The Next Step: No. 18, November 1981

the next step Where is CND heading? Ireland; anti-semitism; positive discrimination; SWP dissensions; TUC foreign agents. Reviews: Wajda's Poland, the Soviet Union, American feminism, the

SDP.

No 18 November 1981 The campaign for nuclear disarmament is a movement for 'peace' and national survival which prepares the way for war just as mass pacifist campaigns led millions to their deaths in the First and Second World Wars.

review of the Revolutionary Communist Party

TOGETHER

SHALL

WE

STOP

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The anti-war movement's preoccupation with future is a distraction from the fight against unemployment and exploit ation, oppression and war in the here and now. • 'No peaceful road' page 11 the danger of war in the

Ten dead - what next? THE HUNGER STRIKE - what caused it, what its consequences were and what ended it - was a central issue in platform open discussions during speeches and Smash the PTA Campaign the tour. speakers emphasised that from our point Britain view in of republican movement and the manoeuvres of the Catholic Church, the Social Democratic and Labour Party in the Six Coun ties and the Fine Gael and Fianna Fail politicians in the Twenty-six Counties, were not of central importance. Nor was Thatcher's peculiar Margaret stubbornness the key issue. For us the decisive factor in the failure political status was the for campaign failure of the British labour movement to stand up in support of the hunger strikers.

Labour's silence government could never The British stand have sustained its H-Block protest if it had been met with a really powerful campaign in support of the prisoners at home in Britain. The British section of only could have shaken the government and broken its resolve against the hunger strikers was the working class.

But as things turned out, far from the a threat being position, the Labour Party and the TUC were reliable allies for Margaret Thatcher in her stand against the prisoners. When the hunger strike was at its most critical - shortly before the death of.

moment Bobby Sands send over to the H-Blocks, not a Tory minister, but Labour's Irish spokesman Don Concannon to show the solidarity of the official la bour British imperialism. And at the TUC Len Murray acted as Thatcher's troubleshooter inside the trade unions: whenever opposition emerged to the TUC's loyal stand, Murray rushed to suppress Trades councils that took up support it. hunger strike were threatened for the with disaffiliation; the trades councils in resolution conference political status was repudiated; and the TUC refused to hear a hunger striker's relative brought by the Smash the PTA Campaign to the September Congress.

left failed to The British the collaboration of the labour leadership. It allowed the ruling class to monopolise the debate on the hunger strike. It Tory intransigence met spinelessness with evasions and silence.

Given this sordid record it's not surprising that British workers did very little to support the Irish prisoners. The result was Tell your bank manager where to put it!

You need revolutionary communist politics and we need money. Support the next step.

Make us a regular financial commitment each month (£5, £10, £20...) and invest in the overthrow of capitalism. Fill in, cut out and send off the box below: Your bank Name of account to be debited Account number Our bank RCT Association, Natwest, Brixton Road SW9 Account number 17482844 Sorting code 60-03-36 Amount to be paid.. First payment due....... same date in subsequent months Signed war goes on. the tactics of the personal of the against the icians that society protest fell on government's The bombing the speaking tour. the government could movement with of support

RISH

challenge Labour's and Editorial 504 Greek myths Staffa dispute Ireland ....monthly the on . and After the hunger strike After ten deaths and many months of agony for Irish prisoners, families and the whole national population of the Six Counties, the hunger strike came to an end on 3 October. The brutal Direct Rulers gloated over their victory.

been inspired by the H-Block struggle; it now adds its weight to the movement for national liberation. The hunger strike is over - but the Before the hunger strike ended the Smash the PTA Campaign had organised a national tour in which John O'Hara, brother of murdered hunger striker Patsy, was to speak at 16 public meetings up and down the country. In view of the uncertain situation in Ireland in early October John O'Hara was unable to come over. But the tour went ahead with speakers from bombing attacks in London and the reaction they generated underlined the importance of the campaign's aim of rallying working class support for the Irish struggle. Attention now turns towards the Northern Smash the PTA Campaign meeting in Leeds on 5 December and the national labour movement conference in London on 6 February.

that Britain itself was virtually the only country in the western hemisphere where prominent representatives of the British ruling class - royalty and senior politcould appear without being mobbed by anti-H-Block protestors. And the whole burden of the political status the shoulders of the hunger strikers, their families and their supporters in the Six Counties.

What about the bombings? Smash the PTA Campaign's unconditional support for the IRA's renewed campaign in Britain was the subject of heated controversy throughout We regret the death and injury of non-combatants. But these are unavoidable in modern warfare - and the republican movement is at war against the British state. The deaths and injuries Contents There is no alternative Labour movement SWP in conference Foreign agent TUC Ten dead - what next? The IRA and the left The war in the unions Larry Quilty: PTA pick up But a new generation of Irish youth has the Smash the PTA Campaign. The IRA resulting from IRA campaigns in Britain with are trivial compared atrocities inflicted on the Irish people by the British forces and their Loyalist allies in the last 12 years. down on our support for the Irish liberation struggle because it leads to bombs on British streets. bourgeois anti-Irish prejudice by criticising the IRA's tactics. We blame British imperialism and its barbarous occupation of Ireland for all the suffering resulting Irish War. from the progress in Ireland and no lasting peace in Ireland or in Britain until British imperialism is defeated Discussions during the meetings and after them ranged over every aspect of the Irish War. Many people raised questions about politics in Ireland itself republicanism, about about Nuclear disarmament No peaceful road Europe Labour's withdrawal campaign Racism Equal opportunities: no way Zionism - never again! Reviews Andrzej Wajda's Man of iron 3 Sovietology today American feminism 4,5 Michael Foot's pacifism 6,7 The Cheka's proud record Breakthrough for the SDP?

20 Leisure shock Letters Letter from Iran Keeping NALGO out Middlesex Poly RCP activities their Dublin activists in problems Britain,

PTA

Campaign the savage of the hunger We refuse to back We refuse to indulge favour of the There will be no of the Loyalism, the British labour conference to act. to this conference. day activity never repeated. 10,11 board 12 13 14,15 16 Editor Mike Freeman 17 Editorial board 19 19 19 20 about the churches, the trade unions, the government, etc. All these are interesting subjects for debate. But many Britain would much rather talk about Irish politics than discuss the developing Irish involved in solidarity work in Britain and how to overcome them. For the Smash the PTA Campaign the burning question is how we are going to extend support for the Irish cause in the working class movement in Never again! During the hunger strike the Smash the organised some important initiatives and gained support from many trade unionists. We did not succeed in bending Thatcher's resolve; nor did we break the TUC from its servile role. But base in the we did consolidate a wider unions on which to build in the future.

The Coventry conference at the start strike back in March assembled the largest gathering of trade unionists in support of the hunger strikers during the whole campaign. The Workers March for Irish Freedom to the TUC in September was widely sponsored in the trade union movement: more than 100 people marched and lobbied the TUC to press the case for a change in policy in Our liberation struggle. campaign showed that it is possible to mobilise British workers in support of the Irish cause. It requires only determination and clear anti-imperialist argument.

The campaign marches on. One fruit activity is that hunger strike several local Smash the PTA Campaign groups are now functioning in different parts of the country. The next big event the Northern and Midlands groups are working towards is an all-day meeting in Leeds with speakers from Ireland and movement. On the national scale work has already begun in preparation for a Recall Coventry time in London this It's theme Saturday 6 February. will be Ireland - time for British workers We hope to draw the widest possible cross-section of the working class More than this we want to involve more people in day to make sure that every • to incident in the Irish War - whether a death from a plastic bullet in Belfast, a bomb in London or an arrest under the PTA - receives a working class response.

We want to make sure that the debacle of the hunger strike campaign in Britain is Keith Tompson Editorial Tony Allen, Annie Dillon, Nick Jenkins, Judy Harrison, Anita Lloyd, Marcelle Reynolds, Frank Richards, Helen Simons, James Wood Published by Junius Publications Ltd BC JPLTD, London WIN 3XX Printed by Anvil Printers Ltd (TU) Typeset by Junius Typesetters (TU) ISSN 0144-350X November 1981

WHEN RONALD REAGAN told the leaders of 22 rich and nations pool assembled at Cancun, Mexico at the end of October that free enterprise, private capital and open world markets were the only hope for the Third World, he was simply repeating the same hard line he has been giving the American public ever since he was elected president. As he said a week earlier in Philadelphia, 'by getting our own economic house in order, we win, win, we all win' (The Times, 16 they October). He means that through the revival of the US economy American capitalists would win, American workers would have to accept lower living standards and millions in the backward capitalist world would have to continue to starve to death. On the same day that Reagan was commending 'the magic of the market' to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, British Chancellor Geoffrey Howe was propounding similar theme at the Mansion House banquet of the Lord Mayor of London: If profits and investment are to recover', he told the assembled City gents, 'there has to be some fall in living standards' (The Times, 16 October).

For the capitalist class the world over there is no alternative way out of the recessIon The aggressive Reagan-Thatcher approach is without however,

BLES

difficulties. On the one hand, so crucial is state intervention in propping up their enfeebled economies that controlling government spending has proved impossible. Reagan's recent cuts were hard enough on American workers, but nothing like hard enough for their employers' liking: fearing a bigger budget deficit and higher interest rates, Wall Street slumped and precipitated a black September' on the stock exchanges of the world. Thatcher's divided Cabinet could not agree on where to make its cuts in spending October. The Tories' attempts to control inflation have quickened the pace of redundancies, but have also accelerated Britain's industrial decline. At the same time, Britain's Tory voters are groaning under the burdens of rising interest rates, mortgage rates and domestic rates.

Black September When Wall Street took fright over a Reagan television broadcast on 24 September, the fragility of the US economy was revealed.

The chain-reaction in the City of London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Sydney exposed the fact that the world's financial markets are 'an American-dominated wired village' The Economist speculated grimly on the prospects for a market-shattering panic leading to a spectacular economic crash' if not next year, then at some time in the 'eighties (26 September). But what did Reagan do to upset the stockbrokers?

He announced a $16bn tax reform and budget cutting package, to follow his July round of $35bn spending cuts, the biggest in American history. But while Reagan's tax cuts reduce revenues his rearmament expenditure programme boosts budget deficit inevitably rises. America's businessmen wanted tougher measures, such as further cuts in social security, to reduce public spending. But Reagan's modest proposals, curtailed as a concession to Congress, failed to inspire Wall Street. The result was a collapse of the stock market. Stock market prices tend to fall as interest rates rise if they or even threaten to rise - because speculators and financiers will benefit more by lending money or purchasing government bonds than by investing in stocks and shares.

And a crash in one market spills over into all the others, not just because of the capitalists' panic, but because world interest rates are tied together by the international flow of money capital.

Wall Street sneezed. The London Stock Exchange, already shivering, caught In the blackest day since pneumonia. Edward Heath put the country on a three-day week in 1974, £3.4bn was wiped off share values. After the day's trading not a single stock in the Financial Times 30-share index was registering a gain. And, while US interest rates settled down towards the end of September, UK rates hit 16 per cent early in October, under pressure from Britain's own budget deficit and a falling value of the pound on the foreign exchange market.

The high level of interest rates at a time of recession reflects the role of credit in the capitalist crisis (see Tony Allen, World in recession', Revolutionary Communist Papers No 7, July 1981).

Credit is a means of allowing capitalists to business when existing levels of stay in profitability would otherwise dictate a halt. Borrowing finances both the expansion of output and consumer demand.

But since the mid 'seventies the bourgeoisie has come to recognise that although credit can foster investment and trade, it does little for underlying profitability and encourages prices to Thus in the rise. current phase of the recession both the White House and Downing Street have been taken over by advisors obsessed with 'supply side' economics. These experts emphasise the need for industrial reorganisation and curbing inflation - even at the cost of raising interest rates and deepening the recession. But the borrowing continues, even though interest payments claim an evergrowing share of company profits - over one-third Britain. The Economist 1n views the 'overborrowers' as a serious threat to the stability of the whole credit system. They include house owners and holders of property men everywhere, many glutted and stockpiled raw materials, bankrupt private companies which cannot afford to make obligatory redundancy payments, nationalised corporations with a dozen successive years of negative cash flow, governments with estimates for small budget deficits that are obvious fibs, countries like freedom-seeking Poland and growing Brazil and starving Bangladesh' (3 October). In short, the victims of the recession everywhere.

The Economist fears that if the credit bubble bursts it 'could make 1929's little local stock market difficulties look like a controlled parachute drop'.

Reagan's attempts to readjust the US economy have brought him into conflict with European governments over fluctuating exchange rates and the chaos these have caused for international trade.

The spectre of protectionism now haunts the capitalist world. Free trade in danger Rising interests rates in the USA have pulled the dollar up along with them.

According to The Banker, the 'effective' exchange rate of the dollar rose by 20 per cent in the 12 months to September 1981, fluctuating wildly within a 23 per cent spread over that time. In the same period sterling fell by 12 percent, with an 18 percent gap between its high and low. Even the Deutschemark and the yen moved up and down by about 10 the next step There is no alternative per cent. Fluctuating exchange rates brought havoc to European trade, finally necessitating a major currency realignment in the European Monetary System. It is true that, since its establishment in March 1979, the EMS has managed to preserve a degree of stability among European currencies. But by October of this year it could stand the strains no longer. After bitter squabbles the Deutschemark and the Dutch guilder were upvalued and the franc and lira devalued, reflecting the balance of economic power within the EEC. Behind the clamour of European voices criticising the Reagan administration and the internal disputes over exchange rates lie fears of growing US isolationism and concern about a general collapse into protectionism by the world economy France's finance minister, for instance, threatened to impose import controls against the Belgians in the course of the EMS debate. Moreover, a major row has broken out in the EEC over Belgium, France and Italy's new plans for state subsidies to their steel industries - plans which contravene the Treaty of Rome.

The German government has threatened to put restrictive tariffs on steel.

The problem of profit The nut that neither Reagan nor Thatcher can crack is the problem of profitability.

It is this problem that is at the bottom of all the complexities of currency and credit. Profit rates have been falling everywhere. In Britain the net rate of return on capital invested in industrial and commercial companies in 1980 was 4.9 per cent; in 1970 it was 8.7 per cent; in 1960, 13.3 per cent. Leave out North Sea o1l activities (which accounted for 41 percent of the net operating surplus of all industrial and commercial companies in 1980), and net profits last year amounted to merely 3 percent.

(British business, 18 September).

The $64 000 question remains - how can profitability in industry be raised?

The answer is only by intensifying exploitation and driving down workers' living standards. Now, mass unemployment is a powerful lever against the working class; but, as is now apparent, it has not proved powerful enough to solve all capital's problems. Thus, new lines of advance are emerging: and there is a consensus among bourgeois pundits on both sides of the Atlantic about these.

Public spending, and especially spending on welfare and wages, must be ruthlessly cut. Meanwhile, private employers must be encouraged to stand firm against wage rises and to shake out labour mercilessly.

The message coming from both Reagan's ranch and Maggie's farm is that only the lean survive. In Britain the prime targets are the public services and nationalised industries. In the former, jobs are being slashed decentralised pay bargaining and new systems introduced with the of aim emasculating the unions and cutting wages. As for the latter, economic commentators bitterly regret Thatcher's agreement some months ago to postpone pit closures. They want to ban U-turns in the relentless onslaught on 'over-manning and "restrictive practices, not only in the mines, but in shipbuilding and the motor industry too. The United States points the forward. Reagan's brutal treatment of the air traffic controllers showed how to deal with unions that wouldn't accept that the bourgeoisie means business, Workers at Chrysler, who recently volunteered to forego wage rises for three years in return for a seat for one of their union represen.

tatives on the company board, are held up as an example to the troublesome BL workforce in Britain. TINA - for us either The difficult problems thrown up by the recession and the harsh measures required to deal with them cause tensions and conflicts within the capitalist class. Financial conditions which encourage some companies to become 'leaner' spell bankruptcy for others, Industries that are more exposed to the fierce competition of the world market than others (textiles, for instance) are desperate for the protectionist measures that the British capitalist class as a whole equally desperately wants to avoid for fear of retaliation. The labour bureaucracy's response to the plight of British capitalism is to fall in behind one or other bourgeois strategy for saving the economy. Whenever the bourgeois experts are divided, the TUC and Labour Party leaders always identify one side as being in the interests of the labour movement and give it Thus the bureaucrats are ensupport. couraged by the emergence of the Tory 'wets'. They back the wets' timid calls for reflation, lower interest rates and planned investment in 'core industries They regularly join pro-import controls protests with beleagured entrepeneurs in the textiles, clothing, footwear and leather sectors. And they have their own ideas about how to make economies in public spending. For the working class all bourgeois solutions to the crisis are disastrous. By choosing between different roads to the of capitalist profitability, restoration trade union leaders simply sacrifice their members' jobs and wages to the requirements of capital. Take one recent example.

Trade unions at the state-owned National Freight Company campaigned against the firm being sold off to private enterprise: their "alternative", which was eventually accepted by the government, was for the workers to buy shares in the company.

Now we can be sure that, with representation on the board, workers will be able to participate fully in the redundancies and wage cuts necessary to make NFC a viable independent outfit.

Trade union leaders are increasingly coming to recognise that their alternative strategy to save British capitalism means austerity for the working class. 'Draconian' measures would be required to deal with the crisis facing a future Labour govern.

ment, said TUC economic committee chairman David Basnett recently, 'but we need this survival kit and we need to make it work' (The Times, 12 October).

But Basnett's survival kit for British capitalism is a suicide kit for British workers Our job is to fight for our jobs and living standaids now, not to get involved in schemes to save their system at our expense. Reagan and Thatcher are, from their class point of view, right: there is no alternative to driving down working class living standards. With its talk of "U-turns, *changes of course and other ways', the official labour movement ignores this and therefore plays into their hands. The recession shows us more clearly every day that there is no alternative for us but to prepare the overthrow of the capitalist system.

LABOUR MOVEMENT

Socialist Workers Party in conference

DEMONSTRATE!

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Debate and discussion are essential to the development of the working class movement. Through open debate political problems are exposed, experiences are assimilated and clarity of purpose can be achieved. But debate can also mystify and confuse. The British labour movement has a long tradition of debating things that are not essential - often to avoid discussing things that are. At one Labour Party conference after another passionate and angry exchanges have become part of the routine of inconclusive discussions.

and the deputy leadership which only distract from the burning issues facing the movement. The Communist Party of Great Britain is holding its conference during the second week of November, The pre-conference discussion indicates that the leadership has managed to avoid a debate on policy and instead has encouraged a 'debate' on the format of the Morning Star, inner-party democracy and other such non-issues.

the Socialist Workers Party. Throughout this summer and during the months leading up to its November conference, a wide-ranging debate on issues such as women, the summer riots and Ireland has been raging inside the SWP. Below we assess the debate inside the SWP and explain the real issues at stake. We welcome comments on our assessment from supporters of the SWP. THE UNDERLYING THEME of all the debates inside the SWP is its crisis of identity. This crisis stems from the SWP's approach to the labour bureaucracy and particularly from its convergence with the Labour left. The SWP's attitude towards be summarised the Labour left can briefly. In industry there is a downturn in militancy which has forced workers to look for political solutions - and the solutions they have turned to are those of Tony Benn. To influence these workers who identify with Benn it is necessary to form a 'united front' with the Labour SWP's Committee left. The Central explains the rationale for this strategy: We can only challenge the Labour left's 4honowtton aramharux

FIGH. THE TORIES!

Debates take place - but debates about issues like party democracy One organisation which appears to be an exception to this trend is ideology of nationalism and class collaboration, its propensity for rotten compromises, if we can draw its rank and file supporters in joint struggle alongside us." (Industrial downturn, political upturn, p3) Unity - on whose terms? Rank and file unity is an objective that could endorse, But any revolutionary unity with the Labour left is not necessarily the same as rank and file unity.

Indeed, today, unity with the reformists unity around reformist often means policies: the weakness of revolutionary forces ensures that unity is always on the terms of the Labour left. Unity falls apart the instant that the struggle turns against the labour bureaucracy and the capitalist system that it protects. The leadership of

SWP

understands this the intuitively problem. Its solution is to fight for a 'united front' that precludes demands which threaten unity with the Labour left.

