The bulk of the IMG’s pamphlet The Socialist Challenge to Labour’s Cuts is taken up with outlining and documenting the extent and meanings of Labour’s cuts. In this respect the pamphlet can provide some useful information for socialist militants and trade unionists.
However the alternative to cuts offered by the IMG, and their proposals for the fight against cuts, offer no serious alternative to the policies and programme of the ‘left’ reformists — the Communist Party and the Labour ‘left’. The IMG offer, in essence, a reformist alternative to the cuts inflicted by the Labour government.
Hand in hand with wage restraint and a huge ‘shakeout’ of labour, British capitalism is set on a central strategy of diverting public spending away from the welfare and social services to productive manufacturing industry. Alongside wage restraint and unemployment, cuts are part of a concerted strategy to force down workers’ living standards.
Any strategy to fight the cuts must start from this point. There can be no coherent campaign against the cuts, capable of more than protest, that does not link the battle against cuts with the entire battle against the Social Contract. The public sector trade union leaders see ‘cuts’ as a separate and special issue. Fisher, for example, supports wage restraint while opposing cuts.
Now the IMG start and finish their pamphlet with the cuts. Nowhere do they link the struggle with the struggle to break the Social Contract.
Any serious strategy against the cuts has to start with an alternative to the politics and methods of the trade union and left leaders. The public sector leaders see their campaign as a special case, as a separate case for protest and lobby. Not only are they not prepared to lead beyond token protests and demonstrations unless pushed, they will be prepared to take action to hold back rank and file trade unionists taking on the local authorities. Already the NUT has actually suspended members for taking action against the cuts. Likewise the ‘political’ alternative of the lefts and trade union leaders offers only diversion and alternatives to direct action.
True the IMG call the left leaders names. They are ‘spineless’ etc., so we are told. But nowhere do the IMG call for independent rank and file organisation against the cuts — nowhere do they argue the need to organise independent of the trade union leaderships in order to take action. ‘The Labour movement’ is exhorted to take up the struggle, as if it was homogenous and in need of a push in the right direction. The IMG’s failure to pose the need for rank and file organisation leaves them incapable of warning militants of the real problems of organising a fight back, and of focusing on those struggles and demands that can mobilise the real fighting strength of the labour movement.
The IMG’s political alternative to the ‘lefts’ is equally flabby and unprincipled. Import controls are opposed … not because they are reactionary, because they export unemployment to foreign workers but because the IMF ‘will simply use stronger measures to sabotage the economy than a run on the pound, as they have done in the past in Latin America’ and ‘at the same time other capitalist countries will introduce their own import controls on British goods’. With capitalists seeking to invest abroad the IMG suggest ‘an immediate embargo must be slapped down’. The IMG do not say whose state it would be that should place an embargo on foreign investment, and abolish capitalist arms spending! They have no alternative to the identical call being made by the Morning Star. All the IMG come clean on is that such issues ‘will be decided by a show of strength between the labour movement and the capitalists state.’
While revolutionaries have always seen the monopoly of foreign trade and an investment embargo as integral features of a workers’ state, only the IMG and reformists raise them as recommendations to the capitalist state now … with the outcome to be decided by a ‘show of strength’ from the Labour movement.
Failing to break with the politics and leadership of the trade union and Labour ‘lefts’, the IMG have no fighting alternative to put forward. They call for militant struggle. The example of the Clay Cross Councillors ‘showed their willingness to fight’. But besides building a broad movement against the cuts, in the strikes and demonstrations the IMG offer in essence only an alternative plan of spending and allocation of resources. They pride themselves that the ASTMS in conference has supported the sliding scale of social expenditure, they call for public works, for a cancellation of the debts and for the opening of the accounts and books of the investors and banks. Nowhere do the IMG connect the action of workers, the fight against the cuts, with the implementation of these demands. They remain alternative policies for the leaders in the labour movement.
Now against the IMG and the Labour left we say the key to fighting the cuts lies in organising to act independently of the trade union leaders whenever necessary and in the fight for clear alternative politics to those of the reformists and trade union leaders. Unless this is done the Labour government and the employers will be able to drive a wedge deep into the labour movement, a wedge dividing the bureaucrats of the manufacturing unions and those ‘representing’ the public sector.
Direct action to stop the implementation of the cuts: to refuse to cover for unfilled vacancies, to refuse to increase the rate of work, to cut the hours not the jobs — with no loss of pay. This means focusing on shop floor direct action, on building shop floor organisation to open the books of the financiers and the bankers, to refuse to implement Labour’s plans through such action. A campaign can be built to oppose the wage restraint policies of the public sector union leaders. From such action we can build a force to demand an end to all cuts, the automatic protection of the social services from inflation, to demand that Labour councillors refuse to implement the cuts, refuse to pay the crippling debts and interest repayments to the banks and finance houses.
Such a programme of struggle — building the organisations that can struggle for control with the government and the employers — lays the basis for a serious campaign against the Labour government’s attacks. The IMG’s pamphlet does not.
