"The pits make a profit every year until they take their cut. It's time it was stopped

THE WORLD Stalinist press gave extensive publicity to the recent congress of the Lebanese Communist Partynot because the party has a particularly massive following, but because it is now the only legal Communist Party in the Arab world.

The persecution meted out to communists in the other Arab countries did not stop the organizers inviting representatives from the ruling parties of Egypt and Syria and extending invitation to further meetings to the Iraqi rulers.

In fact, the congress offered full support to the tripartite federation recently formed between Syria, Egypt and Libya, a federation which is clearly aimed against the socialist revolution in the Arab world.

It was the close collaboration of Egyptian premier Anwar Sadat with the fanatically •anticommunist Colonel Gaddafi of Libya which helped smash the left-wing coup d'état in the Sudan last year:

Sudanese Communist Party secretary Abdul Mahgoub was executed in the blood purge that followed, together with the majority of the party's central leadership. Thousands of communists are now rotting in Sudanese jails.

In Egypt itself, the Sadat regime has carried out a ruthless purge the Nasserite leadership's left wing.

The recent trial of Ali Sabry led to savage prison sentences.

Yet the ruling Arab Socialist Union sent Lufti al-Khuli as a delegate to the Lebanese congress with full speaking Similarly, Suhayl Sukkariyah, a member of the Syrian Socialist Arab Ba'ath Party national comSadat (left) and Gaddafl. mand, addressed the congress, praising the achievements what he termed the 'corrective movement' in Syria under president Lt-Gen Hafez al-Assad.

The Syrian Communist Party is also illegal.

Clearly, Stalinist policy in the Arab countries is to abandon every vestige of independent organization of the working class, in favour of complete capitulation to the reactionary national bourgeoisies.

This was • reflected even more clearly in the discussion on the Palestinian liberation movement.

Gennady Sizov, the Soviet delegate, set the tone for the discussion in a report which stressed the need to support the November 1967 resolution of the UN security council.

This resolution calls for political settlement of the Middle East question, with Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in the June 1967 war.

Support : for this resolution involves the complete abandonment of the Palestinian people's legitimate national demands for the return of their territories snatched by the Zionists.

The final declaration of the congress made it clear that this is indeed the CP's policy.

It hit out particularly at the left wing of the Palestinian liberation movement:

'Congress takes a positive stand on the November 1967 Security Council resolution and regards as incorrect the general rejection of a political solution by certain parts of the Arab liberation movement and the provoking of artificial controversies between the political and military struggles.' In other words, as far as the Stalinists are concerned • Palestinians will have to learn to live with Israel, and their military struggle must be subordinated to the requirements of the Arab bourgeoisie, which will be quite content if the Israelis withdraw to the pre-1967 lines. IVOR JONES believes in coal. That's why he works in the pit as his father did before him.

He heats his home with coal, his water with coal and wife still cooks on a coal fire. 'Finest thing out', he told me at the Comrades Club in Blaenavon. 'And reliable. Not like this natural gas!' In 63 years-52 of them down the pit-Ivor Jones has seen Blaenavon's six pits dwindle to one and the trades which once made everything from pit rails to locomotives disappear.

'Blaenavon was the finest town in Europe, Mr Jones boasted with craftsman's local pride.

'It had all the trades here. We had one of the first Bessemer furnaces. and ships sailed the Seven Seas on Blaenavon coal.' Blaenavon people are hard.

They've had to be.

Alexander Cordell based his best seller 'Rape of the Fair Country' on the struggles of Blaenavon workers against the pit owners and iron masters.

That fighting tradition has broken loose again to make Blaenavon colliery the only pit on the east coalfield to pull out its safety men as an added gesture of defiance.

History in Blaenavon is a living force. It is in the mind of every man and woman in the town.

Ivor Jones embodies as much of this history_as any man. His mind is set. He has lived and will die in coal. But neither he nor anyone else will be wound down to Blaenavon pit until the miners are paid a living wage.

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lon't It's not 1926 now. People had nothing then. We were walking barefoot. A lot of good men died in those six months. When it started I had three half crowns to last me.

I think there's more determination now than ever there was then. People are not going to be pushed around any more.

