[WOMEN'S FIGHIBACKO 24 OUT THEAll pro-working class organisations…]

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WOMEN'S FIGHIBACKO 24 OUT THEAll pro-working class organisations should be aware of the dangers on the 'law and order' question, as British capitalism rots on its feet. Both disciplinarian and liberal 'solutions' are mostly at our expense.

Steve Bundred (SO, April 14) says: "I am not prepared to wait for socialism to get protection... At present the police are failing to do this and wasting their resources on political surveillance, preparing for demonstrations and the like"

I think this is basically true. Certainly, the capitalist state should not release the Yorkshire Ripper, Spandau prison should not release Hess. And it is scandalous that victims, often poor, rarely get recompense from thieves or assailants.

By-product But, outside of specific cases, there is a limit to what we can do about it under capitalism. Present police protection' is a by-product: it is a result of our class enemy needing an independent force, in reality, a racist, scab force, to stand aboverus, to control us.

If the police stop wasting their resources' this will still not be good news for black people, trade unionists or rape victims. I WAS a bit sickened by the Money Programme attack on the WRP but Sean Matgamna's 'article' in SO (March 24) - was JaI Worse.

The WRP, like it or not, is a legitimate section of the progressive and revolutionary movement - legitimate because any recognition for their party and its programme has been hard fought for over many years. Their paper and their cadres have been built painstakingly over the last 20 odd years.

There has been no 'rags to riches' rise in fortunes that I have witnessed (and incidentally I have and have had serious disagreements with the WRP and its predecessor the SLL, confronting them both politically änd physically from time to time as well as standing shoulder to shoulder with them when the common class enemy thought to attack us).

Matgamna's call for thorough investigation into the links of the Workers Revolutionary Party ... with various Arab ontea nl to FROM:

IuD Landseer Rd. London N19 Surely the alternative policy to the current State clampdown is... no State clampdown!

In your Editorial (SO, April 14) you point out the increased tendency of the police to become an unconstitutional force, ultimately as the army became in Chile. I must take issue with your conclusion. You ask the labour movement to fight "to defend existing rights and existing controls over the police and extend them" ... by campaigning for elected police authorities.

This is clearer than calling for 'public accountability' (SO, Where We Stand), which is simply misleading. To suggest that an administrative body, elected or not, can effectively 'restrain' the police is highly illusory and dangerous.

(...) Our campaigning experience bears this out. Local community participation at our meetings in Leeds is largely based on lack of faith in the 'supervisory body' strategy. Everyone knows that this would just be a cover for 'police liais, that is, police-collaboration.

Many local black people have already had their lives made a misery with the help of liaison governments' is nothing more nor less than approval for the capitalist state's witch-hunting attack upon the WRP.

The final paragraph of his article making such a call tries to redeem itself by sticking on a sentence "a labour movement investigation' - obviously a last minute thought that it should be a labour movement investigation.

When the right wing, pro-capitalist elements in the Labour Party started the investigation into the Militant, did we reject outright any such investigation, or did we call for a labour movement investigation into the Militant?

We opposed the investigation regardless of very serious disagreements with Militant. Any investigation or call for investigation at this time only supports the right and pro-capitalist elements.

Your call for an investigation (into this dirty Arab gold, filthy foreign connections, and paid spies and agents) not only aids the Dear Sir, As a formi of 18 and late committees.

(2) You refer to Chile. Comrades from Latin America are as baffled as I am: How would the democratic control of Pinochet have helped the Chileans? Surely we agree that the State-force collaborationist policy of the Chilean leadership was a crucial mistake?

We should not repeat this mistake in Britain or anywhere else.

(3) The Labour Party is right to commit itself to repealing Thatcher's police law. But there is a difference between this and making Labour fight for its policy of elected police authorities, adding statutory powers.

The reality is that even a 100% Labour-run police authority would, at most, back the softcop approach of the Guardian. This approach co-opts its participants into 'divide and rule' " in the inner cities. In one example, it gave 'community control' credibility to bulldozing Front Line in Brixton.

