The Newsletter, vol. 1 no. 13

§ for the Labour Party conference, so for the Trades Union Congress, which opens at Blackpool on September 2. ‘The answer from the ranks of organized labour to the employers’ offensive is a call for militant action all along the line.

HARD LABOUR FOR GERMAN ‘PLOTTERS’

Trade union branches want no more truck than do SENTENCES imposed by the Supreme Court of the Gerdivisional Labour Parties with the half-baked ideas conman Democratic Republic on the four alleged associtained in Industry and Society.

Rates of Professor Wolfgang Harich ranged from two The Constructional Engineering Union calls on Congress to and a half years’ to five years’ hard labour. reassert the need for public ownership and exchange.

Walter Janka. former director of the Aufbau-Verlag pubTho draughtsmen call for the taking over of the machine lishing house. was sentenced to five years. although, according tool industry and the building workers want their industry to the ADN news agency, he ‘stubbornly denied’ the charge of nationalized. plotting to overthrow the East German Government.

Workers on the job see none of the difficulties in taking Gustav Just, deputy editor of Sonntag (the Culture League's over whole industries which seem to have given Transport weekly) received four years’ hard labour, Richard Wolf. 1 House cold feet. freelance journalist and radio commentator, three years, and Zoeger. editor of Sonntag, two and a half years.

Deakin would turn in his grave ADNWN said that Harich. who is serving a sentence of 10 Tn a strongly worded resolution, which should make the years’ hard labour. was six hours in the witness box to give late Arthur Deakin turn in his grave. the Transport and Genevidence against the accused, eral Workers’ Union rejects the policy of wage restraint in any form and ‘reaflirms the determination of the trade union movement. while prices and profits remain uncontrolled, to take such steps. industrially. as will ensure that wages keep

InyA EHRENBURG is the object of a suspicious and nagpace with rising costs’. ging critique in the June number of the magazine The National Union of General and Municipal Workers and the Electrical Trades Union have also put down motions re- VOCE, jecting out of hand any supreme conrt or similar advisory body The voceusion is ven by an article of his aboul Marina Tsvetayeva. conside: by many as the most remarkable pvei which would impose « wages policy on the trades uni oveof modern Russia, She went abroad after the Revolution. rement and reallirming their confidence in collective be aining turned in 1939 and killed herself in 1841. us the means of achigving the aims and objects of the orZyerda a rticle complains of Ehrenburg’s praise for ganized workers.

She broke her bonds with her counThe boilermakers want to add punch to Labour’s fight as subjected to the corrupting influList the Tory Rent Act by asking Congress to support the ence of smopolitan ideas. This was like being idea of a 24-hour general strike poisoned and it did not pass without trace. [t ought te b This is the sort of language which fills the capitalist pres mentioned first and foremost in an article about Tsvelayeva’s with hysteria—but which puts fresh heart into the ranks of poetry”

Labour.

Old age pensioners are never forgotten by active trade unionists. Unlike Cabinet Ministers, the worker at the bench MILITANCY PAYS ON MERSEYSIDE lives in day-to-day contact with his old folk. Tt is not surprising. therefore, that six unions bave sent in resolutions calling Merseyside dredgermen ure now drawing some £3 10s. for increased pensions. a week more as a result of their recent strike. Action against Tory Government In addition to 2 10s. weekly wage rise they gained 20s. a week service pay. Although they did not achieve Five unions want H-bomb tests to end, The foundry workers La reduction in their working week from 56 to 48 hours urge support for all unions struggling for a working day of no they did succeed in obtaining overtime rates for the more than eight hours and a working week of no more than extra hours. forty hours Mineworkers. woodworkers. theatrical empleyees and plumbers demand action against the Tory Government for failing to improve living standards and to maintain full employment. SAYINGS OF THE WEEK The attacks on the social services comes in for severe criticism ‘The Europeans have come to realize that their old attitudes and the medical practitioners want to eliminate prescription are out of date-—Tom Mboya. ‘The Way Forward in Kenya’. charges and special charges to finance the health services.

The Observer, July 28. i An interesting resolution from Natsopa seeks Congress sup- “The Mau Mau “emergency”. as it is called, is now almost port for the setting up of an independent corporation of a over. You still hear of ambushes along the roads. but the similar character to the BBC which would purchase printing Kikuyu tribe, which was the main source of the disturbance, machinery and plant for leasing at low rates to national and has now been rounded up into newly built villages. and if any local groups which would then be free to publish as they man strays outside at night he can legally be shot. (The white wished. settlers, incidentally. miss the Kikuyus very much. for they The cine-technicians wants Congress to instruct the General were the best of domestic servants, the best of workers on the Council to maintain the Daily Herald as the official organ of farm.)—Alan Moorehead, ‘In the Wilds of Africa’, The Sunthe movement. day Times. July 28.

