Purge runs into difficulties

B-Leyland Where's the anarchy BY A WORKERS reported yesterday that after-tax profits for the last financial half-year dropped to £600,000. This is compared to £10 million for the same period last year.

These latest higures are not likely to restore confidence in the combine; which over the past week has announced 'totally unacceptable financial losses' in one of its main factories and a huge plunge in its stock exchange value.

Last Saturday, Mr Raymond Smart, director and general manager of British-Leyland's truck and tractor factory at Bathgate, W Lothian, informed all employees that the company have suspended all further investment this division, a statement that now puts in question the jobs of 'Grim' "Very grim' was Smart's comment on the situation.

Grimmer events were to follow. On Tuesday, as stock markets continued to fall, no less than £22 million was slashed from the company's market value in one day.

Predictably Lord Stokes blamed industrial disputes for the poor results.

He said: "The biggest currént impact on our efforts is being made by disputes in companies which supply us with vital components and services.' The economic recession is compounding BLMC's prolonged crisis as it struggles THE so-called 'card exchange' in the Czech Communist Party—in reality a nationwide Stalinist purge-has run into serious difficulties.

UNOFFICIAL estimates of those so far purged from the Party with the 'card exchange' campaign still two months to run vary from 250,000 to as high as 600,000.

This is out of a total Party membership in 1969 1,500,000.

DUCK

STRIKE OVER 'NONS' MORE than 2,000 dockers at Landon's Royal Group voted overwhelmingly yesterday for a national one-day strike in protest against the alleged continual use af nonregistered labour by employers in the Port of London.

profits down PRESS REPORTER unsuccessfully to compete in shrinking world markets.

Its antiquated structure and Lord Stokes has also lo cover over tr the tanand-order bandwagon anti-union after speech has issued from the noble lord's lips along these lines.

Every British-Leyland worker can now see that the only anarchy is the capitalist anarchy which threatens to plunge the system into depression and mass unemployLord Stokes is very fond of quoting figures on production losses.

THIS WEEKEND' Young Socialists School Saturday May 30 Speaker DAVID MERCER (Playwright)

on heatre, soclalism and culture' discotheque on Saturday evening and WINTER GARDENS PAVILION, 2 10s, including bed and breakfast, fares and i from: Young Socialists, 186a, Clapham High Launched with an official announcement in 'Rude Pravo' on February 3, the Party Central Committee (already purged of all anti-Husak elements) admitted:

'You know only too well that complex developments and crisis situations, above all during the past two years, strongly affected the activity, attitude and views of many communists and whole Party organizations.

'For all the measures adopted by the Party's Central Committee w iate and the partial results achieved, the filled, task has yet to be ful After nearly four months of the 'card exchange campaign, the class nature of the resistance to the Husak regime has become quite clear.

Before the purge began, workers made up 32 per cent of the Czech Communist Party's membership. Now it stands at 22.8 per cent, while in Prague itself, the proportion has fallen to 16.5.

So despite the Czech Stalinists' shrill claims that the opposition to Husak is based on the middle class-the intellectuals, students etc.the figures tell a different Thousands of worker-Party members have simply turned their backs on the bureaucracy.

CONTEMPT

Their contempt for Stalinism is admitted by a Party functionary at the Vitkovice Steel Works in Ostrava:

"Technicians come to the interviews sufficiently well prepared, their replies to questions well founded, giving the impression that they have never been mistaken.

'On the other hand, the workers speak openly and do not conceal things and I am personally atraid that this frankness might cause some of these comrades to be expelled from the Party?

Other Party workers have simply handed in their cards, refusing to attend these Stalinist inquisitions so reminiscent of the post-war Party purges under Gottwald and Novotny.

TYPICAL

Earlier this week, Prague Radio broadcast an account by a Stalinist teacher of a typical 'interview' organized at his school:

I took part in several interviews and I was not satisfied •. They welcomed January [1968], they were influenced Sunday May 31 Speaker CLIFF SLAUGHT (SLL Central Commi 'Significance of Lenin EASTBOURNE London, S. W.4.

According to his estimates, £70 million was lost last year through unofficial strikes. On the generous assumption that 1,000 'wreckers' were at work, this works out at f200 per day per man, a mere pittance compared to the €2,200,000 lost on Tuesday for each of British-Leyland's ten directors!

This is the background to the threat of redundancy and management attempts to introduce Measured-Day Work to recoup their losses.

Having tasted redundancy in 1966, workers are in no mood to tolerate it again to pay for the company's 'rationalization'.

A sharp conflict is now inevitable within the combine.

Motor workers must demand the nationalization of British-Leyland without compensation and under the control of workers' and technicians' committées. by the information media. Aonal impact on them ma until April 1969 [the removal of Dubcek] they fumbled ... I have met only one honourable exception.' The conclusion drawn by this Stalinist informer is indeed drastic:

'Perhaps there is something essential di not medely to eis change the Party's cards, but also to reconstruct the Party ... One cannot be simply satisfied with what individual members say.

It is not essential to show distrust in advance but it is pect of any favourable change from the point view of business leaders. • The $18,000 million increased borrowing powers now sanctioned by Congress will only further push up interest rates and feed the inflation as government departments enter into competition with private industry for credit.

Disclosure

AND ANXIOUS eyes are still turned to the affairs of Investment Overseas Services in New York, Tokyo and London.

The disclosure yesterday that IOS banks have lent 12 IOS directors a total of nearly four million dollars for use in financing their own ventures, most of which is still outstanding, has done nothing to calm already frayed nerves.

Mr David Rockefeller, Chase Manhartan chair real much nearer the mood dominating the key sectors of financial opinion when he said on Tuesday that there was 'a lack of confidence and concern in the country on where we're going and how we're getting there'. struction of capital, which will through huge demean the wiping out of all the fictitious capital created during the last 30 years, can there be any restoration in the rate of profit.

This is the magnitude of the task facing Nixon and the American ruling class.