Workers Power no. 47

ye eae!

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IN THE AFTERMATH of the brutal assault of the United States Airborne Division, Grenadians are nursing their wounded and mourning their dead. Now they must brace themselves for the arrival of a Commonwealth policing or ‘peace keeping’ force. Fraud will now be added to force in the name of the restoration of democracy.

Reagan's democratic missionaries were perfect candid about their task, ““We came here to fight communism, didn't we? | want to fuck communism out of this little island, and fuck it back to Moscow.” (Marine quoted in the Observer 30.10.83) To this end, scores of Grenadians, men and women, have been rounded up, their wrists bound with wire and !ed off to unknown destinatians.

Bernard Coard has been taken to a US warship and BBC radio carried reports that he has been “mistreated”. A jubilant Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf appeared on television telling reporter that he would not reveal to them what his troops were doing with Mr, Coard. It is extremely likely that Coard, Austin and dozens of New Jewel Movement activists are being tortured into confessions. “Queen's Representative’ Sir Paul Scoon’s promise of an investigation and a trial of the murderers of Maurice Bishop clearly tndicated that a trial will be set up in order to justify the invasion. It will set out to discredit the whole NJM. The lives of NJM activists captured by the US marines are clearly at risk.

The arrival of a Commonwealth force will in no way aid the Grenadian people. It must be opposed by the whole British labour movement. Unfortunately this is not. the situation at the moment. The TUC’s resolution

calls on the British government,

{ie Thatcher!) to “offer its help in putting arrangements in hand for free elections and rule based on the democratic choice of the people.’’ There are already reports of the return of Gairy’s notorious ‘Mongoose Gang’ to Grenada. They have been seen operating road blocks with the American invaders. The untying of the hand of Grenada’s !andowners and capitalists with the backing of policemen and troops from Britain or Britain’s stooges are the only ‘arrangements’ that will be put in hand by Thatcher. The Labour Party has not gone beyond the evasive statement that ‘no British forces should become involved in the military operation. Here again the teaders of the labour movement cannot even defend a basic democratic principle - self-determination for the Grenadian people. For this to mean anything it must explicitly involve the immediate and unconditional removal of all US and East Carribean States troops or ‘police’ from Grenada and the arming of the Grenadian militia. It must mean the releage of all pdlitica!l

Fr

_ prisoners taken during and since

sower~

U.S. TROOPS OUT OF GRENADA! NO COMMONWEALTH ,... INTERVENTION!

the invasion and an end to the farcical measures of the Governor General to arrange show trials. Only the Grenadian have the right to try anyone in Grenada. The wretched puppet Scoon must be dismissed and no further Governor General sent or appointed. The Commonwealth policemen or ‘peacekeepers’ must be kept off Grenada.

The leaders of the labour movement have once again disgraced themselves in an orgy of offended British patriotism. Healey has attacked Thatcher as “the President's obedient poodle”. Playing the Churchill he accused her of showing “’...a lack of grit, a flaccid indolence in dealing with it. She has failed in her duty to the House, she has failed in her duty to the Commonwealth and she has faifed in her duty to the Patace,”’

Cancern for the offended Monarch seems to have been to the fore in many Labourites’ minds, not al! of them right-wingers at that! Tony Benn thought it was warth dwelling on in a speech to a protest rally in Lambeth on 28 October. “For the first time in my life, the Queen herself has found it necessary to make known publicly her grave displeasure...’ (reported in Tribune 4.11.83) Such flunkeyism seems second nature to those who have kissed her majesties’ hand or taken the oath of a privy-councillor. It is doubly indecent at a time when the “Queen's Representative’ is setting up a Commonwealth force to pull Reagan's chestnuts out of the fire.

The Labour leaders are simply repeating the charges of weakness, lack of patriotism and Setting down the Queen that they hurled at Thatcher immediately after the Argentine take-over in the Matvinas. It will rebound on them as Ii did last time round, Are they really arguing that they want a more vigorous assertion of Britain and the Queen's interests? Ail Thatcher is nnoyed about is that it was an American and not a British and Commonwealth task force that overthrew communism Do they believe her prattle about

international law?

The Labour left have no independent stance. Allan Roberts, MP (Labour Herald parliamentary columnist— - as well as likening Grenada to Bootle, his constitueny, in the Commons’ debate, has dubbed Healey’s performance first rate,““Denis Healey and Neil Kinnock performed brilliantly. Healey put Party policy on Grenada, Central America and Cruise with crushing force.” (Labour Herald 4.10.83)Labour Herald editorially rejoiced at “the chance to deal a death blow to the’ already fading Faiklands factor.”’

The real ‘Falkfands factor’ is that the British labour movement is a sucker for chauvanist flag waving. Thatcher will always out distance the Labour leaders.in this whilst compromising them hopelessly in the first phases of what ever imperialist adventure she tries. She and her predecessors have done this in two world wars, and countless colonial ones.

Workers in Britain should shed no tears for the Queen, the insulted national hornour, the Commonwealth, the prestige of the House of Commons or any such reactionary garbage. The Labour leaders may ring their chauvanist bells today. They will

be wringing their hands tomorrow.

At best they can discomfort Thatcher temporarily with loyalist or royalist taunts. She will use just these loyalties aga/nst the labour movement whenever it turns to struggle against her. The sight of

the Labour front benchers arm in.

arm with Enoch Powell is not

likely to impress black workers in |

Britain either.

Revolutionaries, social ists, militants must take their stand on the bedrock of working class internationalism.

Down will all US or British

intervention inGrenada!

No British or Commonwealth

‘police force’!

Unconditional support to the

Grenadian resistance.

Moral, material and financial

aid to help get the prisoners

released and the imperialists out of Grenada!

Relationship!

Six Page THEORETICAL SUPPLEMENT on the

Socialist Workers

Militant emphasises Thatcher's “humiliation”: - Tribune attacks Thatcher for letting down the Crown (below)

YOUTH MUST

FIGHT BACK NOW

A NATIONAL YOUNG WOR-— KERS Assembly is to be held on December 10th in Manchester.

It has been called by the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) and the Youth Trade Union Rights Campaign (YTURC)’ It has been given official backing by Labour’s NEC.

It is vital that this conference is packed to overflowing with young workers. They have been amongst the hardest hit by the Tories onslaught. The number of school leavers now on the dole is 168,135,: Another 198,000 are only kept off the register through being on Youth Training Schemes. These miserable excuses for real jobs, pay £25 a week, involve no guarantees of future work, and, with thair registration and record books are deliberately . designed to discipline youth and weed out any militants.

The official Labour movement's record of fighting youth unemployment and the YTS is appalling. The TUC actually supports the existance of the YTS and collaborates with the Tories in running the scheme.

The only demonstration to be held explicitly to protest at the attacks on youth was mobilised by LPYS activists

with virtually no help from the unions.

The fact that 10,000 did turn out in Liverpool in October 1982, is clear evidence that the youth are prepared to act. It is the official leaders of the Labour movement who are refusing to mobilise the anger and energy of the youth.

The dominant tendency inthe, LPYS and YTURC. is the Militant.’It is quite happy to tolerate tha inertia of the bureaucracy. {n exchange it can maintain its own bureaucratic

. stranglehold over the LPYS. It can

get the official backing necessary to allow it ta convene and, it hopes,’ staga manage, events like the coming Assembly. Despite the attacks on youth the Militant has not used its position in the LPYS to launch a wide spread campaign. The LPYS has not grown significantly. (ts activities are nearly ali Labour Party orientated. It

has not hitherto addressad itself on any systematic basis, to the problems facing thousands of young workers

lf Militant have their way, the December meéting wil! be a one-day wonder, a rally with little purpose beyond providing Militant speakers with a platform to spout from.

This need not be the case if ade — termined opposition is mounted on the day. If young workers are delegated armed with resolutions arguing a way forward far the working class youth then the dead-hand of Miiitant can be warded off. Delegates must fight for action in defence of youth. They must fight for a democratic canference where resolutions can be taken and fully discussed. The Militant proposed ‘Gharter for Young Workers’ is full of fine words, but unless a series of active campaigns are mounted, it will be 2 redundant document. A campaign for union rates and rights in the YTS as part of a campaign to abolish it is crucial, It is necessary to organisa around the dole queues in order to link unemployed youth to the Labour movament through an unemployed workers union. Failure to do this will only banefit the fascists.

The curse of capitalist militarism must also be fought. Cruise may be here, but the warmongers can still be fought with working class action. Youth must play a vital part in a campaign against capitalist militarism. It must fight it not with the useless pacifist phrasemongering and sentimentalising that has been the hall mark of the peace movement. It must wage class war against war.

lf these campaigns can be undertaken from the conference - and that will mean a struggle to defeat Militantthen the day will be a success. It will be an important step towards forging what working class youth desperately need today - a revolutionary youth movement.

For delegacies/details, contact Andy Bevan, LPYS,

- 150 Walworth Rd,

LONDON SE17

ica EDITORIAL

NICARAGUA UNDER SIEGE

THE ONSLAUGHT OF US imperialism on Grenada indicates the vicious resolve of the Reagan administration. It aims to stamp out the flames of revolt in the semi-colonies of the Central American and Caribbean Area. The overwhelmingly dominant faction within the American ruling class supports this “reassertionist” strategy. The reason is simple. US imperialism’s world hegemony has slipped seriously in the last thirty years. From Cuba to Vietnam the decline was slow but definite .

Thereafter something approaching disintegration set it. The “Carter years’ centering on the Iranian nightmare convinced the US bourgeoisie of the need for a massive increase in armaments and a preparedness to use them in all the “‘geo-strategic’’ areas. That is, where the interests of the US were threatened. In the Middle East and Gulf regions , in Central America and in the Far East.

The Grenadianinvasion whose preparation long pre-dated the military coup and the murder of Maurice Bishop, was aimed at what US strategists regarded as a key island guarding the shipping lanes into the Caribbean. There is no doubt that the next target for Reagan is the overthrow of the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua. The Sunday Times (30.10.83) reports a’variety of US and other Western Diplomatic sources” as saying that Reagan “hopes to see a new provisional government established in Marxist. Nicaragua by December or January.”

Even the personnel of the counterrevolutionary government has been worked out. The key figure is the millionaire businessman Alfonso Robelo, ex member of the Provisional Revolutionary Government after the overthrow of Somoza. The CIA has doubled the forces-of armed counter-revolutionaries in the last six months - now these number 10,000 and the aim is to increase the figure to 15,000 in the next period. The economic blockade is being tightened with the freezing of 50 million doliars of loans from the World Bank. Rumours abound of an outright blockade of fuel supplies.

The first years of the Sandinista regime were ones of economic expansion. In 1980 and 1981 the Gross National Product rose by 10% and 9% respectively and unemployment fell from 36% in 1979 | to 13% in 1980. The social gains of the revolution were dramatic. The ‘infant mortality rate dropped by a quarter in four years. The illiteracy rate dropped from 50% to 12% in the same period, and the number in school has tripled.

Yet despite these gains Nicaragua remains a country with an economically powerful internal bourgeoisie and in the economic grip of world capitalism.

In industry, which accounts for 30% of the gross domestic product, about 60% is in private and 40% in state hands. The state excercises substantial supervision over the private sector and the Sandinista untons enjoy a certain degree of supervision ‘from below.’’ However the Nicarag- “gan bourgeoisie is stiJl in a position to use its economic power to hold the Sandinista Government to its defence of the mixed economy (ie. state and private capitalist production). The majority of the Nicaraguan exploiting class remains a more or less concealed foe of the Sandinista Government. They have starved the regime by exporting capital to “safer” areas outside the country. Yet the regime still defends the existence of a native bourgeoisie. Danie] Ortega defended the “‘active role as producers’ that the private sector plays in the economy. In the main, statements like these are for international consumption. On an international scale the Sandinista regime remains chronically dependent. The US in 1982 still supplied 19% of Nicaraqua‘’s imports and received 22% of its exports. Western Europe supplies 78% of Nicaragua's aid, partially offsetting the US blockade. The tribute still paid to Imperialism is indicated by the fact that 45% of Nicaragua’s income from exports goes to service its fareign debts. The ‘‘private sector’ is therefore an important sop to maintain the benevolence of the European bourgeoisie.

The coming months will put to a cruel test the Sandinista popular front strategy. Already this is adopting evermore the character of an alliance with the phantom “national bourgeoisie’. The real political and economic representatives of this class are in the camp of Reagan and the Cantras. The bourgeois elements tn Nicaragua and in the FSLN itself, represent little more than a fifth column, a trojan horse for Reagan and Robelo. When the pressure becomes unendurable the FSLN itself will begin to crack with its proto-Stalinist and pro-bourgeois (Social Democratic) poles appearing. If the pro-bourgeois elements triumph and rearrange the government for capitulatory negotiations with Reagan or if the proto-Stalinistelements win out and attempt to follow the ‘“Cuban road” a dire future awaits the Nicaraguan masses. Contrary to the cryptoStalinist advisors within the ‘Trotskyist’ USec, the Cuban road is not the inevitable development of the “revolutionary process”. The USSR is clearly unwilling to back a Cuban-stylte overturn of capitalism in Nicaragua. Moreover Castro himself declared that: “We wou/d try to do everything possible for Nicaragua. But we would face the same problems as in Grenada. So the likelihood of Cuban assistance in this direction is small indeed.

The principal hope lies in the response of the Nicaraguan masses and that of the oppressed and exploited workers and peasants of Central and Latin America. Fifteen thousand US marines may be able to suppress 1,600 Grenaciansoldiers and militia and 600 Cuban building workers. They will not triumph in Nicaragua without setting a torch to the whole region.

But even here a clear revolutionary strategy will prove decisive. in Nicaragua it is vital that a real workers and peasants government replace

the popular front Government of National Reconstruction. What is needed is a government based on workers and peasants councils. The militia and army must likewise acheive democratic control of their officers and commanders. The proletariat must establish full workers’ control of production, expropriating the saboteurs. Above all a really revolutionary policy of ful! aid to the FMLWN insurgents in El Salvador is essential. This road

is obviously not free of grave dangers. The victory of revolutions can never be guaranteed. in advance. However as Grenada has shown the disastrous nature of Social-Democratic and Stalinist strategies hidden under the petit-bourgoeis nationalist rhetoric, either singly or together, lead not only to defeat, but to defeats that shatter the morale of the masses and throw them back years if not, decades. The route out of the impasse of the Nicaraguan Revolution can only be taken by the masses under the leadership given by the development of a geniune Trotskyist revolutionary party. Such a party must be built in Nicaragua. The name of the route forwards is Permanent Revolution.

Gairy.

