The Newsletter, vol. 2 no. 57

EE. GAULLE’S coming to power is a grave set-back for the French working class. It is all the more serious — a set-back since the French working class has not fully shown its mettle.

The workers were capable of a very great deal. They could have. stopped de. Gaulle’s rise to power. could, have.imposed their point of. view about what w as to happen i inside France itself—and about the Algerian war, too.

Why were they unabie to achieve this? Because the established trade union and political organizations, the CGT (General Confederation of Labour), CGT-FO (socialist-led trade unions), Communist Party and Socialist Party betrayed the working class with a mastery -and cunning that come from thirty years’ practice in the art of treachery.

Although the Pflimlin Government was opposed by part of the Right wing in the Assembly, it was voted in by the RightCentre, Centre and socialist deputies.

The communist deputies abstained. But their abstention had a special significance. It did not mean that the French Communist Party did not want to express an opinion about the Pflimlin Government.

Directed against working class _ On the contrary, it meant that the French Communist Party was for the Pflimlin Government. This point was made clear forty-eight hours later in a Humanité article which clearly showed that only the abstention of the communist deputies had made possible Pflimlin’s election.

The French Communist Party was to ‘continue this policy They TARDOS RELEASED, BUT THREE OTHER WRITERS TO STAY IN JAIL The Hungarian communist writer Tibor Tardos, jailed .for eighteen months last November for ‘inciting against the democratic order of the State’ has been released from prison.

The Hungarian News and Information Service reports that Laszlo Gydros, official spokesman of the Hungarian Government, confirmed this at a -Budapest Press conference.

Asked whether the communist writers Tibor Déty, Gyula Hay and. Zoltan Zelk, sentenced at the same time to periods of three to nine years, would also be released before completing their sentences, the spokesman said: ‘I do not know of any such plans.”

REFUSE TO BUILD OR USE ROCKET SITES East Leeds Constituency Labour Party has passed the following resolution for inclusion in the preliminary agenda of the Labour Party conference:

‘That on its return to power the Labour Party will refuse -to build or use rocket sites.’

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First. donation to The Newsletter when this paper started’ a year ago came from a comrade in. Bushey (Herts.).

First donation to The Newsletter’s development fund comes from the same cororade, in a letter announcing his intention of joining the Labour Party—and. expressing the hope that ‘as The Newsletter develops intg a:

paper for militants it will net become ‘a paper for _sectarians’.

In thanking our Bushey reader for his £1 donation, and congratulating him om the political step he is taking, we assure him that the new, enlarged Newsletter we are planning -will continue to carry criticisms, controversy and other highly umsectarian features!

Many other readers have congratulated us on. our intention: of adopting the Strike Bulletin format as soon © as possible—but remember the sum we need to accomp. lish this: £50 per month. We . * It voted for. the emergency law brought before the Assembly by Pflimlin, a law which meant the suppression of all democratic liberties (the banning of meetings, the censorship cf the Press, the prohibition of demonstrations). ’ This emergency ‘law, which: was supposed to be directed

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of support for the Pflimfin Government to the bitter end.

Delegates to the North-Eastern area council of the Clerical. and Administrative Workers’. Union unanimously passed a ‘. resohution calling for a strike in all Amalgamated Engineering Union offices in support. of Joan -Mellors.

Joan Mellors, after working for the AEU for 194 years, : ; was sacked for writing a letter to the Sheffield Press defending : local AEU official Harold. Ullyatt against witch-hunt attacks.

But her claim for victimization. pay has-been turned down.: . Delegate’ demanded that this decision be reversed.

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NEW PLAY BY ALISON MACLEOD “Dear Augustine’, a play by Alison Macleod, will be pro-.

duced at the Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London, for a week, beginning July 282" — The play is about Jewish refugees in London just.after the war, wondering whether to go back to Germany.

. NO FREE SPEECH IN. CROMWELL’S COUNTRY " In King’s Lynn there are two grammar. schools, one for boys _and one for girls: Fhe sixth forms - organize a joint society and invite speakers to come and. talk about interesting ° and controversial subjects.

This society: recently .invited Peter Cadogan to spéak to it’

on ‘Communism and Democracy’.

