Healy's recipe for BL: revolution or nothing
Socialist Organiser1980sTranscribed by hand from the printed page.
GERRY Healy has managed (Newsline August 26th) to produce a full page feature on British Leyland — entitled "The Issues facing Leyland workers" — which fails to address itself to any of the current acute leadership problems faced by workers in the Corporation.
He talks about giving support to the £20 claim "drawn up by the 11 unions" without mentioning that the national officers of the 11 unions have been trying to set themselves up as a self-appointed negotiating committee.
There is not a word about the sharp struggle going on in BL for a democratically elected and accountable negotiating committee — the outcome of which will largely determine whether an all-out confrontation with Edwardes and Thatcher is on this autumn.
Instead, the completely abstract statement speculates that Thatcher will close BL if there's a strike. "If workers leave the BL factories on strike, then Thatcher will shut the gates behind them, never to return."
Michael Edwardes made a similar point in an interview with the Sunday Times last week. "If the pay thing comes to a crunch then the company closes."
Edwardes, of course, has said that before. In fact he says it every time he faces a confrontation with the workforce. This time it will be said a bit louder and a bit more often because the probability of a confrontation is very real indeed.
Closed
Healy's prognosis concedes everything to him. It backs up his threat by making the closure of BL look simple for Thatcher when in reality it is very difficult; otherwise she would have closed it long ago, not providing new funding.
That is not to say that she will not close it if a major strike goes ahead, but it is a decision fraught with political difficulties — not least another ½ million on the dole at a stroke.
To talk about closure as inevitable at this stage does nothing to advance the wages struggle in BL.
Healy says that the wage review has to be approached politically. That is true. But he presents some very dubious politics indeed.
The article makes its starting point the need for an efficient industry:
"There can be an efficient, modern and expanding car industry in Britain, but it cannot happen under the greedy stranglehold of the profit system and the leeching banks. It will occur only under revolutionary socialism when the bankruptcy of the capitalist system and its state machine has been smashed and replaced by a planned socialist economy."
How many Morning Star editorials have carried that line?
For Trotskyists the starting point is not "efficient industry", even if the conclusion is that socialism is necessary to get it. It is mobilising the working class against capitalism to end it and thereby establish socialism.
How Healy sees the struggle for socialism is hard to see since the article doesn't even mention bringing down the Tories.
Instead it lays out a schema in which plants which have been closed are maintained by occupation committees in conjunction with Community Councils until they can be reopened after the social revolution.
BL workers should reject Healy's ridiculous schemas (if they come across them, since Healy's member in BL has not mentioned any of this) and strike for their full £20 claim in a direct challenge to the government.
Occupied
If Edwardes and Thatcher respond by closing the Corporation down then all plants should be immediately occupied in defence of jobs, calling for the Tory government to be brought down and replaced by a Labour government prepared to reverse Thatcher's attacks on the working class.