THE GRENADIAN REVOLUTION of 979 was the first popular revolution in the Caribbean since Fidei Castro ousted Batista in 1959. Followed swiftiy by the revolution in Nicaragua, thase two revolutions soon became the focus of the Reagan administration's determination to reassert its hegemony over its semi-colonial empire. Indeed both the Grenadian and Nicaraguan revolutions were results of this system of rule.

Gairy in Grenada, like Somoza in Nicaragua, survived through intimidation, corruption, rigged ‘‘elections” and above all by direct financial, “intelligence’™ and military support from his North American masters. Like Somoza however, he had became an oppressive burden to important sections of the local bourgeoisie and something of an embarrassment to the Carter Administratian.

By 1979 after 23 years in power, Gairy, who had originally come to power at the head of a powerful strike movement of estate workers and small farmers, was politically isolated from ali sections of Grenadian society, Having long made his peace with the Grenadian oligarchy and their British overlords, by the 1970s Gairy’s personai greed and increasingly eccentric behaviour had made him a tiability to the Grenadian ruling class, Constant interventions in favour af his own corrupt and undemocratic Grenada Manual and Mental Workers Union (GMMNWU) alienated both workers and business owners, many of whom were forced to take Gairyite loyalists onto their payroi!. The powerful landawning interests came into conflict with Gairy in the late 1980s. When the marketing boards for Grenada's most important crops - Nutmeg, Cocao and Bananas - were disbanded and stuffed with Gairy nominees. The division was further exacerbated by Gairy’s takeover of 25 estates, a measure aimed both at intimidating the oligarchy and sharing up his negiected small farmer base. Even within the burgeoning tourist industry Gairy used his position to ensure his hotels and restaurants were full, while other sections of the industry weee discriminated against.

Having alie sated virtually alt the important classes within Grenadian society, it is little wonder that when 40 armed members of the New Jewel Movement launched their insurrection on 13th March 1979, the Gairy regime collapsed like 3 pack of cards. There is no doubt that the overthrow of Gairy had enormous popular support on the island. This came not only from NJIM activists and supporters but also from nan-party members who joined in the rounding up of Gairy’s hated 'Mongoose Gang” of criminal thugs en masse, and also from the Grenadian oligarchy. The overthrow was haijied by the Grenadian Chamber of Cammerce as “a glorious opportunity for Grenada to build something new and differant in the Caribbean,”

The New Jewel Movement, which had ied the revolution, stood at the head of an all class alliance against

=—

Ortega, Bishop and Manley: not wanted in Reagan’s “backyare

The NJM, formed in 1973 out of the fusion of two organisations, had moved in the 1970s from an espousalof ‘Black Power’’ ideas to more traditional! third world “‘soctalism’’. Its leaders were largely western educated and drawn from the Grenadian petitbourgeoisie. Maurice Bishop’s father, Rupert, was a merchant and Bishop himself had tourist interests in Morne Rouge as well as being a barrister, They were revolutionaries in the sense that without an insurrection they would never have ousted Gairy. Beyond they sought to alleviate their country’s chronic dependence on imperialism.

VOTE

Po the iN e | o | [3 | 4 Ss e

MA URICE

BISHOP

S-E St. Georges

Like other revolutionary nationalist Movements the NJM sought to improve the social conditions of Grenada by developing a programme of diversification of industry, improvements in agricu!ture and restricting foreign capital’s export of profits fram the country, It was a programme which, for all its radical language, sought to improve Grenada’s position within the system of world imperialism. It sought to do so primarily by seeking diversification of imperialist investment and alsa, if necessary, ta lean on the non-capitalist states - Cuba, Russia, Eastern Europe - for support.

One wing of the NJM teadershipprincipally Bishp and Unison Whiteman - saw this programme as being

implemented along the {ines of Michael -

Manley’s Jamaican Socialism and tooked primarily to the parties of the Second International for support. Another faction centered around Bernard and Phyitis Coard incitned more towards the stalinist model of development - looking in particular towards Cuba. Both wings however were unites on the defence of the mixed economy ie, capitalism, in Grenada, leaving the struggle for socialism for the dim and distant future.

It was this perspective which allowed the NJM to unite in the 1976 General Elections with the two bourgeois Opposition parties - the Grenada National Party (GNP} and the United Peoples Party {UPP) ina "People's Alliance.”’. The Ailiance, although short-lived, managed to gain 48% of the votes and 6 out of 15 seats in parliament.

fre .

WORKERS POWER November 1983

THE

The New

This was no mean feat in Gairy’s rigged and corrupt electoral system. The bourgeois parties, having already proved treacherous allies in the island wide general Strike against Gairy in 1973/4, rapidity distanced themselves from the NJM once in parliament. By 1979 Gairy felt strong enough to order the liquidation of the entire leadership of the NJM, a move which precipitated the NJM into the armed overthrow of the government in March. in this overthrow the bourgeois parties took no part though they gladly shared the results which the NJM was eager to have them doa,

The “Peoples Revolutionary Government’ installed in 1979 perfectly mirrored the politics and strategy of the NJM. Despite their treachery to the “People’s Alliance”, the bourgeoisie was invited to jain the popular front which made up the PRG. Bourgeois figures fike Norris Bain, ex-GNPer and owner of a merchant house and Lynden Rahmdanny, owner of one of the biggest merchant houses in Grenadaand former President of the Chamber of Commerce were given important posts in the government -Bain as minister of Health, Rahmdanny as Deputy Minister of Finance under Bernard Coard. Nine out of the original fourteen members of the PRG were members of the NJM. The PRG quickly reaffirmed its intention to stay in the Commonwealth and confirmed recognition of Gairy’s appointee Sir Pau! Scoon as the Queen’s representative on the island; a move which turned out to be of no small advantage to imperjalism.

The PRG commitment to the defence of capitalism in Grenada was quickly made clear by both wings of the NJM. Maurice Bishop being interviewed tn the official organ of world Stalinism, World Marxist Review declared: "We see this revolution as being in the national democratic stage. We are an anti-imperialist party and government and we believe that tha process we are invalved in at this time is an antiimperialist, national democratic socialist stage of development.”

Taking up this theme, three years after the revolution Bernard Coard, architect of Grenada’s economic strategy under the PRG, explained: “We are developing our economy on the mixed economy mrode/ {ermphasis in original - WP). Our economy will com - prise the state sector, the private sector and the co-operative sector. Thea dominant sector will be the state sec- - tor, which will lead the development process.” (Report on the NAtional Economy, 1982}.*

Whife the Sacial-Demacratic and proto-Stalinist wings of the NJM might have disagreed over the tempo of de velopment of the state sector and its relative weight in the economy, both saw it as existing side by side with private capitalism. Both hoped to use a state capitalist sector to dynamise and develop the whole economy, a strategy not acceptable to important sections of the Grenadian bourgeoisie,

The problems that the PRG set out to solve were not unfamiliar ones to the tmperialised world, except that the economy of Grenada, a tiny island almost toatlly dependent on three basic export crops and tourism, was particularly vulnerable to imperialist pressure, The revolution of March 1979, ied as it was by a movement committed to improving the lot of the masses, created mobilisations unprecedented on the island since the general strike of 1950. Twenty thousand, 20% of the population, marched on the streets in celebration of Gairy’s resignation a week after the overthrow of his government. The workers and peasants mobilised in the struggles against Gairy had expectations for immediate impravements which the PRG, at least partially, set about granting. The dramatic cuts in unemployment, improvements in health, free educatian and text baoks, a massive literacy campaign, tmprovements in basic facitities - transport, water, electricity etc were all undertaken. The most repressive aspects of Gairy’s regime were dismantled, with the ending of restrictions on trade union recognition, arbitrary arrest, banning of meetings etc. The enthusiastic response of the masses for participating actively in the revoiution was

ROAD TO DISASTER

Jewel Movement in

Coard and Bishop (centre) lead the National

channelled into the Parish councils and ‘popular organisations’’ of women, youth, and the militia.

Such is the material and cultural impoverishment imperialism has inflicted on the masses of the Caribbean and Central America that solving or alleviating these prablems - by literacy campaigns, health measures, land reform indeed revolutionise the iife of the masses, Yet they remain bourgeois democratic tasks even if sem?-colonia! servitude and a venal local bourgeoisie could never bring these gains. These measures are compatible with the maintenence of capitalism even though the landed oligarchy, the local bourgeoisie and the imperialists regard any regime that carries them out as Marxist.

Inevitable venemous counterrevolutionary apposition to elementary economic, cultural and democratic rights for the masses invests any regime that attempts to carry them out with an aura of socialism or communism. However as we have seen im Nicaragua and Grenada these governments remain on the terrain of the defence of bour- -geais. property relations. Oppased, sabotaged, undermined by imperialism and its local agents on the one Side; pressed for an extention of the revolution by the mass#$.on the other, these regimes play a bonapartist role, They exciude the bourgeaisie from direct political power and rely on the masses for this. On the other hand they prevent the masses from taking politica! power and utilising it to carry out a social revolution.

Thus the NJM did not base itself on genuine democratic organs of struggie and power - Councils or saviets - Organising the urban and rural workers. instead they created the typica! ‘‘organs of popular power” so beloved of Castro and his imitators. In Grenada these were primarily the parish and zonal council which were presented with government plans for discussion and criticism but had no power over the poticies or actions of the PRG. Thus popular power is Jittle more than a plebiscite organised to approve the policies af the Donapartist |eaders. Political questions - supremely who shail govern, do not fail within their sphere of competence.

The committment of the PRG to the mixed economy also meant that it blacked any Serious demands of the masses which threatened private property. Coard made this clear in a speech to the Chamber of Commerce shortly after the revolution when he declared “‘with the revolution has come the end to the forcible seizure of private property’ One symptom of this was the failure of the PRG to intraduce any iand reform programme unti! the land occupations forced them to do so.

Land in Grenada is daminated by the large landowners who often have interests tn tourism and the retail!

Youth Section of the NJM:

trade. The big farms, those over 100 acres, which make up only 0.5% of all landhoidings, contro! nearly 50% of all the cultivable acreage in Grenada. While the peasant farmers scratched a tiving on tiny plots of land, it was estimated that half the iand holdings aver 500 acres were left lying idie by their absentee landlords! Yet the PRG contented itself with concentrating on the

25 estates, the most infertile anes at that, taken over by Gairy.

[In February 1980 when farm workers, complaining of bad conditions and low wages occupied the River Antoine estate owned by the De Gale family, they were variousiy denounced by the government as being CIA inspired or being im the pockets of Marijuana smugglers. The PRG quickly declared that it: “could not and would not support the seizure of people’s property as the means of resolving the conditions of hardship of the workers.” (Government information Bulletin, May 5th). The estate was returned to the De Gales and a grateful member of this landowning family wrote ta the 7imes in the following terms: ‘It is relevant to record publically that when, in Feb. 1980, our family estate was peremptorlily taken over by a villaga communes and renamed “The Peopie’s Collective Farm’, government support was tmmediately forthcoming for the managers’ protection and the estate was returned (evantually} to normal working.

it is by judicious, well regulated behaviour that Mr. Bishop - like Mr. Mugabe - hopes to transform this small nation into a homogencus structure pf ?0vomg cp ture of living communities.” {Times 13 Feb. 1981)

While this revalt pushed the PRG inta taking same reform measures, they remained minor. The “Utilisation Law’’ gave power to the Ministry of Agriculture to lease idie lands of estates over 100 acres. |But the “idle lands for idle. hands” scheme was employing onty 160 youths on 146 acres of land by mid-1982,

If jandownership remained fundamentally untouched by the PRG so too did the business community. The 1973 cammittment in the NJM manifesto for “the complete nationalisation of all foreign awned hotels as wei! as foreign owned housing settlements” was unceremoniously ignored. Only Gairy's hotels were taken into state Ownership. The US owned “Holiday Inn” which accounted for 33% of ali available rooms on the island and 50% of all foreign exchange earnings remained untouched as did the private villa developments and land speculation projects.

In August 1979 a 5 week strike over the dismissal of two workers at the Coca Cola bottling plant owned by one of the biggest Grenada companies W.F.Julian and Co. led to the government taking over the plant. The PRG

power

however yietded ta the bourgeoisie’s screams of “creeping socialism’’ which greeted this measure and, two years later, returned the plant to its previous owners, together with all the profits made during that period!

While the PRG encouraged the farmation of trade unions, particularly those under NJM leadership, strikes which threatened ‘‘the economy” were denounced in no uncertain terms. Industrial action by public sector workers in January 1981, taking the form of a “sickout" in pursuance of 4 wage claim was quickly branded by the government controlled newspaper Free West indian as “part of a plan by certain unpatriotic and counter revolutionary elements to dirupt the second anniversary celebrations of our glorious March 13 revolution...’’.

Of course the PRG justified these attacks on the legitimate demands of the masses in terms of defending the ‘revolution’. But the policies of the NJM limited this revolution to &@ bourgeois democratic one. The PRG was demanding sacrifices and discipline not in ordelr to defend a socia/ist state where the workers and peasants exercised real power over decision making, and a planned econmy geared to needs not profit, but for a still bourgeais state where the toi! and sacrifice of the workers and peasants lined the pockets of the oligarchy and the impeiralists and a few crumbs fell to the masses. Worse, the PRG‘s strategy af maintaining a mixed economy with a private sector subordinate to the *‘peoples’ government” and state sector was a utopian ane. It was utopian ta be fieve that an isolated anti-imperialist Grenada could survive imperialist economic and military pressure and intervention, with an internal enemy only waiting for the opportunity to strike. Only the most energetic spreading of the struggle throughout the Caribbean could have kept Reagan’s hands full.

The strategy pursued by the PRG played straight into the hands of the counter-revolutionaries. The masses had to be restrained ta preserve the alliance with sections of the bourgeaisie. This ailtance was crucial, as were the guarantees of private property, tao obtain aid from the imperialist agencies - the IMF, EEC, Worid Bank, UN etc. The emphasis on building up the tourist industry, the most vulnerable to imperialist’ sabotage, emphasised the committment of the PRG to stay within the imperialist arbit ‘‘on its own terms’’, Indeed both Cuba and the USSR, ever fearful! of revolutionary situations developing outside their contral and perhaps embroiling them, unswervingly encouraged this strategy of preserving the mixed economy.

Imperialism had no intention of allowing such a regime, which sought a degree of independence fram it, to survive. Grenada posed the same threat to imperialism’s untramelfed rule in the

_ Caribbean that Nicaragua did in Cen-

tral America. The Grenadian bourgeoisie, intimately linked with and dependant on imperialism was well aware of this.

Thus the struggle for parliamentary elections became crucial both for the Grenadian ruling class and imperialism. For the Grenadian oligarchy it meant the chance of regaining its political contro! over the state. For the imperialists it would have provided the “democratic” jever to bring down the PRG in the same way they ended Michae! Manley’s “experiment with socialismm”’. For the PRG it would have spelt doom, It would have exposed the divisions within the NJM, so carefully concealed from the masses. Given that they had left intact a dominant and aggressive private sectar, it would have meant at best a powerful bourgeois apposition, supported by imperilise.