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the busmen their eleven shillings. The employers and the yellow Press, of course. denounced them for ‘banditry’. ‘anarchy’ and ‘terror’. There were cries of ‘intimidation’, There were no such cries against the very real and much more powerful intimidation by the employers. How else, for instance, should we describe the threat of many employers to sack workers who refused to accept the insulting rise of three shillings forced on them before the strike? Or the threat to dismiss thirty-two busmen al Rugeley without notice or holiday pay because they supported the strike? Employers try to intimidate active trade unionists in a thousand and one ways. The whole profit system is based on inumidation, [hat is why trade unions were formed in ihe first place. Even the right to “peaceful picketing — and everyone who has been on strike knows how narrowly the police can interpret that term- was won only by the strength of the working class.

The busmen and the Covent Garden porters have displayed that capacity for spontaneous organization which is @ feuture of every major working-class struggle. The same capacity for stubborn struggle. for rank-and-file initiative, is latent throughout the organized working-class, as the solidarity of workers who last week refused to run or use blackleg transport proved. This will to fight was shown in the resistance to saclcings in. the motor car industry. It was beginning to be shown in the recent engineering and shipbuilding strike. Right-wing leaders have condemned the workers’ ‘apathy’. But the busmen’s strike has underlined once again the conclusion: there is nothing wrong with the ranks. look to the leaders! Far from niaking the workers ‘soft’, full employment has made them confident, conibative and aware of their strength.

It is this spirit which creates the biggest single problem for Big Business and its government. It is their central problem. They meet it in every attempt they make to drive down living standards. And it is this spirit which guarantees the success of the fight against ‘oryism—giyen one other thing: a real socialist leader-

T WAS their strength and determination which won SOUTH AFRICA: About 3,000 African women demonstrated against the Government's attempt to make them carry ‘reference books (identity cards), USA: A race riot which spread over a Wwo-mile square area of Chicago's South Side began when a group of white youths atlacked a Negro picnic party in a park.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA: Rude Pravo complained that judges.

police, public prosecutors and Supreme Court had shown too much leniency in ‘ceriain cases of counter-revolutionary activities .

FRANCE: Report of the International Commission against the Regime of Concentration Camps found that there had been ‘several’ cases of parachutists or police subjecting arrested Algerians to “bad treatment and often to veritable torture’.

GUATEMALA: Presicent Castillo Armas was shot dead by a member of the presidential palace guard, described as a ‘communist fanatic’. First act of the provisional president.

Luis Lopez. was to decree a state of siege throtighout the catintry.

HUNGARY: Hundreds of “counter-revolutionaries. including 27 students in Szeged. iwenty miners (former workers’ council members in Pecs) and 45 former workers’ council members in Debrecen. were arrested in a new swoop by secret police.

By Our Economic Correspondent

AT the talks with the Chancellor of the Exchequer last week, the Trades Union Congress delegation turned down the request that it participate in the Government's proposed court on wages. prices and production.

The refusal of the TUC should not be misconstrued. There are strong union objections to participation in any tribunal. which may appear to intervene in, or obstruct, free collective bargaining.

The objection, however, is not a refusal to collaborate with the Government in measures to control inflation: it does not even mean that no trade union leader will serve om the ‘wages court. It means only that the TUC will not be officially represented.

Thorneyetoft waved a big stick inthe Commons on July 25. If “saying ao” to wage claims. he said, ‘leads to some fneasure of disagreement. so be at. lt would be better to disagree than to drift’.

‘Clearly. the Government's super-court is to stiffen the ‘no’. The idea is that when next a major wage demand is brewing this ‘impartial body of experis. including in all probability some trade union figure. will be brought in to condemn it. ~ MERSFYSIDE members of the National Amalgamated

ship.