From supervisory bodies to community, policing schemes, the outcome is not in our interest. The existing Police Bill is the police response to the community. Intimidatory operations would be the police restate's attack upon all revolutionary groups in Britain, it objectively sides with the Zionist state against the PLO and their supporters in the Arab states.

When the American and British press talks of the Provos being supplied by rich Irish Americans ought we to shout about a labour movement investigation into the funding of the Provos or perhaps the Militant's accusation that the Provos run a 'mafiatype' business network. Ought we to call for investigations into these things?

Of course not, because it is only. too clear that such an investigation choose what if anything it found only supports the right and reactionary forces.

I demand that SO has the courage to retract this article in the spirit of revolutionary honesty which I believe possesses but which is being somewhat obscured at present.

Revolutionary greetings, DAVID DOUGLASS Doncaster, S. Yorks.

IN THE aftermath of a witch-hunting article in the Daily Express naming me and the WorkI received the following unstamped item of fan mail. Readers may find it interesting as a specimen of the literate readership of the Daily Express, and as timely reminder of the lively company and good times that can be expected in the Cowes British Legion.

We may also wonder what Len Murray had to say to Mr Bennett about the right to strike in wartime. Maybe he, too, now drinks in the Cowes British Legion?

JOHN LISTER, Oxford.

member of your joined at the age in became Treassponse to guideline lar supervision.

Vicious

The Police Bill contains a vicious and wide-ranging set of measures (including community 'consultation'), which cannot significantly be used to protect us from crimes (such as violence against women). Instead it can mainly be used to repress oppositional movements. The answer does not lie in revamping police operations, under community control.

The only useful public accountability of the police is at full public inquiries, like the one needed over Colin Roach's death. The only useful statutory powers restraining the police are to disband the SPG and to close down some of their more racist, bonapartist operations. • If we have a chance to prevent a strong, police regime in Britain, we need the broadest possible mobilisation of all decent, concerned citizens and the clearest arguments from the left. We do not need simple Labourite apologetics. I urge SO (and also the SL) to reconsider its position.

J ZUCKER, Leeds Campaign Against the Police Bill.

DAVE Douglass is right to put a premium on revolutionary honesty: but his complaints should be addressed to the WRP, not to us.

While whipping up a campaign against the BBC on the basis of workers' legitimate hostility to the witch-hunting of the mass media, the WRP adamantly refuses to answer the obvious extraordinary wealth from get its Dave is wrong to say there was no 'rags to riches' change. In the mid-1960s the WRP's old daily paper, Workers Press, collapsed. After a period with only a periodic bulletin, the WRP suddenly launched the lavishily produced Newsline - carrying fanfares of political praise for its new-found friend Gaddafi, and for PLO leaders whom Workers Press had previously criticised.

It is of course conceivable urer and later Secretary of my Branch in Kent), what finished me with Socialism and the Trade Unions was sometime in 1944, when I and my comrades were out of action and so received our letters and newspapers from home (I was in the infantry and we were literally fighting for life and limb..:)

All this will no doubt be not of the slightest interest to people of your kind, patriotism being out of date, you prefer the Russian way of life, God help you.

Going back to 1944, we heard, when we heard from hom, that strikes were, and had been, going on in the UK, particularly the Liverpool dockers. What a disgrace!

My mates and I were disgusted, to put it mildly, and I, for my part, gave up Socialism and IN A recent edition of SO a letter appeared from me appealing to comrades to campaign for the release of Mroleg Radzinsky, a member of the Moscow independent peace group.

The letter contained a few mistakes as printed, most likely my fauit as some comrades on the editorial staff may have found my handwriting difficult to read or decipher.

Nonetheless it is most important that SO comrades involved in CND show international solidarity and campaign for Rodhospital.

• In Cambridge 60 members of CND and the Labour Party, including eight councillors who voted for Cambridge City to have nuclear free zone status, have written postcards to the Soviet authorities demanding his release. Such protest can be like WRP members, Dave - or maybe other activists in the labour movement - feel it is quite legitimate to accept cash from anti-communist (albeit "anti-imperialist") regimes.