Imperialism proceeded to use the carrot and stick on the PRG. European and Canadian imperialism preferred to emphasise the carrot - continued aid. Reagan preferred the stick- military threats. As the imperialist stranglehald tightened in Grenada - the US blocked as much aid as it could and warned US tourists ta stay away fram Grenada. The bourgeoisie stepped up its campaign internally.

The crisis over the bourgeois paper Torchfight represented the first phase of this struggle. In @ running battle with the PRG, this GNPsupported paper was finally closed in October 1979, The month before Carter had announced the formation of the “quick strike” Caribbean task force. The Grenagian Voice, Torchlight’s successor- backed by 22 leading businessmen and tanaowners was closed on its second issue. In June 1980 a sophisticated bomb, planted by a former Peaple’s Revolutionary Army sergeant, under a platform where Bishop and other leading NJM members were speaking, went off kifling 3 women in the audience and injuring 100 others. In August the following year the US Jaunched a NATO exercise - operation “Amber and the Amberdines”, which was clearly a dummy run invasion of Grenada.

As aid began to dry up (the PRG was forced ta turn to Cuba and Libya to finance its international airport)- the econamic situation became worse. Maurice Bishop pointed out in a speech in London that cocao prices had fallen 65% between 1981 and 83 while Grenada had 10 million pounds of nutmeg in store, where the annual production was anly 6 million pounds.

The growing ecanomic impasse and increasing threats of imperialist intervention exacerbated the divisions within the PRG. The New Jewel Movement by its very nature was never a democratic party involving the masses, No congress of the party was ever held after 1978. Political disputes were hammered out behind closed doers within the leadership circles. Given the Bonapartist nature of the regime and the role of Bishop as “’Popuiar teader*’ politica! disputes necessarily took on a personai as well as a political character.

Simmering disputes of this character had been going on for a considerable time within the leading cliques. On the one side stood the supporters of Bernard and Phytiis Coard, the organisers since the mid 70s of a body called the “Organisation for Revolution ary Education and Liberation” (OREL) which was clearly sympathetic to the Soviet Union and Cuba. This body played a leading role in the overthrow of Gairy and controiled key posts in the People’s Revolutionary Army, the 20,000 strong militia, the NJM and the government. On the other stood Maurice Bishop and his supporters,

The crisis in the NJM erupted following Bishonp’s return from a visit to Hungary and Czechoslovakia on 10th October. The political basis of the differences is not clear, although it ts possible that Bishap was considering making concessions to the US government an the question of elections following his visit to Washington in June. Whether these concessions included the ousting of pro-Cuban elements from the government is nat known. Wht is known is that OREL gained a majority in the Central Committee af the NJM for Bernard Coard to became idealogical leader of the party and share the leadership with Bishop. Bishop it appears rejected this and started to mobilise his mass following in his own defence.

On Wednesday 12th, Bishop and Jaqueline Creft, were placed under house arrest by the PRA and units of the security forces foyal to OREL. The government was deadlocked. On Saturday Kenrick Radix, the Attorney General, and clase supporter of Bishop jin the NJM led a demonstration of 300 in St. George’s demanding Bishop’s release - Radix was also arrested. On Tuesday 18th October 500 students marched on Pearls airport, disrupting incoming flights. The result was a split in the government with Unison Whiteman, Norris Bain, Lynden Rahmdanny and Gearge Louison resigning. Whiteman denounced Major Lean Cornwall and Hudson Austin- both members of OREL - for lying about the reasons for Bishop’s arrest and proceeded to or-

WORKERS POWER November 1983 3

ganise a “down tools” for the following day.

The massive demonstration on Wednesday morning 19th October was the resuJt. Three to four thousand Grenadans led by Whiteman marched to Bishop’s house to release him and Creft. Then led by Bishop they proceeded to march on Fort Rupert the military headquarters and arsenal. Here they were fired on by units of the PRA, possibly drawn from OREL supporters. Later it appears that Whiteman, Bishop, Creft, Norris Bain and Fitzroy Bain, General Secretary of the Agricultural Workers’ Union were executed by these same units.

What political differences of such a deep nature could have led to such a tragic outcome? Any move by Bishop towards a compromise with imperialism, even involving elections was clearly unacceptable to the likes of Coard and Hudson who favoured strengthening the state sector and claser relations with the “communist” bloc as the way out of the crisis. What is certain is that neither faction af the NJM represented the historic or immediate interests of the Grenadian masses. The Cuban style proto-Stalinism of Coard and Hudson invoived a deep fear of the masses. Whilst they may have opposed Bishap’s propased political concessions to Reagan, they could offer no real workers’ democracy in counterposition to bourgeois.democracy. Unlike Castro they had no mass popularity they could demagogicaliy exploit. Bishop on the other hand did. A real barrier to Bishop’s concessians to - imperialism would have been the cre-_ ation of real organs of workers and peasants power- councils with the decisive say on all nolicy matters and a mass armed militia which elected its officers and commanders. The discovery of large storehouses of weapons by the invading US marines indicates that neither faction trusted the masses with the weapons, instead the “left” elements tried to settie matters behind the backs of the masses. They preferred to unleash the standing army on the masses. The killings of October 18th were indefensible. Not only did they provide a pretext fo US intervention, but, a hundred times more importantly, they sowed deep confusion and demoralisation amongst the masses, disarming them in the face of that intervention. The bloody dead end of both Social -Democratic and the Stalinist poles of petit-bourgeois nationalism have both been tragically demonstrated in Grenada.

Only the programme of revolutionary communism - Trotskyism - of workers power and permanent revaJution holds an ajternative for the masses Of the semi-colonial cauntries, The role of social-democratis and stalinists alike in blocking the revolution, of seeking alliances with the bourgeoisie to preserve a “democratic ~ stage’ has been shown once again for what it its - a bankrupt strategy which delivers the masses into the hands of imperialism. Starting from the resolute defence and the extension of the gains of the 1979 revalution, the strategy of permanent revolution, would have necessitated. breaking through the radical bourgeois programme of the NJM and the PRG. The genuine democracy of workers’ power is inseparably bound up with meeting the desperate needs of the workers, smai! farmers and the urban poor at the expense of the sacred rights of private property. Onty thus can the masses be consciously and irrevocably won to the side of revolution. The extension of that power throughout the Caribbean and Circum-Caribbean area is the only guarantee of the defense of such a re volutian against imperialism’s onslaught. Grenadian and Caribbean revolutionaries must inscribe on their banners “For a socialist federation af the Caribbean,”

In Grenada, no “Workers and Peasants Government" that was answerable to workers’ councils and an armed mass militia, existed. Nor did a genuine revolutionary party exist which would have fought far its creation. Both a reoviutionary party and a revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ government were, are and will be vital goais of struggle, both in Grenada and in Nicaragua, if the same bloody pattern is nat to be repeated there as Reagan and Thatcher rage like rabid doas through the semi-colania] countries.

*Bath quotes taken from Fitzroy Ambursiey, Grenada; the New Jewel Revolution, in Crisis in the Caribbean. This article draws heavily from the information provided by that essay as weil as Grenada: The Peaceful Reyolution, Epica Task Force.

by Stuart King

ROAD TO DISASTER

Jewel Movement in power

Coard and Bishop (centre) lead the National

channelled into the Parish councils and

“popular organisations’ of women, youth,

and the militia.

Such is the material and cultura! impaverishment imperialism has inflicted on the masses of the Caribbean and Centra! America that solving or alleviating these probiems - by literacy campaigns, health measures, land reform indeed revolutianise the life of the masses. Yet they remain bourgeois democratic tasks even if semi-colonial servitude and a venal local bourgeoisie could never bring these gains. These measures are compatible with the maintenence of capitalism even though the landed oligarchy, the ijocal bourgeoisie and the imperialists regard any regime that carries them out as Marxist.

inevitable venemous counterrevolutionary opposition to elementary economic, cultural and democratic rights for the masses invests any regime that attempts to carry them out with an aura of socialism or cam™unism. However as we have seen iv Nicaragua and Grenada these governments remain on the terrain of the defence of bourgeais. property relations. Oppased, sabotaged, undermined by imperialism and its local agents an the one side; pressed for an extention of the revolution by the massé.on the other, these regimes play a bonapartist rate. They exclude the bourgegisie from direct political power and rely on the masses for this. On the other hanu they prevent the masses from taking political power and utilising it to carry out a social revolution.

Thus the NJIM did not base itself on genuine democratic argans of struggie and power - Councils or soviets - organising the urban and rural workers. Instead they created the typical *’organs of popular power" so beloved of Castro and his imitators. In Grenada these were primarily the parish and zonal council which were presented with government plans for discussion and criticism but had no power over the policies or actions of the PRG. Thus popular power is little more than a plebiscite organised to approve the policies of the bonapartist |eaders. Political questions - supremely who shall govern, do not fall within their sphere of competence.

The committment of the PRG to the mixed econamy also meant that it blocked any serious demands of the masses which threatened private property. Coard made this clear ina speech ta the Chamber of Commerce shortly after the revolution when he declared ‘‘with the revolution has come the end to the forcible seizure of private property’ One symptom of this was the faifure of the PRG to introduce any fand reform programme until the land occupations forced them to do so.

Land in Grenada is dominated by the large landowners whoa often have interests in tourism and the retail

Youth Section of the NIM:

mm LE, TR,

trade. The big farms, those over 100 acres, which make up only 0.5% af all landholdings, contra! nearly 50% of al! the cultivable acreage in Grenada. While the peasant farmers scratched a living on tiny plots of land, it was estimated that half the land haidings over 500 acres were left lying idle by their absentee landlords! Yet the PRG contented itself with concentrating on the 25 estates, the most infertile ones at that, taken over by Gairy.

In February 1980 when farm workers, camplaining of Sad canditions and low wages occupied the River Antoine estate owned by the De Gale family, they were variousiy denounced by the government as being CIA inspired or being in the pockets of Marijuana smugglers. The PRG quickly declared that it: “coufd not and wauld not support the seizure of people's property as the means of resolving the conditions of hardship of the workers.” (Gavernment Information Bulletin, May 5th}. The estate was returned to the De Gales and a grateful member of this landowning family wrote to the Times in the following terms: “‘It is relevant to record publically that when, in Feb. 1980, our family estate was psremptoriy taken over by a village commune and renamed “The People’s Collective Farm”, gavernment support was immediately forthcoming for the managers’ protection and the estate was returned {eventually} to normal working.

It is by judicious, well regulated behaviour that Mr. Bishop - like Mr. Mugabe - hopes to transform this small nation into a homogenous structure pf 70vomg cp ture of living communities.” (7imes +3 Feb. 1981}

While this revolt pushed the PRG into taking some refarm measures, they remained minor. The “Utilisation Law’ gave power to the Ministry of Agriculture to lease idke lands of estates over 100 acres. |But' the “idle lands far idje hands’’ scheme was employing only 160 youths on 146 acres of ‘and by mid-1982.

(f jandownership remained fundamentally untauched by the PRG so too did the business community. The 1973 committment in the NJM manifesto for “the complete nationalisation of all foreign owned hotels as well as foreign owned housing settlements” was unceremoniously ignored. Only Gairy’s hotels were taken into state ownership. The US owned “Holiday Inn” which accounted for 33% af all available rooms an the island and 50% af ail foreign exchange earnings remained untouched as did the private villa developments and land speculation projects.

In August 1979 a 5 week strike over the dismissal of two workers at the Coca Cola bottling plant owned by one of the biggest Grenada companies W.F.Julian and Ca. led to the government taking over the plant. The PRG

however yielded to the bourgeoisie’s screams of ‘’creeping socialism’’ which greeted this measure and, two years later, returned the plant to its previous owners, together with all the profits made during that period!

While the PRG encouraged the formation of trade unions, particularly those under NJM leadership, strikes which threatened ‘the economy” were denounced in no uncertain terms. Industrial action by public sector workers in January 1981, taking the form of a “sickout’’ in pursuance of a wage claim was quickly branded by the government controlled newspaper Free West indian as “part of a plan by certain unpatriotic and counter revolutionary elements to dirupt the second anniversary celebrations of our glorious March 173 revolution...’.

Of course the PRG justified these attacks on the legitimate demands of the masses in terms of defending the ‘revolution’. But the policies of the NJM limited this revolution to a bourgeois democratic one. The PRG was

demanding sacrifices and discipline not in ordelr to defend a socia/ist state where the workers and peasants exercised real power aver decision making, and a planned econmy geared to needs not profit, but for a still bourgeois state where the tail and sacrifice of the workers and peasants lined the pockets of the oligarchy and the impeiralists and a few crumbs fel) to the masses. Worse, the PRG’s strategy of maintaining a mixed economy with a private sector subordinate to the ‘‘peoples’ government” and state sector was @ utopian one. It was utopian to be lieve that an isolated anti-imperialist Grenada could survive imperialist economic and military pressure and intervention, with an interna) enemy only waiting for the opportunity to strike. Only the most energetic spreading of the struggle throughout the Caribbean could have kept Reagan's hands full.

The strategy pursued by the PRG played straight into the hands of the counter-revolutionaries. The masses had to be restrained to preserve the alliance with sections of the bourgeoisie. This alliance was crucial, as were the guarantees of private property, to obtain aid from the imperialist agencies - the IMF, EEC, World Bank, UN ete. The emphasis on building up the tourist industry, the most vulnerable to imperialist sabotage, emphasised the committment of the PRG to stay within the imperialist orbit ‘‘on its own terms’’. Indeed both Cuba and the USSR, ever fearful of revolutionary situations developing outside their control and perhaps embroiling them, unswervingly encouraged this strategy of preserving the mixed economy.

Imperialism had no intention of allowing such @ regime, which sought a degree of independence from it, to survive. Grenada posed the same threat to imperialism’s untramelled rule in the

_ Caribbean that Nicaragua did in Cen-

trat America. The Grenadian bourgeoisie, intimately linked with and dependant on imperialism was well aware of this.

Thus the struggle for pariiamentary elections became crucial both for the Grenadian ruling class and imperiajism. For the Grenadian oligarchy it meant the chance of regaining its political control over the state. For the imperialists it would have provided the “demacratic’’ lever to bring down the PRG in the same way they ended Mitchael Manley’s “experiment with socialism’. For the PRG it would have spelt doom. It would have exposed the divisions within the NJM, so care fully concealed from the masses. Given that they had left intact a dominant and aggressive private sector, it would have meant at best a powerful bourgeois opposition, supported by imperilism.