* yer it is just at this time, when the workers would respond to a bold Jead. that the Labour Party leadership comes forward with its new policy statement, whose sole object is to avoid a collision with capitalism. Tf the Labour Party Conference is to act in accordance with the feeling in the ranks it will be obliged to reject this document. Between now and the Conference the Left wing will be directing its efforts in the local Labour Parties and trade unions towards that end. Not the least lesson of the strikes is that the workers are ready to respond to a policy which would prepare a united onslaught, political and industrial, to bring down the Tory Government and replace it with a Labour Government pledged to socialist planning. It would be unwise (and it could be catastrophic) to postpone this onslaught until a General Election of the Tories’ own choosing. Stevedores and Dockers—the ‘blue union’ are campaigning for representation on the jocal Dock Labour Board.

Dockworkers are allowed five members on the Board, The “blue union” holds that the present niethod of election violates the Dock Labour Scheme Three of the workers’ representatives on the Merseyside Board are lay members of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. The other two are full-time officials of that union.

Present procedure is for nominations to be made in TGWU branches. The nominations then go to a ballot, conducted again through these branches.

In the last ballot the lay nominees did not get more than 240 votes between them, Liverpool had then a working strength of 17400 dockers.

The Birkenhead nominee rolled up five votes. The labour force on Birkenhead docks is over 2000.

The NASD has organized a ballot among its members to take place at the pay-houses on August 3. They will vote there for the two of their members they consider most suitable to serye on the Board.

VPP LS LISSA LS SSSI SSS SOLS SSIES A ‘Lost’ Tribe in Australia DL LLL LIL LLL LL LLL LL DLL EL LLL LLL LLL IDL LLL DLL LLP ILL LL LLLP LEILA DDL LLL PLL A REPORT from the Darwin correspondent of The Times of the discovery of a ‘lost’ tribe of aborigines in Cen% tral Australia inevitably provokes a romantic curiosity ¥ here in Britain.

In the last year or two we have read of newly-discovered > tribes in New Guinea, which was of course once part of the Mi same continuous land-mass as the Australia of today.

Despite our similar reaction to two such finds, despite Ss their proximity in space and their co-existence at this same point in history, the types of culture involved. and the significance of the discoveries, differ widely.

Ss * § A WIDE GULP. The modern natives of New Guines and $ the hunting peoples of Australia, of whom a bare hundred $ or two remain. are in fact separated by a wide gulf in social evalution.

Ss Before taking up this difference in culture and social lif we ought to remember that a hundred years ago such disSs coveries were commonplace. but only a few enlightened thinkers and writers thought it worthwhile fully to Investigate and describe the social phenomena involved. The study of man and society as objective sciences (anSs thropology and sociology) has developed much later than the Ss natural sciences. ‘ Not until capitalism as a social system was entering its final critical phase did there break through any serious questioning of the social and economic order—just at the very time when the ruling class most feared such a questioning!

% Of course. within capitalism these sciences will never truly flourish, since no exploiting and oppressing system can afford ‘ to entertain a science which treats none of its myths and assumptions as sacred, demanding the trath about history, both past and present. ‘ ‘ * ‘ ‘ THE DOMINANT MYTHS. As in every other class-div‘ Aided social system. the dominant illusions of capitalism are connected with the idea that the behaviour patterns and in‘ stitutions necessitated by capital (competition, aggression.

individualism, monogamy. private property. etc.) correspond to something ‘natural’. or laid down for all time. either by > divine decree or simply as part of an \unchanging ‘human ‘ nature’.

Thus it was very difficult for the scientific study of noncapitalist peoples, more and more of which were discovered in the course of the nineteenth century. to establish itself. ‘ In fact there grew up new myths, like that of inborn racial ; ‘ inferiority, to justify oppression and even the wiping out of ‘ colonial peoples.

For this article however the main point is that, as in other > fields of science and all human effort, the great treasure house ‘ ‘ of anthropological science presented by newly-discovered peoples in Australia, Africa. the South Seas. and the AmeiH as. was destroyed by the exploiting interests of merchants.

slave-traders, settlers, and finally the exporters of cupilal and ‘ ‘ planners of world war.

Estimates of the population of Australia at the time of European discovery vary: a modest and widely accepted fig‘ Sure is 300,000.

N ova Ny THEIR TERRIBLE FATE. A separate article would be required to describe the terrible historical fate and the present plight of their few thousand descendants. ‘ Here there is no question of romantic longing to see the “noble savage’. untouched by civilization, living his unspoiled ‘ ‘ life close to nature: it is a question of the destruction of 4 society.