We do not: but if the WRP feel it is correct, why do they not come out openly and admit to it?

Conversely, if they feel it is discrediting, and they have a clean slate, why will the WRP not simply cooperaté in a labour movement inquiry that can establish the facts for all to see?

What Dave proposes is in fact that SO should be dishonest, and suppress its own views on • the WRP. It would be no more principled to do that now than would have been for Trotskyists in the 1920s and 1930s to hold back on their criticism of the Stalinists in the USSR for fear of fuelling a much bigger (and more significant) witch-hunt. unions; when I was demobbed I told my union Secretary what he could do with his union card, in no uncertain words.

I read today that you are the Secretary, or Head, of the infamous and naive 'Workers" Social League, an organisation I have never heard of, and of which I don't want to hear any more of.

I read the article in the Cowes British Legion and as it was nearly closing time I did not have time to digest. But what I did read struck me as a load of rubbish and claptrap, as usual with such organisations.

I hope will have the guts to let me have a reply, however brief. So far only one Labour leader, Len Murray, has done so. Perhaps you will be the second! igne directed at two Soviet Union.

General letters of condemnation and demands for Rodzinsky's release coming from groups of peace campaigners or SO comrades should be sent to the head of the official Soviet Peace Committee, Mr Yury Zhukov, Soviet Peace Committee, Prospekt Mira 36, Moscow, USSR.

Protests by individuals are best sent on a postcard to the director of the hospital where Rodzinsky is being detained and is in such poor health that he could possibly die.

Send postcards with a 19½p Forensic Psychiatry, Kropotkinsky Pereulok, d.9, Moscow, USSR.

My craft is dying, so they say It's time we must progress My skills they are of no more use Move on, goodbye, god bless. My craft is dying, so they say The folk with better brains They've got machines now, so they say That do my job as fast As twenty men, in half the time Much better than in t' past.

Bert has to leve us, so they say Oh how their poor heart bleeds It's very sad, but what can be done It's surplus to their needs.

'We cannot change it', so they say, It's how it's meant to be. But me and Bert say different 'Let's set the workers free' Change the system, so we say Let's take it for ourselves. Let's teach our children all our skills Not leave them on the shelves.

In our world the folks would know The pride that comes from skill The sunlight dancing on the press The images, the thrill.

So join with us and let us say We'll take no more commands Let's make machinery work for uS To build

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• "How do you say son of a bitch in Marxist terms? A filthy, humiliated animal who has been beaten, kicked in the belly, fed on scraps, and is only good for biting poor people? You're educated: tell me the scientific term. What would Hegel have said if he had seen this bureaucratic scum sucking the blood of the victorious proletariat? And Vladimir Illich, what would he "I think Lenin would have said the same as you," Varvara have said?"

replied seriously.' It is partly this very immediate sense of outrage at the theft of many of the gains of the October 1917 Russian Revolution by the bureaucratic caste around Joseph Stalin, and partly its man.

Bons ment to a completely different set of social values, an attachment to what is most vital and precious in human life, and a refusal to relinquish it in adversity.

Idiocies

Serge examines the idiocies of bureaucratic planning, the brutish characters drawn into power and influence by the consolidation of bureaucracy, and the plight of the people of the USSR, caught in the middle of a situation not of their making. Chapter Two tells of the varied types that came together in the Trotskyist opposition - the the permanent revolution"

Serge, however, remains convinced that the Soviet working class is not crushed but merely sleeping: the reason for the frenzied Stalinist political repression is the fear that the powerful ideas of the Left Opposition could strike a chord in the masses and create conditions for struggles that will defeat the bureaucracy.

In the chapter 'Messages' he shows how the arrival of clandestine correspondence from the Communist Left of the VerkhneUralsk Prison brings new vigour - and new dangers to the exiles in Chernoe. And the concluding

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¡MISSILES" TAKE

ers' Socialist League in con- nection with the Cowley dispute,

Send letters to Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London N8. No longer than 400 words, please: longer letters are liable to be cut.

zinsky's release from his present confinement in a psychiatric

It's over, finished, useless, dead The bosses' man complains.