'AR: THE TRAWLERMEN

The cod war is more than headlines in Hessle Road, Hull. This is the back-street community by Britain's largest fish dock where the deep-sea trawlers set out to fish around Iceland and beyond to the Arctic circle.

The remote freezing oceans of the world are home to Hull's 1,800 deep-sea fishermen for two-thirds of their working lives. Whether they sail for the fish monopolies in modern freezer ships or in the oldest most decrepit side trawlers, the men risk death and serious injury, exposure and total exhaustion at places like the Barent Sea, Bear Island and the North Cape.

These are the men who bear the brunt of the cod war the deckies and the skippers who labour 18 hours a day for three weeks to drag the catch from the sea. The fish mean profit for firms like British United Trawlers which owns every third boat sailing in the distant water fleet. But for the men cod fishing is a life of unremitting toil for low wages in appalling conditions.

The owners urge them into battle in semi-military style. "There is clearly only one answer,' says the "Trawling Times' , their mouthpiece. 'We get stuck in and we carry on fishing ing companies of course fight the battle from warm offices. The trawler men fight it on deck.

Yet the issue has superficially united the Hessle Road. The trawlermen and their families declare it their right to continue to fish the Icelandic cod.

But things were not always so amicable. Three years ago a strike of trawlermen split Hull's fishing community into two hostile camps. The men wanted money and union recognition. The owners were determined to preserve what they call the 'individualism' of the industry.

They foraged inland to recruit hands to crew ships. One bunch of scabs was ambushed by angry trawlermen. The owner-Michael Burton of Newingtons trawlers — turned and called the strikers 'gutter rats.

The bitterness still rankles. "They treat us like dirt,' said one staunch unionist. 'But now they want us to fight their Such anger is born from the conditions the deckies have to endure. In trawling you stand 17 times more chance of dying than in work on land. In every year since 1952 more people have been killed on trawlers than down coalmines.

Then there are the disasters. In 1968 Hull fishermen were stunned by a triple tragedy when three boats went down in the northern seas with a loss of 60 lives.

Skipper Phil Gay of the 'Ross Cleveland' gave some indicatíon of the horror of death at sea when his trawler keeled over in an Icelandic hurricane.

'I am going over,' he radioed. 'We are laying over. Give my love and the crew's love to their wives and families.' Those were the last words he spoke. There were no survivors.

The owners (Ross Foods, now Imperial Tobacco) said it was appalling. An inquiry found that some Icelandic trawlers set sail without radios.

For these risks the basic pay is £19.10 a week. This usually goes to the wives. Then men live on 'poundage' - 66p for every 100 lb of fish. They work seven days a week for the trip which averages three weeks to 45 days. They have an agreed 18-hour working day. In between trips the men get three days at home to rest.

The men in the middle are the skippers. They drive the crew in the most vicious rat race yet invented by capitalism.

A skipper's money depends entirely on the catch. After the fish is sold and the expenses of the voyage paid off they get i per cent. Some skippers earn well over £10,000 a year. But some can walk home from the fish-dock without even their bus fare. Iwo bad trips and they are on the danger list—there are two men with skipper's tickets for every skipper with a boat in Hull.

These are the people who fight the cod war. They face the 200,000 Icelanders who lay claim to the sea around their island. The country depends entirely on fish. Iceland is a barren volcanic place with hardly any natural resources. It needs imports to survive and for imports it has got to export and 80 per cent of Iceland's exports are fish.

The Icelandic people want control of a natural resource on which their existence depends. If the waters within the 50-mile limit are open to a free-for-all, they say the cod

ne 1968, the Soviet Stalinists have been haunted = of revolution in western Europe and the growth 1 in the advanced countries in the west. Fearful ir parasitic privileges at home and their control • movement abroad, the Soviet bureaucracy has paign to once again discredit and distort the 1 history of Trotsky's struggle for the regeneraSSR and the world-wide revolution of the worke Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central f the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in id 'Against Trotskyism', a compendium of docus, extracts, speeches and resolutions aimed at distskyism and distorting completely the truth about between Lenin and Trotsky. In this series of Since May-Ju by the spectre of Trotskyisn of losing thei of the labour begun a cam principles anc tion of the U ing class. Thi Committee of 1972 publishe ments, article crediting Troi the relations articles MICE IAEL BANDA replies to this book. PART FIFTEEN The Institute of Marxism-Leninism has claimed though it doesn't mention it in 'Against Trotskyism', that Trotsky refused on the grounds of his own illness to defend Lenin's position on the 'National Question' at the Party's Central Committee and the 12th Congress.

