Maputo raid

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Join the Labour Committee on Ireland. BM Box 5355, London WCIN 3XX However, this success is very flimsy. It is built up on a weak political basis: Support for the idea of a freeze implies no basic hostility to the foreign policy interests and goals of the US government. So as soon as the THE SOUTH African commando raid into the Mozambique capital of Maputo on Monday was notionally aimed at the African National Congress — the illegal organisation of black South African resistance.

But the arrogant contempt for national borders shown by the apartheid gangsters flows as much from the prolonged and massive campaign of destabilisation by South Africa of its black African neighbour states, Angola and Mozambique.

Guerilla squads of mercenaries, armed, equipped and financed by Pretoria, have been conducting systematic economic sabotage and terrorism against the nationalist regimes of the MPLA in Angola and Frelimo in Mozambique. Damage inflicted in Angola alone totals in excess of $5 billion.

Now - having seen the im. pact of such efforts - the CIA has adopted similar tactics in its campaign of disruption in Nicaragua. outside WC"

The main cause of the drastic decline of the Shankill since then - apart from the worldwide stagnation of capitalism and (a lesser factor) the direct results of the war - has been a botched attempt by the state to 'redevelop' the area.

This was part of a grandiose scheme whereby foreign investors would be brought into Northern Ireland to set up new industries replacing the traditional ones in decline, shipbuilding, linen, and clothing. Despite lavish state hand outs, it hasn't happened. At best firms have come and gone again after a few years, like De Lorean.

In the Shankill, the plan was for 76% of the population to be re-housed in twelve-storey or six/seven-storey flats. The 12storey flats were never built, because of public opposition, and the six/seven-storey flats were demolished in 1981.

The general picture is similar in other areas of Northern Ireland, both Protestant and Catholic. The unemployment rate across the Six Counties is 21.7% (October 1982). One striking result is that in Northern Ireland, unlike almost anywhere

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'Buy American' - the US unions' explicitly pro-capitalist strategy looks very much like the supposedly socialist AES!

Airline pilots are currently on strike against sweeping wage cuts IN THE aftermath of the Brighton Labour Party conference, many socialists notably the Socialist Workers' Party - are arguing once again that the Labour Party is useless and irrelevant. One of the best ways to see that these socialists are headed down a blind alley is to look at the situation in the US labour movement.

There is no Labour Party. But, far from that being a boon, socialists in the US see it as central to fight for the trade unions to create a Labour Party. At the sam‹ time, they try to prepare the way for such a Labour Party to be armed with socialist politics, and to be democratically accountable to the rank and file.

If that is necessary in the US, then it is no less necessary in Britain to fight to re-make the Labour Party already formed by the trade unions.

However, the fight for a Labour Party in the US has suffered some setbacks recently. The unions are not only backing the Derhocrats (as is usual) but (in an unusual move) have officially put their weight behind one particular candidate as the Democratic presidential nominee. Harry Sloan, just back from a tour of the USA, reports on the state of the unions and what US socialists are doing. teloworkers presiden: Owen Bieber ar his union conrention: 100% IN THE same week that British trade union leaders stitched up the vote for Neil Kinnock as leader of the Labour Party, a very different type of stitch-up was being accomplished in Florida, USA.

Leaders of most big American unions, meeting at the convention of the AFL-CIO (equivalent of the TUC) voted to endorse Walter Mondale as their choice for a candidate in next year's Presidential elections.

Mondale was leader of the pack of half a dozen Democratic Party hopefuls vying for the support - political, financial, and practical - of the union bosses. The 'choice' before them was the equivalent of choosing between David Owen, David Steel, Roy Jenkins and Edward Heath as defenders of capitalist political positions. the labour movement.

