YS 'right wins big

MERSEYSIDE AUEW district committee has voted to back the Young Socialists' 'Right-to-Work' campaign with a £10 donation and pledged to raise more money in the union and at work-places to help the life.

young marchers obtain accommodation, food, medical supplies and clothing.

The district committee's tionary leadership. decision follows support for the campaign from the union's quarterly shop stewards' meeting last month.

PAGE TWO Workers Press, Monday January 3, 1972 Belligerent MARXISTS all over the world applaud the defeat of the hated Pakistani occupation regime in Bangla Desh by the combined forces of the Mukti Bahini and the But not so the revisionists of the 'Red Mole', the French OCI and the Unified defends Secretariat of the Fourth International. These gentlemen, true to their abstentionist tradition and their mortal fear of an insurgent people, have demonstratively turned their backs on the Bangla Desh revolution.

Bengalis Jessore cheer the Indian army Circulation Dope., Workoon Pon. S10 a Clapham Indian army.

As usual they conduct their craven retreat in the face of imperialism - and the US Seventh Fleet - under a smokescreen of ultra-revolutionary phrases.

Popularity

The December 5, 1971 statement by the revisionist Unified Secretariat disregards the mounting evidence of the undoubted popularity of the Indian intervention among. the E Bengali people and the refugees. It states pompously:

'The leading cliques of both states have launched a war, the criminal counter-revolutionary character of which should not escape any Marxist.' It continues sonorously: "The Fourth International calls upon the peoples of the Indian, subcontinent not to be taken in by chauvinist propaganda of the ruling cliques of New Delhi and Islamabad. The duty of the revolutionaries in both countries is to stand for the defeat of their own bourgeoisie and for transforming the counter-revolutionary war into a socialist revolution.

In Bengal, this means that the Bengali freedom fighters should continue their struggle for Bangla Desh...

And it concludes:

"Down with the counterrevolutionary Indo-Pak 'Forward towards Socialist Bengal!

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'Forward towards the Indian sub-continent revolution!' If it was a 'counter-revolutionary as the Unified Secretariat alleges, it was probably the most popular 'counterrevolutionary war' in modern A group of 'Sunday Times' reporters on the eastern front were astonished at the rapidity of the Indian advance which they could only attribute to the Mrs Gandhi for the Indian popular support 'invasion'. In a despatch from the eastern front these reporters noted:

'By early last week the entire countryside knew the Indians were winning. The Mukti Bahini, is the way with guerrilla armies, grew tenfold more brave with each new victory. The troops advancing on Dacca were so rapturously received that, for example, they were able to redeploy all their cookhouse staffs for normal logistical support. The local population were spontaneously feeding the troops and intelligence dropped into Indian hands like April rain.

'Minute after minute, apparently idle civilian wanderers were arriving with exact positions of Pakistani bunkers, ambushes and roadblocks. The troops coming down from Mymensingh even knew the menus at Pakistani officers' messes day by day.' ('Sunday Times', December 19, 1971.)

Speculation Mr Tariq Ali in a previous issue of 'Red Mole' (November 20, 1971) compounds the confusion with a mixture of lofty speculation and vulgar pedantry which he tries to pass off as Marxism.

If, according to Ali, the Indian government goes to war against Pakistan, presumably to prevent an uprising in W Bengal, then the 'talks of revolutionary Marxists will be absolutely clear, both in Bengal and the rest of the sub-continent. In Bengal, the supporters of the "Provisional Come on the side or the indise. Government" bourgeoisie against the Pakistani army, revolutionary Marxists must criticize this course in unequivocal terms and project a viable alternative. The situation in both parts of Bengal makes that alternative much more concrete and real today than it could have been in 1965. All revolutionaries must struggle to turn the inter-bourgeois war into: a war against the bourgeoisie. rif this is done the idea of a united Red Bengal would begin to turn into a reality.' Prospect This might be 'absolutely clear' to the myops of the 'Red Mole' office in Pentonville Rd. But to an ordinary Bengali militant faced with the prospect of being murdered today by Yahya Khan or being_jailed tomorrow as clear as the mud of the Ganges Delta.

What Ali and the Unified Secretariat were proposing was that the Bangla Desh revolutionaries should fight a simultaneous war on three fronts: against the Indian army, the Pakistan occupation forces and the Bangla Desh bourgeoisie.

It does not require much perspicacity to see that this was Who Bangla Desh?

the shortest route to oblivion for the BanglaDesh revolution.

Coming from the pen of Ali, in particular, this dangerous nonsense isn't as strange as it may seem.