Imperialism proceeded to use the carrot and stick on the PRG. European and Canadian imperialism preferred ta emphasise the carrot - continued aid. Reagan preferred the stick- military threats. As the imperialist stranglehold tightened in Grenada - the US blocked as much aid as it could and warned US tourists to stay away from Grenada. The bourgeoisie stepped up its campaign internally.

WORKERS POWER

The crisis over the bourgeais paper Torchiight represented the first phase of this struggle. in a running battle with the PRG, this GNPsupported paper was finally closed in October 1979. The month before Carter had announced the formation of the “’quick strike” Caribbean task force. The Grenadian Voice, Torchlight's successor- backed by 22 leading businessmen and landowners was closed on its second issue. In June 1980 a sophisticated bomb, planted by a former People’s Revolutionary Army sergeant, under a platform where Bishap and other leading NJM members were speaking, went off killing 3 women in the audience and injuring 100 others. In August the following year the US launched a NATO exercise - operation “Amber and the Amberdines”’, which was clearly a dummy run invasion of Grenada.

As aid began to dry up (the PRG was forced to turn to Cuba and Libya to finance its international airport)- the economic situation became worse, Maurice Bishop pointed out in a speech in london that cocao prices had fallen 65% between 1981 and 83 while Grenada had 10 million pounds of nutmeg in store, where the annual production was only 6 million pounds.

The growing economic impasse and increasing threats of imperialist intervention exacerbated the divisions within the PRG. The New Jewel Movement by its very nature was never a democratic party involving the masses. No congress of the party was ever held after 1978. Political disputes were hammered out behind closed doors within the teadership circles. Given the Bonapartist nature of the regime and the role of Bishop as *’Popular leader” political disputes necessarily took on a personal as weil asa political character.

Simmering disputes of this character had been going on for a considerable time within the ieading cliques. On the one side stoad the supporters of Bernard and Phyllis Coard, the organisers since the mid 70s of a bady called the “Organisation for Revolution ary Education and Liberation” {OREL} which was clearly sympathetic to the Soviet Union and Cuba. This body played a leading ra/e in the overthrow of Gairy and controlled key posts in the People’s Revolutionary Army, the 20,000 strong militia, the NJM and the government. On the other stood Maurice Bishap and his supporters.

The crisis in the NJM erupted following Bishap’s return from a visit to Hungary and Czechoslovakia on 10th October. The political basis of the differences is not clear, althaugh it is possible that Bishop was considering making concessions to the US government on the question of elections following his visit to Washington in June, Whether these concessions included the ousting of pro-Cuban elements from the government is nat known. Wht is known is that OREL gained a majority in the Central Committee of the NJM for Bernard Coarec to become idealogical leader of the party and share the leadership with Bishop. Bishop it appears rejected this and started to mobitise his mass foallowing in his own defence.

On Wednesday 12th, Bishop and Jaqueline Creft, were placed under house arrest by the PRA and units of the security forces joyal to OREL. The government was deadiocked. On Saturday Kenrick Radix, the Attorney General, and close supporter of Bishap in the NJM led a demonstration af 300 in St. Geaorge’s demanding Bishop's rejease - Radix was aiso arrested. On Tuesday 18th October 500 students marched on Pearls airport, disrupting incoming flights. The result was a split jn the government with Unison Whiteman, Norris Bain, Lynden Rahmdanny and George Louison resigning. Whiteman denounced Major Leon Cornwall and Hudson Austin- both members of OREL - for lying about the reasons for Bishop's arrest and proceeded to oar-

November 1983 3

ganise a “down tools” for the following day.

The massive demonstration on Wednesday morning 19th October was the result. Three to four thousand Grenadans ted by Whiternan marched to Bishop's house to release him and CFeft. Then led by Bishop they proceeded to march on Fort Rupert the military headquarters and arsenal. Here they were fired on by units of the PRA, possibly drawn from OR EL supporters. Later it appears that Whiteman, Bishop, Creft, Norris Bain and Fitzroy Bain, General Secretary of the Agricultura! Workers’ Union were executed by these same units.

What political differences of such a deep nature could have led to such a tragic outcome? Any move by Bishop towards a compromise with imperialism, even involving elections was clearly unacceptable to the likes of Coard and Hudson who favoured strengthening the state sector and closer relations with the “communist’’ bloc as the way out of the crisis. What is certain is that neither faction af the NJM represented the historic or immediate interests of the Grenadian masses. The Cuban style proto-Stalinism of Coard and Hudson involved a deep fear of the masses. Whilst they may have opposed Bishap’s propased political concessions to Reagan, they could offer no real workers’ democracy in counterposition to bourgeois democracy, Unlike Castro they had no mass popularity they could demagogically expigit. Bishop on the other hand did. A real barrier to Bishap’s concessians to imperialism would have been the cre ation of real organs of workers and peasants power- councils with the decisive say on all policy matters and a mass armed militia which ejected its officers and cammanders. The discovery of large storehouses of weapons by the invading US marines indicates that neither faction trusted the masses with the weapons. instead the “left” elements tried to settie matters behind the backs of the masses. They preferred to unleash the standing army on the masses. The killings of October 18th were indefensible. Not only did they provide a pretext fo US tntervention, but, a hundred times more importantly, they sowed deep confusion and demoralisatian amongst the masses, disarming them in the face of that intervention. The blaody dead end of both Social -Democratic and the Stalinist poles of petit-bourgeais nationalism have both been tragically demonstrated in Grenada.

Only the programme of revolution- . ary communism - Trotskyism - of workers power and permanent revojution holds an alternative for the masses of the semi-colonial countries. The role of social-democratis and stalinists alike in blocking the revotution, of seeking alliances with the bourgeoisie to preserve a “democratic * stage”’ has been shown once again for what it its - a bankrupt strategy which delivers the masses into the hands of imperialism. Starting from the resolute defence and the extension of the gains of the 1979 revalution, the strategy of permanent revolution, would have necessitated. breaking through the radical bourgeois programme of the NJM and the PRG. The genuine democracy of workers’ power is inseparably bound up with meeting the desperate needs of the workers, small farmers and the urban poor at the expense of the sacred rights of private property. Oniy thus can the masses be consciously and irrevocably won to the side af revolution. The extension of that power throughout the Caribbean and Circum-Caribbean area is the only guarantee of the defense of such a re valution against imperialism’s onslaught. Grenadian and Caribbean revolutionaries must inscribe on their banners “For a socialist federation of the Caribbean.”

In Grenada, no “Workers and Peasants Government” that was answerable to workers’ councils and an armed mass militia, existed. Nor did a genuine revolutionary party exist which wouid have fought for its creation. Both a reoviutionary party and a revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ government were, dre and will be vita! goats of struggle, bath in Grenada and in Nicaragua, if the same bloody pattern is not to be repeated there as Reagan and Thatcher rage tike rabid doas through the semi-coltontal countries.

*Bath quotes taken from Fitzroy Ambursley, Grenada; the New Jewel! Revolution, in Crisis in the Caribbean. This article draws heavily from the information provided by that essay as well as Grenada: The Peaceful Reyvojution, Epica Task Force.

by Stuart King

WORKERS POWER November 1983

SMASH THE ‘SUPERGRASS’

QUESTION: When is “contradictory, bizarre and in some respects incredible” evidence good enough to convict seven men? ANSWER: In Northern Ireland when there is no jury, one judge drawn from a Unionist background and the seven men are Republicans.

The words quoted above are those of Lord Chief Justice Robert Lowry during the latest “supergrass” trial last month when Kevin McGrady’s uncorroborated evidence ied to seven mere republican fighters joining over 300 others held in prison solely on the word of paid informers.

The use of informers has been publicly supported in the last month by both the Director of Public Prosecutions and James Prior, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. They would have pre ferred to have remained silent. However, recent retractions of evidence by “supergrasses’’ Robert Lean and Patrick McGurk in October led to 28 republicans

ELECTIONS IN ARGENTINA

The sweeping victory for the Radicals in the October 30th Argentine election has thrown the Justicialist Party (Peronists) into confusion. The disintegration of Peronism is a real possibility. Official Peronism is reaping the bitter fruit of its overt and covert cooperation with the military junta in the post Malvinas war situation.

All the parties of the Muitipartidaria (an alliance which included both major bourgeois parties) and the bureaucraceis of the two CGTs (Confederacion General dai Trabajo - Genera! Confederation of Labour} collaborated to hold back the mass movement. The massive general strikes of Decamber 1982 and March 1983 which mobilised millions of workers were kept to 24 demonstrations rather than: than developed into a mass indefinite strike to drive drive the Junta from power.

Only the latter could have broken the hold of the bloody Generals, perpetrators of the ‘dirty war’, over an armed force whose rank and file were disaffected and politicised by the incompetent conduct of the Malvinas War.

The bourgeois parties and the Peronist union bureaucrats feared the eruption of the masses more than they fear the Generals who still have a gun in the back of the ‘Argentine Democracy’. Both parties have given undertakings not to prosecute the perpetrators of atrocities. They prefer to hold out the threat of a return to military rule as a means of disciplining the masses.

The non-Peronist left has been gaining in influence sinca the Malvinas War. The Communist Party, the Workers Party (PQ) and the movement Towards Socialism {MAS) - the latter two perties being supported by the Fourth Internationalist Tendency and the international Workers League (Morenoites) respectively - afl stood candidates.

PO received 13,500 votes for its Presidential slate and 17,500 votes for its parliamentary candidates. MAS did considerably better with 46,000 and 55,000 in each category. The CP received 440,000 votes for its parliamentary candidates and supported the Peronist candidate Luder for the presidency.

PO centrally argues for an “anti-imperialist united front” to lead a “‘great national upsurging against imperialism’. Its paper Prensa Obrera suggests as on of the key provisions for such a front the call for nationalising the banks and foreign trade ‘‘before complying with payments on the foreign debt’. MAS centres its agitation on the slogan for the repudiation of Argentine’s national debt and for the “Second Independence” of Argentina.

Certainly Argentina’s astronomic national debt rampant inflation and chronic unemployment centrally pose the need to struggle against imperialism in the shape of the IMF. A direct struggle on these issues would certainly involve the rural and urban petit-bourgegisie. But the central and decisive force for such an onslaught remains the Argentine proletariat. (t must be broken from its Peronist links and the tactic to do this would be the call for an independent class party based on the trade unions. These would have to be wrenched from the corrupt Peronist bureaucracy and the two faderations united. Genuine revolutionary Trotskyists should argue for a revolutionary transitional programme for such a party. Without this, “anti-imperialist fronts” and anti-imperialist rhetoric threaten to merely produce water for the mill of Peronist populism.

Our January issue will carry a fuller analysis of the positions of the ‘Trotskyist’ groups in the Argentine elections.

SYSTEM

being freed. Also there have been further reports of bribery, intimidation and invitations to perjury. Every week Prior receives complaints fram \iberalminded solicitors and barristers who object to having their reputations further shredded through participation in this latest mockery of “justice’’. These events have demanded that the government openly back the use of these measures.

The use of paid informers, while not new, has bean a prime tactic of the RUC and British Army since 1978/9. It was then that a series of embarrassing revelations by Amnesty and the Bennett Report confirmed the widespread use of torture against republicans in order to extract information. The international furore and the alienation of bourgeois nationalist opinion produced a re-evaluation of tactics, Tha British State decided it could acheive the same ends - gain information on IRA operations, acheive bogus convictions and sow disunity in the republican camp - by using informers, The method is simple. First, break a suspect under interrogation and force them to implicate themselves. Secondly, in return for immunity from prosecution, substantial! payments and by use of sophisticated psychological harassment born of protracted isolation, get the informer to give lor invent) information on others.

SOCIALIST ACTION READERS who opened their paper the week that Maurice Bishop was killed must have been shocked. Phil Hearse proceeded to inform them for the first time that “Despite the paraphenalia of alleged participatory democracy in Grenada, in reality the revofution has been led by a small group of leaders of the New Jewel Movement.” (SA 28.10.83)

The Grenadian form of *‘mass consultation, the Parish councils and the Zonal councils’, he went on to inform his wide eyed supporters,”in no way amounted to genuine mass participation in decision making.... The illusion that this system represented authentic participatory democracy have been proved to be absured”’.

Indeed they had. But who has been sowing these terrible illusions in the NJM? In fact none ather that the Socialist League, whose members are among the most avid readers and sellers of Sociasist Action. It is this organisation which has been among the most slavish hagiographers of the New Jewel Movement and its jeadership. Over the last 4 years its members land those of its predecessor the IMG} have lost no opportunity to make propaganda for this ‘island of sacialism’”’ in the Caribbean, In the many articles in their own press and Labour Party publications they have extolled the virtues of Grenadian democracy. Thus in Sociafist Challenge, predecessor of Socialist Action, Paul Lawson wauld declare in a review of Three years of the Grenadian Revolution that, “Foremost has been the estabdlishment of the system of ‘peoples democracy’ which allows the vast majority of Grenadians to participate in the running of their country.” (SC 11.3.82)

At the end of 1982 fnternationa/, published by supporters of the Socialist League and the Fourth International, produced a major four page eulogy to “Grenada‘s Big Revolution’. The article infonned its readers that Westminster-sty!e democracy had been rejected, “in favaur of the direct involvement

National H-Block Committee march in Dublin, 1980

Grenada: Socialist Action cover's its tracks

In the 1979/81 period, the RUC’s preferred device was to recruit informers this way and put them back into the republican community. However, successful reprisals by the IRA and an amnesty in 1982 undermined this ploy.

it was the defeat of the hunger strikes in 1981 that led to the new’supergrass’” development. The demoralisation experianced by many prisoners, the prospect of decades in jail and the open espousal by the IRA of a “long war of attrition” produced fertile soil for informers to spring up in prison. Add to this that on the fringes of the republican movemant there are barely politicised elements, least able to resist the pressures, and one can understand the initia! successes enjoyed by the RUC. = ~ .

Their first major victory against the republican movement was last August when 35 men were convicted on the evidence of Christopher Black. Twentytwo received sentences totalling 4,000 years. Black

is now in Austrailia living in refuge from the IRA, .

seeking comfort in his £40-100,000 blood money. The 1RA’s initial response was to kidnap relatives of the “supergrass’ (as with Harry Kirkpatrick} to put pressure.an them to retract. This has been abandoned Jaregly because of the isclation of the informers which makes them relatively immune from this pressure. Many have been in custody for over a year. This is especially so now that the British have abolished preliminary hearings in which family and friends in attendance often induced a retraction. The confirmation by Prior of their usefulness means that, despite spectacular defections such as Robert Lean’‘s, the use of “supergrasses’’ wil! con-

eh..2

Derek Spiers (iF L/Report}

of the working people, through their own organisations, in the running of the country.”