The Democratic Party is quite unlike the Labour Party. It is -and always has been - a boss- can candidates. es' party, which has nevertheless been able, in the absence of any substantial political party of the US workers' movement, to secure the support of important labour' image, as Vice-President sections of the trade union bur- he carried responsibility for the eaucracy - some supporting brind the Democrats DAW on a 'lesser evil' basis, and Democrats against Republicans tionary policies of Jimmy CartDer's Democratic administration. others simply because the Mondale helped invoke the Democrats reflect their own proanti-union Taft-Hartley laws against striking US coal-miners;

The Teamsters' Union is a Mondale was also part of the notable exception. In recent Carter administration's preparayears it has endorsed Republi- tions - later to be implemented by Reagan - for the smashing Though Mondale has assidNot the air traffic controllers' uously cultivated contacts with union PATCO. AFL-CIO bureaucrats, and And, lest Mondale's less worked hard at creating a 'pro- 'hawkish' stance on Central America should fool anyone, he alsu stands for the building of a anti-union activities and reacvast fleet of B1 nuclear bombers as part of an arms build-up begun under Carter and stepped up under Reagan.

He is currently sponsored by some of the bigger oil monopolies.

But perhaps the decision of top union leaders to throw in $2 million of their members' cash and promise the active campaigning of local officials to secure the election of such a capitalist politician can best be understood if we look at the politics of AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, himself re-elected for a renewed term at this year's convention.

Kirkland is a hard-line right-winger, who recently agreed to serve on Reagan's committee on Central America only on condition that the committee was led by Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's right hand man in the genocidal wars in South East Asia and the 'destabilisation' of the Chilean government by the CIA in 1970-73.

At the AFL-CIO convention he piloted through a motion on Nicaragua: not defending the Sandinistas against Reagan's CIA-backed 'contras', but attacking the regime's alleged abuses of 'human rights' Kirkland's politics are those of many union leaders in the USA: and just as they support US imperialism abroad, their sole object of political involvement at home is to back the Demorrat lagct libalu tr cunmad anti-union legislation, or most likely to be susceptible to AFL-CIO pleading. They are strongly opposed to any independent political voice for the working class.

Auto Kirkland told the United Auto Workers convention this year:

'We intend to restore control of the White House and Congress to leaders who will represent all the people [!] instead of the privileged few"

Among Kirkland's favoured leaders were Lyndon Johnson's Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, and veteran reactionary 'Scoop' Jackson.

In this, he struck the same note as the incoming UAW President, Owen Bieber. Though his predecessor Doug ATT Fraser had on occasion muttered vague and careful hints that he might support a trade-unionbased Labour Party (in order to press tor concessions from Democratic Party leaders), Bieber himself linked denunciations of Reagan's policies to calls for active support to the Democrats.

Recapture

''There is a good chance to recapture [!] not only the White House but the Senate. But that means going out now and beginning to work at the grass roots with our members."

Acoording to the UAW journal 'Solidarity' "Convention delegates cheer: ed the call to political action"

Such limited political horizons are not the exclusive property of the right wing of the US union bureaucracy, however. One left bureaucrat who has spent some time and energy arguing for the launching of a new party is Oil and Chemicals union official Tony Mazzochi. Yet even he has concluded, in an open letter of September 5, that:

"discussions have convinced me that it is too early [!] to orgarise a full-fledged Labour Indeed, the only union consistently to uphold the call for a Labour Party in the USA is the Communist Party influenced United Electrical Workers. (The CP itself, however, gives notquite-explicit, but consistent, support to the Democrats).

Deprived of any political alternative to the Democrats and Republicans, the American workers' movement remains in the grip of a union leadership which for the most part actively opposes even the most rudimentary class consciousness.

The AFL-CIO bureaucracy is so steeped in conservative and class-collaborationist routines that it has presided over steady decline of unionisation in US industry to below 20%.

While rationalisation; closures and lay offs have taken a heavy toll of unionised jobs, union leaders are profoundly reluctant to take on board the problems involved in organising the vast ron-union workforce.

