Our eighth article to mark the 40th anniversary of the CPBML by looking at the past four decades through the eyes of Workers and its predecessor, The Worker. This month: The long fight to displace Thatcher...
1979: Thatcher Out!
WORKERS, SEPTEMBER 2008 ISSUE
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Following the 1979 General Election, our Party quickly reassessed the political situation facing workers and concluded that it was not just business as normal for capitalism, that in fact the post war bourgeois consensus had been ditched and that Thatcherism was a dangerous governmental stance which was set to undermine and destroy the organised working class. We changed the basis of our line from 'Don't Vote, Organise for Revolution' to "Thatcher Out".
Typical of our swift response was the arresting call of the headline in The Worker produced on 29 November 1979: "Thatcher Government Must Go!" The article commented:
"Government policies have but one rationale. All resistance must be crushed. They are prepared to gamble everything on the slaughter of the organisations of the working class of Britain. Central to that policy is destruction of industry, while the ruling class decamps and seeks to shroud itself in the newer and more congenial institutions of the EEC. Every form of Government holding in industry is to be sold off at rock bottom prices to the carrion of the City and the international money markets. .... What remains of British industry is to be butchered and the workers taught to be humble."
In the same issue's editorial, we wrote:
"The Thatcher gang came to power on the promise of increasing incentives all around and using sound monetarist policies for creating an economic climate in which industry would thrive. There would be no need for an incomes policy and wages could be left to a 'free' system where the market was in control, and there was no need for interference by the central government.
This whole thesis was patently false from the start. It pretended that capitalism had departed from the pure laissez-faire system of Adam Smith out of some arbitrary whim and not because it had been forced to by its own internal contradictions. The nationalisation of industries which were necessary but not profitable enough to be left to the private sector, the intervention of the government on the side of employers to impose wage limits, the attempts to encourage by government action investment at home and to discourage the export of capital were all efforts to shore up a failing system and not the result of some misunderstanding about how the system was supposed to work.
What this Government has actually done is to effect a severe wage cut by introducing soaring inflation and then, by applying strict limits on monetary growth, to bring about a sharp downfall in productive output. A major world-wide recession was on the way in any case and government action here has not only made it certain but also exacerbated its seriousness. Whatever faint hope there might have been that cuts in taxation would stimulate industrial investment has been completely swamped by the enormously high cost of borrowing money – the highest in Britain's history.
Are they mad then? Committed to increasing profits, everything they have done has led to a decline in output, to closures and bankruptcies of the small firms they were supposed to be helping and to a severe economic depression. No, they are not mad. They know that the main threat to profit is an organised working class which is strong enough to resist paying the whole cost of capitalism's decline. What we are seeing is an all-out attempt to destroy the will and the ability of the working class to resist by destroying production and creating even more massive unemployment, by eroding the value of wages with swingeing inflation and attacking the trade unions to break their strength.
The CBI recognises the strategy and even though the immediate effects are bad for business they know that the organised working class has to be smashed if capitalism is to survive in Britain."
The editorial ended by warning of punitive actions to come:
"We had better be prepared for it with everything we have learned from two hundred years of class struggle, plus what we think through now about ending a system which can only continue to exist on the basis of our complete fascistic enslavement."
How did it happen?
Thatcher's government drove unemployment up, even on conservative official statistics, from 1.3 million in 1979 to 2.4 million by 1981, and 3.5 million in 1985. Monetarist dogmas cloaked an assault on production because our working class was absolutely entwined in industry. Draconian anti-trade union legislation was pushed through. National assets were sold off cheaply.
Why did it all come to pass? The essential explanation lies in the fact that workers were ideologically ill-prepared to fend off the assault and many workers actually voted for her government and agreed with its views.
We are still circumscribed by the past to this day. We desperately need a resurrection of class thinking if we are to fend off new ruling class attacks and find our path to a better form of society, socialism.