Still out

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Trotsky The classic Marxist anal! of Stalinism is Leon Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where It Going?' Available via Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London N8: £2.50 plus 50p postage. ismi THE workers at Industrial Pyrameters, Birmingham, are still solid after a month on strike. This is despite being offered reinstatement - they were sacked on July 4 - and a very small increase in their 3% wage offer from Pyrometers boss Harold Smith. As one of them told us, 'to go back now would be to waste all the sacritice and • eftort oi the last month.

They regard Smith's latest offer as a sign that he is on the run and his vindictive decision to withold holiday pay he owed the strikers as a sign of desperation.

The strikers now have a list of Pyrometers major customers (including Lucas, Vauxhall, the NCB and Perkins Diesel) and are contacting the unions at them to arrange for blacking.

Donations, messages of support, etc., to D.P. Hyde, 19 Philip Sydney Road, Spark Hill, Birmingham.

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Arthur Scargil, When you were elected President of the NUM gocialists welcomed it as a victory for militancy and working class independence against the yellowhearted collaborationists that generally run our unions. Many of your actions since have shown that judgement was not entirely misplaced.

You have taken a clear stand on pulling out of talks with the Tories and the bosses. Quite right. They air to bind and gag us with laws and prohibition. why should we come licking at the boots which aim to crush us? You have proclaimed, extravagantly, that you are prepared to go to gaol rather than kow-tow to the bosses' law.

And yet...

Thousands of trade unionists are imprisoned, beaten, shot in the streets in Poland and you propose? Not just talks with the gaolers, but to glority the persecutors as the representatives of the workers.

You condemn Solidarnosc, the chosen representative millions of Polish workers, for demanding what we, even under a Tory government, can take for granted as a basic right — the right to join a union, to organise to fight for more control by working people over their lives.

You recognise the Tories' anti-union laws for what they are - manacles for the working class, yet you are blind to the ransparent the Polish regime, visibly backed by naked force, by tanks and guns and stormtroopers.

For defending your members interests, their jobs, you have been vilified by the-press, labelled "lunatic" ,. "extrem. ist"

Anyone would have thought this would have given you an insight into the workings of propaganda and character assassination.

(Dinnington NUM, in personal capacity). underground, hunger-strike and face bullets and batons in order to restore capitalism.

Workers the world over aren't that different. Miners in South Africa, America, Bolivia and Britain have used the same militant class tactics.

Are Polish miners a different animal? Or Russian miners like Klebanov and Nikitin, who fought for the safety of their fellow workers and against official corruption?

You may have been called mad by the gutter press, you haven't yet been incarcerated in a psychiatric prison, fed mind changing drugs or locked in solitary confinement for daring to question the ruling order.

Klebanov and Nikitin have.

And how do you solidarise with these workers? By repeating the vile slanders of the Kremlin bureaucrats - they are "mad" - for representing fellow workers, for fighting lifethreatening speed-ups, for criticising low safety standards!

Your project for a world mineworkers' federation, uniting East and West would be fine -international solidarity can only strengthen the workers' common interest. It would be fine, if it were a workers' international. But you've failed on the most basic principle. "Know your own class" The "unions" of Russia and Eastern Europe are not workers' organisations, they are tools of the state, opposed and thrown aside by the workers whenever they've had the most minimal chance to express themselves democratically.

Every upsurge in class consciousness, in militancy has seen these "unions" line up ERIC Heffer, the serious left's candidate for the Labour Party leadership, has published his 'manifesto' At its heart is a strong reaffirmation of socialism and presentation of Heffer's understanding of what socialism is.

"The Labour Party is a socialist party or it is nothing... the question that has to be asked is: what do we mean by a democratic socialist society? Democratic socialists believe it is essential to end class society. Socialism cannot be achieved unless that happens and genuine equality of opportunity cannot be created while class divisions exist.

"Class society arises because the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange is in the hands of a relatively small group ...

"It is impossible to create a classless society while, private ownership of the major industries exists. That is basically the case for public ownership."

Necessarily

But public ownership does not necessarily mean nationalisation, he says.

«Nationalisation has too often been equated with socialism. That is not so, it can be state capitalism, as are our nationalised industries in Britain...

"Democratic socialism does not envisage a society where everything is state-owned and state-run. A democratic socialist society means that personal initiative will not be destroyed but encouraged."

But more than public ownership is needed:

•.. to avoid the creation of a new class and 'to ensure that society does not become bureaucratic, it is necessary to create forms of democratic management."

By John O'Mahony class. But in substance, Heffer is right. He goes on:

"The third vital ingredient of democratic socialism is democracy itself. There cannot be socialism without democracy ... it is perfectly understandable for working peopie who righay cherish their freedom, for which they, and especially their forefathers fought, to say that if what exists in Soviet Russia is sociali? then they want no part of want 1 all ol He says we must maintain and develop freedom of thought, publication and worship.

"Democracy must • bet? extended to every sphere of public life. There should be a free and open society, With the ending of the Otticial Secrets Act, and the introduction of a Freedom of Information Act."

The House of Lords should be abolished.

that the capitalist class have a monopoly of violence or potential violence, the state, whose dismantling and destruction is a central precondition for any advance to a socialist democracy.

The manifesto is disappointing in its ultracautious proposals for what the left should do now. He says the clock can't be turned back in the Labour Party.

66 •.. as time goes by some further constitutional changes, leading • to a wider involvement of the membership in decisionHeffer: candidate of the Left making at all levels, will be desirable, but certainly not at this moment. So, for the time being we should leave the constitutional position as it is..."

This is the approach of those like Vladimir Derer who say the left now needs to consolidate, not, go on a new offensive.

The short answer is that we have little to consolidate. All the gains on democracy - reselection, electoral college - can be domesticated and neutered by the Labour Establishment. Such rules and regulations are common to many right wing Labour Parties JOHN HARRIS in Europe. Reselection has not yet been used to bring the PLP into line with the Party.

If the left does not resume the offensive we may well see our formal gains rendered irrelevant to the basic task of changing and fundamentally renewing the Party. This will be a danger especially when the Establishment is led by the soft left.

Despite the weaknesses of his manifesto, Heffer's candidacy is itself, of course, a • powerful counterblow against the attempt of the Kinnock left to filch the gains of the last period from us.

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,. is a comprehensive state- ment, yet it does not mention