His past in relation to Benfreedom is a history of sectarian and opportunist perfidy. From 1968 to 1970 implicitly denied Bengali nationhood under cover the reactionary slogan of a 'socialist Pakistan'.

Since the Pak occupation of E Bengal, he hurriedly—-but unashamedly - switched bandwagons and came out in favour of a 'Red Bengal'. In order to conceal his opportunist past Ali resorted to the typical revisionist method of caluminating Socialist Labour League and distorting our real position by stating that the League was supporting the right-wing Awami League's brand of politics.

Distortion

Ali and company persistently indulged 1n tortion, despite the many, lengthy articles published in Workers Press analysing Awami. League policy and the sinister connertions between Awami . League leaders and 'the'. Indian governHowever, the SLL, despite its differences with the Awami League, did not adopt an ultimatistic attitude • towards that organization's individual spokesmen in this country. While correctly refusing to appear with British liberals and reformists on oro-bangla Desh Dlatiorms 1r Britain, the SLL, wherever and whenever possible, did organize its own meetings with Awami League speakers in defence of Bangla Desh.

In these meetings our speakers made no principled concessions to the Bengali nationalists and, instead, pointed out the necessity for defeating imperialism by the joint action of the European working class and the Bengali people.

The attitude of the SLL and the Workers Press to the Awami BY MICHAEL BANDA League was clearly stated by R. Black in an article appearing as far back as April 1971:

'But its [Bengal's] unity and development as a free nation cannot be carried through under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Awami League.

'Right to the end, the leaders of this bourgeois-landlord party sought a compromise with Khan, proposing E Bengali autonomy within a federated Pakistan.

'Rahman's refusal to take a firm stand on E Bengali indepenMujibur Rahman dence flows from the class position of the Awami League leaders.

'They fear the movement of the worker and the peasant masses for basic social changes more than domination by W Pakistan.

Just before the outbreak of fighting last month Rahman declared:

' "Doesn't the government of W Pakistan realize that I am the only one who can save E Pakistan from communism?..."

'Statements like this have justly earned him the nickname of E Bengal's Chiang Kai-shek.

The Awami League leadership is the biggest single political danger to the struggle for Bangla Desh.' Position That . was our position then and it is our position today also. [See Workers Press, December 18, 20. 21, 22, 24, 28.] In spite of the numerous articles on the Awami League the 'Red Mole' virtuosi of 'nonexclusion' and 'single-issue' politics had the temerity to suggest as late as September that whole concentrated on supporting the Awami League... to the extent of totally ignoring the revolutionary, left groupings... and the development of an NLF'.

Two weeks after this downright distortion, the 'Red Mole' triumphantly announced the programme of the Nut or-as it is better known-the Bangla Desh National Liberation Struggle Coordination Committee.

What did the programme reveal? It was beyond any doubt an unprincipled bourgeois programme., The , preamble of the programme states:

Unprincipled Pursuant to the recent call and directive of Maulan a Bhashant, the leader of the oppressed people, to unitedly carry forward the liberation struggle... the representatives of the National Awami Party (under the leadership of Maulana Bhashani) [then follows a string of parties]... and other political and mass organizations met in a conference and formed "Bangla Desh National Liberation Struggle Co-ordination Committee....

By a curious coincidence — which the 'Red Mole' does not explain — the same Bhashani, during the period referred to by 'Red Mole', ? was also participating in the Indian government-Awami League-sponsored National Consultative Committee together with Moni Singh and Muzaffar Ahmed of the Bengal munist Party!

If there is any principled divergence between this programme and the present policy of the Bangla Desh government, it is more apparent than real. Further on the programme makes clear the essentially supplementary role of the Co-ordination Committee to the Bangla Desh government: Objective "The immediate objective of this Co-ordination Committee is to take the liberation struggle forward to success on the basis of a definite programme and line of action keeping close contact and maintaining full coordination with BanglaDesh goyernment...' The real class nature of the Co-ordination Committee revealed in the type of state power envisaged in programme:

"This will be a Bangla Desh or the workers, peasants, toiling people, middle classes and the patriotic section of the bourgeoisie —a people's Bangla Desh.' Coalition In short—a bourgeois republic and a coalition government.

Is it any wonder then that this so-called 'revolutionary' programme does the word socialism once mention Ali's method of exposing the supposedly reformist nature of the SLL vis-à-vis Bangla Desh is based on a simple principle indeed: if revolutionary parties don't exist you invent them. But then, as Engels observed, you can't transform a shoe-brush into a mammal by an expedient grafting of mammalian glands!

CONTINUED TOMORROW