spain 10, 14n.. 119
Twentieth Congress 119 Spriggs, Sir F. 19
Stalin, J. V. 119
SACKINGS 35, 174 Stalinism, see: Communist Party,
Sallman, Dr P. 48 Russia
Schonfield, A. 27n. State
SEATO 176 capitalist 58f.. 70fL, 163
Sectarianism 137 workers’ 67. 68, 70, 71
Sedgwick, P. 1lOn. Strachcy, J. 25
Share values 16f. Strikes 86IL, 96n., 153, 161 See
Shaw, H. 21 also: Disputes
Shaw, R. 96n. Strike strategy 87, 155, 164ff.
Shinwell. E. 94n., 104 . Strontium-90 46, 49
Shipbuilding 30ff., 34n. Sudan 9
Shone, Sir R. 30, 34n. Suez 12, 80, 94n.
Shop stewards 86, 89, 157 Summit talks 176
attacks on 158, 160fT, 169n. Sweden 48, 4£
Short-time working 36 Switzerland 48
Siam 9 Symons, J. 97n.
Sierra Leone 55 Syria 9, 117
Sicvcrt. Prof. R. 49
Simon, J. E. S. 40 TAX EVASION 16
Socialism 66fT. Taylor, Col. G. 46
conditions for 69 Tearse, R. 145
‘in one country1, theory of 118f.. Telephone tapping 74n.
120, 121 Television, commercial 62f., 64n.,
‘Socialist Appeal’ 146 65n.
Socialist Fellowship 148n. ‘Television and the Child’ 62, 65n.
Socialist forums 147 Theory, social-democratic 99,
Socialist Labour League 2f., 33, 107ff.
125, 147f. Theory, socialist 69
activity of 134ff. ' ‘Third International After Lenin,
and Centrists 113 The’ 127n.
and Communist Party 124ff. Tillett. J. 65
and intellectuals I40f. Tito, J. B. 119
and Labour Party 150ff., 181 Torture 9f.

191
 Tory government 52
' and London bus strike 871.
and race riots 58f.
l ory Party 72
and unemployment 3911.
and violence 79f., 94n.
Trade Disputes Act 145
Trade rivalries 26f.
Trade union leaders 86fL
growing power of 101
‘Lefts’ among 10J
Trade unions 161, 164ff.
Trades Union Congress General
Council
and London bus strike 87f.,
96n., 105, 117
betrayal of General Strike 119 •
Transitional demands 172ff.
Transport and General Workers’
Union 87, 101
‘Travel Trade, The’ 24n.
‘Tribune’ 107
Trotsky, L. D. 119, 120, I27n., 144
on criticism of Labour bureau­
cracy 171
Turner, H. A. 36
UNEMPLOYMENT If., 7, 35ff.,
94n., 158, 163
among young people 38
by industries 38f.
‘Universities and Left Review*
110n., 114
USA 10f., 12f., 24n., 27, 43, 46, 48,
50, 52n., 53n„ 54
VICTORY FOR SOCIALISM
107, 112f.
Vince, P. 62, 65n.
192
Violence 811., 62f., 64n., 79f., 94n.
WAGES 16, 17, 28n., 158ff.
claims 97n., 175
cuts 160
Walsh, A. 20f.
War 4311., 69, 176L, 183f.
Waymark, N. 104f.
Westminster, Duke of 18
Williams, T. 95n.
Williams-EUis A. 53
Wilson, C. Shirley 22
Wilson, H. 41 n.
Witch-hunt 71
in Labour movement 80, 105ff.,
146, 148n.
Workers’ councils 121
Workers’ International League 145
Working class
and H-bomb 49fL
and Labour Party 150
and socialist ideas 69
and transitional demands 173
and war 49ff., 118
grave-digger of capitalism 66L,
184f.
independent action of I70f.
in socialist revolution 69ff., 171
internationalism 23, 58
leadership, crisis of 74, 79ff.,
I l l , 131f.
preparation of, for power 74,
131, 171
World Peace Council 118
YORK MEMORANDUM 101
Youth 63, 65n.
use of against colonial peoples
57ff., 61
Yugoslavia 119, 124
PETER FRYER Is Editor of The
Newsletter, the weekly journal of
the Socialist Labour League, and
Managing E ditor of its theoreti­
cal organ, Labour Review. He Is
32. A t the age of 20, as a junior
reporter on the Yorkshire Post,
he was dismissed because of his
membership of the Communist
Party. He joined the staff of the
Dally W orker In 1948, and la
1949 became Its parliam entary
correspondent, also carrying out
assignments in Paris, east Berlin,
Warsaw and B udapest In the
autum n of 1956 he was sent to
Hungary to cover the uprising
there. His dispatches were sup­
pressed, and on his return to
Britain he resigned from the
Dally W orker and was soon
afterwards expelled from the
Communist Party after 14} years.
In May 1957 he founded The
Newsletter, which has played a
prominent part in many indus­
trial disputes; its circulation has
doubled since it was proscribed
by the Labour Party leaders.