'We wouldn't strike when we needed it. We're right down at the bottom of the pay table. I have to keep myself, my wife and a crippled brother on f16.10.

We pay £4.15 rent and live on what's left. My brother gets a little from Social Security.

'We only work five days a week but you have to work overtime. They're counting overtime as wages.

Mr Jones started in the pits as a boy in 1922. He wouldn't like to go back to those times. Nationalization, he said, was a real gain.

would have been a lot more pits closed and a lot more men on the dolé. And the old private owners wouldn't have spent money modernizing the pits and putting in new equipment.

'But we know now that after nationalization came in we still had the same bosses. They put in new equipment but they took the cost out of us by increasing 'And we still have to pay millions of pounds to the late owners. The pits make a profit every year until they take their cut. It's time it was stopped.' Many miners like Ivor Jones know that when the old coalowners sold out they put the money they got into coal by-products.

Why. 1.30 Woodentops. 1.45 4.15 Play School. 4.40 JackDog. 5.44 Sir Prancelot. 5.50 's se Open len's Houseparty. 3.10 Tea Break. 4.50 Land of Giants. 5.50 e88 Slept Here'. ay the Rent'.

Said Mr Jones, 'There's a lot of money made every day out of by-products. That should be nationalized too. Coal is a vegetation. Medicines, cosmetics, nylons and even margarine contain coal. We should think of nationalizing these.' After a lifetime as a Labour man Mr Jones can't bring himself to believe that workers' control of nationalized industry within a socialist economy could become reality.

I don't think it will ever come down to the workers'. , he told me wistfully. 'But I don't know what will happen. In a sense history repeats itself.

'In another few months there'll be 2 million unemployed. But I don't think men will stand it like they did in 1926.

I think this strike could go on for six or eight weeks but I don't see the Tories holding out. They'll break. We've got the support of the transport unions as well. Anyone with a Day claim knows if we go down they'll go down so we'll get the support.

'But the Tories will do anything to stop us. They'd put us to eat grass if they could.

"They might try to stop our Social Security because millions of pounds will be going out and nothing going in.

'If they do try to stop our money it'll be a second Ireland, a second Tonypandy. I think they'll try to use the army to move coal be riots if they do, out there'll t Many miners are wondering why they're not getting strike pay from the union. But for the help of friends and •relations there are some who would literally starve.

Said Mr Jones, 'We've STS IPS Domen tay 4.10 lanny 45.20 Bosams: 5-50 News. aying dues to the union sinc 1926. Where has the mone gone?

'he 400 Blaenavon men hav Iready been warned that thei pit could close permanently if they refuse to allow safety men to work.

ut the time has come whe the miners will no longer g down the pit for starvation whats Roberas promised us us years ago, he said.

They sell coal at the pit hea or £6 a ton but 200 yards dow the road merchants are selling it for f14 a ton.

'We are the producers. We are due the best money. Even if they gave us the £9 we asked for I'd only get £4.50 after tax and i lot of the rest would be swallowed by the cost of living.' The Welsh coalfield is at war. The Tory government is the enemy.

At a crowded bus station cafe across the mountain from Blaenavon the hub-bub of voices stops dead and a radio is idea: why not publish the general's Complete Works?

After doing his sums, became clear that many millions were to be made by publishing two tomes of the 'Caudillo's' speeches and messages which would find an automatic sale to official bodies, state unions, town-hall libraries etc, etc.

Immediately Lara hired a team of 'scholars' to prepare the Complete Works. When this work was well under way, our humble financier sought Franco's Franco authorization and caused a furore in the Prado - Franco's official residence.

The chief had seen an outline of the edition and was most annoyed to see that it included his most extreme fascist texts of the years 1934-1936, including his messages to Hitler and Mussolini. It even had the famous Seville speech in which he offered 'a million Spanish soldiers for the defence of Berlin'.

All this was 'unpublishable' said the Prado. Most apologetically Lara had to abandon his lucrative project.

No doubt Lara would be most pained if he knew that Franco's self-imposed censorship arose from the 'Saviour of Spain's' wish not to upset unduly his friends in the Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe...