[Like a shack in an earthquake, India's ruling…]

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Like a shack in an earthquake, India's ruling Congress Party, which has been in power continuously for the last 28 years, is feeling the ground crumbling beneath it. The decision of an Allahabad High Court on June 12th to convict Mrs Indira Ghandi, Prime Minister for the last 9 years, of corrupt electoral practices worsens the crisis for her bourgeois nationalist government which has been developing for some time.

The world crisis is affecting all relations within imperialism, and weakening the basis of all bourgeois nationalist leaders. In India itself this has taken the form of rampant inflation, corruption in public lite, especially in food distribution, and dramatic increases in the numbers of jobless in the towns and landless peasants, irredeemably hocked to moneylenders, in the country. This has polarised the classes in India and swept away the basis for a nationalist government.

These developments lie behind the conviction for a small part of the corruption upon which the Congress Party is based. Mrs Ghandi had her election to Parliament in 1971 set aside and is debarred from public office for six years for using paid government officials, including her former private secretary, to forward her election prospects. Fou As prices rise in the shops so also does that price which the Chilean working class are paying for the betrayals of its leadership which culminated in the coup of September, 1973.

Recent critical statements by Eduardo Frei and other former leaders of the Christian Democrats -who supported the coup and are now wooed by the Communist Party and its allies in the former Popular Unity - result from the fact that, despite 20 months of ferocious economic and political attack on the working class, the ¡unta has failed to restore a stable economic basis for capitalist accumulation in Chile.

But it is not for want of trying. There has been a devastating attack on working class living standards. In 1974 the official cost of living index rose by 376 per cent; and up to May this year by a further 125 per cent. Every three months wages are adjusted upwards by the change in this index up to a month FOR GANDHI other accusations, including spending over the legal limit and bribing voters with gifts were dismissed.

The Judge, Mr Justice Sinha, granted a stay of operation of the sentence for 20 days so a successor to Mrs Ghandi may be appointed but the Congress Party has announced that she will stay on as Prime Minister pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. This may take at least as long as the four year High Court action, and so almost certainly will allow her to remain throughout the next Indian General Electior next year, besides giving her the chance of a friendly court which Mrs.Gandhi packed with politically sympathetic judges in 1973.

Meanwhile the Congress Party stages innumerable rallies to whip up popular support, and the opposition parties have launched Resignation Demand Week with rallies and pickets outside the president's palace. The latter are heartened by the result of the Gujurat state election, where the Congress Party lost to Jayaprakash Narayan's People's Front by 12 seats in a 182-seat Assembly. The elections were held after months of disorder in the state last year, which started with protests over rising prices and ended with the dismissal of the State Government.

Mrs.Gandhi has been driven into a corner by her very consolidation of personal power. She has to stay on and thereby be discredited because the Congress Party is literally unable to cope with her even temporary withdrawal. In the earlier: so real wages have time to drop by about half between each adjustment and never even momentarily catch up. In addition the official figures underestimate the rise in the cost of living by a huge amount.

A few price increases of basic commodities since the coup illustrate this: milk and sugar up by 17,000 per cent, cooking oil by 10,000 and calor gas by 8,000 per cent; rice by 21,000 per cent. The total effect has been to push down real wages to perhaps as little as one third of their level before the coup.

Increasingly the inflation has been accompanied by a major economic slump leading to massive levels of unemployment. The official figure for unemployment in Santiago (where nearly half the population live) was 9.9 per cent in Maich and was up to 13.3 per cent in April of this year.

These figures are generally thought to be about half of the real ones. Among many enterprises reported closing completely or for extended periods in the last two months are one of the country's largest steel blast furnaces and the major tyre company.

Inflation, then, ue ATuo fou s!

Unlike the opposition parties. many large sections of workers have fought the Government tenaciously: revealing its vicious anti-working class nature.

In May 1974 there was a 20day national strike of railwaymen over pay which was broken by the Congress government when they imprisoned 30,000 strikers and sacked 15,000. They joined the countless numbers of discontents who have now been in prison for months and years without trial. The Railways Minister responsible Lalit Narayan Misura, was assassinated by a bomb in January this year.

Also in January this year was a national strike of 200,000 dockers for a pay increase of £2.75 per month tollowing a 30% rise in the cost of living in 1974. The government declared this illegal under emergency regulations dating back to the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971.

Workers' and peasants' resistance, was expressed on March 6th this year with a massive demonstration of half a million in New Delhi led by J.P.Narayan which presented a petition calling for an end to corruption in public lite, the revocation of the 1971 state of emergency and the dismissal of the Congress government in Bihar State.

