Why Militant Are Wrong to Use Courts

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THE RIGHT has a majority resolution to the NUS conon the Labour Party National demning the witch-bunt. Executive, but some of the "This is a warning shot centre are very unhappy with across the bows of the NEC". the domination of stone- be declared, "to say they

Labour Party chair Same started a witch-bunt". McCluskie of the National McCluskie is a Foot supUnion of Seamen has broken porter. His unease, however,

ranks and denounced the may will be stired by even NEC majority for going far some of the softer rightbeyond what Labour Party wingers from the trade unconference decided. He sons on the NEC — It only wants the five members of from fear of what a fullMilitant's editorial board to blow witch-bunt will do to be expelled, but is outraged Labour's prospects in the by the McCartbyite formula coming election. adopted by the November McCluskie is right: live NEC: 'Are you now or have NEC has no mandate from you ever been a Militant the last conference for what supporter?' it is doing. MILITANT'S threat to take the Labour Party to court poses important questions for socialists. Is this threat principled? Is it wise?

That the capitalist courts should not be invited or allowed to interfere in the affairs of the labour movement is, we believe, an important socialist principle. But the issues can perhaps be brought out most clearly by the procedure - logically upside-down though it is — of considering the threat first from a purely practical, tactical point of view.

From this angle it is an irresponsible act of adventurism.

The planned Register is a loose framework which can be worse than the old proscribed list - or become a dead letter. It depends on the struggle in the period ahead. The 'Register' reflects the weakness of the Right and the bureaucrats, as well as the formal strength the block vote gave them over the rank and filc at Blackpool.

A determined resistance to expulsions by a united Left could reduce the effects of the Register to nil or almost nil: Sections of the softer Left, in the immediate aftermath of the conference, had shown signs of being shocked into resistance by the attitude of the Right and the way they gained a clear majority on the NEC. Now Militant's legal 'coup' is likely to help the trade union bureaucrats to go for a blanket ban on Militant.

Militant argues that the Militant's Ted Grant: zig-zag tactics NEC majority is 'rigged' but this is essentially no more than self-deception. The block vote to stifle the movement for democracy in the Party, deployed against 80-odd per cent of the Party rank and file activists, was of course outrageous and fundamentally undemocratic. That is one reason why it is just and democratic to resist the operation of the Register.

The state of the block vote, however, is a reflection of the state of the unions, and testifies to the need for a campaign in the unions or demucracy • If we can sensibly describe the NEC as 'rigged', then we must also say that it will remain rigged' until we transform the unions, or decisive sections of them. How does going to the courts help that?

It can only blur a number of important issues. Central to the labour movement in the next period will be resistance to what the courts will be trying to do to the unions.

Militant too, of course, will favour such resistance. But its presence course can only create confusion.

The Right can probably get a majority for a blanket han an Militant at tha novt vớn vn ànd bàc conference - especially with the ammunition, in arguing with the rank and file, of Militant's resort to the courts. So to go to court to counteract the 'rigging' amounts to the incredible position of buying time -and paying for it heavily within a year at latest - or else hoping that somehow the 'rigging' can be undone, that the power of the bureaucratic general secretaries can be broken, within a year.

This is the most senseless ultimatism, which stakes everything on achieving virtual miracles in an impossibly short time. TITL - 1 11 1519- .. What will Milltant do, faced with proscription, when the miracle doesn't happen to order?

Militant has zig-zagged rather wildly. Faced with the duty to fight the register politically by rousing the Labour Party rank and file to make it unworkable, Militant hedged, and its representatives made declarations that they would go, if not quietly, at least without breaking any furniture - that they would accept expulsions rather than have Constituency Labour Parties closed down by the NEC for defiance.

This could only encourage the Right to maximise the purge and hinder the work of politically fighting the Register and the purge.

At the same time Miliagers like John Golding.

McCluskie has proposed a principled, for example, to sue Rupert Murdoch for libel.

The principle is that we don't bring the courts into the affairs of the labour movement, thạt we don't set up the judiciary and the legal machinery of the state as arbiter of the affairs of the labour movement.

That would cut across the essential drive for the political, organisational, and ideological independence of that movement from bourgeois society and all its agencies - that is, it would cut across the development and preservation of the ideological, political and organisational prerequisitas for the ancialiat transAUNO AVI VAIN DUNNO VI MALL -formation of society.

That is a fundamental principle.

There are cases • which seem to be exceptions to it but in fact are not. Leon Trotsky in the late 1930s called on the Mexican police to investigate the leadership of the Mexican Communist Party. He also advocated the use of the courts and police agencies of the USA and France against the agents of the Stalinist secret police, the GPU.

Assassins

Although the GPU nested in the labour movement, it was in substance a gang of assassins functioning as an extension of a force totally alien to the labour movement, the police state apparatus of Stalin. They. murdered opponents such as Ignace Reiss in Switzerland, the anarchist Carlo Tresca in the USA, Trotsky's son Leon Sedov in France, and many militants in Spain, such as Erwin Wolf and Andres Nin.

To set the police against them was not to make the capitalist state the arbiter of the labour movement.

Militant could try to square their course of action with socialist principles by saying that the Goldings and the trade union barons are an alien force in the movement, the direct agents of the ruling class.

That's part of the truth, but not enough. They are also of the labour movement, reflecting to a serious extent its present stage of development. They have not been inserted from outside. Their methods are not comparable with the GPU's.

The unions are undemocratic; and the Labour Party constitution that gave the general secretaries the sort of power they wielded at Blackpool is undemocratic too. But who can seriously believe that we can go to the courts and demand a democratic labour movement?

have gone too far. They have

True, the courts in Inna-stahle hnuiroenis. democracy such as Britain normally dispense a high level of justice and fair and impartial dealing - within the existing laws. But we can see how the courts are now increasingly being used as an instrument of the Tory government and the ruling class to impose their conception of 'democracy' and 'the rights of the individual' in and on the labour movement - such 'democracy' as compulsory postal ballots which help atomise workers and massively increase the power of the ruling class media to manipulate them, such 'rights' as the right of an individual to disrupt union organisation in a plant..

To appeal to the courts as arbiter against the NEC is wrong in principle. Because in Britain now we have the most brutal ruling class attempt for decades to bring the labour movement tightly under hostile laws and to shackle it to the state, many thoughtful workers will be especially alienated from those who bring in the courts.

The attitude vhich some on the Left have adopted -if it works, it's justified -is not likely to be the dominant one in that part of the labour movement which should be Militant's natural constituency to go to for support.

And in any case, as we have seen, in any but the shortest term resort to the courts won't work.

It would be indecent and wrong for Socialist Organiser to go on from this to roundly condemn Militant for threatening to go to court. The Right land for that matter Michael Foot) do not have any moral or political right to condemn Militant.

Responsibility rests with the witch-hunters who have tried to hoist the Militant editorial board on the yard-arm without even a drumhead hearing. Militant is very much the weaker party, and its action is defensive.

That doesn't make its actions right.

Militant has so i far only threatened to go to court. It should abandon the idea and decide instead to fight politically and organisationally all the way in every single constituency party against the witch-hunt, the Register, and the purge organising with the broad CLP left in a united campaign. The threat to rely on the courts is irresponsible adventurism, wrong in terms of socialist principle, and likely to prove disastrous in its practical consequences.

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by John O'Mahony