Dividends from the Incomes Policy
COMMUNISTS
By MAURICE GENT
Fr HE Prime Minister may prove to be a good I recruiting officer for the Communist party of Great Britain. Thanks to his speeches in the House of Commons last week and again on Tuesday, the party has at last received publicity and public attention On the scale it has long manoeuvred to obtain. .
But in any case, after two lean and depressing years, the British Communists were looking for- ward to a more promising future. A declining membership, especially among intellectuals dis- turbed by the Sino-Soviet split; deplorable results in two general elections; and mounting opposition from the Trotskyites in industry—all these had reduced the Communists by the end of last year to a very low state of morale indeed. The palmy days of 1944, when membership topped the 80,000 mark, seemed far, far away. Twenty years after the Second World War, .the Communists were a despised minority with few leaders of any stand- ing and their membership down to about 34,000.
Yet now, on one front at least, the industrial tront, the Communists do seem to be making progress. The Government's incomes policy has in recent months done more to discredit Labour's standing among rank-and-file trade unionists than one would have believed possible.
The Communist party is exploiting this wave of hostility to the Labour government as it tries to build 'the unity in action of all left forces' which was decided upon at the party congress last November. A very interesting document now being circulated amongst the Communist faithful prints a speech made by Mr Frank Stanley, the present chairman of the Communist party, as the keynote contribution to a special Communist party factory branch conference held in London on June 11 and 12.
Mr Stanley (who is a shop steward convenor in Sir William Carron's Amalgamated Engineer- ing Union) calls for fifty new factory branches this year as 'a modest start.' His main point is that 'if workers are to be won for Communist ideas, then it will be above all the result of the political battle waged in the factories.'
He states : (1) 'The Communist party organises branches in the factories because the factory workers are the most decisive sections of the population. While trade union organisation is important for the workers, political organisa- tion is even more important—that is why we must have party branches in factories.' (2) 'The Communist party is a party of class struggle. The factories are the key points of the class struggle where it proceeds day in and day out.' (3) 'The factories bring hundreds and sometimes thousands of workers together under the same roof. This makes it possible for us to work in an organised fashion with greater advantages than when the individual workers are scattered to their homes ii .over the place. The factories are the most fruitful field for Communist work.'
The Communists are still saying in public that the electoral front is equally important. Yet when their success in the trade union movement is measured against their abject and repeated failures in parliamentary elections, one begins to wonder what Karl Marx would have said about a revo- lutionary party not prepared to concentrate on a direct industrial takeover when this represents the only chance of achieving real power. In the last general election there were fifty-seven Communist candidates and all of them lost their deposits. The highest percentage vote was achieved by Mrs Annie Powell, in Rhondda EaSt, who got 8.4 per cent of the votes. The whole lot collected only 62,112 votes between them and in twenty-three of the thirty-five constitu- encies contested by Communists in both 1964 and 1966 the Communist share of the vote fell.
Turning to the trade unions, however, one sees that Britain's second largest union, the Amalgamated Engineering Union, has a fair number of Communist officials, while Communist party members also hold office in a number of unions important in the engineering and building industries, such as the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers, the Amalgamated Society of Painters and Decorators, and the Plumbing Trades Union. There are Communists, too, on the executive of the National Union of Railwaymen and the National Union of Mine- workers. So far as the waterfront unions are concerned, the Prime Minister has already made his point. We did not, in fact, need the Prime Minister to tell us that some of their prominent members are Communists.
In the majority of cases Communists are active at local or regional level and the possibilities of a national takeover are slight. Their success in occupying a number of shop steward positions in the motor industry, winning posts of real power in the vehicle-producing factories and
those which serve it, is possibly their most im- portant achievement so far and contrasts very strongly with a lack of headway in parliamentary and local elections in the areas surrounding these factories. Efforts are now being made to form national shop steward committees in engineer- ing with a strong left-wing bias.
The failure to put all the pressure on the industrial front in the past has been a cause of dissension within the party. Last year one of the most prominent Communists in the trade union world, Mr Reg Birch, now a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union execu- tive, was thrown off the national executive of the party because of his pro-Chinese views and his insistence that more time and money and effort should be spent on the factory rather than dissipated on parliamentary elections.
An analysis of the 508 full delegates at last November's party congress shows that 134 were in the engineering and shipbuilding industries and sixty-two in building. a pretty strong argument, one would have thought, in favour of the Birch approach. And from this month's Communist party directive it looks as if the Birch point is being taken on industrial organisation. To quote Mr Stanley again : The factories are the key points in the struggle against the Government's incomes policy—now the main immediate issue confronting all trade unionists.' Perhaps, hanging above the bed of every politician, employer and union leader in coming months ought to be the text : 'Communists can only exploit a grievance if a grievance exists.'
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