The SWP is so committed to uniting with the reformists that it tailors its policies to accord with the orientation of the Labour left. Of course, the Central Committee rhetorically asserts the political independence of the SWP. One of its major documents repeatedly warns its membership not 'to ingratiate itself with Bennites'. However, it offers the guidance regarding the distinct policies SWP membership should pursue in the the 'united front. In the end, to reassure the membership that the SWP has something distinct to offer, the Central Committee brags that the SWP is better than the reformists at organising sympathy for those in struggle: 'on the terrain of campaigning for sympathy we are better than the reformists' Industrial downturn, political upturn, p4). A lack of distinct policies haunts the SWP's favourite 'united front, the Right to Work Campaign. The Right to Work Campaign Central Committee Autumn perspectives document illustrates the difficulties the SWP is in. In a moment of boldness the Central Committee insists that 'we should not shy way from raising the politics of the Right to Work Camand its differentiation from the paign People's March/TUC conception'.

But what are the politics that differentiate the RTWC from the People's March? The reader of this perspectives document will search in vain for an answer. In reality the RTWC has no distinct policies. Whát distinguishes it from the People's March is not politics but the militancy of its supporters. In every sphere of activity the Central Committee is hard put to discover what distinguishes the SWP politically from the In the end, the practical Labour left. solution that is offered to activists in the RTWC, in industry, in all spheres of party activity, is an exhortation to sell Socialist Worker. This downgrading of distinct SWP policies is not mere opportunism. It from a flawed analysis of the stems present balance of class forces and of the obstacles facing the revolutionary movement. The confidence trick The SWP's attitude to the Labour left and the struggles of the working class is neatly summed up in a major Socialist Worker What now for left?", editorial, written by Paul Foot (3 October). Socialist Worker congratulates Benn and his campaign managers for their magnificent showing in the Labour Party deputy contest'. It then warns the leadership Labour left against relying too much on electoralism, and exhorts them to throw their resources into the fight among the rank and file of the movement against the Tory Government and its policies Predictably the article ignores any issue of political substance which divides the SWP from the Labour left. Apparently such matters are best left to private discussions. The SWP's indifference to the reactionary consequences of reformist politics is illustrated in the way What now for the left?' treats the rank and file. For Paul Foot united work in the rank and file is essential. The editorial justifies its appeal to the Labour left by pointing out that the rank and file is to the right of Benn: the deeper the electoral process delved into the rank and file, the heavier the majority for the right. The implication of this statement is that the working class rank and file is more reactionary than Benn, and therefore the

SWP

and the Bennites should work together to push a right-wing rank and file to the left. It never occurs to Paul Foot that rank and file workers support the right because of the policies and activities of the Labour left. Wales is a good example. The Welsh region of the TGWU supported Healey rather than Benn, as did many other union and Labour Party activists Yet, historically, Wales has been a leftwing stronghold. The rightward shift of the Welsh labour movement is the result of decades of betrayals by the leftreformists. Left-wing rhetoric lacks credibility with those who have burned their fingers than once. Those Welsh workers more who still hang on to their jobs prefer the realism of the mainstream labour bureauillusory promises of the cracy to the Labour left. But the SWP wants to reach the rank and file in alliance with the very forces that bear responsibility for the demoral.

that prevails in the workplace.

isation What now for the left?' ignores the paralysing influence of reformist politics among workers because it ignores political problems altogether. Instead of providing an assessment of the political problems rank and file, it advances facing the explanations for its depsychological moralisation: How people think and vote is linked inextricably to the ebb and flow of their confidence. When workers feel confident, when trade union organisation can protect jobs and push up living standards, then the political drift is to the left.' (Socialist Worker, 3 October 1981) Confidence begets confidence and effective trade union organisation means higher living standards. Who can disagree?

But the real questions remain. Why have workers lost their confidence? Why have unions become ineffective? The answers to these questions are not to be found in the realm of psychology but in the policies and activities of the Labour left.

The SWP sidesteps the problem of reformist politics and opts for psychology. Socialist Worker publiely justifies every compromise in terms of its moraleboosting effect. Privately, its confidenceboosting mission with the Labour left is pragmatically the 'united justified front' will give the SWP a hearing among Bennite workers. This strategy simply cannot work. For workers it is no use because it allows the reformists to retain the initiative: it will not increase their confidence, but only strengthen their faith in reformism workers have no psychological Active problems - all they require is clarity of purpose and political answers. Nor, as it happens, can this strategy enhance the SWP's organisational appeal. Why should workers transfer their allegiance to a party that confirms the authority of their traditional organisation on every critical The with the question! peace pact Labour left simply forces the SWP to justify its existence. Today the SWP is paying the price for its 'united front' strategy in internal dissension. The organisational diffuseness that is a result of its opportunism has antagonistic factions and thrown up generated a debate. The shallow character of this debate is vividly illustrated by the fact that none of the protagonists have publicly acknowledged the real issues at stake. The grand debate The debate inside the SWP seems to be centrally about work around the oppres sion of women and racism. Opponents of the SWP leadership claim that their organisation is abandoning work which to the specific oppression of relates women and of black people. To get to the roots of the conflict we have to the SWP's record on these examine questions. The SWP relates to political oppression in one of two ways. On the one hand, it treats oppression economistically, ignoring

the specificity of oppression.

Thus, it argues that the way to fight racism is by getting black people to join trade unions; and, as a popular SWP slogan goes 'a woman's place is in her union'. On the other hand, it treats oppression from a classless point of view - discrimination against women becomes a problem for women and the harassment of blacks is something for blacks to defend themselves against. Over the past five years the SWP has generally veered towards the classless approach. It embraced feminism and told women to get on with the job through the Women's Voice groups. Similarly, it set up Flame and advised its black members to carry on fighting racism.

This approach inevitably led to a separation between the SWP's work in the unions and its activity on race and women.

Moreover, the classless character of this activity ensured that women and black members were working as women or as blacks, not as working class revolutionaries. It was only a matter of time before the SWP leadership lost control over these spheres of work. Black members left the organisation as they moved towards black nationalist politics. Women's Voice became a radical wing of the feminist movement. Over the summer, as these problems compounded by the SWP's were growing organisational diffuseness, things reached a head. To retain control the Central Committee decided to wind up the Women's Voice groups.

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The subsequent debate about the fate of Women's Voice masks the real issue: the inability of the SWP leadership to exert political control over this area of work. Leading SWP member Chris Harman let the cat out of the bag when he complained in his contribution to the discussion that 'the ideas of the women's movement have been influencing Women's Voice groups rather than Women's Voice groups carrying class politics to women'.

The organiser of the SWP's race work Bruce George also noted the organisational consequences of the SWP's adaptation to black separatism: The Flame perspective of building a mass separate black revolutionary party. wrecked our black work wherever comrades were unfortunate enough to try and operate it.

The SWP leadership's instinct for selfpreservation has led to a shift away from the classless approach to political oppres- Opponents of the leadership are sion. fighting to retain the old separatist perspective. That the debate is about women and race is incidental; what is really at issue is the SWP's organisational coherence, and the ability of its leadership to keep a grip on its members' activities.

Hocus-pocus perspectives The Central Committee talks a lot about the working class and appears to be more principled than its opponents.

In fact, the leadership's perspectives have nothing to do with working class politics. They treat oppression as an economic problem and reduce it to a trade union issue. Take the SWP's assessment of the summer riots. The Central Committee denies the racial dimension of the inner-city revolts and tries to make out that they were class not race riots. Because it wants to justify an approach to the street fighting from a trade union point of view, it cannot admit that it was a response to racial oppression.

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Devious arguments about class riots' are complemented by a clumsy search for white rioters. The SWP needs to dig up all the white rioters it can find to substantiate its case that the real issue this summer was unemployment and not police harassment of blacks: There were disturbances in over 40 towns, many of them towns without a large black population. The common thread linking all the rioters was their youth and the effect that unemployment had on them either directly or through family, friends etc.' (Bruce George, party race work committee This may be news to black people in Southall, Brixton, Hackney, Liverpool 8, Moss Side, Chapeltown, etc. But serves the purpose of glossing over the specificity of racial oppression and allowing the SWP chiefs to put race work on ice. The denial of racial oppression as a specific problem allows the SWP to call for unity between black and white on economic grounds. This is what lay behind the projection of the Right to Work Campaign as the solution to the facing black youth. In fact pro biels the RTWC has become the answer to all political problems, a 'united front' for all seasons. Once all particular forms of oppression are obscured, then we are all - white, black, women, etc - in the predicament; and the universal Same panacea is a march to Blackpool to the Tory Party conference. Let them die The Central Committee's dogmatic adherence to trade unionism is most clearly expressed in its Irish perspectives. It is very difficult to portray the war in Ireland as a pure trade union issue.

Even the theoreticians of the 'class riot' school did not manage to portray Irish hunger strikers as British trade unionists. As a result the Central Committee concluded that Irish freedom was a lost cause. While one hunger striker after another starved to death, the SWP proclaimed its 'extensive coverage of the issue in Socialist Worker. And that more or less was the end of the matter. To ward off criticism of its inaction over the hunger strike, the Central Committee noted fatalistically: *The hunger strike has gained negligible campaign Britain'. Why? Because the support in *overwhelming majority of the labour from movement top to bottom has swallowed the lie that the prisoners are criminal terrorists' (Central Committee and Irish sub-committee Irish Perspectives). Is the SWP going to combat this lie? The answer is a resounding no!

The Central Committee justifies its abandonment of the hunger strikers by blaming the labour movement for its chauvinism. This is more hocus-pocus. If the labour movement was not dominated by imperialist propaganda and supported the Irish liberation movement, then there would be no need for the SWP or anyone else to try to build solidarity with the Irish struggle. But the Irish perspectives document is not just evasive, it is also hypocritical. The Committee Central sneers at those who try to gain working class support for the Irish people by labelling their activity as breast beating' and 'moralistic. The perspectives document condemns the fight for an unpopular cause as 'moralism'. To give credence to this argument the Central Committee plays on the most backward sentiments of its membership: *Already our comrades have had to say, "No. We are not going to support counterproductive demonstrations simply to salve our consciences". And we are going to have to say that again. (Irish Perspectives) In the vocabulary of the SWP, demonstrations unpopular by issues are definition "counter-productive'. The SWP did not lift a finger to mobilise support in case it was accused of 'moralism'. What is the SWP's alternative?

'In place of the moralising we have to look at what political space has been opened up on Ireland within which we can begin to overcome our isolation. There is some. Although support for the hunger strikers remains negligible, a vague feeling that the troops should get out (often held alongside with other very reac tionary ideas) is widespread. (Irish perspectives) Hunger strikes are unpopular - they will have to die. But a certain vague feeling' which is 'reactionary' is widespread' - just the thing for the Central Committee to build on. In case you wonder what the 'vague feeling' is, it is that of the weary petit bourgeois who has had enough of the war and wants Britain to rid itself of the Irish. And the political space' that's opened up is, you've guessed it, inside the Labour Party.

Having abandoned the hunger strikers, the Central Committee has a vague feeling' that a 'political space' exists in the Benn camp. We are back with our old friend, the united front: 'Concentrating on building such a campaign marks a new emphasis on our Irish work and of course means building an alliance with those to the right of us. There is nothing strange about this, it is yet another example of the united We have to be clear that the front tactic alternative is purity - in complete isolation. (Irish perspectives)

THE

GREAT

EVASION

"There is nothing strange about this': betraying the hunger strikers for an alliance with the Labour left 'is yet another example of the united front tactic'.

At least the Irish perspectives have the merit of drawing out the real alternatives: fighting imperialism, oppression in Ireland - or uniting with the Labour left around issues which the perspectives themselves describe as something that looks 'very soggy to us'. Where will it end? The Central Committee seeks to discredit its political opponents in the debate by swearing its allegiance to the workplace.

Every perspective document exhorts the membership to turn to the workplace.

LABOUR MOVEMENT

But the record of the SWP shows that it is very selective about the issues that it raises there. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to state that it takes up all questions at the workplace from the point of view of a trade unionist. In other words, the SWP concentrates on issues which are taken up by others in any case at the place of work. This means that issues such as racial oppression and the Irish War become irrelevant to the SWP's workplace politics.

Workplace politics union Sarace provide a bridge between the SWP and the Labour left. As trade union activists, both components of the 'united front have a common interest in defending the official labour movement against the Tories. Causes which the labour bureaucracy support such as CND, EEC withdrawal, fighting unemployment and the Tories, are issues on which the SWP can give full vent to its rhetoric. Concerns towards which the labour bureaucracy is obliged to pay lip-service, such as antiracism, the SWP treats in a classless way.

And issues which are an anathema to the labour bureaucracy, the Irish such as liberation struggle, the SWP prefers to ignore. This is how the SWP sustains unity with the Labour left - but it is a unity that is directly against the interests of workers and of the oppressed

TALE

GREAT

EVASION

The rightward shift of the SWP cannot be halted. This summer it defined racial oppression out of existence. By early autumn it denounced supporters of the hunger strikers for their moralism.

The RTWC is carefully restricted lest it offend the left labour bureaucrats. More and more the SWP acts as an instrument of the labour bureaucracy and covers its tracks by invoking the 'united front and the need to boost working class 'confidence. Many SWP supporters will agree and say that the SWP is bad on questions such as Ireland, race, women and gays.

But they excuse their organisation by claiming that at least it is good in industry. But how can an organisation that abandons the interests of the proletariat in the struggle against imperialism, racism and other forms of oppression be good in industry? The SWP's industrial work suffers from the same politics that lead it to its unity pact with Benn. That's why the RTWC has gone along with voluntary redundancies at Gardner's and has argued for them at Laurence Scotts. The RTWC cannot challenge its allies in the labour bureaucracy that's why it marched to the Tory Party conference instead of the

TUC

The Women's Voice debate is a carefully stage-managed affair, designed to distract attention from the party's flight to the labour bureaucracy. SWP members would do well to ponder whether they want to help build a second-rate Labour Party. If they really want to build a party of revolution it's time they left the SWP and joined the struggle for a real alternative to the Labour Party.

Pat Roberts the next step, November 1981 5

• FOREIGN AGENT TUC +

Imperialism

MISSION

ZIMBABWE

OVER THE LAST 40 years the TUC has been ready to execute any mission demanded of it by the Colonial Office.

Industrial conflict in the colonies has often been militant and violent.

Colonial Office the TUC's long put experience in containing class conflict to good use in Asia and Africa. Along with the gunboats, the government despatched trade union bureaucrats to the colonies to teach the 'natives' the virtues of moderate trade unionism. In Africa, many unions were the creation of the TUC bureaucrats.

Their "fraternal' assistance ensured that the class struggle would be channelled into safe institutions. TUC leaders handpicked and groomed future union leaders: some were brought to Britain and trained to become effective agents of British imperialism.

TUC's services imperialism continued long after the African colonies won formal independence: Zimbabwe is a good example. The TUC has a long and proud tradition of assisting trade union organsiations in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. The General Council intend to expand their activities so that the TUC can respond effectively to the many requests it receives to assist trade union development."

(Zimbabwe: assistance,

TUC,

July 1981) The working class of Zimbabwe has long suffered from the attentions of Western union bureaucrats. During the last decade of white majority rule, the International Congress of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and its affiliates were busy sabotaging the struggle of the African working class. The unions they set up and financed were successful in curbing workers struggles against the Smith regime. In 1971 the ICTU boasted of its massive investment in Zimbabwe unions: 'It is probably true to say that this country has received in recent years more international trade union assistance than any other countri the African continent' (cited *Showdown in Zimbabwe', Revolutionary Communist Papers, NO 1979). The money was well spent. When mass strikes broke out in 1972 against the racist regime, the union leaders worked overtime to get workers back inside the factories. But now the TUC must again come to the rescue Ever since independence the Mugabe regime has been under pressure from the working class. In 1980 strikes broke throughout the

OUL

demanding higher living standards. 6 the next step, November 1981 Salisbury The working class pressure by attempting to develop a system of industrial relations which could institutionalise struggle. The government-initiated Riddell Commission published its report in June.

One of its central recommendations is that clearly industrial relations are drawn up.

The Zimbabwe. Congress Unions (ZCTU) has called on the TUC to guide its negotiations with the government over the Riddell report.

promptly despatched former AUEW-TASS official Jim Mortimer Mortimer is an ideal choice for the job: recently was the chairman Advisory, Conciliation And the Service

(ACAS).

At have made a living out of offering mediation in return for the abandonment of industrial action, ACAS was particularly effective in industrial containing

ACAS

greatest diffuse the famous struggle at Grunwicks - while it arbitrated the employer stepped up the attack and eventually the workforce. Mortimer's job in Zimbabwe will be to teach trade unionists to rely on the state and not on the class struggle. This 20 visit is seen by the TUC as a prelude to a "programme of Mortimer will be promisug bureducrals. Mugabe hopes that Mortimer will do to the workers in Zimbabwe what he did to those at Grunwicks.

MISSION

GERMANY

WHEN BRITISH TANKS rolled into Berlin in May 1945 the TUC bureaucrats followed obediently in their tracks. While the diplomats of the USA, in Union and Britain negotiated the carveup of Europe and their armies enforced September the new order, the labour bureaucrats got together with the military authorities to rebuild the institutions and procedures of a modern capitalist society.

This was no easy task. The defeat of fascism meant the German bourgeoisie as a political force.

Freed from the yoke of fascism, German workers were demanding radical reforms

COUILLY

nationalisation The such as But its services to British imperialism overseas are shrouded in diplomatic obscurity. Here we expose the record of the labour bureaucrats who joined with the British Military Administration in post-war Germany to destroy the influence of working class militants. And we examine the machinations of the TOC in the pro-imperialist international union federation, the ICFTU, whose current project is to sabotage working class activity in post-independence Zimbabwe.

government has responded to governors were 'people's the class cratic and handed over worked out procedures for for the of Trade The TUC to Salisbury. government's the

COT

and ATO CLOs ACAS Mortimer thing the US lacked disputes. One of achievements was to the military command. defeated trade union assistance. on the look out for In the meantime members foremen. arbeiterbewegung, many, Princeton, 1957). the Soviet destruction of the workers' and 1975) control in industry. The allied military welcomed by local committees of social democommunist militants who captured fascists and demanded the removal of all ex-Nazis from official positions. They presented plans democratic administration of communities and factories and proposals for the formation of new trade unions.

Documents and letters in the Congress House archives reveal the special contribution made by the TUC to the British drive to strengthen its hold in Germany against the overbearing Social might of US imperialism. What Britain lacked in military power it made up for in its long experience of colonial adminis- 'fifties. tration and labour relations: it had some- - a strong labour bureaucracy with decades of experience controlling a militant working class.

The groundwork, however, was done by Monty picks his team retary Within weeks of the defeat of Germany the Western forces banned the 'people's committees' and all working class political activity. The newly revived Communist Party was outlawed and thousands of its imprisoned. British military tribunals sentenced workers in the Ruhr who resisted the re-employment of Nazi Tanks were sent in to quell a lot similar protests among the Recklinghausen miners (Karl Heinz Roth, Die 'andere Germany. Munich, 1976). But militancy persisted: 70 per cent of the elected councils in the mines were made up of communists right up to 1948 (Harold Zink, The United States in Ger- The prime objective of British policy now shifted toward setting up a reliable trade union organisation to contain working class unrest. Field Marshall Mont- , gomery outlined his tactics in his memoirs: The Russians supported the trade unions. I decided not to do this. I was very much in favour of letting them grow as circumstances permitted. But I was against having them forced upon us. hoped to ensure that in due course the right people would emerge to lead them. If e acres too once came was a would end up in the wrong hands and that this could create problems.' (cited in Schmidt and Fichter, Der erz wungene kapitalismus, Berlin, The point was to stall until the right personnel was ready to take on the job.

The TUC joined in the quest for suitable labour leaders from among the aged German bureaucrats who had survived the Nazi period in exile. In Hampstead, the TUC found former white-collar union chief Hans Gottfurcht - then on the payroll of US intelligence - and he became a key figure in the new trade union framework. In Stockholm, the social democratic trade union federation leader of the 'twenties, Fritz Tarnow - the man who drew up the blueprint for Hitler's work service' scheme - came out of retirement to take a prominent position in Britain's new scheme. Right-wing reformist Hans Boeckler was recruited to help organise trade unions in the British zone, and rabid anti-communist veteran Kurt Schumacher was brought back to re-establish the Hanover Democratic Party in These hand-picked men presided over the German labour movement until the late Tewson's tactics Once the right leadership had 'emerged', the TUC turned its attention to the establishment of a trade union machine that could stem the growth of unofficial organisation. In July 1947 Foreign Sec Francis Pakenham (now better known as the moralist Lord Longford) suggested an exchange of trade union delegations between Germany and Britain TUC General Secretary Vincent Tewson blocked the proposal that impoverished German workers should visit Britain lest they gain an impression that things are flourishing here and that we could give more assistance. But he eagerly took up the idea of a British delegation to The delegation reported back to the Foreign Secretary in January 1948. It was concerned that the conditions of repression and austerity in Germany were still unfavourable to the consolidation of responsible' trade unionism.