It has Seen no secret that the United Secretariat of the Fourth Internationa! (USEC} has been split over the characterisatian of the government in Grenada. Neither is it a secret or a surprise that the permanent factions in the Socialist League are at loggerheads with each other on the question with the pro-SWP(US) elements visibly reluctant to part with recent copies of Socialist Action, The Socialist League’s co-thinkers in the USA, the SWP (US), in their enthusiasm to dump the Fourth !nternational and emburassing remnants of Tratskyism like the theory of Permanent Revolution have been angling for a merger with the Stalinists in Cuba and Latin America. These ‘‘Trotskyists” of the USFI, according to their own account, first began to take “carious notice” of the Grenada revolution when they saw Maurice Bishop rush to the podium at the non-alligned conference and embrace Fide! Castro after one of his speeches. Having jong since politically embraced Castro themselves, the SWP {US} rapidly despatched Ernest Harsh, Andrew Pulley and Diane Wang to investigate, and by August Grenada had been added to the SWP’s growing list of genuine’Workers’ and Peasants’ Governments” white the NJM was deciared a “Revolutionary Proletarian leadership’. {Pulley it seems was very impressed not only by the reforms introduced by the regime but by the fact that he found a poster of Che Guevara in front of Barciay’s Bank! Nat, mind, by the the fact that Barclay’s had been taken over (which it hadn’t) nor by the fact that it was under workers control lwhich it wasn’t) but by the fact that there was a Che Guevara paster outside it!}

While the Mandelites tut-tutted at this overenthusiaism for Castroism on the part of !ts American co-thinkers, in practice their programme for the Grenadian Revolution was identical.

tinue. The IRA are resigned to this. However, both the British and the nationalist population know that nothing fundamental will be altered by their use. To date, the main effect has been to break up the Ardoyne unit of the IRA. In fact, their use to date has done more to disrupt the operations of the loyalist UVF in Belfast. The Economist recently

admitted that previous repressive victories, such as

internment, and the introduction of Dipiock Courts were only “temporary successes {which} did not prevent the problems coming back.” (17.9.83)

The Economist went further and accepted that protracted use of these measures was “an admission of defeat.”

The reason for this is clear. Since tha October 1982 elections for the now-moribund Assembly, the strength of political support for Sinn Fein has been well-demonstrated. This was confirmed in the June '83 election results which gave Sinn Fein candidates over 100,000 votes. This popular base will not easily be eroded, since the IRA, INLA and Sinn Fein ara looked to, by the oppressed saction of the nationalist minority, for defence against the brutal

repression of the RUC and the British Army. tn

addition, one unintended effect of the “supergrass” campaign has been to rekindie action committees on the basis of “Stop the Show Trials’, committees which fell apart in the wake of the 1981 Hunger Strike defeats.

The absence of even the most elementary damocratic and legal safeguards in Northern Ireland is nothing new. The British State (and before it Stormont) has used a battery of repressive legislation against the nationalist population in the Six Counties since the Partition in 1922. Nor have the British ruling class seriously attempted to hide the fact. As long as they can make the British working class accept the tie that nationalist resistance is “terrorism” then they can convince most on the mainiand that extra-special measures are necessary and legitimate to combat it. The political inertia of the British Labour movement is crucial in allowing the ruling class to keep fighting its long running war in Ireland.

in the present period, amongst the prime tasks of Irish solidarity work in the mainland is the ruthless exposure of the nature of the present “‘showtrials’. United activity in the labour movement with all those who wish to see the return of “normal” justice in Northern Ireland is both possible and ne cessary so long as it is realised that only politically independent working class action can force a retreat by Prior and his ilk.

However a campaign which confined its appeal to the democratic sentiments of British workers will quickly be shown to be self-defeating. The political support for the Army's role in the Six Counties would sweep aside any democratic impulses that might initially motivate sympathetic action.

Revolutionaries, therefore, need to argue that only anti-imperiasist propaganda can convince the working class that they share a common bond with the nationalist struggle in the Six Counties. Only by unambiguously explaining our unconditional support for the IRA rasistance to the RUC and the Army, only by explaining why British tmperialism is compelfed to redefine “British justice’ for the nationalists can we create a longlasting antiimperialist solidarity movement.

hy Keith Hassell

They. preferred to talk about a “Revolutionary Government” in Grenada, a-more helpfully imprecise term which left the reader to decide whether this meant nationalist revolutionary or socialist revolutionary, ar indeed whether there was a difference. Not one word of criticism of the policies of the NJM or its government appeared in the pages of the USEC publications. They sowed chronic itiusions in the democratic nature of the regime. The popular front nature of this government was passed over in silence, as was its Commitment to the ‘‘mixed economy”. While the Mandelites shied away from declaring the NJM a “revolutionary proletarian party” they were certainly not in favour of fighting for a revolutionary Trotskyist Party. Why should they? They had no criticisms af the New Jewel Movement.

Had the USFI had a section in Grenada, lof course they never tried ta build one despite a positive flood of USEC tourists thither) their programme, indistingurshabie from that of the NJM, would have spelt disaster, as did the programme of Bishop and Coard. in Britain, the SL consciously peddled illusions in the Grenadian regime, declaring as hopeless ’sectarians’’ and “ultra-tefts” any who tried to put revolutionary alternative to these policies.

it is compietely in character with the spineless centrists in the leadership of the SL that immediately the crisis hit the NJM and the Grenadian revolution they "“discovered’’ that demacracy in Grenada was a sham and the first criticisms of the NJM’s programme appeared. This has nothing to do with revolutionary criticism, it has a lot to da with running scarred and attempting to cover one’s tracks. The catastrophe in Grenada has once again exposed the bankruptcy of the USEC's centrism and its uselessness as a revolutionary leadership.

py AE I —e—e

WORKERS POWER November 1983 5

In the NUM

THE ‘LEFT LEADERS’ of the NUM are doing their utmost to avoid a showdown with MacGregor in the coalfields. The miners are being left at the mercy of a management committed to drastic cuts in the workforce and a fundamental weakening of the bargaining power of the NUM itself.

Arthur Scargiff

Despite rave reviews in thea press, MacGregor has had no change of heart about the future of the mining industry. For example, plans to close pits currently producing at over £60 a ton would Iaad to the closure of the entire Kent coalfield and half the South Welsh coalfield in the near future. With that. in mind MacGregor is quite prepared to hold out the bait of large redundancy payments to older miners and guarantees of work to younger trained miners who are prepared to laave their ravanged communities and travel to coalfields sarmarked for development.

The man who broke the power of the ISTC is out to do the same with the NUM. The NCB intends to link pay more firmly to bonus schemes so that wages and conditions are determined by jocal managers and the NUM‘s wage claims and negotiating rele can be successfully undermined, Already face workers are dependent on bonus payments for 30% of their take home pay. As a result the management has been extremely effective

John Sturrock {Network}

in halding down miners’ wages over the last year by the systematic revision of bonus rates. Despite last year’s much heralded 9% wage offer to the miners the new government earnings survey shows that underground workers’ earnings increased by 3.6% and those of surface workers by 3.1% over that same period. In this situation the national wage claims of thea NUM have less and less bearing on miners’ take home pay. At the same time the struggle to defend living standards and conditions has become sharply exprassed in a wave of unofficial stoppages against management measures to increase discipline or alter shift patterns in pursuit of higher productivity at lower bonus rates.

In this situation the only way to maintain the morale of the miners and foil the plans of the NCB is to support all miners taking industrial action and attempt to spread their action with mass pickets so as to prevent the NC& taking on the miners in a series of pit by pit conflicts. That such action is possible was showed by the Yorkshire miners in October. That the lefts in the NUM are set on opposing such action was shown by the Yorkshire NUM’s refusal to give any real backing to the Monktonhall strikers.

The Monktonhall strike was symptomatic of many that have taken place in the mines this year. Management shelved development plans for the pit and refused to evan discuss that decision with the union. The anger of the man could have been the signal for generalising the struggie against the new ‘get tough’ MacGregor management. But Scottish NUM leader and CP executive member Mick McGahey had no intention of doing anything of the sort. The clammy hand of the NUM left bureaucracy immediately descended on the strike For even though the Monktonhall strike was the first of this wave of pit disputes to be declared official, the strikers were officially discouraged from picketing out other miners in their support. Instead McGahey suggested they stay at home backed by a £2 a week levy of Scottish NUM members.

The Monktonhall miners were being lined up as an exemplary selective action aimed at winning public support for the cause of defending the Scottish coal industry. A Scottish TUC rally was held in defence of Scotland’s coalfields. A one day strike was organised to back the Monktonhall strikers without any plans for further action. Once the rallies had come and gone the Scottish NUM stabbed Monktonhall in the back. After eight weeks on strike McGahey recommended a return to work on the grounds that the NCB management was now prepared to discuss its davelopment plans with the local NUM....there was no offer to withdraw the redundancy threat posed by managemant’s pians. No wonder a sizeable proportion of Monktonhall miners resisted a return to work and denounced the deal as the sal] out that it was.

Repeatedly tha NUM lefts have shown their profound distrust of the membership and their refusal to back them up when they move into action against the NCB. Monktonhal! is just one more betrayal chaiked up by the NUM left. The membership will repay this with ever greater distrust of the NUM leaders whenever they talk of fighting MacGregor. A growing rift between the NUM leadership and the rank and file will work to the advantage of the NCB unless militants can channel the anger of the rank and file into a fight to commit the NUM te beat MacGregor. It is the

in the POEU

THE BATTLE AGAINST the privatisation of British Telecom has put the “Broad Left” union jeaders to the sharpest of tests, In the POEU the “Broad Left’ took control of the executive from the right wing “Mainstream” group last June. It is their members that have been in the frontline of resistance to the Torias’ plans to make £4 billion and scrap 15,000 jo¥s from the sale of this choice growth industry to private buyers.

In the face af this attack the Broad Left has adopted a strategy af selective action as an alternative to fighting for alt-out action. To fight for allout action would mean fighting the right wing in the POEU executive and trying to mobilise the anger of the members against them. But this the Broad Left - leaders will not da, and the result is that their policies are tailored ta maintaining agreement with the POEU right.

AN EXPENSIVE DIVERSION

Because they never see any further than the next executive elections, the BroadLeft are keen to prove that they are “‘responsible’’ leaders. The censure they received from a delegate meeting for not putting right-wing MP Jahn Galding forward for the NEC has made them deeply suspicious of the members. The fact that by failing to consult the members on this in the first place they laid themselves open to censure seems to escape these aspiring officials. Thus, with the time-honoured bureaucratic refrain that the members don’t want an all-out fight, they are vying with the right to ensure that ane does not develop.

The Broad Left has based its strategy on two main ideas. On the one hand, they have set out to

Ls

wage a publicity campaign to swing ‘public opinion’ against privatisation. To this end the six Telecom unions are spending a cool £200,000 on press advertisements entitled “Whose finger will be on the button?” which graphically point the finger at Japanese and American interests. But this expensive nationalist propaganda is nat the oniy means of diverting a head-on clash with British telecom that the Broad Left /eaders have up their sleeves.

On September 18th a special POEU conference set the pattern for the fight against privatisation. Motions calling far ali-out strike actian were not taken by the Broad Left dominated executive. As a Sacialist Action correspondent put it, in a piece of inadvertently candid reportage, the motions “were not reached on the agenda. The union's chairperson assured conference that they were only opposed because they tied the executive's hands”. (Socialist Action 23.9.83) Too right! The Broad Left wanted at all costs not to have their hands tied by a commitment to an all-out fight with Telecom and the POEU right.

The solution advanced by the Broad Left was to try to stop the Tory attacks with selective action. Behind all the talk of “imaginative new tactics’ and guerilla campaigns’. the Broad Left refused ta give a lead and fight ta win the membership to an allout battle with the Tories. Instead they held out the

prospect of the majority of POEU members continuing

ta work normally and providing financial backing for a selected few strikes in stategic places. In early October 1,000 engineers in International

Services began an officially backed work to rule. They

were to be backed by selective stoppages in Aberdeen. This action was supposed to hurt the gavernment. In addition action was planned against the major backers af Mercury private communications company - Barclays Bank, British Petroleum and Cable and Wireless. With a fund of £1 million the POEU executive argued that this action would immediately hit the government. POEU Broad Left and

BROAD LEFT ROAD TO DEFEAT

answer to the NUM leaders’ disgraceful charges that the members are not willing to fight. For the executiva this is an excuse to back out of a fight with the NCB.

In the face of MacGregor’s 5.2% pay offer the left NUM executive gave no lead. Scargill talked of handling the offer “very carefully’ and made no recommendation toa the special delegate confarence convened to discuss pit closure and the pay claim. The result was a decision to operate an overtime ban which Scargill and co are taking no responsibility for while demagogically claiming it represents tha decision of the conference dele gates. The truth is that in the absence of a clear lead conference voted for the overtime ban more as a means of registering their opposition to the pay offer than as an effactive action against the NCB. With coal stocks running at record levels an overtime ban will actually cut the NCB’s costs,

That the miners have been committed to such a token action is itself a further proof of the treachery of the NUM left leaders. They were not prepared to put their positions at risk by going to

the members with a package of demands on closures, pay and discipline which would unite the coalfields in action. That would have meant challenging the right wing on the executive and supporting ai] struggles against the NCB. Above all it would have meant organising the rank and file of the union. As Dodworth and Monktonhall show all too graphically this is what the NUM left, from McGahey through to Scargill, will not da.

MacGregor and the NC8 still want to cut 70,000 jobs and around 70 pits. They area intent an tightening the managerial screw in the pits so that they can claw back on bonus payments. Scargill and McGanhey will not stop them. The NUM executive is openly discussing a joint approach to the Tories with MacGregor on behalf of the coal industry. The militants in the pits will have to build thair own rank and file miners’ movement and based on strengthened and democratic workplace organisation if they are to force the NUM to act effectively on behalf of its members and destroy the NCB’s plans.

by Dave Hughes

IS THE PARTY OVER FOR C.P.?

IN THE RUN UP to the Communist Party’s 38th Congress in November, rival factions were openly at each others throats. In itself the dispute is nothing new but the open ferocity with which it is being conducted is. For the first time in years there is a battle to topple the party leadership.

The principal actors in this Stalinist drama are the Eurocommunists who dominate the Executive and run the magazine Marxism Today (Mclennan, Jacques, Cook} versus the largely trade union based elements who contro! the Morning Star(Chater and Castella).

The main issue under debate is how the party is to interpret its Broad Democratic Ajliance strategy embodied in the 1977 programme the 4ritish Road

to Socialism. The Eurocommunists are eager to use

it to justify a shack-up with everyone from the CND to the SDP. This is the way they will build an ‘anti-Tory majority’.