As a matter of form—or so -he thought—the’ secretary ine . formed his headmaster of the speaker and subject. ‘The meet- , (Continued overleaf) ing was immediately vetoed.

LEEDS METER READERS STAND BY HARRY NEWTON, shop ‘steward of the Leeds electricity “ meter readers’ branch of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, was dismissed at a moment’s notice on: May 10.

His dismissal followed an organized resistance by all the meter: readers to the Yorkshire Electricity Board’s increase in the number of visits to .be made by the meter readers each day.

The pretext for dismissing Bro, Newton was alleged insolence to a foreman. As the decision to limit the number of visits made was the official policy of the meter. readers’ branch. ~ the entire branch refused to start work the next day when they learned of their shop steward’s dismissal.

After a total stoppage of about four hours the men were finally persuaded by the district organizer of the union, Alderman Sykes (last year’s Mayor of Morley) to return to work FRANCE (Continued from front page)

-against the fascists, was in fact mainly directed against the working, class, and Pflimlin “cynically admitted this when he declared: ‘There. will be no unilateral application of the emergency law.’

- The French: Communist Party voted for the special powers in Algeria, which Guy Mollet had first proposed in 1956, and .. which aimed at putting all administrative, judicial and political power into the hands of the same brass hats who refused to submit to the authority of Pflimlin’ himself.

But the French Communist Party did not stop here. On the agenda submitted by Pflimlin to the National Assembly a motion of congratulations was sent by ALL the deputies to the generals who had valiantly defended the honour of the French Army. “While pretending to struggle against the Algerian war, the Stalinist deputies congratulated the generals on their excellent conduct in that war!

Both of one mind ft This policy of support for the Pflimlin’ Government flowed from the French Communist Party’s refusal to call on the working class to settle the country’s political problems. On this point the Stalinists and the social democrats were of one mind.

While the Communist Party indulged in these anti-working-class and openly reactionary parliamentary manoeuvres, Stalinist. spokesmen in the factories convened meetings.

But the action proposed in the course of endless speeches ‘amounted to nothing more effective than petition-signing and the-dispatch of telegrams to the Assembly.

-The vote for the state of emergency, the vote for special powers and the congratulations to the generals could only strengthen the extremists in Algiers in their determination io impose their policy.

Behind his show of strength the full weakness of Pflimlin’s s :

Government stood revealed and it was at this stage that the - extremists attempted their Ajaccio coup.

(To be continued) so that he could start negotiations on Bro. Newton’s behalf. The Board also agreed to pay the men for the time they had been stopped.

After -the negotiations the Yorkshire Electricity Board confirmed the sacking of Bro. Newton.

Many of the meter. readers are far from satisfied with the part played by the full-time officials. After a delay of nearly a month the matter has been placed in the hands of a subconfmitiee of the joint council of the unions and the Board fon further investigation.

‘Let him sign on?

After more than five weeks the union has still not met the repeated claims by the entire branch of meter readers that victimization pay should be given to Bro. Newton. The advice of the full-time officials i is that he should sign on at the Labour Exchange.

The meter readers are making a voluntary collection each week so that he can continue his fight to regain his job.

obviously a turn-out of the hard core of party militants (perhaps 20,000 in all): designed to create the impression of having done something—and to let off the pressure built up by three days of living on the alert against the putsch repeatedly predicted by the party leaders.

Stoppages of work for short periods. were reported in a number of factories on the next two days, but no positive slogan was put forward.

An analysis of the slogans which caught on during the crisis is revealing. At the mass. demonstration on May 28 the. organizers did their best to have none at all.

Communist militants introduced their own: ‘Down with de Gaulle’ and ‘Fascism shall not pass...

_ More radical slogans spread But the demonstrators (more than half of them workers) were well ahead of this, and more radical slogans spread tapidly, despite energetic attempts of Communist Party official organizers to squash them.

Among these were ‘Peace in Algeria’, ‘The paras to the factories’ (i.e., dissolve the airborne forces and put the paratroopers to work) and, though less widely, calls for a popular front government.

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From one point of view these slogans go to the heart of the matter. Dissolve the military and paramilitary machine; end the war: these demands answer the most real and immediate needs of the working class.

