12.12.1996

The two policies

From the Workers’ Weekly, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, December 10 1926

Fellow workers: most of you have been forced back to work on the degrading slave terms imposed by the employers and their government ...

The supreme lesson is that capitalism in Great Britain is in a state of decline and less able to guarantee to the workers each year the standard of life to which they have previously been accustomed.

There have been two policies in the labour movement for meeting this state of affairs ...

In the first place there was the working class, socialist policy advocated by the Communist Party and the Minority Movement, accepted by Cook and the left wing of the Miners’ Federation, and supported by the miners and the working class generally. The basis of that policy was that ... all attempts to make lower that standard of life must be resisted by the whole working class, and that the movement of resistance must be developed and transformed into a struggle against the capitalist state, for the setting up of a workers’ government which would solve the industrial crisis by reorganising industry on socialist lines.

The other policy, of the employers and the trade union leaders, was that the workers should accept lower standards, provided the capitalists would reorganise their industry, making it more efficient to compete in the markets of the world, and so enable them to restore the wages of the workers to their previous level. This capitalist policy is a delusion. As fast as the capitalists in Britain reduce wages and improve the equipment and organisation of industry, the capitalists elsewhere do the same. The competitive position is unchanged. The workers are faced with the certainty, not of the restoration of their lost wages, but the call for further reductions.

The struggle within the labour movement during the lockout cannot be understood unless we have in mind those two policies - one working class, the other capitalist - struggling for supremacy.