The Next Step: No. 47, May 1984

next step Rank and file control the key All out to win No 47 May 1984

COAL

review of the Revolutionary Communist Party Protesting On 30 March Yorkshire miners joined an RCP-organised protest against the visit of Tory Party chairman John Selwyn Gummer to Bradford. Gummer got his face slapped and two people were arrested.

ONUY OF

20p Revolutionit could happen here p12. Looking foralead: Yorkshire miners need national action to stop pit closures

the

NEWS

Labour movement Supporting the miners The left and the miners' strike Winning all-out action 10 Merseyside Militants Ireland Border war Idiot imperialism

FEATURES

Editorial 11 Scargill's soft centre The British revolution 12 Violent class confrontation is nothing new in Britain. Before and after the First World War the ruling class was rocked by working class upheaval. We explain what it takes to make a revolution - and why it could happen here.

Third World wars 16 Slaughter in the Sahara Reviews 20 Utopian revival Arms for Loyalists 22 Letters BM RCP London WC1N 3XX 2 the next step, May 1984 next step No. 47 May 1984 monthly review of the Revolutionary Communist Party Publisher Junius Publications Ltd, BCM JPLTD, London WCIN 3XX.

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Correspondence to The Editor, the next step, BCM JPLTD, ISSN 0144-350 X May 1984 7 Stop the Yard! 8 Drugs diversion Racism Sari Squad on tour Capitali 18 Rent bo Housing s Raymond O 23 Activities

SUPPORT

the miners! We've collected food and money for the miners at hundreds of workplaces and working class estates throughout Britain. Help us keep the strike going. Rush donations to our fighting fund for the miners at Political status now! Problems of everyday life Europe's war against illegals'

THE NUM

to come. This Preparing for even year andebates, films and fun. There local pn. specialist courses coverfrbyshire, debate on Loc, the Bolshevik regional divisions union. closer links was To help prevent the bosses starving the miners into submission RCP branches have collected funds and food for the miners. By mid-April around £1500 had been collected at street meetings trade union branches, factory

CATIONAL LINE MINEWORKERS)

KENT AREA

On the march: the RCP's strike special sold thousands on pickets and demonstrations

SUPPORT YOUR

MEN IN

ts': Kent miners' wives march for support in the Midlands. At Keresley in in in South Yorkshire local RCP branches have helped form women's support en's active involvement in the strike impaigning between Yorkshire militants and the isolated Nottinghamshire strikers who have since formed an unofficial rank and file strike committee.

Shortly alter the mass lobby of the April national out a strategy for winning executive meeting in Sheffield, around 80 miners from Yorkshire collieries be a week-long series of talks, and three Notts pits as well from representalves Scotland and ruth Wales squeezed into One outcome to Marxism CP meeting at a nearby - nd a few days later after Collecting gates, in hospital canteens and bus garages all over the country. These funds have been handed over to rank and file miners' organisations and women's support groups in the major coalfields. next step the miner must be won* Harris (F a demonstration of Kent and Yorkshire miners - and Notts strikers through Nottingham, more miners came along to an RCP rank and file miners' conference.

meetings provided an opportunity to discuss the issues of the strike - for first REBe time lor many miners - and helped to overcome some of the barriers created by the national leadership's restrictive area by area strike strategy. Vanloads of food collected from city estates have been distributed to strike welfare committees from Polmaise in Scotland, through Edlington in Yorkshire to Aylesham in Kent.

Supporting the miners was inevitable. been to make theminers'strikeunited andeffective Solidarity In Bradford, Birmingham, Manchester and London RCP branches organised tours of local workplaces by striking The aim was to do miners. more than raise money - it was to win political support for the in their miners struggle against the Government. Where possible we arranged meetings BaSS either inside or outside the The workplace. results ranged from offers of sympathetic action from railway workers in Birmingham, to help with picketing from Bradford engineering workers, to nurses at the threatened Thornton View hospital in West Yorkshire joining miners' pickets. This solidarity work had wider

LOO

Some engineering plants in Bradford their first mass meeting of workers for many years. Miners experience in picketing was Instrumenta in pushing a strike by workers at the Moorlight electric. light factory Ashton-under- Lyne towards victory. Picketing In Scotland, Yorkshire, Lan- Derbyshire and the Midlands

RCP

joined pickets at pits, power stations, docks and transport We also helped to depots. When the Coal Board announced a major programme of pit closures in March, the Revolutionary Communist Party recognised that a major confrontation between the working class and the employers From the beginning of the strike our members and supporters have been out actively mobilising solidarity with the miners. Our aim has and to win the widest and most active working class support for the miners' resistance to the Coal Board, the Government, the courts and the police.

women's flying organise pickets that police road blocks between Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire more effectively than the men's. On 9 April a detachment in when o from pit viles g in the Doncaster area succeeded in blocking the entrance to Ollerton colliery in Notts and turning around many more scabs than earlier pickets had achieved. Women Not just soup and sandwiches has been the theme of the RCP's extensive involvement women's support groups, especially in the Yorkshire area. We have argued for women's active involvement - in collecting and distributing beffefits, in picketing, and most impor tantly, the committees that run the dispute. We challenged the sexist have attitudes displayed by many miners' pickets and demonstrations as prejudicial to the working class unity we need against the bosses And we have challenged the attempts to keep union's women in a subservient role on the sidelines. Already women have made a big impact in the dispute - in pickets of the Coal Board headquarters in Doncaster, pickets of Nottinghamshire collieries and on demonstrations ir Coalville, Leicester, and in Mansfield and Nottingham.

Protesting On 30 March Yorkshire miners joined an RCP-organised protest against the visit of Tory Party chairman John Selwyn Gummer to Bradford. Gummer got his face slapped and two people were arrested. Up the miners: Manchester Massey Ferguson workers with local RCP candidate Dave Halisworth in a tactory gate solidarity rally

BUNEIL

RAR

Tory кілі сочни

SUPPORT

SUPPORT

THE

THE

MINERS

• MINERS

On 4 April 30 miners joined Sheffield's RCP branch in a lobby of the city's Labour coun cil. We demanded a freeze on miners' rent and rates; transport for flying pickets; funds. facilities and nurseries; restrictions no on collecting money for the miners; and a halt to council support for Bob Radcliffe (reflex the police until martial law conditions were suspended. While the council expressed deep con cern' it provided no practical assistance.

THE PARTLO.

THE FUTURE

ROP

REVOLUTIONARY

COMMUNIST PARTY

Lobbying Shame faced councillors contributed a few pounds to the miners strike fund. The council later, agreed to freeze rents and rates for the 2000 miners who live in the city. However, it has yet to agree to provide free school meals through the Easter holidays as other councils have done. We intend to keep up the pressure to win this and the rest of the miners modest demands from what claims to be a socialist Labour council. the next step, May 1984 3

Winning all-out action Miners strike From Day One of the miners' strike the Revolutionary Communist Party has been campaigning to win support for an all-out national stoppage. To turn the union's areaby-area strike into a broader working class response to the employers offensive, of the NUM leadership and the views of many militant miners who have tended to follow it spontaneously. As the NUM executive moved slowly towards a national strike in the sixth week of the dispute, some miners began to share our view that six hard and hungry weeks had been wasted.

The message that only rank and file control over the strike at pit, area and national level could carry the strike forward was beginning to get across.

National action *I realised by about the second or third day of the flying picketing that we needed to get beyond the area strikes and have a national strike Yorkshire miner Danny Ostle told the miners' rank and file conference in Nottingham.

The area strategy meant a lack of involvement at pit level in the militant areas, lack of coordination among the various areas on strike, and a failure to take the arguments to miners in the moderate areas: I don't think we should be afraid of going down to Notts and having it out with them, in the welfares, around their homes it necessary, as well as on the picket lines. "In fact because of the saturation policing it's easier to do it away from the picket Lines. And you can get through the roadblocks if you're care ful - 1 know because I've done it to go to Ollerton and we're already seeing some results in North Notts." The Coal Board launched an all-out national offensive with the full backing of the Government, the courts and We argued that the police. to meet this onslaught with tactics of limited action and delay was to court disaster.

The employers' extraordinary attack demanded extraordinary response. Yet many miners defended the NUM's selective and divisive strategy. They argued that 4 the next step, May 1984 we have challenged the approach under the NUM's constitthe ution was only T115 spreadway go about ing the strike and that the President had to give a lead for all-out action. While MacGregor and Thatcher, the judges and the police made up the rules they went along to as suit their needs, the miners were prepared to be held back by the fine print of the union rule book. We argued that to win had to this dispute take the measures necessary to meet a concerted capitalist attack with a classwide, nationwide response.

Rank and file control The RCP has emphasised the need for mass meetings and representative, accountable strike committees, to ensure the mass of miners actively participate in the strike, and that strike leadout the wishes ers carry of the rank and file. We have seen that union moderate leaders in the areas and in other unions cannot deliver the support of their members for the

TAKING CONTROL

A handbook for trade union militants TAKING CONTROL outlines a strategy for reclaiming our unions and rebuilding them as effective fighting organisations strike. Rank and tie in volvement and control is the only guarantee of united effective strike and sympathy action that can force the Government to back down on pit closures.

file Many rank and miners have become frustrated by the disorganisation, delaying tactics and bureaucratic inertia of the NUM leadership. RCP's Sheffield At the meeting miners from Monktonhall Scotland and from South Wales described how their local leaders refused to provide funds for transport to the lobby of The union the executive. leaders did not relish too much rank and file pressure, so the militants had find their own funds to for the dispute. Miners from Hatfield in the Doncaster area explained how their attempt to make their strike committee more representative and active had fierce hostility from the controlling clique. Miners in the moderate areas face even greater difficulties. Geoff Poulter from Bolsover, a colliery in North Derbyshire miners whose the Notts NUM, explained their problems of isolation and financial hardship. He emphasised the importance of meetings of file rank and miners clarify the issues, and made clear that for them

VELY

it was a fight to the finish.

Ballot campaign The RCP's call for a campaign for a national ballot has proved the most con troversial issue at our meetings. because confusion between of any our call for a ballot campaign and the clamour from

OUT

SOON

FROM

JUNIUS

Rernard Brown (reflex) Notts strikers are not scabs: isolated militants need national unity all sections of the establishment for a poll. It is because the issue of the ballot most sharply divides those who look at the dispute from a narrow trade union viewpoint, and those who take a wider working class perspective. The NUM has held back from calling a national ballot because it fears it cannot deliver the support of its members. The union has tried to win support by the backdoor methods of rol ling area strikes, and more recently by manipulating the rules to reduce the majority required for strike action. While the NUM's strategy may win short-term results it cannot mobilise the majority of miners, together with other workers, for a major showdown with the bosses and their state. To do we have to get out that of the committee rooms and campaign for support for all-out strike action. We have been calling for a ballot as the only way to involve the Inas: of miners, link up the activists and overcome regional divisions. Most militants have been reluctant to take this bolder the dispute. approach to One Notts miner Bolsover meeting declared a view frequently expressed earlier in the strike: see what you're getting at, and I hate to say this, but if we go for a ballot, we'll lose'. Our response was that this was to accept cereal before the battle had been properly joined. If we don't win majority support among the for the strike,

HEHACTS

then there is no way that we We have can make it bite. no alternative but to go on a vigorous campaign to win a ballot and then move on to win the strike At Sheffield the branch secretary of Dodworth pit asserted that miners in safe pits and safe areas had no right to vote away the jobs Kent of miners in and South Wales and Scotland Yorkshire'. But, and argued, the area-by-area gave strategy effectively Notts miners and other

NOTTS

MINERS

FOR THE

STRIKE

moderate areas a veto on the full national strike that was the only way to safeguard the jobs in every coalfield The only way to save to get a 100 per jobs is cent strike action 80 percent is simply not good enough. Picketing out had been successful in spreading the strike from a few areas lo the 80 per cent level. But it had not succeeded after three or four weeks in The getting the rest out. only way to do that, to win vital to success. the unity to win national was ballot for all-out action The viability trap Many miners argue that closing running pIts down the industry is unnecessary. They maintain that with reasonable subsidies and protection agthe imports alnst cheap British coal industry could be competitive. At one of our meetings a Yorkshire miner echoed Arthur Scargill's view that we produce the cheapest deepoutside mined coal South Africa'. We pointed out that

PARTE YANT

TRANCE

making the British coal industry viable at a time of capitalist recession means miners sacrificing their livelihoods Making British coal competitive on the world market with coal produced in South Africa means making conditions in Britain's pits like those under the Apartheid regime. And that, we argued, -100 000 miners working like slaves in the 100 super-pits Mac- Gregor and Thatcher are planning to leave open.

RCP

supporters posed the question another way.

Instead of asking - how can the British coal make industry viable? - it's time British miners started asking capitalism a viable system for miners? Instead of counting the pit closures and redundancies needed to let the Coal Board survive, we need to carry on fighting to keep every pit open and save every job, to sure we survive the crisis And we argued the need to extend that fight into a struggle for a better one whose viabilisystem ty does not depend on destroying workers' livelihoods wiping ane

WOOE

CONSULES

Fran Eden Rock solid strikers: but Yorkshire miners need more than guts to win

its role in the strike. dispute. about the political divisions that limit the scope of the strike. They have ignored the crude nationalist policies of the NUM leadership and they are silent about attempts to justify the miners' case on the grounds of economic viability and profitability. The collaborationist perspective of saving four industry and making it more competitive are views that the left simply preters to forget. Some factions have gone further. Socialist Organiser, for example, had no inhibitions about actually reprinting arguments The from NUM pamphlet Coal not Dole in its special strike supplement. Servile Left-wing organisations that call themselves revolutionary are happy to accept the existing leadership and of direction the miners' strike. In this respect they are considerably benind many miners who are profoundly concerned about the way the strike is conducted and all too aware of the implications internal divisions and lack of political leadership.

Instead of facing up to the problems of the strike the left groups have taken on the roles of jesters and cheerleaders. Left-wing papers assure the miners that everything is all right - we need only more of the same.

Socialist Action paints a picture of mass solidarity and support: *Across the country, activists are building rallies, establishing labour movement committees, and organising factory tours.

This kind of support, along the with stopping ment of coal, and preparing solidarity action, can win?.

Fantasy So cia list Action prefers to ignore the real difficulties that stand in the way of winning effective solidarity action stop the to movement of coal. Instead it presents a fantasy world of mass which is nothing short of deception.

Miners who have gone to steel plants at Ravenscraig or Port Talbot Scunthorpe and those who have been out on strike for weeks with little financial assistnot be fooled by idiotic complacsuch ency. Big possibilities To compensate for its polit- The left and the miners strike Jesters at King Arthur's court The miners' strike has confirmed the continuing decline and irrelevance of the British left. Pat Roberts examines In contrast to past miners' strikes the left has not even made a pretence of politically intervening in the current The political problems which the strike faces are simply ignored. The various left groups have kept quiet ical irrelevance the left has opted for phrase-mongering.

This is what Socialist Organiser means by leadership: *A general strike could stop MacGregor's pit closures plan and rip up the anti-union laws.

It can win this struggle. And it can do more. It can make it impossible for the Tories to govern; and the level of mobilisation involved would open up big possibilities beyond that. We TUC to call on the organise for a general strike.

general strike could indeed open up "big poss- It can do this and it could do that. After a few pints anything possible. While we are asking Len Murray to organise a general strike, why not call on lan MacGregor to pay the miners' full wages into their strike fund?

A tew more pints will dim the memory collapse of the Triple Alliance and the internal splits in the

NUM

and make victory seem that much closer. Cheerleaders When it comes to cheerleading from the sidelines the Socialist Workers' Party takes first prize. The SWP has used the strike to pull forces together after a long period of downturn and decline. Party supporters have put up a lot of posters and distributed a lot of placards. At the same time they have gone great lengths to tell the miners what they already know. Paul Foot's speaking tour has turned the evasion of political argument into fine art. Night after night audiences have roared with laughter as Paul Foot tore into Ian MacGregor, Ray Chadburn and the Tories. This may have been very humorous, but it was criminally complacent. Tact and discretion Instead of offering a strategy the left has simply repeated the arguments that militants already knew by heart. Socialist Worker, Militant, Socialist Action and Socialist Organiser all declared that direct action counts and balloting is irrelevant. The left united in admiration for Arthur Scarstrategy which Was proclaimed universally as astute the only way and to win the strike. Socialist Action congratulated the NUM leadership on its divisive area-by-area strike strategy: *The determination of the left on the NUM executive to base themselves on the areas where the jobs are threatened is absolutely correct." The left tactfully forgot to after a mention that twenty week overtime ban and six weeks into the dispute a national strike had still been ach-

HOL

ieved. It ignored the problem that region-by-region action left the NUM leadership in total control withaccountable or our beng responsible for the dispute.

It evaded the lessons of the past show that dis- Pures conducted on an area basis almost always favour the right and prevent the emergence national focus. The left kept silent about the negative consequences of the official strategy - in particular the strengthening of parochialism. The left's journalists looked the other way when striking Notts miners were abused and by Yorkshire i eaten in Nottingham on 14 April.

Most importantly of all the left indulged and strengthened the illusion that flying picketing on its own the way Tereseted forward. Picket worship picketing is an im- Flying portant tactic for spreading the strike. But it is nothing more than a tactic - on its own it does not represent a strategy. It is not a substitute for winning the arguments and mobilising sup- The left's worship of picketing is a symptom of economism its un-

BELS

critical for support any action and its silence on the crucial political issues of the dispute. Virtually every left group parrotted the argument that no man has the right to vote on another man's job' As an affirmation of the principle of no redundancies this statement correct. IS But a principle is not an argument, much less a strategy. Millions of workers have been voted out of their jobs in recent years and unless our class adopts a different strategy millions more will lose their jobs in the near future Repeating ad nauseum that no one has the right to vote on another man's job will not confront the problem unity against winning redundancies. In the miners' dispute this argument re presents an evasion of the problem of forging a solid basis of mass support for the strike.

TOUR®

IN MINE COAL

-AND •

ACCREGOR

win miners support for the strike they have to be convinced by political argument, not confronted breast-beating with about principles. And ballot or no ballot, as long as the miners in Nottingham or anywhere else are not convinced that they should support the strike, then the strike will not be won. Greek chorus The left met the RCP's call for a national campaign to win a ballot for an allout national strike with derision. As far as the left was concerned the course taken by the strike The left's enough. pathetic calls for more milspreading itancy and for the strike had all the conviction of a chorus trying give a Greek tragedy a happy ending. Flattering militants does not help to win strikes. All that it can do is to create the illusion that the existing leadership of the

NUM

and the TUC can beat the Coal Board and the Government. This 15 exactly the conclusion the left has drawn. Every miner who has been out picketing power stations, docks and depots knows that until now solidarity from other unions has been more in the way of token gestures than anything real Not so the left. Paper solidarity While steelworkers' leader Bill Sirs was telling miners stop picketing steel works, Socialist Action was praising Sirs' union for its

NAVANAL MON OF MENLHORKERS

YORKSHIRE AREA

ROUSTON DRIE BRANCH

ARTHRTSEARGTY

EACH ACTORDING TO HIS ABL

ROTCH ACCORDING TO HIS KEED

Scargill ascendant: the left carry the banner for the union bureaucracy magnificent efforts. Militant heaped praise on the transport and railway unions as well as on the steelworkers: *The tremendous lead from the top in the T&G

NUR

Aslef, and ISTC black coal movements should now be backed up by mass meetings all areas. Papers like Socialist Organiser also devoted their presses to making the Labour bureaucrats token gestures look good. Telling militant miners what they already know is bad enough. But at least militants are fighting hard to win the strike. Echoing the dishonest phrases of trade union leaders who have done nothing for the miners is simply sordid. It is worse than dishonest. At a time when everyone can see that Bill Sirs is calling for scabbing and the other union leaders are hiding behind the rule book the left has launched a public relations exercise for the bureaucrats. The Triple Alliance of coal, rail and steel unions is a bureaucratic fiction - yet It 15 peddled as good coin by a left clutching paper resolutions. Rhetoric We understand the can silence of the British left.

Its disengagement from any political struggle stems from its subservience to the labour bureaucracy. All problems are swept under the carpet and stage

CC C

given over to bureau- 1S cratic manoeuvring. Even the perfunctory criticisms Miners strike that the SWP used to make Scargill and the rest are no longer heard at its meetings All the old talk about rank and file action turns out to be pure rhetoric. Instead of politically fighting for rank and file control Militant action now enthuses about the 'tremendous lead from the top'. Many on the left shamefacedly agree with our criticisms of the labour bureau- Yet they argue that cracy. now is not the time to raise They these issues. should remember Trotsky's warning to their predecessors during the General Strike of 1926: The conduct of the really revolutionary elements in the British proletariat and above all the COSS predeter mined by this. They will uphold the unity of mass action by every means; but they will not permit even the semblance o the opportunist unity with leaders of the Labour Party and the trade unions. An implacable struggle against every act of treachery or attempted treachery and the ruthless exposure of the reformists illusions are the main elements in the work of genuinely revolutionary partici pants in the General Strike.

The left groups have had their say the 1984 miners' strike. They have indicated that they have more in common with Bill Sirs and Moss Evans than with the isolated militants struggling to establish rank and file organisation and action in Lancashire, Notts and Warwickshire. the next step, May 1984 5

Border warfare Ireland Today, the waging war against the republican movement: Irish National Liberation Army Glinchey first ever republican ed up to conceal undercover RUC operations republicans in the Twenty-six Counties.