In some cases this meant the sheer murder of men and .

women. often shot for an afternoon's sport as though they $ PLLLS LL LS LIL LLL LLL LLL LL LLL were wild animals. (Television viewers will recall van der Post's account of his own grandfather's participation in such exploits against the South African Bushmen.) Disease was the main killer. and natives died in hundreds of thousands all over the world with the introduction by the whites of measles. tuberculosis, syphilis and other gifts of Christian civilization, In Tasmania the brothers of the Australians were wiped out to the very last individual. Where populations were not physically destroyed. the people was severed from the land on which it depended and its traditional way of life decayed.

The Australian aborigines of today are such a people. decimated and reduced to underprivileged status in an alien civilization which has imposed its system upon them. As indicated above, the newly-found groups in Central Australia are highly exceptional in having maintained their isolation.

* NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES. In referring to such peoples as ‘primitive. it is customs and way of life that are under discussion. At one time it was thought, even by progressive thinkers like Morgan and Engels, that with higher levels of material culture went greater brain-power.

In point of fact, however, there are no significant difterences of ability between the racial groups in the world.

The culture of these hunting and food-gathering people is called primitive because it is based on productive equipment and methods of a very clementary type.

Their only implements are digging sticks, for taking wild roots from the soil, and hunting tools such as spear-throwers and boomerangs.

The returnable boomerang represents the peak of ingenuity in the limitations of a hunting and food-gathering culture. In different conditions in other parts of the world, and perhaps because of the need to hunt different types of game. there was invented the bow and arrow which. by using stored-up energy of a non-human kind in the bowstring. meant a great advance in techniques.

‘The Australian hunters represent. not a ‘backward’ people, incapable of the advance to civilization, but the last carriers of a stage in social and cultural evolution left behind by peoples in more favourable conditions.

* STRANDED EN A LAND-MASS. Like every other pyople. their ancestors of prehistory wandered over vast distances.

Historical chance caused the Australians to be stranded in a Jand-mass with highly unfavourable geographical conditions which not only made excessively difficult the advance from food-gathering to agriculture. but which were to isoJate Australian society completely from all the more advanced centres of civilization.

in New Guinea, climatic conditions and type of vegetation made possible the advance to cultivation of the land and settlement in permanent villages.

Much more space would be required to give an account of the way of life of Australian or New Guinea natives, or of their sufferings at the hands of colonialism.

When the newspapers. quoting the leader of the Australian government expedition, speak of the groups recently discovered as “incredibly primitive’. and eating ‘rats, mice, lizards. etc... they are describing a way of life not at all ineredible but typical of peoples living in difficult. serni-desert geographically isolated. and relying on wood and stone as the only materials for production.

In this sense their culture is akin to that of the early predecessors of all men.

James Todd vi LPL LLL LO

3). “SSF signifies my surrender of my fight for the ideas and objectives

AN article in Izvestia of July 27 calls for revision of the Soviet panel code, and notably for the abolition of the second paragraph of Article 58 (i) (c).

This clause, which is dated July 1934. reads as follows:

‘In the cvent of the flight abroad of a member of the armed forces, those adult) members of his family who in any way assisted in preparing or 2 out this act of treason, or who, although they Knew about it. did not inform the suthorit shall be deprived of liberty for a period of five to ten years, with confiscation of all their property.

‘Fhe remaining adult members of the truitor’s family who were living with him or were dependent on him at the time wher the crime was committed are subject to disfranchisement and to exile to remote districts at Siberia for a term of five years.’

This Draconic paragraph has long been a source of embarrassment to the professional cover-men of the Soviet bureaucracy.

Only two years ago a Communist Party member was symmoned to King Street to be quizzed by Reuben Falber as to why. in his capacity as an official of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR. he had supplied an inquirer with a translation of the paragraph in question.

This translation had been used to confound a party spokesman who had declared that no such law existed or could exisi in the USSR. The spokesman had indignantly demanded of King Street whether the SCR existed for the purpose of ‘spreading anti-Soviet propaganda’!

DOCUMENT ‘WHY I RESIGNED’ —BY ANTONIO GIOLITTI The following is the full text of the letter of resignation sent by MP Antonio Giolitti to the Cuneo Federal Committee of the Italian Communist Party, and published in Unita on July 24.

Giolitti, who is 42, joined the party in 1940 and took part in the Resistance. His resignation was accepted by the Federal Committee, and he was not expelled. Dear CoMRADES, I feel I still have the right to address you by this title because the ideas and resolves which impel me to present to you, with this letter, my resignation from the Italian Communist Party are in no way a denial of my past as a militant communist and of my socialist ideals.