Of necessity this means jettisoning the party’s farma! commitment to the centrality of the labour movement in the alliance. In fact the Eurocommunists are open about their hostility to the class struggie. Bill Ward of Manchester CP argued, “‘In my view the idea that intensification of the class struggle, however it is presented, is the sole, or even the main area of struggle, is as sectarian a delusion as it was before 1930.” {Focus 9.83)

To varying degrees the motley array of ferninists, peaceniks and party ful!l-timers who constitute the Eurocommunist faction, share this outlook. Hence their tireless efforts, particularly in the pages of

Marxism Today to prove that the industria! working

working class is disappearing.

The trade-union based faction have tried to present themselves as a ‘left’ aiternative. Deposed industrial organiser Mick Costello attacked the

Jacques/Cook axis as a ‘right-wing reformist trend”.

This faction stress the need for a ‘Leninist’ party, more newspaper coverage in praise of the ‘socialist countries’ and an orientation to the trade unions. They insist that the labour movement is central to, indeed must be the leadership of, the Broad Demacratic Alliance.

executive member Dave Ward, for example, waxed enthusiastic about the possibilities of selective action “in the end it would mean 35,000 union members out, supported by 100,000 financially - that could bring Telecom to its knees.” (Socialist Action 21.10.83).

While the Broad Left leaders may have wished to keep the bulk of their members out af the dispute,

the Government and British Telecom management had

no such intentions. The employers hit back with a lack-out. This was inevitable and, for that very reason, the Broad Left had always been fearful of this outcome. As Dave Ward put it in the same interview “The rea/ problem is how we prevent a national fock-out.“ The truth is the POEU leaders had no way of preventing a lock-out and opened themselves up to precisely such a management counter-attack.

BACKING DOWN FROM A FIGHT

British Telecom locked out 2,500 at the International Exchange on 11th October. Their retaliation was co-ordinated with an application from Mercury for a court injunction under the anti-union laws against the POEU‘s “secondary action”. The Strategists of the Broad Left were put on the spot. if the management widened the scape of their fockout then the union stood to loose its strike fund within weeks. Lock-outs threatened to destroy the entire strategy of the Broad Left executive and they accordingly cut the number of workers involved in selective action so as to save on strike pay. The prospect of British Telecom being crippied by selective actian was even further fram realisation. tn an important showdown the POEU leaders missed the opportunity to broaden the dispute. With engineers out on mass pickets winning support fram other

In fact their politics are every bit as right-wing and reformist as those of their opponents. They are not a left alternative. They are a variation of Stalinism just as the Eurocommunists are, Their much spoken of warking class orientation is in reality no more than the traditional Stalinist orientation to the trade union bureaucracy. They are keen to construct alliances with the likes of Moss Evans, Kitson and co, as wel! as certain old-style Tribunite MPs. It is the good old Broad left strategy that brought us traitors like Scanlon, and that led Ken Gill to drop a mation at the TUC opposing the Soctal Contract. Costello and Chater have been using the formal control of the Morniag Star viz the autonomous Peoptes Printing Press to regularly espouse this strategy.

Neither wing of the CP is ‘evolving’ in a revoiutionary or left direction. Sincere militants who find themselves in the CP’s ranks need to underStand this and break altogether with Stalinism in all its variants. This choice could well face such militants sooner, rather than later, While the two factions have hitherto co-existed, this can not go on for much longer.

The YCL The Morning Star faces a cash crisis. Over 44,000 members have left the CP during the Jast ten years. The party is down ta 16,000 members, mast of wham do little more than carry the card, The erasion of the CP’s industrial bases continues apace. It is no longer able to mount even bureaucraticaily run LCDTU conferences.

The CP is facing a dramatic crisis. has, according to Costelia, collapsed.

For the British Stalinists the chips are down. Even if they survive as a united party after November's congress their problems will be far from over. The dispute has reached the point of no return and the Executive’s warning “’that innerparty struggle could immobilise the party.” (Draft Congress Resolutions}, will be fulfitled. We will not mourn the collapse of the CPGB, For revoilutionary communists, the destruction of that party is to be welcomed.

engineers who were refusing to scab and with the lock-out threat hanging over a/f Telecom workers, the chance to take decisive action was there. When it wasn't taken the pickets shrunk, the anger of the rank and file subsided, and orders went out from the executive that ft was alright to cross picket !|}nes provided the work of strikers wasn't undertaken!

The POEWU executive backed down in the face of legal attack too. In advance of the court hearing they called off action against Mercury's backers so as to clear themselves of some “secondary action” charges and thus not prejudice the High Court decision. in the event they received a temporary respite when the High Court ruied against Mercury.

The POEU still faces the threat of court action and of a wave of dismissals and Jackouts at the hand of British Telecom. Management deferred plans to sack 19 engineers in the hope that the POEU could be persuaded to climb down further and negotiate a timetable and terms for negotiation. If the special POEU conference on November 7th voted to escalate action in any way, British Telecom signalled that they were ready to declare war on the union.

With their strategy of selective action, the Broad Left lulled the majority of POEU members into a false sense of security and complacency. Rather than put their executive posts to the test of winning the rank and file to effective industrial action the Broad Left - effective prisoners of the right wing that they only organise against at election times and

through their electoral caucuses - in fact treated their rank and file with the traditiona! suspicions of Trade Union bureaucrats and went for the soft option of selective action. The history of the dispute shows that selective action will not win; that is the bitter truth about the Broad Left’s leadership in the POEU. Only all-out action to cripple the Government and British Teiecom - action that draws on and extends trade union action to biack Mercury can stap the Tories’ privatisation plans. |

by Dave Hughes

WORKERS POWER November 1983

HARD LEFT GO SOFT ON KINNOCK

CONFERENCES USUALLY HAVE their own catchwords which indicate who has won the day. At the TUC conference the catch word was “credibility”, signifying the right wing advance. At the Labour conference the catch-all catch word was “unity”. This littla word sums up the new ialance of

forces in the Labour Party.

The election of the Kinnock/Hattersiey leadership was the prelude to the establishment of a centre-right ruling coalition at every level of the party. In the NEC elections, as in the electoral college, the union block votes made sure that the centre, around Kinnock, McCluskie, Kitson and ca., and the right around Dunwoody and Varley, had a solid majority over the constituency-based Bennite left.

With the conference’s overwhelming vote to expel Militant’s five leading members and rejection of calls for no more witch-hunts behind them this centre-right majority has given notice that it will “protect” the Labour Party from “entrists’’. This was the significance of its 14 to 9 vote to expel Tariq Aji on the grounds that his views were incompatibie with the Labour constitution.

The ruling coalition are not going far a new round of massive witch-hunting, but they will take care to satisfy right-wing demands to tame the ‘eft. Hence their refusal to reinstate the suspended left-wing Wythenshawe party and the exclusion of jeft-wing trade union delegates from its re-convened AGM.

Hence the confidence with which right-wingers in the local parties are enforcing the ban on sales of the Militant. In Gillingham, a long-standing member, Bob Herley, faces expulsion far selling Militant at a meeting.

UNITY ON THE RIGHT’S TERMS

The “balanced” leadership on the NEC is itself at the mercy of a right-wing Manifesto Group dominated Shadow Cabinet. Healey, Hattersley, Kaufman, Jahn Smith and Shore command all the key portfolios. On Grenada and Cruise it has been Dennis Healey who has been calling the shots for the Labour opposition. The right-wing’s power over policy is to be enhanced through representation on the new Campaign Committee. This body, the brainchild of Kinneck’s Labour Co-ordinating Committee (LCC) mentors - Hain, Hewitt, Clarke et al - will render Benn’s old base, the Home Policy Committee, and the NEC itself, irrelevant as far as policy formulation is concerned. The “modernisation’’ campaign in the party will be carried aut under the auspices of this body. This, as the much dijuted policy statement “Fairer Britain’ indicates, wil! involve a retreat from the left’s cherished policy goals enshrined in the last manifesta. Kinnock and Hattersley both agree on the need for this. As Labour Weekly reported: “Both want to see changes. Kinnock calls them “refinements. Hattersley refers to “adjustments.” (7.10.83)

This real shift rightwards is being perpetrated in the name of the new “unity” in the party. The socalled “hard !eft’ in the party, the Bennites, Ken Livingstone and the axis around Labour Hera/d and fribune are rapidly falling-in behind Kinnack . Like their friends in the LCC and the “‘soft left’”’ they were thrown into disarray ever since Benn made his deal with the right at Bishops Stortford. They were farced to give up mounting a challenge to Healey after Bishops Stortford and then dithered in the face of the last NEC’s witch-hunt. The scale of the electoral defeat finished them off. None of them could disagree with Kinnock‘s new version of

Laurie Sparham {iFL}

Unity on the Tribune platform?

their ald slogan “Never Again’. Never again would they conduct the sort of battie that, for a brief spell, they did in 1980/81. The New Statesman was accurate when it noted: “Perhaps the most significant difference between 1980 and 1983 is that the far left was then in the ascendant and is now in retreat, More than that: it is in disarray.” (7.10.83)

Evidence for this judgement jeaps out of every week's edition of Tribune. Its editor, Chris Muiten, wished Kinnock much “goodwill” in a fraternal open letter to him. Taking up Kinnock‘'s own favourite theme he offered the vacuous advice that: “You have first to unite the party.” (7.10.83) The fallowing week it gleefully declared: “The Labour Party is on the road to recovery. For the first time in many years it enjays a leadership in which all sections of the party apparently have confidence.”

The same editoria! went on to distance itself from the “hard left’’ arguing: “Anyone who upsets that new found unity of purpose and confidence will deserva short shrift from the rest of the move

ment. That includes the Left if it stands on the sidelinas sniping from a position of ideological but ultimately sterile purity.’’ (14.10.83). The sniping at “ideological purity” is to be expected of the ideotogical eclectics in the Tribune office. They are now accepting unity on Kinnock's terms, which, inevitably means trimming the policies of the established “eft. Benn has been singing a similar tune: “‘ This year’s conference has built confidence.” { Sociasist Action 14.10.83) True - but confidence in what? When the interviewer asked him about the policy evasions in the “Fairer Britain’’ document an exasperated Benn snapped: “t think you're nit picking.” The mood of “confidence’ {in Kinnock) and the pull of “unity” (around Kinnack) have been enough to tame the once feared Bennite legions.

Few Labour leftists expected to see Ken Living stone join in the lurch to the right. Many of his admirers - particularity around London (and now national ) Labour Briefing - were shocked to hear Ken at a rally in Brighton argue that “the left could easily isolate itself if we are sean to be wanting only to keep arguing over the battles of the past.”

THE NEW MODEL LABOUR PARTY

His paper, Labour Hera/d, rationaltses this retreat by arguing that the NEC has a feft majority (they are describing the same NEC which expelled Ali!) and that Hattersiey’s electian is not a move right but (wait for it): ” a result of a widespread desire for unity.” {7.10.83) Talk about not seeing the wood for the trees. Labour Herald completely fails to understand that the only basis for this unity is that the ieft has been prepared to shift to the right.

Each in their own particular way the various fragments of the rightward moving Labour left are drawn to the prospect of building a new model Labour Party. The mode! they wish to emutate is that which ardent papular frontist Eric Hobsbawm calls a “neo-socialist party." Modelled on Papandreou‘s Pasok and Mitterand's PS such a party would cease to be a “narrow”, ’’class based’’ party and become a party of “ali the people.” In order to acheive this the left must unite with the right inside a tolerant and broad Labour Party.

At present Benn may be spurning the idea of a coalition with the SDP and Liberals. But he and his followers are not opposed to the canception of building a broad party in alliance with, and therefore on the terms of, the right. A recent Guardian column of Benn’s was dedicated to calls ta the marvelious “radicals” of the Liberal Party to take their rightful piace in the Labour Party. Similarly Ken Livingston has recently made no secret of the fact that he does not want the party to be dependent on the ‘white male worker’ but that it should “learn a tat from the Liberats’’ in terms of community politics and become a party that aggregates the interests and campaigns of minorities and the oppressed.

The whale problem with this strategy whether it takes the form of positively promoting a coalitian with the Liberals and SDP, or the form of fighting for a “neo-socialist” party, is that it relegates the interests of the working class behind those of the electorally important middle classes. As well, it rejects the primacy of working class action against the Tories, in favour of constructing an electoral alliance based on policies that all sections of the alliance accept. Mitterand’s repeated austerity pians directed against the working class are an indication of where this whole schema l/eads to. Socialists need to learn from this and reject it outright. That this project leads logically to daing the right’s dirty work against the left in the Labour Party is shown by the LCC’s recent open letter to the feft.

In a transparent bid to flush out and isolate any forces that won’t jump on the Kinnock bandwaggan they propose to unify the left around a platform of defending existing Labour Party policies, no

challenge to the new leadership, opposition to a new witch-hunt (not a fight against the present one} and fighting to help “construct a new, wide base of support.”

PUTTING ON A LEFT FACE

The clear purpose of the LCC tetter is to split the Bennite/Livingstonite left from the astensibiy Trotskyist forces around Socialist Organiser and Socialist Action. As such it should be condemned as @ witch-hunting Maneouvre. But have Sociasist Organiser (‘we're all Bennites’’) or Sociasist Action (the new cheerleaders for the National Labour Brief-

ing) drawn any correct conclusions from the re alignment of forces in the Labour Party?

A quick glance at Socialist Organiser might lead an ill-informed teft-winger, disillusioned with Benn, to think that they have. Their favourite failed MP Reg Race has been given acres of space to fume at the new leadership. Their chief ideologue John O'Mahoney denounced “the soup of compromise” and a report of the SO intervention at the conference proudly stated that “we were there, prepared to stand against the unity tide and point to the future’. They have rejected and attacked the LCC letter as a threat: “unity or else’. Alt af this points to one thing. The centrist SO, after a long period af accomodation to the Bennites, now hopes ta pose as the only true “hard Jeft’’ current remaining. To do this, they have to put on a left face.

At the same time, however, the essence of their centrist potitics, their continuing accommodation to left-reformism, is evident in their paper. They argue for the reconstruction of a left-reformist alliance to “remake the labour movement.” To acheive this

rer nee

they are raising the call for workplace branches, as though they are a panacea, a substitute for clear politics.

SO are not gaing any further than their old goal of “organising the left". They are not fighting to construct a revolutionary alliance pitched against Benn. They are stil! attempting to form a hard left grouping on “hard-teft’’ Labourite politics while now being prepared to accept that Benn will not be caming in on it. In other words their fundamental perspective is unchanged. it appears leftish precisely because it is now being fought for in a climate where

most of the Left are in headlong retreat.

THE SAME BANKRUPT PROJECTS

Socialist Action, late onto the Benn bandwaggoan, are determined to hang on now they are there. They are piling into the Nationa! Labour Briefing - safe cover at the moment. They attacked Sociasist Organiser for voting at a Briefing meeting to reject the LCC ietter outright because of the “importance of not isolating @riefing (NB. as we go to press SA has published no reply to the LCC letter in its own name - WP} from those who voted for Kinnock in the Party by having clear proposals for left unity ourselves.” (SA 4.41.83) Their purpose in arguing this is really not that different to Socialist Organiser. They want to create a left-reformist blac: “And Briefing could begin to bridge that gap precisely because it wasn’t associated with one particular set of ideas.” (4.11.83) No clear sets of ideas ptease, merely a loose grouping with a paper - Nationa/ Labour Briefing - that has got something for everyone.

The project of Seciasist Organiser and that of Socialist Action remain the same bankrupt ones of 1980/81. The difference is that Saciafist Organiser have modified theirs to suit the times. Socialist Action hope that 8riefing will excuse them from

4 id Wo Credibility gap?

Comrades,

{ was interested to read the article by Dave Stocking in which he urged support for Heffer and Meacher in the Labour Party elections. Would | be right in thinking that your organisation is not too confident about this since there is no bold headline stating your position but only a reference buried towards the end of the article? What is wrong with an abstantionist position instead of supporting “yalitics and programme...(which) deserve no endorsement’”’ ?

As far as the right-wing MPs are concerned, their defection to the SDP would wel! occur under a Kinnock-Meacher leadership as well as Heffer-Meacher; and if “ The sleepwalking of Kinnockism or Bennery will isad straight to the precipice in the late ‘80s then why discriminate batween the two? You may say that my position is too purist, but if only Kinnock and Hattersley were standing would you urge a vote for the former as the least-worst reformist? In other words, does the tactic of critical support always end up by lending credibility to fake-left raformists?

Another point which surprised me in the article was the reference to the “‘scandalously undemocratic electoral systam’’. Surely Trotskyists are not in the business of arguing that bourgeois parliamentary elections can be made democratic by reforming the system?

Fraternaliy, Arthur Ford (Wolverhampton)

The leadership election cantest provided us with an opportunity of putting the fake lefts - Heffer and Meacher - ta the test in front of their supporters. This is the essence of critical support. We never support any reformist in any election on the basis of their programme The problem with abstentionism is that it would have not atlowed revolutionaries to put these candidates to the test.

-EDITORS

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having to do that and allow them to continue to cling to their scenario of an ever growing teft in the labour party that they can blend with.

In the face of the new”’unity” in the Labour Party the tasks of rea! revolutionaries are straightforward. Given the teadership’s emphasis on campaigns we must force them to act on their words. Every action against cuts in the NHS must be supported, publicised and built on, to acheive mass action against the Tories. The same must be done around struggles on unemployment, wages and conditions. Kinnock must be forced to turn rhetoric into real deeds. This way he will either stand exposed as a faker - which we think he is - or he will be forced by the action of the workers to put up or shut up. Fhis way too the right wing will be weakened since the emphasis of activity will be shifted from parliament to the streets, the factories, and the hospitals. Alongside this we should cali on the PLP to use their parliamentary opposition to the cuts etc as an auxiltiary to and tribune for workers’ struggles against the Tories.

The present witch-hunt sttll needs to be fought and reversed. But this must be \inked to a struggle to further democratise the party. The tessons of the last five years are that this means a campaign in the unions to democratise the block vote.

A ceaseless drive to link up with workers’ struggles and to democratise the party are crucial. But the object must be to construct a revolutianary tendency in the Labour Party. Permanent “‘alliances”’ of the left-are will o' the wisps. The leaders of leftreformism have supple spines. Electoral demands will bend them easily. Their fotiowers, more sincere and often mare resolute, must be broken from reformism and won to a revolutionary banner. In the period ahead that is the most decisive task facing revolutionaries inside the Labour Party.

by Mark Hoskisson

Statement by two

members of Slough SWP

This year's annual conference has resulted in yet another ‘victory’ for the politics and perspectives of the Cliff-dominated leadership. The perspectives for the coming year have been rammed through by the leadership and their ever-faithfui middle cadre. The membership have been assigned to their usual! role of passive spectators.

in order to head off the vilification andrubbishing that dissenting voices (such as ours) are greeted with in the SWP let us point out the rea! nature of potitical debate in the supposedly democratic centralist SWP. For a start, peopie may ask why we have not used the channels for debate prior to the conference. Democratic centratism is, in a nutshell, maximum internal discussion by an informed and educated membership to reach a decision, combined with maximum centralism in carrying out the decision. For this to work , demaCracy has to exist throughout the year, nat just before conferences. We would need a regular unedited Internal Bulletin {even if we did choose to publish some internal material in Soc/alist Review).

- We would need a real national internal life through

fractions, and a regular flow of information,

‘available to all members, between branches and

the centre and between branches. Furthermore, there would have to be the right to form factions and tendencies between conferences as well as just before them. Only with these things could the leadership be classified as really accountable to an involved membership. None of these things exist inside the SWP.

- From intimate experience of SWP-style democratic centralism, we can only laugh at accusations that we are the ones guilty of a breach of democratic centralism. Democratic centralism, SWP-style, means a few words to the crowd before being hung, drawn and expelled. The IB seems to have been quietly suppressed. One of us has received no IBs, while the other last received an IB in mid-1981. Two or three IBs are supposed to have been proauced since then, but unfortunately do not seem to

WORKERS POWER November 1983 ?

~GOVERNMENT >?

LOCAL GOVERNMENT HAD pride of place at this year's Tory party canference - almost on a par with Argentina at last year’s do. A measure of Tory resolve to do unto Labour town hails what was done unto the Genera/ Se/grano can be gleaned from the fact that there were no fess than three major “debates’’ on local government.

One after another, Maggie's ministers trooped onto the stage to describe how local authroity budgets would be slashed, how the “big spending” metropolitan juntas would be sliced up, and how Ken Livingstone, this year’s Galtieri - would be chopped: “neutering the newt” as one minister put it,

After that display, no-one could be jeft in any doubt about the Tories’ determination to drasticalty reduce town hall spending and strip away the last vestiges of local autonomy. Of course, attacks on local government are nothing new. Callaghan and Healey started the recent trend in 1977. The first Thatcher government continued and extended their work. They cut town hali spending by 5% in real terms, meaning that some 120,000 jobs were lost.

AN ALL OUT TORY OFFENSIVE

Local government remains a prime target for cuts because of the huge sums of money involved: 21.3% of total public expenditure, some £23 bn in 1983. Local government will account for 12.8% of Gross Domestic Product this year. It employs 1.75 miflion people, excluding “law and order”, the one sacrosanct growth area.

Such figures make mouths water at Tory Central Office. They also put the “achievement” of Thatcher's first term into perspective. They did not achieve as much as they hoped for. No wonder then, with a general eiection victory under their belts, the Tories launched an attack on several fronts.

The government pians massive reductions ‘n the central grant element of local spending for next year. This will be enforced by stiff ‘hoidback penalties.” for any authority that does not keep its spending in line with government targets. These targets themselves are highly arbitrary and iong since altered by the Tories to the detriment of the inner cities, in favour of the Tory shires.

At the same time, they are falling in absolute

have found their way into the hands~of the membership. Nor can we really believe that no-one has had much to say for the last 2% years. Also the recent expuisions in Bradford of 6 members and the resignations of 9 others {many of whom were longstanding members of the party) only came toa our attention after the expulsions and then by the comrades who had been expelled or resigned. Is it really democratic centralist practice that the Central Committee has not said one word on the subject or that rumours damaging to the SWP about the Bradford affair are, as usua!, left unanswered? Other instances of such breaches of democratic centralism by the leadership could be raised. However, we shall leave it to SWP members past and present to think back and remind themselves of their own favourite examples.

The present established leadership in the SWP fear that real accountability would expose the fact that their endless ‘‘tactical’’ zig-zags have brought expulsions and stagnation rather than the much sought-for recruitment and growth. The leadership will not let the membership judge their 2ig-zags because to do sa would expose their errors and threaten their tight control over the organisation.

As to the present. perspectives, they do not provide an adequate basis for Jeadership in the class struggle. The reason for this is that the “downturn theory does not and cannot explain what is really going on in the class struggie. It is quite true that the Tortes and the bosses have enjoyed a number of very significant successes. However, though the class struggle ebbs and ftows like the tides, unlike the tides it is not a natural phenomenon. The trouble with the perspectives is that they do turn the class struggle into a kind of natural phenomenon. The “downturn” seems to stand above developments in the class struggle as a law unto itself, The interventions of revolutionary socialists is totally underestimated in this perspective. To say this is not to propose substitutionism. it is to recognise that what !s needed is an organisation fighting for revolutionary politics inside the working class and building an alternative leadership to both the trade unian and Labour bureaucrats and to the ideological and oryanisationai limitations of simple trade union militancy.

The SWP’s idea of a downturn, going on since 1974 is idiatic. How does the party account for the wages explosion in 1975, the “winter of discontent” which smashed the social contract in 1978/79, and the steel strike of 1980, which threatened to bring about an alliance af major sections of the working

terms: in 1983 total grants are 53% of jocal authority income; in 1979 they were 61%. Already, inner city areas tike Islington have seen Rate Support Grants (RSG} fall from £53m in 1979/80 to €28m in 1983 4% in real terms, while Camden receives no RSG at all. Next year’s targets are between 3% and 12% less than this year in real terms. The highest reductions are reserved for innerLondon boroughs, and for the GLC, which is faced with an astonishing 35% cut.

lf the Tories are not stopped either services must be butchered or enormous rate increases would be essential just to stay still. For example, the London Borough of Southwark is faced with a £35m gap between revenue and expenditure next year. This would require a 60% rate increase according to their Treasurer. Such a rate rise represents a massive blow to the living standards of workers and, the Tories gleefully note, a one-way ticket to electoral suicide for Labour councillors.

The second element of the attack, effective in 1985, is “‘rate-capping’. This means simply that town halls which do not stick within Whitehal! guidelines will have their rates decided by central government.

Partly in order to prevent discussions within their own ranks, the Tories have included a provision which exciudes authorities from rate capping if their budgets fall below the ‘safe’ figure of £10m. This convenientiy excludes the vast majority of Tory councils. But here too, the real intention is to target the metropolitan councils and their boroughs - the so-called Labour “big spenders’.

By and large, the councils on the “‘hit-list’’ are also those with the worst conditions in England.

According to ‘Urban Deprivation”, produced by the Department of the Environment, eleven of the topline authorities with the highest levels of deprivation are in London. They include Brent, Hackney, Lewisham, Lambeth, tslington and Southwark, who with Greenwich have recently seceded from the

London Boroughs Association to form the Association

of London Authorities. Add Liverpool and Sheffield to this list and it begins to read like a “Who's Who” of Tory hates.

Jenkin has underlined the centrality of these areas to the Tories’ plans by bringing forward the proposal to abolish the metropolitan councils. This openly political attack on Labour councils is part of the wider ruling-class offensive to permanently weaken the Labour Party.

class with the steel workers against the Tories. In that strike it was the actions of the bureaucrats, not the “downturn” that led to defeat. The SWP’s perspective is in fact political fatatism which, in the case of the health workers’ struggie of 1982 led to the party writing off the health workers to defeat before the final battle with the bureaucrats had been fought.

Turning ta the question of Ireland, the CC’s self-congratulations on the party's work around ireland must have come as a shock to the three of us on the Babby Sands Memorial demo fast May, and to the small group of activists who worked hard around the hunger strikes. The coverage of the trish struggle by the party is pathetic during the times when the Republicans are not faunching an offensive in Britain. When the Republicans are militarily active in Britain, the coverage is not only pathetic, but also capitulates to the anti-brish chauvinism within the British working class - criticism of the bambings as headlines, calls for troops out now and support for Republicans only in fine print. This is a disgrace given that it is our awn bourgeoisie that is oppressing the trish people. The SWP has failed to maintain unconditional solidarity with the struggle of an oppressed people. We ask SYP members and supporters to examine the attitude of its leadership and its publications to Aldershot, Birmingham, Chelsea and Hyde Park tall scenes of Republican attacks in Britain) and ask themselves if the SWP realty has stood firm against pro-imperialist and chauvinist prejudices inside the British working class. Our answer is that the SWP has not and that, without a clear antiimperialist perspective, it never will.

For the reasons we have outlined we have decided to leave the SWP. But we are not leaving politics. Nor are we sinking into the ‘’swamp”’ or going off to wander in the sectarian wilderness. We have decided to enter into discussions with the Workers Power group. This group is not sectarian, nor has it collapsed into the Labour Party. It is an organisation that takes seriously political discussians of relevant issues in the class struggle, that takes seriously the education and political development of its members and that, to the best of its ability, involves itself in the day-to-day class struggle. We cail on other revoiutionary-rminded militants wha are members, or supporters of the SWP to read the publications of the Workers Power group and to consider taking the same step as us.

Yours fraternally, K. Norris and 1. Cam

had bao

Residential Social Workers demonstrate outside pay negotiations —

At the same time, it is an attack on the jobs

and conditions of local government workers. Though the Tories have refused to publish reports which “conclusively prove” that the proposed quangas,

which would replace the local authorities, would be more efficient and save money, they have made no secret of the fact that 9000 jobs would be “saved’' immediately.

If this were not enough, local government workers face attacks on two further fronts.

The Private Eye-sation of Cecil Parkinson may

have cost him his job as a Minister, but at least he could fall back on an MP’s salary and a business. Not so the growing number of lacat authority workers threatened with the dole by privatisation. The entire range of services are vulnerable, fram whale housing estates, for example Knowsley District’s sale of 3200 homes and flats to a private company, to professional services, like Westminster's recent proposal! to privatise architects and valuers.

The last, but by no means least, component of the Tories’ ansiaught is next year’s pay settlement. Tne published ‘’quideline” is a 3% “increase’’. This also has to be put in the context of next year’s funding cuts. As the Guardian recently noted, “The best the eployers can be expected to do if they keep reasonably close to financial limits and bargaining priorities is an increase of around 1 per cent” (t8.10.83). But in order to achieve this, many authorities, as in past years, would have to cut the numbers on the payroll - for the higher spenders these cuts would need to be drastic.

By forcing the employers, some of wham need litthe encouragement, into a tight corner, the Tories clearly intend to cut real wages in this sector for the fifth successive year. Taken together the

measures proposed by the government amount to a massive reduction in the already inadequate services provided locally. The effect on jobs would be staggering.

Ted Knight - defending who?

In the frontline of the attacks, mast of the metropolitan Labour councils are attempting to marshall their forces under the slogan “Defend lacal demecracy’’. This is the refrain of the Labour leaders in South Yarkshire and London, for example. No-one can doubt that the combined effect af the Tory plans would make local government an even more hapeless appendage of tiie central state machine. But the calls to safeguard “‘democracy”’ are based on, and spread, dangerous illusions and false strategies. They proceed on the basis that local democracy is real ane that it can be used to achieve socialism piecemeal and by example.

In fact, local powers are entirely controlled by the central state. The only reai measure of autonomy is the freedom to spend the product of a 2p rate! Outside this provision, no local authority can spend a penny without statutory authority - the conditions see to that.

The strategy for fighting the Tories that flows from this perspective is pie in the sky. In a nutshell,

lan Mcintosh (IF)

CAN LABOUR DEFEND LOCAL

John Sturrock { Network}

Livingstone and Blunkett appeal to the ‘centre’

of British politics to rally to the defence of “‘its’’ local democracy. Already the municipal lefts are taking comfort in the grumbling of Tory associations. Not content with appeals ta SDP and Tory conferences to save local government, Ken Living stone recently claimed that the very House of

Lords that crushed the GLC’s cheap fare scheme will not stand by and see loca} democracy perish!

In order to get the GLC a good name, Livingstone and Tony Banks fought and won a battieinthe GLC Labour group to get the Queen to open the Thames barrier. —

This “broad front’ approach will not force Thatcher to change her mind. !n this strategy the workers whose jobs and services are threatened are ‘“‘dema fodder”. Tightly cantralled, token actian is contemplated as a last resort. The only potentially effective weapon, mass strike action, is jattis=ned for fear of losing their fair-weather friends.

Labour councillors who genuinely want to fight the Tories must put their effort into building industrial action. Workers must demand of them that they use their positions to lay hold of the machinery of local government and spend the massive amounts of maney paid to the finance houses on the needs of working people in their community. In this way, workers could be invalved in a political struggle against Fory austerity measures.

But if the Defend Landon Charter set up by the newly-formed Association of London Authorities is anything to go by, the prospect of council-led resistance is remote. Described as a 10-poaint Charter of popular demands for London, the campaign aims to get “hundreds of thousands of signatures’ and “build up to a Defend London week in the New Year’ (London Labour Briefing. October 1983).

These measures are totatty inadequate.

To the Councils wno launched the campaign, we

say : support workers taking action now! But given the hostile attitude of Southwark and Lambeth {two of the signatories of the Defend London Charter}

to the residential workers’ current industrial action, a hard fight will be necessary.

ALL OUT STRIKE ACTION!

In ptace af gimmicks, local government svorkers must organise now to put their unions on a war footing . On paper, the TUC and affiliated unions in local government are pledged to campaign against the attacks an them and organise support for official action. Left to the trade union leaderships, the reality is different. For the most part the unions are confining themselves to publicity on the nature of the attacks and trying to “raise public awareness” of the value of the services provided, like NALGQs fim “Put Peoole First’’ campaign. Squandering the unions’ resources in this fashion goes alongsrde promises of support to individual branches taking action. These promises translate into Jeaving workers in struggie, (like Kent social workers on strike since August 4th), isolated from the rest of the union and yvuinerabie to the bosses’ attacks. In the nature of local government, and the attacks on it, different workers are affected by the proposals at different times. The current recipe is ultimately one of demoralisation and defeat.

The unions must be won to a position of all-out strike action, nationally to Defend jobs and services!

Stop the cuts - no rent or rate increases!

Defend the metropolitan councils!

Smash the privatisation plans!

Settie the wage claims in full!

The Labour councillors must be won to using their office to support and organise such action. Without it the Tories will have their way with focal government and the aiready inadequate services that workers depend on.

by Dave Jenkins

ree PP PP ee

BREAK THE TORY

ANTI-UNION LAWS

RECENT GOVERNMENT FIG— URES indicate a degree of hesitant upturn in the performance of the British economy. Overall production is rising at an annual rate of 3.5%. The numwer of employed workers has risen slightly - vy 17,000 in the second quarter of the current financial year. In addition, employed workers, on average, have managed to keep incomes ahead of inflation - real take-home pay for male workers rose vy 4.3% in the year to July.

For several groups of workers this has been a signal that the time is ripe for a fight to recoup what has been Jost in the last four years. This was the central! argument used by strikers at Vauxhall, even in the traditionally moderate plants of Dunstable and Luton. At Rolls Royce, in Crewe, the first pay strike in thirty years Is explained by the fact that skilled workers there are now eligible for rent rebates and Family Incomes Supplement.

Rolls Royce also shows another factor at work, the ending of short time working and an increase in the order books brings back confidence that had been sapped by the threat of the dole. The development of the dispute at Shell’s Stantow refinery, the company’s most profitable plant, from a strike over victimisation to one against a 4.5% pay offer confirms this tendency.

However, confidence In victory is not the only cause of strikes. Recognition that there is now little left to lose can equally fuel determination to fight. The milttancy that very nearly brought a national stoppage and widespread occupations to the shipbuilding industry, where orders are still tow, shows this. Management attempts to cut even more jobs and stitt hold pay down convinced many that to stand and fight was the only option.

Important as all these disputes are in underlining the continued combativity of important sections of the warking class, they do not ammount to a qualitative change in the general situation. Government strategy was never based on forcing ail workers, regardless of their strength or the profitability of their companies, to accept some nationally imposed pay limit. The Tories recognise that such an approach led, in time, to the collapse of Wilson, Callaghan and Heath's economic policies, because it allow-

DEFEND THE NEWHAM &

SUPPORT THE NATIONAL PICKET

Monday 14th November at 9 am

Old Bailey Court, London

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ed very large numbers of not particularly strong workers to follow where powerfully organised workers broke through the limit. The Thatcherite strategy, while it certainly does not welcome or encourage wage deals above its projected 3%, can accomodate the ability of some workers to break the limit. indeed, tn the past they have themselves proposed higher than average deals for the miners in order to prevent a strike that might easily bring in behind it other important sections of worKers.

It is the prevention of a generalisation of a working class antigovernment offensive which lies at the heart of Tory thinking. In their first term of office they relied on the effects of the economic recession and hard-nosed Edwardes’ style management to Keep down wages and cut jobs. At the same time they were preparing their defences for the upturn in militancy that they knew would accompany any cyclical revival of the economy. Those defences are the anti-union laws, the specialised police units, continuing high unemployment and de-unionisation via, for example, YTS schemes and the encouragement of non-union ‘new technology” industries.

Their preparations for dealing with a ful! scate fightback by the working class are not yet completed. So far they have only brought into place their weapons against the spreading of economic militancy. They have concentrated on outlawing blacking, mass picketing, sympathy action, political strikes and ail forms of ‘’secondary” tion. Recently announced were the weapons they hope to use to destroy the working class’ ability to mount a political fightback - laws to strengthen right wing: trade union ljeaderships, minimise financial support to the Labour Party and to illegalise all political action by unions by redefining what political funds may be used for.

The first attempts to use the already passed anti-union jaws have not been an unqualified success by the bosses. There was much talk of taking out injunctions against the striking Barnsley miners, but when the threats produced no re sults, nothing more was heard of them. At the Stockport Messenger an injunction did force the NUJ to drop action in support of the NGA, but it did not lead to a defeat of the dispute. At Highland Fabricators’ otl rig construction yard at Nigg, Easter Ross, mass pickets defied the Tories’ jaws with impunity. The decision against Mercury in its legal action against the POEU has also made the laws appear ineffective. In the Shell dispute the leaders of the Stanlow workers have so far avolded being served with the writ that bans their secondary picketing.

None of this should lead militants to think that Tory plans have gone astray, that their stra-

John Sturrock (Network)

tegy is collapsing. Far from it.

in Barnsley the sabotage of the NUM officials made an injunction unnecessary, at Nigg the quite exceptional isolation of the yard allowed 2,000 strikers to prevent 150 police from forcing a way through for the scabs. In the Mercury case the judgement hinged on interpretation of the law; was the dispute between the POEU and British Telecom(with Mercury being affected but not directly involved in the strike) or was the POEU taking action directly against Mercury? By leaving the interpretation of the law to the Appeal Court the bourgeoisie has allowed time to reconsider the | situation. In addition the threat of legal action has been enough to allow the POEU executive to seriously weaken the union's strategy by refraining from action that are clearly “secondary” within the meaning of the Act. By relying on legal! arguments the union has placed itself in a position where it will not be easy to fight an eventual Appeal Court ruling against them.

As for going into hiding to avoid a writ this makes no difference either to the effectiveness of the injunction against those named in the writ or to the ability of the police to smash up picket Iines as soon as they are given the go-ahead.

In the coming months militants will not be abie to mount effective action to regain lost wage rates, enforce decent working conditions or defend victimised workers by trying to go around the Tories’ Jaws. These laws must be taken on and wiped from the statute books. This means not only organising the forms of action that have been outlawed, not only spreading disputes across whole industries and enforcing whatever Secondary’ action is necessary, but also making the destruction of those laws a conscious objective of all working class struggles.

At the present time, with an upturn in sectional militancy, militants must argue not only for strengthening and spreading disputes and for mass direct action but also for rank and file control and co-ordination of those disputes around both economic and political demands. The Tories are confident that four million unemployed and their battery of laws will prevent the development of all out nationwide action against them. Precisely such action, a general strike against the main pillars of their strategy- the anti-union laws- must be the openly declared and worked for goal of all militants.

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“WORKERS IN ACTION ar

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RESIDENTIAL WORKERS

The anger and militancy of NAL GO’s residential workers is being squandered by the union’s leadership. From Lothian to Portsmouth, Bury to Southwark, residential workers have shown a detarmination to force the amployers to concede their claim by taking all out strike action.

The claim, for a 35 hour waek and premium payments for working shifts irregular hours and week-ends, puts residential workers on a par with other local government workers. The union leadership has only been prepared to offer “sympathetic consideration’ to branches forced to escalate action because of employer provocation.

For the most part they have fought tooth and nai} for a perspective of limited and selective action - ban on overtime and admissions, enforced by strict guidelines {including the right for amployers to use scab labour!)

Selective action prevents real unity from being built amongst the rank aac! file, but keeps bureaucrats like Mike Blick firmly in control. They are able to get away with it because workers are concerned about the effects of their action on clients - disadVantaged children, the old and the handicapped.

“Responsible” bureaucrats can’t stomach the wrath of the gutter press. Playing on this, the bureacracy dodge their responsibility to their members by refusing to lead an all-out strike despite the fact that rea/ responsibility for the consequences of such action would tie squarely with the employers. indeed, the conditions under which residential workers are forced to work are themselves damaging to clients.

Selective action, as last year’s health strike clearly demonstrated, has a damoralising effect. Residential workers taking all-out action in retaljation for management scabding tactics are isolated from other residential workers. The determination of workers not faced by such provocations immedjately, cannot help Out be worn down by the ineffectivensss of the limited action.

Alt-out action by residential workers, coupled with the threat of total action by all local government workers if the claim is not speedily met, is the best way forward.

The union laadership will not contamplate such action unless nonresidantial NALGO members translate their until-now passive sympathy into active solidarity,

Bradford hospital occupation

The occupatian by workers of the Thorton View Hospital in Bradford has now been underway for over three months, {t remains as solid as ever. Workers Power recently spoke to 2 member of the Occupation Committee.

Can you tell us the background to your decision to occupy?

Thornton View is the second largest of six geriatric units in Bradford. The AHA decided to close the hospital along with one in Shipley. A support campaign was set up. We were backed by GPs, CHC, local MPs and our consultant geriatrician. We lobbied the AHA and held the chairperson captive to get publicity. We labbied MPs, got petitions going, but thesAHA were adamant. We had a meeting at the hospital. We were annoyed. All the work and they were stil! determined to close the hospital, so we decided to ga into occupation on 6th August this year.

How did you go about organising the occupation; what support did you have?

We have the support of the staff (apart frorn 8 RCN) and alsa as | said, the GPs and relatives, We formed an occupation committee and elected Brenda

as our chairperson. We have one NUPE steward and one COHSE steward. We also formed a supporters’ committee and everyone may attend any meeting. They are held once a week unless some thing urgent crops up then we have them more frequently. We have had people from other organisatians ta come and help us organise. As for administration, well, we threw them out and occupied the offices. Qur occupation office is where the Nursing Officer used to be. We started a 24 hour picket which we still maintain 10 weeks after, and we have a rota. We also co-opted a lega: advisor. unto the occupation committee.

What kind of response have you had from the Health Service unions - this occupation has official backing hasn't it?

The occupation was made official very soon after it had started. More by goad tuck than anything else as Shaun Hil!- iard, the Regional Officer was an holiday, so we had to go Straight to the top and fetch Bickerstaffe here. He came and hasn‘t been seen since. NUPE branch secretary Aiex Corina is fully cammitted to the occupation, as is the COHSE full-timer, and they spend a great deai of time here. We don’t see much of the other officials from areas around here, The only support we have got from other workers is to go out and argue it for ourselves. We musn‘t keep it a lacal issue though.

What about support from local Labour Parties-and MPs?

Local Labour constituencies send regular pickets. Labour MPs say they support our action, but we have yet to see how far that support goes, Nei! Kinnock came and kissed an old lady. Of course, the press were here for that.

Have management tried to threaten the workers? How do you deal with them?

As | said, there are no administrators here - we are in ful) control. We allow

a nursing officer in three times a week, because as jong as one administrator

is let in, then the AHA is legally responsible, so we get supplies and wages. She is accompanied at all times by members of the occupation committee and has* to give us 30 minutes notice when

she comes. We have photos of aii the administrators, and a weli-tried system ut locking doors if we aren't sure who people are. We have telephone links from the occupation headquarters with all entrances and exits. We have had letters from the AHA threatening us with writs, but our legal advisors say they are meaningless, so we threw them away.

What ‘about getting support from other workers?

We have sent out speakers ta other hospitals and factories, Labour Party ward meetings, etc., asking for support - financial and on picket lines. We have relatives and other individuals picketing also - from university lecturers to unemployed youths with punk hairstyles. We have a joint march planned through Bradford soon with Hindie Gears - a firm that has been on strike for 9 months.

How do you see things develaping now after 10 weeks in occupation? Is the feeling still as strong?

We are very determined to win. We have Produced a new leaflet calling for pledges of supportive strike action if and when needed. We have also set up a telephone tree for pickets in case management try to move out the patients. We see suppartive strike action as cruciai if we are to win. We are sure a date for closure will be announced soon, prabably in December, and with other workers’ heio we will be ready. We can’t allow this to remain a locai issue and we don't see ourselves as a speciat case. We put at the end of our teaflet “The fight for Thornton View is the fight for the whole NHS”. That is how we see this occupation.

published hy WORKERS POWER, BCM Box 7750, Landon WCIN 3XxX