This indicates that they acknowledge Lenin's trust in Trotsky to fight Stalin during the last days of his political life outlined in Moshe Lewin's book Lenin's Last Struggle' [Faber and Faber] which we quoted yesterday). In fact, however, the Institute confirms that a letter from Fotieva (Lenin's secretary) to Kamenev exists which refers to the 'pact' between Lenin and Trotsky, showing that the latter had accepted Lenin's brief.

It was in March 1923, also, that Lenin dictated his last articles, 'Better Fewer But Better' and 'On the Workers and Peasants Inspection'. Both these were slashing attacks on Stalin in particular as the chief representative of the bureaucracy.

Lenin was, in the words of one of his secretaries, preparing 'a bomb' against Stalin. He never finished his preparations, which were undoubtedly aimed at putting an abrupt end to Stalin's career as general secretary and politically exposing his unprincipled manoeuvres.

On March 10 1923, Lenin suffered another stroke which deprived him of the power of speech. His political life was at an end. What emerges with absolute clarity from the documents and letters now available confirms to the hilt Trotsky's version of these events in "The Stalin School of Falsification'.

For many decades these documents were suppressed by the very Institute which now publishes this book. Circulation of Lenin's testament or of his last articles became a serious offence and the entire period was rewritten in Soviet history books to obscure the differences and paint Stalin as 'Lenin's faithful pupil'.

was not until Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th congress of the CPSU in 1956, a speech which did not long remain secret, that the existence of these damning documents was admitted.

Now the Institute for Marxism-Leninism is belatedly trying to re-enter them in the archives, to enable the falsifiers at the Institute to regurgitate all the lies about Trotsky and Trotskyism.

The final chapters of this book consist of resolutions denouncing Trotskyism passed from 1923 to 1927 by various Stalinist Party organizations and trade union and factory bodies.

It is difficult to imagine who is going to be impressed by reading the opinions of the presidium of the CC of the Agricultural and Forestry Workers' trade union in their letter to the Metalworkers' CC in support and approval of the letter of the presidium of the Metalworkers CC to the leaders of the 'New Opposition' - which is solemnly reproduced here.

Knowing that the same bodies which unanimously condemned Trotskyism in 1927 passed resolutions equally unanimously ten years later calling for the wholesale massacres of Stalin's opponents, these documents lack any semblance of credibility.

They are presumably included on the principle that if you throw enough mud, some of it must stick, though the documents are all based on the myth of Trotskyism created quite consciously by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev with the sole purpose of blackening Trotsky's name and preparing the ground for the Stalinization of the Bolshevik Party.

The book goes no further than 1929 when, the editors inform us, Trotsky's expulsion from the USSR 'thus finally smashed the Trotsky opposition ideologically and organizationally' If Trotskyism was smashed "ideologically and organizationally' in 1929, how is it that in the next sentence they can tell their readers:

'However, under various guises, Trotskyite ideology continues to harm the liberation movement'? Members of the Opposition on their way to exile in 1928. Seated left to right: L. Serebriakov, K. Radek, Trotsky, M. sky; standing: C. Rakovsky, Drobnis, A. Beloborodov, Seznovsky.

Like all bureaucrats the editors of this book have learned nothing from history, which demonstrates that objective truth is stronger than all their carefully fabricated lies.

Whatever their wishes, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism cannot turn the clock back to the • 'Stalin era' they so much loved. Their crisis forces them to attack Trotskyism by every means possible.

That is their particular service, to imperialism in its hour of crisis. But the lies and slanders this volume is intended to sustain have already been discredited even by the liars themselves.

