Suspended founder member Solidarnosc whose sacking in Gdansk started the 1980 Las been given suspended jail month scullcite at the end of her trial in After the December coup in 1981, Anna returned the Lenin shipyard and was there among the workers when the tanks broke down the gates. She was interned but released in J. The state prosecutor demanded three years in jail on the charge that Ecological AN ALMOST unprecedented ecological disaster is hitting the Arabian Gulf , Qatar and Kuwait. Wall. Because of Iraqi shelling of an Iranian oil well, its platform has collapsed allowing millions of barrels of crude oil to flow into the sea.
The oil slick is the size of Belgium and gotting bigger. Marine life is being devastater. Experts won't cap the well until Iraq promises not to attack them. years old.
to a relief worker.
Many of you will have seen this piece of film and similar reports of the etfects of the two-year long drought in Ethiopia relief agencies are appealing for funds. Britain has manag princely £250,000 while Reagan has refused 'communist' aid to the government of Ethiopia.
The Sunday Times bolstered Reagan's argusent fallen ine West had West had been diverted to the Ethio. pian army, and was even being used pay Ethiopia's arms bill to the Soviet Union Nearly three million the drought threatens to repeat the pattern of the disastrous famine of ten years ago.
The famine follows hard on the heels of other problems for the military regime (called the DERG: Last vear. in massive campaign codenamed 'Red Star', the military attempted to wipe guerrillas who Oul justly fighting. for dependence for Eritrea. us believe that the famine is. due natura Cause.
'natives fighting among themselves' But the spectre of starvation is not a God-given retribution. It can be trac ed directly to the legacy of colonial rule imperialist domination.
A few facts and figures help us make sense of the causes of starvation and famine in the world today.
LOTE million people hall of them children - die every year from hunger. America has so much grain stockpiled preserve market price and profits 140 million tons • that it has decided to take one-third of crop land out of production.
billion a yeal store the grain. The na tional Bangladesh $10.4 billion.
Malaria kills
million children a year in the African alone. The cost of a worldwide campaign eradicate disease - the Millions stárve while capitalism profits sum invested in the world in arms and military spending every 36 hours.
Five hundred million people in the Third World suffer malnutrition. If the world was a village of 1000 people, 240 of them would be starving.
The West builds stockpiles of nuclear weapons and grain. Milk lakes, butter mountains and the rest keep bolster profits while millions starve all over the The TV and the papers focus on the famine Ethiopia with no mention of the true cause, real effects, of imperialism's wonderful free-market economy
Photo: CARLOS AUGUSTO GUARITA (Photon) Socialist Action 8 April 1983 it will end in debacle, and that 'unity
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A YOUNG CHILD with stick-like arms and legs and a swollen belly is being fed through a tube in his nose. He weighs only 10 pounds. He's two and a half Chances of survival? 'Not very good' according The press would have
Cost Us sipresent, it costs the
DURING the two years since the election of the Francois Mitterrand Socialist Party-Communist Party (SP-CP) government there have been many illusions in the British left.
For example, New Socialist published an article last year entitled: 'Mitterrand, far one of the main leaders of the far left slate ('Voice of the workers against austerity') which stood 4000 candidates in the French municipal elections. told Brian Heron how the left must fight back against the pro-capitalist path of Mitterrand.
How do you explain the poor showing of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party in the first round of the municipal elections?
This election was the first since Mitterrand came to power, and thus a national political test. During these two yeals, anu especially during une last six months the government has implemented a policy of austerity freezing wages temporarily and increasing social security charges.
The initial gains for the working class are being eroded by this pro-capitalist policy. There was a deep disappointment inside. the working . class that this government is applying an austerity policy even deeper than the previous right wing government.
At the beginning of '81-82 there were a lot of illusions as far as the government. was concerned - witn the exception of a small minority of workers linked to the far left. But for the majority of the working class there was a situation of social peace.
The workers were waiting to see what the government would do.