The New Ireland Forum's debate on the Irish parties' options for future Anglo- Irish relations has sparked conflict in Dublin over how tar its report snowa pay service to nationalist traditions. But all sides agree on the need for more security cooperation with London. Twenty-six Counties complicity in Britain's Irish War has exposed the spurious character of the Republic's neutrality and independence. For more than British imperialou vears. ists and the Dublin regimes they sponsor have sustained the lie that the Southern "Free State' created by Partition in 1921 is really free.

But the war continues into the eighties, Britain's domination of the whole of Ireland is becoming increasingly difficult to disguise. Threat Anglo-Irish cooperation against the national liberation struggle has grown response to the growing threat to establishment control on both sides of the Border.

In the Six Counties, the IRA's armed struggle has stretched the forces of the Crown. Ten members of the security forces, had been killed by mid-April. Last month's attack on a Catholic South Belfast showed the IRA's ability to strike back against British legal terror. British troops the streets of the Six Counties face hostility open and attack from increasing numbers of nationalists. In late March a soldier the Queen's Regiment, which granted the was recently freedom of Belfast by grateful Loyalist officials, discovered that he was not free West to wander nationalist Belfast when he was critically injured by brick-throwing youths in Monagh. Explode As the cycle of British and nationalist

TO OTESSIOD

resistance hots up in the North, the tensions created the war threaten explode over the Border into the Republic. At the 1983 endi of 2000 Irish police and troops fought running battles with a handful of IRA volunteers around Ballinamore in County Leit- The Irish security forrim. ces got back kidnapped supermarket boss Don Tid- But they lost a police ey. 6 the next step, May 1984 British and Irish governments are together chief Dominic Mcpassed over the Border and into the history books of cross-Border collaboration on 18 March, as the extradited from the Twenty-six Counties to stand trial for political offences in the North.

Royal Ulster Constabulary man John Harrison of the crack anti-terrorist squad told Belfast Crown Court on 29 March that the facts about his December 1982 execution of two INLA volunteers in Armagh had been coveragainst cadet and an Army private first - the soldier to be killed the Twenty-six Counties since the Civil War ended 60 years before.

Since the Ballinamore shoot-out Irish police have fought with Dominic Mc- Glinchey and stumbled republicans with large cache of explosives in Dundalk. After moving South last winter, the Irish War: seems likely there. Preference Increasing support for the struggle Britain is dealist reflected in Sinn Fein's electoral successes in the North. Republican candidates are displacing the pro- British Social Democratic and Labour Party as the nationalist community's first preference vote. Last June e Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams was elected MP for West Belfast on a traditional republican ticket of abstention from imperialist Parliament at Westminster. Sinn Fein has since scored further successes in council elections.

Sinn Fein's Sean McKnight won a seat on Belfast City Council in March with almost 3000 first preference The

SDLP

polled votes only 1040half its vote in the May 1981 election when Sinn Fein didn't stand.

Republican candidates have in creased also their vote in Southern by-elections. In June Sinn Fein is contesting four SCaL in the EEC elections in the Twenty-six Counties, while Vice President Danny Morrison challenging SDLP leader John Hume for his European seat in the North. The republican electoral challenge reflects the mounting instability of Trish political life. Offensive The crisis of British control in Ireland has forced the Twenty-six Counties regime cooperate with Britain in a security and political offensive against the republican movement. Free State forces have mounted huge operations in an effort to track down escaped IRA men after last September's "Great Escape' in the North, and to catch Dominic McGlinchey and Don Tidey's kidnappers. But the weakness of the Twenty-six Counties state means its forces are often poorly trained.

McGlinchey in chains: the fruits of cross-Border collaboration They are regularly outwitted by republicans. The spectacle of Irish troops charging in the back of republican hidedoor outs while IRA volunteers escaped out the front door, and ot seven Irish policemen being left tied up and trouserless by Dominic McGlinchey prompted the British government to send James Prior to Dublin in January to sort things out.

Extradition Prior met Irish justice minister Michael Noonan - Bruce Brit ct.21 Where Jyoube? While the Irish establishment backs British terror, peace campaigners from the Irish Labour Party and Irish CND attack Amer- They imperialism. plan to use President Reagan's

SULTECT

Ireland to assert Irish and warn neutrally ainst Ireland joining the US-dominated Nato. The absurdity of opp osing mythical American occupation in country occupied by British troops escaped British first time the a security conterence has taken place without the cover of economic or political negotiations. Within a fortnight the Rangers regiment the Republic's SAS - was given responsibility for running 'anti-terrorist" operations. The decision to extradite McGlinchey marks a new phase in Twenty-six Counties acquiescence to British demands Atter his recapture on St Patrick's Day this year, late night meeting of Cabinet ministers from the Fine Gael/Labour Party coalition decided to extradite him immediately. McGlinchey rushed to the wak Border and handed over to the

RUC

within 18 hours of being picked up - even though he was wanted in connection with several oftences in the South. McGlinchey's extradition was a blatant admission of the South's subservience to t22 nere voube?! CND leader Bruce Kent on a recent visit to the North.

Kent denounced the 120 US bases in Britain as the greatest surrender of sovereignty ever allowed by great power to anore other' While Irish radicals and the British left oppose American threats to the sovereignty of great powers like Britain and its satellite Twenty-six Coun ties, Britain's bloody denial of the Irish people's sovereignty goes enged. Britain. Now that it has opened the legal gate across Border, the the Twenty- Counties establishment six looks set to extradite several more republicans wanted in the North. Clampdown Alongside the joint security operations has come a concerted clampdown on republicans' political activities. In Britain, Sir George Baker's recent review of the Emergency Provisions Act stopped short of recom mending the proscription of Sinn Fein. But Baker did float the idea of disqualifying parties which refuse renounce the use of violence' from elections, and of encouraging targets of IRA attacks to sue Sinn Fein for compensation. Crush Ideas about proscribing Sinn Fein and strengthening the incitement to violence laws have been keenly debated in the Twenty-six Counties.

Government ministers have broken off relations with all local councils and bodies which include Sinn Fein representatives. Premier Garret Fitz- Gerald has warned that the ultimate legal sanction ag- Inaust antlimperansts could yet be introduced: No government Call eVel rule it out. A government that ruled out nternment would rule out the possible survival of democracy.' Today, the *survival of democracy" British imperialist-style in Ireland depends on crushing those who oppose Partition and British domination on both of the sides Border. The Southern establishment has done its best to help hold back the republican advance in the Six Counties.

Its New Ireland Forum is a feeble attempt to rebuild the credibility of the SDLP's constitutional nationalism. Destabilisation British pressure on Dublin to move against the republican movement is the culmination of progressive on the Free

TESLLICHOBS

State's room to manoeuvre.

Before the Second World War, the South was allowed to assert formal independence from Britain. During the war, the Twentysix Counties could retain Its neutral stance without threatening British interests.

Even the declaration of a Republic in 1949 was not a problem for Britain, given the absence of the publican threat. Once the current war got underway, the Republic's independent stance was modified. In 1976, it passed the Criminal Law Jurisdiction Act to allow trial in the South for offences committed in the North and Britain. Yet even then the Twenty-six Counties establishment could stall on extradition and overt security collaboration. In the eighties, formal Irish independence is fast becoming thing of the The past. stakes for British imperialism in Ireland are too high to allow any concessions to 'green' politicians. Fifteen years of war in the North and the effects of the

TELESSIO

have destabilised the Twenty-six Counties, where more than 200 000 un employed and public debt of almost £5 billion have already necessitated increased state repression.

this situation the potential for the war to spill over the Border and threaten the status quo throughout the whole of Ireland is immense. Increased collaboration between Dublin and London has only one aim: to end that threat by smashing the antiimperialist forces in Ireland.

Fight The Southern state seems well prepared for the battles Three in-

COUNCI

fantry battalions and a are squadron permanently deployed in 11 military posts along the Border. Trish has grown from 8000 when war began to 14 000 the today, while defence spending has increased by 300 cent in per real terms. The Twenty-six Counties now has the highest policepopulation ratio in West- Europe outside the North. All of this hardware has been bought to back up Britain's war against the

IRA.

As the security correspondent of the Irish Times recently noted, the idea of external defence is simply irrelevant in the face of the potential threat to internal security. Despite this formidable machinery of repression, the spread of war to the South is a positive development.

gives anti-imperialists in Britain the chance to expose Dublin's collaboration and smash the myth that Irish freedom was won in 1921. holds tremendous dangers for British imperialism. For 15 years, Britain has kept control of containing the struggle the Six Counties. But it cannot do so forever. Recent develop.

ments bring closer the day when the Irish proletariat will take up the fight for national freedom, and break the stalemate in the Irish War.

Political status now! It is three years this month since republican hunger strikers Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, McCreesh died in the H-blocks.

for political status. Today, rights of a new generation of Irish POWs.

accorded the status of political prisoners.

captured combatants in the continuing struggle for national liberation and self-determination. with which the British have attempted to label us and our struggle.'

That statement from Irish republican prisoners was smuggled out of the H-blocks of the Maze prison in October 1980.

Days of the later, prisoners began a hungerstrike in support of their demand for recognition as prisoners of war. Their protest ended inconclusively when Britain appeared to offer concessions. The following March, with no concessions fortha second coming, hungerstrike was launched. It was last from the spring to the autumn of 1981. Before its end, 10 hunger-strikers were dead. The hunger-strikers won support from the nationalist community the Six Counties. The first of them, Bobby Sands, was MP for Fermanagh elected and South Tyrone with 30 000 votes. more than After Bobby Sands' death on May, 100 000 people marched behind his coffin.

Every hunger-striker's death was followed by fierce fighting between British security forces Stop the Yard IN DECEMBER and March Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad crossed the Irish Sea, snatched two nationalists from the streets of Belfast under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and flew them backto London's Paddington top security Green police station. Last month London Irish Freedom Movement supporters staged a demonstration outside Scotland Yard, to Britain's legal PrOLeSL al terror the Irish

CLOSE

people. Flair The Irish prisoners, Tommy Quigley and Paul Kavanagh, now face a total of 16 firearms explosives charges. Commander Hucklesby of the antiterrorist squad disnas played the British establishment's usual flair for media management. Hucklesby has surrounded the prisoners with armed police and emphasised the seriousness" of their case, implying that Kavanagh at least is linked the Christmas bombing at Harrods. Hucklesby hopes to sustain Patsy O Hara and Ray We supported their fight we are campaigning for the We demand, as of right, political recognition and that we be we claim unis right as We refute most strongly the term 'criminal' nalist youth Seven nationalists were killed by plastic bullets. The extent of for the support hungerstrikers proved to the world that Irish republican prisoners were not criminals. Yet Britain refused to concede their demands. The Tory government was prepared to murder 10 young Irishmen to sustain the myth that a war for Irish national libeis a ration spiracy. Just On a recent trip to the Six Counties support of women republican prisoners in Armagh jail, we spoke to O'Hara Peggy whose son Patsy was the third hungerstriker to die, 21 May 1981. He was 24. The day Patsy was arrested I was out with his girlfriend.

When we came back the British Army was all over my house. Two Special Branch men went

ALL!

FREE PALA

Free the prisoners: putting pressure on the police a lynch-mob atmosphere to ensure a conviction on flimsy evidence. Terror The Irish Freedom Movechallenging the ment 1s anti-Irish prejudice that Hucklesby and the media have created around Quigley and Kavanagh. Our 'Stop the Yard' protest on 6 April focused attention on police terror against the Irish community under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Outside Scotland Yard, where police barriers to keep us back and a menacing line of black marias to keep us in order, IFM speaker Carol Taggart promised Hucklesby a hard time: "The British police are Two who died for Irish freedom: Bobby Sands and Patsy O'Hara up my stairs and came down laughing. They arrested Patsy and said that the Special Branch had found a sock in my house that matched a sock found by a hand grenade. Patsy got eight He was brutally beaten y Calls up in Long Kesh. He was put 'on the boards' without bed or blankets for refusing an internal examination' with a mirror.

When the first hunger-strike ended and they hadn't got the demands they were supposed to Bobby Sands and Patsy get, started negotiating over a second Bobby Sands was the officer commanding in the H-blocks

DROP THE CHARDS

mistaken if they think that bringing Irishmen to Britain their job easier. There here who are people will shout long and loud against British terror.' Quigley writes Both prisoners are now being held on remand Kavanagh in Wormwood Scrubs, Quigley in Brixton Tommy Quigley has jail. been writing to the Irish Freedom Movement about our work, his case, and the hypocritiestablishment's cal manipulation ofhysteria about 'terrorists": *That was great news about your Sheffield demonstration (against bans on Irish solidarity). I scanned the local papers to see if they would report i, but as usual te kept to their high standards of for the Provos, and Patsy the same for the IRSP. They didn't go on hunger-strike to starve themselves to death like people think. Thev went on hunger-strike for their just demands." Courage I had it in my mind to save Patsy. One night near the end I was in with him, giving him water and holding his hand.

sald to raisy men i cant care about anything else, I was going to save him. Patsy said to me "Tm sorry mammy we haven't won, please mammy

SMASHI THI

PREVENTION

TERRORISM

ACT

reporting and said nothing.

But the message got across despite them. I really appreciated the next steps, they were a welcome change. the first real papers I have read since I was dragged over nere, 1 looK TOr ward to more if that's possible.

I see some of the rags had a field day at my expense the other day, the usual "shock, horror" headlines guaranteed to whip up anti-irish feeling and prejudice my case. It will do them no good. "And later in the year we'll spectacle have the the world's most infamous mass murderer and terrorist Ronnie Reagan tramping round Ireland making a tool or nimselt and getting his shoes dirty. I was reading that he brings tons of sand everywhere he goes to block streets off in case the fight go on". Then I knew that if I'd taken Patsy off the hungerstrike, he would have gone back on it again. He wouldn't let me save him because he didn't want to let all the other young fellas down. *Our Patsy saw Bobby Sands and the other wee fellas dying.

He knew what he was going to go through. So I think he was very brave. It takes courage. All them brave young fellas had to die because Margaret Thatcher wouldn't give them their rights.

Some day I hope she goes through what I went through."

Iranians try a suicide attack on God love the child it must be awful living in fear terrible isn't it? What sort of reaction do you get when you talk to or dinary people about Ireland?

It would be impossible to talk to some people in here about But this is not where you find your average person.

I hope all your plans are successful, all the best Tommy' Support The reaction of ordinary people our campaign against British legal terror becoming more and But we more positive. need still more active support to beat the media free Kavanagh and Quigley, and stop the Yard. Ireland Dumped They put Patsy into Bobby Sands' room to die. After he died, the RUC said they were taking him up to Omagh instead of bringing him home. In Omagh they phoned up the IRSP and said if they didn't come and get Patsy's body it would be dumped outside our door. I went home and went into the house to see Patsy. Patsy had a beautiful face, he was a wild, wild handsome boy. But now his nose was broke and his face covered in cigarette burns.

When I last saw him he hadn't any of those. They did it to him after he was dead. Even in death they couldn't leave him alone. One of the policemen who took Patsy's body up to "Justice magn was shot later moves slow but sure" I said to myself when I heard. Them wee fellas who died on hunger-strike laid the foundations for a big movement.

Everybody here supported them, everybody felt it was their son I'd say to the working class people in Britain, if they'd been born over here that could have been their son too. Our young fellas will go on fighting because this country belongs to us. The British people should realise that we're on the same side."

Pressure Mickey Devine was the last hunger-striker to die on 20 The protest August 1981. ended without achieving its The British state demands. claimed a victory. Margaret Thatcher announced that the hunger-strike represented the republican movement's "last card". The prisoners had other The statement they ideas. released at the end of the hunger-strike made it clear that the fight would go on and that not to fight would *doom the nationalist population to subserviency under British rule. In the three vears since Bobby sands and Patsy O'Hara died, the republican movement has kept the pressure on Britain both inside and outside the with spectacular successes like last September's mass jail break-out, and the day to day military campaign waged by the IRA Freedom Everywhere outside Britain, the hunger-strike, the elec- Sands and tion of Bobby recent republican mose election

SUCCESSES

ex Doser the lie that Irish freedom fighters British crimiaLC nals The Irish Freedom Movement is fighting to kill that lie here. During 1981, we campaigned for support hunger-strikers' for the demands for political status, organising a march to the TUC conference at Blackpool to demand labour movement backing. On this Mav year, be holding branches will public events throughout Britain to commemorate the 10 who died. Join us; ring Keith Tompson on 01-274 3951 for details. the next step, May 1984 7

Drugs scream the headlines. tell-tale signs of drug abuse.

tion from its responsibility for social breakdown.

an easy target at which to aim their protests.

divert the struggle against them.

talism. Victorian jection. From rookeries to That cherite slums, drugs have been the constant companion of the working class. For the downtrodden, drugs are an escape from the horrors of everyday life under - capi- Opium den The British establishment has 200 years experience as one of the world's biggest drug dealers. From the early years of the nineteenth cen- Britain tury, schemed to smuggle Indian opium into China to stupefy its people and destroy Chinese resis- British expansionism. The leading opium supplier was the prestigious BritishfirmJ ardine Matheson.

By 1836 nearly 8000 tons of opium was being smuggled into China. But that wasn't enough for William Jardine.

As the Chinese authorities struggled to keep the drug out, Jardine urged the British government to blockade China's ports and occupy neighbouring Hongkong. Ruthless The first Opium War had begun. On 21 May 1841 the British navy destroyed the Chinese naval fleet near Canton. In August Britain seized Hongkong. A year later, China was forced to pay out milhons in reparations, open up five Chinese ports to foreign trade and Hongkong to the ecue British 'in perpetuity'. Further Chinese resistance prompted further threats from the British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston: *These half civilised governments care little for words and they must not Stick but Only The actually feel it on their Shoulders before they yield."

For decades, opium continued make up nearly TO half of all Chinese imports.

Britain's ruthless prosecution of the opium trade undermined Chinese society and consolidated Britain's hold over the region. Control Today state control over the traffic in drugs tight. IS From Third World production to delivery on the streets, the state regulates supply and price of THe heroin, cocaine, cannabis and every other drug. America, the matia runs the drugs industry for its friends on In Capitol Hill. Britain the control is more 8 the next step, May 1984 Drug diversion *Hooked on heroin — teenage epidemic hits council estates' are proliferating in response According to the Fleet Street dailies to the establishment-inspired heroin is being handed out like smarties outside school hysteria.

gates and on run-down estates in every inner city. Worried parents are checking their children's eyes and arms for the Social Security dispensed a Drug scares are a convenient grant distraction for an establishment concerned to divert atten- And for concerned radicals, the reviled figure of the drug pusher is Drug scares serve to obscure the real cause of social problems and to Drug peddling has always been a feature of modern capi- For the state, drugs are a method of social control.

They are used to keep the most oppressed, alienated sections of the working class in a state of permanent sub- The regulation of

COVETL

the local ganja trade by Brixton police only came to light after the 1981 riots.

Capitalism creates the conditions that lead to widespread demand for drugs Recession, mass unemployment and poverty have encouraged the pervasive habit among disaffected youth of snitting glue, butane gas and other more down-market drugs The and solvents authorities are prepared to tolerate increasing solvent - it is after all a more effective method of keeping working class youth down than the state's YTS containment schemes. Pretext The current furore about a drug epidemic has been carefully orchestrated by the establishment. In reality there always drugs 'epidemic'. Loudly quoted Home Office statistics about the extent of drug addiction worth the paper

LIOS

The they are written on. present hysteria about drugs has a twofold purpose. While the state promotes and tolerates drug abuse among certain sections of the working class, it is concerned that it should not get out of hand. The object of the current anti-drugs campaign prepare the 1s to ground for a crackdown on drug offenders. Police action is not designed to get rid of the drugs trade, but to control it. The authorities are particularly keen to curb its criminal side effects such as burglary, shop-lifting and prostitution. The broader context of the anti-drugs hysteria is the Tory government's moral rearmament exercise. The establishment wants to use the current drugs furore in the same way as it has procam-

THOLCO

serance paigns the By whipping up hysteria about drug addiction, the Tories hope cohere a public To consensus in favour of more stringent social control.

Moral rearmament legitimises wider police and state interference in the life of the working class. Drugs become the pretext for police raids on gay clubs in search of "poppers amyl nitrate - and the extension of police stop and search powers in black inner-city ghettoes. Radical and communitybased campaigns against drug addiction and drug pushers Last month, the Department of Health and €6 m to be spread over three years for 51 rehabilitation and coun selling projects in England and Wales and 13 ventures Scotland. London's 11 Community Drugs Project, Bradford's Bridge Project and Birmingham's Drugline have all been allocated substantial sums. In Birkenhead in the 'smack city' to the Wirral - - famisensationalist press lies on the Ford and Woodchurch estates have set up the Wirral Parents Against Drug Campaign. Abuse According to one member, some mothers are suicidal or are taking valium - mothers helpers' little to cope with their children's drug problems. The campaign has criticised the local council for its failure to respond to the local media's ridiculous claims that 85 per cent of youngsters in certain areas are drugs The on campaign wants to lock up drug users for a six month "drying out' period Repression By singling out the drug dealer as the cause of increasing drugaddiction, these campaigns set out to tackle the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. Their demand for more concerted government action including calls for of restoration death penalty for drug pushers legitimises increasing state repression and police harass- They play the same ment. populist antirole ds tue mafia Italy and America which have been turned into vehicles for the extension of police powers (see box on Ireland). From Castlemilk and Easterhouse in Glasgow to Peckham Bermondser and in London, theestablishment is cultivating these campaigns to cohere a broad They anti-drugs consensus provide the authorities with a radical cover in their bid to control au aspects ol working class life. Dope pushers are not the problem. Capitalism real creates the conditions that engender drug addiction, alother social cononsin ana problems among the most oppressed workers, whom offer only can a grim existence. The capitalist recession employment, poverty and state repression which make drugs an attractive escape for thousands of workers.

