EEC vote-move to left?

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Led utility like the NCB farm out important contracts to firms like Scotts with no control by the NUM?

• How can suppliers to nationalised industries be brought under social control and ownership?

• And why are capitalists able to apply for Temporary Employment subsidies when they simply intend to use it as a tactic to weaken workers resistance to final closure?

However, it is important that such an inquiry should be run by elected rank and file committees, backed up by their own advisers.

An inquiry under the aegis of Boyd and Duffy is unlikely to carry the struggle forward.

Secondly, such an inquiry should be seen as an addition and a stimulus to a firm fight for support action by other workers, not as a substitute for it.

The interview with the AUEW officials was also interesting. homogeneous red-hot revolutionaries, straining at the leash to get at the capitalists, held back only by a totally reactionary, homogeneous apparatus.

The same kind of pressures that affect full-timers affect the ordinary steward to a lesser degree. The difference is that the steward workers with his/her members, has the same material interests as them, and is recallable by them.

Workers like those at LSE, slow off the mark as they might be, will in the end fight harder than their left-wing full time officials - who in the end will put the survival of their own function in the organisation first.

The categories 'rank and file' and 'bureaucracy' are still important, but Socialist Organiser needs to think more about their interrelationship.

How about some articles on this?

CAROL HOBBS, Bolton. THE TUC's move to a harder line on withdrawal from the EEC has been reported in all the press as a shift to the Left. But why? The TUC was not counterposing a Socialist Europe to the EEC, but a capitalist Britain. And what's left-wing about that?

Liebknecht - the main enemy enemy is at home.

For some people on the Left, withdrawal from the EEC • makes sense because it is linked to a plan for siegeeconomy import controls, which they see as the keystone of a left-wing economic policy. Yet many on the Left reject the import control policy as nationalist - and still support withdrawal from the EEC! Why?

lan McCalman (Socialist Organiser 51) has come up with one of the most contrived arguments yet: we should support withdrawal because the EEC Commission would prevent a Lett Labour government subsidising the steel industry, or nationalising other industries.

Not hostile The short answer to lan is that the EEC is not hostile to industrial subsidies - it organises them on a huge scale. The EEC has presented no obstacle to the new French government's nationalisation programme, which is bigger than anything suggested by the leaders of our Labour Left. And in any case the EEC Commission has practically no powers to impose its will on EEC member governments.

But that is all beside the main point. There is no reason at all to suppose that capitalist rationalisation of the steel industry in an isolated Britain would be less devastating than in the EEC framework.

Our answer to the EEC plans for the steel industry should be an international struggle for a workers' plan, not a nationalist programme of getting Britain out of the EEC and leaving steelworkers in other EEC countries to find their own answers (presumably by demanding subsidies and protectionist policies from their respective governments).

And, in line with Marxist principle, "The main enemy is in our own country" , we should focus our fire on the British Steel bosses and the Tories - not allow them to divert blame to the bogeymen in Brussels.

Real anti-capitalist measures by a workers' government in Britain would of course be opposed by the EEC Commission, and by all the ruling classes it represents - not because of Clause so-and-so of the Treaty of Rome, but because of class interest. But the serious enemies of such measures would be found in the House of Lords, the monarchy, the top ranks of the civil service, the army, the police, NATO, etc. The EEC Commission and the. Treaty of Rome would not figure in anyone's mind as important props of capitalism.

And the task of a workers' government would not be to cut Britain loose, but to link up with the workers' movements in Europe and extend the struggle for its anti-capitalist policies internationally.

In the elections for the EEC Parliament, : French revolutionary socialists ran an exemplary campaign under the slogan, "Long live Workers' Europe - without fatherlands or frontiers" That should be our answer to the EEC - not "Britain out!"

COLIN FOSTER London working class on one side and the bourgeoisie and liberalism on the other. It is clear that today the Mojahedeen have made their choice - Bani Sadr is their president!

Long live Revolution!

Long live Socialism!

Student supporters of the Unity of Communist Militants in England.

Khomeini