As you know, last, June government changed its policy and imposed an austerity policy with a wage freeze. In the local elections which took place before municipals was saw the phenomenon of abstention by working class voters - two or three per cent of the voters who usually voted for the SP and the CP decided to stay at home.
parties of the bourgeoisie who were in sharp retreat after the Mitterrand victory in 1981 used the austerity policy to take the offensive. For the first time in a very long time the right wing parties have been able to mobilise a lot of people For example they have been able to organise big street demonstrations during the last six months in nearly all the major towns mainly middle class, but still a big mobilisation. During the municipal election campaign the Gaullist leader Chirac, was able to organise a meeting of 80,000 people in Paris. At the same time the CP and SP organised a meeting of less than 4000 people. Even the extreme left got SO was recent He the the La rally of 8000 people. And that was repeated in all the major cities This reflected a total demobilisation of the working class and the official left parties. wanted to use this election to show that a new majority had against the left, and this project was only thrown back in the second round of the municipal elections when the working class abstainers keep out the right wing. But in the first round of the elections the working class abstention in most industrial cities was very big. Mitterrand (right) with finance minister Jaques Delors of and second round of the voting the the working class abstainers, because So the right wing that they had lost votes. emerged Will the left leaders respond to the warning of the elections to modify rallied to their austerity policy?
On the contrary, as we've seen in the last few days, because the government refuses to take any fundamental anti*The Mitterrand government Immigrant workers in France suffer harshly from austerity policies and discrimination During the week between the first CP and the SP made a big campaign applied even using rather 'leftist' language towards they understood that it was on the left unity'.
after . who VOLe the capitalist measures it's caught in a trap. Austerity is going to have to be HOIC foreign speculators and the bankers manoeuvre against the franc.
This is the kind of thing which all reformist governments face — we saw it in Britain during the Wilson government when the IMF stepped in and again under Callaghan. They are saying that we have to have 'national We will explain precisely the opposite - that if this government continues to capitulate to the bosses then with the bosses' can only be on their How did the CP fare in the election?
If we look at the towns where the CP been traditionally see the decline has been very marked. In many of the Communist suburbs especially the 'red belt' of Paris -the CP lost between 5 and 15 per cent of its vote, usually around 10 per cent.
The credibility of the CP is declining rapidly. I think that we can say three successive electoral disasters for the CP that they have a structural political crisis. I don't see how they can regain their former posiWhat about the far left organisations supported the 'Voice of the workers against austerity'? There is an all-round loss of confidence of the workers in their traditional organisations, not only the SP and CP, but the trade unions as well which losing hundreds of thousands of members as a result of their leaders supporting austerity. But the hundreds of thousands who are fed up with the right wing policies of the labour movement leaders are in total disarray and have not in their majority rallied to a left alternative Frankly speaking the far left has not been able to sufficiently capitalise on this disappointment. We been able to organise only a minority. The score we made - about four per cent of the vote — is not so bad in the sense that we made a very political I want to make one qualification During our election campaign we had me people than ever before from coming to our meetings, even people who two years ago were following their leaderships. For example at Longwy, where three years ago you had a big struggle over redundancy in the steel industry. all previous leaders of the CP including ex-full timers came to our meeting to discuss with us. Some have been expelled, others have left the CP. The one alternative today is the extreme left, all the centrist forces have collapsed Two things are linked: building an alternative to the CP and the SP and explaining that austerity is not inevitable. The arguments of the CP and the SP that there is no alternative today, and that you have to wait for real social change, these arguments have some credibility because people don't see what a credible alternative would be.
So we have to develop in a concrete way a 'workers solution to the crisis', an anti-capitalist solution to the crisis. The difficult thing, always, is to make the link between our anti-capitalist propaganda and the concrete struggle, to avoid having just abstract anti-capitalist propaganThe second thing is to build an organisational alternative Many workers who came to our meetings said 'OK, we agree with you, but the organisations represented here are too small. When That's why we decided to to for we'll come with common slate with Lutte Ouvriere (Workers Struggle) and why we are fighting for a more long term unity.
Nearly 40 per cent of our candidates were workers not in revolutionary organisations, but who were prepared to stand up in their factory or union and say 'OK this time we'll go with the revolutionaries in a public way'. That's the potential that we have to build on.
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has taken the path of capitalist austerity'