To point the finger at drug pushers is a distraction from fighting the real cause of working cs stone the capitalist system. The real pushers are the respectable, pin-striped inhabitants of Whitehall. To deal with them we need to take on the system itself. Andy Clarkson According to Irish liberal opinion the entire drug addiction problem in Dublin is the responsibility of one family the Dunnes. Since the Dublin establishment moved in to break up the Dunnes' extensive network, the media has created other drug fiends Baker' Ma and the General® - to explain the prevalence of heroin addiction in Dublin. Traditionally, alcond! has been the favourite Irish analgesic. The Catholic establishment's strenuous efforts to persuade Pioneers young take the pledge' and abstain from the demondrink never made much headway. Today, however, pint of beer costing more than £1 in Dublin, . the drugs trade is doing what the Catholic church was never able to do. A £5 shot of herom 1s now a much more attractive proposition than a pint OI Guinness to many impoverished youth. Oppression Britain's occupation of Ireland has ensured that the crisis has had a devastating impact on both the si and Twenty-six Counties. Drug addiction has grown Dublin as

CHORNO

unemployment has soared per cent in so me inner-city areas. The rise in drug abuse has induced the same re- Uppers for the down and out: drugs offer escape route from harsh reality A drop of the hard stuff from radical

SOOTSE

community groups as in but on a much Britain bigger and more militant scale. The establishment response has been to clamp down on the camtheir paigns protest have threatened to get out of hand and challenge state control of the drugs

HOUSES.

Parents Concerned Drugs

(CPAD)

Against groups sprang up in Dublin 1983. early Social workers and community St Teresa's

OBVISES

Gardens, Crumlin organised local residents to evict the Dunnes from the flats. In other Dublin estates the pushers received the same Gardai When the drug Gener set up business in other areas and took to the streets the community activists demanded tough measures from the Gardai (Irish police). The force was condemned for its halfhearted approach to rooting out the pushers. Radical Dublin Central TD (MP) Tony Gregory, called for special courts to dispense tougher pushers. At a time when the coalition government of. Fine Gael and the Irish Labour Party is pushing for greater police powers in its new Criminal Justice Bill, the anti-drugs lobby is fuelling the law and order consensus. In February the CPAD groups organised a 2000strong protest march to the Dail (Irish Parliament) to demand the abolition of bail for pushers, confiscation of assets and stiffer mandatory sentences. The anti-drugs campaigns have been backed by the liberal, socialist and republican press. But the establishment reaction has been hostile. Evictions, shoot-outs, kidnappings and, militant demonstrations are a challenge to the state's control over the drugs trade The Government has responded by accusing the groups of being infiltrated by terrorists. and arresting leaders. The CPADs have replied to the establishment offensive by pleading their innocence and redoubling their outbursts against the Dunnes and other Dublin The anti-drugs pushers. a diversion campaign from the real problems confronting the Irish working class - the British occupation Six In the Counties, attacks on jobs and living standards, record unemployment and vicious repression. Radical anti-drugs protests channel workers' energies from fighting the real cause of evil

SOCHE

Ireland British im perialism.

Britain's most vehement anti-immigrant campaigner Enoch Powell recently called for 'concerted European-wide action on immigration'. But the European immigration authorities do not need any encouragement from Powell. In France and Germany, deportees are filling the prisons faster than the authorities can book seats for them on planes home.

In the Netherlands a 13 year old boy was recently held for two weeks in a police cell while the authorities hunted down his parents. In Britain the Home Office is running down "illegals', while giving South African teenage track-star Zola Budd a clear run to British citizenship. This month the Afia Begum Campaign Against Deportations and Asian women from the Sari Squad are going to Europe to throw down the (see box). Gareth Evans looks at Europe's war against illegals.

police thugs in France during the past 18 months. Their deaths are the brutal consequence of the anti-immigrant hysteria whipped up by the far right's racist outbursts and by the Mitterand government's witch-hunt against illegal immigrants. Last August, the Socialist Party leader succumbed right-wing pressure and drew the line between those immigrant workers who are part of the national reality' and clandestine workers 'who we send back to where must from'. Mitterthey came and's statement gave the light to the French riot police to evict immigdeport rant and se walters them in their thousands. Pressure In France, unemployment can lead to the loss of a then withwork permit, drawal of a residence permit and ultimately deportation. Leaving your passbeing at port Protesting against deportations: the Sari Squad in action At the end of this month Asian women from the Sari Squad and other supporters of the Afia Begum Campaign Against Deportations are setting off on a week-long of Eurwill be seizing ope. They ле отропишу го шакс the Eurounpact pean elections to be held highlighting June, In Dy the of deportation case victim Afia Begum and challenging the immigration policy of the European socialist parties. Racism in Europe A case for action gauntlet to Powell and his continental counterparts Forty immigrants have been murdered by racists and involved in a traffic accident can be sufficient grounds for deportation. Social pressure on foreign workers so intense that some 1S are accepting pitiful offers pack their bags and go home. After the defeat of the Talbot strike at Poissy in January the Government stepped in with offers of 'reinsertion aid for sacked immigrant workers to to their turn

OW COULL-

tries. In March Citroen got rid of nearly 2000 jobs by offering money to foreign workers to leave France.

Similar attacks on imtaking place migrants are Europe-wide. The introduction of the Aliens Law in West Germany last September has made it virtually Sari Squad hits Europe In their manifesto the socialist parties, including the British Labour Party, they will guarantee say the rights of immigrant workers legally resident' in the EEC. But they also call for 'measures to eliminate illegal employment.

This is nothing more than a polite call for the reof all illegal im- The anti-racist delegation will be organising meetings and demonstrations with ions in France, the Netherimpossible for foreign workers to bring their families Wives into the country. must now years to join their husbands, and children not over six are allowed in. Unemployment off benefit cut after six months, after which the work permit is withdrawn.

Integration Foreigners are being ported from Germany because their houses are too cramped according to the A Turofficial regulations. couple were deported

KIST

their they sent children to Turkey for education - proof that they didn't intend to integrate" German In into society. some parts of the country language test has been introduced for foreigners resident for 10 years, with deportation as the penalty for failure. Pressure this scale on forced 32 000 foreign workers to accept derisory £2500 from handouts of the German government to return home last year. A further 30 000 are expected to leave in the first six months of this In year. workers Duisberg, Turkish at the Mannesman steel plant recently received writoffers of repatriation money from the company addition state offer. They were told that the sum would be reduced lands, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. The tour will culminate in a march and rally at the European Parliament Strasbourg on 23 May. If you would like to join the tour, help build support for it or donate money to finance it, contact the Afia Begum Campaign Against Deportations, 22, 136 Kingsland

BOX

High Street, London E8 Costello Zaro or phone on 01-247 7848 or 274 2820. Up against the wall: French police hunt for "illegal immigrants - it's happening all over Europe £350 for each month by they failed to take up the offer. So far 900 Turkish workers have agreed to go Fightback Immigrant workers are org anising to combat these attacks. Germany thousands have taken to the streets protest against in deportations and immigrant deaths in detention centres.

In Poissy just outside Paris several thousand marched in February against the fascists who had smashed up the Talbot strike the month before. Many immigrants have a precarious legal status and lack basic civil rights such as the right to vote. Increasingly, they are demanding equal legal and political rights to strengthen their position. By itself, however, the demand for civil rights cannot challenge the racist Britain, offensive. In the of blacks from majority Britain's former colonies have always had the right vote and form their to own political organisations.

Sixty per cent of Britain's black population were born according in Britain, and the law share equal with British status white But that has people. not prevented the establishment from stigmatising blacks as scroungers and criminals.

France most immig In rant and anti-racist organisations are demanding an automatically renewable 10 and residence year work permit. This has been a traditional demand for many years and was endorsed by Mitterand during his 1981 presidential campaign. On the face of it this demand would relieve immigrant workers of much of the insecurity they suffer. Most entered France on one year work and residence permits which can later be replaced by three year or 10 year cards. This means that many immigrants don't know from one year to the next whether they will be able to stay in France No solution The problem with the demand for 10 year permits is that it implicitly accepts the division between legal and illegal workers which is the basis of the Government's immigration policy.

does the work permit system which is the basis of the divbetween legal ision and This demand only illegal. legitimises the criminalisation policy which lays all immigrants open to attack The demand for amnesties is another popular camslogan among immigrant and anti-racist gro- Europe. This appups in roach also fails to challenge the state's immigration controls. The Mitterand government introduced amnesty that operated from mid-1981 to February 1982.

To qualify, applicants had to prove that they had been in full-time employment for Many illegal wora year. kers were sacked when they asked their employers to cooperate, others were too afraid to come forward.

The result was that only 153 000 out of an estimated 300 000 illegals applied the amnesty. Of these for appli- 23 000 had their rejected Canons SOlIC were deported, others kept their heads down and re- The verted to anonymity. amnesty did nothing for than half the ilmore legals in France - and nothing for those who have entered the country illegally since then. What it did do Governwas provide detailed informent with mation on the size, composition and location of the This has hidden workforce. enabled the authorities to hunt pursue the ruthless for illegals which is taking place all over France today.

Yearning A recent pamphlet by Paul Gordon of the Runnymede Trust, Deportations and removals, discusses anti-deportation campaigns in Britain, including Afia ane Begum campaign. It argues correctly that public campaigns which highlight the operation of the im migration laws are the only beat the Home way to Office. But Gordon then advocates radical changes in the system of immig ration control' and promoratorium on poses deportations, new amnesty for illegal entrants and a 'new independent body to deal with cases involving Racism the exercise of discretion.

Gordon's approach represents a yearning for byedeportgone days when ations were fewer and governments could be prevailed exercise upon to COlL Passiol But in Britain and throughout Europe there will be no easy victories any more.

In a Europe wracked by recession, governments can no longer afford to make concessions. This does not that victories mean beyond our grasp. The Afia Begum Campaign Against Deportations has -demon strated another approach to fighting the immigration For the past year the campaign has fought to stop the deportation of a young Bangladeshi woman, Afia Begum, and her baby daughter This month the camp- Europe aign is going to with members of the Sari to fight for Atia Squad Begum's right to stay in Britain and to make the struggle against racism an the June Euro issue in pean elections. Solidarity The European tour is an opportunity to popularise the only realistic approach to challenging deportations - an approach that takes account of changing conand ditions to the scale of the racist offensive. Only a campaign that takes opposition to all immigration controls as its starting point can defend immigrant workers against attacks. The Afia state Begum campaign has suc- Afia cessfully defended Begum from deportation for a year through resover olute defiance of the Home Office and by building widespread backing for her The • Case. key to turning the tables Powell and his European co-thinkers is to make the plight of immigrant workers in France and Germany a campaigning issue the European in labour To defend immovement. migrant workers and unite the working class, we need transform the struggle to against the immigration laws from an issue of lishment compassion into an issue of class solidarity.

the next step, May 19849

Merseyside Militants Militant elections. Liverpool is Militant's stronghold, has the Labour council got?

"When were elected going to we were elected last May."

the rainand deputy in g election proout lts mises. Yet reality of -controlled of Liverpool lake (13 May 1983) odds about Rates and rents Militant's promised f2 rent cut never materialised. stead, council tenants were given a meagre redecoration a lowance Christmas. Liverpool's

•CUT

uncil housing remains the most expensive outside London. Militant's rises'. The who the same harassment from local any the that on benefit have off Far from the cut, council •rate arrears kers. The same would 'pr the use of procedures, through which people property seized. Despite its avowed preferences, the committee merely recommended that a further sub- 'monitor' committee how bailiffs confiscate people's

SUSSESSONS.

Housing Labour claims to have started 1100 ot its promised 6000 new homes. But they are now called houses for rent', houses. not counci Just as under previous Liberal councils, they are being built by private contractors 10 the next step, May 1984 Militant-controlled Liverpool council is the loudest opponent of Tory attacks on council spending. This month, Militant is campaigning to strengthen its base in the local the 'spinal column for a Marxist tendency. But how much backbone last May said that we are WC do the things we said we were going to do before the local pool of using cheap labour only now Militant's commitment of privharsh atisation building battling price in list house now at high housing private at Those who are enough to forcible threatened eviction. homes Dovecot to

SCIL

take over homes breach provisions. alprovement Housing chair 'unfortunate sidered the Tory icies'. councillors who that they LO Militant's to creating for 1000 jobs. were cre- Militant that the labour their movement employment of

SONC

According to one lead ing council the national offer of 4.5 for wage many *corpie who will their supp-

LOSE

lementary Liver- Militant councillors have developed close relations with the executive of the council workers Joint Shop Stewards' Committee. Leading stewards have been recognised as negotiators and brought in to 'advise coun Militant committees. Pauline Dunlop councilot is pleased that the unions are coming to us and not taking strike action': We had about 40 disputes in about five months. Although the trade unions haven't won all the disputes, because they have been dealt with quickly fair seen to have had a hearing they are happier.'

less cil workers mmittee doors was debers in the agreed workers' their be and thus real wage rise. 'satismittee antee of "knock-on' Just "satisfactory Liverover meeting in March, union officials consolidation. 75 Starting times for workers shift 6am. systell would to be Militant's Derek Hatton (with the bouffant): compromises with the Labour leadership While workers council have suffered deterioraling work conditions severa o their convenors have joined Labour councillors on Liverpool Polytechnic's Board of Governors. This has done little to help students or Polytechnic workers. The council insists that the union should become self-financing in running costs. Students' union officials say this is impossible They of The the strain of Labour thinking, which to reconcile lishment books. The Despite Militant rupting city, councillors trea to £30m for Tories cut from the workers vices forgrant in attempt to made aign clear that, just any other municipal authority, the city fashion give minof services as being tightly controlled. No frivolous programmes are being approved. The issue is the provision of basic services.'

The council's limited aims mean that it has no interest in mobilising rank and file the against

WORKET

Government. nock and that they back Yet instead of the refusal to fight, councillors Neil Kinnock. budget day 'conhis Salford for the Tories. councillors knew of finances, Kinnock said: Distasteful, as outrageous are better getting ove Unable to break with the politics of the labour bur- Militant eaucracy, councillors have buckled under Kinnock's call for moderation. Since a coalition of Liberals, Tories and rightwing Labour rebels defeated the proposed illegal budget on 29 March, moves have been under way to come up with a compromise. Tory minister Patrick Jenkin has said that he will £30m, up

HOL

colle

WILB

but he is willing to look again at Liverpool's finances.

Left-wing Labour Party bureaucrats have seized on this as an opportunity to resolve the dispute and avoid further embarrassment. Members of the party executive's new local gov sub-committee pledged themselves to give all the support we can to resolve the present impasse and get Liverpool out of its 'unique situation'. Milit ant councillors quickly fell into line. While the Tories made it clear that any rethinking on their part would still mean cuts and big rate rises, Hatton welcomed signs that there was more positiveness' in the Govern ment's attitude. If the Govwilling ernment was alone' "leave said h e the council would 'willingly take part' in Jenkin's financial review. By falling into line with what is acceptable to Labour's leadership, Milit ant councillors have abandoned the struggle to defend workers in Liverpool. Even their de-select attempt lo one of the right-wing rebel councillors was ditched in the face of party executive opposition. As we go to the coalition of Labour rebels, Liberals and Tories is trying pass budget.

COLOTORSC

Whether it succeeds or not, spending noW seem

GITS

inevitable. Meanwhile, Mil itant concentrates on building the Labour Party around the May council elections Workers in Liverpool who want to defeat the Tories need to challenge First, Militant's approach. we must reject ideas about working within the limitations of local government We have to fight finances. for the jobs and services we need, regardless of the consequences for the council's account books. Second, we need to give up relying on Neil Kinnock and start relying on organised tne strength of the working class - starting with 30 000 council workers. Breaking with the betrayals of the Labour Party will be the first step towards breaking Tory of the the back attack on Liverpool. Mick Hume

Scargills soft centre fter six weeks of picket line A battles every striking miner is asking the same questions.

are we going to get an all-out national strike? How can we stop the energy supplies to British industry and force the Coal Board and the Government to back down on their plans for pit closures and mass redundancies?

Above all, the problem is - how can we pull the mass of miners and other workers into action alongside the militants who have got the strike underway, spread it by flying pickets and begun to win wider sympathy action? The answer is only by a different approach from that being pursued at the moment by the National Union of Mineworkers and its President, Arthur Scargill.

Arthur Scargill is immensely popular among militant miners and among activists in other unions. Unlike most trade union leaders, Scargill proclaims his commitment to the working class and his hostility not only to the Tories, but to the whole capitalist system. On television he communicates authority and conviction.

He has a thorough grasp of the facts and argues his union's case clearly and forcefully. What a contrast to the servile and incoherent mumblings of Bill Sirs or Terry Duffy, or of the miners former leader Joe (now Lord) Gormley.

other union leaders offer vacillation and compromise, Scargill promises to fight the system. Yet Scargill has so far failed to deliver.

Instead of giving a confident lead in the current dispute he has constantly lagged behind events. Many have congratulated Scargill on his clever tactics.

But his reliance on the NUM's rule 41 to endorse area-by-area strike action in fact exposes a lack of decisive leadership.

striking miners spending all their energies picketing out fellow miners instead of extending strike action to hit the power Rule 41 has allowed the leadership to make official action already underway in Yorkshire, Kent, Scotland and South Wales. But it has also allowed Nottinghamshire and other areas to refuse to join the strike, and thus to undermine the effectiveness of the national campaign.

At the 12 April meeting of the NUM national executive in Sheffield, Scargill used procedural ploys to evade calls for a national ballot. And he declared his. intention of changing rule 43 to reduce the majority required for strike action from 55 to 50 per cent. These were widely regarded as skilful manoeuvres that succeeded in wrong-footing the right.

reality it is rank and file pressure that has put the moderates on the executive on the defensive and made a national strike increasingly likely. Scargill's manoeuvres in fact reveal the leadership's weakness and lack of confidence in its ability to win a clear mandate of support from the miners for the NUM's strategy for fighting The result of all these the Coal Board. committee room manipulations is that miners had to go through six weeks of divisions and delays before the leadership even began to move towards an all-out stoppage. Scargill's manipulation of the union rule book is no answer to the real problems facing militant miners.

central question is, how can we win the hearts and minds of the mass of miners and other workers for a full-scale confrontation with the Coal Board and the Government? This is where Scargill's the real weakness lies. cargill's aggressive style and fiery

HO W

speeches appeal to a minority of taneously identify with his attacks on the employers and the Government. But many miners and other workers are not immediately impressed by Scargill's posturing - they need to be convinced by argument. Scargill's rhetoric lies a strategy that is simply not convincing. the hearts of the militant minority but he has not won the minds of the masses.

And what is more, militants who identify with Scargill but lack his charisma cannot persuade their more moderate mates why they should follow his lead.

Many miners accept the view expressed by successive Coal Board chairmen and by successive governments, that the security of their jobs depends on the viability of the coal industry.

watched the impact of the recession, the falling demand for coal from industry, the increase in foreign competition, the mounting stockpiles. Many miners - and many more workers in other industries accept that the only way to make the British coal industry viable is by closing uneconomic collieries. Joss of jobs and the destruction of While communities, but regard these as inevitable and unavoidable. It is not surprising that Scargill has difficulty confronting these views because they have long been official NUM policy. Scargill now attempts to counter this lalaustic attitude to arguing that it is possible to keep pits open, save jobs and improve the market position of the British coal industry. He It has meant maintains that output should be raised to 150 million tonnes a year, not cut back to 97 million tonnes as MacGregor plans.

He calls for higher state subsidies and investment, cheap imported coal to make the British industry viable. support for industrial action to press the Government to adopt this different policy for the industry. He presents this policy as 'the miners battle for Britain' to save the coal industry and safeguard jobs for future generations.

Scargill's arguments just do not make sense to most people. Anybody can see that there is a basic conflict between miners desire to save jobs and the bosses' drive to make the coal industry competitive. open pits that lose money year after year is not in the best interests of any capitalist It is obvious that subsidisemployer. ing miners to produce coal that industry does not need, at prices higher than the competition, is not sound financial policy for a capitalist government under intense pressure to curb its spending.

it is futile to rest our case on the viability of the coal industry. M miners. He contines his attention to the measures required to make coal mining The profitable. Yet Scargill constantly puts himself forward as the Coal Board's most enthusiastic salesman. His defence of the miners rests on his alternative management policy for the mining industry. But MacGregor does not need next step Many militants spon- Yet behind Scargill has won They have anti-capitalist They regret the and rendered the pul closures by work. and protection against Scargill appeals for MacGregor, They can see that keeping system. T This is why acGregor does not present his strategy for managing the coal industry in terms of what is good for the sympathy action. the Coal Board. We should Scargill's advice on how to screw profits out of miners. He knows that the only way to do it is by closing pits and putting miners on the dole. Scargill's fantasy of a high-output, secure employment industry is a dangerous diversion from the fight to save jobs in a declining industry.

