Minimum wage is not incomes policy!

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Don't defend CPs Archer IT is with sadness that we have to report the death of Mary Archer. She will be greatly missed by all activists within the Haringey labour : movement, where she spent the latter years of her life.

Over these years she built up a reputation of commitment and activity in the Labour Party and Labour campaigns, always acquitting herself. well. However Mary: was not simply a hard worker who got on with the job at hand. Her dedication to the movement came from the future she anticipated for it. She was first and foremost a political person. Mary had joined the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s, staying with it right up until her death.

It was in the arguments and debates that her political experience came to the fore. It was always quite beguiling listening to Mary argue her corner against the CP or Labour Party wets, drawing in the experience of struggles and lessons of the labour movement which she had learnt often • many years before her adversary was even born.

It is as a lifelong revolutionary socialist that Mary Archer should be remembered. I WAS puzzled by Alan Thornett's opposition to a statutory national minimum wage (in his report on the TGWU conference, Socialist Organiser no. 140).

"It was argued", Alan wrote, "that this (a national minimum wage) is 'not an incomes policy by the back door'. Of course that is just what it is."

Formally and literally, it is possible to describe a statutory national minimum wage as an incomes policy. It means the government intervening in WITH A perspicacity unusual amongst London SO supporters, Andrew Hornung (Writeback, SO 141) points out the logic involved in the argument that socialists should not defend the Tudeh Party (TP), which the Khomeini regime in Iran recently banned.

"Logically, Stan Crooke is arguing that the CPs in general have ceased to be an element in the working class movement and that they represent nothing more than agencies of reaction', , he writes.

Quite so. Trotsky pointed out that, in its repression of the working class, the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union was no different from fascism. The whole record of Stalinist regimes underlines the truth of this statement herefore On what basis should political organisations which support such regimes, albeit by using the language of vulgarised Marxism, be regarded as 'elements in the working class movement' rather than as 'nothing more than agencies of reaction'? Doesn't the record of the TP, or any other Communist Party you care to think of, prove Stalinist organisations to be 'agencies of reaction'?

(And doubly so in the case of the TP: exported from Moscow after the fall of the Shah, the TP was not qualitatively different from a clique of KGB agents' Kianouri's confessions are at least accurate on this point.)

Yes, we should defend Mujahedeen supporters from repression, even though they are not part of the workers movement. They at least are fighting against the regime, and deserve solidarity on that point. The TP, on the other hand, continues, even now, to defend the regime.

In certain circumstances, socialists should also defend Communist Parties from repression. An obvious example is the overthrow of Allende in Chile, which involved massive defeat for the working class. But the situation in Iran is not comparable: the in-fighting between anti-working class factions of an anti-working class regime is not an issue upon which socialists take sides.

Would socialists have defended the Strasserite ('Left wing' Nazis passed in 1934) from the 'injustices and abuse of civil rights' which occurred on the Night of the long Knives? I think not. . And the same holds true for the Iranian Night of the Long Knives.

Andrew Horning's position amounts to maing defence of Stalinists axiomatic for socialists because they are allegedly 'a section of the working class movement'. More - logical would; be to wage-fixing. But there's difference between measures push wages up and measures push wages down!

Socialist Organiser supporters in most unions, I think, have recognised this, and supported a minimum wage law at the same time as they oppose wage controls.

To define a minimum wage law and wage controls as both examples of the same thing (incomes policy) is playing with words. To use this definition as proceed from the of the working class.

Where a successful attack on Stalinists would involve a setback for the working class (e.g: Chile) we should defend them, whilst not giving them political support.

But where the outcome of such attacks is of no interest to the working class, as in Iran, the socialists should not defend the Stalinists from the consequences of their own anti-working class and completely reactionary politics.

STAN CROOKE, Glasgow.

The story starts with the explosion of knowledge in physics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One element was Einstein's theory that matter was actually a sort of frozen energy. In theory at least, mass could be changed into energy (movement or radiation) with an incredibly high exchange rate. As physicist Walter Nernst wrote in 1921 'We are living on an island of guncotton. But we have not yet found a match that will ignite it.

Another element was Max Planck's Quantum Theory which contradicts our common-sense understanding of the world but explains and predicts many odd properties of matter and energy.

These theories gave impetus to the study of the behaviour and structure of atoms, which had already resulted in the discovery of the electron in 1897 and the proton in 1911.

One notable centre for the study of atomic physics in the 1920s was the University of Gottingen in Germany, under professors Max Born and James Franck. Among the many brilliant physicists who studied there was one Robert Oppenheimer.

The third element in the story is the politics of the 1930s. The rise and spread of Nazism and Fascism resulted in the exile of the cream of the world's physicists from Germany and Central Europe. The majority went to the US.

Gottingen was destroyed as a research centre by the loss of the Jews Born and Franck. The surviving physicists were split by the battle between 'German physics" and the "Jewish" physics of Einstein. The "modern" physicists in Germany were even attacked as "white Jews"

In 1932 James Chädwick made a key discovery in the story of the Bomb - the neutron - the third type of particle that an argument against a minimum wage law is as wrong as using it as an argument for wage controls. ingers and soft lette t wingers and it as an argument for wage controls - and TGWU general secretary Moss Evans is one of them.

But the fact that people try to use it as sugar on the pill of wage controls is no reason to oppose the minimum wage. After all, shorter hours, inflation-protection clauses, and work-sharing deals are all used for the same purpose. We'do not therefore oppose shorter hours, or inflation-protection, or work-sharing. We demand the sugar and refuse the pill.

Like other reforming labour legislation within capitalism -laws limiting working hours, or laying down health and safety conditions, or outlawing sex discrimination - minimum wage laws are limited in effect.

Nonetheless, the fight for such laws is an important way of making the wages issue a class issue rather than just a sectional issue. It is a way of using the strength of the best-organised workers to win improvements for the least-organised or most weakly placed.

FOSTER, Islington. goes to make up atoms.

The neutron can pass easily into the nucleus of an atom, unlike an unattached proton, and can make it unstable (radioactive) or even cause it to split. It is therefore the key to nuclear fission. Though Rutherford, the first to change one element into another, pooh-poohed talk of using the neutron release the enormous energy locked up in atoms, the Hungarian Leo Szilard realised that if an element could be found to give out two neutrons on absorbing one, then a chain reaction could started to release atomic energy.

First, physicists bombarded light atoms with the newly discovered neutrons, but from 1934 they tried bombarding uranium, the heaviest natural element, to see if they could make new and heavier elements.

Irene Joliot-Curie in Paris was doing this experiment when she found she was consistently getting odd results. Ida Noddack, a German chemist, had previously suggested that uranium might disintegrate instead of just getting larger when struck by neutrons. In 1938, Lise Meitner correctly interpreted Joliot-Curie's results. Meitner, a non-Aryan refugee from Nazi Austria, realised that fission had taken place.

On hearing this, Szilard confirmed that surplus neutrons were produced during fission and hence that a chain reaction was possible. He tried to persuade felow-scientists to stop publishing further results and when this failed, in 1939, he Send letters to Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London N8. No longer than 400 words please: longer letters are liable to be cut.