Due to the wages stop, and having in mind the inadequate control of prices, we find the trade unions handicapped in fulfilling their proper functions, and there is the danger that having little or nothing to do in this field, they will fail to make the proper impression on the mind of the average member in the workshop.

This danger is increased owing to the existence of works councils.' (Report of the TUC delegation to Germany, 1-10 December 1947, Congress House, 21 January 1948) The report recommended that the powers of the unofficial works councils

be curtailed to strengthen the unions. To lend weight to this suggestion the report referred to the 'statesmanlike attitude' shown by Boeckler and his clique during the food riots of 1946, which the leaders had done their best to contain. The argument against workshop organisation taken up by the British was promptly government. In 1948 the demands of workers for workshop level participation rejected by the management were occupation administration.

The

TUC

report was craven in its British imperialism. It Susse coe noted, for example, that 'at no stage in our visit was any dissatisfaction with the progress to completion of denazification expressed to us, and that the unions 'anxious to resume international were affiliations, but not anxious for the formation of unions united across the zonal divisions imposed on Germany by the Allies. In reality rank and file workers maintained a constant hostility to the power and influence conferred upon Nazis by the occupation forces. There was also consistent pressure for rank and file unity and the establishment of a united trade union movement in all four zones.

Divided nation, divided class While the Allies moved towards formalising the division of Germany be- Eastern and Western blocs, tween the the TUC actively promoted the division of the working class, subverting rank and file aspirations for unity. In 1947 the TUC initiated a concerted campaign to bring about the break up of the World Federation of Trade Unions which included Soviet representatives and Stalinistdominated unions from various countries.

The TUC suppressed the WFTU's 1946 report on German trade unions which (as a copy preserved in the TUC files demonstrates) presented a far more realistic picture of prevailing conditions in, Germany. The anti-communist manoeuvres of the TUC reached a peak in 1948-49. In Berlin, where workers were organised in the communist-dominated trade union of the Soviet Occupied Zone, the FDGB, the TUC set up an alternative anti-communist union, the UGO. Another TUC delegation in November 1948 noted that 'every possible assistance will be given to the UGO, who are regarded as conducting the most important struggle in the whole of Germany'. At its July meeting the General Council recognised the UGO as 'representative of the free workers of Berlin' Meanwhile, the TUC had persuaded the Foreign Office to finance the UGO to the tune of 800 000 East Marks per month.

When it came to splitting the German unions in order to cut out the communists no bounds to imperialist there were generosity.

UGO

The episode preceded the of the capitalist Federal declaration Republic. Western strategy was to make West Berlin safe by destroying communist and united communist-social democratic organisations there, thus promoting the lasting division of Berlin. In response to the formation of the West German state, the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin in the hope of isolating it from the capitalist

TUC

republic. The pursued its proimperialist role through to the end by adding its voice to the cold war hysteria that ensued. A final quotation from the TUC's report on a delegation to Berlin the blockade concludes the during sordid record of the TUC in occupation service in Germany: 'If the airlift capacity is not increased, there will be an increase in unemplovment which would considerably impair the resistance of the Berlin populaton to totantarianism and soviet aggression... Berlin is the social bridgehead of democracy in Eastern Germany, perhaps in Eastern Europe.' (emphasis in original) Sabena Norton The Greek election Mythical socialism The electoral victory of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) on 18 October has been hailed as a major gain for the Greek working class.

It is no such thing. The new Pasok administration led by Andreas Papandreou represents the interests of Greek capitalism. This shift to the left is the price that the ruling class is prepared to pay to obtain the co-operation of the Greek labour movement.

IT HAS TAKEN over 50 years for the ruling class to allow a left-wing government to take over the administration of Greece. This in itself is an indication of the weakness of the Greek ruling class.

The backward character of Greek capitalism has limited the development of a bourgeoisie. As a result, the Greek ruling class lacks the means to enforce capitalist social relations through parliamentary democracy and consensus politics. In the inter-war period the rule of the bourgeoisie took the form of a non-parliamentary dictatorship. During the Second Imperialist World War the Greek bourgeoisie was prepared to collaborate with the German occupiers so as to keep the mass movement in check. After the war the ruling class united with British and US imperialism to crush the movement of workers and peasants. The defeats inflicted on the labour movement during the Greek civil war gave the bourgeoisie a breathing space. In the 'fifties until 1967 they erected a facade of parliamentary democracy. A degree of economic growth gave the bosses room for manoeuvre. But this period of parliamentary democracy soon came to an end. Greek capitalism could not overcome its backwardness, and hostility to the system was prevalent among workers and peasants. In 1967 a military coup put an end to the parliamentary charade.

During the period of the military dictatorship between 1967 and 1974, the bourgeoisie attempted to restructure Greek capitalism. Relying on foreign capital and state investments, a degree of industrial growth was achieved. Through coercion the working class was held down and the small peasants were kept in check. As hatred of the military regime became widespread the ruling class understood that changes had to be made.

In 1974 'democracy' was restored. It was a step designed to pre-empt a major social upheaval. A right-wing government British Army Commander Scobie surrounded by the guerrilla leaders he disarmed in Athens in 1944. British military repression made Greece Papandreou's Pasok to keep the working class in line.

was elected to oversee a smooth transition to parliamentary democracy. The establishment of the new form of capitalist order coincided with the deepening of the world recession. And this recession soon revéaled the structural defects of Greek capitalism. In recent years the Greek economy has barely grown. Public sector spending designed to fuel the economy only generated indebtedness.

This year inflation is rising towards the 30 per cent mark. And by the end of this year nearly one out of five will be unemployed.

The ruling class has decided that things cannot go on in the old way. To deal with popular discontent and to win the allegiance of the labour movement to the policies necessary to save capitalism, a left-wing government has been allowed to get elected. From Stalinism to social democracy The Greek working class has still not recovered from the massive defeat inflicted upon it by the civil war of the 'forties. Responsibility for this defeat lies with the Stalinist Communist Party which betrayed the mass movement and allowed bourgeoisie to get the upper hand.

For much of the post-war period working class politics and trade union activities were either illegal or were tightly restricted by the state; only in 1974 was the Communist Party legalised, Despite widespread the CP suspicion, managed to regain influence in the labour movement because it faced no opposition from any real working class party. Today it holds a dominant position in the trade unions.

The real beneficiary of the earlier defeat, however, is Pasok. Its nationalist and reformist policies mirror those of the Stalinists, but its advantage is that it is not compromised by the past. Pasok is all things to all people. Its emphasis on social change and the renewal of Greek society strikes a strong chord among all safe for the Western Alliance; now it's up to Social Democracy It is the perfect instrument to classes. channel the general yearning for change towards the reorganisation of Greek capitalism. Socialist sophistry Pasok is strong on anti-capitalist rhetoric but weak on anti-capitalist politics. Unlike Mitterand, Papandreou is not even prepared to launch a cosmetic nationalisation programme. In typical populist vein, he stated that his economic plans would affect just ten Greek families the economic oligarchy'. And to win support Papandreou has called for the establishment of a vast movement of agricultural and industrial co-operatives'.

But even if these measures were implemented, it would only mean capitalism along Scandinavian Lines. Greece, however, is not Scandinavia: the co-operatives will turn out to be a device for rationalising agriculture and industry under state supervision. As for its social programme, Pasok promises to improve health and social and to reform the education services system. Papandreou has also pledged him: self to give legal protection to the trade No doubt some of these measures unions. will be implemented to consolidate the new government's social base. But with the public sector deficit running at ten per cent of GDP, apart from a few token projects, social reforms will be confined to the statute books. On wages, the promise is a classic case of double dealing. A system of indexation is to make sure wages rise in line with prices - so long as wage rises do not This can only mean generate inflation. that wage rises must fall behind inflation.

Of course, Pasok has also promised to reduce price rises while extending social services. The new government will soon learn though that, for Greek capitalism, curbing inflation means cutting living standards. While the left has hailed Pasok's opposition to the EEC and NATO, this is more a measure of the former's stupidity than the latter's progressive outlook Pasok's antagonistic stance stems from its commitment to Greek nationalism: it blames institutions overseas rather than capitalism in Greece for the problems faced by the masses. Even its attack on NATO has a reactionary content. As Papandreou told Le Monde, the problem with NATO is not that it is an imperialist alliance, no, it is too biased towards Turkey: 'It's an alliance that costs us dear and which profits Ankara' (17 October 1981). Pasok has used anti-Turkish chauvinism to good advantage.

It has promised that Greek honour will be salvaged at the expense of the Turks.

On the other hand, Papandreou's hostility towards America is more pragmatic US bases can stay in Greece as long as they are 'isolated' from Greek society.

Where next? The new left-wing government will implement a few reforms before it launches an offensive against the labour movement. The ruling class, for its part, hopes that Pasok's brand of populist nationalism will be effective in neutralising working class opposition to its countercrisis measures. Here the CP poses no problems. If anything the CP's nationalism exceeds that of Pasok. There are no programmatic differences between Pasok and the CP the CP merely emphasises building links with Eastern Europe. And that's about all. In the short run Pasok and the CP will be able to contain the working class. But the crisis of Greek capitalism is so profound that a major social upheaval cannot be prevented. It is urgent that a revolutionary party is built in time for the struggles ahead. Andrew Clarkson the next step, November 1981 7

IRELAND

IRA bombs in Britain hypocrisy of British socialism.

THE CONSENSUS among British left groups is that the IRA bombing campaign which began with an explosion outside a Chelsea army barracks on 10 October and continued with the car-bombing of a senior army officer in Dulwich a week later, makes the task of building opposition to British rule in Ireland more difficult. Socialist Worker insisted that it must be said loud and clear and often that 'bombing operations like the Bridge affair do nothing to end British rule' (17 October). Socialist Challenge was equally emphatic: Undoubtedly, the Chelsea bomb will make the task of building a movement for troop withdrawal in Britain more difficult' (15 October). Let's first look at the background to the left's reaction to the latest phase of the Irish War. Breaking the barriers The October issue of the SWP's monthly Socialist Review contains a survey of its 'attempts' to build solidarity in Britain with the H-Block prisoners. It's a sorry tale: a series of defunct campaigns and demonstrations for which the SWP could not even mobilise its own members.

National events were supported only by the far left and republicans. attempt to win trade union support was a non-starter: Hostility or sullen indifference did not just come bureaucracy. Almost everywhere the issue was raised that was also of the rank and file. The response sombre conclusion is that it is impossible to win support among British workers for the H-Block prisoners or for the immediate withdrawal of troops; the only hope is to latch on to the Labour Party debate about how a future Labour government might govern Ireland in a more benevolent way. It is important to note that the Socialist Review article was published while the hunger strike was still going on, and before the bombing campaign began. It sums up the outlook of the radical left throughout the hunger strike and helps to explain its failures. But what is difficult to understand is this: if the SWP thought it was impossible to win support for the Irish struggle before the bombings, how could the bombings make the job more difficult?

What it difficult to build Irish solidarity in Britain is the strength of the anti-Irish and pro-British sentiments in the labour movement. The left found it impossible to mobilise support for the hunger strikers because it is not prepared to challenge British chauvinism.

The left's condemnations reinforce the nationalist barrier to winning working class support for the Irish cause.

Socialist Worker's conclusion to its the bombing editorial is sheer hypocrisy: *Nevertheless the fact remains that British socialists must continue, in all circumstances, to agitate for the end of the British occupation in Northern Ireland, Troops out of Ireland 8 the next step, November 1981 The left grovels The British left did nothing to mobilise support for the Irish hunger strikers; now it joins in the chorus of condemnation of the IRA bombing campaign in Britain. We plumb the depths of the opportunism and But SWP members have not been agitating for troops out now' since the article laboriously explains how they couldn't win support for better conditions in the concentration camps in the Six Counties, never mind approval for the withdrawal of troops, It clearly.

outlines the direction of SWP Irish work in the coming months: this does not Ebury involve 'agitation for troops out now' but building support for a conference entitled Ireland - time for Tory policies supposed to be held last summer, has now been postponed from November Individual terror' One of the central themes in the left's attack on the IRA is the dismissal of terrorism'. Groups such as the Militant Tendency and the Workers Revolutioncondemnations of isolated conspiratorial who launched futile attacks on bourgeois politicians and state institutions. Marxism has always Any terrorism' declared the WRP's News But how can a soldier in an army of from the national liberation with mass support the individual" with a bomb in his hand fanatical individual terrorist killed by the state ever drew 100 000 people to attend his funeral as did IRA volunteer Bobby Sands? Which terrorist cabal has ever won 30 000 votes, not once but in two successive parliamentary elections, national liberation struggle in Fermanagh-South Tyrone? How could a few military machines in the world for 12 long years? Members of the IRA active units have nothing in common with the individual terrorists' repudiated Marxist tradition; soldiers in a popular war of national The left's denunciations of 'individual terrorism' are nothing but a capitulation to bourgeois hysteria against any violent attack on its class interests. The spokesmen of the ruling class scream "terrorists, 'madmen', 'subhumans, 'psychopaths', and the left groups grovel and whimper The WRP advises the IRA to take a leaf from the book of the Palestine Liberation Organisation' (The News Line, 12 October). The points to the African National Congress as a model for the IRA. Both the WR and the CP invent major differences these among similar national liberation movements.

those who fight conference, which was no choice but to fight back.

invoke Lenin and Trotsky's dismissed as a ' "heroic would have had no far from realising that "individual terrorism" in Ireland. The News Line Communist Party of the judices: strategic essentially All are at war against imperialist states; all are obliged to use terrorist methods; are killed and injured as a result of their activities. The only difference between the PLO, AN and the IRA that really matters for the British left is that the former carry out their activities against foreign states several thousand miles - the IRA is forced to fight the British state in Britain. Thus the PLO and the ANC win the plaudits of British socialists while the IRA is a target for Don't blame the IRA When the bourgeois state comes under attack it responds with violence and repression, The Prevention of Terrorism Act was the government's response to the IRA's 1974 bombing campaign: it bombs went off. But instead of exposing the authoritarian reaction of the state and trying to rally working class resistance against it, the left blames..the IRA. State repression is no longer the result of the inherently coercive character of bourgeois rule, but the fault of British socialists' advice to all oppressed peoples is to lie back and accept the tyranny of bourgeois society: if you resist it will only make things worse.

But the Irish people are up against the British army day in and day out on the streets of the Six Counties. They have The RP reaches further depths. Not only does it blame the IRA for provoking the state into strengthening its repressive apparatus, it also blames the republican movement for the deaths of the hunger Their last action gave the Tory Government the opportunity to starve ten heroic young fighters to death,' (The News Line, 19 By resisting Britain's attempts to brand Irish freedom fighters as criminals the Government the opportunity to kill its prisoners. What a grotesque inversion of reality of imperialist oppression!

If only they had worn the prison uniform beginning the British state enforce its rule in the concentration hadn't given the British government the opportunity to shoot them by leading the Easter Rising! If only the Irish people would accept British rule it would relieve government of devising means of murdering and suppressing them relieve the editors of The News Line of their paranoia about the possible consequences for their own miserable skins.

Foremost allies? According to The News Line 'the labour and trade union movement is the foremost ally of the republican movement the fight against Thatcherism and imperialism' (12 October). Those fighting against imperialism in Ireland might be forgiven if they hadn't noticed the contribution of this foremost ally' to their struggle. The fact is that the official labour and trade union movement is one of the foremost allies of British imperialism against the Irish people. And the British working class, whilst potentially the foremost ally of the Irish people, is potential: it remains today a bulwark of British rule combines wishful thinking about the revolutionary character working class movement with adaptation to its most backward pre- The WRP is opposed to the shooting or bombing of generals or Irish guards [the British army regiment stationed at the Chelsea barracks] under conditions where the working class do not yet appieciate the reactionary role of the army in this country.' (19 October) An appreciation of the reactionary role of the army would become more widespread among workers if British socialists argued forcefully in support of those fighting British military repression, The other side of the coin to chauvinist approval for the army: by indulging the with its condemnation of the IRA the WRP reinforces the latter.

What has the WRP done to build an anti-imperialist movement? The News Line cannot be accused of modesty: •The WRP has a consistent record of defending and supporting the struggle by the Republican movement for a united Ireland and the unity of the Irish and British working class. We opposed the sending of troops to northern Ireland in 1969, have demanded their withdrawal ever since, and supported the demands of Republican POWs for political status pending a complete amnesty.' (19 October) This is a fair summary of the editorial positions taken up by The News Line and its forerunner during the Irish War. But we have seen how all these platitudes go out the window the moment a bombing campaign really puts the pressure on, All "troops out' editorials and formal statements of support for Irish unity and independence count for nothing when a paper sides with the British ruling class against the IRA when it brings the war to Britain. In this respect the WRP is no different from many other radical left groups. But the WRP has one distinguishing characteristic: the record it claims is "second to none' in 'supporting the Irish struggle is entirely confined to the pages The WRP, except for a short period in the late seventies, has never supported During the long months of the hunger strike it did not participate in events organised by H-Block/Armagh committees locally or nationally; its members did not attend any of the pickets, demonstrations, marches or vigils in support of the prisoners. Nor did it organise any independent activities to declare its political status and mobilise wider support.

In short the WRP's fine record is a sham: on paper it's a disgrace; on the streets it is denounce the nationalism of the Irish people. They have no right to withdraw support from their struggle against British imperialism because it claims the lives of non-combatants, in Ireland or in Britain.

They have no right to criticise the tactics They have a duty to the Irish people and to the British working class to support the Irish liberation movement wherever and however it conducts its war against the British state.

When is a sympathiser with Irish unity a supporter of British rule? When he condemns the violence of the IRA

The war in the unions The Smash the PTA Campaign has been building support for the Irish struggle in the trade unions since it was set up two Here we report on the debate years ago. raging in various union forums around the country. Reports from Nick Jenkins, Fenna King, Annie Dillon and Glyn Cohen.

Greenwich: reaction defeated At Greenwich trades council's October meeting a delegate from TGWU-ACTSS 1/1257 branch moved a motion condemning the trades council's policy of supporting the hunger strikers demands and threatening to disaffiliate his branch if the policy was not overturned. The only other motion on the agenda, from the same branch, condemned the trades council for supporting the policy Greenwich

NALGO

of opposition to all redundancies - including voluntary redundancies. After a short but heated debate both motions were thrown out, with only two votes in favour of each.

The ACTSS delegates then left the trades council. On both Ireland and redundancies the ACTSS motions are a capitulation to the British ruling class. It is not surprising that failure to defend or unconnected the prisoners goes hand in hand with a refusal to fight against job losses.

Coventry confrontations In Coventry three union branches communication workers (UCW), metal and local governmechanics (NSMM), ment workers (NALGO) - have threatened to pull out of the trades council because of its support for the H-Block demands. UCW branch secreprisoners' Gerard Jones told the Coventry tary Evening Telegraph that a number of our members have served in the armed forces or have sons now serving. Some are hostile to the IRA because of past events in Coventry'. The trades council responded by convening a special seminar on Ireland and inviting representatives of the dissident branches to attend. The seminar went ahead despite a hostile campaign in A UCW proposal to the local press. withdraw the trades council from the local hunger strike action committee was defeated after a stormy debate at the September delegate meeting.

The trades council's refusal to succumb to right-wing pressure over the hunger strike is commendable: however Irish policy retains key weaknesses. The trades council has a long record of giving formal support to the Troops Out Movethe International Tribunal, the ment, Young Liberals' 1979 'Time to go' demo and numerous conferences. when it comes to action on the Irish issue or a direct challenge to the Irish policy of the TUC, the trades council backs down.

When for example back in 1979 it was urged to support a demonstration against a proposed Orange march through Coventry, the trades council refused, declaring that working people of this country do not understand what the Orange Order stands for, therefore any confrontation would be very damaging to the troops out movement' (Minutes, June 1979). And when the TUC proscribed the Smash the PTA Campaign labour movement conference in Coventry last year because it opposed the official line on Ireland, the trades council withdrew its support. It criticised the TUC but blamed the conference organisers - not the TUC.

