GREAT BRITAIN ON THE EVE OF THE ELECTIONS
The Conservatives have now decided to rush into general
• elections on October 8th. In so doing, they assume that the résult will be in their favor. They are counting on the climate of international "relaxation of tension"
and on the improvement in the economic conjuncture in Great Britain.
They will claim before the British public that their diploclaim to have succeeded in reinvigorating the country's stagnant economy in a context of price stability.
But in reality, their strongest card in the elections continues to be the timorous and confused policy of the leadershio of the Labour Party and the trade unions.
Since the official reformist leadership abandoned in practice the programme of nationalizations, the indispensable precondition to a genuine planned economy, the domestic policies of the two parties offer scarce any tang-
ible ditterences to the ordinary voter. And on the plane of private economy, it is natural that preference should to the authentic representatives of "free" enterprise who have been able to show their dynamism as businessmen.
The issue of atomic weapons ought normally to polarize around the Labour Party the deep current that is running through the British masses opposed to the use of these including by unilateral disarmament by Britain. But the official Labour leadership has found a way to take
It will certainly not be the recent Manifesto Labour Party, concerned with culture, morals, the beautification of life, and joy in living, which Will obtain the party additional mass votes from worker and youngworker circles. For in these circles it would be hard for the argumentation of the Manifesto, picturing 1959 Britain in the colors of a society largely freed from material need, to find a persuasive and attracting echo.
Capitalist realities, in such matters as threats of war, job security, length and tension of labor, housing conditions, etc, are always vivid enough so that the worker does not take seriously the accountancy of the capitalist regime as a framework for leisure. On the other hand, the cultural manifesto of the Labour Party may have some effect on certain privileged petty-bourgeois strata who are anxious better to enjoy their material ease.
Despite the auguries that seem favorable for a new Tory it would be prudent still to reserve a prognosis. In reality the margin between the two parties remains very narrow, and it would be enough for a mass of floating voters of less than a million to shift at the last moment over to Labour for the LP to carry off the victory.
Despite the recent Gallup polls (favorable to the Coninfluenced by powerful propaganda kept up by the Tories' extraordinary financial resources, and the control of the state in their hands, by-elections have dicated the slow and steady rise of the Labour Party.
However important the reflection of the workers' movement in the parliamentary mirror may be in a country like Great Britain, it is necessary to be careful not to judge it only through this image. The Labour movement has in recent times shown many signs of growing mature, which, at the present stage, places it right away in the vanguard of the workers' movement of all the countries of Western turope. The spontaneous combativity of the British proletariat was been shown in a series of remarkable struggles, which this year set both British and European records.
In these struggles, important demands were put forward that show a class consciousness, and even a political consciousness, far superior to what we now. observe on the rest of the European front. Despite the shortcomings or even the opposition of the official leaderships, strikes of solidarity with workers or union representatives sacked by the bosses have been frequent and dynamic. In all these cases we have seen the mass of the workers and the lower supervisory personnel mobilize spontaneously and make up for the weaknesses of the apparatuses.
The threat of unemployment bequeathed by the recession, and fed by constant technical advances, has rendered timely at this stage a central demand repeated pretty generally by all union men: the 40-hour week, or, in a more general form, reduction in working hours, without reduction in pay. That is a fully justified demand by which the proletariat throws back on to capitalism the consequences
It may be expected that British capitalism, at grips with revived international competition, easily on new wage increases than on reduction in working hours — one more reason for organizing the battle on this field in a united front of all the trade unions, a need already felt by an important mass of the workers.
More political issues have already emerged this time in
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL the trade-union sector of the Labour movement. We refer especially to the strong minorities that appeared on the question of atomic disarmament in the national conferences of a whole series of unions this summer, before the TUC itself meets in convention at Blackpool in September. The fact that the official reformist leadership, by making a scandalous use of the weight of the bureaucratic machine; finally succeeded in obtaining a formal majority for its "non-nuclear club" policy, does not diminish the fact that the real majority in the trade unions - and not.only. in the wards as in the past - is at present far to the left of this leadership.
And this is so not only on the issue of atomic disarmament but also of nationalizations, quite correctly considered as inseparable from a really socialist policy.
The overwhelming majority by which these two were voted at the national conference of the great Transport and General Workers' Union, led by frank Gousins, is indicative of the present degree of maturity of the British proletariat.
For the first time in the history of the British Labour movement, the leadership of the left wing has passed to the trade unions and is at the same time set at a higher level than at any moment in the past. This new left, on an essentially union labor basis, is currently being formed around three basic demands: disarmament in the general arrection of unilateralism; nationalizations; reduction in working hours.
To organize this left among the rank and file, on these ree issues, un task of the revolutionary Marxist wing of the Labour move-
In case the Labour Party wins the elections, form of the left is going to take on a decisive importance, speeding up under the best possible conditions the political ditterentiation that has begun inside the Labour movement. In case of an election defeat, the same platform is going to become the basis of a more general struggle of the left against the new power of the Tories.
Such a defeat, furthermore, would not fail in any case to turn over the leadership of the Labour Party to its left.
At the present stage, general conditions in Britain remain more favorable than elsewhere in Europe to the militancy of the workers' movement. The improvement in the economic conjuncture does not seem to have the stayingpower of a genuine prolonged boom. Like the rest of Western Europe, Great Britain is also emerging from the 1957-58 recession, but with a rather moderate rate of new expansion. So far the revival has been felt only in the field of consumers' goods, whose sale was stimulated internally by credit. There are indications that this stimulus is already weakening.
That leaves exports; these, however, though they have shown a certain progress, do not seem to be about to put an end to the irresistible drive shown for some time now by German and even Japanese exports.
Without Britain's being faced by the prospect of a new catastrophic crisis, it is making its way through a relative revival toward a situation of new difficulties, for its capitalist competitors, modernized than itself. have the advantage of better productivity and consequently of lower production costs. Hence there is a prospect of continuing if not aggravated tension on the social plane in but with a correlation of forces that encourages the proletariat to resist and fight.
The conclusion for the revolutionary Marxist wing within the Labour movement must be that its chances of becoming the militant structural frame of the new left are real ones, provided that it thoroughly digests all the lessons of the sectarian experiences of the past, and patiently and intelligently with the class forces who are their transitional experience in the organized Labour movement.