Against All Bombs

AGAINST ALL BOMBS

The campaign in Britain against nuclear weapons is beginning to turn towards the working class. As it does so, it will create an increasing challenge to the capitalist state.

This marks a development both in the activities and in the consciousness of the Campaign. It is a genuine turn to the masses of ordinary workers, not the bureaucracies of the Labour and Trade Union movements. Already, as a result of this emphasis, we have seen the beginnings of industrial action against the bomb. Workers directly involved have refused to handle nuclear cargoes. Others have held token strikes.

THE BOMB IN CLASS SOCIETY

More and more people in the campaign are seeing the deeper implications of working class action against the bomb. The class which dominates production controls society. It decides policy and, despite the democratic facade, enforces it through its state apparatus. Until the ordinary people are free in production, they cannot have any effective say in the decisions of war and peace, life and death. Only a society with inhuman relations in production could produce these monstrous weapons.

But the USSR has the same monstrous weapons. Should this not be different if your society is fundamentally different from ours? We know the means of production are nationalised. But Marx himself insisted that it is the `relations of production` (the relations between men and men at work) which determine the class nature of society1 . The property relations might reflect these relations of production or might serve to mask them.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

What has happened to your Revolution that your leaders should threaten the workers of other lands with these weapons? What has happened to the internationalist ideals of October?

The Revolution made sweeping changes in the property relations. But it did not solve the central contradiction of class society, that between rulers and ruled in production.

It was never the policy of the Bolsheviks to allow the workers to take over power in production itself. In 1921 Lenin wrote: `It is absolutely essential that all authority in the factories should be concentrated in the hands of management. Under these circumstances, any direct intervention by trade unions in the management of enterprises should be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible`. This typifies the whole ideology and practice of the Party in this period. Here were the roots of Stalinism.

From this viewpoint, the USSR has essentially the same relations of production as Britain or America. The Russian worker has to get up in the morning when the alarm clock rings. The time is not of his choosing. Someone else has decided what he shall produce, how much, and at what cost to himself. Has he chosen to have Sputniks rather than butter?

Both and East and West management makes all the plans, and seeks to reduce the worker to a standard unit in them. It consciously removes variety and decision making from his job, and subjects him to the ruthless tempo of machines. In Marxist terms, he is alienated. And any opposition to this system brings him up against the forces of the State, which, again, are beyond his control.

Is this a State that is `beginning to whither away from the moment of Revolution`? Or is it a kernel of the Socialist programme that has withered away?

INTERNATIONAL ACTION

In Britain our protests bring us up against our State forces too. When a mass demonstration tried to immobilise a NATO base at Wethersfield last December, six of our members were gaoled for long periods. Many others have been arrested on similar demonstrations.

We have also protested against the Russian H-tests, which threaten workers all over the world with `socialist` leukaemia. Our bourgeois police have protected your Embassy against us, and arrested hundreds of demonstrators.

Our struggle is the struggle for new relationships in production and in society. Both East and West, privileged protected by their State machines manage production and parcel out the social product. They try to protect these privileges against their greedy neighbours.

That is what the H-bomb defends. But workers gain nothing by assisting in protecting their own rulers against others. We must have faith only in ourselves, in our ability to transform society. We extend our hands in solidarity with the working people of Russia, over the heads of our rulers and yours. We have already taken up this struggle: it is yours too. Together we must ACT – OR WE SHALL PERISH TOGETHER.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

The Committee of 100 exists to organise mass civil disobedience and resistance against the production, testing and threatened use of nuclear weapons. Its basis is in rank-and-file action, not in politicians’ manoeuvres.

Its Industrial Sub-Committee seeks to develop these ideas among ordinary workers. Its first leaflet stated: `Workers make the weapons of mass destruction, transport them, handle them, install them. They supply and equip those who use them. When they no longer accept to do so, the politicians will have to fight their own wars`.

The Sub-Committee is composed of workers in the Docks, in road and rail transport, and in the Engineering, Building and Printing industries.

Published on behalf of the Industrial Sub-Committee of the London Committee of 100, by Ken Weller (Engineering Shop Steward), 37, Queens Mansions, North Road, London N.7

• 1`The sum total of the relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arise legal and political superstructures`. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol.13, p. 6-7, Moscow 1959.