But from another point of view they are terribly limited since they fail to raise the question of power even in the ‘Most rudimentary form.

Who could end the war in Algeria? Whe could dissolve the paratroops?

They could not govern ‘The essence of the crisis was that Pflimlin could not end the war. Nor could Gaillard. Nor could Mollet. Nor any of the other possible: parliamentary coalitions.

Not only could they not end the war: they could not govern the country. Long before the’settlers’ rebellion it was obvious

From Our Paris Correspondent, Seymour Papert ‘But it’s the same ones back again,’ exclaimed an Algerian settler bitterly disappointed to see his Saviour come to power surrounded by the usual parliamentary medley of socialists, radicals and what-have-you:

Spoken bitterly or-with relief the same words must have been on the lips of millions of Frenchmen. Hence, in part, the flatness. of Paris’s reaction to the installation of the new Government. No jubilant parades -of Gaullists. No mass expression of feeling against the régime.

The Communist Party demonstration on June 1 was that the whole French State machine was rapidly degenerating.

The greater part-of the police, the army, the civil service was utterly demoralized if not frankly hostile and contemptuous of Parliament. The Algiers. coup was. the death-blow. to an already half-paralysed organism.

General de Gaulle is not- Massu and he is not the settlers of. Algiers. It is already quite clear that though they brought him to power he has. higher dreams: than to serve France’s most backward elements:

In fact he has offered himself to big. capital as. the only man who can pull off a last-ditch attempt to break free of the blackmail of these elements which have, for a long time, been a drag on the ‘rational’ development of French capitalism.

In this he has the support of Mollet, whose outlook is closely linked with that of capitalism. ~ .

Against the virtual certainty of an open class struggle if a frankly military dictatorship is imposed he offers at least the hope of getting out of the Algerian war and rationalizing ihe economy without a naked> class fight.

In order to do this he will have to drive a wedge between the brass hats and the settlers, perhaps by offering the former the prospect of an integration into a bureaucratized French régime. He will have to-risk stabbing in the back his most vociferous supporters.

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Thus the state of affairs of three years ago is turned on its heawl: then a ‘socialist’ Mollet was needed to do the dirty on the workers to carry on the war; now a ‘fascist’ is necessary -to do the dirty on his rabble to end the war. may break off into: the veins and be carried to the lungs.

No treatment short of amputation of the limb has any chance of being helpful. ;

Leukaemia Radio-active material in bones may also result in leukaemia. This is a form of cancer of the white blood cells.

Although only a minority of leukaemia cases is due to man-made radiation there is little doubt that some cases are so caused and are not due to ‘natural causes’. There is no known way at present of differentiating these from ‘natural’ leukaemia.

Normally, white cells are formed in the bone marrow and lymph glands. In leukaemia the marrow cavity becomes packed ..with abnormal white cells which may later flood the bloodStream.

The packed-out bone-marrow can no longer efficiently manufacture red cells, which are essential for carrying oxygen to

By Our Medical Correspondent ‘ IV. Radiostrontium ’ Tus radio-active material is inhaled in air, and absorbed through drinking water and from the surface of cereals and vegetables.

The major portion of strontium 90 fall-out enters the soil, however (in rain). Then it enters grass, the cow that eats the grass, the milk the cow produces, and the child or adult consuming the milk or dairy products. :

Radio-active strontium is concentrated in bone. It only emits beta rays and is therefore not a genetic danger, like radiocaesium.

However, the fact that it is concentrated in the skeleton makes it even more dangerous, in a sense. than radiocaesium.

The actively developing bones of young children contain about four times as much radiostrontium as do the bones of adults. And a given amount of radiostrontium in a child’s Sones is about three times as harmful as the same amount in the bones of an adult.

The fall-out of. strontium 90 is therefore at least ten times as harmful to a child as it is to an adult.

Sarcoma The radio-activity in the bone may affect the bone itself, ; causing a tumour known as bone sarcoma. This usually affects the thigh bone but may occur at other sites. It causes severe pain as it erodes the membrane lining the bone. Spontaneous fracture of the bone may occur.

