The Labour Party is not only the power supervising the attempt of capitalism to get out of the crisis by forcing the burned of the crisis onto the backs of the working class. It is also the party controlling the T.U.C. and the individual Trade Unions. It is able to govern and at the same time stab the working class in the back when there is a fight back. This makes it not only a party of the ruling class, but the best bosses’ party. Whilst, the CPGB is the more dangerous enemy within the working class, because it uses the terms of Marxism-Leninism to hide its counter-revolutionary bourgeois character, the Labour Party is the most widespread enemy.
The Labour Party is the best bosses party. Yet nearly every Trade Unionist is paying the Labour Party a weekly subscription – usually without even knowing it! We are paying Labour to attack us! How? – through the Trade Union political levy. Every industrial Trade Union has a political fund. By law this is administered separately from the “general fund”, which cannot be used for “political” purposes. The money for the political fund is raised through the “political levy”. Every worker who joins a union pays this levy automatically, as it is included in the weekly dues. Although the precise details vary from union to union, the bulk of the political fund is usually controlled by the National Executive, and a smaller part is controlled by the district committees.
As the Labour controls the unions, it is not surprising that nearly every union spends its funds entirely on promoting the Labour Party. Even the revisionist CPGB and the Trotskyites (who are always full of “revolutionary” slogans) stand fully in support of affiliation to the Labour Party, and the spending of our money to prop up the Labour traitors. In case workers in a particular area object to paying Labour to attack them, most unions have rules preventing the workers spending the fund in their own interests. Rule 18.6 of the EEPTU (electricians and plumbers union) for example says “expenditure from the fund must be in conformity with the constitution of the Labour Party”. The AUEW rulebook states that support can only be given to election candidates who “accept the policy and programme of the Labour Party” (rule 44.3).
How can we fight back? Firstly the rank and file workers themselves must take control of the political fund. This means that the workers in the branches must demand the right to spend the money which they have contributed – not on the Labour Party, but on political campaigns which are in their own interests. This struggle in itself will bring all sorts of bureaucratic opportunists out of the woodwork. There will be all sorts who call themselves “democrats”, “socialists” and “militants who will oppose the struggle of the masses to control the fund which they have paid for. It will be a long struggle, which will include supporting conference resolutions for democracy in the unions, and supporting rule changes to get rid of the limitations, which only allow the money to be spent on the bosses labour Party.
Alongside this campaign, revolutionary Communists support the mass campaigns to contract out of the political levy, which are already taking place. In Grimsby, for example, lorry drivers and many factory workers in the T.G.W.U. are collectively, contracting out. In June 1977 “Class Struggle”, the political paper of the Revolutionary Communist League of Britain, reported that 250 workers at the Laporte chemical factory alone had contracted out. An article in the February 1978 issue of “Class Struggle” reported that 300 firemen in Durham stopped paying their political levy as a result of their direct experience of fighting the Labour Government, and being sold out by the Labour opportunists in the T.U.C. In the course of such campaigns the local opportunist union misleaders are further exposed by the bureaucratic trickery they get up to in an attempt to prevent workers from exercising their right to contract out – such as making it difficult to get hold of the forms. Such campaigns directly nail the Labour Party as the best bosses party. They make the real nature of the opportunists more deeply known among the masses, and they deprive the bosses Labour Party of part, of its funds. At the same time we must clearly distinguish between building such mass campaigns and individual contracting out, which in itself is only a gesture.
Finally in the long term we must struggle to remove the artificial separation of the political fund from the general fund of the unions, which was imposed by the House of Lords in order to restrict the activities of the workers organisations. The funds of each union as a whole, should be spent as the members see fit, in the interests of the working class. This struggle is not just a struggle against opportunists in the union, but is also a struggle against “legal” restrictions imposed by the bosses’ state.