Behind the serious and bitter decision to Jeave the CPI (after over fifteen 4 of politic ruggle as a communist inst fascism) is an experience which I have undergone and thought about deeply.

The answers given under the party imprint to my booklet. and the report of the last meeting of the Central Committee, deprive me cf any remaining hepe of opening up in the party an internal debate on the political and ideoiogical problems which 1 have found myself repeatedly compelled to face for more than a year.

The ideas which I have expressed are now brought forward as @lypical example, unique in the CPL. of ‘unprineipled revisionism’ and are branded as a conscious concession te anti-communism.

:

1 have sought in vain to correct the deformations in my work which have been listed in support of these charg moreover, in his report to the CC Togliatti, after having nied that in the booklet there could be found anything ‘coherent or serious’, claims to reduce it to two propositions which are not to be found in it.

He condemns them as heretical. as ‘social-democratic banality’ and as expressions of *bourgegis ideology’.

But what matters is not so much the polemic against my presumed ‘revisionist’ positions, as the interpretation of Marxism, of the Twentieth Congress [of the CPSU] and the Eighth Congress fof the Italian CP] which emerges from this polemic. and which opposes every revivifying idea and every honest attempt to investigate the very serious problems opened up by the Twentieth Congress and by the facts of Poland and Hungary.

For this political reason, and in no wise from intellectual punctilio, I can no longer accept a formal discipline which Printed by Plough Press, Ltd., r.o. 180, Clapham High St., London, $.W.4 Published by Peter Fryer, 180. Clapham High Sr., London, S.W.4. which today I hold essential for the victory of socialism.

The future will tell if the road T choose now is right, and should be followed by the socialist revolutionary forces in Ttaly and in the world.

But as to the present it is obvious that if the road to new ideas is barred for the workers all prospect of the conquest of power is precluded—to the point that in Togliatti’s report to the last CC we find the bewildering admission that ‘we cannot today concretely define how there can be realized’ the objective of ‘a democratic government of the working classes’ laid down by the Eighth Congress.

And how could it be otherwise when we remain tied firmly to dogmatic and sectarian positions which impede the political and trade union unity of the workers, which is the only force capable of achieving the transformation of Italian society from capitalism to socialism?

To this cause will continue to dedicate my energies. From this I will draw consolation for the grief of apparently separating myself from you, comrades of the Federal Committee of Cuneo, comrade partisans, workers. peasants, intellectuals, comrades in struggle for so many years, to whom I feel closer than ever now.

Our roads must join one day—and that day is not far off if we know how to work to bring it about. And the separation of today will prepare the more solid and effective unity of tomorrow.

For these reasons and in this spirit I request you to accept my resignation, without going through the procedure laid down by article 6(f) of the Statutes of the CPI.

Postscript. I am sending a copy of this letter to the secretary of the CPI, with a request that it be published in the Unita of Wednesday. July 24.

In view of my public duties this request cannot be considered illegitimate and trifling: my resignation as a deputy, which [ will announce quickly after the publication. should be preceded by an accurate explanation of my act.

[LETTER POLICY STATEMENT ASKS FOR TROUBLE To propuce a pamphlet like Industry and Society in times like these is asking for trouble.

Bus workers have just fought a bitter struggle a private companies: the market men are still doing battle ugainst the bosses’ charter; the workers at Standards. BMC. Nortons and Briggs have not forgotten their struggles against uneniployment.

Yet the Right wing try to tell us capitalism can continue to tun things with just a little help from the Government.

But there are protests all round. Reynolds News printed a letter signed by 32 MPs who call for the rejection of the policy statement. Constituency parties are putting forward spec proposals for nationalization.

The engineering unions are already parties to the Confederation’s plan for engineering, which cuts across this document. and the National Federation of Building Trades Operatives has a nationalization policy too.

There must be a fight against the document. and those Bevanite MPs who believe that the policy is acceptable because it can be interpreted in many different ways must rethink their position.

The rank and file want a policy of nationalization—and we don’t want the type we've got now. with Lord Stick-in-the-mud running it, As a member of the Labour Party, I believe that Aneurin Bevan and the constituency representatives on the NEC should lead the fight against this policy statement.

They must not allow themselves to be put in a position of defending it at Brighton in October—rather, they should resign from the NEw and lead the fight from the Conference floor.

London, S.W.16.

While the Editor is on holiday The Newsletter will be smaller than usual. Normal size will be resumed on August 17.