Brezhnev call to action

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BREZHNEV and his East European understudies have recently been demanding that their statecontrolled 'trade unions' should start being more vigorous and militant for their members. The union functionaries are not doing their proper job - after Solidarnosc - in the division of labour between the components of the bureaucratic caste.

Division of labour it is -for in Stalinist society social autonomy by any group is a Kuron s AS THE Jaruzelski regime moves to formally dissolve Solidarnosc, Jacek Kuron has called for the armed overthrow of the bureaucracy.

Kuron, founder of the Workers' Self-Defence Committee [KOR] and a major political influence in Solidarnosc, had long argued for a reformist, step-by-step policy. Now the experience of Jaruzelski's brutal crackdown has pushed him back closer to the revolutionary socialist ideas he originally advocated in the 1960s.

soon power must pass to the younger men of your threat.

"Cadres", as J.V.Stalin put it, "must decide every. thing" • Or, as his successor Khrushchev put it a generation later at the end of the 1950s: 'Spontaneity is the main danger"

Bureaucratic, hierarchical 'party' control permeates and moves or immobilises all the organs of society, simultaneously mummifying them and turning them into petrified bastions of s rethink Likening the martial law to an 'occupation' , Kuron wrote in a Solidarnosc underground newsletter: "I advocated the principle of non-violence in my opposition activity for many years.

'But nowadays I consider the overthrow of the occupation by a mass operation the lesser evil.

"I think that such an action should take the form of a coordinated attack on all centres of power and information in the country" bureaucratic control.

The bureaucracy bases its claim to historical validity on adapting the historic claims Marxism makes for the working class. It substitutes itself for the working class. The pseudounions are an arm of state power, but also act to inhibit working class action because they occupy the social space that trade unions would occupy.

The workers are faced with a nightmare world in which things are not what they are named as, do not do what they are supposed to do, and go through rituals designed to confuse and mislead.

Thus we get the scene of the boss, the actor-manager who allocates the parts in the bureaucratic parody, telling his trade unions - if you don't oppose me more noisily, I'll take your licence away or replace the leading actors.

It would be comic if not for the jailing and torture of real trade unionists, and the massive repression of the working class which the pseudo-unions facilitate.

The British labour movement should sever all connection with the Brezhnevlicensed 'unions' , and help the Russian and East European workers to build real trade unions.

----- pull-quotes -----

You know, Yuri, I'm not getting any younger... and

ISAID POWER MUST PASS TO THE YOUNGER MEN