World-wide repercussions of Vietnam war

took place at their union's conference in Douglas, Isle of Man, last week. This was the consummation of an earlier betrayal by stalinists and centrists in the organisation.

The select few-the 600 Millions of teenage jobless in USA ployers to help the nation by taking on at least one trainee worker for every 100 •employees when the next batch of school-leavers comes on the scene in the next few weeks. Some two million schoolleavers and graduates will swell the ranks of this great army of teenage unemployed.

JOHNSON'S FEAR

Johnson fears like the plague the impact of this potentially revolutionary force in American politics, of which the militant struggle of the Negro youth has already given a foretaste in Birmingham, Alabama, in Harlem, and elsewhere.

The problem is especially serious among Negro youth. "The Times' New York correspondent recently reported the statement of Mr. Reynolds J. Nowell, vice-president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States:

"Among Negroes, he noted, the percentage of teenage unemployment was double that of the population as a whole, and among Negro giris still greater.

One in three non-white teenage girls in the labour force is unemployed, he noted. In general, one in every four persons unemployed is a teenager and just a little under one-half Brown, who remained unabashed on the platform, but the executive council motion was carried overwhelmingly, according to Cannon, who refused a card vote.

To repeat last week's Newsletter: the rank and file is now bound to a highly bureaucratised union machine, and the real crime of this betrayal of the rank and file is the way Degeneration period in the class struggle, the Communist Party of Great Britain was able to take over this union. But through the degeneration of the Party internationally and through the opportunistic and revisionist policies of its union and Party leaders in Britain, the whole of the left in the ETU was laid open to attack in the courts by the right wing, who followed their successful action with a ruthless witch-hunt.

This is what killed the militancy of the majority of members of the ETU and completely knocked the stuffing out of this year's 'left' delegates.

Now, as the class war intensifies under a Labour government struggling to save the pound and capitalism for the bosses and the Tories, the right wing are in power and are able to deliver a crushing tactical defeat on the militants.

Not invincible For many years rank-and-file ETU members have sympathised with and supported the policies of the Socialist Labour League. Along with the Young Socialists, the League is putting up a struggle against the betrayals of the Wilson government and trade union bureaucrats over rising prices and the wage freeze.

In other parts of the country workers are making inroads into Brown's incomes policy showing that Cannon's rule, though tough, is not invincible.

We call upon Electrical Trades Union members and all trade unionists to join us in the fight for socialist policies now, to build an alternative leadership for the working class to Cannon, Wilson and all the right-wing friends of the Tories and the bosses.

of all teenagers in the work force have never held a fulltime job' It is not difficult to imagine the social chaos and bitterness which must characterise the Negro working-class areas in the cities of this most advanced industrial country in the world.

This is the underlying secret of the enormous growth in militancy of the Negro movement, and the rush of its 'liberal' leaders to arrive at agreement with Johnson and the Democrats.

Here we have overwhelming evidence of what Marxists mean by 'the epoch of imperialist decay' when they characterise modern capitalism. Half a generation faces the prospect of no permanent opportunity to work, even as slaves of capital.

CAPITALIST PROBLEM A large proportion of these may never work. By 1970, instead of the present figure of 13 million Americans aged between 20 and 24, there will be 17 million. And this will include millions who have never held down a job!

Capitalism can find no solution to this problem. Not even the supporters of the system can hold out much hope. The fact is that this rise in unemployment, speciHE Vietnam war is arous- ing the hatred of workers all over the world. Predictably, the most intense reaction has come from the West Coast of America, where 15,000 students, workers and professional people gathered at the campus of the University of California for a 34-hour teach-in and protest against the U.S.-directed war in Vietnam.

Prominently placed on the speakers' platform were three empty chairs reserved for the three professors representing the viewpoint of the State Department who funked and absented themselves.

Dangerous ideas

All the speakers attacked U.S. policy in Vietnam and Dominica. Referring to the absence of the pro-Johnson intellectuals, the organisers of the meeting said that these three refused to participate because, amongst other things, the teach-in will spread some dangerous ideas to the masses of the people', and because 'the protest movement against the war is successful: and spreading".

I. F. Stone, a left-wing radical, well known for his exposé of the U.S. role in the Korean war, was warmly applauded when he identified himself with the students' protest and said that the U.S. ¡was in Vietnam because it wanted to dominate the world and that the main object of Johnson, McNamara and Rusk was not democratic government in Vietnam, but a military base.