Such a course would involve a continued round of confrontations with the employers over wages, conditions, and job security, and bring into the unions a potentially militant new layer of highly exploited workers, including large numbers of women, black workers, hispanic workers and other: minorities currently under-represented in The same logic of the 'lesser evil' which brings the union leaders to back outright capitalist parties brings them also to accept the demands of the capitalists themselves that in order to 'save jobs' , unions must agree to 'givebacks', 'concessions' involving wage cuts, speed-up, and the destruction of union rights and working conditions won in decades of struggle.

But interestingly such union leaders, while retreating in practice, have also drawn up on paper their 'alternative' policy to Reaganomics. The AFL-CIO line - beginning from an explicitly anti-socialist, cross-class standpoint — is strikingly similar in essence to Labour's 'Alternative Economic Strategy' in Britain, so dearly cherished by sections of the Left.

Borrow Where the AES calls for a strengthened National Enterprise Board, for state investment to assist the modernisation and expansion of British industry, and for the necessary funds to be borrowed, the AFL-CIO, in a plan adopted this month, calls for:

• Creating a reindustrialisation board of business, labour and government to set industry policy, • Setting up a national development bank to use loans, loan guarantees and tax incentives to finance new industries and help older industries modernise, • Spending more federal funde on "job-creating programmes' and to rebuild public works.

And where the British Communist Party, and other supposedly left-wing advocates of the

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"We know that the charity food distribution centres) are seeing more years ago it was primarily the street people. Now we're seeing the new They are often families who have worked all their lives for a "I'd rather be beaten", one man told a journalist. "It's AES, look to protect 'British' firms and their profits through the nationalistic policy of import controls, this too is the policy of the AFL-CIO, which calls for:

• Measures to 'restrict harmful imports' - including proposals to require domestic parts in foreign cars.

Such tinkering with the structure of capitalism is of course no more a socialist policy in Britain than it is in the USA.

Conversely, the refusal to challenge the 'right' of the employers to preserve and increase their profits at the expense of workers' jobs, wages and conditions leads to betrayals and retreats both by 'socialist' union leaders in Britain and by their hard-nosed right-wing Democrat counterparts in the USA.

The policies are similar: but the context does make a difference. In the US, the trade unions propose policies from the standpoint of being the tail of one or another capitalist party. Anticapitalist measures are ruled out from the start.

Within a party based on the organised working-class movement, the path is open to challenge such acceptance of capitalism, and to argue for socialist policies.

In the USA, therefore, the question of building a Labour MITHANICS many aspects of the bosses' offensive was restricted entirely to a perspective of defensive struggles. The soaring costs of health care, the cuts in welfare support, the anti-union legislation, all point to the need for a workers' party and a workers' government to implement alternative, socialist policies.

But to issue such a call means to come into conflict with some 'progressive' layers of junior people, more families" officials and officers of the unions who will take a militant stance on trade union questions living, but are now out of work". but remain either committed te Democratic politics, or reluctant to rock the boat' of mer under Reagan, the most establishment politics. oppressed and exploited have Poverty the income of the typical white The problems faced by US family. workers are enormous. Unemployment under Reagan has risen from 7.4% to over 10%. Over come to grips with these prob half the unemployed have run lems, or to wage a concerted and out of unemployment benefit conscious fight against racism and between 25 and 30 million families have lost their health insurance, in a country with no class.

National Health Service and punitive bills for treatment.

The average period of unemployment is five months. in record numbers - 210,000 in The bare statistics do little to the first quarter of 1983 alone (a probe the scale of poverty and rate of nearly one million a year) süffering. Figures show that of the 19 million jobless or underCreat ALE JESS "A couple 01 I'm not a freeloader, but we need the food".

'better than one-fifth of the population 'of a city of 450,000 suffered most. The typical black persons. And we know there are family now earns just over half a lot of people we won't get to"

Prominent amongst those in the queues were single mothers, No labour movement leader- unemployed, and low-paid famship can succeed which fails to ilies with several children.