The British pupils of the Moscow lie-machine, among them the Communist Party's Mrs Betty Reid and Monty Johnstone, have already tried and failed to revive the slander campaign of the 1930s against the Trotskyist moveThe book 'Against Trotskyism' demonstrates how much international Stalinism . fears and hates the growth of revolutionary consciousness in the working class and the development of the revolutionary alternative leadership.

MR ANDERSON AND FRIENDS 'O LUCKY FILM REV BY ALEX MAN' IEW MITCHELL There is in existence a secret society called the Lindsay Anderson managerie. Nobody knows where it is or how to join.

Its membership is kept confidential, but one can draw up a rough who's who of members. There is Mr Anderson himself of Royal. Court fame, Malcolm McDowall, Anthony Page, Rachel Roberts, Arthur Lowe, Dandy Nichols (Mrs All Garnett), Sir Ralph Richardson, playright David Storey, producer Michael Medwin and perhaps a score more.

There is a common characteristic of the membership— they are all immenselytalented people.

Anderson is one of the most skilled directors-on film and in the theatre-in Britain today.

But his work, as brilliant as it is, is made in an atmosphere of suffocating self-indulgence. It is as if AnderSon and his coterie are out to impress each other. So it is with the mutual admiration society's latest piece of artistry 'O Lucky Man'.

In this production, Anderson himself takes part as Anderson and the film ends with a streamer and balloons party in which all the actors —as themselves-participate.

Sitting in a cinema packed with Anderson devotees from the London Film School, one could hear them saying to each other: 'Look, there's Jasper, eLC., as they recog nized their friends.

It was such a miserable, obscure and introspective ending to a film of considerable genius.

McDowall plays a young, blue-eyed youth who is childishly innocent about the ways of capitalism. The film tracks his odyssey from one catastrophic and rapacious event to the next.

Each episode is linked together by the splendid use of the voice and Price who played so enth the SLL Pag Empire Pool, March.

Alan Price.

Ursula Stuart Mason, the museum's Press officer, told us music of Alan incidentally, lusiastically at ¡eant at the Wembley, in PAGE Left: Czech cameraman, Miroslav Ondricek with director, Lindsay Anderson (right). Anderson's work, brilliant as it is, is made in an atmosphere of suffocating self-indulgence.

There is something canny about the selection of these episodes. For instance, in one of his early jobs, Mick Travis visits a Yorkshire town in his capacity as a coffee salesman. He meets the owner of a large shire hotel who invites him into the back for some 'entertainment.

They enter a darkened room where blue films are being shown. The proprietor then does the introductions: Travis meets the editor of the local paper, the local taxation inspector, the head of CID. The hotelier is himself the mayor.

There is one shot of a short. piglike individual, who bears an astonishing resemblance to very well-known leading figure in the Labour Party. He has two near - naked women on his knees.

The episode is a stinging attack on certain politicobusiness collectives north.

There is another remarkably Travis Presciens. chapter in exploits. He gets involved as personal assistant to Sir James, a leading City gent whose giant consortium has huge contacts in Africa. Shades of Lonrho.

He falls into the hands of the church, the secret service, the medical profession, the prison service and the dogooders. Each experience is a crushing indictment of the system of capitalism. In that sense, the film has much to commend it.

But at the point when he could have delivered an almighty, telling blow to the ethos of capitalism, Anderson abandons the intellectual and artistic foray of the previous two and a half hours (yes, the film is slightly over-long).

His tour de force collapses into a rave-in.

So it was with Anderson's last film, 'If'. After an insightful look at the horrors of public school education, Anderson ended with McDowall blasting everybody down with a machine-gun. It was fantasy and it was nihilist.

In 'O Lucky Man' Travis decides not to rebel against the system. In other words, you can't beat the system — it's best just to join in and do your own thing.

Let's just indulge ourselves while we can, said the lyrics of the Alan Price song.

The film epitomizes the radicalism of these artistic cliques.

They might be able to formally and brilliantly describe the utter decadence and corruption of the ruling system.

But they can't say or do anything beyond that. At this point they do the only thing possible - they capitulate to the very thing they claim to despise. have difficulties! Immediately