Shopworkers for self-determination? In September the of the shopworkers union conference USDAW, representing 50 000 workers, called for the restoration category status, the withdrawal of British troops from the Six urged the union executive to campaign for a united Ireland. The well-supported motion also called for the ending of Diplock no-jury courts, the Emergency Powers Act and the PTA.

However all these measures upholding the right of the Irish people to determine their own future free from British interference were contradicted by ference's support for a Bill of Rights.

Proposing such legislation, to be imposed by Westminster, not only denies Irish independence in practice tains the illusion that Britain could play a progressive role in Ireland, something it never has, and never will.

Builders' build up The biennial conference of the building workers union is coming up next year: of supporters of the Smash the PTA Campaign will be putting motions for the conference to their branches on the December 'star nights'. The first priority is to prevent a repeat of the debacle engineered by Communist Party members London region at the 1980 from the conference where debate on Ireland was suppressed. The CP was upset by a motion from the Battersea (PG010) Branch that made no reference to the long-defunct Better Life For All Campaign, which remains official UCATT (and TUC) policy. Instead CP members proposed that conference be asked to endorse the idea of a united Ireland in the future, to oppose repressive legislation and to call for the 'progressive' withdrawal of British troops.

But in the end rather than let conference decide, the CP hacks prevented motion from getting onto the agenda.

anti-imperialist building workers All must make sure that the CP doesn't get with these sort of manoeuvres away again next year. ASTMS action Irish activists in the scientific and technical workers union Sheffield in October to coordinate action to swing the union around to support the cause of Irish freedom. The campaign is based on the call for the immediate withdrawal of troops and support for self-determination for the Irish people. Supporters of the Smash PTA Campaign proposed that the the demand for the repeal of the PTA should its be included and this Our proposal that support determination should be include support for the movement fighting for self-determination was defeated, All the left groups represented -. SWP, IMG However WSL, Workers Power - united to oppose inclusion of support for the national liberation struggle in the programme of the campaign. workers can be won to oppose the British occupation of Ireland persuaded that they should support the republican movement dies hard on the British left. trades council discussion on Bill Webster and siderable autonomy for the Eastern divisional of special Counties and remain unbroken. the conference. to group's ritual condemnation the consolution is for the it also sustolerable. Trades Council were Westminster council. active trade unionist, take over as secretary of

NUPE

council the day.

ASTMS

met 1n and large Paddington been detained. was accepted selffor extended to The illusion that British without. being remain disoriented." endless round Newcastle conference activist and Around 80 people attended a Newcastle "Ireland what is the solution?' in October. Speakers included left Labour MP Joan Maynard, Derry Trades Council Militant supporter National H-Block/ Armagh Committee member Paddy Logue.

Joan Maynard reviewed the deliberations of Labour's National Executive inquiry into Ireland and concluded that its report was a 'mish-mash'. She proceeded to put forward a mish-mash of her own: a 'federal united Ireland with con- Unionists'. Maynard remains locked in the traditional Labour left outlook. As long as British socialists continue to give credence to a castle progressive British solution the Party's bipartisan approach with the Tories will When it comes to Ireland most of the British labour movement finds itself to the left of the Militant sect: Bill Webster provided the most right-wing contribution He reiterated his of those fighting British rule in Ireland, blaming the IRA, not British imperialism, for the divisions in the working class. Militant's Irish people to lie down and accept partition and British domination and for the Loyalist-dominated unions to set up a Labour Party with the aim of making British rule more Webster and the record of the Derry subjected to a blistering critique by Derry trade union Three days inside When the Smash the PTA Campaign heard that Larry Quilty (42) and his teenage son had been picked up after the Chelsea barracks bombing and held at Paddington Green police station, we immediately organised a picket outside, which continued nightly until they were released. Larry Quilty later spoke to Nick Jenkins.

LARRY QUILTY is a depot keeper for socialist and cells: he is shortly to Westminster Shortly after branch. 6am on Monday 10 October he was standing in a small office at his workdo with and the place when it was suddenly invaded by four heavily armed members of Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Squad: You Mr Quilty? We want to ask you some questions about the bombing the other At the same moment another squad with dogs was smashing down the door side. of the Quiltys' flat on a nearby estate.

The police arrested 18 year old Larry taking away ransacked the flat, far as and other amounts of clothing personal effects. Father and son were both taken to the special 'anti-terrorist workmates." interrogation unit in the basement of Green police station though it wasn't until 36 hours later that either discovered that the other had Their Total isolation On the way to Paddington no word! were exchanged. They gave me no indication of why I had been arrested. When we got to the station no charges were read out. Nothing.

I was just dispossessed and taken to cells which were literally in the bowels of the earth.

It's a dungeon. They called them the cells for Category 'A' prisoners. You can't hear anything. It's total isolation. The whole atmosphere is set up to psyche you out. Even the interrogators don't wear watches so that you The next 60 hours was a seemingly under of questioning

IRELAND

Anti-H-Block campaigner Paddy Logue. He recalled the case of the AUEW-TASS member Brian Maguire who died under interrogation at Castlereagh barracks in Belfast: Derry Trades Council refused to condemn his murder but promised an inquiry which never took place. He exposed too the 'non-sectarian' pretensions of trade unions in Derry and throughout the Six Counties that operate discriminatory practices against Catholics And he quoted a statement from the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trades Unions (to which Derry Trades Council is affiliated) declaring support for the sectarian para-military RUC police force. Paddy Logue also took up the New- Trades Council

ECSOLULO!

Ireland passed in May 1981 for its adaptation to British imperialism. It implicitly endorsed partition by referring to the province' and Northern Ireland'. It condemned violence on both sides, ignoring the fact that British army violence against Catholic workers is the problem.

The trades council policy equated the violence of republican resistance with the violence of imperialist oppression. It talked about uniting the working class and then ending posing the the British military presence whole issue the wrong way round: 'first get the British army out, then there will be the conditions to destroy sectarianism'.

He concluded by urging trades council members "to re-examine your policy on Ireland' and 'to find out about what's going on, not just from the official trade union movement, but from ordinary workers and ex-prisoners.

sealed hermetically bright lights in and over again, the same 'Over questions. Where were you on..? Who were you with...? What did you do...?

It's easy to get mixed up and confused'.

Most of the questions had nothing to bombing the Chelsea barracks events of the preceding days.

They were about Larry Quilty's background and his politics, his involvement in the labour and trade union movement.

Both Larry Quilty and his son were denied access to legal representation or any contact with family or friends out- It's not just the fact of being held, It's also knowing that both of us are marked as police records are concerned. They try to make you feel like you're a criminal.

And the whole thing has been done in such a way as to sow seeds of doubt amongst my Late on Wednesday 12 October the Quiltys were released. The charge? None.

living Irish crime? Being and near Chelsea barracks. Smash the PTA! Larry Quilty welcomed the initiative of the Smash the PTA Campaign in picketing Paddington Green and he particularly unions in the endorsed campaigning against the PTA: The only way to beat this is to work like mad through the trade unions. They ought to be organised at a branch level to respond. If place the branch ought to an arrest takes come out on strike immediately. After all this act is quite clearly being used politically to intimidate those who oppose Britain's war in Ireland," the next step, November 1981 9

THE REAL THREAT of a third world war has given rise to mass movements in many western countries.

But the failure of these movements to understand the origin of the drive towards war leads to a false and dangerous strategy to prevent it. For the disarmers, war threat is a product of the psychopathology of bourgeois politicians (especially American politicians); of the unbridled, menacing ambition of the military elites; or - for some - of cruise missile technology itself. For us war is a product of the capitalist system of production.

Capitalism means war War has only become a danger once more because of the world-wide recession. Falling profitability intensifies competition among rival national capitals and forces them towards a new conflict for political and economic control over the backward capitalist world. All the major capitalist countries are rearming so that they can get a share of the action in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

Disarmament is the ideal of socialism.

But, because war is an integral feature of the capitalist system, disarmament can only be achieved by destroying capitalism.

War expresses the interests of the capitalist class it can only be prevented by overthrowing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. There can thus be no peaceful road to disarmament: disarmament can come about through violent reonly volution and the replacement of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with dictatorship of the proletariat.

No matter how many people mobilised in the process, urging capitalist governments to disarm means abandoning the class struggle. Pacifism means the renunciation of the workers revolution. It means accepting the tyranny of the bourgeoisie. In even the most democratic of bourgeois societies the capitalist class is armed and ready to use violence against the workers: the regular use of the military or the police to break strikes in every western country is testimony to this. Slogans calling for 'peace' lead workers to acquiesce to the relentless violence of the bourgeoisie.

Pax Britannica, Pax Americana The campaign for nuclear disarmament appeals to people's aspiration for peace and everybody's personal interest in his own survival, but it obscures the contlict of class interests that lies behind these emotive terms. Peace means things to different people. Pax Britannica - peace under the British empire of the nineteenth century - meant the freedom of British capitalists to rape and plunder every corner of the world: to millions of people in Britain's colonies it meant brutal and savage oppression. Pax Americana means exactly the same in Latin America and the Middle East today. As far as the British government is concerned 'peace in Ireland means Irish people accepting British rule - and the poverty, discrimination and repression sectarian that go along with it. "Peace for most Irish people means 'Brits out. "Peace' in South Africa depends on the stable operation of apartheid; for the black it means the destruction

ASSES

South African state. "Survival' for the the European middle classes is a problem for the future; for the millions of people around the world it is a problem this The against famine, minute. struggle disease and war is always a struggle in the here and now. the survival of the Slogans about human race in reality express a concern the next step, November 1981 10

NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT

The top priority for the labour movement today is to unite the working class against unemployment and wage cuts. But the top priority for the Labour Party and the TUC is to keep people busy working for unilateral nuclear disarmament. The anti-nuclear campaign seeks not to unite workers against the cause of their problems - British capitalism - but to unite the British people against some alien, external menace.

national for survival. anti-war activist Nick out the chauvinist logic of this well: 'Only the unilateralists have identified nuclear war as the greatest threat. They are the true patriots. Only they are standing up the for Britain's independence from the cowboy New Right in the Pentagon and the Siberian strategists in the Kremlin. Radio 17-23 October) And just as the British anti-war movement stands up for true Britons, so the German anti-war for the fatherland. This is how Pastor Heinrich Albertz demonstration that was recently held in Bonn capitalist I speak as a German patriot. Why should voicing our national interests be left to reactionaries? Everyone knows that in the present state of armaments, the two halves of Germany are to be the killing ground of the great powers.

(The Guardian, 12 October 1981) Mixing pacifism what the left wing of the labour bureaucracy knows how to do best. Thus it was old Tribune MP lan Mikardo who most successfully broadened the thrust of the Labour Party conference debate on 'defence'. He compounded the conference's general onslaught on "the Japanese'.

with an Japan, he told delegates, is only able to 'knock the living daylights' out of the British economy because Britain puts too much of its resources into weapons.

the Labour against war? The Labour Party and trade union leaders are the most influential force in anti-nuclear war movement. In peace-time the labour bureaucrats have always kept up tirades against war: World War Keir Hardie proclaimed his undying commitment to peace, before the Lansbury led an anti-war crusade. But because they and their allies always had Britain's interests at heart, they took the lead, once different of the 'thirties, wrote in know in Veteran

CND

Humphrey recently drew laration Amsterdam, July 1932). Times, Britain and its allies. movement speaks addressed the mass against nuclear weapons with patriotism is programme should proceed.

chauvinist system is a good example.

anti-Americanism Trident is politicians (for it. Now, Council member the an alliance: before the First and Second World War George war was declared, in Not an anti-cruise missile protest on Greenham Common, but dummies set up for nuclear trials in the Sahara desert.

drafting workers into the forces - there to die for British imperialism. As Trotsky 'the imperialists advance that the pacifism of social democracy at the first roar of the cannon will be transformed into the most policy: servile patriotism and become the most important reserve for militarism' (Decto the Anti-war Congress at Today "inveterate peacemonger' Michael Foot prepares the way to deliver the these working class to fight for British imperialism in the Third World War. Like Trotsky quibble in the 'thirties, we can predict with grim confidence the role that he, Mikardo and the rest will play as war again draws near: we only have to look at the way they 'oppose' the burgeoning militarism of On one In fact the official labour movement's 'unilateralist' posture accepts that Britain should ready itself for war. We are not saying we do not believe in defence: of course we do, left-wing National Executive member Joan Lestor told the recent Labour Party conference. Labour's NEC is simply concerned - as are sections of the capitalist class - about the cost and efficacy of some of the measures probecause, posed for defending Britain. Much of the debate about nuclear weapons is concerned with how Britain's rearmament The controversy surrounding the replacement of erialism Polaris submarines by the Trident missile Because of the colossal costs it entails, and Canada. of opposed by a number military experts and by several bourgeois

SDP

leader Is Lance. David Owen). For the disarmers this creates the opening for a progressive alliance of soldiers and pacifists against back in June, CND National Dan Smith took an optimistic view of the prospects for such The political coalition against Trident is now almost extraordinary, and almost certain see the cost of Trident throttling the rest of the defence budget.' (The Guardian, 4 June) But in fact this coalition failed: in July, Trident was given the go-ahead - at the expense of several naval dockyards.

Debates of the Trident/Polaris type prevail in other areas of bourgeois military over the right balance between 'strategic' and 'tactical' nuclear weapons; over the balance between conventional and nuclear weapons; and over the deployment of neutron bombs and cruise missiles. And, needless to say, labour movement defence buffs eagerly join in They like to controversies too. cost-effective over the most weapons system for Britain, enlisting dissident generals living (Lord Carver) and dead (Earl Mountbatten) to support their preference for conventional forces and obsolete nuclear technology.

thing however the British bourgeoisie is united - on the need for Britain to stick closely to its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and especially to the USA. The official labour movement understands this: thus while both TUC and Labour Party conferences voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament both too decided to uphold Britain's membership of NATO. Why? Firstly, as the NEC put it, NATO was 'an instrument of detente no less than defence'. A war machine thus became a force for peace. Labour's second defence of the alliance is that We' (British imp- Labour's

NEC

with which assumes an identity of interest) can stay in NATO and work out new relationships ... We can be like Denmark, Norway These three countries are in NATO but refuse to have nuclear weapons on their soil. Because the creation of non-nuclear zones' consisting of such countries is a major theme of the European nuclear disarmament movement it's worth digressing to examine this issue.

No peacefu road Idealistic pacifism confronts war with moral indignation the way the lamb confronts the butcher's knife with plain.

tive bleatings. But the task consists of confronting the knife of the bourgeoisie with the knife of the proletariat. g Trotsky, 1932

The 'non-nuclear club' Like many of today's debates on war, the of neutral or 'non-aligned' question was hotly contested in the countries workers movement before both world 'disarmament' wars. The slogan arose in the social democratic parties of small European countries on the fringes of the major Continental powers Norway, capitalist Sweden, Switzerland - before the War. At the time, Lenin noted: The petty striving of petty states to hold aloof, the petit-bourgeois desire to keep as far away as possible from the great battles of world history, to take advantage of one's relatively monopolistic position in order to remain in - this is the objective maebound passivity social environment which may ensure the disarmament idea a certain degree of success and a certain degree of popularity in some of the small states.' (The "disarmament" slogan' (1916), Collected Works, Vol 23) Lenin condemned the call for disarmament as reactionary. It was, he said, based on the illusion that small countries could become independent of the imperialist system. Yet that system inexorably drew small nations into the vortex of world economy and world politics. Lenin concluded: ‹ "disarmament" tremely natural, specially rational programme of small states; it is certainly not the international programme of international revolutionary Social-Democracy'.

Little has changed since Lenin's day.

Weapons technology has advanced over the past 60 years but that simply makes our warmongering 'disarmers' more dangerous. Edward Thompson's pie-in-thesky notion of a corridor of non-nuclear states across central Europe serves only one purpose: to strengthen the narrow nationalism of the labour movements in every European country. His paeans to peace only herald another war in the "theatre, European with consequences more appalling than even the last two.

Why the bureaucrats love the bomb Why is it that hard-headed Labour Party and trade union officials are all of a sudden to be found stomping the country making sentimental speeches about their fears for children yet unborn and raising the dreadful spectre of a nuclear holocaust? Left Labour MP Frank Allaun gave a clue in his speech to the CND labour movement conference in Manchester last March: *My constituency is less than half a mile from here and people are living in disgusting itself conditions. But why bother to fight for change when a bomb could be dropped on us tomorrow?' Allaun's question Holland, First World differently and more candidly to get to the root of the matter. It should read: Because I am incapable of doing anything defend the jobs, housing conditions of my constituents, why not blame government spending on nuclear weapons for all this and get the local populace out campaigning against missiles?. Trade should be equally frank. The recession has gravely the position: bureaucrats spurned by the to resist hundreds of thousands of redundancies, cuts in living standards and onslaught on working They believe that the disarmament issue is one on which they can drum up popular support and help to ensure the return of a government more needs. Thus. we find Larry Smith, one of is an exthe top officials in the union most hardhit by the crisis - the TGWU - leading the drive to commit the Labour Party to disarmament: The millions of pounds spent on weapons should be used for civil programmes. There is a need for new factories, buildings, roads and investment in capital goods, schools and hosnesources retraining and redeploying workers.'

Unable to fight the bosses, the trade leaders are reduced to pleading union with the government to spend their money more wisely. The nuclear disarmament issue lets the bureaucrats off the hook. It allows them to dodge the real problems of today by pointing to the danger of nuclear war tomorrow. It allows them to get out of fighting for their members now by promising that a future Labour government will deal with their problems by a simple switch of expenditure. commitment to NATO means that it will never cut military spending. Allaun's constituents and Smith's members will have to carry on living and working 'in disgusting conditions. They greater risk of being vapourised as Michael appeal to needs to be posed Thus it was the movement conference: when wages and up groups against the union leaders weakened they Tories and have failed conditions. massive expansion: conclusion follows: their responsive to the fight against the bombs.'

declining public should be diverted into being sector trade unions. But Labour's will run a

NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT

Foot faces up to his patriotic duties and leads the labour movement towards war.

Disarming the workers The radical left groups give the staid But in a campaigning of the vicars and bureaucrats in CND a radical thrust and a dynamic young people. Their great concern, however, is to take the politics of CND into the working class movement.

in various left-wing organisations that built the CND labour the

SWP

was accused by CND hacks of being disruptive it pointed to its work in setting bomb' among missiles. engineers, miners and council workers.

Let's look at one example of the SWP's trade union work for nuclear disarmacould ment: the Nalgo Action Group pamphlet "Jobs not bombs, by Alison Williams.

Williams' introduction begins by detailing some of the effects of cuts in public expenditure in terms of services and employment. It then notes that 'one sector far from being cut is lined up for private "Defence" , The The cost of this lunacy is being brought home by trade unionists and their families through declining public services and lengthening dole queues. And having paid for it with our living standards, when the big bang comes we'll also be the ones who pay for it with our lives. That's why we have to organise to stop the missiles NOW. The fight for jobs has to be terised Now, as a matter of fact Britain's services and rising unemployment have nothing to do with devastation the defence budget. The public services squeezed because British capitalism is in crisis and cutting back on government spending in non-productive sectors is one way in which the profit system can be stabilised. And the bourprepares geoisie is able to get away with doing this because of the politics of the public the attention right now. Ever since the mid seventies, when the cuts began in earnest, public sector trade unions have accepted what the interests of the national economy require of them.

series of pamphlets,

SETBOL

officials have made out special cases for sparing their own members occupations from cuts. As an alternative, they have urged the Government to make its cuts other sectors. Now the radical left has come along and, with its jobs not bombs' slogan, given all the bureaucrats campaigns a single focus. What it says is we agree that economies are necessary, but don't cut us, cut spending on cruise The cuts campaigns of the 'seventies were a flop. "Special case' arguments not save countless hospitals, schools, nurseries and jobs. Workers who accepted the need for rationalisation in the national interest were paralysed when it came to fighting for their own jobs.