We should rest our case on what is necessary to preserve miners livelihoods.

Why should miners who work in lossmaking pits or in loss-making areas be deprived of their only chance to make a living, while miners lucky enough to work in 'economic' pits cling on? Miners in South Wales and Kent have to support themselves and their families just like miners in Nottinghamshire. It's time the NUM stopped pretending that what is good for the miners is also good for the British economy. It is clear that the survival of their system now depends on destroying our livelihoods on a vast scale.

We have to make it equally clear that the procedures survival of miners' jobs, the miners' union, our class, now depends on going on the offensive against their system.

This means moving beyond Scargill's limited trade unionism to the broad approach of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

The recession has raised the stakes Scargill strategy obsolete. In the early seventies, Scargill's methods were effective. He led the miners in a battle for higher wages against the employers and the Tory government, and he won. The strikes were militant, but the capitalist system itself never came under threat. An appeal to trade union principles was sufficient to unite the miners and win widespread working class solidarity. Even sections of the middle classes and the establishment were sympathetic to miners demands for better pay for their dirty and dangerous Today's battle is fought on different terrain. The central issue is not how much miners get paid for their work, but the removal of the rights of tens of thousands of miners to work at all. The miners are up against not just the Coal Board and the Tories, but the full might of the British capitalist state. Today, appeals to trade union solidarity cannot unite the miners, never mind mobilise the rest of the working class. As the middle ground unites around Thatcher and militant miners need a fighting strategy that can mobilise mass support for their struggle against the he Revolutionary Communist Party has been campaigning for a national strike since the current dispute began (see pages 2, 3, 4, 5). Our strike special the miners' next step has taken the arguments for all-out action on to hundreds of picket lines and demonstrations, to miners' welfare clubs and housing estates in all the major coalfields. If rank and file miners take matters into their own hands, as they are beginning to do in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, then we can prevent any further delays and disorganisation and spread the picketing and the T Moving ahead to win a national strike demands some immediate changes. We need to break from the past traditions of collaboration between the NUM and throw out the Plan for Coal Ironically, both MacGregor and Scargill still swear by this document. Drawn up between the NUM, the Coal Board and the Labour Government in 1974, the Plan for Coal indicates the union's agreement to productivity increases and and pit closures in an expanding modernising industry. Scargill clings to it in the forlorn hope of a return to expansion and good relations with management. MacGregor sees it as a weapon against the miners: he rejects the planned output targets as unrealistic but takes advantage of the NUM's commitment to the industry, which resistance undermines rationalisation programme.

boycott colliery review procedures From national, to area, to pit level, the NUM collaborates in numerous standing committees with the employers and the Government. The pit review prolonged involve consultation about problems of geology and productivity and profitability that pave the way to closures and job losses.

Even during the current dispute NUM officials are working on joint projects with management. To fight the bosses we need an independent union with no ties to the employers or the state.

A national strike requires a clear programme of demands. These must put to the fore resistance to MacGregor's closure programme. They must include the demand for a decent wage for miners - which, despite the five-month overtime ban, remains an outstanding issue.

no pit closures! no redundancies!

With four million already on the dole we need to preserve every job. In cases of exhaustion we must insist on the redeployment of all jobs. We should also make sure that every miner who wants to retire early is replaced by a young worker. a nationally agreed basic living wage No miner should have to work overtime or rely on bonuses to make a living wage We need to get rid of divisive area agreements and productivity bonuses. We must make sure that every miner gets a living wage, whatever the geological conditions. Miners disabled through work should be guaranteed the same basic wage for life. To win a national strike requires the maximum mobilisation of miners, of women in the mining communities and other workers. This means mass meetings Open meetings, full discussion and democratic decision making are essential to ensure the involvement of the largest possible number of workers in the strike Regular mass meetings ensure that the rank and file is fully in control, and that the leadership is fully accountable.

strike committees. Committees which involve the most active militants in the strike as well as the official branch leadership are vital to give direction to the strike. Committees should include not only miners but also women and other workers engaged in sympathetic action.

The miners strike of 1984 has had a slow and halting start. It is now too important to the working class to be left under the control of its present leadership. With a different strategy and effective rank and file organisation it can still beat the combined forces of the British establishment.

the next step, May 1984 11

come out into the open as a direct confrontation.

class and the capitalist system.

to crush the miners' resistance.

they stand up and fight for a decent life lasting benefit to the working class.

the threat of revolution and review our future prospects.

BRITAIN HAS NEVER faced the prospect of a revolutionary upheaval.

ruling class of France, Germany, Austria or Italy the British establishment has never lost its grip on society. The British state has always retained the initiative and ultimately contained every threat to its rule.

tive stability has certainly boosted the confidence of the ruling class. strengthened the conviction that a revolution could never happen in Britain. However, the history of the class struggle this century does not deliver such a simple verdict.

shows the omnipotence of the British establishment. But it also reveals opportunities for change and sometimes it gives us a glimpse of the hidden power of the working class.

The stable character of British capitalism stems from its unique historical position.

Britain was the first capitalist power. It also enjoyed centuries of uninterrupted peace to develop its social and political institutions.

Capitalism developed relatively smoothly over a long period of time, allowing the establishment considerable room to adapt to new circumstances. Change was introduced The state could thus anticipate gradually. social unrest and often pre-empt it, through skilful combination of coercion concession. The myth of invincibility The ascendancy of British imperialism in the nineteenth century allowed the accumulation of capital on an unprecedented scale.

plunder guaranteed a protracted period of prosperity for significant sections of British society. Some of this wealth even filtered down to the skilled sections of the working class, the labour aristocracy. group of workers benefited from the Empire, the rest of the proletariat experienced its exploitation in a less brutal form than its continental counterparts. Notsurprisingly, class conflict in Britain was more muted than elsewhere. The trade unions developed a strong attachment to the capitalist system at a very early stage. The identity of interest which the labour movement developed with British capitalism limited the political development of the working class.

boration was widespread and even workers on strike often proclaimed a misplaced loyalty to the industry which exploited them.

The extent of this collaboration was unique for the time. One German observer of British trade unionism, Schulze-Gaevernitz, noted the stability of class relations in Britain in 1906: This powerful position of the worker is not dangerous for Great Britain. for half a century of trade unionism and political training has taught the worker to identify his interests with those of his industry. It is true that he opposes the employer in questions of the level of wages, hours of work, etc, but externally he is at one with the employer in all matters where the interests of his industry are concerned. It is not rare for employers' organisations and workers' trade unions to act together on current economic questions." (cited in Lenin, Notebooks on Imperialism', Collected Works, Vol 39) These attitudes are prevalent today in even the most militant unions - the collaboration 12 the next step, May 1984 For the first time in many years the conflict between the classes in Britain has miners and the Coal Board has turned into open warfare between the working The Government and the employers are prepared to use all the resources at their disposal - the police, the courts and the law Their response shows what workers can expect if The economic disease of capitalism has no short-term cure.

that means more sacrifices, more indignity and a future without hope.

why anything less than the overthrow of the capitalist system can bring no But can there be a revolution in Britain?

Below, Frank Richards assesses the British revolutionary tradition.

On pages 14 and 15 we examine how the British state has organised to contain of the miners' union with the Coal Board in Unlike the for campaigns investment well known.

COITTOS 1S

century, this developed framework of collaboration was peculiar to class relations in Britain. The institutionalisation This relasystem of workers cooperation ployers was of tremendous benefit to British It has also imperialism. Despite its privileged position, the British ruling class did not have things completely its own way. It outbreak of the First World War marked the decline of Britain as the leading economic power and brought an explosion of class conflict. In 1910, the miners, textile workers and shipyard workers fought major battles against their employers. three years millions of seamen, dockers, railwaymen, cotton workers, miners and others strike. The *shook the employers. more worried about the growth of a highly politicised shop stewards movement and the increasing appeal of the policy of direct and This leadership' While this action among sections of the working class.

To make matters worse, this escalation of class conflict coincided with the extension of militant action by the suffragettes and the growing threat from the national liberation movement in Ireland. For the first time the British ruling class was losing its grip. resources to ride the storm. In the end the arrival of the First World War, and the state's desperate campaign to foster patriotism and Class collachauvinism, neutralise its opponents.

Ministry of Reconstruction in 1917 recalled how foreign conflict had helped put down rebellion at home: *The naked fact is that the country, the mother of free institutions, was four years on the brink of civil war. And if the Germans had not saved us the struggle would have raged not only between Catholic and Protestant Ireland but throughout Great Britain between class and class.' (RJ Scally, The origins of the Lloyd George coalition) Events showed that the war could postpone but not eliminate the threat class action. saw the most coherent opposition to the rule of capital in Britain either before or since that time. A confident working class fought hard to consolidate its position.

the number of workers in trade unions rose to 45.2 per cent from 17.7 per cent in 1911.

The Russian Revolution made a positive impact on militants, and the Government of spread of Bolshevism. The dispute between the with working class unrest.

And for workers in its favour. That is for controlling their members.

to union between us and anarchy. and import But early this job of this with eminvulnerable, all inevitable? The years leading up to the far from defenceless, During the next showdown between movement of workers. wave of militancy But they were even help indicated its weakness.

Yet while 'The failure of the British revolution is above all the failure of revolutionary trade unionism. was far too limited. It had to use all its issue. allowed the establishment to A report to the labour movement. challenged. cided with class harmony of foreign competition ruling class to its opponents at home. problems for the employers.

of working The years from 1918 to 1921 could not provide a strategy power. from the same political flaw.

By 1920 The well-organised Can there the day began to have nightmares about the The capitalist class was well and truly overstretched.

Mutinies in the police (1918 and 1919) and in the armed forces often left the establishment desperately short of reliable troops to deal The ruling class only saved its neck with the aid of the official labour leadership.

The British establishment avoided making a show of strength from a position of real weakness, and postponed the fight until the odds were Important concessions were made to the trade unions. In return, the labour leaders were delegated responsibility remained The union officials gave sterling service to the capitalists.

Tory leader Bonar Law declared his gratitude the as only thing When unemployment rose and the climate of economic insecurity forced many workers these on to the defensive, the bosses launched an By the end of 1921 the capitalist class was back in the driving seat.

• During the next five years it completed the of defeating the working class.

The was establishment emerged from the volatile postsociety. war years with all its institutions intact.

Alof though the bosses knew they were no longer the threat of revolution had receded into the background. But was this Anatomy of defeat The defeat of 1918-1921 cannot be blamed on the power of the capitalist class.

While the British state was not at all confident about the outcome of a itself and the mass The establishment's desperate turn to the trade union leaders for Leading civil servants noted with anguish the difficulty of governing the country in the old way.

the establishment passed through a political crisis, the working class became a prisoner of its narrow brand of Trade union militants were well organised, and the shop stewards' moveparticularly in engineering - was a coherent force, but overall workers' outlook They saw class conflict primarily in terms of industrial disputes, and fatally underestimated the need to fight for a proletarian political alternative on every Contemporary revolutionary groups reflected the narrow obsession of the British As a result the prevailing sentiment of British nationalism was never Class conflict in industry coinof

NOALLETS

foreign policy, the Empire and the problem This enabled the use the outbreak of the First World War to such good effect against The radical trade unionism that developed at the time presented considerable immediate Yet it could not take the working class very far forward.

Its sectional and parochial character meant it for taking Even the socialist groups of the years around the First World War suffered The left was so preoccupied with industry that it failed to champion the cause of women'semancipation suffragette movement developed outside the mainstream of working class politics and inevitably remained under middle class influence. Similarly, the antiimperialist struggle in Ireland made only a marginal impact on the labour movement at a time when unity with Ireland's powerful liberation movement could have provided an irresistible challenge to the British state The defects of militant trade unionism became painfully evident during the radical years of 1918 and 1919. Soldiers returned from the front demanding far-reaching change and 'a land fit for heroes The army and navy were struck by widespread mutinies Even the police went on strike in Liverpool and London. The few loyal regiments that spent much of their time quelling mutinies and policing the rest of the army.

But these dramatic developments occurred in isolation from the labour movement.

The British left made no attempt to influence the mutinous soldiers and sailors to forge revolutionary movement. Under of circumstances the working class was only a question of time The working class lost because its militant leadership was fighting a limited battle over industrial issues at a time when the class war about every issue affecting British This was an ideological confusion Workers catastrophic dimensions. attempted to fight employers over pay and conditions while uniting with them against Bosses' baton charge: they've got the guns —but we'v

be a revolution foreign competition. The labour movement was thus left defenceless when the employers pointed out that to be competitive meant lower wages and worse conditions.

result even militant trade unionists became reluctant to pursue their objectives fully, for fear they might undermine British capitalism's international position. Militant unionism proved incapable of sustaining its own limited offensive. The central problem facing the workers' movement in the twenties was its indifference to the question of state power.

class took the threat of working class action seriously and organised its forces through the every eventuality. STaTe to dea. witn Plans were drawn up to respond to mass strikes and other emergencies. state geared up for war against the working union militants remained oblivious of a need to fight the state machinery.

Even when the General Strike broke out in B e got the numbers - it we organise them in Britain? 1926 the union leaders argued that they were pursuing a legitimate industrial dispute.

In contrast, Baldwin characterised the General Strike as a As a threat to constitutional government and the state. The Tories threw all the repressive resources of the state into a war to defend the very existence of British capitalism. Yet trade the trade unions continued to operate as if were engaged in a normal industrial they dispute on a larger scale.

servant accurately explained the reason for The ruling the defeat of the General Strike: The General Strike could not succeed because some of those who led it did not wholly believe in it and because few, if any, were prepared to go While the unrough with it to les logical conclusion - violence and revolution.' (Thomas Jones, The General Strike showed how far militant disastrous limitations Tory Prime Minister Stanley A leading civil Whitehall Diary, revolutionary change. lutionary politics. revolution. transcend In at home and abroad. was 'reformist". the CPGB advocated almost Party. approach: fluence on future legislation."

ship to the philosophical plane.

The only today's trade unionism could go. It also showed its The problem of leadership Party. The failure of trade union militancy strengthened the hand of the official labour leaders.

It showed that the policy of militant direct action could not challenge the labour bureacrats' all-rounded political approach.

The defeat of the General Strike was used as an argument against direct action and militancy.

'Class struggle means more than going on strike. It means fighting for political leadership' It seemed to confirm the view that patient work leading to the eventual election of a Labour government was the only realistic Labour option that could benefit the working class The rank and file militants and socialists who eventually united to form the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1921 knew that the Labour leaders could not be trusted to defend the interests of the proletariat.

They were also aware of the necessity for But in practical terms they could give no real meaning to revo- Instead, they continued with the old perspective of trade union militancy while declaring a meaningless faith in

ESCLABLO

The CPB was the first serious attempt to build a revolutionary party in Britain.

As such, it marked a step forward. However, the CPB never realised its original aim of establishing a revolutionary alternative in Despite its revolutionary rhetoric it policies Labourism failed to union traditions and ignored the broad political issues that really particular, it ignored its responsibility for fighting British imperialism In June 1923, the ment of 1945. Committee of the Communist The criticised the CPGB and stated that its attitude towards the anti-imperialist struggles in India and Ireland Far from challenging the Labour leaders, revolution'. uncritical support for the Labour Rather than fight for an alternative to Labour it argued fatalistically that the election of a Labour government was the best result the working class could expect.

A November 1922 statement in the party's trade union paper All Power summed up this Wise tactics demand that we should do our utmost to return the Labour Party to power. Nobody knows the shortcomings of the Labour Party better than we, but we must be prepared to temporarily overlook these shortcomings, and establish the political United Front. The Labour Party returned to power means a distinct break with the political past of this country: it means that the organised working class movement can have much more in- The CPB confined its struggle for leader- In practical terms, the Labour Party would lead and failure the CPB would act as a pressure group on it. All that the CPGB could offer the working with culture. class was the vague promise of much more influence on future legislation'.

CPGB's failure to advance revolutionary alternative to the Labour Party has stunted the development of working class politics up to today. Since the twenties the Labour Party has been given a clear run The left has always been at pains to avoid confronting the hold of Labour over the British working class. Thus the question of revolution has remained an issue discussed in academic circles, without any practical significance. Redefining revolution pressure group politics of the early CB have become the bread and butter of left. Rather than challenging Labourism, British communism has become an adjunct of the Labour Party.

In the beginning pressure group politics implied organisational dependence on the Labour But with the passing of time it has meant political dependence as well.

Over the years, various groups have entered the Labour Party to change it, only to discover eventually that it is they who have changed.

The domesticated Militant Tendency is the latest in a long line of entrist organisations which have found that their existence is inseparable from that of the Labour Party The fear of organising independently of has influenced what passes for revolutionary politics in Britain.

The left has resolved the inconsistency of advocating revolution while calling for critical support for Labour by trivialising revolution.

The CPGB and the numerous left-wing organisations that have emerged over the years have tended to opt for a half-way house calling for militant action and demanding that the Labour Party leads it Just as the left has been too embarrassed to challenge Labour, it has also proved re- 'unpopular' issues The British left's appalling record on imperialism nationalism, women's oppression and other non-industrial issues meant that the process of radicalisation which occurred during the Second World War lacked any progressive political focus. In effect revolutionary had been reduced to what was acceptable to the traditions of British The struggle against capitalism was now confined to Parliament. In contrast to the post-war upsurge of 1918 to 1926, the initiative at the end of the Second World War was monopolised by the Labour governvery meaning of revolution had changed, to become an incoherent concept.

Thus Tribune, the paper of the Labour left, could greet the election of the Attlee government with the headline Reflections on a A year later it declared that the first session of the Labour Government's Parliament. did more revolutionary things to this country than the first three years after the 1917 Revolution did for Russia'.

The fact that Tribune could get away with characterising the nationalisation of a few declining industries and the extension of welfare measures as revolution indicates the degradation that the term has suffered.

Since 1945 very little has changed.

The failures of the early CB have not been corrected - if anything the left has regressed.

We can now begin to see the reason behind the failure of revolution in Britain The success of revolution can never be guaranteed But if a revolutionary alternative is entirely absent it is hardly surprising that workers choose the only option that is open to them.

While revolutionary politics are not on offer the Labour Party can always carry on. And when Labour is in crisis as it was during the 1983 General Election, it will be the right The wing which is the main beneficiary.

of the British revolution has got nothing to do with the soil or the climate or It is above all, the failure of revolutionary leadership the next step, May 1984 13

State and revolution THROUGHOUT THE MINERS strike, Home Secretary Leon Brittan has gone to great lengths to deny allegations that the police have been involved in undercover operations, phone tapping and the selective harassment and of militants. These denials carry little conviction. Historical evidence confirms that the state has always engaged in such during putes. Cabinet minutes show that more than 65 years ago, in 1919, the security forces conducted an extensive surveillance operation of union leaders, monitorng their mall A special Strike Committee was established, involving civil servants, military personnel and government ministers, to coordinate a plan of action against the working class. In April 1921 the plan was put into operation in anticipation of a major industrial dispute. When the threatened strike did not materialise, a senior civil servant recorded his conclusions: The Strike Committee (was) very sick.

They had been waiting for two years to press the button. They had pressed it. The Strike Books had been issued from the secret banks where they had been concealed: the milk cans were rolling down to Devon and could not be stopped, the troops were steaming in ship and train from Ireland, from Malta, from Silesia to defend us from the men of Fife.' (Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, volume I) These arrangements - including the mobilisation of a volunteer force of former army personnel, university students and other middle class sympathisers made without recourse to without the sanction of the law and without any publicity. Just as the state oftensive against the miners involved the mobilisation of a national police force and the establishment of a special Cabinet committee, so too in the past the state has been ready to go to any length to defend capitalist privilege. For the record In the final analysis, the role of the state is to ensure the maintenance of capitalist power. That it does this backing from Parliament and the courts gives class coercion legitimacy.

the fensive legal while flying branded as illegal. always find a law to justify repression.

And if necessary resort to the Emergency Powers Act of 1920. Under this Act, the Government may if it feels that the stability of the country is threatened. During a State of Emergency regulations by have the full force of law. words, the Government has a free rein do what it wants. The Emergency Powers Act has only been used against workers on strike. This is because a threat to the life of the country can only mean a threat to the rule of capital.