-' The tumour may invade the muscle surrounding the bone and eventually ulcerate through to the skin. Bits of tumour various parts of the body. The child develops anaemia and becomes progressively paler, weaker and more breathless.

Other cells normally formed in the marrow are also interfered with. These are the platelets, which are essential for the normal process of blood clotting.

-.Haemorrhages therefore take place into the skin and there may be bleeding from the nose or mouth. Healthy white cells, necessary for mastering infections, may not be produced in sufficient numbers and severe ulceration of the mouth, throat and gums results.

The liver and spleen are often packed with the abnormal cells and enlarge considerably.

The disease is usually much more acute in children. It causes : fever and rapid wasting but is not usually painful. A few cases may be temporarily arrested but the vast majority prove fatal.

V. ‘Unanimity of Ignorance’

These are unpleasant facts, but it is no use running away from them. And the full reality may be .more frightening than we know.

The Medical Research Council’s 1956 publication ‘Hazards to Man of Nuclear and Allied Radiation’ contains the ominous Statement: ‘There are many large and serious gaps in oun knowledge of the medical and biological effects of jonizing radiation’.

In the words of Ritchie Calder, in a letter published in The Times on May 30, 1957: ‘This unanimity of ignorance is not reassuring; the risks to humanity are not in what the scientists know but in what the scientists do not know.’

The known risks are surely sufficient to warrant stopping the tests immediately and unconditionally.

_ Two classics of Marxism which are especially helpful to understanding current events in France are “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (Marx, 1852) and ‘The Only Road for Germany’ (Trotsky, 1932).

Tribune . has. brilliantly employed quotations from ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire’ in its presentation of the French crisis— though what a pity that the worst of available translations. was used, in which some passages become nonsense and the meaning of others is reversed!

' -Perhaps the main reason why “The Eighteenth Brumaire’ deserves study today is not such superficial similarities as exist. between the coup d’état. of December 1851 and that of May-June 1958 (Algerian generals etc.) but Marx's basic: political analysis.

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He comes out against the discussion of what happened in terms of a struggle between ‘reaction’ and ‘the people’-—‘a night in which all.cats are grey’ and which ‘veils the class. struggle’.

La. ae . ea And he shows the fatal consequences for the workers of merging politically with the petty-bourgeois democrats, accepting their slogans and their Jeadership.

United front rejected

Trotsky’s analysis of the passage of the German State through Bonapartism to fascism shows bow the two working-class parties both rejected the united front that alone could have saved Germany and the world from Hitler’s victory.

The social democrats followed the line of the ‘lesser evil’, supporting Hindenburg ‘against’ Hitler (much as the French communists supported Pflimlin ‘against’? de Gaulle), while the communists, operating Stalin’s orders, were in practice helping the Nazis. ;

It was for circulating this and Trotsky’s other writmgs on the 1930-33 crisis in Germany that the first British ‘Trotskyists’ . were expelled from the Communist Party;.they were, so to speak, ‘premature united-frontists’.

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The middle class More nonsense is talked in the working-class movement _ about the middle class than about any other subject.

The Right wing justify their policies of ‘restraint’, ‘moderation’ and all-round half-heartedness with the argument that ‘you mustn’t antagonize the middle class’. ;

Yet the Right wing has in historical fact done just this again and again: see, for instance, what happened with the Labour Governments of 1924, 1929-31 and 1945-51.

Basis for fascism

In fact it is Right-wing policy that drives the middle class into the arms of. reaction.

The Right wing does just enough, industrially and politically, to irritate the middle class, while not impressing them with the power and determination of the workers.

In Italy in the early 1920s and again.in Germany ten years later the hesitant, disunited, indecisive actions of the Labour movement made it seem to the middle sections a. factor capable. of causing disorder and inconvenience without being able to take control and refashion society in iis‘°own way.

This provided the basis for fascism.

General.Strike Lesson

It is when the working class is acting with the maximum militant unity that the middle class begins to swing over-to its side.

This was seen very clearly during the last days of the General Strike of 1926. just. before the sell-out.

It is important for the workers’ organizations to take up the special demands of the middle class, and to carry. on direct work among them (and the Right wing usually neglect both these things, since what dictates their attitude is not really the interests of the middle class but those of the monopoly capitalists!).

