Statement of the Political Bureau on redundancy¶
Core Argument¶
The Political Bureau’s statement, published in the RCP Internal Bulletin on 29 December 1944, intervenes in a factional dispute provoked by an editorial in the Industrial Bulletin on the question of redundancy. The opposition, composed largely of younger comrades whose industrial experience is confined to wartime conditions, has misidentified a tactical question—the slogan “nons first” (non-unionists first)—as a matter of political principle. The PB insists this is a category error: the editorial addressed factory tactics, an appendage of the transitional programme, not the programme itself. By elevating a partial, conjunctural demand to the status of strategic orientation, the opposition has inverted the relationship between revolutionary strategy and tactics, converting correct ideas into reactionary lies.
The PB draws on a passage from Trotsky to ground its argument: an idea correct from the standpoint of revolutionary strategy becomes a lie if not translated into the language of tactics. The fight against capitalism as a whole does not absolve revolutionaries from fighting today against the specific measures by which capitalism increases working-class misery. Chief among these will be the attack on trade unions and the maintenance of unorganised workers at the expense of the organised. The “nons first” tactic is precisely such a measure—a defensive tactic in the factories, not a substitute for the transitional programme.
The statement then elaborates the programme the opposition allegedly overlooked. The Trotskyist position is distinguished from all other labour and petit-bourgeois currents by its insistence that full employment and decent living conditions can only be won through a programme of struggle: a sliding scale of hours and wages, a guaranteed minimum, a general plan of industrial production and public works, and, crucially, factory committees and workers’ control. These transitional demands raise the question of power daily. The war had pushed this aspect of the programme into the background, but the evolution of the international situation—particularly in “liberated” Europe—now brings it to the forefront.
The polemic is directed against a sectarian tendency within the RCP that confuses a tactical expedient with strategic principle, thereby emptying the transitional programme of its concrete content. The PB warns that such confusion, if uncorrected, would leave the party unable to respond to the conjunctural fluctuations of employment—redundancy before the end of the war in the Far East, the readjustment of industry, the possibility of a short post-war boom—while the masses, instinctively fearing mass unemployment, look for a programme that answers their questions on every point. The statement is a defence of Marxist method: the unity of strategy and tactics, the translation of general perspectives into concrete directives, and the refusal to let partial slogans usurp the place of the programme as a whole.