FORD PAY FIGHT COLLAPSES

MOSS EVANS, chairman of the union side of the Ford National Joint Negotiating Committee, admitted yesterday that their failure to give a lead to the men in February, when there was a feeling for a strike, was responsible for the collapse of the This rare moment of honesty from a reformist trade union leader, however, still evades the all-important question of how does the fight against the lory pay laws proceed from here?

To this, neither Evans, nor any other bureaucrat from transport or engineering unions which dominate the NJNC, has an answer.

After announcing the Transport and General Workers' Union senior stewards decision that there was no desire for an all-out strike at Fords' 21 plants, Evans said:

'None of them supported an all-out strike call now being made, but they criticized the unions for not giving a positive lead earlier. It would have been a different situation in February.

'The responsibility for the lack TURN TO BACK PAGE MOSS EVANS... Bold admission by bureaucrat.

Brezhnev and Nixon during the US President's visit to Moscow last year. THE RUSSIAN Press has deliberately played down the Watergate crisis which is part of the economic and social decay of United States imperialism. This is admitted by the British Stalinist paper 'Morning Star' which declared in a report from. Moscow on Monday: 'Apart from carrying the announcements of new appointments in Washington arising from the Watergate affair, the Soviet Press has neither commented on nor reported the great storm that has broken out around President Nixon over the case.

he whole emphasis here in all the mass media has been on the fact that the Soviet peace initiative, launched by the 24th Congress two years ago, is winning success and is going to be pressed home with renewed vigour. ..

hile having no space for the corruption of American capitalist politics, Sunday's 'Pravda' devoted an entire page to listing organizations which had sent resolutions of praise to general secretary Leonid Brezhnev after his recent Lenin Peace Prize award.

Brezhnev, of course, has awarded the prize to himself.

The Soviet Stalinists are keeping the Russian people in ignorance of Watergate because they are determined that Brezhnev's visit to Washington next month should go ahead as planned. As the London 'Times' pointed out on Monday, the visit can only serve to strengthen the rocking Nixon. It is an indication that the Russian leaders place the reaching of an agreement with the United States above all else. 'his is because the Stalinist bureaucracy faces a crisis no less severe than that the character of a social parasite. This means that despite its enormous political power, its position is tremely contradictory and insecure.

That is why it continually screens itself behind a facade of parades, flattery and phoney 'peace awards'.

The censorship of all reports on the Watergate affair reveals not only the official powers of control which the bureaucracy has—but also its real fears of the Soviet masses.

Those who-like the revisionist International Socialism group-claim that Russia is 'state capitalist' are not only under writing off the entire gains of 1917 but, bureaucracy, are in fact falling on their faces before it.

If the bureaucracy is all-powerful, if it has already destroyed the revolution, why is it still afraid to let the Russian working class know what is happening in the United States?

The neat, simple and defeatist 'definition' of Russia as 'state capitalist' assumes that the bureaucracy has already won a battle which is not yet over.

Trotsky specifically repudiated such mechanical pessimism in a passage which is worth quoting in full:

The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character; (b) the tendency toward primitive accumulation created by want breaks out through innumerable pores of the planned economy; (c) norms of distribution preserving a bourgeois character lie at the basis of a new