The fight for jobs means a fight against British capitalism public sector or sector. The fight against the missiles' is simply a distraction from the serious defence of jobs; it adapts to the prevailing notion that jobs can be saved by redistributing government revenue; far from 'disarming the bosses', it disarms the workers. Don't despair, fight Capitalist society has always been characby barbarism and brutality: nuclear technology merely adds to the effect. However even though the capitalists are preparing to wreak unparalleled the society they have created, this is no cause for despair. The plea for the capitalists to disarm themselves, the dream of disarmament, is nothing but an expression of despair.

There can be no justification for this at a time when the crisis of bourgeois society the conditions for the only section of society that can prevent the nuclear holocaust - the working class to realise its destiny through the violent overthrow of the capitalist system.

Many people are drawn into the antiwar movement because they want to see an end to bourgeois militarism; they find the posturings of the major imperialist powers deeply offensive and want to see peace and socialism in their lifetimes.

Not every supporter of CND shares the chauvinist prejudices of its leaders, or identifies with the cynical manipulations of the Labour Party and the TUC. But current campaigns against nuclear weapons can neither fulfil the hopes young workers have for peace in the future nor advance these workers' interests today. The disarmers raise fears of a more or less distant Armageddon to distract from the problems of the moment. They speculate about wars that might happen but ignore wars going on CND activist and academic Stalinist Dave Fernbach thinks we should already get into training to fight for Britain - in a broad and democratic manner of course: The Left desperately needs a positive alternative: one that will enable Western Europe to block any Soviet interference in our affairs without presenting any military threat in return.

A break with nuclear weapons and the Atlantic alliance would mean either larger and more expensive regular forces, or alternatively greater degree of popular mobilisation, which is surely the direction in which the Left ought to press.' (New Statesman, 24 October 1980) Fernbach's models are the Swiss domestic militia and the 'Dad's army' of the Second World War, At the moment 'popular mobilisation' is presented as a 'positive alternative' to both nuclear weapons and conventional forces. But it isn't difficult to see how patriotic outrage at any 'interference' in 'our affairs' could quickly turn such an alternative into yet another weapon in the arsenal of British imperialism.

Mike Freeman the next step, November 1981 11

NOTORIOUS FOR its wine lakes, butter mountains and faceless Brussels bureaucrats, the EEC will not, delegates at Labour's September conference decided, be the subject of a referendum when the party next gets into office: Labour will Britain out, with simply take Along disarmament, therefore, Europe is now central issue for the official labour movement. Why? Scabs and election agents Behind the vote at Brighton stand the trade union bureaucrats. They have every interest in kicking up a fuss about the

EEC.

First, making radical noises against the EEC serves to distract militant workers from the struggle on the shop floor - and from the role the bureaucrats play in sabotaging that struggle. Instead of assisting workers in their fight against redundancies and cuts in living standards, the bureaucrats go around breaking strikes and telling the rank and file to put the finger on the EEC. Foreign imports, they tell us, are causing unemployment, and the Treaty of Rome prevents the government slapping on import controls.

Similarly, price outstrip wage

USES

increases because EEC food is so dear.

*Don't fight the bosses and certainly don't fight us', say the bureaucrats, fight the EEC Second, the bureaucrats like to blame the EEC for what workers had to endure under the last Labour government. Spreading the myth that entry into the Common Market is what made the Social Contract so unpleasant suits union leaders well: they come away from the 1974-79 period looking innocent, and so does everybody in the Labour Party bar Wilson, Callaghan and Healey - and those nasty pro-Europeans who've now sold out to the SDP. Third, the EEC is something all wings of the Labour Party can agree on - at a time when the union bureaucrats are desperate to get party members to pull themselves together and put the Benn- Healey dispute behind them. John Silkin understands this well. His loudly applauded message to the Labour conference was •Let us unite against the Market today'.

Last, the bureaucrats think that anti- EEC rhetoric is an electoral winner. The EEC is unpopular in wide sections of British society (largely because entry happened to coincide with the onset of the crisis) and opposing it seems like a sure way for Labour to pick up votes.

And since the next delicate renegotiation of Britain's payment to the EEC budget, in 1983, is probably within a year of a General Election, the union leaders appear to have it made. So the bureaucrats like going on about the EEC because it gives them a cover both for the present and for the past; because it helps Labour to put its house in order; and because it is an issue on which differences with Thatcher come cheap and through which they can rally middle class voters. By playing morepatriotic-than-thou and by wooing Britain's insular petit bourgeoisie, they hope once more for the days of beer and sandwiches at Number 10. Defending the milkman What are the arguments the reformists use to attack the EEC? Of course they harp on about the costs of membership, about Britain's deficit on manufactured trade with the EEC, about the money Britain has to shell out to finance the Common Agricultural Policy; of course they believe that Britain's crisis originates in Brussels, rather than in capitalist social relations and the low profitability of British industry. But today their case against the EEC goes a bit further than this.

Tony Benn's logic is the most consistent here. It runs as follows: Had it not been for the fact that a number of Labour MPs voted with Heath for entry 12 the next step, November 1981 The EEC In, out it all about? This autumn's TUC and Labour Party conferences came out unequivocally against continued British membership of the Common Market.

So what's new? in 1971, Britain 'would still be a parliamentary democracy' (Arguments for democracy, Cape, 1981). By entering the EEC the British 'establishment' deliberately arranged things so that there would be no parliamentary democracy through which Labour could achieve socialism by consent'. Britain is therefore a colony of the EEC; the establishment is made up of colonial administrators'. Signing the Treaty of Rome 'subordinated our key law-making and tax-gathering powers to the Common Market' and, because of this, ensured that Labour governments of the future would be unable to implement the Alternative Economic Strategy. Thus there can be no chance of socialism until Britain gets out of the EEC Let's take this point by point. The view that Britain is no longer a parliamentary democracy, for instance, 1S manifestly absurd. precisely was through parliamentary democracy, through Wilson and Callaghan's 'socialism by consent, that the 'establishment' Brussels bother THE EEC is not at all the strong, cohesive body the labour bureaucracy makes it out to be. Nor is the British bourgeoisie entirely enamoured of Conceived in the years of the Cold War as an economic bastion against the USSR, the EEC was born at the peak of Europe's post-war boom. For a long time Britain wasn't ready to join it: most of Britain's export revenues came from the 'Commonwealth', while only a small proportion came from Community countries.

But when the European market grew faster than their old colonies, the bosses had to find a way into the EEC. Yet, by the time they did, the EEC was no longer the happy club it once had been. Europe was in recession, competition was reaching new heights, and acrimony ruled at Brussels. Today the ruling classes of Western Europe are faced with falling profits. More than ever they are compelled to search for new markets, for raw materials and for new spheres of investment. Tried and tested in trade, largely barren of oll and precious metals and increas ingly unprofitable, the EEC does not appear to them nearly as lucrative a place to do business as Africa and the Middle East.

In fact imperialist exploitation of these two areas is about the only thing the countries of the EEC can now agree on. The EEC has the Lome Convention to help it trade with Africa on the best terms possible. And it wants to keep in with Arab regimes so badly that, unlike the USA, its gives formal recognition to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. It can, though, find agreement on the need to keep imports of things like US steel and Japanese or shake weathered the storms of the 'seventies. In any case, capitalism waves parliamentary democracy goodbye with military coups, not the votes of MPs. However, Benn's central thesis is that Britain is oppressed by the EEC. This is Has Benn where the joke ends. been down the Falls Road in Belfast? Has he been down Railton Road in Brixton? If he had he would have seen some real oppression. In fact Benn can say little about the This mechanics of Britain's oppression'.

is because the machine works in the other direction: Britain is an imperialist power.

All Benn is concerned with is the creaking of the British state machinery - straining under the weight of competition in the world market and the problem of crushing its opponents. That's why he wants to lead a liberation movement' to get it back into shape, and his oily 'socialist' politics provide the grease.

This leads us to Benn's final point: that the EEC will prevent a future Labour textiles out, as well as on the urgency of cartelising its petrochemicals industry; and it's unanimous about the need to strengthen NATO against 'Communist aggression'. But there the unanimity ends and imperialist rivalries inside the EEC begin. A single European currency has proved a chimera; the European Monetary System, a charade. Intra-EEC protectionism - 'non-tariff barriers to trade, as they're politely known is mounting. Further, enlarging the Ten by bringing backward economies like Spain, Portugal and Turkey into membership looks dicey too. And while France remains fond of the Common Agricultural Policy and wants to see the Community spend more money on streng thening European industries against foreign competition, Britain and West Germany hold them back. They both think the CAP is a considerable burden, and feel too strapped for cash to increase their contribution to the EEC budget. So why, given all the problems associated with it, do Thatcher & Co still back the EEC?

Why, when Lord Carrington addressed the Tory Party conference in favour of the EEC, was the heckling so desultory? The answer is that the bourgeoisie feels neither strong nor desperate enough to embark on an isolationist course.

On the contrary, Thatcher knows that free trade and foreign competition provide an excellent means of disciplining Britain's industrial laggards. Anyway, Britain's oil exports to the EEC convert a deficit on manufactured trade with the Ten into a surplus overall. It makes no sense to cut loose from Europe - yet.

government from implementing the Alternative Economic Strategy on the scale he would like. Here he may be right. But since the AES is just the bureaucrats' way of trying to maintain British capitalism, the fact that the EEC might frustrate its introduction should not bother us at all.

Qualms about withdrawal That, you might think, is all there is to the anti-EEC lobby. Far from it. The irony is that some of the EEC's opponents take the maintenance of the interests of British imperialism so seriously that they are beginning to have qualms about withdrawal. Because Europe now accounts for about half of Britain's trade, pulling out obviously poses problems - a fact that Labour leaders from Peter Shore through Michael Foot to Eric Heffer have noted publicly. Already Labour is embarking on 'detailed studies' of what an exit from the Common Market would exactly entail Doubts about traditional anti-Market politics also nag the Bennites. Mitterand's election and the growth of anti-nuclear the Continent have

HOVCHECE

tempered the left's diatribes. There are fewer directly chauvinist attacks on the megalomaniac Germans and the selfish French: "withdrawal', Benn assures us, 'is nothing to do with nationalism' (New Socialist, September/October 1981). Instead, paranoid delusions about the omnipotence of the Council of Ministers and the European Commission are given pride of place. While Labour vacillates over withdrawal, commitment to Britain's its interests remains consistent. When, at a new stage of the crisis, the British bourgeoisie opts decisively for • protechon against its imperialist rivals, we can be sure that the Labour Party will start campaigning as never before against the EEC.

Meanwhile, calls for 'closer links with the Third World' - that is, for renewed economic and political domination of the oppressed coming into fashion. That well-known patriot AUEW president Terry Duffy, for example, won unanimous support at Brighton for his backing the Brandt report.

The radical left remains as confused about the EEC as ever. It wants to itself from separate the chauvinist implications of the reformists' views; but it still favours withdrawal. It wants to be with the workers (who don't like the EEC) and with the Labour Party (which has good reason to play on the workers fears) at all costs. And it continues to imagine that, because the bosses put most of their eggs in the EEC basket, forcing them to put their eggs in another would be a major victory for the proletariat.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While the EEC upsets the petit bourgeoisie because it affects the British way of life' (metrification, etc), it plays no part in the oppression of the British The EEC is about the working class. circulation of commodities and capital, not the enforcing of capitalist profitability.

The British state is willing and able to do this by itself. Any concession to the idea that Britain deserves 'sovereignty' from the EEC (or for that matter, from the IMF, USA, gnomes of Zurich or the dreaded multinationals) is in reality a call for greater freedom for an oppressor British imperialism is economically weaker than West German and French imperialism, but politically it has plenty to teach Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand about denials of sovereignty.

The choice facing British workers is not the false alternative of continued membership of the EEC or withdrawal.

It is to side with their own state or against it. 'In' and 'Out' are the policies of different wings of the bourgeoisie. Shaking the British state to its foundations must be the policy of the proletariat.

James Wood

EQUAL

years and made no progress at all.

discrimination. THE SUMMER RIOTS left the British establishment looking around for new ways of keeping law and order. Many commentators pointed to the success "positive discrimination' that side widespread repression calming America's cities after the long, hot summers of the mid 'sixties. Politicians and pundits suggested that positive discrimination might go towards solving the problems of Britain's inner cities. The Guardian went so far as to describe it as 'an essential weapon against racial disadvantage' (7 August).

Promoters of 'positive discrimination' that government bodies, local propose authorities and private employers should take 'positive action' to ensure that a certain percentage of jobs were filled by black people and that blacks should be treated favourably when considered for appointment or promotion.

that 'positive discrimination' will alleviate the long legacy blacks suffered and allow black people to compete equally with whites.

The bourgeoisie positive discrimination. The Guardian is of its concern in favour because social stability. Tory MP for Edgbaston Jill Knight is against. Knight, notorious for her racist, broadsides against the 'debauchery' of Jamaican blues parties, has strongly spoken out against discrimination' (Financial Times, 7 August 1981). She obviously acknowledges and approves of discrimination against blacks. Somewhere in the middle the British ruling class acknowledges that open racial discrimination only provokes trouble and must be curbed and that in some cases positive action is necessary. As the Financial Times succinctly commented on allegations of racism at British Leyland: "Racial bias is bad business'.

Cutting Lambeth's cake Some of the most ardent protagonists of 'positive discrimination' Labour MPs and local councillors. When he became leader of the Greater London Council Ken Livingstone discovered that the GLC-managed London Fire Brigade has less than a dozen black employees. He immediately set a councillor to work to produce an equal opportunities policy to deal with the situation. When John Carr produced his report in late September it promised that in future the GLC would take measures to ensure that blacks applying to become firemen got a fair He added that despite the overwhelming evidence from the Fire Brigade and elsewhere he had no reason to believe that the council had discriminated in the past! Despite Livingstone's

OPPORTUNITIES

NO WAY

Tony Benn likes it: but many Labour MPs are scared of it. Ken Living stone wants to introduce it; Ted Knight has been trying it for three Party is completely opposed to it. We look at the record of positive London. such policies alongthree years - shows why. - Lambeth has had - has had in a long way called Positive employees, other the policy The idea is of discrimination that questionnaire divided about service sector. for has had in Lambeth. 'reverse an almost allegations, between dustmen with blacks. the other way. are left-wing movement. ment to happening now in Britain.

American case. Bakke student who anti-racist The Revolutionary Communist rhetoric, it is certain that 'positive discrimination' will do nothing for blacks in A look at Lambeth where have operated for over an equal opportunities policy, and a sophisticated race relations unit to monitor its implementation, since September 1978. The council produces a slick race relations bulletin action to publicise its progress. Through careful monitoring of use of black papers and community groups and a number of measures aimed at removing discrimination from recruitment procedures, aims to bring about equality for blacks. When it was introduced the policy was hailed as a model of its kind and unanimously accepted by the council's biggest union NALGO. But what has this progressive policy achieved?

In May 1980 the council sent out a inquiring into the ethnic origin of all employees. Only seven per cent bothered to reply in the public December 1980 So in councillors ordered a headcount. The results of this show just how little impact three years of equal opportunities and dozens of 'positive action programmes The construction section return shows total absence of blacks in administrative jobs - despite the fact that blacks are well represented in the craft and manual sections. In public services of racism and collusion management and unions to exclude blacks are widespread. Last year Kennington came out on strike for three weeks in refusal to work Council leader Ted Knight just looked But the main problem with equal opportunities policies is not just that 'they don't work', but that they strengthen reactionary views in the labour Jumping the queue Rather than breaking down the divisions that exist between different sections of the working class, a strategy of positive discrimination takes those divisions, accepts them, and by giving special treatparticular groups, reinforces the separation of blacks and whites. This is what happened in the USA - and it's Two years ago positive action hit the *Bakke headlines Over lie was a white American was refused a place at medical school. His place was taken by a black student who had lower exam results but was given a place to fill the black 'quota'. Bakke took the case to the US Supreme Court - and won.

important, his case became point for reactionaries the breadth of America. Such is the depth of racist feeling in British society that even talk about positive discrimination has already sent the reactionaries into action. tunately they include not just Jill Knight and the Monday Club, but many in the labour movement. The Labour Party's plans for positive discrimination have already provoked a backlash. At a summer meeting of the TUC-Labour Party left-winger Norman Atkinson warned that the unions would not accept a black draft' into the factories (The Times, 21 July). Atkinson found vocal support on the committee from Clive Jenkins, Judith Hart and Eric Heffer. The Labour Party and TUC are so scared of the strength of racism in the unions that they immediately capitulated to it. Schemes for positive inevitably provoke a racist reaction. They take as their starting point the view that there are only so many jobs and so much money to go around. They accept the notion of a fixed 'national cake' to be shared out - and then propose positive action' to increase the share going to blacks. The logical conclusion that this means worsening the position of whites is inescapable. Anybody who accepts the constraints the working class living standards and then proposes some redistribution is talking about deepening the divisions among workers. Take the whole cake The oppression of black people is essential to the survival of the capitalist system. It can only be fought from an anti-capitalist view point. But what does this mean in practice? cleansing our ranks Order a copy of Cleansing our ranks: a platform for anti-racist trade unionists (20p plus. sae, or 20 copies for £3). It's been produced by WORKERS AGAINST RACISM's trade union to launch a campaign throughout the labour movement against crimination. It's our reply to the TUC's employers More a rallying length and Spitalfields Unforthat equal without regard to race. Liaison Committee fixed quota the across discrimination to whites as well. be must capitalists impose on possible. • Positive equivocally rejected. at the have no jobs. Looking for some positive action?

*Black to sub-committee police harassment at racial disyou get a branch meeting! Racism • Many local councils and private operate apartheid systollls denying jobs for blacks. Tower Hamlets in East London employs only 2 blacks in an area with one of the largest Asian populations in Britain. At a bus garage in Havering management and unions have a long-standing agreement not to employ blacks. Where such colour bars exist, they must be smashed. But this will not happen by pleading with management. The example of Lambeth shows opportunties schemes are worse than useless. Unions must ensure that all vacancies are filled, and filled • Where employers threaten redundancies it's no good defending jobs selectively.

What use is it for black workers to have a of diminishing an ever number of jobs? The only way to cut division between black and white workers is to fight to save every job and to fight for a job for every worker.

This kind of struggle challenges the logic of a system which has always denied work to blacks and increasingly denies it • The rights of black workers cannot protected just through elementary trade union measures. Every aspect of the oppression of black people - especially police and fascist harassment and the activities of the immigration authorities be the concern of active trade unionists. Only this can ensure the development of the political consciousness that will make defence of blacks discrimination must be un- At best it means token gestures, like Lambeth's decision to employ a black mural painter. Look USA: there may be quotas of bourgeois blacks studying at the Harvard Business School. But in America's inner city ghettos 75 percent of black youth Kevin Green a platform for anti-racist trade unionists workers' charter' - to black and white workers alike. If you want to deal with the racists in your workplace, fight formal and informal colour bars, to respond to passport raids and work make sure copy for your next union the next step, November 1981 13

Racism Jew-baiting on the rise Zionism: Israeli soldiers baton an Arab youth pernicious force in capitalist society today.

the false solution of Zionism.

ON THE EVE of the Second World War millions of European Jews faced the certain prospect of extermination under the Nazi jackboot. The process was already well underway in Germany. It was at this critical juncture that the Western Allies were to discover they could absorb no more Jewish immigrants. As boatloads of Jewish refugees sailed from port to port, including right up to the Statue of Liberty, they were turned away. All but the wealthiest were delivered back into the hands of the Nazis. Holocaust hypocrisy Even after the war, amidst hypocritical cries of horror at the revelations' about the concentration camps, the same story continued. As late as 1947, 450 000 'displaced persons', mainly Jewish survivors from the Holocaust, rotted in refugee camps in Europe - their numbers continuously swollen by the pogroms in Poland. The allies didn't want to know. Labour British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin made the cynically astute observation that American support for a Jewish state was because they didn't want too many of them in New York' (cited in N Weinstock, Zionism: false Messiah). As a long-standing anti-semite he could understand that.

