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Enterprise Board' is based on a naive, ill-defined push for more 'worker involvement in management'. They deplore the fact that in this respect, "British industry is backward ... compared even with countries such as Japan (!) .:. lags far behind European industry. The GLEB concept of Enterprise Planning attempts to remedy some of these deficiencies by offering employers an incentive to enter into joint planning with their employees...

It also, of course, offers employees an incentive to enter into joint planning with their employers - to cooperate in redundancies and wage cuts for the sake of saving some jobs with GLC aid - or to become employers themselves, through a co-operative, and make their own redundancies and wage cuts.

In a recent polemic in Socialist Review, GLC officials John Palmer and Hilary Wainwright offer as their best example of how the GLC jobs strategy can work, Lee Coopers in Romford, where 140 women were sacked ... but ten of them formed a co-op with GLC help. That's a claimed success. The admitted failures include the Third Sector co-op in Willesden. This co-op was formed with less than a third of the previous workforce when the previous owners, GEC, wanted to close down. It 50D for a single copy, 40p per copy for 5 or more, and 30p pr cop:

for 20 or more, from Employment Unit, Southwark CVS, 135 Rye Lane, London SE15. Cheques payabl to Southwark CVS.

Please add an for postage.

MORTHLE Tory councils cut services: Left' ra then collapsed in a welter of corruption.

To improve services in their 'bastions' or 'fortresses' socialism, the let councils have gone for decentralisation. Done within a strictly limited budget, this is likely to lead the councils into conflict with the unions.

Decentralisation is desirable. (For that matter, co-ops are not always to be condemned out of hand). But the left councils propose it, not as a part of a programme for improved services which has as its centre a serious class struggle for more resources, but as an alternative to that struggle. Some leftists explicitly define decentralisation as a preliminary to the fight against central government: the existing services, they say, are so bad that no-one will defend them; therefore, they must be improved first before we can confront the Tories. For the council workers, this generally comes down to the message: you must work harder if your jobs are to be saved. Not a very socialist message.

Diary 50p increases cut living standards In contrast to their frequent impatience with their lowerpaid workers, the leit councils have been very respecttu to their top-paid permanent officials. Their usual way of dealing with them is to create more £15,000-a-year jobs and fill them with socialists. Unless these new socialist officials are put onto the high salary scales, the councillors explain, they won't have the necessary authority. The irony of paying people £15,000 a year to promote socialism, and this at a time when the councils are being far from generous to their lowerpaid workers, seems to escape them.

Essentially the leftist councillors are applying an attitude to the top officials of 'if you can't beat them, join them' -and dragging a lot of socialist academics and intellectuals into that attitude with them.

Nowhere has a left council sought to develop a joint campaign of agitation with the council unions against the power of the senior officials measures of workers' control within the council departments, for equalisation of wages, etc.

The left councils have also developed a virtual new bureaucracy on the fringes of the labour movement: law centres, unemployed centres, permanentlystaffed community groups of one sort or another. On the basis of these, a 'community politics' has developed which largely consists of these paid officials talking to each other. To have the paid officials is desirable, just as it is desirable for trade unions to have paid officials. But a struggle against bureaucratism is necessary too, just as in the trade unions.

Continued JOHN Lowery (SO136) does a great service to those of us who have long sought in vain for any clear political basis to the incoherent tirades of SO's "anti-imperialist" "internationalist" critics.

Comrade Lowery spells it oui "To focus on the relationship between the working class and the capitalist class in Argentina is to miss out the whole role of imperialism... " At last we have it.

The crucial question in Argentina (and, presumably any other supposedly "underdeveloped" country - which Argentina isn't anyway, but that's another matter) is not the class struggle between labour and capital, but the relationship between nations of the "developed" and "underdeveloped" worlds.

That's what is meant by "an analysis of the struggle worldwide". , and "a struggle on the world scale against imperialism"

This sort of pseudo-internationalism has nothing to do with Lenin or Trotsky, who started from a world overview, but invariably focused their conclusions on the class struggle within both imperialist nations.

Lowery's approach has much more in common with "development" theoreticians like Baran, Frank and most explicitly Wallerstein. It leads directly to popular frontism (often under the guise of the "anti-imperialist united front") and is ideally suited to Stalinist/State Capitalist "solutions" for the third world.

It is precisely this kind of «anti-imperialism" that Stanley C. Raptis was debunking (SO155) and methinks Harry Sloan (SO 156) doth protest too much.

JIM DENHAM Birmingham

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of a People's Marcher "How politics were kept out by Satvinder Singh and Tony Purtill Introduction by Jeremy Corbyn, MP SES