The Newsletter, vol. 9 no. 470

world capitalist system and not simply on Britain.

Be sure of your copy of this journal of International Marxism bu writing to:

186a, Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4. these closures, the area council of the NUM, intends to Paynter's advice, collaborate with the Divisional Coal Board in 'ensuring smooth re-depolyment' When the closures were first announced the area council of the NUM, at a special meeting on October 17 voted to oppose the closures.

After this, however, Sid Schofield telephoned Will Paynter, and the outcome was the following letter, dated November I1.

With reference to our telephone discussion on the problems the area union is facing arising from the Board's decision to close the Monckton collieries, ! would like to submit the following observations for consideration by your council meeting.

First, let me say that I appreciate your difficulties as an area this closure upon those directly or indirectly affected. 1 personally had the experience of dealing with and trying to stop simultaneous closures of seven pits when I was President of the South Wales Area.

Further, it is necessary to see the Monckton closures in proper perspective. It is necessary to undertand that this is not just a out in the White Paper on Fuel Policy of October 1965. I quote a few relevant passages from it :

'The aim now must be to improve the position of the industry by further concentration of production on the economic With this in view the Board will seek to accelerate the closure of gross-losing pits that have no prospect of moving out of that category!

It further states: 'The size of the industry within the framework set by the General Fuel Policy will depend significantly on its success in reducing costs. Relieved of the double burden of unprofitable collieries and past capital debt and with the successful prosecution of the NCB's own policies for improving the health of the industry, the economic part of the industry should be able, with rising productivity, to increase its output and its market?

Indeed to facilitate the acceleration of the policy of pit closures the government has made available £30 million on a pound for pound basis with the Coal Board to assist in manpower deployment and other consequent problems.

The National Union has repeatedly pressed upon the government the need for a co-ordinated fuel policy based upon indigenous resources and for a slowing, down of the closure programme. We are meeting the Minister again to press this and to get his replies to earlier submissions. But this policy is a fact of life and its effects are more severe in some coalfields than others.

Taking 1965 and 1966 together there have been 88 collieries closed, mainly in four coalfields: Durham, Scotland, South Wales and Lancashire. In some of these pits tens of millions of tons of coal reserves have been available but incapable of being extracted on a profitable basis.

• mention these a particular closure taking place is therefore action against government policy.

It is, I suggest, unlikely that any government will capitulate before the threat or the fact of direct action, particularly if thai action is only sectional in character. In fact, we have recognised fron the start that the whole union cannot succeed in changing government policy without the active support of the whole Labour and trade union movement. This is the policy of the union and it is the only one that has the prospect of ultimately succeeding. proceed with the divisional board to ensure the smooth redeployment of the Monckton men.

Yours sincerely, After the receipt of this letter a further special meeting of the Yorkshire area council was called. After the letter was read the previous decision to oppose the Monckton closures was rescinded by 65 votes to 37 and instead a resolution was passed 'requesting the Monckton and all other branches to co-operate with the Board in the redeployment of men from the Monckton Collieries'.

At the same meeting another resolution was passed: 'That we cannot agree to the request of the Monckton branches for a public inquiry into past capital expenditure at the Monckton Collieries'.

Thus the right wing in the area leadership, backed by 'Communist' Paynter, refused the demand of the rank and file to fight against closures.

Miners throughout Yorkshire know that if the Monckton closures go through without a fight, others will follow.

Paynter, like all the Communist Party leaders, is unable to fight this because he is unwilling to fight the Labour government.

Talk about 'the active support of the whole Labour and trade union movement' is a smokescreen for doing nothing-as YOUNG SOCIALISTS GRAND XMAS BAZAAR Saturday December 10 at THE CORN EXCHANGE LEEDS 1 Christmas gifts : Prizes Galore : Special attractions for all the family Be sure to see the wonderful range of stalls This is set

The Communist Party talks about the present crisis as if it had something to do with • Wilson's economic stupidities. Nothing of the sort. World capitalism has revealed once again that it is going to attack the working class, especially in the major capitalist countries, in order to solve its problems and difficulties.

Because the Communist Party is nothing more than a talking shop and a 'left' cover for Wilson it cannot but betray the working class in the coming period. -They are sponsoring a conference in London on December 3 but according to the rules of this gathering, no binding decisions can be taken.

take lots a in in the ma t take part of the time making their Jong-winded speeches as usual. of the Communist Party, but do nothing because you might make Mison That has her Belie fied to soviet toreien who, they • met bureau might anger salaries the dole constitutents time that the rank and Demands Labour JT down a motion in the Pa in mentors care • no conider EMAND it resigns and then b repared to replace Wilson an the other right wingers who support it.

IF Wilson will and the Parliamentary Fi demonstrate and lobby the Houses of Parliament as never be inevitable.

FORCE the Wilson cabinet to rebefore destroy This does automatically mean a for simply a leaders of the Labour Party as APPRENTICES' VICTORY THE BOILERMAKERS apprentices at the Fairfield shipyard have gained a partial victory against the management. After striking for an increased payment given to journeymen earlier this year, the apprentices have forced the management to give in-the ayment will be made, but for a shorter period than claimed. • See page four for fuller story.

'WE CAN'I say to those who sell food . .. "You must not put up your prices because wages have not gone up". That is a fact of the economy you live in', said Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan talking to Cardiff University Socialist Society last Friday (November 18).

In these words, he admitted his slavish obedience to the capitalists who control 'the economy we live in'.

On entering the meeting Callaghan found a copy of The Newsletter and devoted the first part of his speech entirely to a violent attack on the Socialist Labour League.

He said that he wanted to warn students against this organisation; though they might think it was trying to strengthen the labour movement, its sole aim was to smash the Labour Party, social democracy and the Communist Party.

"There has some very research organisation, be warnedhad not just in been a strong enough warning He objected particularly to the statement in last week's Newsletter that "Wilson, Brown and Callaghan are at war against the wages and conditions working class.' His whole speech was made as a reply to this statement, but it only served to show more clearly the anti-working class nature of government policies.

In particular, he attacked the car workers for 'bidding the price of labour in the Midlands'.

said that union officials had told him that 'Midland carworkers will not take other jobs being offered te ali • when there are did not explain where these other jobs are, or at what wages.

It was Callaghan's proud boas hat he was doing all he coul to encourage 'private enterprise' and that 'the government has deliberately made it more difficult to sell at home'.

In other words the government is trying to solve the crisis of capitalism at the expense of the working class, as the Socialist Labour League and The Newsletter have always maintained.

Yes, Mr. Callaghan, you were quite right to concentrate on attacking the SLL. The government's Tory policies are forcing more workers to recognise it as an agent of big business, and that they must build a new leadership to destroy that government.

Only the SLL has the policies for such an alternative.

THIS IS THE TEXT of a leaflet being circulated among Communist Party members concerning the CP demonstration in Leeds on November 5, when organisers of the march used the police to prevent Young Socialists participating. The leaflet has also been sent to the "Morning Star', "Challenge', newspaper of the Young Communist League, and the four organisers of the demonstration.

An Open Letter to the Communist Party fulltime organisers responsible for the Leeds demonstration of November 5 1966.

Dear Howard Hill, Bob Wilkinson, Dave Priscott and Bill Moore, On November 5 this year you organised a Communist Party demonstration in Leeds against the wage freeze and associated Labour government policies. When our contingent of 30 Young Socialists lined up with their banners, End Wilson's Wage Freeze' to join in your demonstration, you called upon the police to exclude them.

Dave Priscott led an inspector to the spot, and this officer duly read out the relevant section of the Public Order Act.

When the march moved off, eight police officers barred the way to the Young Socialists, who were told they would be arrested if they attempted to march. Naturally we went on to hold a meeting on the Town Hall steps to explain what had happened.

Your leaflet distributed to Young Socialists and Socialist Labour League members at the march is arrogant and unprincalling cipled. You had in fact written to the police telling them that other organisations and their banners would not be allowed in the march, and yet your leaflet has the impertinence to blame us for the intervention of the police.

By calling in the assistance of the police in this way you reveal a quite new stage in the development of the politics of the Communist Party.