Nearly four decades later, the tragicomedy continues. Soul-searching the cause of the Holocaust is a profitable business. There has been an stream of films on the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Meanwhile, as Vanessa Redgrave elegantly relives the horror of Auschwitz, anti-semitic rocities continue in real life. Never far below the surface of bourgeois society, anti-semitism has recently 14 the next step, November 1981 never again! Bombs outside synagogues in Antwerp and Paris; pogroms in Argentina; anti-Jewish demonstrations in Poland and Iran; anti-semitism remains a screams the latest issue of National Front News at the British Board of Deputies. Judy Harrison examines the origins of anti-semitism and head in a virulent form in countries as far apart as Argentina, Iran, Belgium and Austria. What the academics, psychoanalysts and assorted bourgeois apologists can't explain is why. proved so resilient? What is it about the Jews that has made them the object of hatred for centuries? Real Jews We will not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we will look for the secret of the religion in the real Jew.' (Karl Marx, On the Jewish question, 1844) For Zionists and anti-semites alike the Jews are a 'Chosen People. Zionists believe the Jews were pre-destined to flee from country to country anti-semitism is insurmountable. tragic fate of Jews, throughout the Diaspora is for them a confirmation of their historic claim to 'the promised land'.

post-wal Anti-semites broadly agree. They argue Jews are an alien, blood-sucking, parasitic breed congenitally incapable of assimilation into Western Christian The solution is to let them go back to where they came from or, better still, eradicate them altogether.

This convergence of outlook has even resulted in Zionists semitism. In Germany, Joachim Prinz greeted

OYCE

power thus: endless *The theory down. We want assimilation to be replaced by the conscious recognition of the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. atrecognise their own specificity can respect a state founded on the principle of the purity of and race. From every last hiding nation reared its place of baptising and mixed marriages [the Jews] make nowledge and Zionism: false Messiah) role Jews of capitalism merchants and usurers. in Between prompted by the pogroms "Jewish hatemongers' Between 1881 million developed capitalist countries.

virulent form Why has anti-semitism - that The society. welcoming anti- Zionist leader Hitler's rise to of assimilation has broken those Jews who to fight anti-semitism. are being pulled out. This does not us unhappy. In this coercion to ackclearly stand by community, we see at the same time the fulfilment of our dreams.' (cited in N Weinstock, illiterate What Zionism and anti-semitic theories have in common is a metaphysical view of Jews and Judaism, which inevitably leads to reactionary conclusions. Marx put the question back on its feet when he drew attention to the 'real Jew' - that is, the have historically played social and economic life. Before the rise their role was typically as tradesmen, either producing commodities more, or facilitating commodity exchange. Jews were the artisans, the shopkeepers, the As Marx put it, they lived within the pores of feudal society. This was not their lot through choice or destiny, but because they were forcibly barred from playing any other role within 'gentile' society. Their ghettoised existence, the cohesiveness of their communities and their religion were an expression of these facts of economic life sought The basis for anti-semitism already existed in the special relationship Jews recession, had to the rest of society. They were ruthlessly persecuted under the Romans, the Crusades and throughout the Labour Middle Ages. But systematic pogroms, mass expulsions and the 'final solution' of genocide are modern phenomena - the products of capitalist development. It was number capitalism that lent anti-semitism its most complete and most barbaric form.

Exodus April 1881 and June 1882, 225 000 Jewish families fled from Russia to Western Europe and the USA (W Fishman, East End Jewish radicals 1875-1914).

It was the first in a wave of migrations, that swept the Russia and Eastern Europe at the time.

and 1925 nearly four Jews emigrated to the more They were not too welcome in the West either. Anti-semitism took its most in the countries where capitalism developed most slowly. But it was on the increase everywhere. The Jews had been dislocated from their traditional occupations with the advent of modern machine-based production and the rise of 'twenties an aggressive industrial bourgeoisie. The small Jewish artisan was ruined, but could find no work in the towns when he had to compete with millions of peasants driven off the land. His wealthier brother - the merchant or money-lender - came up against the hatred and resentment of the nascent industrial capitalist, but was munist politically barred from competing with Jews surrendering in the Warsaw ghetto: Zionism was a reaction to the labour movement's failure him on equal terms. Even in the countries where the Jews had been most integrated and, in some cases, achieved considerable wealth and status, the arrival of thousands of destitute Jewish refugees stimulated anti-semitism. The Jewish Chronicle, the official organ of established Anglo-Jewry, was quick to see the writing on the wall Referring to their brethren from Russia and Eastern Europe the editors observed: Our fair fame is bound up with theirs; the outside world is not capable of making minute discrimination between Jew and Jew, and forms its opinion of Jews in general as much, if not them than from the Anglicised Trom of the community. (G Lebzelter, Political anti-semitism in England 1918-1939) The sensitivity of English Jews was heightened by the mounting campaign for restrictions on immigration, led by an unholy alliance of conservative politicians and trade union leaders, which culminated in the 1905 Aliens Act. Jew-baiting was intensifying in London's East End, where the majority of the refugees settled and work in the 'sweated' trades. Against a background of economic the Jews became a natural target of resentment for East End workers And their sentiments were echoed by politicians and trade union leaders. Dockers' leader, Ben Tillett, complained that 'the influx of Continental pauperism aggravates and multiplies the of ills which press so heavily upon us' (Fishman). Remembering his 'internationalist' obligations he told the newly-arrived immigrants: 'Yes, you are our brothers and we will do our duty by you. But we wish you had not Jews and communists England anti-semitism never assumed catastrophic proportions it did in Europe. But, if they'd been put to the test, the British labour movement leaders would have fared no better than their Continental counterparts. A product of bourgeois society, anti-semitism was able to take root in the working class because it was never seriously challenged.

The Bolsheviks had fought an uncompromising struggle against anti-semitism recognising the importance of challenging "Great Russian chauvinism'.

But by the and 'thirties the communist parties of Europe were adapting to antisemitism all down the line. In Germany, the KPD bent over backwards to reassure the population they were even more patriotic than the National Socialists.

This included vehement denials of a Jewish/Communist conspiracy; the comleaders, claimed, they were Aryans through and through

In England, during Mosley's anticampaign in the East End, the semitic CPGB told British workers: 'Hate the Jew, if you must, but do not allow your hatred to make you the victim of the Fascist who, on the plea that he also hates the Jew, makes you his accomplice in worse crimes? (Lebzelter, p158) Meanwhile, in the USSR, the Jewish question was far from any resolution, By the thirties anti-semitism flourished and the Birobidjan 'experiment' (a se miautonomous Jewish state) had collapsed.

The Soviet bureaucracy was not above deflect using anti-semitic prejudice to from its own failures, in the same way as the old Tsars. With such an example in 'communism', it's small wonder that Zionism became most influential ideology amongst the Jewish workers. Zionism, contrary to the claims of its supporters, is a very modern movement - less than 100 years old. Jews may have made ritual references to 'next year in Jerusalem' ever since its fall in 70AD, but they never seriously meant it until the twentieth century. It was the pogroms, and ultimately the Nazi Holocaust, that lent an old dream a sudden sense of urgency: From its inception Zionism appeared as a reaction of the Jewish petit-bourgeoisie (which still forms the core of Judaism, hard hit by the mounting anti-semitic wave, sucked from one country to another, and striving to attain the Promised Land where it might find shelter from the tempests sweeping the modern world.

(Abram Leon, The Jewish question, p245) The fact that this reactionary response to anti-semitism could also take a grip on the substantial Jewish proletariat was aspects of Zionism were repulsive to Jewish workers, not least the unashamedly bourgeois and pro-imperialist statements of leaders like Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann (the former modelled his plans for a Zionist state on the success of British chartered companies in Africa).

But the abysmal failure of the labour movement to fight the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe seemed to leave no "left-wing' variety of Zionism emerged, inspired by the writings which justified the colonising of Palestine by Jewish settlers on the grounds that the Jews needed their develop their own to working class. 'Borochovism' helped sell the Zionist project to Jewish workers and socialists. In particular, the idea of comwas held up as evidence of the socialist ideals in the embryonic Zionist state. The fact that the kibbutzim were to be built on territory forcibly expropriated from Palestinian Arabs, using exclusively Jewish labour, was justified on the grounds that for centuries Jews had been denied Thus it was that the Jews walked into trap. The steady trickle of the Zionist Jewish emigrés to Palestine from the early twentieth century onwards, turned into a veritable flood in the 'thirties. By the end of the war the Jewish population in Palestine had swollen from nine per cent to 32 per cent of the total. From the outset the imperialist powers cynically manipulated the Zionists' aspirations. As early as 1917 British statesman Balfour gave his formal blessing to the Zionist.

project. Sir Ronald Stors, a governor under the British Mandate in Palestine, observed that a Zionist state could serve the role of • "a little loyal Jewish Ulster" in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism'.

However, the British were only prepared to go so far; they could not afford to damage their traditional relations with the Arab leaders or let the Jews whip up too much resentment from the Palestinians. By the 'thirties British gunboats were turning back thousands of refugees from Nazi Europe. By 1947 they were locked in a bloody war with the Haganah and the Irgun - the Zionists' military and was forced to relinquish its Palestinian Mandate before the United Nations, and in 1948 the state of Israel was declared. Behind the scenes stood the by now the new masters in the Middle East and hence best placed to take advantage of the loyal little Jewish state.

their right to national self-determination, entirely subservient to US imperialism, and by brutally oppressing the Palestinians, could they hang on to their promised Zionism, far from solving the Jewish has that Jews guaranteed question, remain the object of hatred by millions.

Not only the traditional anti-semites, but also entire Arab peoples who legitimately regard the Jews as the usurpers of their rights, have turned against the The Jewish question today The British left pays lip-service to fighting anti-semitism. In practice it does neither.

At its height the Anti-Nazi League made grotesque overtures to the that fascist attacks on blacks was merely a subterfuge for their Teal' target - the work; the Board was put off by the SWP's Anti-semitism is still an important weapon in the fascists' arsenal. Whilst the Jews, unlike blacks, can hardly be accused today of directly competing for plays a useful role in lending fascist ideology a populist image. The ordinary, poor British workers versus the greedy, boss is a message that still strikes a chord.

National Front News still rants on about Britain being 'used as a milch-cow by an alien power' (October 1981). The reformist and radical left has no answer; it is as obsessed with the evil influence of finance capital as the fascists themselves.

It was the Labour Party Young Socialists, not the fascists, who organised a demonstration through the City of London against the merchant bankers last year. It's the International Marxist Group, not just the NF, that tells us repeatedly that British capitalism's disease could be cured if we eliminated the money lenders.

At this year's Labour Party conference one speaker accurately commented that all that divides the Labour Party from the Tories is the issue of control over the finance houses. By attacking the individcapitalist, in particular the moneyitself, the left reinforces the prejudices that provide the basis for anti- The reformists' deep-rooted concern for British straight into the hands of fascist demonology about 'alien powers'.

Most strikingly of all, the left's response to the overtly racist message of the almost word for word the fascists is message of the CPs in the 'thirties. It's not the racism they object to - Hate the black if you must'- but the way the NF manages to recruit racists to the Nazi cause. To the extent that black workers turn away from communism and towards petit-bourgeois nationalism, it's for much the same reasons that Jews embraced Zionism in the 'thirties.

The tragedy of the Jews is still with us today. It was possible for the victims of imperialist barbarism, the pariahs of bourgeois society, to become the servile creatures of imperialism themselves because they had no confidence in the ability of the working class to smash anti-semitism.

The racist screw THE FACT that black prisoners in Britain's jails suffer persistent brutality will not be news to most people. It certainly won't be news to the hundreds of blacks sentenced to prison or detention centre in the wake of the summer revolts. But information recently passed on to the next step shows both the systematic character of this brutality and confirms that fascists are organised openly in British prisons. Michael F lives in South Lambeth. In was released from mid-September he Wandsworth prison. He immediately con- London Workers Against tacted South Racism and made a long statement describing the conditions for blacks in Wandsworth. Wandsworth is run as a punishment its regime is even stricter than that demanded by Home Office guidelines. No association between prisoners is allowed. appalling. In some wings of the prison between 70 and 90 prisoners are forced to share access to two toilets and two cold water taps. Black prisoners face more than just these barbaric conditions: they get very special treatment from the fascist screws.

are not worried about The warders displaying their political allegopenly iances. Many sport National Front badges and tie pins. And they make sure that black prisoners know their place - as Michael explains: *From the moment the prisoner steps into the reception area from court it's the NF badge wearers who deal with him. They shout at the prisoners, they call them names, they are petty and demanding. They like the black prisoner to know that inside the prison there is a body of men who are ready to deal with him because he is black.

Open sanctioning of fascist activities notably at Wandsworth, Strangeways and Wormwood Scrubs - is not a deviation from the normal British prison regime. It is part of a system which starts with the treatment of blacks on the streets by the police, goes through the courts and ends in intimidation by fascist thugs in prison.

This is born out by all the statistics and information available about the treatment of black prisoners. The solution isn't a more humane prison regime. Black prisoners are treated like animals because all blacks are regarded as criminals, or suspected criminals, by the state. Liberal campaigners for penal reform have challenged that asnever sumption. They do the opposite, offering friendly advice to the Home Office on better and cheaper ways of dealing with 'criminals'.

SOLWAR

has begun a campaign, involving ex-prisoners and their relatives, to expose the brutality at Wandsworth and fight the criminalisation of the local community. For more information contact SOLWAR: phone 01-274 3951.

GLC POLICE INQUIRY

Behind closed doors THE SCARMAN SHOW broke all boxoffice records when it opened at Lambeth Town Hall. But Scarman was nothing compared with the latest production at County Hall. Directed by Paul Boateng (with himself in the leading role), this one promises to run and run.

FRAN EDEN

WAR's national organiser - was there at the opening on Unlike poor old Jeremy 12 October. Thorpe, who wasn't even short-listed for the GLC's lucrative race relations' post, she at least managed to get inside. Accompanied by a number of black people who submitted evidence about police had Racism to the GLC, Fran tried to brutality attract the chairman's attention. However, it appears that all the Police Committee's talk about "public accountability" is The strictly for press consumption. minute she opened her mouth, the chairman, Paul Boateng, threatened to...

call the police! His side-kick, radical left councillor Steve Bundred mumbled something about dangerous publicity-seekers wasting the committee's time.

Still, we're determined to bring the Police Committee under democratic control. And WAR groups could do with some of the money the GLC's dishing out to the community relations boys and So rush your other worthy causes. evidence of police harassment to us fast and watch this space for details of the committee's next 'public hearing'. For copies of WAR's dossier of evidence to the GLC send 20p plus sae to WAR, c/o Box 22, 136 Kingsland High St, London, E8

RICKY OTESANYA

Now drop all charges! STUDENTS from Kingsway-Princeton college in London were jubilant when they heard the result of Ricky Otesanya's trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court on 23 October. Ricky, a 19 year-old Nigerian student at Kingsway has been in gaol since the Finsbury Park revolt in April 1981. He was charged with causing grievous bodily harm to Commander James Dickenson (breaking his nose!) and actual bodily harm to Chief Superintendent Patrick Carson. According to the magistrates - who've refused him bail all this time - he organised the Finsbury Park riot single-handed. But at Snares- He was found not guilty on all but one charge, for which he was sentenced to six months. So technically Ricky should now go free. He's already served that six months, and more. But he's back in Ashford Remand Centre, trying to get bail for yet another charge - aiding and Ricky must continue and be stepped up.

successful series of pickets at the court, and over 600 students voted at a union meeting to back Ricky all the way. Now they've got this far they're determined to win. But support from the National Union of Students is non-existent. The student bureaucrats have done nothing for Ricky, or for the Bradford 12 or the 3000 other youths framed-up on charges WORKERS AGAINST RACISM groups have been set up in many London colleges to co-ordinate a fight-back against the NUS leadership and make sure Ricky and the Bradford 12 get the backing they need. For details of WAR activities at your college phone 01-274 3951.

Stop Press Abdul Ahad, a Bangladeshi worker from Brick Lane, was arrested and held overnight at Bethnal Green police station on Saturday 10 October. Subsequently his home was raided, passports were seized and he was thrown back in the cells again. His crime? He'd gone to Bethnal evidence Green police station to give about a theft! Abdul is demanding the GLC Police Committee takes immediate action against the Brick Lane cops, and is taking out charges against them himself.

the next step, November 1981 15

Lech Walesa plays himself in Wajda's latest film. In real life Solidarity and its intellectual supporters' tendency to compromise with the Stalinist bureau- Andrezj Wajda, Man of iron, Academy Cinema Two, Oxford Circus, London. SINCE THE formation of Solidarity in 1980 artists and intellectuals rous protessionals, have flocked to offer their services. One of the most illustrious is Andrzej Wajda, the veteran film director whose trilogy A generation, Kanal and Ashes and diamonds is well known in the West. His latest contribution to documenting Polish workers' struggles is Man of iron which has been showing in the West End of London since the end of September, and within Poland itself since the spring. It is certain to be a very influential film. Man of iron is the sequel to Man of marble, the first Polish film to deal with the Stalinist terror of the fifties, which Wajda finally completed in 1976 after more than a decade of fighting for permission from the authorities.

Marble traced the eftorts of a voung film maker to document the career of a fictional Stakhanovite 'shock worker' of the 'forties who was framed and imprisoned in the fifties. In Iron we learn that the hero of Marble, Mateusz Birkut, was shot during the massacre of workers in Gdynia in 1970. His son Maceij Tomczyk (played by Poland's James Dean, Jerzy Radziwilowicz) is the man of iron in Wajda's latest film, a worker in the Gdansk shipyard who organises the 1980 strike and is marked down by the state bureaucracy as a dangerous member Solidarity. Tomczyk or tae second-une un marries Agnieszka, the television reporter from Marble who continues her quest for historical truth in Iron and spends the strike period as a political detainee. In solidarity with Solidarity Yet Iron is made very differently from the earlier film. Wajda has taken advantage of the political thaw won by Polish workers to weave newsreel into his fictional reconstruction of the fight to establish an independent trade union.

Newly released film coverage of the 1970 revolt in Gdansk and Gdynia is integrated with shots of the negotiations between the strike committee and former vice-premier Jagielski's Government Commission and with Wajda's own filming within the occupied shipyard, Lech Walesa appears both in his own person - signing the agreement with his ridiculous giant Pope pen and praying at Mass - and also, together with Ann Walentynowicz, as an actor, witnessing the church wedding of Tomczyk and Agnieszka.

The film's narrative is provided by following the antics of Winkel, a radio reporter pushed by the bureaucracy into getting the dirt on Tomczyk. Winkel is a spineless, puffy little hack who could have walked straight out of the pages of a Graham Greene novel. He tracks down and interviews an old student friend of Tomczyk, his mother, his wife (in her prison cell) and others who have known him. With a microphone hidden inside his jacket he wheedles and ingratiates himself with everyone he meets.

An alcoholic stumbling through a country where the strikers have prohibited the sale of alcohol, Winkel's reptile progress is a powerful image of the corruption of the society. No wonder Western reviewers identify so strongly with him. The Tomczyk that Winkel reconstructs is a dedicated fighter of the working class. He is a craftsman, an intellectual, a passionate lover, a devoted son and an adoring father. Wajda portrays his growth to manhood as the result of a decade of tempering in the class struggle, including periods in jail for protesting against brutality against workers. In 1968 police Tomczyk, then a student at the university, implores his father to bring out the Gdynia shipyard workers in support of the student demonstrations; Birkut, fearing police provocation, refuses and Tomczyk breaks with his accusing him of cowardice.

Then in Tatner, 1970 the Gdynia shipyard workers go out on strike but receive no backing from Tomczyk and his student friends: the strikers are massacred, Birkut among them. Tomczyk is beside himself with grief, abandons his studies and vows to avenge his father and the whole working class. He goes to work in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, where he remains, working as a clandestine political agitator, for the next decade.

Wajda's handling of his material makes this a powerful film. There are certainly a number of sentimental passages, particularly between Tomczyk and Agnieszka. But in general the presentation of Tomczyk as embodying the and determination of the Polish workers works reasonably well. The main fictional characters, and particularly Winkel, 16 the next step, November 1981

FILM

Who are the friends of the Polish people? have considerable depth and shading.

The sophisticated integration of fiction and newsreel and the fluid reconstruction of the events of a decade sweep the audience along and compel identification with the workers' struggle.

Wajda moves his audience carefully between scenes of brutality, tenderness, anguish, anger, cynicism and comedy, building up a very credible - and to a large extent true - image of contemporary Poland. Whither Wajda? However, the film's artistic success masks its very dangerous politics. It is unlikely that many who see Man of iron will recognise what Wajda's own political standpoint is, because it is embedded so deep within the film. At no point is the audience invited to be critical of the material presented. Man of iron is a fairy tale of heroism and villainy. The film gives not a hint, and intends to give not a hint, of the tensions, fears and debates within Solidarity.