Emergency Powers in practice 31 March 1921 26 March 1924 2 May 1926 29 June 1948 11 July 1949 31 May 1955 23 May 1966 16 July 1970 12 December 1970 9 February 1972 3 August 1972 13 November 1973 The state machine does not exist to serve the law. Rather the law exists to serve the interests represented by the state. In every important government of the day is forced to put the state machine at the disposal of the 14 the next step, May 1984 detention major industrial disand conversations. There was hardly were Parliament, today has the Emergency forms of working class. men's strike, Harold Wilson went with full the state Court employers' ofthe strike. pickets are The employers can the ruling class can military State of Emergency Thus, bate recently Order-in-Council In other Roy Jenkins first same view. like control over repression. Coal London Transport General Strike Docks Docks the Rail Seamen the

BOCKS

fought the dockers, Electricity special legislation. Coal

DOCKS

Coal - Electricity the use conflict, the Cap in hand to Westminster: respect for the state still holds the labour movement back capitalist class, Cabinet secretary Thomas Jones recalled the close affinity and cooperation between the Government and the employers in the days leading up to the General Strike in 1926: It is impossible not to feel the contrast between the reception which Ministers give to a body of owners and a body of miners. Ministers are at ease at once with the former, they are friends jointly exploring a situation.

any indication of opposition or censure. It was rather a joint discussion of whether it were better to precipitate a strike or the unemployment which would result from continuing the present terms.' (Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, volume 2) This outlook is not confined to Tory ministers. Successive Labour governments have had no compunction about using Powers Act and other class repression against the During the 1966 sea- Labour Prime Minister to

OLCLCVISIOE

was a strike against against the community. In collaboration with the shipowners, Wilson organised a ruthless campaign to smash Even if individual government ministers had scruples about state repression there is nothing they could do to stop State security - a polite term for the organisation of capitalist interests - is not a matter for political de- Labour spokesmen who criticised the Tories for sanctioning the acquisition of machine guns by the Metropolitan Police were shocked to discover that Labour Home Secretary authorised their use as long ago as 1976. Jenkins was not in the least embarrassed when challenged during a radio interview: *I am perfectly sure that Mr Callaghan when he was Home Secretary would have taken the Jenkins,. like Callaghan, any Home Secretary, has no real the machinery of class Not that Labour ministers ever tried to control it. If anything, successive Labour governments have distinguished themselves by the zeal with which they have been prepared to put boot in against striking workers.

Under the leadership of Clement Attlee, first post-war Labour government using troops and The last Labour government under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan despatched thousands of police to break the strike at Grunwick in 1977, and sent the army to smash the firemen's strike of the same year. Labour went on to threaten striking ambulancemen with of troops, and following the upsurge of industrial unrest during the winter of discontent in 1978/79, it devised a plan to cripple effective strike action by criminalising secondary pick-

CRUSADE

eting. In all its essentials, the last Labour government's 'Concordat' with the unions prepared the ground for the barrage anti-union laws implemented under Thatcher. The state and the left It is ironic that the British left and the official labour movement sentimental about the state than those whose interests it defends. italist class accepts the state as a necessary evil. It has no illusions that Parllament can decide anything of importance: a whisper in the right ear is more likely to get things done. The ruling class treats the ramblings of the Labour left on the need to make Parliament more accountable with the disdain they de- One leading mouthpiece of the SCIVe. ruling class poured scorn on the left's loyalty to Parliament during then Labour leader Michael Foot's dispute with left winger Peter Tatchell extra-parliamentary action: What is touching about the latest re-run of the Cromwellian Putney Debates is the faith both Mr Foot and Mr Tatchell clearly share in the efficacy of Parliament as the source of political power. Few observers of the modern House of Commons are prepared to credit it with any higher status than as a periodic electoral college, remaining in uncomfortable permanent session, for whichever party is to head Britain's notoriously powerful executive.

(The Economist, 19 December 1981) The leaders of the British labour movement have nurtured this naive belief for more than a hundred years. As a result, the state has not been seen as what it really is - the organiser of the enemy camp - but as the legitimate arbiter of social conflict. The British state has been able to do what it likes because its authority has never been challenged.

By agreeing to play by the rules of the game the British labour movement has become an upholder of the power of the capitalist state. disapproves of particular forms of working class action it can point to the rules which the official labour movement Playing by the rules means accepts. the capitalist class dictating to the working class what action it can or cannot take. In the thirties the militant National Unemployed Workers' (NUWM) met with considerable hostility from the Home Office. The unemployed marches organised by the NUWM were focus for police harassment brutality. The

NUWM

a hostile constant arrest and kept up a stream of abuse designed to denigrate the marchers and criminalise unemployed. The authorities were particularly concerned NUM's readiness to defy the law and ebrated time. Wily essful: encouraged by the Cook, 1918-1939) protest. are more The cap- PrOLESE beyond the pale Throughout the ist. The late last over the role of labelled The miners' outbursts liberties. When the state machinery that ployers, Movement ignores at its peril. and leaders faced media about the its refusal to cooperate with the police.

The state repression meted out to the NUWM stands in marked contrast to the experience of the Jarrow marchers.

The Jarrow march is the most cel unemployed demonstration of the thirties. This march, which mobilised 200 people, overshadowed a much larger one organised by the NUWM at the same One observer cogently explained une arrow march was Suce *The (Jarrow) march organisers accepted the stringent conditions laid down by the police that they should not undertake a mass lobby but attend in small groups to individual MPs whose names had to be given in advance.

Because the marchers were prepared to accept these conditions, the Home Office ruled that marchers would be allowed to have tea in the House. Moreover, the Special Branch was "non-political" nature of the march. One result was that the Home Office allowed Movietone News to take some film of the Jarrow marchers rally in Hyde Park, when they had always refused permission to do this in the past.. The Jarrow marchers became a folk legend, and they did so at least in part because they obeyed the rules.' (J Stevenson, "The politics of violence' in G Peele The politics of reappraisal The Jarrow marchers accepted the rules and acquired the reputation for 'dignified' The success of Jarrow and the failure of the NUWM showed that respectability pays. The whole episode gave the state a free hand to dictate what is legitimate and what gue. post-war period protest became institutionalised.

Today, most demonstrations are really ineffectual marches shepherded by police. When protests go beyond token actions the state and those who accept its authority are ready to denounce them as extrempickets at Warrington year and the miners' flying pickets both received the 'extremist" treatment. The violence of the state accepted as legitimate - but those who fight back against their exploitation as criminals and are disowned by the labour leaders.

strike contirms the irrelevance of the left's view of the state The left greeted the full-scale mobilisation of state repression with indignant about infringement of civil liberties. But the leaders of the TUC and the Labour Party could not bring themselves to back the pickets. Rather than organise effective resistance to the state offensive, the Labour leadership sought a parliamentary debate on civil But state repression cannot be debated out of existence. As the experience of the past century shows, the power of the state stands in our way.

And if the fight against pit closures can evoke such a ruthless response from the security forces, what can we expect when workers go on an all-out struggle to defend their livelihoods?

The ruling class has at its disposal a poses a mortal threat to our class. This threat is all the greater because the working class is not yet armed to meet it. Thus while the miners went into battle ill prepared, the emthe police and the judiciary had everything worked out.

While the miners were fighting an industrial dispute, the state was engaged in a war This is a lesson which the working class The working class also needs to prepare for war. That is why the revolutionary perspective of fighting for state power is the only realistic option open to our class. In a situation where every major dispute raises the question of state power, revolution becomes a necessity for our survival. The miners' strike has shown that today any dispute about workers' livelihoods immediately becomes a struggle over who rules.

THE DEFEATS OF THE

heavily on the left of today. Even the left outside the Labour Party pessimism about far-reaching change in Britain. The introduction to the Socialist Workers' Party's major publication last year, The revolutionary road to socialism, sums up the left's fatalism: "These are bad times for socialists.

around us are the signs of a world in crisis, vet men and women seem unable to do anvthing about it.' The mournful introduction prepares the reader for the inevitable message that the revolutionary road has reached a dead even for the more left-wing of radend, ical left parties. The experience of the last 80 years certainly gives little grounds for blind optimism. But if we are prepared to learn from mistakes, the past can be a source of strength and even of inspiration. Thatcher's class In the eighties the bosses have scored a series of victories over the working class.

They have defeated the unions, forced millions of workers on to the dole and devastated social services.

also managed to humiliate Labour and win a decisive parliamentary majority in 1983. In the process Thatcher has acquired a reputation for being bold, resolute and unstoppable. political problems from the South Atlantic War to GCHQ indicates that she is not an opponent to be underestimated.

Where does the capitalist class get from? this power British isn't what it used to be at the turn of the century. Britain has become a declining economy barely able of the pretence competitiveness rivals. The British ruling class no 1LS longer rules the world. Its power has declined in proportion to the decline British of capitalism. Thatcher cannot obscure the fact that the economy is in a mess and that the system is in crisis. Instead of power and confidence, the economic figures show a class

PREPARING FOR

PREPAPINGIOR

WER

PUT HARTY

AGITATE

Future prospects weigh given to power in 1S entire v relative - All But midable forces spect and reasonable. are the hallmark the experiences of rely on its and strength. Tories ine feat in 1983 not because electoral decline, Her handling of

COLLIE

imperialism ibility to maintain with reaps the benefits. Five years of Order your copy now! Send 30 pence plus 20 pence p&p to Junius Publications Ltd, BCM JP LTD, London WCIN 3XX. Make cheques payable to Junius Publications.

that is helpless and weak in the face of forces beyond its control. Establishment Britain today does not rest on a firm foundation. It is power which is the strength of the ruling class is above all based on the weakness of its opponents. Thatcher can look good against weak opponents. Next to a Michael Foot or a Neil Kinnock she will come off as a polished performer.

when confronted by more forsuch as the miners the ruling class becomes more. circum- The usual provocative statements and ultimatums that of the Thatcher approach were conspicuously absent during the first six weeks of the miners strike.

The miners' strike shows that even today the establishment cannot always have its way. In the end, the Government has to its opponents" weakness tc reputation for boldness Thatcher's benefactor The crisis of the establishment is more than matched by the paralysis of the official labour movement. Labour's demarks a turning point; Labour's of continued of the 2O8E beCause manifest irrelevance of its policies to the eighties. The Labourist tradition which has weathered so many storms has finally come unstuck. It is still the dominant influence in the working class.

But it on maintaining that monopoly indefinitely. Most importantly Labour's present programme lacks plaus- Therefore, the among workers. scope for its electoral success is limited.

Until now the main beneficiaries have been the Conservatives. In the long run it may well be the working class that For the first time since the revolutionary upsurge of 1918-21 the Labour Party faces a crisis of credibility. Even its most loyal supporters tolerate it as a matter of routine or because it is not as bad as the Tories. Others are more cynical The Programme of the Revolutionary Communist Party

REK

WEL

FOR

HANDS

and quite prepared to look elsewhere for practical solutions. Every important event in the class struggle for demonstrating OCCasi irrelevance. The miners' strike is only the latest episode. The paralysis official labour movement strike is a source of acute embarrassment for the Labour Party's friends. It provides yet another crucial experience that can be used to expose Labour's pretensions to be the leadership of the working class.

The British political scene is far from The capitalist class is weak depressing. and relies on the political crisis of the working class to maintain its system. At the same time the forces which are responsible for this political paralysis - the Labour Party and the TUC selves in a mess. It is clear that this form of cooperation between Thatcher and her labour movement benefactors cannot go on indefinitely. This is the time for new a time when for revolution becomes a realistic possibility. Volatility The breakdown of the arrangements is the penalty that the establishment has to pay for its failure to resolve the crisis. remains intact for the moment, have become than at any time since the war.

volatility is reflected in opinion polls which show sudden rises and falls in the popularity of certain parties. It is shown in the high incidence of last-ditch strikes which are doomed because they come too late, but which represent a desperate attempt to hit out. It is shown in the miners' strike which, despite the media's expectations, spread from area to area and evoked a sense of solidarity within sections of the working class.

As yet, this volatility lacks direction carries no distinct political and

RC P

DEVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST

PARTY

Leading the way: the RCP fights for unity under the banner of revolution lying unease becomes another Labour's utions. the during the journalists, volatility over a period of time. open people are themlisten campaigning our confidence For the times' old political their up While everything class courts. more volatile This timistic viction. It is symptomatic of an underand a loss of confidence in many of the old solutions and institgo in any This volatility can direction. It can set Yorkshire miners against colleagues from Nottinghamshire.

It can turn the fury of pickets against or provoke street violence against immigrants. On its own this simply dissipate itselt WIl Yet this volatility can provide the creative energy necessary to build a revolutionary movement. It leaves workers possibilities and makes new more critical of the old ways Today, many feel that they are unable to do anything about their situation The apparent lack of any way out of a spiral of unemployment, cuts and coercion means that people are ready to alternatives that they would once have rejected out of hand. Hence the prospects for in building a revolutionary movement today British left, these are hard and nothing can go right. When there is a low level of trade union militancy, they moan about the downturn'.

When there is a miners" strike, they throw the " "invincibility" hands at of the Government, the police and the Alone in Britain today, the Revolutionary Communist Party is opabout campaigning for revolution and serious about building a party to lead the working class to state power That's why both our programme and our annual conference are called Preparing for Power. This year's Preparing for Power conference runs from 13-20 July (see back page for details). Come and join us for a week of debate about the way forward for the working class. The lesson of every struggle today is that it is never too soon to take the next step down the road towards the British revolution.

Helen Swift the next step, May 1984 15

of occupation. south simmers. In Africa today, the many varied guerrilla organisations and the regimes they struggle against range from Muslim fundamentalists to 'Marxist-Leninists'. gotten wars have in common is their underlying cause more than a century of imperialist domination of the continent.

Wild frontiers Africa's states were all artificial creations of imperialist oppression. across traditional ethnic and These borders were fixed by boundaries the colonial powers in the scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century.

At the conference of Berlin in 1884 the European powers negotiated the division of Africa. between French and British army units at Fashoda in the Sudan in 1898 demonstrated that what they could not agree on amicably they were prepared to fight over.

The African people themselves played no role in the division of their continent except as cannon armies. The imperialists' interest in Africa was principally strategic rather than economic.

The imperialists did practically nothing to develop the economies of their African possessions. Between 1880 and 1936 investment in sub-Saharan Africa was negligible. Agriculture simply stagnated.

According to a 1954 report more than 70 per cent of agricultural land was devoted to subsistence farming. Industrial minute. As late as 1960 South Africa was the only country in Africa where even 10 per cent of the population worked in industry. When after the Second World War, Africans inherited an economically backward continent divided into states shaped to suit the colonial powers. • Western Sahara suffered more than most from being annexed by Spain, a weak colonial power, in only interest in claiming control over the territory was to protect its fishing rights in the waters around the Canary Islands.

The borders France and Spain imposed on the colony in the thirties were meaningless to the local population.

Spain's 1974 census less than a million of the territory's 1.5m people live permanently within its boundaries.

on their traditional practice of herding Algeria and and trading in Under Spain little economic development 16 the next step, May 1984 Africa's forgotten wars In Western Sahara guerrillas of the Polisario Front fight a Moroccan army In Chad troops loyal to French-backed President Hissene Habre confront Libyan-backed rebel Goukouni Oueddi.

Sudan civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist In Ethiopia the military junta contends with secessionist forces in Eritrea and Tigre as well as Somali nationalists in the Ogaden desert.

took place. territory. What Africa's forworld's people's response Their borders cut imposition was to fight. religious France Incidents like the clash work and the flocks. fodder in colonial southern plantations. independence OT United Nations development was "decolonisation' arrived foreign non-existent 1884. Spain's had been. Italians to colonise French According to and weapons. The rest carry Mauritania. Further east in As late as 1952 there were only 200 civilian workers in the entire The Fosbucraa mining company only began production in 1974, almost 30 years after the discovery of one of the richest sources of phosphates When Spain left the colony in 1976 it encouraged Morocco and Mauritania to The invade and redivide the territory.

to this new foreign • Chad was formed in the sixties when West dismantled its African Empire. Under the colonial administration Chad had been a single department so its 4.5m people - split into 11 major ethnic groups and 200 smaler ones - were expected to become a nation.

Chad is also divided between the south, where Africans French-owned cotton plantations, north Muslim Berber were herdsmen live a nomadic life with their Almost 80 per cent of the country's foreign exchange earnings comes from the export of cotton from the • Until 1956 Sudan was ruled by Britain in condominium with Egypt. The granting prompted civil war between the mainly Muslim north and the African and Christian or pagan south. The south had been incorporated into British Sudan to protect Britain's control over access to the Indian Ocean.

More than 17m of Sudan's 22m people are northerners, who control the national economy and political life.

More than 14m of Sudan's people work in the agricultural sector and agricultural exports account for 90 per cent of the country's exchange earnings. Economic development in the south was almost The under the British. majority of the southern population live in small villages, tending their herds as they have done for centuries.

• Ethiopia was never formally governed by foreign powers but its economy and Its political development were directed from London and Rome as surely as if it The British encouraged the Eritrea to prevent occupation in the 1880s and 1890s. At the same time Britain supported the Amhara Prince Menelik with money Britain wanted Ethiopia as a buffer between its own possessions in Sudan, and Italian and French territories.

The local economy was destroyed by the inflow of goods from Europe.

Eritrean industry fared number of factories were established in the Italian colony and by the beginning of the Second World War a substantial working class existed in Eritrea. In 1962, under the auspices of the United Nations Menelik's successor Haile Selassie annexed Eritrea. Eritrea's four million people were forcibly incorporated into the Ethiopian which included the empire Tigreans and Somalis, as well as almost 12m Oromo peasants in the south.

USA insisted on the annexation as it wanted to use Ethiopia's northern highlands as a base for its early warning radar and radio stations, to observe the Middle East. Under imperialist domination the Ethiopian economy has country still depends for more than 60 per cent of its income on the sale of coffee from the Ethiopian hillsides though more than 80 per population depends on farming for its survival less than six per cent of the available land is under permanent crops.

Starvation The world recession has devastated the backward economies of Africa.

70 and 90 per cent of Africans depend on agriculture for their survival. Most work a few acres of land and produce just enough to feed their families. The economies of African states are dependent on the export of primarily agricultural products to earn foreign exchange necessary to pay for vital imports food. The collapse of world prices for agricultural commodities African governments to trim imports.

The removal of food subsidies and the imposition of price rises on basic items of food such as bread and rice has provoked riots and fuelled secessionist tendencies within African states Zaire. The recession has brought to the fore weaknesses inherent in the economies of African states. vention turned common land into private property, African agriculture has suffered as its surplus produce is invested in profitable industries

HOTE

ploughed back into the land. Even during the sixties when food production rose by two per cent a year, it failed to keep pace with population growth of 2.5 per cent.

In the seventies this divergence was even While food output stagnated at greater. 1.5 per cent annual growth, population grew at 2.7 percent. divided into smaller and smaller plots insufficient to support those who worked them, and the soil was rapidly exhausted.

African yields of cereals slumped.

African hectare produced less than 1000 kilograms of maize in 1979; the world average was more than three times as high French paratroopers arrive in Chad: France's largest operation in Africa since the Algerian war better. lost. officially Amharas, The Behind stagnated. The Allast two years. cent of its Between country. the northern sector. the south advance into especially of has forced Sudan. producers. from Tunisia to velopment projects. bureaucracy Ever since colonial interand had been spent. not fall in production exchange earnings Holdings were sub- An Under imperialist domination traditional agricultural practices and traditions disa ppeared, fallow periods were abandoned and methods of soil improvement were The result is poverty and mass starvation: almost two thirds of the countries recognised as poor by the United Nations are African.

• Western Sahara barely has an economy.

Outside areas under Moroccan occupation traditional nomadic and pastoral ways of life have been interrupted by the war.

Moroécan lines production of phosphates has begun again but not on a scale sufficient to employ workers drawn into towns like Smara. Morocco itself has serious economic problems The war costs around $1m a day and the world price of phosphates, from which Morocco earns almost 40 percent of its foreign exchange, has fallen by 30 percent in the Morocco has amassed a $12 billion foreign debt.

When King Hassan ordered the removal of subsidies on bread and other basic foodstuffs in January Morocco's urban poor rioted and forced him to back down. • In Chad the decline in the world price for cotton has wreaked havoc on the Lower rainfall over the last five years has caused the drying up of wells in Soil exhaustion in has allowed the desert to areas traditionally cultivated by peasant farmers.

Many nomads have moved south in search of water putting even more pressure on the land In 1983 Chad had to import 260 000 tons of cereals, and expects to need food aid of the same order in 1984.

• The recession has closed in on Nimeiri's Nimeiri was one of the first to feel the effect of the squeeze on Arab oil After the 1974 oil price rise when Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had huge amounts of money to invest, Numeiri was able to attract considerable funds for de But the inefficient was unable to administer planned draining and irrigation projects.

Last July the Government admitted that of the $220m allocated to the south in the 1977-83 economic plan only $45m The decline in the price of cotton, the main export, has caused a from 1.2m bales in 1976 to 0.6m in 1982 and a loss in foreign Sudan's foreign debt is now $7.8billion and the country has no way of paying.

Sudan defaulted on its interest payments in 1982 and an IMF team provided a plan for austerity. Southern projects are now vital for Sudan's recovery, particularly the production of oil at Bentiu discovered in 1979. But in February the main concessionary, Chevron, announced the suspension of its operations in southern Sudan after guerrillas kidnapped expatriate

workers in Rub Kona. Japanese companies have also backed out of commitments in Sudan. • Ethiopia's economy is in ruins. Agriculture makes up more than 70 per cent of Ethiopian exports. accounts for more than 60 percent.

Cyclical fluctuations in the price of coffee on the world market mean that Ethiopia's income varies wildly from year to year making planning impossible.

credit rating with international financial institutions is still high.

government has sought to take advantage of this to start development projects with foreign investment. nessmen are to be attracted by promises of tax holidays and exemption from import duties. In particular the Government hopes to attract agro-industries carrying out the first stages of processing Ethiopian exports. The Government has begun to impose high duties on imported goods.

of a local inflation rate of 35 to 50 per cent such measures can only increase the immiseration of the Ethiopian masses.