It has long been our opinion that your policies stand in the way of the workers in their struggle for socialism. But to actually call in the forces of the capitalist state against other tendencies in the labour movement is a clear identification with the class enemy.

This was not an isolated incident. Earlier this year, members of our organisation were arrested and heavily fined after insisting on participating in a similar demonstration.

Recently in Rotherham your members, including Bob Wilkinson, who were part of a 'Peace in Vietnam' demonstration, pulled down their banners and went home without demonstrating at all because Young Socialists refused to haul down their banner 'Victory to the Vietcong'.

If it meant marching with Trotskyists, then they preferred not to demonstrate against the imperialist war! Who are the sectarians, you or us! !

This lining up with the forces of the capitalist state, in our opinion, flows naturally from the consistent failure of the Communist Party to fight for revolutionary leadership against the Labour leadership and the Labour government of Wilson.

Instead of characterising this government as an instrument of the class enemy you have put forward the theory that it is at least better than the Tories. Thus you help all those 'lefts' who want to avoid a fight against capitalism by appealing for loyalty to the Labour government.

But now you have actually worked openly with the police of this capitalist state against those who are in fact conducting police a consistent struggle against the capitalist policies of Wilson.

Your own banner carried the legend: 'Unity of the Labour left, militants in the Unions and the Communist Party can change Wilson's Tory policies'. • We will tell you one thing: unity of the police and the Communist Party against the Trotskyists will help to strengthen Wilson, without a shadow of a doubt.

But let us analyse your slogan. Does it make any sort of sense to demonstrate for left unity" and then to devote all your efforts outside of the Party membership to excluding other organisations.

We know that kind of unity: we are asked to pack up our own policy and our organisation entirely. So these are the conditions for unity?!

When we were in the Labour Party we fought for se cialist policies: despite the witch-hunts and expulsions and the banning BLANCO W. Paynter, Secretary.

Paynter in fact recommends in his next paragraph.

of our paper 'Keep Left' we won the majority of the Young Socialists for three successive years in battle against the right wing under both Gaitskell Wilson. They accused us of being splitters and called upon us to unite. .. behind Wilson !

We insisted, and we insist to which is in the interests of the working class is unity in struggle, in which Communists (and we regard ourselves as Communists) strive to take the struggle forward to the mobilisation of the working class in the fight for state power.

Your kind of unity is specifically designed to exclude those who fight for revolutionary policies, and it is a unity protected by the police.

This kind of, 'left unity', in which the participants accept the politics and bureaucratic control of Stalinism, was similarly maintained only by police repression, this time the police of the Stalinist bureaucracy, in Eastern Europe after 1945.

Everywhere the methods of bureaucracy are the same: to prevent above all the emergence of the workers behind such a leadership spells the doom of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in their hangers-on in the leadership of the other 'Communist' Parties, as surely as it does of the imperialists.

When Howard Hill referred to our members " fascists', Leeds demonstration as , he showed he had learnt nothing from the long history of Stalinism and the crisis which it brought to the USSR, Eastern Europe and China and to the workers' movement all over the world.

Have a whole number of Party members become so steeped in the opportunist politics of peaceful roads to socialism' that they must cynically revert to the epithets invented by Stalin, which their own leaders in the USSR now. themselves admit were based on torture and forced confessions ?

We for our part shall continue to work politically in the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolsheviks.

Above all we fight to build the independent revolutionary Marxist leadership. We will fight alongside all sections of workers struggle, whatever their political affiliations, in order to conduct the struggle for political leadership.

Your policy of left unity' is a waiting policy, hoping that with the betrayals of Wilson the workers will turn in desperation to your policies.

You hope that all the weak elements in the Parliamentary

THE PERUVIAN peasant leader Hugo Blanco is again facing the death sentence. He was originally sentenced by a military tribunal at Tacna on September 8 to 25 years' jail.

The defence appealed against the original sentence, and now the prosecution is calling for the death sentence on Blanco, claiming that he is guilty of premeditated murder. The appeal is now before the Supreme Council of Military Justice.

The British labour movement must continue to press for the immediate release of this heroic peasant leader, and • the others who were jailed in the first trial, by sending letters and telegrams of protest to the Peruvian Ambassador, Peruvian Embassy, 52 Sloane Street, London, S.W.1.

The union 'policy' is for 'unity of everybody'-meanwhile, accept closures.

Doesn't the "whole labour movement' include Wilson, Callaghan and Brown-and aren't they the ones whose policy is closures and unemployment?

Pit closures can only be stopped by a political fight against the right wing of the Labour Party and the TUC— didn't their actions in the seamen's strike show that?

Paynter is right on two points.

Pit closures are political acts.

Opposition to pit closures does involve a fight against the Labour government.

But Paynter and the Communist Party will not lead such a fight.

Instead they support the right wing against men like the Monckton miners when they put forward an absolutely correct demand, such as the demand for an inquiry into the finances of the Monckton collieries.

As the Labour government's attacks on the working class intensifies, the need for a new leadership becomes more and more apparent.

Gerry HEALY THE NEWSL Novemb er 26, 1966

In last week's article we outlined the development of the working class and the capitalist class in Greece since the end of the Civil War in 1949. 1963 marked a new stage in the development of the struggle between these classes. BY 1963 EMIGRATION from Greece was running at 100,000 a year (15,000 higher than the live births per year). Combined with some industrial growth this cut down unemployment and even created a shortage of unskilled workers in some sectors. Large numbers of workers retained left-wing political traditions, while many others were newly arrived from the villages and had not even joined the unions.

But the workers began to feel their strength again because of the demand for labour power, even though the unions were controlled by police agents and their right-wing supporters.

In the absence of organised mass-meetings or demonstrations by their own organisations, the workers attended the rallies called by the Liberals to further the demand for free elections.

But another development was more significant. Once it had been decided to call a General Election November 1963, as polling-day approached there was a great increase in the strike rate. 1963 showed a 16 per cent increase over 1962, and after the election victory of the Liberals in November there was a steep decline for six months.

It was after this lull that the Stalinists launched a campaign for free elections in the trade unions. The first demonstration they called brought a response from over 100,000 workers.

When the Stalinists tried to turn the rally into a • friendly parley with the Liberal Minister of Labour, they were shouted down. The workers present defended the Trotskyists against the physical attacks on them by Stalinist stewards.

STRIKE CHANGE This demonstration was followed by important changes in the nature of strikes in Greek industry. Of the strikes taking place in 1964 and 1965, one third lasted from 12 to 30 days, a great change from the short-lived disputes typical of the earlier period.

More than half the strikes were successful. Not only that: more and more strikes were in defence of union rights and not only for wages.

Again, in many strikes in the provinces, local peasants joined in the demonstrations of striking workers. In more and more cases the Stalinists clashed with strikers advising them to avoid militancy. Repeatedly strikes turned into demonstrations in the streets.

against the long period dominated by the petty bourgeoisie, it is now the workers who come on to the centre of the stage of struggle. This brings the poorer peasants closer to them.

On the other hand, Papandreou drew behind him large sections of the better-off peasants, the town bourgeoisie and the main body of students.

The Stalinists, completely subordinated to them, told the masses that reactionary measures of the Papandreou government were perpetrated only by particular right-wing individuals in the anvernment or in Papandreou's party. They argued that peaceful

The struggle against revisionism and for the continuity of the revolutionary movement, which has been fought long and hard in Greece as in the other sections of the International Committee, prepares us to take these opportunities.

Given these international perspectives, and basing ourselves on the analysis of the strength of the opposed classes, we should be in a position to make more precise the analysis of the stormy political events of the last few years and thus to arrive at a sharper understanding of the immediate tasks before Trotskyists in Greece.

In 1961 Greece became an associate member of the European Common Market. All the capitalist parties welcomed the move as providing export markets for agricultural products, and also attracting more foreign capital into Greece.

But at the same time a great uneasiness prevailed in capitalist circles. Unless they were able to change the pattern of internal investment from parasitical to industrial channels by 'modernising' industry then there was every danger of foreign capital completely swamping the native bourgeoisie.

The modernisation of certain sectors of agriculture would equip them to export to the European countries, and thus help the whole internal market. But would not the foreign investors, quicker off the mark, reap the benefits?

Further, the modernisation vine and olive cultivation threatened the disappearance of vast numbers of small peasant cultivators and the turning upsidedown of the class relations upon which capitalist "stability' depended.* These were the big problems underlying the splits within the Greek ruling class in recent years, all of them making even more difficult than ever the problem of dealing with the working class, wondering if its political revolutionary spirit would be reborn as the Civil War defeat receded into history.

As early as 1952 Winston Churchill had advised the Greek bourgeoisie to abandon the policy of 100 per cent repression, to give up their dominating fear of Communism. But the Greek bourgeois regarded this as premature.

Churchill understood better than they the international role of Stalinism.

And yet in another sense they were more right than he was, for it was the working class which had to be taken into account in the long run, and not only their Stalinist leaders, however historically important their betrayals: "The laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus' in the words of the Transitional Programme.

It was in the years following entry into the Common Market particularly that the Greek capitalists recognised the vital portance to them of the Stalinists, who, although banned under laws persisting since the Civil War, are permitted to work through the popular front EDA and other legal organisations. These Stalinists serve to separate the great militancy of the workers in the factories from the political crises and the 'struggle for democracy' This separation of economic struggles from politics is a line of the Stalinists in every country, as was seen particularly in the seamen's strike of 1966 Britain.

WEAK LINK

The international advisers of the Greek capitalists have no such illusions and they pay constant attention to the problem of economic and political stability of this very weak link in the chain of world capitalism.

For example in 1964, when the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) was consulted by the Greek government about the demands then current for democratisation of the unions, Spaak, the Belgian social-democrat, said on behalf of International Confederation of Free Trade Unions that there should be no relaxation of the police control of trade union organisations.

In 1965 the Common Market's economic advisers counselled deflationary policies to avoid the balance of payments crisis which was building up and drew attention to the measures this would require against the resistance of the working class. They understood very well that Greece had been drawn into the network of political and economic problems now facing every capitalist power.

The first hesitant steps of the Greek capitalists to 'get in on the act of the post-war expansion of capitalist production took them headlong into the plunge of this same international capitalism into the contradictions between national economies and international problems which has recently been expressed particuJarly in the 'liquidity' and 'inflation' crises.

All the accumulated class hatreds and the unresolved problems of Greek society since the Second World War were thrown into the melting pot by this development.

Having hesitate \ so long they had finally decid d-forced economic realities-to face risking the reappearance of the working class on the political scene. This came just at a time when all the elements were accumulating for the radicalisation of that class on a higher level internationally, and especially among the youth, from whom the revolutionary forces always derive their main strength.

Here then are the clues to the politics of the last six years, and to the perspectives of the Fourth International in Greece.

MILITANCY

Since 1961 growing militancy among the youth in the towns has been obvious to everyone. In 1963 the police murder of Lambrakis brought over 200,000 to his funeral—a massive political demonstration.

Against the background of this militancy of the youth and of the growing wave of strikes, the Stalinists in the EDA strove to channel everything behind the Liberals' demand for free elections. For this reason they sabotaged militant actions by the youth and the workers.

The Stalinists played another card in diverting this youth militancy: they set up the 'Lambrakis youth' as a "broad-left' movement without commitment to a single party or class. Very soon tnis organisation had 20-30,000 members, and made rapid strides in the impoverished youth of the peasant villages.

The Papandreou government elected at the end of 1963 announced better guaranteed prices to the peasants, limits to police repression and a few 'democratic concessions.

But these were sops to the peasants and the petty bourgeois behind which an attack on the working class was prepared by isolating it.

began the towns, using their tractors as weapons. They gained the

em be Healy taimen. o Michae Bandı

writes:

THE LABOUR MOVEMENT faces a grim 1967. There is now a distinct possibility that before Ig6o comes to an end the number of registered unemployed will have exceeded the three-quarters of a million mark.

The limited savings of those who were first in the unemployment queue will be nearing exhaustion at a time when prices are steadily increasing. The purchasing power of wages that are frozen is on the decline each week.

As the statement of the Political Committee of the Socialist Labour League has stressed (Newsletter, November 19) wage freezing has been transformed into wage cutting.

After the shakeout Within the large motor car plants, now that the first phase of the unemployment shakeout is over, reorganisation of the various departments is under way.

The first stage is, generally speaking, an attempt by the employers to create a pool of labour not attached to any department. This pool can then be allocated to either existing or new departments as the reorganisation gets under way.

In the meantime there are no bonus earning or piecework agreements covering the pool—it is ordinary time rates, take it or leave it.

There are examples where militant shop stewards are transferred to the pool, thereby being immediately separated from the section of workers whom they previously represented.

In a matter of weeks the division which is being created inside the plants will become the medium for driving down wage rates by attempts to foist new agreements on the workers under the guise of reorganisation. At the same time the threat of an army of unemployed signing on at the Labour Exchanges each week will be used to back up the authority of the employers and their foremen.

Towards Marxism Strange as it might seem, however, lt is not the growth of unemployment, the freezing of wages and the attempts at wage cutting which are by themselves responsible for the growing political disquiet within the factories and the trade unions.

To understand the present developments we must look a little closer at the past history of the British working class.

There has been in England a powerful attachment between the working class and their traditional organisations, the trade unions and the Labour Party. In spite of a whole series of betrayals since the beginning of the century, they have remained loyal to these movements.

In their minds, the hope remained that one day a solution pressure could push Papandreou's government in a reformist direction, democracy at home and neutralism abroad.

It was the strike struggles of 1963-64 which really marked the turn from the 'black decade' of the 1950s.

The great crisis and events of 1965 certainly brought on to the streets first the masses of the petty bourgeoisie and then after few weeks the unorganised working-class youth.

But it is vital to recognise that this awakening took place on the basis of the previous two and-a-half-years revival of working-class struggle.

In these years just before 1965 the Greek workers had begun to come into open conflict with their Stalinist leaders, even though this was not expressed in the form of new political formations and trade union leaderships.

It is this resurgence of the working class, and the fact that radicalisation working-class youth takes place against its background, Which must be the starting point for the strategy and tactics of Greek Trotskyists.

This radicalisation of youth, fed by the intensifying international crisis of imperialism and the linked crisis of the Stalinist bureaucracy, ofters opportunities everywhere for winning cadres for the construction of the Trotskyist revolutionary parties.

These were the perspectives of the 1966 Conference of the International Committee of the Fourth International, at which Greek Trotskyists were represented. to their problems could be found through the struggles of these organisations.

During the post-war period of the inflationary boom the most organised sections of the working class were able to improve their wages despite resistance from the employers.

Insofar as they thought of the future it was in terms of the return of a Labour government, which they believed would provide them with a more lasting solution to their problems through the Parliamentary struggle to apply socialist policies.

This was essentially the atmosphere in which the Labour government of October 1964 was elected.

Although the Labour leaders from the start began to prepare plans to attack wages, the full reality of what was happening did not become clear until the early Autumn of this year.

Now, all these illusions are being shattered. The period of the long compromise is drawing to an abrupt end.

Those very same Labour and trade union leaders in whom they placed their hopes are in the vanguard organising their age-old enemy, the lory employers, to fight the working class.

Wilson and his Cabinet are now seen as the people responsible for all the things such as unemployment and wage freezing which were previously associated with the Tories.

It is the full realisation that the very leaders in whom they had placed their trust have betrayed, and not what is happening itself, which lies behind the developments in the trade unions.

These have not yet been reflected inside the Labour Party because it is presently the most opportunist of the two major organisations. However, in the course of time they must be, under circumstances which will necessitate special attention from the Socialist Labour League.

Nature of the crisis It would be a mistake to imagine that this is an episodic crisis. Middle-of-the-road politicians and their fake-left hangers-on hope that in a few months Wilson will reinflate the economy and we will automatically return to full employment.

They forget that a basic source worseninresent crisis lies in the of the States capitalism in addition to the outmoded, uncompetitive nature of British economy.

Whether or not reinflation will again be introduced will be decided not in the City of London, but in Wall Street, and the position there grows steadily worse.

We must, therefore, prepare to understand more about the vast political changes which are now beginning to take place inside the working class.

The Prices and Incomes Act has tied the trade unions to the GREECE ( state, which has now become the chief and open protector of the employers in their opposition to wage increases. The Labour government and the state are capitalist institutions, therefore all struggles which are waged against their decisions will be political struggles.

A political struggle is essentially one which poses the problem of power.

What is the use of fighting the government if those concerned are not prepared to fight for power?

But that is precisely what the trade unions are unable to do. They are defensive organisations organised to operate within the framework of capitalism.

The problem of power can only be approached through the building of the revolutionary party, the Socialist Labour League.

Some problems It is at this point that a number of serious difficulties face the militant trade unionist.

He or she has been accustomed to working and fighting in a period of boom, and now the situation has completely changed. It is understandable, therefore, that they should engage in the same forms of industrial struggle as they have been used to over previous years. Herein lies the real danger.

In order to fight Wilson's rightwing Labour government, it is necessary to understand happening politically.

If we simply engage in purely industrial struggles we will be incapable of realising the significance of the problems ahead.

There is, today, very little room left for the non-political trade unionist.

If we engage in purely left trade unionism as against the conception of building the alternative revolutionary leadership we will be making just as serious a mistake.

Left trade unionism is just as inadequate as non-political trade unionism.

It consists at best of a policy of bluffing the employers, and at the same time trying to frighten the right-wing trade union leaders by left noises.

Not only does such a policy create illusions in the minds of workers, but it deliberately misleads them at a time when more than ever they need revolutionary political leadership.

The Socialist Labour League is in complete opposition to such a policy. We insist that more than ever it is necessary to politically prepare and train a revolutionary leadership within the trade unions for the purpose of taking power.

Next week:

The ENV strike The Stalinists' December Congress The policy of the SLL age At the same time as farm prices were raised Papandreou announced a 'wage freeze' in order to strengthen industry.

The workers were solidly 'left', Stalinists, their traditional ns 55 they remained loyal to the 1964 the EDA pal elences in.

the EDA vote increased. Strikes often turned into political demonstrations.

In July 1965, Papandreou resigned after a clash with the rightwing faction of the king and the court. In the giant demonstrations which followed, more and more workers clashed physically with the Stalinists who wanted to confine the struggle to support for the Liberals.

Among the masses the slogans went beyond this: •Plebiscite! Out with the King! Soldiers join the people!' Meanwhile the EDA and the Liberals insisted: 'Papandreou! Free elections!', and attempted to keep the demonstrators peaceful.

The governments appointed to succeed Papandreou fell after only a few days, and chaos threatened. A general strike called by the Stalinist and Centre Unions brought a 70,000 response, but was confined to a one-day protest.

By October the obvious failure of the Stalinists to give any political lead enabled the government to be stabilised at last and forced the mass of the workers off the streets. In fact they then carried through a number of extremely militant strike actions, particularly the public servants.

The government tried to ride the storm, giving some economic concessions but hitting hard at every political strike.

In December the government reimposed complete police trol in the unions, scared even by the rapid growth of the Stalinist unions 1965. The Stalinists have of course continued to agitate only for elections.

Of great importance, beginning in summer 1965 accelerating in 1966, was the outbreak of peasant struggles in reaction the political crisis especially to now worsening farm prices. This culminated in the great peasant demonstration and march on Salonika in August 1966.

Government action was swift: armed police and army motorised LETTER

The editor of The Newsletter has received the following letter from Nigeria.

DEAR BROTHER BANDA, At the annual district conference of our union, the Nigerian Stevedores and Dockworkers' Union, Mid-Western Region, which took place on October 25, 1966, the secretary informed the delegates in his secretariat report of The Newsletter sent to him by your organisation, which has the same ideology as our union, and how educative it is to every staff and members of our union in the Region. He also told them that students of higher learning in the town are also interested in reading The Newsletter every week.

The conference also unanimously adopted a motion congratulating the Socialist Labour League for providing The Newsletter in which workers' activities are being published. We also commend the effort of the Young Socialists and that of the editor of The Newsletter.

We also support the Liege demonstration against NATO and the war in Vietnam by the Young Socialists.

Convey our union's support to all the progressives in Britain and especially our brother Blue Union' Yours in the struggle of the working-class people of the world.

District secretary. divisions were immediately sent to the city. The conscript troops refused to act against the peasants. On entry to Salonika, the peasants received massive support from the workers and Lambrakis youth. Eventually order was restored after much fighting, in which there were 20 casualties.

Since the summer, the movement in the cities has again taken on more strength. Sections of workers from dustmen to nurses and bank clerks have taken militant strike action and the agitation among the small shopkeepers and traders has continued.

STUBBORN

There is an appearance of 'retreat' from the street fighting of last year; in reality the struggle has become stubborn and continuous among much wider struggles than were involved before the 'July events'.

The Stalinists have the role of separating the industrial from the political struggles, separating the youth into 'non-class' organisations away from the labour movement and separating the workers' struggles from the peasant discontent. The task of the Trotskyists is to build a party which can unite these struggles.

This means that the Greek Trotskyists must continue to take up in a principled way the fight against the Stalinists on all the political questions of the nation.

Above all revolutionary workclass youth must mobilised politically for a struggle against the union leaders and the Stalinists.

Organised work in the trade unions must be carried out from the point of view of defeating the Stalinist leadership and uniting the factory struggles with the great political issues before the Greek working class.

A programme for the peasants can only be put forward on the basis of a revolutionary orientation of the working class. Otherwise the peasant struggles will be dissipated in defeats.

An urgent task for the Greek Trotskyists is the launching of a revolutionary youth newspaper, to agitate on all the issues confronting youth.

From the work around this newspaper there can be the immediate perspective of a revolutionary youth organisation which can challenge the right wing and the Stalinists.

In this way revolutionaries Greece are playing their part in the fulfilment of the tasks decided at the Third Congress of the International Committee in 1966.

SPEAKERS FROM BRITAIN and France commemorated the 10th anniversary of the heroic struggle of the Hungarian working class in 1956 against the Stalinist bureaucracy at a meeting of over 400 London members of the Young Socialists and the Socialist Labour League and other young and adult workers last Thursday (November 17).

The lessons of the Hungarian revolution for the struggle of the international working class today were sharply drawn by G. Healy, national secretary of the Socialist Labour League, Pierre Lambert, secretary of the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste of France and Aileen Jennings, Editor of the Young Socialist newspaper Keep Left'. Michael Banda, editor of The Newsletter, was the chairman.

G. Healy told the enthusiastic audience: • WE ARE NOT here tonight to commemorate a memory of a revolution fought out for six weeks. We are here because this revolution lives very much in all the events and all the happenings that are now taking place in Britain.

I well remember when I came Young Communist League and had the privilege meeting a number of YCL members who were sent into Europe to do illegal work against the dictatorship in Hungary. Hungary at that time was known the White graveyard for communists went into Hungary and they lasted on the average months. Then they were prisoned, tortured and disappearterrible dictatorship which preceded the developments place after the end of the Second World War is something that every one of us should understand and know about in relation to capitalism.

When we talk of Hungary today we are talking of something to the regime of Horthy, not to return to the dictatorship of big capital, but to cleanse Hungary of this vile bureaucratic dictatorship.

The Hunarian Revolution was different from the Russian Revolution in 1917. There was no question that the Hungarian fighters opposed the economic reorganisation of the means of production-they defended this.

What they fought to do was to cleanse their movement of bureaucracy and dictatorship, to return to the Bolshevik tradition, to return to the kind of Party which lead the revolution of 1917.

I recently spoke to a convenor of a very large factory who came from Western Europe in the 1930s. He said that when he came to England he sincerely believed that the English working class would never take the revolutionary road.

They had so much order, so much taith in their organisations, that they would take the road to socialism through these organisations at some future time.

He never believed that what he had seen in Europe would take place in this country. But now it is different.

After a few months of the present Labour government an enormous change is taking place because the Labour government and the trade union leaders who were elected to carry forward the interests of the working class in the struggle against capital are Budapest had declared a strike and the whole character of what began as a revolt of youth against autocracy now took on a different character.

The big battalions of the working class now came into action. Workers who had appeared to e suttering the dictatorship, now came on the streets and joined the students.

And then we remember what happened after the second intervention when the tanks came over the bridges at Budapest and pumped shell after shell into the working people's homes.

They could not quench the revolutionary working class in Pierre Lambert action. The general strike held. This nameless number of people would not go back.

Now it was no longer just a few students. Now the working class fought on, deserted by everybody.

At the United Nations, the American John Foster Dulles declared that this was not an international question.

It is a lie to say that the American imperialists embarrassed the Soviet bureaucracy. They permitted the Soviet bureaucracy to go in and crush this revolution because American imperialism knows that a socialist revolution will rid them of their privileged positions.

It was under these conditions that the Hungarian workers fought on. But by December 6 the end was near.

At last the Soviet bureaucracy entered the countryside.

The workers' councils were arrested and carted off to concentration camps without trial. They were brutally treated. There are many still in jail today in Hungary without trial.

And what was the truth about this revolution? After all the investigations carried out by the Soviet bureaucracy there was not one single piece of evidence to demonstrate that there was an imperialist influence which had a hold on these workers. They stuck it out to the end for socialism.

The working class had been forgotten by all the Labour politicians. The middle class had forgotten it.

The real force that can change society is ignored.

The only movement all over the world that recognises the power of the working class and that recognised the power of the Hungarian working class is the Trotskyist movement; the International Committee of the Fourth International.

We recognise this great power and that is why we have never turned away from the fact that capitalism is a system of crisis.

Even though it may carry on isit is today back ears a sale crisis. The private ownership of the means of wealth is something which the working class in Britain is now beginning to move against.

Where was cowardly British Communist Party when the tanks were pumping shells into the workers' quarters in Budapest?

Some members protested.

But the Communist Party leadership justified everything the Russians did in Hungary. They justified everything that Stalin did in the Mocow Trials. They have justified every bureaucratic attack on the working class all over the world.

The Communist Party is the greatest party of hypocrites.

But the Communist Party will have to answer for Hungary.

The role of the Communist Party in relation to the working class in this country is the same treacherous role as it was in Hungary and in the Moscow Trials.

It is the idea of compromise with world imperialism, of doing a deal wherever they can as they did in Spain, as they did with Hitler in August 1939. And this type of opportunism has led the Communist Party into one attack after another against the working class.

Stalinism today is as treacherous as Wilson. Today in Europe if it were not for the French Communist Party, the Italian_Communist Party and the British Labour Party, we would make a great leap forward to socialism.

Any tendency which in any shape or form adapts itself to Stalinism or covers up for Stalinism is thoroughly corrupt and is not a working-class tendency. It is fighting the working class.

We will not be silent about what happened in Hungary, in the Soviet Union, in Vietnam or anywhere else.

That is what Trotsky taught us.

The development of Marxism will proceed without anything being covered up and we will give no concessions to those who want to crush it.

The working class has a long memory. It is much longer than the life of an average human being.

The memory of the working class begins when capitalist production begins. The memory of the working class in Britain is at least 350 years old.

So when the working class yoU Aileen Jennings speaking in front o moves into struggle it moves with this memory unconsciously strapped across its back.

Workers are forced to think under the conditions imposed on them by the system.

It is not true that the Hungarian workers will not be vindicated. bureaucrats, change.

The history of man is the history struggle to go forward into the light of the future. It is a socialist future end this exploitation of man by man to conquer the powers of nature in order to develop each person as a human being.

In this struggle for socialism the Hungarian workers will be vindicated because the bureaucrats will not be allowed to continue without the truth being told.

February 1956 Khrushchev made a speech in which he said, without naming names, that everything that Stalin did was crime against the working class.

At that moment we were proud to be Trotskyists. We felt that if we had done nothing else but keep the opposition to Stalinism alive until other youth could take up the struggle, then we had done our job.

We understood what Stalinisn meant and what it had done to the workers' movement.

The Soviet people move into he future while the bureaucrats move from one crisis to the next. NU% EVOLUTION RD SOCIALISA of the Hungarian Revolution banner The more imperialism gets into a crisis, the more its puppets go into crisis.

arde So lea people push forward; leading authors have protested against the sentences on Daniel and Sinyavsky. There is growing up Soviet Union this great opposition.

So when we commemorate it is because of the living things of today.

tion defeatedhe Hungarian revolu Lenin proved to the whole world that unless she truth are al party that tells times to the working class that prepares the working class for all the difficulties it has to face and that will not compromise with capitalism then the struggle will be defeated.

We must have a party that will train its members to be disciplined communists, teach them not to sell their principles for conneromise.

Leninism is above all else his torical truth. But the backbone working class. It is inseparable from the working class. It de. velops and is part of the living struggles and experiences of the working class.

We are intensely interested now in all the events beginning to unfold in Britain.

The working class is now coming on to the scene. The task is not to repeat the mistakes of Hungary but to learn this lesson: the workers will fight, they will give unqualified support to real leaders, to people who won't be frightened, who will build a real party, who will fight as we did year against the Prices and Incomes Act, against the war in Vietnam, for the nationalization of the basic means of production, under workers' control. Like we did when the terrible disaster occurred in Aberfan. That was a class question.

This is a class system. Now that this new situation is coming in Britain you have to answer one question.

Do not commemorate Hungary to Hungary Dre working as a memory.

but then turn part build this revolu king class here tionary party Help us to make the Hungarian people stronger when they rise again.

Teach them to do what we did in Liège-to campaign in the face of police provocation against all those who we m are aking is bes road ot revolutionary struggle for the construction of the revolutionars mise with ith capitalise no 3 витріо- party. the revolutionary and Hungarian the whole spirit of the volution will live for ever in the ang-class history. y WOTT.

P. Lambert, seretary of the OCI in France and a long time comrade in the Trotskyist movement, described the foun ding of the First International development of the theory of class struggle Marxism.

The struggles of the working class in the late 19th century cul minated in the Paris Commune From this struggle imortant lessons were developed whick the Bolshevik leader. was able to itself in was the unity of the working class struggle all over the world.

Lambert pointed out that the Stalinist bureaucracy had expropriated the victories of the revolution in same way that the trade union bureaucracy used rebetray the working class the same way that the revolutionaries must defend the trade unions against the ureaucrats must the conquests of 191: be defended.

Then Lambert described period of defeat for the working In France in 1936 the working 1938 sas bee beaten and Spain crusning the workers' revolution.

The Bolsheviks exterminated during the Stalin purge imperialism, Trotsky Wak murdered by Stalinist agents 'But in spite of world imperial ism, Stalinists dura SOCA lution, Lambert said. aculocials rene proletarian revo- will conquer new posiEast Berlin 1953 the lithe mad against workers raced bureaucracy. This action coinFrance one later, 5.5. cided with a general strike 1954, French imperialism was defeated in Vietnam at Dien Bien Ph We had to trot it ad to m become a material force. • in 1956 the Hungarian workers began build workers' councils. Their the state against imperialism, prost allime was the defence Lambert explained.

'Workers' delegates were subject to immediate recall. These workers were fighting for the elimiaon or lue parasitic bureau cracy, freedom of thought inside the camp of the working class, the creation of an armed militia and the suppression of the permanent olice force the Soviet Union had sent 1 its troops. out ther had refused fire and fraternised with the Hungarian workers Khrushchev had to witharaw these troops and send in others, explaining that they were going to fight fascism.

was ese ause they sara tin the struggle of the Hungarian workers problems which were their probsaid Lambert.

He went on to explain that the crisis is rinening for _The Soviet Union bureaucracy. In a country which was 110 Y advanced TeNS thousands of youth were knocking on the door of the bureaucracy.

upheavals were not confined to these countries. Imperialism was aware that these revolutionary acuons Worcink with upheavals in the West. That wand the raist tea napalm terrorised people victuall [ne bureau crat Gromyko was having dinner with Johnson in the United States The Chinese was a position peap out coe cistenese Chinese Communist Party bore the responsibility for

the murder of the Indonesian Communist Party.

But we say this to those who try to make profit out of these mistakes-look at what is happening in China' On the other hand the war in Vietnam is . a preparation for a war on China. US imperialism would not stop at Hanoi, he said.

The Chinese leadership's policy of socialism in one country could not defeat imperialism. The Red Guard felt this. They were going to the highest leaders, not with a rogramme, but with the words must fight with other methods'.

Events internationally were showing that it had been correct to answer Trotsky's call 30 years ago. In the ranks of the Fourth International many cadres had been tried out and many more infiltrated simply hoping for quick victory of the working class Such people did not understand the long struggle for consciousness.

Some tried to use the name of the Fourth International to explain that the bureaucracy could reform itself. The Pabloites justified the second intervention of the Soviet tanks in Hungary.

'In France and England we have demonstrated that the Fourth International lives. There can be no Marxism in our age without he rebuilding of the Fourth In. ternational. It is up to us and our discipline to convince the vanguard of the working class to build the Fourth International, he said.

A. Jennings, Editor •Keep Left', said that when the Hungarian Revolution took place many at the meeting were not active in the socialist movement.

But the full lessons of the courageous fight of the Hungarian workers against bureaucracy bec me much clearer through the ex eriences of the youth in the Lak our Party in the early 1960s.

"Tae Hungarian revolution was not a social revolution but a political revolution against Stalinist bureaucracy. The heroic struggle of the workers, students and youth was a definite mation of Trotsky's most brilliant Stalinist bureaucracy,' He explained that it was based lished on the property relations estabwould have be removed in order for a development towards socialism.

'The task of smashing the bureaucracy is the task of the working class. This is the basic principle which was proved SO correct in the Hungarian revolutionhe Hungarian revolution was an international question she said. Its historical significance affected every Young Socialist in Britain. Young Socialists had a basic affinity with the Hungarian working class in that they had both shared an experience of struggle against bureaucracy.

*From 1962 right through to 1964 we fought the bureaucracy of Transport House-the same bureaucracy which today plans in the Labour government to attack the working class through the wage freeze and anti-trade union legislation.

'We mobilised the unemployed working-class youth to fight for socialist policies against the Labour bureaucracy. Our campaign forced the Labour Party to run campaign against unemployment.

"Throughout our fight we were led by the theories of Trotskyism and Marxism. For this reason only were we able to bring about a crushing defeat for the Labour bureaucracy.

'Our victory took place right on the eve of the General Election in 1964 and the effects of our success have been widespread. Ours was a victory over one of the most highly-organised Labour bureaucracies in the world. Hence our determination to build from this achievement a socialist youth movement on a mass scale.

"Today we celebrate the Hungarian revolution under much more favourable circumstances than when it took place. Today capitalism is in an insoluble international crisis.' The working class was rapidly becoming more and more radicalised as its basic conditions were threatened. Everywhere youth were to the fore in the struggle against imperialism and bureaucracy.

'Trotskyism shows itself to be force in Western Europe through the experiences of the YS and our comrades in Révoltes in France,' she said.

"The Liège demonstration in Belgium on October 15 reflected the enormous changes which have taken place within the working class. The Fourth International mobilised a contingent of 900.

"Taking the Hungarian banner on the demonstration was very important for us. We have to see the struggle of the working class as being international in which the experiences of the Hungarian revolution were vital.

"The police intervened to ask us to take down the banner on behalf of the revisionists and the Stalinists, because these people far from wanting the defeat of imperialism, assist it to continue and betray the interests of the working class.

"The Young Socialists see the question of the victory of the workers and peasants in Vietnam being inseparable from the victorious struggle of the working class over the bureaucracy.

'Hungary showed the power of the working class. The main lesson emerging from that struggle is the need for a revolutionary leadership. We know the working class will fight. Our task is to build the revolutionary leadership which will take the working class forward.

different from those times. Hungarian Communist Party had thousands of self-sacrificing members who fought in all manner of conditions against the capitalist dictatorship.

Then after the war when capitalism collapsed as a result of the defeat of the Nazi armies they hoped that with the coming of peace the Hungarian Communist Party would institute socialism, that it would bring the working class forward into the society for which so many had died and that in doing this it would write a most brilliant chapter in living memory of those who had died under capitalism.

But this did not happen be. cause the Communist International under the leadership of Stalin had degenerated into the opposite of a revolutionary international movement.

Stalin had now instituted ar iron-tight bureaucracy. All criticisms, all debates, all discussions, differences-everything crushed, under a police regime An so when these Hungariar Communists looked ahead to the building of communism in Hunpointed because instead of social- bitterly disapin Hungary the same kind of dictatorship which Stalin had foisted on the Soviet people was foisted on Hungarians by Rakosi and by the other bureaucrats representing Moscow This was a terrible blow to all communists had fought for socialism in Hungary and they lived under this for a considerable number of years.

They suffered oppression-with secret police earning lighest wages in the country They saw the poverty of the working class—unable to answer back, with no trade unions represent them. They saw the countryside where the peasants lived in misery and they waited for an opportunity not to go back now in the front line of the fight against the working class.

They are driving down wages and working conditions, tossing thousands of men out on the streets, allowing prices to go up, allowing profits to go on without any interruption-and allowing the speculators to make millions of pounds day after day.

A change is going to take place because those leaders who the working class in Britain believed would carry the country forward to socialism are now attacking the working class and this is setting up an enormous resistance, an enormous hostility against leaders who are doing the dirty work for the Tory party, just as Rakosi did the dirty work for the Stalinnist bureaucracy.

This is where the Hungarian Revolution meets the present situation which is developing Britain.

We are on the threshold of the beginning of the English Revolution. The Labour Party is no longer the solution for the problems of the working class. Its leaders are the same bureaucratic gang of privileged traitors who have crept into the workers' movement and who have taken control and used it in the interests of the Tory Party.

They are the fifth column of the Tory Party in the Labour and trade union movement. Because the working class are now going to fight they will fight with few friends.

What really happened in Hungary?

A group of students called a demonstration, marched through Budapest and the demonstration grew and grew.

At the end of the evening, after some poems and ballads had been spoken, there were workers gathering around wanting to do something.

Suddenly the news came that biggest industrial centre in FIVE WEEKS after the Liège demonstration, a report has appeared in the Militant, weekly paper published by the Socialist Workers' Party in the United States. / Mary Alice Waters who describes herself as 'a participant at Liège' goes to great lengths to try and prove that the Young Socialists were sectarian when they carried a banner supporting the Hungarian Revolution.

'Unfortunately, she writes, 'there were also one or two sour notes struck during the course of the weekend. The British Young Socialists carried a banner proclaiming "Long Live the 1956 Hungarian Revolution".

contingent of about 150 Belgian Communist Youth seized upon this banner as a convenient pretext for walking off the line.

The leaders of the British Young Socialists, instead of recognising that the banner was an unnecessary obstacle to building a united-front demonstration in defense of the Vietnam revolution, and instead of seeing the walk-out of the Communist Youth as a defeat for such a united front, saw the wnole episode as a victory for themselves?

Two important conclusions arise from these remarks. The first concerns the United Front and the second what actually happened at Liège. Comrade Trotsky wrote about the united front in 1922 in the following way:

'We broke with the reformists and centrists in order to obtain complete freedom in criticising perfidy, betrayal, indecision and the half-way spirit in the labor movement. For this reason any sort of organizational agreement which restricts By AILEEN JENNINGS Editor, Keep Left our freedom of criticism and agitation is absolutely inacceptable to us. We participate in a united front but do not for a single moment become dissolved in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment. It is precisely in the course of struggle that broad masses must learn from experience that we fight better than the others, that we see more clearly than the others: that we are more audacious and resolute. In this way, we shall bring closer the hour of the united revolutionary front under the undisputed Communist leadership! Now let us turn to the Belgian entrist paper, 'La Gauche', edited y Mary Alice's Pabloite friend, rnest Mandel. In its issue dated Ictober 22, 1966, it spoke about behaviour of the Young talinists at Liège as follows: "The Young Communists (Moscow tendency They had shown their agreement with the slogans of the demonstration but found themselves confronted with an unforeseen situation at Yser Square. The Young Socialists held up a huge banner for the glory of the Polish and Hungarian revolutions of 1956.

The Belgian Communist groups threatened to leave then if the banner was not removed.

We were in a delicate situation.

On the one hand, we could not tolerate unforeseen banners among the official slogans, on the other hand it was not possible to remove the banner without unleashing a battle.

Basically, even if we had used means to remove it, we would never have wanted to remove such a banner.

As for the Communist group, the only sound attitude would have been to demonstrate with us on the agreed slogans.

Instead of that, the leadership of the JCR gave the order to leave the demonstration which allowed us to appreciate the weak state they were in and the dissensions inside their movement. More than one Young Communist did in fact participate, despite everything, in the demonstration and the meeting as they understood the importance of this new collaboration which was more important than the incident in question!

So, really, the crime of the Young Socialists boils down to the fact that they accept Trotsky's definitions of the United Front and in applying it at Liège they split the Stalinists.

What a terrible thing to do Mary Alice?

If the SWP had educated you in the tradition of Trotskyism you would have not had to exaggerate the number of Belgian young Stalinists who left the demonstration.

You say 150, the French Pabloite JCR say 100, the Belgiar IGS, who should know, say nothung.

Really, there were only a handful who left the march. The Young Socialist contingent was 00 strong, almost tour times as nuch as the stalinists, even if we accept your exaggerated figures.

Perhaps, the task of the SWP, which used to be a Trotskyist party, consists today in depicting the Stalinists as numericall more powerful than they actually are.

November 26, 1

_BY SYLVIA PICK_ 'WE SHALL WIN; we've got to win. If we don't we shall lose everything we've built up in the last nine years? So said a shop steward of the Longbridge car delivery drivers, on picket duty at the entrance to one of the storage compounds at Austin's BMC factory.

The Longbridge drivers have been on official strike against redundancy for two months. Theirs was the first strike to be called against the unemployment crisis forced on workers by the Wilson government's freeze policies.

In the first few days of the, struggle strikers forecast that it would be a long job and might prove tough and grim.

Their tenacious fight has involved them in very real financial hardship. They have been receiving f4 per week strike pay eked out by public assistance. With each week that passes the problems of making ends come anywhere near to meeting grows more unmanageable.

They know their strike has also caused hardship to thousands of car production workers, who have been intermittently laid-off from the Austin factory as the storage compounds become choked with cars which cannot be moved. They speak with deep appreciation of the solidarity of many of these workers.

'See those flats over there?' asked the pickets. 'There's bloke living in one of those who brings us tea twice a day. He's one of the blokes laid-off because of our strike' Sympathy gifts • They also tell of gifts from other local sympathisers. Coke for the stove in the hut they have built to make picket-duty more bearable as the days get colder. Sausages to fry for hot snacks.

The drivers speak with contemptuous disgust of the terms offered last weekend by their employers, the Longbridge Group of Delivery Agents (LGDA).

These terms were put forward at a meeting sought by the employers themselves. Their doing so gave rise to hopes that they intended to offer substantial concessions to the drivers in order to get a return to work.

"They offered to take back 75 of the 333 redundant men for one month only, during which time the question of redundancy • Was to be discussed. They must think we're daft. That would have given them a chance to clear the compounds: then they would have announced that the position was unaltered and the redundancies must stand,' one alleged.

"They also made the condition that there must be total mobility between one type of job and another. This would have meant that a driver could be switched an hourwe should our guaranteed week. All the improvements in pay and conditions which we have built up would have been broken down. We wouldn't have been much better than slaves of the firms.' They described conditions in the working lives of delivery drivers up to nine years ago, when they became unionised.

At that time a driver was paid 15s. for taking a car to Newcastleon-Tyne from Birmingham.

No security In order to make a decent living he had to do two such journeys in 24 hours, leaving him little time for rest. High-speed driving was often a necessity. There was no security of regular employment, no guaranteed week.

From a tough poorly-paid job hey had won pay and conditions omparable with other jobs in the Midlands.

A new factor emerged in the dispute early this week when it was rumoured (though denied by MC) that two outside groups f delivery agents were to be allowed to start moving vehicles from the Longbridge factory.

Delivery drivers say there never has been any written contract between BMC and LGDA which prevented other firms from moving cars from Longbridge. All that has existed has been a 'gentleman's agreement'.

How binding is such an agreement likely to prove between gentlemen' when compounds are choked with cars which cannot be moved?

An abortive attempt to underCORRECTION C. Slaughter's article in The Newsletter of November 12 on the ideas of the Rev. lan Paisley contained two printing errors which alter the sense. The relevant sentences should read as follows:

'Fascism is not defined by its ideological content ... ' and 'Paisley's movement, whatever its future in Ulster, whether or not the dominant bourgeois interests decide his political and military organisation as its weapons against the working class, is a warning to the labour movement of all Britain and Ireland.' Registered at the G.P.O. as a newspaper Published by The Newsletter: s.w.4 mine the strike on Monday ended when pickets were reinforced at the Reabrook Road entrance to the premises of • one of the IGDA members firms. About 30 strikers arrived at the depot saying that they 'couldn't go on much longer' They were persuaded by the pickets to disperse without holding their proposed meeting or trying to enter.

Mr. R. Carrington, LGDA chairman, was at the same time reported as announcing: 'It needs only a few delivery men to go vehicles again, can start moving back and we Striking drivers declare that BMC has already stated that work for 75 per cent of their number could be found, in spite of cut-backs and the economic freeze. They are asking, therefore: 'Why does IGDA find it necessary to sack 55 per cent?' They are demanding a withdrawal of all redundancy notices.

The weakness in the leadership of this strike has been that the Transport and General Workers' Union has made no attempt to enlist the support of car production workers in a drive for a swift victory.

From the beginning the strike has been restricted to a union dispute, affecting only transport themselves see it as a wider issue, involving struggle against government policies.

SHEFFIELD RENT REBATE SCHEME FOR SHEFFIELD Newsletter Correspondent SHEFFIELD CORPORATION housing department institute a rents rehate scheme in the citv.

MAIT да Several months ago the Labourdominated council sent questionnaires to all 63,000 houses inquiring about family income. Sixty per cent of the tenants returned the forms and there was a considerable hostility in the city's labour movement to any suggestion of a rebate scheme.

Shardlows engineering workers, for example, set up a 'rents committee' which advised workers to ignore the questionnaire.

A report from the city treasurer indicates on current estimates that by 1970-1971 there will be deficiencies which could reach _ 641,000 as far as the city's housing programme is concerned.

The Corporation raised the rents in December 1965 in order to make up for deficiencies. However, events over which the city has no control have been building up at local level.

The Selective Employment Tax, which has pushed up the cost of building, the rise in the bank rate from 6 to 7 per cent and the Housing Subsidies Bill, which was halted by the election, and could have stabilized interest speaks rates on housing to 4 per cent are all factors which have forcec the Corporation to revise their present rent structure.

Of course the proposals outlined by the housing management committee place the burden of this crisis on the tenants and the working class.

The proposals put forward are really a means test.

There are alternative schemes, one based on a 2s. 7d. increase, and the other on current rental values. The latter would be reached on the basis of the 1963 Valuation List.

Favoured scheme

It is apparent from the treasurer's report that the second scheme favoured. adopted, those tenants able to pay full rent would pay an average increase on present rents of 22 per cent—7s. 3d. weekly.

For those tenants who cannot afford the new rents, based market values, there are two rebate schemes.

The first limits the rent to one seventh of the gross family income. If the total weekly income is less than €10, the fraction would be one-fifth after a deduction of f3.

The second scheme involves a guaranteed minimum subsistence income to each tamily aiter paying the rents.

These schemes are of course a thinly - disguised method of raising the rents and they ignore the "prices' point of the prices and incomes policy.

Rent increases of this size will come at a time when short-time working and unemployment are affecting the steel industry and a struggle in the working class must be prepared.

It is rumoured that certain left councillors - will oppose the scheme, but this can only be a token strugglesture unless a serious government and for the nationalization of the banks and building societies is waged.

The role of the Communist Party in Sheffield over this question is as yet unclear.. They are participating in a ring-round' of local councillors at the moment. asking various people to vote against the scheme.

The real answer to the question lies in the powerful organisation of the working class.

The 'rents committee' at Shardlows was a step in the right directie to Med in cemen tees sy and These committees should an all-out struggle waged against the wage freeze, rents rises and unemployment.

This is the policy of the Young Socialists and it was these poliwhich the YS Socialist Labour League marched through Sheffield last Saturday (November 19).

Russia and Eastern Europe, and at Fairfield shipyard THE TEN-MONTH-OLD industrial peace at Fairfields shipyard, Glasgow, was shattered by the strike of 130 boilermaker apprentices demanding that increases given to the journeymen as part of a deal made in a 'productivity agreement' between management and unions should also be given to them.

Fairfields was one of the few industrial establishments allowed to go ahead with a wage increase after the wage freeze was introduced by Wilson earlier this year.

But the increase is linked to sweeping changes in the traditional manner of operating in the yards where given trades were always kept to certain well-defined jobs and were strictly demarcated from other trades.

abolishedractice has long been in European yards but until this year has remained within yards on the Clyde and in other parts of Britain.

The shipyard owners and the Wilson government think that a few shillings extra in the wage packet is well worth the expense if holes can be blown in the trade union wall of 'craft protection'.

One thing that the Fairfields agreement is to management have their way is the right of certain crafts to carry higher earnings than others.

They also plan to reduce the apprentice training period fron five to four years.

This will obviously be taken up by other yards which have also begun to agree to similar agreements with the aid of the Boilermakers and other union leaders. The result is that giant steps will be taken in the immediate future to break down the craft nature of shipyard work and produce ships by labour more like the way cars are produced.

Once the technical problems are worked out this becomes a definite possibility, provided that the inions can be forced to agree to the necessary changes.

Only strugglers So far the apprentices are the only section of workers which has entered into struggle to oppose the management The apprentices previously struck work for two weeks but che yard o it a le are in.

join the struggle.

They expected this decision woul e taken at a mass meeting held a week ago.

To their disgust only a one-day token stoppage was. called The announcement of this weak lecision was greeted with hoot f derision and angry shouts trot the youth.

"he strike decision was calle ff the verv next dav so that th apprentices had no choice but themselves to resume their strike on the Monday morning.

Despite appeals by union officials they remained firmly opposed to resuming work until their demands were met.

All apprentices have been sent a copy of an apprentice charter which makes a number of promises of pay increases What the charter and the productivity agreement seem also to mean is that certain trades and apprentices will lose a percentage of their earnings.

action of the youth at Fairfields is extremely important party and in the trade union bureaucracy will be afraid of losing their influence and will be attracted by your apparent closeness to the 'strength' of the Soviet bureaucracy.

As in the 1930's, you long for the days when, in the aftermath of defeats for the working class, middle-class illusions about "peace' and general reforms can make some sort of popular front in which everyone will agree to exclude and attack the revolutionaries, the Trotskyists.

You miscalculate! This time the betrayals of Wilson come atter period of full employment and high expectations in the working class, whereas MacDonald sold out after 1926 and the subsequent unemployment.

This time Trotskyism grows in number and influence, and it has the strongest political youth movement in Britain, or in Europe for that matter.

Your-line-up with the police at the Leeds demonstration is part of the fear-stricken response of your whole political movement to this growth of the revolutionary forces.

You will meet us in every struggle, in every strike and every demonstration, and the more you call the police the more steeled will our members become through their experience of Stalinism in action. And the more your own members in the for the whole of the trade union movement on the Clyde.

The Fairfields experiment was launched as 'socialism'. It is nothing of the sortit by despite the blessing given to Wilson government, the McGarveys and the Communist Party trade union officials on the Clyde.

The shipyard owners are desperately searching for a means to beat their foreign competitors. To do this they must reduce costs and modernise their yards.

Despite closures during the last number of years most of the shipyards on the Clyde are in deep difficulty.

John Browns has failed for the last year to show a profit on the shipbuilding enterprises; Stephens shipyard a million pound loss; Fairfields saved from bankruptcy only by government loans of one million pounds.

Capital amassed

Consortiums are being set up to amass the necessary capital needed to build larger building stocks and dry docks to take the size of ships which can be produced in foreign yards.

To get the shipyard owners out of the red the Fairfield 'experiment' was launched and trade unions, Communist Party members, Labour MPs, left and right, assembled to launch the fake "socialism'.

Shop stewards were sent for braining as work-study experts to a school lent by the Electrical Trades Union at Esher.

Militants who were not inclined to accept were made "redundant'.

Funds made available from the coffers of the trade unions, so that their own members could be exploited more expertly than before!

The apprentices have blown a wide hole in this farce so that the Fairfields model will never be the same again.

Later this week 16 MPs are visiting the yard to inspect the 'new model shipyard' where trade unions jointly capitalism.

they the yard they will walk under the huge board which announces to all and sundry that 'productivity starts here' These MPs must be told to go back to parliament and to fight for the nationalization of Fairfields and the whole shipbuilding industry.

Restore the wage differentials until such time as an apprentice conference has been called at which the whole question of the new Fairfield scheme be reviewed.

Operate elected yard committee.

lling police Communist Party and the Young Communist League will call you to account.

We understand very well what led you to call in the police. We know also that the coming struggles of the working class will give many more opportunities for these lessons to be learned by thousands of workers, young and old.

The Communist movement in Britain will win the leadership of the working class in Britain from the reformists, but this movement will be led by the Young Socialists and the Socialist Labour League in a fight against those who blacken the name of Communism by . collaborating with the police against us. fore repeat tons we ainst ade against the employing class and against the right-wing Labour leaders. To us, 'left unity' , if it means anything, means a struggle against the enemy class and its agents in the labour movement.

Over your heads, we call upon all members of the Communist Party and Young Communist League to renounce the actions you took on November 5 in Leeds, and to take the road of revolutionary struggle against the class enemy, to return to the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky.

Yours etc.

Jean Kerrigan.

Committee member for Yorkshire).

By our Sheffiele FORTY Young Socialists trom Sheffield and other Yorkshire areas marched through the busy centre of the city on Saturday (November 19) and demonstrated outside a Labour Party conference at which Richard Crossman was speaking on the Labour government and its policies.

The YS carried posters and banners against the wage freeze and unemployment. Also there were posters opposing the rent rebate scheme to be introduced by Sheffield Corporation housing department.

The demonstration was watched with interest in Sheffield because of the introduction of short-time working and the threat of unemployment in the steel industry.

Apologist

Inside the meeting Crossman played the role of apologist for the policies of Wilson. He lavishly praised Labour's 'social policies' , education, housing, hospitals and pensions.

This social programme, he said, depended on the economic policy of the government, the ability to get the economy under control. He held out a gloomy prospect: either we accept wage freezing and the trade union laws and a certain amount of unemployment, or very high unemployment and inflation.

And no other clear alternative came from the meeting, except from Young Socialists delegated from their trade union branches.

They called for the nationalization of BMC with workers' control. Many Labour Party THE FOLLOWING shop stewards from Pressed Steel Fisher Ltd., Ward End Works, Birmingham (formerly known as Nuffield Metal Products) wish to be dissociated from a report in the November 19 issue of Thè Newsletter concerning an officiallysponsored shop stewards' course:

S. G. Jefferson (AEU), E. W. Hanson, E. Smith, R. A. Sabell, J. Millard (T&GWU).

They do attend a course of basic studies for trade unionists in industrial relations at the Birmingham University extramural department, but were not in the course reported. We wish to apologise to these shop stewards. By our Sheffield Correspondent Correspondent members agreed with this policy.

In the field of foreign policy, Crossman tried to explain the government's actions over Rhodesia by claiming that there was no popular resistance to Smith's regime.

(Yet it has been acknowledged that there is a strict censure of reports from Rhodesia of armed resistance and strike action against the regime.) -Certainly it was clear that Crossman had moved even further to the right and that all kinds of issues, such as pit closures and unemployment are going to be raised inside the Labour Party.

The Socialist Labour League and the YS will be able to attract many supporters from the trade union movement in a fight against the policies of Wilson, who is supported by Crossman. open letter - CP answered on ca An