Indeed, the percentage of US families living below the poverty line has risen to 11.2%. Workand sexism which so severely ing class incomes have fallen divide and weaken the working 1% under Reagan.

But the rich have done well -The tide of poverty has other with a 7.3% increase in income effects. American workers are even after inflation. While the being turned out of their homes low-paid $10,000-$20,000 brackGet gained only a miserly $220 from Reagan's tax hand-outs, those on $80,000 or more picked - as mortgage companies fore- up tax cuts averaged $15,130. close on those behind with their Though 30% of US factories LOOK, CHARLIE - AS ONE OF 12 MILLION LNEMPLOYED YOU SHOULD KROW THE PRESIDENT IS RIGHT!

FOOD ON THE TABLE AND A ROOF OVER OUR HEADS!

5431,85 savage policies at home and his massive nuclear arms build-up and imperialist war moves in Central America can be made effectively only from a political standpoint which consistently opposes US imperialism and argues for a socialist, working-class perspective.

Compromise with Democrats like Mondale can only blunt the edge of anti-war agitation -though Mondale accurately reflects the cold-war views of the American union leadership..

Equally pernicious are the illusions created in the 'progressive' character of maverick Democrats, such as the black leader Rev. Jesse Jackson.

The main impact of Jackson's opportunist campaigning has been to generate still greater confusion on the nature of the Democratic party, and draw in new votes from sections of the working class who have traditionally abstained or not even registered to vote. As he put it:

"If we increase the number of registered voters by registering blacks, Hispanics and the young, we'll expand the party, not divide it"

Jackson's impact therefore is to expand the populist appeal of the existing racist, reactionary, bourgeois to alane ity businessmen by threats of organised boycotts and . other actions to force big employers in cities like Chicago to do business with minority-owned suppliers and banks.

Yet one of the main reasons why Jackson can appear as a radical friend of the oppressed is because the US labour movement has no alternative on offer, no perspective of championing the demands and struggles of black and other minority workers.

In taking up the fight for the opening of the books of the employers to build füll-scale opposition to demands for 'concessions'; in raising demands for a free, federally-funded health service, for a crash programme of housing and useful public works to create new jobs; in demanding adequate benefits for the unemployed, financed through taxes on the wealthy and the corporations; in press. ing for US troops and military aid to be withdrawn from Lebanon, Central America, and THERE'S NO FUTURE IN A MAKE WORK JOBI WHAT WOULD IT GET YOU? ...BESIDES THAT! ban on enforced overtime, • Eliminating military spending and using the money to support housing, medical care, schools, child care and other social needs, • Abolition of all taxes on those at or below the average income level, and taxation of the rich to provide for social needs. End the capital gains loophole.

• An end to all military alliances, and withdrawal of all American troops from foreign countries.

• Total elimination of nuclear fission power.

• Free medical care for all as a basic right.

• An end to all forms of sexism, racism and ageism. ~• An end to the capitalist system and its replacement with the social ownership and democratic self-management of all industries and natural resources.

Partly because of this explicit socialist platform, and partly because of its rejection of the Democrats, the P&FP remains largely devoid of official trade union representation, and lacks the mass base in the black, hispanic and minority communities necessary to develop as a full-fledged Labour Party.

It remains at present a radical, largely middle-class party, within which the Communist Party and the remnants of the Socialist Party are beginning to attempt to drive out the militant Attempts to replicaté the P&FP in other cities across the USA are at an even more embryonic stage of development than in California - and could well run even earlier into similar sabotage from the CP and SP (both of which favour a strategy of pressurising the Democrats).

Yet the very existence on the ballot of a substantial, multitendency socialist political formation is a step forward in the backward arena of US politics.

The next period, up to the 1984 elections, will see a major test of the ability of the small minority of revolutionary socialists in the USA to find ways and means to link their programme and demands both to the daily struggle of the working masses and to the general task of building a mass working class party on a socialist programme.

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