In the northern provinces drought has precipitated an almost complete collapse of the region's subsistence Millions of people have been farming. forced to leave their land to seek food from international relief agencies.

Repression and resistance To contain the conflicts sparked by the recession in Africa local rulers have had to use more and more savage repression.

They have been their imperialist masters. But the African masses have fought back. of different organisations fighting within each state reflect local experiences, but they all represent the native population's response to the exploitation and oppression forced on them by imperialism.

• Almost 100 000 Moroccan the northern occupy Morocco has built a 10 foot Sahara. high wall of sand around the northern third of the territory where the main phosphate deposits are. with barbed wire, US-supplied electronic and automatic artillery emplacesensors ments, has failed to protect the Moroccan controlled sector from Polisario guerrilla Morocco is reduced to making periodic sorties into guerrilla-held areas of the territory. In January, it took 25 000 Moroccan troops several days of bitter fighting to capture Amgala from a small Polisario force. Polisario has won considerable support among the territory's settled population and managed to recruit among the well trained fighters of the nomadie peoples.

This combination has allowed it to mount spectacular guerrilla attacks and to carry out more conventional military actions.

Polisario defeated Morocco's ally Mauritania in 1978. much to the career of its leaders in exile in important Muslim freewheeling population. Although fighting a national against another

WOR

Polisario describes its struggle as pan-Arab.

• The instability of Chad's social composition makes it impossible for any group to hold power for very long.

two current contenders fought together against the post-colonial military regime of Colonel Felix Malloum.

Hissene Habre and Goukouni Oueddi have chased each other in and out of the capital Ndjamena. Whichever happens to be in power has had to use the same brutal methods to keep the In the south the Sara people control. who work the cotton plantations have been subject to periodic raids and even aerial bombings. • Despite its formal democratic structures Sudan is dominated by Jaafar Niwho came to power in 1969 meiri through a military coup. mained in power for 14 years by playing off one section of Sudan's population against another. created by today's recession, his attempts to forge alliances with local politicians in the south and with Muslim oppositionists in the north have become more and more erratic and less successful.

Islamic fundamentalists, Other French and organised have against the government. Coffee alone leaders of the sect. of prominent Nimeiri has resorted to Ethiopia's methods of repression. The military Nilotic Western busiregion. assembly. for leadership. son') On top It southern region. prolonged Derg, The Selassie. backed to the hilt by 1975 the Militarised labour units The multitude The army instigated operate with military rule.

soldiers were slaughtered. part of Western in Eritrea. This wall, armed more intense resistance. The most

WESTERN

Polisario's ideology owes

SAHARA

centres, and the lifestyle of the nomadie Muslim country, The Since 1979 masses under CHAD: Last Nimeiri has re- But in the instability which began Caaden 1 In the north strong among the large student and urban population, demonstrations mass Even Nimeiri's own Ansari Muslim sect has taken up opposition to the Government.

Nimeiri has responded by arresting the Nimeiri's declaration of Islamic law last June was designed to head off opposition to the wave of arrests In the south, Ansari's. more He began by exploiting divisions between Equatorian and offering peoples in the region, provincial self-government to the three provinces which make up the southern His schemes have only succeeded in robbing moderate local politicians of their platform in the now defunct regional Without this layer the people have looked to more militant organisations Anyanya Il ('snake poicalled after the south's army in Sudan's first civil war, now has at least 5000 well trained and armed guerrillas.

demands total independence for the At least four other guerrilla organisations - espousing different ideologies and based on different sections of the population - are competing for the leadership of the southern people.

the • Ethiopia's ruling military junta, shot its way into power in 1974 when the famine in the north and the increasing success of the Eritrean struggle combined to topple the regime of Haile Derg's first task was to destroy the popular movement unleashed by the fall of Haile Selassie. In September army declared martial law. were created. 'red terror, the declaring war on all workers' and peasants' organisations which refused to co- Tens of thousands of students, workers and peasants The new regime then drafted altogether 200 000 peasants into a national 'army' to crush the secessionists The Derg's military repression, backed by more than 10 000 Cuban soldiers and Soviet military equipment has provoked A number of nationalist organisations operate in Eritrea.

Eritrean important People's Liberation Front which controls up to 85 percent of the territory.

Its claims to be a Marxist-Leninist organısation are only to satisfy Chinese backers.

In fact it is a nationalist organisation WESTERN SAHARA: Northern third Morocco since Spain pulled out in 1976. More than 10 000 have died in eight years of fighting.

is the summers harbuy has laste atest in a civi war unal since independence in 1960. An est imated 20 000 have died SUDAN: Renewed outoreak

OT CIVI

1955-1972. Casualty rate claim Government troops killed 20 000 have ETHIOPIA: More died in trite in frica longest in 1962. The war in which sedar Saltie has claimed around 30 000 lives.

which wants to develop the Eritrean economy independently. People's Liberation Front The Tigre controls about 80 per cent of the province of Tigre. It demands self-determination for Tigre which, it argues, necessarily mean independence.

Ogaden desert the simmering guerrilla war waged for 20 years by the Western Somali Front has already sparked Liberation conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia in 1977. It demands integration region with Somalia. Its main platform is religious, since the region's Muslims have suffered decades of discrimination at the hands of the predominantly Amhara ruling class Arc of crisis The imperialist powers main concern over the instability in Africa is the effect that African disturbances have on other vola- The depth of the crisis affectile areas. ting the continent means that imperialist powers can no longer stand at arms length and expect their local stooges to keep Increasingly, Western powers are order. called on to intervene in Africa themselves.

The problem is that every time they go in find it more difficult to get out.

they And in the crisis of the eighties, every conflict between African factions local threatens to blow up into an international crisis among the Western powers themselves. • While Western Sahara's phosphate deposits may be Morocco's main reason for being there, its American and French concerned backers are more consequences of defeat for a Moroccan regime that has been their loyal ally in the region for decades. was alarmed to read a 1979 CIA report predicting Moroccan defeat and immediately approved a bankroll to keep up the Moroccan war effort. Reagan has carried on. that credit rating is currently more military than $100m. money to buy American Northrop F5 jets, gunships and a range of the helicopter sophisticated most France too has supplied a good deal of But neither the USA nor France is prepared to publicly back Morocco's claim to Western Sahara. tility from other African states 30 now support Polisario.

sent its troops into Chad last • France YeS. trade has trie presume free the France has tried to limit the con-

EGYPT

A LIBYA

SUDAN,

ERITREA

TIGRE DJIBOUTI

French trading French efforts does not In the of the force in Chad. Christian Sudan • In insurrection. unidentified believed Egyptian army USA is wary to take with the Sudan. President Carter to the November, • In Ethiopia the It is a policy Morocco's Morocco has used this of oilfields modern weaponry. Now they Both fear hos- - 20S1 the Horn. from starvation. ians have neighbouring states,

MALIA

homes. As barbarism. are regularly has world in blood. with Libya By the But of dollars in Nimeiri In has widely plane March, arranged by have been Days later The There are even advantage trench Snamprogetti conflicts to The East. Until the The Both the Ine mutan USA and In Ethiopia close to death the border into and the Algerian Western the struggles between backed tyrants and the masses become more intense the region sinks closer to Mustard gas and' mortar fire peasant directed against villages in Eritrea and Tigre. The Sudanese a scorched-earth instigated policy in parts of the south. Africa's forgotten wars are drenching some of the poorest and most inaccessible parts of the As long as imperialism dominates Africa barbarism will continue The slaughter of thousands of Africans is -It is up part of the present world order.

to workers in the West to make common cause with the villagers of Eritrea and the nomads of Western Sahara to make sure the masses of Africa are not forgotten beneath the heel of imperialist oppression.

John Johnson the next step, May 1984 17

Why should we Call this a recovery? pushing investigate. 'NOW IS THE TIME', directors' spokesman Walter Goldsmith told a businessmen's convention in January, 'to revive the radical zeal of 1979. He urged the Prime Minister and her Chancellor of the Exchequer that 'to curb public spending is not something to be striven for with little hope of reward: it is the bedrock of the policy upon which the present Government was elected'. Yet it is a policy which Margaret Thatcher and her failed acolytes have consistently achieve over the past five years.

This year's budget and public spending plans show the problem. The between the Government's expenditure and its income, which it has to make up by borrowing money - the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement - was planned at £8.2 billion. It now looks like reaching billion. year's PSBR also £10 Last overshot - by f1.5 billion. This year's excess has occurred despite the package of f500m cuts announced by incoming Last month the Confederation of British Industry reported that its members are more optimistic than at any time since 1976 about their company prospects. It predicted that manufacturing output will grow by 3.5 per cent this year and four percent next year. However, the CBI's forecasts are based on nothing more substantial than a survey of the expectations of its members and the inspection of the •economic indicators from the last quarter of 1983 through rose-tinted spectacles. The employers are loath to admit that any improvement in the British economy must start from the bottom of such a deep trough that unless it is both substantial and sustained it will not even restore the economy to the feeble state it was in before it took the nose dive of 1979.

The real economy shows signs of continuing a sluggish improvement from the rock bottom of the early 18 the next step, May 1984 Forecasters more optimistic but little hope for jobless

BANK OREN CLEO

ONE

POUND

The Tories and the employers eagerly greet the long-awaited economic revival, but their inability to control public spending reveals the forces their system towards collapse. Phil Murphy and Tony Allen chancellor Nigel Lawson last July and an * extra €500m income from selling off shares in North Sea oil. Even the Treasury's ingenious fiddling of the statistics could not disguise the fact that state spending was out of control.

Every year since 1979 public spending has risen faster than the rate of inflation.

In real terms public expenditure has grown by five per cent since the Toriestook office. When Labour's chancellor Denis Healey handed over to Geoffrey to the public sector accounted for 40 per of the entire cent For five years the Tories have been talking about improving efficiency and imposing restraint, about rolling back the state and the virtues of private enterprise. Yet the state sector has expanded to occupy 44 per cent of the nation's economic activity. Surveying the record of public spending The increases, *is this eighties. Output: in the last half of 1983 most manufacturing sectors registered an increase in output. Metals rose by five per cent and chemicals, engineering, textiles and clothing were all up by two per cent. manufacturing output was only 1.5 percent above the 1981 trough and still 14 per cent behind the 1979 level.

Industrial production overall in 1983 was more than six percent below the 1979 level. Even if the CBI growth forecast is accurate, at that rate it will take the rest of the eighties to get back to the position of the late seventies. Investment: investment in manufacturing also increased in the last quarter of 1983. However, even this increased level was less than the quarterly average of the previous year, and the 1983 total was still 38 per cent below the 1979 figure. pay the price? Uncertaint: In markets power?' decline of British capitalism.

why the state in curbing its expenditure.

and The 'welfare Howe British economy. state expenditure. capitalist workforce. and taxation Times inquired recently Government in office or in back in February, inadequacy Yet for 1983 as a whole seventies. since 1980. continue until 1985. 'changed work practices'.

intense As the National security. 6331, Q6% 14.2 7.4 - td2.02 3.3 2.8 15.7 forces The Government's difficultiesin curbing public sector expenditure are an indication of its wider problem of reversing the The massive scale of the state's interference in the economy is a measure of the frailty of a system that boasts of its faith in the individual entrepreneur. A look at three major areas of public spending reveals difficulties faces such Welfare, law order and defence, and trade, indefence dustry, energy and employment together account for nearly three quarters of the total state budget of around £120 billion Welfare and warfare state' government provision for social security, health and personal social services and education - takes up slightly more than half of all Second Since the these World War governments in all the major countries have underwritten the welfare services necessary to maintain an efficient, healthy and well-trained Since the recession struck ship Britain in the mid seventies, both Labour itionally and Tory governments have tried to cut on welfare spending but with Institute Economic Review commented the inadequacy of the recovery so far has been in the main an of investment. The position of the British economy today is so bad that even if investment rose at the 10 per cent rate the most optimistic forecasters predict it would still increase. be way below the levels of the late Productivity: the Tories have long claimed the credit for the miraculous growth in productivity of five percent The CBI reckons this will But the latest to stay. Bank of England quarterly report confirms that the improvement in 1985. productivity has been achieved by the closure of unprofitable plants, the shakeout of jobs in industry and The productivity miracle is largely due to more exploitation in shrinking traditional industries, not to more limited success. Education spending has been cut in cash terms, but in real terms it still shows a slight increase since 1979. A declining birth rate and falling school rolls have provided a pretext for the spending axe in education. But the growing healthcare demands of an ageing population made health service cuts more difficult to justify. Public sympathy and well-organised union and professional lobbies have helped to ensure a real spending increase on health of almost 20 per cent since 1979 The most uncontrollable element in the welfare budget - and indeed in the whole sphere of public spending - is social Since unemployment has grown by two million, and the numbers of pensioners and those claiming child benefit and family income supplement have all increased. This year social security is expected to cost more than £35 billion - almost 30 per cent of total state expenditure and an increase in real terms of more than a quarter over the past five years. The second big consumer of government revenues is the state's repressive apparatus. The police, the courts and the armed forces are vital to protect the British establishment from its enemies at home and abroad. At a time of growing social conflict at home and heightening the Government international tensions, has had no alternative but to pay out more and more money to ensure its own physical survival. Strengthening and reequipping the police for riot control the scale and mass strike-breaking on recently seen in the coalfields has contributed to a one third increase in the law and order budget over the past five years military The equipment of Britain's with the latest and most murderous technology, largely conventional rather than nuclear, has meant a real increase in defence spending by around one quarter since 1979. Between them the forces of state repression account for about 17 per cent of public expenditure.

Lame duck clinic The third important area of state activity is its direct intervention in the economy.

In terms of volume spending these areas than welfare and consume much les less than three per cent of overall public expenditure. However, they reveal the extent to which the state is obliged to interfere directly in the capitalthe wheels of the ist economy to keep ramshackle profit-makingmachineturning The British state has long propped up vital energy-supply and transport industries that could no longer survive under private ownership. In more recent years have been joined by industrial BL lame ducks - steel, shipbuilding, Rolls Royce. The Government has itself attempted to promote new technology enterprises, such as ICL State sponsoris necessary since Britain's tradresourceful and dynamic entrepreneurs lack the resources or the efficient exploitation in expanding Now that new investment sectors. there is little traditional industry left and little sign of any substantial growth sectors capable of leading an industrial revival, productivity can be expected to stagnate rather than Whatever their differing views on the scope of the British economic and the revival, the politicians economists and the businessmen all agree on one thing - recovery or no recovery mass unemployment is here The CBI expects a steady three million plus on the dole through The long range forecasters disagree only over the extent to which the number of jobless will swell into The message for the the late eighties. working class is clear - upturn or no upturn this system has got to go.

develop dynamism TO dependently. The Tories swept into office determined to curb state intervention in industry and set the inessman free. The results uneven. The Tories have sold off £3 billion worth of shares in state companies and other industrial assets Cable and Wireless and Britoil. They have ruthlessly cut labour costs throughout the nationalised industries ways, post and telecommunications, gas and electricity have been able. But coal, steel, shipbuilding and the railways remain a big drain on the exchequer - between £1.6 billion last year. increase spending 1979 is largely accounted for increased subsidies and investment in the coal industry. The cost of various Government schemes to control the unemployed organise the and to supply labour to industry has risen as the dole queues have lengthened. Spending on special employment measures has grown by more than 60 percent since Thatcher took office. Thus while the Tories have managed to cut back on spending in trade and industry, they have had spend even more on energy and employment. The weakness of prise constantly vention in the economy and makes its withdrawal very difficult.

on the newly-appointed industry minister Norman Tebbit have proved so great that his colleagues have begun to ask whether the driest coming rather wet. The problem of profit Economic decline, rising unemployment and social and political instability call for higher and higher spending of public funds. But the growth of public expenditure itself worsens lying economic crisis of British capitalism.

State spending is financed by which is largely a deduction profits produced by private industry and commerce. Even personal taxation in the comes out of profits as workers end compensate for higher tax by Lena to winning wage rises that maintain takehome pay. The thus transferred back to their employers.

When profits are healthy employers are prepared to pay high taxes to finance the public services their system requires. But when profits in the private sector are languishing at record lows as they have done for the past decade, taxation for pay vices becomes an intolerable burden.

The deficit on the government budget, the PSBR, imposes an additional load on private capital. Like any other debtor, the government has to pay back what it borrows. The state's debt repayments will consume a profits made in the private sector in the the future present of Government borrowing there is less loan capital available on the money markets for private capitalists.

More competition for loans means a higher price for borrowing higher interest rates. Higher interest rates make it even more difficult for businessacquire capital for In its recently-announced public spending over the next three years the Government has declared its commitment to under control before the whole system grinds to a halt. assessment of the prospects for the British economy and its underestimation of the obstacles to dicate little chance of success.

Wishful thinking The Government has declared its firm intention to hold public spending constant in real terms. Its projections however rest shaky foundations. very first is that the economy will revert to an annual growth rate of between two and three per cent after the zero average of the Thatcher years up to now.

hard figures give less grounds for anticipating such a bright short-term future for technology inbercaguered bus been including ICL, Airmade profitthem they lost The 60 percent on energy by of cheap to private enterinter- The pressures Thatcherites was beall the undertaxation from the Treasury Party branded the burden of taxation is this year alone. public serevery year. But even if the measures growing proportion of the large scale means that manual workers. break. money public profitable Welfare: plans for bring its expenditure the long-term But its over-optimistic curbing spending in- Last month plans the 80 The and jobs. further terms. lower Homes fit for heroes?: workers homes have to go to make way for capitalists profits British capitalism than does the wishful thinking of the CBI (see box). The second basis of Government forecasts is that inflation will decline from five per cent this year to 4.5 per cent next year to three per cent in 1986. Few people outside the Treasury take such a rosy view of the likely course of price rises.

Most observers expect inflation to rise rather than fall with serious consequences for the Govern- Even the allment's spending programme.

Select Committee has Government's plans as The committee estimates a real increase in spending of 1.5 per cent The Financial Times' assessment of the public spending white paper was that it demonstrates a notable triumph of hope over experience. It singled out spending in local government which overruns its target by between five and eight per cent Yet the White Paper envisages a 13 per cent cut in real terms over the next three years, starting with a two per cent cut in cash terms this year.

current rate-capping were fully implemented this target could not be reached.

The three percent cash limit on wage rises in the public sector has already been breached by a 4.5 percent offer to local authority The Government looks like having to keep revising its targets upwards, an old habit it keeps promising to If we look at the three major areas of expenditure we can see the problems the Tories are up against - and how they are likely to try to resolve them.

the Government plans to increase spending slightly, in real terms, on health and social security.

However, given the likely increase in need for health care for older people and for benefits for spending is unemployed, The certain to fall far short of demand.

Government has already announced its plans for cuts in NHS services and jobs.

social minister services Norman Fowler made public ominous for a fundamental overhaul' of the social security system.

The consequences for the 20 million claimants and 000 staff who adminster the system can only be more cuts in benefits Education, which has already suffered heavy cuts, is threatened with a 10 per cent reduction in real More teachers on the dole and standards in the schools are the inevitable result. The onslaught on public housing is scheduled to continue - a 16 per cent cut in cash spending is planned for next year alone. Law and order and defence: from 1986, the Government is planning to hold down expenditure increases on the armed forces, while spending on the police is maintained in real terms. The Government has not budgeted for any wars such as the one it recently conducted against Argentina. the world order makes it highly likely that Britain will be engaged in further military activity to preserve its interests overseas. Nor has the Government allowed for the cost of mounting regular police operations of the sort recently displayed in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere.

the likelihood of growing class conflict in Britain will force the state to finance the wider deployment of its coercive apparatus. The chances of keeping spending on repression down seem remote indeed.

Economy: ambitious scheme is its proposal to reduce spending in real terms on trade and industry by more than 50 percent over the next three years. at the rate of £2 billion a year is a central feature of this programme.

ways, British Telecom and parts of BL, steel and shipbuilding are being pushed to the front of Thatcher and Tebbit's shopwindow. But even if they find buyers for all these old losers their problems will not be over. Indeed the state will have lost the enterprises that helped to balance the books while remaining saddled with the chronic loss makers. real cutting edge of Tory strategy is to be applied. The Government is aiming to achieve a dramatic reduction in its subsidies - external financing' to nationalised industries this by raising the profitability of these industries to the extent that they will be 98 per cent self-financing by 1987. Today only 45 percent of their capital spending is generated internally. for this short, sharp shock treatment are the railways, and shipbuilding, steel and the coal industry. One leading economic commentator recently cynically characterised aid to Inese industries as 'unhappy mistake' which arose from the reluctance of the Department of Health and Social Security responsibilities'. The Government's intention now is clearly to transfer tens of thousands of workers from those industries on to the dole queues in an attempt to make drastically slimmed-down operations profitable. However, the instability of and services. Yet crisis. the Government's most lity. The sale of state assets British Airgow shipyard of working standards. This is where the get away with it. industries. the remaining It intends to do wages. dancies is The candidates to believe. an to take on new Public or private Under careful direction from the Cabinet, Coal Board boss lan MacGregor is current attempting to forge ahead with the process he began at the British Steel Corporation.

Confrontation Every attempt by the Government to restrain public spending leads towards confrontation with the working class.