But the only road to winning great masses of the middle class solidly to the workers’ side is to demonstrate the immense strength of Labour and its ability to enforce its will upon capital. .

BRIAN PEARCE .

JuNeE 14, 1958 system in Hungary, a refuge for the treacherous and capitulationist Nagy-Losonczy group.

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“Remember the unprecedented speech made by Comrade Tito in Pula, in which he took the rebels in Hungary under his wing, while describing the fraternal assistance of the USSR to the Hungarian people as “Soviet intervention”—a speech which contained direct calls to certain forces in other socialist countries to follow the so-called “Yugoslav road”?

The so-called ‘Yugoslav road’, it may be remembered. was Kardelj’s call for a government based on workers’ councils, ‘Much experience and merit’

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‘That does not exhaust the question, however. If the NagyLosonczy group were preparing to restore capitalism in league with Tito then why have they not been put on trial for these crimes?

And how does this allegation square up with the explicit Statement of Khrushchev elsewhere in his speech:

‘The Yugoslav communists have much revolutionary experience and great merits in the struggle against our common class enemies. The working class and the entire working people of Yugoslavia made a notable contribution to the struggle against fascism in the second world war.’

No matter what differences separate British socialists from Tito—and there are many—they must not let this latest canard go unanswered. And if the Soviet bureaucrats want to apply economic sanctions let them do it to the class enemy, such as de Gaulle’s France, and not to another workers’ State.

THE campaign against the Yugoslav Communist Party has assumed a sinister aspect with Khrushchev’s furious outburst at the Sofia congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party.

Khrushchev—no mincer of words—demanded_ obsequious loyalty in place of critical independence and repeated his threats against ALL dissident élements in the Stalinist world.

In this sense the Sofia speech denotes a sharpening attack against the working class in eastern Europe and a more conciliatory foreign policy towards imperialism. This latter aspect of Soviet policy is confirmed by the silence on de Gaulle and the overtures made to the U.S. imperialists in Khrushchev's letter to Eisenhower. :

Khrushchev’s technique was not much cruder than the Chinese. He attacked the Yugoslav’s as ‘revisionists’ and then proceeded to define revisionism as a ‘modern Trojan horse’ of the imperialist camp and revisionists as people who desire ‘the - preservation or the restoration of capitalism’.

One example of this ‘revisionism’ given by Khrushchev is enough to reveal the hollowness of the argument.

‘The Yugoslav leaders did particularly great harm to the cause of socialism by their public pronouncements and their * actions during the Hungarian events.

‘During the counter-revolitionary putsch in Budapest, the Yugoslav. Embassy, in effect; became-a centre for those who had started the struggle against the people’s democratic

‘The immediate task facing American socialists is the formution of a Labour Party, independent of the capitalist parties, and firmly based on the organized working class,’ said Farrell Dobbs, secretary of the U.S. Socialist Workers’ Party. at a meeting in Leeds last Sunday.

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There were definite grounds for optimism on the American political scene, he said.

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The American socialist movement had a long way to 20 and many obstacles to overcome. But the British Labour movement had a real ally in the American workers.

) LETTER LANCASHIRE MINERS FIGHT PIT CLOSURES.

REDUNDANCY in the mining’ indust?y if mentioned last year would have raised a laugh. It couldn’t happen!

But now in a changing situation shadows of pre-war conditions, of unemployment, of short time, are having to be faced.

The National Coal Board has. declared its intentions to commence closure of some collieries on economy grounds. The figure of six to seven pits in the Wigan district has. been mentioned and now the process may well be speeded up.

However the attempts by the Board to saddle the miner ~ with the burden of solving the crisis of capitalism is being vigorously opposed.

“ The Lancashire area of the National Union of Mineworkers, is to be asked to give instructions ‘that no agreement be made in the area for the closure of any pit on grounds of economy’.

It is clear that the rank-and-file miner is not prepared to help to create a pool of unemployment for use in driving down his own standard of living.

Salford 5.

Printed by Plough Press. Ltd. (TU), r.o. 180 Clapham High St, London SW4 Published by Peter Fryer, 180, Clapham High St.. London, S.W.4.