One clue to Wajda's politics is the film's time-frame which ends with the signing of the Gdansk Agreement in August 1980. Yet the film was completed in the spring of 1981, by of the divisions within time many which Solidarity, which could have been anticipated even at the time of the agreement, were already apparent. Wajda is concerned to present a picture of a working class united not only in action against the reactionary Stalinist bureaucracy, but united also politically. Yet as the September Congress of Solidarity revealed, there is strong opposition to Walesa's leadership cracy could well bring disaster tor rolsn workers.

which crystallised after he called off the strike in protest at police violence at Bydgoszcz withmembers of the out even informing other Central Co-ordinating Committee.

Wajda may have thrown in his lot with Solidarity, but he is Walesa's man. He portrays the Polish working class as heroic and the leading force in Polish society, but does it no service by presenting its victory as a fait accompli. In the film the only power ranged against the workers of Solidarity is the armed might of the state, rendered impotent by the unity and fearlessness of the strikers. Winkel's attempts to assemble information to be used against Tomczyk founder in the face of the fighting spirit of the strikers and end as farce.

The Polish army and the Soviet army are a very real threat to the Polish revolution. But whether the Stalinist bureaucracy would move against the workers with tanks, and the scale of resistance it would meet, depends on the ideological and political strength of the workers movement. Every compromise by the Walesa with the bureaucracy which goes leadership unopposed makes armed intervention more, not less, likely because it undermines the political unity of the working class.

Time to halt? Polish workers face many immediate more problems than the use of the army to smash their movement. Some of these are apparent in Wajda's film, but are not recognised as such by him. Others are not even mentioned. For example the conservative Catholic church, which Walesa, Tomczyk, Walentynowicz and in fact all the workers are shown as supporting, is presented as a benign and natural part of Polish society. Even the atheistic Agnieszka realises that only a church wedding will do justice to their love when she comes to understand the strength of Tomczyk's religious faith. On the other hand, there is no acknowledgement in the film of the reactionary force of Polish national ism within sections of the working class, Polish nationalism has a positive content in so far as it seeks to preserve the integrity of a country which for two hundred years has suffered invasions and mass murder at the hands of its neighbours; but when Polish workers remain silent in the face of violence directed against gypsies and Jews, that is another matter Wajda is most noticeably, and understand. ably, silent on the role of the intellectuals.

Their influence over the mass of Polish workers is fortunately limited, but with their constant urging of caution and moderation they are a major force pushing the leadership back into the hands of the bureaucracy. In an interview with Film Polski Wajda made clear his own new position that now is the time for Polish workers to consolidate their gains and call a truce with the bureaucracy: •Should this revolution be carried through to the end without stopping, in order not to lose all the acquisitions made by the victorious class? Or, on the contrary, should it be recognised that the present state of the revolution demands a halt in order to continue when th time is right? I think this question is still relevant. But the economic reality of Poland today is that there are no long term concessions for the to grant. For intellectuals like Wajda state compromise may make sense, but for Polist workers there is no going back.

The working class has no need of eulogy and embalming, however well intended. What it demands of those artists and intellectuals who offer it support is an honest assessment of its strengths and its limitations alike. Above all it What Wajda has given needs argument.

- THE

Polish working class is a few cheers from the sidelines which are unpleasantly reminiscent of the praise many intellectuals heaped on the Allende Government which only hastened the slaughter of Chilean workers at the hands of the Junta. Wajda has found a new artistic freedom in the political upsurge of the past year However, his own political position, and the use to which he has put it, are working to undermine the very struggle which won him the freedom to make Man of iron Gareth Evans

И в. Сталин 11879-1953 Sovietology today N Tolstoy, Stalin's secret war, Jonathan Cape, London, 1981, pp463, hbk £9.50.

M S Shatz, Soviet dissent in historical perspective, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp214, S Bialer, Stalin's successors: leadership, stability Cambridge and change in the Soviet Union, University Press, 1980, pp312, hbk £12.50.

S Bialer, ed, The domestic context of Soviet Croom Helm, London, 1981, foreign policy, pp491, hbk £14.95. WHEN IT COMES to trying to understand the the bourgeoisie is a victim Soviet Union, its own propaganda. For decades imperialist ideologues have produced material on the Soviet Union which sought to expose the evils Yet this beast has survived. To communism. explain the resilience of this affront to humanity, Western scholars have examined everything that is irrelevant to a study of the Soviet Union - the mystique of pan-slavism, the Russian mentality, the childhood of prominent Bolshevik leaders, the psychological predilections of Stalin and the influence of the harsh winter. The four books under review maintain the standards long established by Western Sovietologists.

Man as history In the realm of historical vulgarisation Nikolai Tolstoy has few equals. His authority on matters pertaining to the Soviet Union was established before his birth. For Nikolai Tolstoy, according to the dustjacket, is 'heir to the senior line of the Tolstoy family and his great grandfather was chamberlain to the court of Nicholas IT.

Tolstoy's latest contribution to the study of demonology - Stalin's secret war - shows that an aristocratic connection can still be turned to duvalllage. Tolstoy's originality is emphasised by his publishers who point out that the author draws on 'much more evidence'. The new evidence turns out to be previously published memoirs and books, much of it thank goodness.) long out of print. Tolstoy's study of Soviet policy during the period 1938 to 1945, even if banal, has the merit of simplicity. Just about everything can be explained by what Stalin ate, thought and did. In the world of the senior heir to the Tolstoy family: 'there has probably never been a ruler in history whose power was as absolute as Stalin's.

Though autocracy had its limitations, it is true to say that in all essentials Soviet policy was simply Stalin's policy. This being so, I believe that what Stalin did and what Stalin said are of paramount importance.' To prove his point, Tolstoy spends over 400 pages tracing various Soviet policies back to old Uncle Joe. Man no longer makes history - history becomes the man.

History and backwardness Marshall S Shatz has hit on an amazingly original idea. He has discovered that dissidents in Russia day phenomenon. are not only a mocen reviews Dissidents even existed in Tsarist Russia! Soviet historical perspective makes no dissent in historical specificity: history concessions to never changes, it only repeats itself in cycles: It is the contention of this book that contemporary Soviet dissent though it has its own unique characteristics is the product of a pattern of development Russia has been following since since the the eighteenth century. dissent death of Stalin must be viewed as the latest cycle in a recurrent pattern that has helped to shape Russian history since the age of Peter the Great.' Shatz' timeless generalisations inevitably ignore what is distinct about different periods in history. He uses the past to rediscover his own prejudices about Soviet society. It is like explaining the current failures of Soviet agriculture by pointing to the persistence of bad weather during the last two centuries.

Elite theory Seweryn Bialer is considered something of an expert on the Soviet elite. His two recently published books, Stalin's successors and The domestic context of Soviet foreign policy, show an excessive preoccupation with what bourgeois academics call 'decision makers' at the expense of the basic social processes at work. Stalin's successors is subtitled Leadership, stability and change in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately 'change' is interpreted narrowly in terms of personnel change at the top. Bourgeois academics and journalists are fascinated with important individuals. We had 'after De Gaulle'; now we're getting 'after Sadat'; this is an exercise in 'after Brezhnev' speculation.

individual is the UnIS maTTow Locus complemented by the abstract methodology of political science. Each section is introduced by a discussion of concepts and definitions. The rest of the available material is then brought into Thus a profound with the definitions. discussion on the distinction between "stable' and 'unstable' (the author feels that it is 'useless and arbitrary' to define when the "less" becomes "instability" and the "more" becomes "stability" ") is followed by numerous tables and charts which seek to quantify stability in the Soviet Union. The same scholastic approach is evident in the series of articles collected together in The domestic context of Soviet policy. The different Soviet experts who contributea to unis text Even the are mesmerised by generalisations.

the wider social forces better aracies that shape the objects of this inquiry. The focus is too institutional and too compartmentalised.

"The domestic context' never Despite the title, really emerges. What we have instead are isolated chapters of Soviet life abstracted from material Concol From right to left The degenerate character of bourgeois theories of the Soviet Union gives us no ground tol complacency. The ahistorical definition-oriented approach of the right also characterises much left-wing writings on the subject. Most left-wing theories of the Soviet Union are really nothing more than expanded definitions. Vulgar theory on the left and the right must be exposed by The world-wide struggle for Marxism. the development of a Marxist analysis of the Soviet Union is an urgent task. Frank Richards Sisterhood in the States Building feminist theory - essays from Quest, 1981, Longman, New York and London, pp280, pbk £6.50. THERE ARE TWO sorts of feminists in the USA.

The first sort are in the National Organisation of Women (NOW) which seeks to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society'. This means getting women into campaigning for the Republican Party, onto the boards of big corporations or into activity in their local Parent Teachers Assoc lation or ecology group. The sort read Quest. Published

ONCL

Washington since 1972, this journal aims to establish feminism as a mode of analysis'. Its writers are very critical of 'mainstream' feminand highly concerned about American working class women and blacks. Behind all the academic verbiage and militant rhetoric Quest have central preoccupations:

• LWO

personal/sexual politics and women's coops or advice centres. More than half the book is taken up by attempts to define feminism. Here the uninitiated reader will encounter some confusion because in the first 50 pages we are introduced to such concepts as radical feminism, socialist feminism, non-aligned feminism, cultural and spiritual feminism and lesbian feminism, which, we are told 'deliver a unique threat to the complex history of human oppression'. Howthings are further complicated because ever the lesbian feminist camp itself is divided into what we might call cultural nationalists versus political lesbian feminists. Don't faint if you belong to neither group or both. Moreover it seems that lesbians are 'oppressed by radical feminists as well as by reform and socialist feminists'. While Quest recognises that many of the political divisions among women's groups are simple differences in style and not necessarily ideology, its only conclusion is that 'studying the styles of various organisations should strengthen each group and open communication channels. So much for theory and ideological struggle; how about practice? Two models of liberation are presented. The first is to set up capitalist enterprises run by women only. Beverly Fisher- Manick (a self-confessed feminist, community organiser, mother, housing airector, contra class, multidictory perfectionist, working ethnic Detroiter, procrastinator, woman-lover, anti-capitalist seeking basic change and survival for herself and her daughter) describes them like this: within the The majority of projects women's movement are not at present selfsustaining but can and should be. For example, our women's centres offer free services to women with little planning as to how we will pay for the operating expenses, such as salaries for staff. If these projects operated as "feminist businesses", they would pay for their staffs and at the same time continue to grow.

- feminist-style: flourish- The American dream ing companies with no men around.

For American feminists less concerned with corporate viability there is radical social work in health clinics and Rape Crisis Centres. The aim of the DC Rape Crisis Centre, for instance.

is to work towards the elimination of rape...

the dissemination of information. education of people about rape... and work to reform including institutions connected with rape , hospitals and the legal system". A battle of ideas to make racistchauvinist cops more sympathetic to women: community policemen - American-feministstyle. It may seem a long way from a lesbianowned food store in San Francisco to a women's South London Labour subcommittee nea but the concerns and political strategy of bourgeois feminists are the same personal politics in private Ene world overt and reformist politics in public.

Kevin Green What did you do in the war, Michael ? Simon Hoggart and David Leigh, Michael Foot: a portrait, Hodder and Stoughton, pp216, hbk £8.95, pbk £4.95. MICHAEL FOOT told the Labour Party conference that he was an 'incurable, inveterate peacemonger. But Foot's record in the Second World War gives the lie to this.

Hoggart and Leigh's journalistic pot-boiler contains a quick account of Foot's co-author ship of the bestselling Guilty men (Gollancz, 1940), a histrionic attack on Neville Chamber lain, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald and a dozen other right-wing politicians for their lack of enthusiasm for waging war against Germany. For Foot the men who failed to rearm against Hitler in time were guilty: they were responsible for the debacle of Dunkirk for the story of an army doomed before they took the field. His diatribe against the 'appeasers' had a simple message.

. Apart from some honourable exceptions (such as Churchill), the Tories, Foot argued, weren't patriotic enough.

They lacked sufficient ruthlessness in pro secuting the military interests of British imperialism. So much for our inveterate peace monger. Hoggart and Leigh's boudoir history ignores the political significance of Guilty Men. It also ignores another episode in Foot's wartime career - one that has, however, been exposed in Martin Middlebrook's recent book The battle of Hamburg (Allen Lane, 1981).

the night of 27 July 1943 Bomber On Command launched one more raid on Hamburg.

As usual, it aimed north of the Elbe - at areas which were almost entirely residential 0I commercial rather than military. But this time it took more phosphorous incendiaries than was normal. That night 40 000 German civilians including 22 500 women and 5400 children were incinerated in the streets or asphyxiated in air-raid shelters. In terms of civilians killed by bombs, nearly as many died this way as died in throughout the war. Such was the Britain devastating loss of life that criticisms of the raid were even made in official quarters.

At the time Michael Foot was editor of the Evening Standard. He received a number of articles attacking the RAF's bombing campaign.

He declined to print them James Wood the next step, November 1981 17

Heavy duty George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's political police, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp528,

NDK £ 24.00

THE VECHEKA, formal title of a central body colloquially known as the Cheka: the All- Russian Extraordinary Commission for Comand Sabotage. Davung com ter revonnon Created in the winter of 1917-18 by the Old Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinsky ('Iron Felix): founder member of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, escapee from several sarist prisons, nemesis of Okhrana agents-provocateurs in the Bolshevik Party 1910-12 and a leading figure in the at various October revolution. Empowered, times and in various situations, to investigate, arrest, interrogate, try, jail, send to concentration or labour camps, execute and shoot on sight bourgeois journalists, corrupt officials, profiteers, speculators, criminals, looters, bandits, Black Hundreds, kadets, clergymen, monarchists, Social Revolutionaries, Left social kevolutionaries, Anarchists, Mensheviks, foreign "diplomat' spies (particularly British ones), Kronstadt sailors, dissident printer and chemist trade unionists, nationalist peasants, assassins, insurrectionaries, emigre strikers and common-or-garden sloverwves. capitalists. Adept at the use of informers and double and at setting up bogus oppositional a-culs. bodies. Responsible also - at various times and places for snow-clearing, combatting typhus pidemics, gun control, rail and river firefighting,

SCCULLLV-

commanacermg umbel and fuel, enforcing labour disipline, overseeing industrial and military conscription, requisitioning houses and looking after waifs and strays.

The Cheka: literally, 'a lynchpin", and certainly the lynchpin of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Held up by Lenin as a model of working class ruthlessness — 'a good Communist', he said, 'is at the same time also a good Chekist".

Leggett's book is a compilation of a vast of interesting information on the amouL activities of the Cheka. However, the data it assembles is turned to a familiar political purpose. Leggett uses the fact that the Tarist Okhrana, Lenin's Cheka and Salin's GPU employed similar methods to suggest that the diverse regimes within which these police organs flourished were al similaı that Leninism derived from Tarism, Stalinism from Leninism, and that all three were characterised by Russian love of cruelty and violence.

In fact all class societies are based on terror.

The amount of terror evident at any particular time depends on the balance of class forces and the efficacy of other mechanisms of preserving the domination of the ruling class. Moreover, the systematic use of terror is a teature of unstable societies in which rival social forces vie for power, which is why terror and conterterror have raged in Russia for much of the Rival terrorisms tought tor

OCSCHL CORLULY.

control during the break-up of the Roman Empire; they fought for it throughout the central Europe of the 'thirties and 'forties; and terror continues to contront insurgent terror in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America today. Paralels between methods of terror under different regimes prove nothing what matters is the social content of those regimes. important difference between the Cheka and GPU is that, while the Cheka served the interests of the working class under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the GPU served the of a bureaucratic clique BmLerests usurped the workers' state. The Cheka's enemies were those forces seking to overthrow the workers government and restore the dictatorship of bourgeoisie. The GU's main the target was the working class and the peasantry.

It is true that there was little difference in their methods, but terror is terror: the question for Marxists is not which side was more brutal, but who was doing it to whom? This is why we ureservedly back the terror of the Cheka. Our only egret is that the Cheka was insufficiently ruthless in curbing the growth of the bureaucratic elements in the Bolshevik Party that eventually stifled the Russian Revolution.

Peter Blumkin 18 the next step, November 1981 reviews Russia, 1917: to defend the revolution, ruthless measures were necessary Blast from the past David Lipsey and Dick Leonard, eds, The socialist agenda, Jonathan Cape, London, 1981, pp241, £7.95. Shirley Williams, Politics is for people, Penguin, London, 1981, pp230, £2.50.

David Owen, Face the future, Jonathan Cape, London, 1981, pp552, €12.50.

Ian Bradley, Breaking the mould? The birth and prospects of the Social Democratic Party, Martin Robertson, London, 1981, pp172, £2.95.

THE RECESSION provokes class conflict, it polarises society and destroys CUSSCESUs Political parties that in better times might move away from their traditional constituences towards the centre are driven today to consolidate their own social bases. Thus the Tories move right and Labour moves left. Margaret Thatcher appeals to the owners of capital, large and small, not without creating some strain with the paternalistic, 'one nation', Tory traditionalists. Tony Benn turns towards the sellers of labour power, so far with uneven success, and at the cost of shattering the rigid Labour Party structure built up in the years of post-war complacency. One fission product of the impact of the recession on the Labour Party is the Social Democratic Party.

The SDP is based on the nostalgia for the past of the professional middle classes. They long to bring back the days when steady growth and rising living standards subdued class antagonisms and gave rise to the illusion that greater equality created by an encould be lightened Labour administration. The popularity of the SDP in the media reflects a widespread bourgeois sentiment in today's harsh times for the old ways of consensus and co-operation.

But the crisis that forced the social democrats dictates their out of the Labour Party also irelevance in the class struggles of the future.

Crosland is dead The Liberals have uneasily SDP (as many observed) is the direct desendant of the dominant faction in the Labour Party of the 'fifties and 'sixties. Its theoretical legacy comes from Anthony Crosland who redefined socialism to mean acceptance of the capitalist system, rejection of the very concept of class and pious expressions of the need for greater freedom, equality and compassion. The socialist agenda begins with a collection of tributes to Crosland and his politics; its second half consists of attempts by Crosland's followers to reconcile the politics of the booming 'fifties with the crisis-ridden 'eighties. It's an uneasy combination. Crosland believed in expanding public spending, he rejected incomes policy in principle and he even opposed anti-union legislation.

Today's SPers - like Agenda contributor IMD Little - have to differ with their mentor: 'All this was very reasonable in those days, and I believed much the same myself. Alas, there has been a sea-change between then and now. Alas indeed for Crosland's acolytes who fill the rest of Lipsey and Leonard's collection with apologies for cuts, wase contos and cures ou union rights. Alas too for Crosland himself, who, before he died in 1977, saw his growthbased ideals fonder one by one on the rocks of the crisis. 'Croslandism' itself died in late 1976 when Crosland gave up his opposition to Healey's public spending cuts with a statement that could serve as his epitaph: This is onsense, but we must do it'. Call it a policy? The SDP is short on policy because the prescriptions that revisionist social democracy based on full employment and social harmony have little place in a society with three million on the dole and rioting in the streets. However, having founded a new party its leaders are obliged to come up with some response to contemporary problems. Their major political theme is to attack state intervention, centralisation solutions ana bureaucracy, TneTT are popular participation, decentralisation and industrial democracy. "Politics", declares Shirley Williams portentously 'is for people'. The merit of Williams" book is to cover these commonplaces in a concise 200 pages while David Owen grinds on for more than 500; and in terms of banality as well as tedium the doctor takes the biscuit. Hostility to the state is a petit-bourgois prejudice as old as capitalist society. So is the notion of economic and political control being vested in a community of small producers.

Williams makes common cause with today's ecologists; Owen traces his roots from the utopian socialists of the nineteenth century, through the guild socialists and the Fabians, to the "industrial democracy" schemes of the last Labour Government. Anti-statist posturing has some appeal to the small man frightened by Labour's nationalisation plans. But the problem is that senile British capitalism cannot survive without massive support from the state. Thus the SP's decentralising zeal has little appeal for British capitalists. Its schemes for 'workers' participation' have even less appeal to workers who know they mean sharing out redundancies, short time work and wage cuts.

A broad democratic alliance?