Even if the economy stabilises to the extent the Government hopes it will, holding expenditure steady will mean cuts in jobs The probability that the recession will deepen makes even wider attacks on welfare services and nationalised industries a more likely prospect.

Privatisation is one stage in a process of forcing workers to pay the price for the This process begins with the closure of factories, mines and hospitals.

the shedding of jobs and the restructuring of working practices, with the aim of raising efficiency and restoring profitabi- It continues with the sale of shares or putting services in hospitals and town halls out to private tender.

And it goes further with the shakeout of more jobs after privatisation - as in the Scott Lithunder its new Trafalgar House ownership, or for Cambridgeshire school cleanersunder Pall Mall contractors.

The deterioration of pay and conditions goes hand in hand with the loss of jobs.

The Government is eager to turn its crisis of public expenditure into a crisis class livelihoods and living We cannot afford to let them The fightback against public spending cuts must begin with resistance to all attempts to rationalise and restructure public services andnationalised We need to fight all attempts to make public sector enterprises more economic, efficient of viable at the expense of our jobs, working'conditions and Opposition to privatisation as a means of pushing through mass redunone aspect of the broader struggle to defend living standards. It is not however the only issue on which to fight, as many trade union leaders with vested interests in public ownership seem Narrowing resistance to the cuts to opposition to privatisation often leads - as in the NHS - to acceptance of sacrifices in jobs and conditions in the hope of keeping the contractors out.

But whether under public or private ownership workers need to keep every job and to preserve wages and conditions.

- no cuts, no redundancies should be our slogan the next step, May 1984 19

They have a dream Raymond Williams, Towards 2000, Chatto & Windus 1983, pp273, hok £9.95 Anderson, In the tracks of historical Perry Verso/NLB 1983, pp112, pbk materialism, £4.95 "The guns, let us talk about the guns", He Who Yawns said. "We will", Sitting Bull said a we must ta ot the vison els without a vision are nothing". (Martin Cruz Smith, The Indians won) TODAY the gurus and pundits of the left are coming on very strong about the need for a new vision of socialism. Surveying the disarray of the working class throughout the world, they conclude that Sitting Bull was on the right track. Yes, of course, they say, what we need is a vision! These two authors both agree that if we are to progress towards socialism, then we need desperately to change our way of thinking about it. We need to set out in greater detail the forms that a socialist future will as sume. Both writers have in the past conducted Raymond Williams in 1961 similar surveys: with The long revolution and Perry Anderson in 19/6 with consideratons on western mara ism. Now each of them takes his earlier work as the starting point for a fresh appraisal.

Anderson reviews recent writings, emphasising the left's failure to produce any theoretical advance in the area of a politics or a strategy which could lead to the overthrow of the rule of capital. In his earlier work.

Anderson predicted that the philosophical. aesthetic and cultural focus which had characterised Western Marxism since the war would give way to a concentration upon the more concrete concerns He of economics. welcomes a "renaissance historical materialism' in these fields, citing the work of Mandel, Braverman, Miliband, Thompson. Hobsbawm and many others. He had also hoped that a revolutionary conjuncture of theory and practice would accrue from the upsurge of working class miitanev between 1968 and 1974. Instead he has witnessed a crisis in Latin Marxism', generated he claims by the dual disappointment of Maoism and Eurocommunism. Anderson notes that as the challenges mounted by the Communist Parties of France, Italy. Spain and Portugal faded, then so too Sartre, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan and others fell silent, moved on or simply defected.

Retreat to idealism To develop the kind of strategy that Anderson has in mind it is first necessary to identify the agency of historical change. Neither Anderson nor Williams shows any confidence in the traditional candidate for this role the work ing class. Instead they put their faith in the invigorating effect of the utopian, prefigurpolitics now fashionable on the left.

ative In other words they opt for a polities whose essential emphasis is on how the future will be rather than on how we will get there, Anderson and Williams subscribe to the ideas of the who believed socialists, pre-Marxist that society could be transformed by the will of enlightened individuals. The Marxist understanding of the transition to communism is based on the materialist analysis of the progressive development of the productive forces under capitalism, and the creation of a class which is capable of overthrowing capitalism and establishing communism. It is strange that Anderson adheres so strongly to the utopian devotes considerable philosophy space to criticising one particular form of the idealist method - structuralism.

Anderson's critique of the structuralists is in fact a telling one. They had applied to human society generally the analytical model developed originally by Saussure in relation to language, for Anderson not only was the application fundamentally inappropriate, but ase. me node was astorted une brocess of its application. Saussure's balance in his conception of the sign (word) between the signifier and the signified (roughly the bare word' and the 'concept into which each sign can be divided) gave way to a 'gradual megthe signifier. Extra-linguistic ot reality, which already had only an arbitrary relation to the sign (via the signified), now receded altogether, In post-structuralism, meaning itself was scen as compete unstable strung out along and between shifting signifiers.

Truth was an illusion. Another crucial distinction which was abused was that between langue (language) and parole (speech). The basis of this distinction was that the laws or structures of language were conartons or possomty speech. That did not mean, however, that those as were me cause or any paracular speech act, which is how the distinction was wrongly put to work in history and anthropology. Th laws were presented 'as if they caused certain therefore did not events.

ACTURE

Casa get a look in, as indeed on a logical application of the model it could not - any analysis of 20 the next step, May 1984 reviews under ving laws could not be expected to explain particular developments. In this conlusion history was seen, as caware said ob served, as legislated accident.

Finally, emphasis upon structures to the exclusion of all subjects, which was the hallmark of the school, led, ironically, to a total subjectivity structing the structures themselves. They exposed the implication behind every posited structure - that is, the existence of a subject distinet from it, from which the structure is perceived. Attacking such a notion as metaphysical, they removed any possibility of the objectivity of the structures, or indeed any possibility of defining them at all.

Anderson argues that the structuralists were coomed to aure because mey encount ered a Marxism whose emphasis was mainly philosophical and which was crippled by the the Soviet continuing disappointment of Union. He fails to appreciate that Marxism which remains academic in nature and divorced from the class struggle will always be prey to idealism. Williams starts out on a different tack. Revising and extending his earlier analysis, he approaches the question of a transition to socialism by examining "postindustrial society", democracy and representand a number of other social issues 8101 His method is to look at the world and depict lost opportunity, mess tnat he sees alienation, waste, crisis and war. He then goes on to decribe how confused we have become, before urging us to change our ways of thinking and working now so that change will be- COnC BOssDIC. Williams claims to share none of the illusions of the British labour movement in the effectively managed, Casidus deliver the goods. But his own schemes for how we should proceed simply repeat the gradualism of his 1961 work, The long revolution. He calls for fixed term Parliaments, for proportional representation, for a relevant second chamber, for representative industrial councils' to work in parallel with local coun cils. Cable and satellite under local control will be used to foster real interaction between people and communities. Utopian blueprint Willas and Anderson are at one in their near despair. They insist that we must change our attitudes and develop a blueprint for the future. In doing so, they are both seeking to recover the positive aspects of utopianism which they see as having been eclipsed by the advent of scientific socialism. The blueprint therefore must install the institutional detail missing from Marxism, but must compensate for what they see as that tradition's moral Insurency. Both writers are convinced that the crucial resources for such a rehabilitation can be found in the women's, peace and ecology movements. The virtue of these movements is that they address questions about nature which are bigger than those dreamt of in the traditional philosophy of historical materialism.

vore man mat me are casabe oncuaung such vast concerns and advancing practical short-term objectives. These movements can provide not only a credible alternative vision but also a way of mobilising towards it, precisely because their practice seeks to embod the values that their hoped-for future will contain. Neither Williams nor Anderson provide any examples to back up their argument that the feminist, peace and ecology movements have provided a practical lead or a superior ethical dimension to the anti-capitalist struggle. Confronted with the paucity of examples, Williams is reduced to righteous admonitions, quoting the phrase 'actual people at those who prefer the more scientific 'classes".

Williams and Anderson arrive at a lame conclusion to the grand search for a strategy aimed at wresting power from the capitalist class. It is not as if either writer underestimates the enormity of the task. On the contrary they are almost mesmerised by the might of the state. Williams, however, evades the ques of class power almost completely

•TON

blithely asserts here and there that before his proposals are implemented there is first the "breaking the arbitrary power of matter capital. On how this will be achieved there is next to nothing. He is suspicious of the command structures" of the parties in the West, and of the economies of the East. When push comes to shove, however, he believes it is the 'existing political parties" and "institutions' towards which all the libertarian currents should direct their energies. Anderson is more cons cious of the shortcomings of such an approach.

He includes a token acknowledgement that it is the workers, by virtue of their class capacity who are the vital agents of change. But the real thrust of his book is in another direction Anderson is not concerned to stress the importance of building an independent party expressing this 'class capacity and giving effect to it.

Instead, he favours the coming together of a various and plural bloc' of interests.

A question of leadership Anderson notes in passing that the failure of the Eurocommunists to develop a successful strategy was connected with the way in which they retrod the revisionist path of the Second International. If he had developed this point he could have shown that the central feature of this path is a belief in the ability of the state to act in the interests of the working class.

But in his survey of dozens of books from the mid-seventies onwards, Anderson does not even mention Santiago Carillo's Eurocommunism and the state (1977), which was a major statement of this revisionism. A discussion of this sort would have shown that much of the labour movement and most elements of the women's, peace and ecology movements display exactly the same sort of faith in the capitalist state Just as importantly, such a discussion would have emphasised the need for an organisation capable of expressing the independent interests of the working class and capable of leading workers to the seizure of power. In 1981, in his Arguments within English Marxism, Anderson did consider these issues more directly. Then he referred to the cogency and realism of the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky.

In his new book, Anderson dismisses that tradition in a few lines for being fixated with the October Revolution and for having failed in Portugal in 1974. Anderson and Williams have no answers to the problems confronting only dream of a conflict-free future while the working class is up against it at present. But if there is a crisis of confidence, it is not really in the possibility of a better world: it is rather in our ability to get to it. It is the latter problem which both these books evade.

Pat Ford A special relationship Michael Farrell, Arming the Protestants, Pluto Press 1983, pp374, pbk £7.95 Arming the Protestants is a well researched and carefully documented account of the formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary (the Specials) Constabulary (RUC) and the Roval Uister between 1920 and 1927. In this period the struggle for Irish independence assumed new dimensions and posed a major threat to British rule. The Specials played a major role in helping the British state defeat that threat.

Michael Farrell's book gives us a valuable insight into how they succeeded. The RUC and the Specials were formed from the remnants of the Loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force as a Protestant security force to replace the mainly Catholic Royal Irish Constabulary in the North. The recent murders f. Catholics in Armagh linking the Ulster Defence Regiment - which replaced the Specials in 1970 - to the paramilitary Protestant Action Force show that relations between the security forces and Loyalist death squads are still as close as ever. Farrell's command over the minutiae of obscure governmentreports, parnamentary debates and long forgotten Cabinet minutes is impressive.

the main political thrust of his Noneteless. His argument is that an intranbook is flawed. sigent Protestant community in the north east of Ireland exercises an effective veto over any attempt by Britain to meet the Irish people's Farrell elevates the aspirations for freedom. Loyalist community to the position of an independent social dynamic in the struggle between Britain and Ireland. But the Loyalist establishment has never been anything other than the agent of imperialist interests in the Six Counties.

By presenting Loyalism asan autonomous force, holding sway over Britain, Farrell inevitably ends up casting British imperialism in the role of a frustrated reformer, thwarted by extremists.

Farrell presents the plans to partition Ireland in 1919 as the initiative of the Loyalist leaders who 'were bending their energies securing Partition. The Coalition towards government at Westminster, which devised the British strategy to partition Ireland, is relegated to the sidelines. Farrell scarcely mentions the passage of Britain's Better Government of Ireland Act in March 1920, yet this was the Act which established the Six Counties of Northern Farrell's portrayal of the Unionist establishment as the prime protagonists in the plan to partition the country is surprising since one of the sources which he quotes extensively Thomas Jones' Whitehall Diary - amply demonstrates the central role of the British ruling class Jones was the Cabinet secretary and an intimate friend of the British Prime Minister Lloyd George. His diary documents the debates that accompanied the formulation of Britain's strategy towards Ireland from the First World War to 1925. Jones' diary clearly shows that Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Churchill, Austin Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead had no compunc tion about subordinating the demands of the Loyalist community to the overall interests of British imperialism. In September 1921 Lloyd George spelt out that he would tolerate no opposition from Ulster Loyalists to the Treaty settlement with the Free State: 'Men will die for Throne and Empire. I do not know who will die for Tyrone and Ferma- The feeling here for Ulster is not so strong nagh. as in 1913/14. Lots feel a bit annoyed about Ulster, think them unreasonable, narrow.'

Tory leader Austin Chamberlain later reinforced Jones' account bears witness to the unity of the ruling class on this issue Tory Leader Austen Chamberlain announced that he was not precluded from putting the greatest moral pressure on Ulster if the Treaty was satisfactory and vital to the Empire. Farrell is oblivious to the true relationship between the British state and its Loyalist allies.

He concludes that the Loyalists have sustained an overriding influence on British strategy in Referring to the 1974 Ireland up to todav Ulster Workers' Council strike, which toppled Tory minister William Whitelaw's power-sharing Executive, Farrell argues that this was another assertion of Loyalist intransigence: Faced with ultimate Unionist refusal to dilute the exclusively Protestant character of

the state, the British government abandoned all serious alemons ar retorm are concentratee on crushing the IRA. In reality British Army participation in the strike to British establishment interests.

Farrell again depicts Loyalism as an autonomous force when he presents the formation of the Specials in 1920 as the initiative of the Loyalist They thoroughly committed to establishing the proposed Northern state, regardless of the whims of the government at Westminster' Thomas Jones demonstrates, the British ruling class needed no encourasement Loyalists where its own interests were at stake.

Indeed, without British arms and funding, the Loyalists would never have been able to reactivate the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1920.

November 1920, the illegal armed UVF had become the legal armed USC.

Britain's sole purpose in arming and funding the Specials was to defeat the republican movement. Hence, when the Border settlement was finally resolved in 1925 and the republicans had been crushed, the British rapidly placed the a reserve footing despite Loyalist High levels of Protestant unemprotestations. ployment and the resistance of the Ulster establishment did not stop the British from dispensing with the Specials. From then on, they were mobilised only during periods ofinstability: in 1932 when the first nationalist Fianna Fail government was elected in the south, in 1936 during the IRA Border Campaign, and finally in 1968-9 during the civil rights campaign.

Farrell's confusion over Loyalism is best illustrated when he argues that the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December which established 1921, the Irish Free State in the South, presented a problem for the Northern state: The antagonism or contradiction between the British government's two main objectives fostering a "responsible" government in the South and sustaining the Northern Government - was becoming sharper.' In reality there was nothing inconsistent about these two planks or brush poncy.

and the creation of the Irish Free State, by dividing the republican movement and guaranteeing British rule, was the only logical step for the British ruling class. Farrell misses the major contradicition that did arise ournees tablishment of the Northern Ireland state. While Partition temporarily resolved the Irish Question for Britain, it also brought the national liberation struggle within the boundaries of the British Lloyd George remarked during the Treaty state negotiations that we are only behind them (the Loyalists) to this extent that we cannot allow civil war to take place at our doors which would embroil our own people Irish people are over the threshold and under.

mining the foundations of the British state. The British ruling class backs the Loyalists te the hilt, not because it is constrained by the "Loyalist veto' as Farrell implies but because its very survival depends on winning the Irish war. Andy Clarkson The good time boys Michael Wilcox, Rents, Methuen 1983, pp47, pbk £1.95 Rents, Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith Rents was Michael Wilcox's first major success as a dramatist. Since it was first performed Traverse Theatre Club in Edinburgh at the in 1979. Wilcox has gone on to receive acclaim as a theatre and television playwright.

Wilcox is gay, and kews is about male pro stitution in Edinburgh. The Guardian theatre critic described the play's first Lyric as an important occasion. The sun day Telegraph, which still renders gay 'gay, declared that Rents had a lot to say not merely about homosexuality, but about humanity in general". The gay press has scrambled find hyperbole gross enough their admiration for Wilcox's effort. In fact, Wilcox's play, which has just finished its run at the Lyric, has nothing to say about 'humanity in general and precious little to say about homosexuality in particular.

Male prostitution is different. Like female prostitutes rent boys are reviled for trading in their own bodies, they run enormous risks of violence from clients and police, and like female prostitutes they do not choose their "profession. They are forced into it by want.

Dennis Nilsen's murders of young gay men miscovered last year m vort London show the risks run by rent boys in London and other you nave only to listen to the variety of regional accents among the boys in Piccadilly other gathering places Circus or in London to understand that they are there because they discovered that the streets of London were not, after all, paved with gold.

The boys who tout in such places are pursuing the only youth opportunities capitalism has to offer them. issues; it would be difficult for anyone to write male prostitution without aboul Yet Wilcox studiously avoids what sets them. male prostitution apart from female prostitution.

The most striking thing about the rent boy is that in general he is tolerated on the gay scene. Of course at the first sign of trouble from the police he is ostracised, but day to day he is part of the homosexual subculture. The integration of prostitution into the gay sub- Yet.

CULLIC

(OT homosexuals. The state does not differentiate from The between male prostitutes and other homosexual men. Chatting up and seeking trade are both "soliciting for an immoral purpose. The Wolfenden committee, whose 1957 report led to the liberalisation of the law in 1967, had as its terms of reference homosexuality stitution. Since the state does not distinguish between and

HO OSCARS

hardly surprising that male prostitution has a special niche within the gay scene.

RENTS

There are other influences which ensure the continuation of this relationship between the gay convennonal gay scene was carved out un the fifties and sixties by its proprietors and their middle class clientele. interests and their morality have left an indelible stamp on the gay scene even though wor- King class gays are now its back bone. in con ditions of absolute illegality middle Today the gay men were anxious to ensure uneir arrairs were discreet. They wanted sex that was circumscribed by a precise For working class homosexuals, prostitution was, and sometimes still is for unemployed The generalised oppression of homoscene. sexuals ensures that however liberal society male prostitution on the gay scene.

ol me queens bodyguard commander res the discovery tral atter with a male prostitute shows the pressures on ruling class gay men. Poverty on the other hand, still forces young working class gays into prosutaaon. Relax, don't think Rents avoids all this. Indeed it colludes with it.

Most critics have ability to make such a desperate issue funny It is bad form for gay artists to produce a novel, play or film about gays which is "sad'. This is self-oppressive. For most gay artists this means celebrating the commercial others, like Wilcox, it means tarting up beyond recognition some of the most desperate aspects of homosexual oppression. Of course humour well used can open up a subject such as male run at the prostitution and reveal new features.

Wilcox resists the temptation to do this. His humour is an evasion. His message to those concerned about homosexual oppression "relax. Even the account by one of the rent to express boys of being threatened by a client with a knife is turned into a belly laugh for the audience. The Lyric Theatre production of Rents was competent. All the actors were sufficient- -y protessional not to disturo tne smoot sur face of the play. But it is the Methuen text which reveals the extent of Wilcox's retreat from the issues he raises. An appendix shows sections of an original draft which were dropped. A speech by Robert, one of the two rent boys in the story, has been cut out. It is the only speech where the issue of male prostitis set within the context of a vicious ution capitalist society and a community pressed people. By itsell it would have re deemed the rest of the play.

Rents isn't really about male prostitution at all. It is about the fantasies and failures of a middle aged polytechnic lecturer, was when he wrote it. While rent boys are lecturer who Rents touches on these mentioning Richard entertaining but the oppression of Rent strike housing Prostlutes It Is Rent strikes ton joined the protest. worse than Davy adequate, tenants leaders male prostitution. The campaigned for it. Their values, their 13 percent today. class ment opted provision.

HOUSTE

cash relationship John Wheatley for all. these forces continue to sustain The fall of his relationship

WANT

commented on Wilcox's gay scene. For But for justice: Marching plexity' nomous associations in its struggle for better housing.

70 years ago. of ophousing they need. as Wilcox figures of fun and objects of lust, Richard, the befriends them is sensitively drawn. It is his obsession with the two younger men that is the real point of the drama. In the end we are forced to the same conclusion as that rent boys are untrustworthy and best kept at arms length, they may be

WHEN

don't get too involved. In short, Wilcox endorses the attitude of the gay scene to 'the rent'. You may get an opportunity to see a production of Rents. Go, but read John Rechy's City of night before you do.

John Johnson ing, goldmine. Joseph Melling, Rent strikes: people's struggle West Scotland 1890-1916, Polygon Books 1983, pp115, pbk £5.95 MOST STUDIES of 'red Clydeside' have focused on the industrial agitation. Joseph Melling's examines the housing struggles of 1915. The most serious resistance to the landlords' profiteering was in Glasgow, where 25 000 tenants in Govan, Partick and Shettlesliner, The massive street strength eventually forced Lloyd George's coalition government to introduce the Rent Restrictions Act in November 1915.

Set against the backdrop of the First World War, the housing struggles in Glasgow did not escape the taint of patriotism. The Independent Labour Party, which played a leading role in the rent strike, encouraged chauvinist sentiments.

Pat Dollan told working class women, who were at the forefront of the struggle, the landlords were unpatriotic. no better than the Huns...

The spies'. Parkhead shop steward Kirkwood told the authorities that if the nation is to have an adequate supply of the munitions of war, the workers must have healthy housing accommodation.