The only positive and organisational proposal came from Staughton Lynd, Yale professor and director of the Mississippi Freedom Schools. He called for the recognition of the Caamaño regime in ally marked among teenagers, is a problem of capitalist "prosperity and not of business crisis.

GROWTH RATE UP

A slump or even a mud recession in the U.S. would raise the problem to gigantic proportions. Reynolds . Nowell also observed:

'This failure to provide employment for so many of the new entrants to our labour force is especially significant, since the economy has been expanding at a good 5.6 per cent annual rate for four years, and a distuls to come bly will be In other words, at a time when U.S. capitalism is producing more, and expanding its wealth at a rate higher than ever before, when the value of holdings on the U.S. stock exchange is higher than ever in history, unemployment is on the increase, and capitalism can offer not even the prospect of a minimum human existence to a large proportion of its youth.

Automation, even though so far it affects only a small sector of industry, is the reason for this new phase of capitalist contradictions.

Millions of workers without industrial skills, and this includes millions of youth, by Mike Banda Dominica, scathingly denounced the pro-Johnson intellectuals (... annihilation in a Brooks Brothers suit is still murder') and called for massive civil disobedience to make Johnson resign.

'We cannot wait until the next presidential election—we must vote with our feet, he concluded.

Civil disobedience by itself will not stop Johnson's war. It is only through organised political and industrial action of the working class that the Japanese Trotskyist youth on march against Vietnamese war war can be halted. The first political step towards such a movement would be to break decisively with the Democratic Party and firm support for a labour party.

Need for clarity

Amongst those who also spoke were Paul Potter, Isaac Deutscher and Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, who, paradoxically, supports U.s. intervention in Dominica but is opposed to a similar policy being pursued in Vietnam. The fact that he was applauded on Vietnam and not challenged about Dominica shows the need for clarity and leadership in the anti-war movement now developing in the United States. especially Negroes, are dispensed with as expensive machines and computers eliminate millions of jobs.

And yet capitalists will continue to press forward with automation to the best of their ability; so the problem will get worse instead of better.

Workers in more backward sectors of industry will be no better off, since they are always likely to find their source of employment wiped off the map altogether by the rich giants of finance and industry. This is an international problem which is sharpening the class struggle all over the world.

FEW CONCESSIONS

There is one other very significant aspect of the present phase of the problem in the USA. Socialists have for many years worked for the establishment of a mass workers' political party in the U.S., but the trade union bosses, who work with the capitalist parties, have retained control of the movement, and the wealth of U.S. capitalism has given leeway for certain concessions as a result of militant trade union struggles.

But the present problems can only be solved politically, The movement of protest is not confined to the West Coast though. In Columbia and Cornell Universities on the East Coast, hundreds of students demonstrated against the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps as part of the campaign against the Vietnam war. Many of the students involved in the demonstration were either censured or reprimanded by the Universities' administrations.

The biggest individual blow against the Johnson regime, however, was struck by Lewis Mumford, the doyen of America bourgeois intellectuals and president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

At the Academy's annual awards ceremony in New York on May 19, Mumford shocked his audience by indicting in ringing terms U.S. policy in Vietnam as a 'moral outrage'.

'We have a special duty,' he said, to speak out openly in protest on " every occasion when human beings are threatened by arbitrary power: not only as with the oppressed in Alabama and Mississippi, but the peoples of both North and South Vietnam who must now confront our government's cold-blooded blackmail and calculated violence...• Japanese mission From America to Japan.

On May 12, at a council meeting of Sohyo, the General Council of the Japanese Trade Unions, a decision was adopted to commence a nationwide movement against the war in Vietnam and to express solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution by collecting material aid and by sending a fraternal mission to North Vietnam.

Trotskyist youth and students of the Internationalist Communist League of Youth have played a prominent part in demonstrations in Japan against the Vietnam war. by a fight for socialist ownership and planning of industry. This is brought home by the bankruptcy of the reformist policies of the unions.

In a few cases, unions have reached agreements with employers about redundancy and restrictions on new hiring, in order to protect their own members who are already working.

AUTOMATION'S IMPACT While this might preserve the existing jobs for a certain time (and even that depends on the by no means certain continuance of the boom), it actually helps to increase the problem for the working class as a class, raising the whole problem of the unity of the employed and the unemployed, a point upon which Trotskyists have always insisted.

The same report by "The Times' New York correspondent highlights one aspect of this contradiction:

*The impact of automation falls most heavily on new entrants into the labour force because of restrictive union hiring rules and the practice of attrition, or the displacement of workers eliminated by new methods and machines solely by