The link-up between the SDP and the Liberals is not surprising: its's their only hope of playing the electoral system to some adantage. What is more in tersting is the convergence between the populist "community" politics of the SDP and the "broad democratic" approach of the Eurocommunist wing of the Communist Party. They share the notion that Thatcher triumphed because of the growth of anti-corporatist prejudices fostered by the last Labour Government and a repudiation of Labour's supposed narrow working class orientation. They both policies that "integrate class and aD PLUYC national democratic interests and perspectives (Pat Devine, The Labour Party - why the deline?', Marxism Today, January 1980). Both traditions condemn the 'sectarianism' of the Labour left and seek to promote linkages among diverse popular campaigns. And they have asimilar social base in the 'caring" professions and the academic world. Thus the defection of former CP executive member Sue Slipman to the SDP should not be seen as a freak event, but as the logical course which other old colleagues may yet follow.

How the mould will crumble What are the prospects for the SDP? lan Bradley is a poor guide. He is a journalist who cannot see behind the personalities and institutions of politics to the social forces that drive them to success or failure. For him, as he writes in the introduction to Breaking the mould?, the truth, as always, lies somewhere in between' He would like to think the SDP might make it, but he has his career to think about so he hesitates to commit himself. (If the SDP should prosper Bradley and his Fleet Street colleague Peter Jenkins must surely be in line for honours for the services they have rendered the new party in The Times and The Gurdian respectively). The fate of a political party depends on its capacity to express the interests of a major social class. There are those - for exampe at The Economist - who would like to see Labour ditched and the SDP become the official party of the working class. This is a non-starter. Despite the flirtation of the Gang of Four with Chapple, Duffy and Sirs, not even one of these charlatans would join the SDP at its launch.

Without a single trade union behind it the SDP Will never get mass working class support: the recruitment of ex-International Socialist industrial organiser Roger Rosewell will scarcely tilt the balance. And the parade of rats joining a newly-launched ship, MPs and concillors with records in Parlament and local government varying from the nondescript to tho se reeking of corruption, will not enhance the SDP's chances.

As everybody from Thatcher to Benn now appreciates the SDP is a bigger threat to the Tories than to the Labour Party. But the odds must be on the Tories remaining the party of the British bourgeoisie and retining mass middle class support. There are plenty of alternatives to Thatcher on offer inside the Conservative Party should a change of course become Hecessary As there are only two classes that matter in British society the fate of the SDP depends on the struggle between them. At present that struggle iS simmering. middle class people fear the future so they cling on to the past and the plausible figures of Jenkins and Williams, Owen and Rodgers. But when the class struggle erupts, as it must, they will be forced towards the ex tremes of British politics.

The precarious middle ground on which the SDP has staked its future will disappear. The vagaries of the British electoral system may give the SDP-Liberal alliance some short-term prospects. But the dynamics of the class struggle will soon consign the SDP to the dustbin of history. Mike Freeman Leisure on the dole? Clive Jenkins and Barrie Sherman, The leisure shock, Eyre Methuen, London, 1981, pp185, £4.50. "Leisure is a waste of time for the unemployed" (from a videotape on unemployment in Scotswood, Photocom, Benwell, Newcastle, quoted in The Times, 8 October 1981).

A woman prisoner out on a pioneering training run from Askhem Grange prison in York, featured in all the daily papers on 16 October. But what is the message on her T-shirt? The Guardian and The Daily Mail blacked it out; The Times blurred it; The Sun scratched out the letters to make it illegible; only in the Daily Express is it just about visible. The message reads: Who killed Liddle Towers? - the boxer who died in police custody in 1979 and one of the rising fatalities in Britain's police stations and prisons. If you really want to know, look in the next step...

Letter from Iran The atmosphere in Iran has been electric since 20 June when the Mojaheddin organsupport of the Fedayee isation, with the with a half alarmed the regime guerrillas, million-strong public demonstration in support of the ousted President Bani-Sadr. To save the Islamic republic Ayatollah Khomeini found no alternative except to begin murdering the antiimperialist prisoners in ran's jals. ror inis purpose the government employed a greater promising number of revolutionary guards, them good salaries and long-term loans for buying houses. At the same time the Ayatollah called for police service. the establishment of a secret Until the organised force could be set up, he urged all moslems to act as secret agents for the regime. Since then the combined forces of the police, the revolutionary guards and thugs of Party have been the Islamic Kevolutonary hunting down, like hungry tigers, the members the supporters of revolutionary and isations. The victims are often executed within a few hours, sometimes without being identified.

The number of executions has so far been 200 each day. The Attorney-General about Ayatollah Mosavi Ardebili has announced that demonstrators or anybody carrying arms should be executed irrespective of age. This has sometimes meant that children only eight years old have been condemned to death.

seen such cruelty scarcely History before, even amongst the fascists. Just today one policeman, who had observed a set of executions, told me that the revolutionary guards shot a supporter of the Mojaheddin in the city of Arak 37 times when implementing a death sentence. There are many similar stories: myself saw a mother crying and shouting, You have killed my son. Why are you demanding money for delivery of his dead body?'. The fact is that the authorities demanded 10 000 rials [equivalent to f65] for the bullets spent on his execution by firing squad!

Turning to the activities of the left, we can divide them broadly into two parts; first, there are the opportunists such as Tudeh Party and the "Majority' of the Fedayee Guerrilla Organisation, who have a policy of total support for this regime. Since their papers were recently banned people call them the wooden stick with two filthy ends (a Persian proverb) because they are despised by both the people and the regime. Second, the revolutionaries, who consist of the Mojaheddin (although they are not Marx- Organisation, the Fedayee ist), Peykar Organisation, Komolah, the Democrat some other small Party or Kurdistan and groups. Almost all of these have been in continuous battle with the forces of the regime in all cities and towns of Iran. Many of their members and supporters have been executed, 1177been forced to go underprisoned, or have ground and curtall tneir acavites Since July the Mojaheddin have been unable to issue their paper Mojahed. The regime also their radio transmissions. The Peykar jams Organisation, which has lost many of its top activists, has not been able to print its paper

LETTERS

for a long time. Only the Fedayee Guerrillas have succeeded in publishing and circulating Kar. The circulation, of their weekly paper course, is very limited, for top security must be considered. One mistake by a supporter who is caught with one paper means death without a douot Despite the involvement of the regime in a fierce and longstanding war with Iraq, much military involvement is being put into the The army, in co-operation Kurdistan front. with the revolutionary guards, tried for a long time to occupy the town of Bukan, the base of the Fedayee Guerrillas in Kurdistan, and where the Komolah and the Democrat Party had concentrated. According to the regime's radio, by the end of September the army managed to advance into the town and push the revol- But the fighting has been utionaries back. One soldier who recently came back fierce. from the front with a finger missing, said that from amongst 300 soldiers who went to Kurdistan from one military base, only 15 had survived. Daily life for the masses is harder than two million refugees from before. Roughly the war are dispersed throughout the country.

The food shortages are felt by everyone, even though basic foods are sold by coupon. Inflation has put much pressure on the working non-manual workers on class and all other limited salaries. Though the government claims that inflation is about 25 percent, prices are often trebled. Unemployment has gone well above three million. This figure may well rise because workers who do not identify closely with the regime are being sacked from the public sector. Private sector activity has also diminished substantially and is incapable of creating new employment. As a result internal productivity increases are almost nil.

Besides all these economic pressures on the repression is so fierce that people masses, scarcely dare to object. From the point of view of repression, it is much worse than in the period of the Shah. The Shah imprisoned and tortured his opponents but this regime tortures and eliminates without any fear.

All recreational facilities such as music centres, theatres, swimming pools, night clubs and so forth are banned. Universities are still closed. The TV has no educational programmes.

All these pressures besides war and economic pressure are increasingly making people fed up with the regime, but still a considerable percentage of people are silent because the war continues. In my view it is very hard to believe that any drastic change is possible before the The departure of Banideath of Khomeini. Sadr and Rajavi has not brought much hope for the people. Manesh Tehran 7 October 1981 *This letter has been slightly shortened.

To affiliate or not to affiliate? Debate is raging in my NALGO branch about the Labour we should affiliate to whether Party. There's going to be a ballot about it next April. The executive says in the latest should join issue of Public Service that we because a moderate union like NALGO could stop the Labour Party from adopting extreme policies! A lot of Tories at work are against it because they want to keep politics out of NALGO'. On The the other hand the left is all for it.

Affiliation to the Campaign for NALGO Labour Party is being pushed by supporters of Militant. Some friends of mine in the SWP say the Labour Party is a load of rubbish but still think we should affiliate.

I don't think much of the Labour Party but voting against affiliation seems to mean siding with the right-wingers. Where does the RCP stand on this? "Perplexed" Jenny Taylor Southwark Pat Gordon writes: We think NALGO activists should vote against affiliation to the Labour Party. Instead we think they should fight for the union to set up a political fund. Such a fund could be used and anti-imperialist finance to campaigns or other political activities in the interests of the working class.

Of course we don't want to keep politics out of NALGO. But it's a question of what sort of politics. We want to promote working class politics in the union - and the Labour won't assist that. Labour's policies Party provide no defence against voluntary redundancies and wage cuts, and no way forward on the key political issues.

The SWP's position confirms its irrelevance: why maintain an independent organisation if you advise workers to affiliate to the Labour Party? If the SWP thinks the Labour Party's good enough for NALGO members it should affiliate too. It's fear of taking an independent stand - even if this means taking the same position as the right in a particular vote reflects its inability to fight the politics of Labourism in the trade unions.

Irish meeting banned I would like to follow up a letter concerning and victimisation of seven the suspension students by Middlesex Polytechnic authorities which appeared in the last issue of the next step. The writer pointed out that several of those victimised by the Poly Directorate for their part in last year's occupation were also identified as supporters of the national liberation struggle in Ireland. The writer also referred to the hysteria generated after the decision by one union meeting to donate £1000 to the Irish Socialist Party's London support Republican group to cover fines imposed for spray-painting Stoodlis Already this term the Poly authorities have demonstrated their willingness to clamp down on any person or group supporting the Irish liberation struggle. Now the victimised students face expulsion from the Poly - not just a one year suspension. Further steps have been taken to curtail debate on Ireland. On 24 September the Poly assistant director John Duke attempted to ban a meeting organised by the Irish Society at All Saints, The meeting had been scheduled to start at 7.30pm with a showing of the film, The H-Block hunger strike. However, at 4.30pm the All Saints site vice-president received a letter informing him that the book ing was cancelled. Subsequently, the lecture room was locked up and the projectionist sent home. The vice-president phoned Duke and demanded an explanation. He was told that all meetings on Ireland would be banned from the All Saints site. Duke later denied this.

The meeting took place despite the ban, although the film could not be shown. Over 40 people attended to hear the two guest Maureen Maguire of Provisional speakers: Sinn Fein and Frank Murphy of the Irish Republican Socialist Party.

On 1 October Duke wrote to the union executive to 'clarify' the position. Despite the rhetoric and intentional ambiguity, Duke succeeded in making his position and that of the Poly Directorate clear: the authorities feel that they are entitled to censor and prohibit any goes beyond meeting which they consider of political prescribed certain bountaine debate. This can only be seen as part of the wider attempt by the state to stifle debate on Ireland and thus emasculate any movement which challenges its role in Ireland.

The response both to the victimisation of the seven students and to the banning of the Irish Society meeting has been minimal. Many students, it seems, are ready to back the estab lishment on both these issues, despite their consequences for student union integrity and autonomy. I would urge all readers of the next step in colleges to raise motions in support of the seven those facing expulsion especially students. of the Irish and to protest at the Society meeting at the All Saints site.

Joan Hoey North London Chairperson Irish Society, Enfield site the next step, November 1981 19

LONDON

Can professors, priests, ecologists Preparing for power and radicals stop capitalism cruising into oblivion? Or will only class war deal with the bourgeoisie's plans? Can the world economy recover from the recession? What's going on in industry?

How long will the union bureaucrats be able to sabotage the fight for jobs? When will apartheid be smashed in South Africa? What are the prospects for revolution in Poland? Does the far left in Britain have any prospects at all?

Confused? You won't be if you attend the six remaining Preparing for power educational discussions.

Weekly on Mondays at 7pm.

Polytechnic of Central London, student union building, room 1F, Bolsover St, London W1 (nearest tube: Great Portland St/. E1 per session. Write to BM RCT, London WCIN 3XX, or phone 274 3951 for more details.

Smash the Prevention Racism

SMASH THE PTA CAMPAIGN

RECALL CONFERENCE

Saturday 6 February 10am-6pm House, St John's Way, Caxton London N19 The March 1981 Coventry conon Ireland recalled to and the assess the work done next steps for building labour ference movement support for the Irish struggle. Get your union branch or organisation to delegate you For more details contact Keith now! Tompson on 01-274 3951

SPTAC

Conference 6 February

CHANGE YOUR UNION'S IRISH POLICY!

If you are a member of NALGO, ASTMS, TGWU or UCATT and want to win your freedom, then contact SPAC. Trade union the to support unions to put a motion to the forthcoming union support annual conferences.

RCP*

activities

COVENTRY

Coventry Smash the PTA Week of Action on Ireland.

Campaign discussion. building. Brixton prison, by social. of Terrorism Act Campaign Torchlit demonstration on the seventh anniversary of the intro.

duction of the PTA, Friday 27 November. Support the struggle for Irish freedom! Assemble outside Mornington Crescent tube station at 6pm for the demonstration to Archway. South London Workers Against Public meeting on fighting racism Cleansing our ranks Wednesday 9 December, 7.30pm. Lower Hall, in the unions. Lambeth Town Hall, Acre Lane, SW2 (nearest tube: Brixton).

Regular meetings in East London East London SPTAC meets on alternate Sundays at 2pm.

• East London WAR meets on • the next step discussion group Fridays at 7pm. For more details write to Box 22, meets every week. 136 Kingsland High St, London E8, or phone 274 3951.

MANCHESTER

Public meetings. Manchester University, students union building, Oxford Rd, 7.30pm. Speaker: Nick Jenkins. Thursday • Struggle for Iran Foot needs Benn - but who 5 November. Speaker: Kate Marshall, Thursday needs them? 26 November. Fighting for gay rights Speaker: Alex Farrell. Thursday 3 December. Manchester Workers Against Unions must oppose racism in the NHS! Throw out Patrick Jen- Racism kin's racist questionnaire! Join Recall • the MANWAR protest, Saturday 7 November, 12 noon. Wythenshawe hospital. Manchester University, Campaign Poulton campus. Irish for struggle groups are now fighting in these Write to SPTAC, BM RCT London WIN 3XX 2-6 November. University of Warwick, students union building.

• Monday 2 November, 7.30pm The Patriot Game: film and three Arts Room HO52, • Tuesday 3 November, 7.30pm.

Play: Terence McSwiney (died in 1920 after 74 days on hunger strike). Followed • Wednesday 4 November, 7.30pm. Debate on Labour Party's Irish policy. Speakers: SPT AC, Labour Party, Tony Mc- Nally (CPGB Midlands secretary).

• Rally to mark the seventh anniversary of the PTA and to protest against British rule in Ireland. Saturday 28 November, 11am- 1pm. Coventry city centre.

• Coventry SPTAC meets fortevenin as Phone 01-274 3951 for details.

Monday nightly on Public meetings. Warwick University, students union build- • Khomeini's Iran. Thursday 12 ing. 7.30pm. Debate with Workers Power November. on 'the united front. Thursday • Beyond the women's move- 17 November. ment. Thursday 26 November.

• Smashing the apartheid state.

Thursday 3 December. Coventry Workers Against Fortnightly planning and Racism discussion meetings. 7pm: next on 12 November.

Phone 01-274 3951 for details.

Lunchtime meetings. Leeds University, students union building, Woodhouse Lane, 1pm. • Battle for Iran, Thursday 5 • Pacifism or class war? A November. debate on nuclear disarmament.

Thursday 19 November. Smash the PTA Campaign Northern labour movement conference on Ireland

AFTER THE HUNGER

STRIKES - WHAT NEXT?

Saturday 5 December, social. Our answer to Patrick Jenkin's questionnaire, MANWAR public meeting. Speaker: Pam Lawrence.

Thursday 12 November, 7.30pm.

students union building, Oxford Rd.

Manchester Smash the PTA • Taking Ireland to the TUC Tape/slide show of the Workers' March for Irish Freedom, plus discussion. Tuesday 3 November, 7.30pm. Preston Polytechnic, • Torchlit procession to commemorate the Manchester Martyrs - and support the H-Block protestors. Thursday 19 November.

• Manchester SPTAC meets on alternate Fridays at 7pm. Contact sellers of the next step, write to Box 33, Corn Exchange Buidling, Hanging Ditch, Manchester M4 3BD, or phone 01-274 3951.

Staffa fights on! HOT ON THE HEELS of their infamous sell-out at Laurence Scotts in Manchester, the AUEW mafia have got a new headache - this time in East London. Over workers, 400 60 percent black, voted to occupy their nearly plant in defence of jobs. The company, weeks ago Staffa Products, makes hydraulic equipment. It had announced plans to move its entire East London workforce redundant.

Plymouth, operations to five to occupy. ASTMS staff members as well as The workers voted fight. the engineers joined the workforce that only last November accepted nearly 40 redundancies, in an area that's seen closure after closure go by without opposition, this was news indeed You could tell the union officials weren't too enthusiastic from the outset.

Chris Newson, one of the AUEW stewthe local ASTMS official came they how described with a letter from his union's solicitors, advising the staff to get outside ards, the gates - or else forfeit official recog- First, nition and their strike pay. The unity down between the shop floor and staff workers undermined by district secretary, subtly suggested to the engineering workers they should follow Vic was Then tactics. suit. We told him to get stuffed, and make this dispute official The Thursdays, injunction was While icated, the bosses were occupation. 200 police descended on broke up the occupation. are workers fighting 10am -6pm. Belle Vue community centre, Belle Vue Rd, Leeds.

Registration: f2 (unemployed: £1.25). Trade union activists from Ireland and Britain. Discussion, debate, workshops, films, evening Terence MeSwiney': a play performed by Coventry SPTAC, Tuesday 3 November. the next step pounds to keep Staffa in London they contemptuously. didn't pay a consultancy firm a fortune for nothing. Their carefully laid plans to dismissed it revealed to the workers when they found secret documents in the managers' offices expedite containing a step-by-step plan of action.

government making the existent union. one to workers as they maintain stark The For a ence Scott, responded. 39 Somers Road his blackmailing Swift, the AUEW concentrate forcing Boyd and Duffy to officials background to the manoeuvring was of course their fear of legal action against the union, after an on the entire prevarserved

AUEW

for moving in the the kill. On Saturday 17 October, at 5am, and Staffa Management moved back in along with a security firm, and proceeded to move equipment out.

The workers received letters a few days later informing them they were sacked.

The AUEW had just got around to making the dispute official when the police moved in. Clearly the bureaucrats hoping they won't have to pay out too much strike pay now. But the Staffa keep are determined to some lessons. Firstly, about the bosses' tactics.

They've learnt Contrary to the advice they received from some local well-wishers, the injunction Staffa is out to smash the union -part of the reason for the was not a bluff. Plymouth move - and, once the occupcouldn't afford to lose customers by letting it drag out. What's more, the bosses have learnt some lessons on, ation was from the AUEW's handling of Laurence Scotts. They knew the union bureaucrats would run for cover at the first sign of Secondly, its become pretty clear that all the discussion about the viability of trouble. the firm, the good economic arguments' for staying in East London, are irrelevant when it comes to the crunch. The bureaucrats have been pushing a familiar line: •Staffa makes the best hydraulic equipment in the country, 'skilled workforce, etc. Not only is it obvious to everyone that Japanese manufacturers have been very successfully competing with Staffa's parent company (US-based Brown and Sharpe); it's also clear that the bosses aren't in the slightest interested in the unions' apologetics. Even when the GLC made the gesture of offering millions of Staffa the move to Plymouth were The move to Plymouth makes excellent economic sense from their point of view wages, 10W reduced workforce and a weak or nonsubsidies. Staffa the their struggle facing reality outside the factory gates is in fact the same for every group of workers taking on the bosses today. Whether it's Laur- British Leyland or Staffa, trade union militants are faced with a ruthless management - backed up by the courts, the bailiffs and the police - and a spineless union leadership prepared to settle for a pittance.

Staffa can and must win. They need your support. Send generous donations to: STAFFA strike committee Walthamstow, E17 Pass motions of support in your trade union branch. And if you live in East London get down to the picket line mass pickets every Monday 7am.

Judy Harrisor on bitter Staffa workers occupying to save jobs.