The Independent Labour Party curb sought to workers' independent actions and redirected their struggles into demands for intervention by the wartime government. The Labour Party has always presented the 1915 Rent Act as a victory. Class pressure certainly played a part in its introduction, and the law provided some relief for workers. But influential sections of bourgeois opinion also supported the Rent Act.

Glasgow shipyard bosses at Harland and Wolff The right-wing Glasgow Herald declared that the Act 'may help us win the war. After the war rent restriction remained in force. It was a factor behind the decline the private housing sector from around 80 per cent of all housing provision in 1910, to In the post-war period the Labour govern for new and cheaper council Shettleston used the experience of 1915 to promote his 1924 Housing Act among Glas Bogey' gow workers. The state had been forced to give in to the rent strikers. Now, Wheatley argued, it could be used to provide decent housing conscience, 1S

JUSTICE

matter.

IN I

AL A

THE N

and and administrative harks back Melling ends by arguing that the comof the rent strikes defies a 'simple class analysis'. He is convinced that the 'autothe abour created sy Party' won real victories for the working class Tenants of Glasgow's Labour council may reach a different conclusion. Many live in the same tenements that were the scenes of the rent strikes ing police, The council's implementation of the new Housing Benefit system means that the rent strike is no longer an option for large numbers of unemployed council tenants on the broken-down estates of Easterhouse and Castlemilk. Working class people in West Scotland have yet to win the struggle for the all the chapters. Mike Wall Long goodbye Dorothy Gardiner and Katherine Sorley Walker eds, Raymond Chandler speaking, Allison & Busby 1984, pp271, pbk £2.95

RAYMOND

CHANDLER

died 25 years ago, The Times commended him as one of a handful of mystery writers who, 'working the common vein of crime fiction. mined the gold of literature'. Raymond Chandler speaking, a collection of his letters on himself, his writ- Hollywood, television, reveals something about the mind behind the Chandler's reflections on his Ulster Loyalist heritage, classical English education and chequered career will be new to many devotees for whom Raymond Chandler exists only as the real life Philip Marlowe, the private detective at the centre of Chandler's best work.

But Chandler was not Marlowe. As his novels suggest and his letters confirm, Philip Marlowe was the man Raymond Chandler would have liked to be. In the incorruptible Marlowe.

fast with a gun and faster with a caustic one- Chandler created a character of such that even Hollywood, which the could not spoil author held in contempt the effect. Films of novels such as The big sleep or The long goodbye brought Marlowe to life in the form of many different actors.

Chandler's letters make clear who best portrayed his own image of 'P Marlowe, an alcovulgarian who never sleeps with his clients while on duty. Humphrey Bogart was "the genuine article, Alan Ladd merely 'a small boy's idea of a tough guy.

Marlowe novels focus on crime an degradation in America from the Second Work War to the end of the fifties. Chandler was obsessed with the ugliness of a world populated as Marlowe: bound by contradictions by junkies, drunks, pimps, pushers, mobs and murderers. His vivid portrayal of the grubby reality behind the American dream led some contemporary observers to read radical motives into Chandler's work. They would have liked to cast him in the same mould as communist crime writer Dashiell Hammett. Chandler was dismissive of such ideas. For him, Philip Mar lowe was the embodiment of individual morality, not social dissent: 'Marlowe has as much social conscience as a horse. He has a personal is an entirely different Through Marlowe, Chandler railed against police corruption and those who ran society for the touch of a soft buck'. But he was equally scathing about socialists and comm unists. Chandler said that he could see hardly a hair's breadth' between monopoly capitalism and communism - both showed 'contempt' for the individual 'as a person. In his novels, Philip Marlowe wants to see honest legislators protecting policemen honest citizens clamping down on the gangsters and pocket-lining politicians who run corrupt machines. Marlowe "always marks high on insubordination'. But his protest is that of the petit-bourgeois individual, who an imagined golden age to decency and equality and objects to the excesses of capitalism in decline.

Raymond Chandler remains a giant among writers, the creator of the definitive private detective. The key to his success lies not in the technical detail of plot, which he made up as he went along. Chandler's gift was his ability to develop an idiosyncratic style through the "American-English' patois which fascinated him, the quick-fire conversations between Marlowe, the brutal hoods, the bullyand the beautilul women who always end up as the guilty party. In Chandler's words, 'the really good mystery is the one you would read if you knew somebody had torn out the last chapter. That quality sets Chandler apart from his imitators who pass for mystery writers today, whose books you would pick up only if you knew somebody had torn out Moose Malloy the next step, May 1984 21

Letters I have read the last four issues of the next step since buying it at a big demo here. I find your analysis of events, both national and international, really superb.

now understand what is going on in various places in the world, whereas before I was just confused by the reporting of events However, I in the mass media. will need a lot more convincing be glad if you would publish your answer to my questions and criticisms. On Northern Ireland: Caoccer are beese who plant bombs and kill noncombatants, innocent civilians, in the UK or in Northern Ireland are somehow waging a legitimate war of liberation way can tie brush working class be convinced that indiscriminate killings of civilians should be conconca, especiany when they nemselves are treatened. Also you seem to ignore the rights of the Protestants in the North as though it was a straight fight between Britain and occupied Northern Ireland. Okav so the Protestants have been the tool of imperialism I agree but their fear of how they would be treated in a united reland is well founded. Of course a socialist Ireland would guarantee their personal safety anu coually. But my view of the IRA is that it is a mixture of nationalists and socialists. but with some Irishtype fascists and psychopaths Every liberation struggle also has this mixture, which means that there is no guarantee that real international-type socialism will come to power in Ireland after the British have left.

On immigration: you seem to be putting the view that every type of barrier to immigration be removed. This suggestion is ridiculous as the welfare state would collapse under the burden and rascism would Hourish as workers fought for the I must question your materialist understanding of hisyour statement on LOrY the April amations You issue of the next step. appear to stray into metaphysics when speak humanity's and mastery 'ultimate control' endowing the human divine powers and a destiny outside of the natural world.

Historical materialism surely the application of science to human fore should integrate with other areas or our scientric analysis of the world, such as biology, physics and ecology. Bourgeois ideology has influenced science over the last centuries

LWO

as it does most obviously today in the trendy ecological movement. the revolut-

SUT

ionary process only gains from a rigorous promotion of scientifmatenaust analysis ol the world. Ecology should expose workings of this more o the world of which we are still a component, however conscious and automomous we may claim to be of it. Therefore why do you abanissue petitdon this to the bourgeois influences of Friends of the Earth? Animals nave no malenable rights and neither do humans; both spec- 22 the next step, May 1984 Question time few existing jobs. We should be saying that all immigrants who are here must be equal citizens and only their families can be But most of al we must argue that only socialism organised internationally can ever deal with the desperate need that the people of the poor countries have in trying to get into the rich countries to find Only could have the rich SOCIaLIST countries helping the poor to build up their economies, instead of exploiting them for profit. Only socialism would mean that people would have the opportunitv to build a decent life in their own country and not have To eave me a aneenas to seek work. We should explain to people that only by helping the Third World to reconstruct their economies can we ever find outlets for our own products and therefore our salvation is linked to theirs. On the Soviet Union: while I agree with your analysis in general, I can't help remembering that they supply arms for most of the liberation struggles with very little 10.

GOVIOUS

themselves. Also, we can criticise the lack of real socialisttype democracy in the Soviet Union, but let us remember the saying: 'You can't have demo. cracy in a beleaguered fortress.

Was there ever a time when the Union was not under Soviet attack, so necessitating that the decision making had to be taken into the hands of a lew and sometimes one man. Democracy is too slow and cumbersome for war footing county on a Democracy would also allow the West to destabilise the Soviet countries. Les Williams Liverpool the next step replies: on eland. you argue that you would like to see a socialist Ire- Animal rights and materialism les, we learn from materialism, are ultimately matter in motion.

There is a reactionary element much humanity's 1n ot activity in nature. Modern capitalist agriculture, which produces dust bowls and famines, is only one example of the destructive character of this activity which has developed a rich biosphere of species diversify, best able to adapt. integrate and survive. The struggle for a commus society or muma dev. of elopment is surelv part evolution, anel

MUSTHOUGE

constructive attitude a more to our ecosystem, unless of course you regard it as supernatural. Martyn Elliott Canterbury the next step replies: Martyn Elliott argues that commumsts snowd invoive them selves in a struggle for animal rights because we are a component of nature; both people and animals, we learn -trom materialism, are ultimately mat- LeL ThIs Is not the historical of materialism Marx. the reactionary It Is materialism philosophers as Feuerbach,

SUCH

Ludwig land yet you refuse to take sides with those who are fighting for Irish freedom. Our position is straightforward. We support the Irish people's right to self-determination and their right to fight Our support is not qualifor it fied when IRA bombs go off on British streets, even if they result in regrettable civilian casualties.

Civilian deaths are the unfortunate reality of every war - the responsibility for this lies not with those fighting oppression, but with the British state want to win British workers to cause freedom because they have everything to gain from seeing British imperialism defeated in Ireland.

To do this we need to convince them they up against the same enemy as the Irish people - the British state - and have just as much interest in taking sides against it. We can win workers to this point of view - if we use arguments that appeal to their class interests. The question of the rights of the Protestants is a diversion from the central issue of the national oppression of the Irish people by British imperialism. The British state has always justified its rule in the Six Counties by claiming to defend. the democratic rights of the Protestants. On immigration: your objection to our demand to smash all Ingraton controls is shared many people on the left. by Like you, they are more concerned to protect Britain's economic interests than to fight the immigration controls enforce in the working class. According to your preblack scription,

HOT DELORS

wait for socialism some time in the distant future before We camthey get their rights. paign against all immigration controls now because we have no interest in making British but every Viable. interest in uniting the working whom Marx and Engels fought against 140 years ago. The idea that humanity and 'matter in

HELLEC

motion, passively evolving, ignores the historical specificity of different forms of society and humanity's active role in the development from one to anoter deucalem to capitalism Marx took a to communism). different view. In his Theses on Feuerbach, he attacked the old materialism for ignoring the role of conscious human activity in social change: The concerning the change of circumstances anu upbringing forthat circumstances are crangeu oy men ana inat u 1s essential to educate the educator himself." A communist society will 'naturally". not Write to... the next step

BOBBY

SANDS

class in opposition to the British The argument that we state. should help reconstruct the economies of the Third World and export capital to labour rather than labour to capital has been around since European countries closed their doors to immigration in the mid-seventies.

Couched in socialist rhetoric, it is a shabby apology for the state its repatriation

LELCOSLTCS

The socialist immigration minister in France Georgina Dufoix is now offering "reinsertion aid and retraining to induce immigrants to return to Africa to take up jobs in French factories there. The West German government has set up training schools for returning Turks in Izmir. All these "socialist" measures are used to justify state attacks on immigrant workers. On the Soviet Union: Soviet Union's backing for the liberation struggles of the Third World does not rest on a principled anti-imperialist basis.

is wrong to argue that the Soviet Union does not reap a return from supplying arms and funding Any these

SHOY CHECHEES

movement which poses a threat to the imperialist weakens their hold on the backward capitalist countriesisclearly to the Soviet Union's advantage.

At the same time, it is always ready to sell out the guerrilla movements waen the imperialsts have got the upper hand. On the question of democracy in Soviet Union: to retain Ene soviet state power the Bolsheviks were forced to suppress proletademocracy. The Soviet Hall suppression however, is not democracy, a concern mourated Dy defend proletarian power, but a need to destroy it. The Soviet bureaucract posed by Soviet masses the more than it fears the threat of imperialist intervention.

Only man's conscious activity can overcome me nama ba riers to development and the social barriers ie capitalist social relations. This conscious approach to progressive change nature. SetS apart Marx Capital, As notes in *a bee puts to shame many an the

ACHEECCE

CONTESSOr of her cell", but what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect raises his structure his imagination

DCLOTEE

erects it in reality. Our task Is to subordinate nature in une struggle to build a new world, not to see ourselves as part of eternal natural world and its With this

EUSUCCE

TILTELS

oppose anunderstands, WEl imal liberation as an attempt to free part of nature from our control. BCM JP LTD, London WCIN 3XX Catholic Marxist Mick Kennedy's article on James Comov me next steg showed the importance of Ireland for socialists. But he missed one important point about Connolly's life and ideas. Throughout his life Connolly was a devout Roman Catholic. Some of his most important writings - such as Labour, nationality and religion tried show that What Mick patible Kennedy's views on this? Does the RCP believe that a practising Catholic like Connolly can really be a revolutionary and a Marxist?

Sean McClure Royston, Glasgow Mick Kennedy replies: Connolly's Catholicism was • inconsistent his indeed Marxist outlook. In his writings, Connolly exposed the depen dence of the Catholic Church in Ireland on British imperialism.

He also recognised the appeal of its message of salvation in the next world for those denied their liberty the DreSCHE However, his attempt in Labour, haronaut Tenor counterpose Christian ideals to the we pracuce hierarchy, and his insistence that faith was of a matter personal conviction, indicate his failure to embrace a fully materialist approach to religion.

am very impressed with the RCP's revolutionary politics on Ireland, racism and many other issues. But I was very disappointed Thursday's by - last meeting on women and medicine.

Two areas concern me. First, I felt the revolutionary focus of the meeting was absent the Pill,

ISSUCK

abortion. government cuts etc were with piecemeal, without ceat the broad political perspective: that women are not equal, that women's labour is not valued equally with men's, that women are equally

HOL

uvolved social and political life.

I was also alarmed that the RCP's male workers did not seem to be significantly in- The volveu m te • meeting question of women's oppression should concern all workers equally, just as anti-racist work is not confined to blacks alone.

compromising its politics and being opportunist by organising meetings which seem to be aimed at bourgeois feminist individualists rather Second, I feel that it is necessary for a revolutionary party to develop its own critique of capitalist medical practice, otherwise it is not clear that capitalist medicine works in the the medical There profession. is a great deal of controversy within the medical profession itself about the effectiveness of assroache. ahe treat These arguments

TCHES.

Just as the RCP has brilliantly understood Britain's war in Ireland and the problems of racism, reformism etc, it is essential that the same revolutionary understanding of women's oppression and the dericiencies or capitalist medicine is developed in order For Marxists, all religion is a mystification of the real forces that move society and a dange-

TOUS

whose destiny is to change the real world, not to escape from Connolly's project of estabpolitics in lishing proletarlal Ireland contained many flaws.

His merit, compared with many who have since laid claim to his heritage, is that he made a very brave attempt. March Success A nara On behalf of the Crossmaglen Patriots Republican Flute Band (Wishaw) / thank the Irish Freedom Movement for the hospitality given to the march in Sheffield. We were very pleased with the organisation of the parade, and look forward to marching with you again in the near tuture

OBS SO BORE

Band Committee Wishaw, Scotland Women and medicine to advance the revolutionary Strugge Cathy Dyer mackne the next step replies: The meeting on women and medicine walen you reler to was the last in a series of four forums held in central London. The purpose of these meetings was to discuss issues such as prostiwar and the within the context of IOnS women's oppression under capitalism. There is nothing opportunist about organising meetings that deal with topics which have long been the traditional preserve of feminists. Our intention is to cut enrough une mysunication ol issues by the women's anese movement and to demonstrate the Marxist approach issues of concern to the working ROP has always of argued question women's oppression is a vital one for the whole working class.

Our book Real Freedom gives a Marxist analysis of oppression under capitalism and class stra for women's tegy liberation The men in the RCP have made an equal contribution

LUOU

understanding women's oppression and to putting our politics into practice. Finally, we disagree that it is the job of a revolutionary party to develop a critique of capitalist medical practice. It is obvious to any worker who has had anything to do with the medical profession that it is not there to provide workers with the health care ther need revolutionaries is to fight for a system that can provide workers with what they need, not to endow medicine itself with a revoluuonary content

Meetings

BRADFORD

Saturday 5 May 12-1pm Remember Bobby Sands! Tyrls Wednesday 23 May 7.30pm Is revolution possible in Britain? Central Library, Princes Way

CARDIFF

Saturday 5 May 11-1pm Remember Bobby Sands! The Hayes Market Tuesday 15 May 7.30pm Disarm the militarists! Speaker: James Wood Room 3.29, Joint Student Union, Park Place

GLASGOW

Tuesday 1 May 7pm Ireland's freedom fighters from Wolfe Tone to Bobby Sands Speaker: Mike Wall Tuesday 15 May 7pm Orange Glasgow and Belfast Speaker: Mike Wall Tuesday 29 May 7pm The fight for solidarity in Britain Speaker: Alex Fraser All at Committee Rooms, Queen Margaret Union, University Avenue Contact ABCAD for more information: ABCAD, Box 22, 136 Kingsland High Street, London E8 or phone Sharmila Kumari on 01-247 7848 or 274 2820 For subscription rates see page 2.

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BIRMINGHAM

Tuesday 1 May 7.30pm Taking control Digbeth Civic Hall, Digbeth High Street Saturday 5 May 11,30am Remember Bobby Sands! Chamberlain Square

COVENTRY

Saturday 5 May 11-1pm Remember Bobby Sands! Belgrave Theatre Wednesday 16 May 7.30pm Women and the revolutionary party Speaker: Kate Marshall Hare and Squirrel pub, New Union Street

MANCHESTER

Saturday 5 May 10.30am Remember Bobby Sands! Rally on Ashton Town Hall steps, then a motorcade through Ashton, Oldham and Manchester 2pm protest against the PTA Central Detention Centre, Crown Square Thursday 17 May 7.30pm Lessons of the minersestrike Speakers from the Yorkshire picket lines and miners' wives committees Old Dog, Old Street, Ashton under ne Creche available (phone 061-330 7231)

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They wil hold stace meet wi, rattres, lid stret heatre accompanied by lie do to decked yo They will hold street meetings, rallies, and street theatre accompanied by live music.

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Thursday 10 May 7.30pm Marxism versus feminism Speaker: Kate Marshall Sussex University

SHEFFIELD

Saturday 5 May 11-1pm Remember Bobby Sands! Peace Gardens Friday 11 May 7.30pm Lessons of the miners' strike Mailcoach pub, West Street Friday 25 May 7.30pm What is the RCP? Mailcoach pub, West Street

SOUTH LONDON

Saturday 5 May 11am Motorcade to Remember Bobby Sands! Meet Brixton tube Wednesday 9 May 7.30pm Is revolution possible in Britain? Speaker: Frank Richards St Matthew's Meeting Place, Brixton Hill Tuesday 29 May 9am Committal proceedings for Tommy Quigley and Paul Kavanagh Lambeth Magistrates Court, Kenninaton Drop the charges! Organised by the IM

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POWER

Do you take the next step? Live in the North?

Then join other readers in Manchester and start fighting for revolutionary politics in Britain Saturday 26 May, 10am, Sidney Building, Oxford Road morning session

LESSONS OF THE MINERS' STRIKE

Mike Freeman

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SOUTH DIES AREA

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Frank Richards Creche and accommodation available.

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the next step, May 1984 23

They can be beaten the No 47 May 1984 Thousands of paramilitary police launch brutal attacks on miners' picket lines.

The courts rule that police have the right to blockade county borders and turn back flying pickets. The DHSS harasses hard-up miners" families. shows its 'soft' face as the welfare state or its hard front as the Special Patrol Group, the state machine in the miners' strike has acted as nothing less than the organised violence of the ruling class.

To many people, the repressive power of the state seems unbeatable.

Revolutionary Communist Party, power could be matched by the organised force of the working class. The key advantage the state has over the workers is not one of power. It is obvious that 20 000 police coalfields cannot match the strength of 184 000 miners, let alone of 22m workers. The real difference is one of preparation. Police have planned and run next step review of the Revolutionary Communist Party Yard, Whether Cabinet ordinate strike-breaking activities.

unprepared. the For the that ago. and smashed measure up to face today. All they lack in the why has 20p their intervention in the miners' strike from a computerised centre in Scotland pinpointing the pickets' weak spots and moving in to exploit them.

Meanwhile Thatcher presides over a secret sub-committee set up to co. the politics behind the state's The state has geared up for war and the miners leaders have been caught Now they are relying on militant tactics and political arguments which served them well a decade But yesterday's solutions do not the problems workers The miners and the working class have the power to fight back and win.

preparation. Above all, this is a question of politics. That's every year since 1979, the RCP organised a summer conference Preparing for Power - to discuss the vital questions of the day and to map class war out a strategy for winning the struggles to come. This year Preparing for Power will be a week-long series of talks, discussions, debates, films and fun. dozen specialist courses covering everything from the and an Introduction to Marxism, to the Employed/Student UB40/Unwaged The state seems powerful because it is prepared for duction to Ireland. There will be a Bolshevik revolution power,

PREPARING FOR POWER 1984

FRIDAY 13 JULY - FRIDAY 20 JULY

Polytechnic of Central London, New Cavendish Street, London W1 Send 30p to the address below for the conference brochure with full details of the week's events All week Weekend £12.00 £5.00 £8.00 £3.00 Make cheques payable to RCP Association, send to BM RCP, London WIN 3XX For details of accommodation, creche facilities etc, ring Kate Marshall on 01-274 3951 British revolution and a Marxist intro- Plus many extra sessions of general, interest, film shows, great debates and dancing, all rounded off by a boat trip down the Thames.

If you are interested in preparing for then Preparing for Power is