Existing organisations

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must get together THERE is a general desire for a single organisation to lead the fight for the democratic reforms, for Party policies and candidates who support them.

This could take one of four forms:

(a) an existing organisation: Both the LCC and SCLV originally aimed to take over from other organisations, but in practice they are simply two more among many other Left tendencies - and with no concrete achievements to their credit, either.

CLPD is the best organised and most effective, and the only one which is open to members of all the other groups. But although many of them join CLPD, they show no inclinations to give up their own organisations.

This option is therefore a non-starter.

[b] a collection of ind. ividuals: This was the format of the Benn campaign and worked out quite adequately for its months' life, despite a high proportion of talkers to workers.

[c] an alliance of organisations: this is obviously better than the previous option, as it gives a chance of proper co-ordination and firm commitment. This too has been tried out and worked well in the RFMC for the eight months up to the Wembley Conference.

It is this type of organisation which the CLPD Executive would like to set up to mobilise for the 1982 Conference.

[d] a new organisation:

At first sight the call to launch an organisation of the Left with individual and affiliated membership at a Central Hall rally looks better still. In fact it is nothing but a recipe for disaster.

I suspect those putting forward are largely attractWHEN the Health and Safety Commission (HSC) proposed regulations to require employers to provide information on dangerous substances and to test them before exposing worker to them, the government response to was to postpone them, under pressure from business, and then to reject them in favour of much weaker EEC regulations.

The EEC scheme excludes foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, intermediates (chemicals made during a process) and chemicals sold in quantities of less than one tonne a year in total.

Tests for poisonous effects and for causing cancer and birth defects are only compulsory if more than 1000 tonnes of the chemical is sold per year.

The HSC scheme would have included all these id by the sheer glamour -he speeches, the propganda, the publicity! -rut I will do my best to deal with it on its merits.

The main argument put orward is that it will unite he Left. Apart from being mprobable, to make that he yardstick is the height if irresponsibility. The only criterion which means anything is that of resuits.

By this standard the Left has wasted its time on the policy of the empty gesture, and its record has been one of almost complete ineffectiveness. The last Labour government was little more than a Tory government by another name, and so was the one before that.

All our fine policies are not worth the paper they are written on if they are not. carried out. It is what Labour does that counts.

Thanks to the democratic reforms, at least there is now some chance that the next Labour government will carry out Labour policies, whereas otherwise exceptions. Predictably the Chemical Industries Associaton (CIA:), i.e. the bosses, didn't like it, and told their friends in the government so. Surprise, surprise, the Tories chose to implement the EEC scheme (and that several months late).

To show the diference between the two schemes, let us consider the organochlorine pesticides (DDT), which would have been covered by the HSC regulations but not by the EEC ones.

Mucks up

After these were introduced it was discovered that they are not broken down in the environment, but persist in the soil for ages.

Unfortunately, because they are similar to some chemical compounds found in living things, they are

Victor Schonfield (treasur

er of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, writing in a personal capacity) argues instead for an alliance of existing organisations ectively as a Left campaign despite the advice given by some who took part in it, shows just what would happen. It failed to win 30-odd Tribune MPs, and it failed to win NATSOPA, the FBU and, above all, NUPE.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one was a misfortune, to lose all of» them was downright careless.

And the Benn campaign was careless - not grossly, but enough - in laying itself open to being portrayed as divisive, and allowing itself to get isolated from the middle ground. Not only did this cost the Left the Deputy Leadership and the NEC, but more crucially, the last chance to gain party control of its own manifesto.

The lesson is that you can only win a majority from the Left and the Centre. It is absurd to pretend that the GMWU is likely to support the left as such, and equally absurd to deny that the GMWU already supports many things that the Left is fighting for, and could well be won to others.

Fantasies

But the only way is to campaign for specific proposals on their merits _ not on the grounds that they or their supporters are Left.

The Left must stop indulging in fantasies and throwing away its real chances. At present it is only possible to do effective work. as part of the Party's majority, by organising the majority to back up its own policies.

Therefore an alliance between existing organisations is generally acceptable. Setting up a new one is political suicide.

SCIENCE YOU KNOW!

riding round on an invisible bicycle seat.

A few days after the article came out, there was a knock at Herb's door. A man from the DoD, telling Herb to 'clam up' about his invention and demanding to see the formula and any of the paint still left.

Herb wanted to oblige, being a patriotic American, but, alas, he found that he had clumsily spilled the last of the paint over his notes, so that the formula had become invisible!

All very amusing, but these people have some power over our future!

The explain ers' knows JO THWAITES introduces James Connolly's 'Socialism Made Easy' WITH THE prospect of a witch hunt in the Labour Party looming, the short pamphlet, Sociausm Made Easy, by the great Irish socialist is a paiserum istration of what labour movement organisatons should be like.

Though he was writing 80 years ago, the message 1s as relevant today as it ever was. The questions asked by workers in the first section ате similar to those that come up in your union or Labour Party branch time and time again.

'Well, I'm not interested in internationalism. This country is good enough for me"; or: "Would you confiscate the property of the capitalist class and rob men of that which they have, perhaps, worked a whole life time to accumulate?" • Or: "You won't get the irish to help socialism. Our Irish leaders tell us that all we Irish in this country ought to stand together and use our votes to free Ireland".

Fruits Connolly simply and convincingly answers by showing how the capitalists organise internationally you just have to look at the headlines of their papers to see that - and pointing out that a worker can be exploited by a capitalist who is living thousands of miles away.

"He is, therefore, interested in the revolt of Labour all over the world...

On confiscation of the how she fruits of our labows go into making profit that could pay for the cost of the whole industry we're working in again and again. So he explains: "The capital of the master class is not their property; it is the unpaid labour of the working class".

On Irish nationalism he says: "Sure, let us free Ireland" - but points out that an Ireland with the Green Flag floating o'er it won't make a lot of difference if you are still unemployed, paying high rents, and living in poverty -Arguing pamphlet goes the need for ›lidarity. EvE what scabs dr on to workryone ' but Connolly argues that it's not necessarily the scabs who turn the tide against the strikers.

He talks of a public transport strike in New York (where he was living at the time), where all the workers struck, except the engineers in the powerhouses which supplied the electric power to run the cable-cars. Thus the scabs could run the system and break the strike.

He's arguing for industrial unions (he was an activist in the IWW) and for united action.

Happiness

He refers to the Irish Land League and how the word "boycott' came to be part of our language. Captain Boycott was an Irish landowner who suffered at the hands of the tenants when he and his kind were trying to evict them.

Organised • in the Irish Land League, labourers, servants and all those whom those landlords depended on for their existence refused to work. They even organised doctors, shopkeepers, and grave diggers to 'boycott' the landowners.

Connolly also explains how he saw socialism - a society organised to serve the interests of the mass of the people and run by those who know what they're talking about, the working class. A society where national boundaries will have no more. than administrative significance, and where the health and happiness of ordinary workers come first.

In other words, Socialism must proceed from the bottom upwards, whereas capitalist political society is organised from above downward' Witch-hunt The final section explains why it is that the working class is the only class that can change capitalist society, and that any organisation that claims to be fighting for socialism has to be rooted in that class.

While it seems to me that in this pamphlet Connolly relies almost exclusively on organising for socialism through the trade unions, and doesn't talk of building gives a clear explanation of what socialism is about.

Trade union and Labour Party members, in view of the witch hunt and the SDP defections, would do well to read it.

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an independent workers' party, this short pamphlet