The growth of this opposition cannot of course be separated from the largely peasant move ments which have swept to power in similar circumstances in the revolutions in Vietnam and Cambodia, and these must give tremendous instrument of the junta in imposing wage cuts, but also a threat to it by shifting capitalist activity into speculation and by destroying the wealth of the petit-bourgeoisie which constitutes much of the junta's original support.

Even ultra-cheap labour has not re-established a stable basis for Chilean capitalism. And the junta has now, under the expert guidance of the American monetarist economist Milton Friedman whose growin influence in the British ruling ciass is notorious, launched a programme of 'economic reconstruction' involving the ending of the deficits of the nationalised industries and huge cuts in social service spending including the. ending: of all free medicine. This follows massive cuts in the previous year when health and education spending fell from 30 per cent to 5 per cent of the budget.

Even if these measures curb inflation they will further raise the price of 1973's defeat for the Chilean working class by intensifying the economic slump as every historic gain of the Chilean workers comes under the axe.

"lessons of October - namely that the petty-bourgeoisie including the peasantry, is incapable of playing the role of leader in modern, even if back ward, bourgeois society ... the peasantry can either support the dictatorship of the bourg eoisie or serve as prop to the dictatorship of the proletariat." further "Stalin and Bukharin preached that thanks to the yoke of imperialism the bourgeoisie could carry out the national revolution in China. The attempt was made. With what results? The proletariat was brought under the headman's axe. Then it was said: the democratic dictatorship will come next. The petty-bourgeois dictatorship proved to be only a masked dictatorship of capital By accident? No, 'the peasant follows either the worker or the bourgeois."

But the Stalinist thoery of rigidly distinct stages of the socialist revolution has not been abandoned by the Maoists either, while one section collaborates in bourgeois governments, another section, having split on the issue of parliamentary working, engages in guerrilla warfare and sent its town cadres to work in the peasant movement leading struggles like those of the 'Naxalites', peasants who rose up and killed their landlords.

The great need is for the building of a Trotskyist movement as a section of the Fourth International which takes its understanding of the roots of Stalinist bureaucracy and parliamentarianism into fighting for the method of Trotsky's Transitional Programme. Here he states:

The economic crisis continues to mount in West Germany, once the miracle of post war capitalism. Unemployment is increasing and now stands at five per cent. For the past 5 months 1 million workers have been out of work and the number on short time has risen to 950,000.

The major factor in the German economic crisis is the continuuus fall in export orders especially in the capital goods industries, a fact which highlights the international nature of the curren slump and the impossibility of any single capitalist country escaping its effects.

Falling exports continue in the consumer industries, however, especially the motor industry. Volkswagen will dismiss 600 wor‚kers at the end of the month as the first step of a sweeping rationalisation drive that according to Herr Smucker the president of VW will result in 25,000 redundancies (one fifth of the labour force) by the end of 1976.

In response to this growing attack on the working class the collectivisation. The farmer will remain owner of his plot of land as long as he himself believes it possible or necessary."

CREDIT

To assist this the moneylenders must be abolished and the banks nationalised under the management of workers committees which can then provide cheap credit for small farmers as well as large collectives.

At each point the struggles of small farmers must be directed towards the demands which establish the strongest links with the working class in opposition to monopoly capitalism. Again • as Trotsky wrote:

• • the banks, the trusts, the merchants rob the farmer from every side. Only the farmers themselves, with the help of the workers, can curb this robbery. Committees elected by small farmers should make their appearance on the national scene and jointly with workers committees and committees of bank employees take into their hands control of transport, credit and mercantile operations affecting agriculture.' Such a programme must now obviously include the demand for the resignation of Mrs Ghandi and a campaign for the removal of the Congress government and its replacement by a government of workers' parties, whilst at the same time fighting to develop soviets of workers and peasants within the wages struggles that are erupting now all over India.

Schmidt government boasts only of its wizardry in bringing down the rate of inflation, at the expense of a massive increase in unemployment, from 7.1% in February to 6.1% in May. While the earnings of millions of German workers fall with unemployment and short time, the 'Social Democrat' SPD acts only to stabilise the currency in the interests of bankers.

Moreover by imposing a ban on immigrant workers being recruited by German firms and by preparing to send home the majority of recent immigrants after their work permits expire, the SPD leadership is able to masquerade as the defender of German workers (while in fact acting to increase unemployment) by diverting attention to foreign workers and stirring up racism.

The treachery of the SPD leadership demands a fight in the German working class for a new leadership which will carry through the fight for the political independence of the working class movement and prepare for the approaching revolutionary struggles.

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Thursday June 26th 1975 UPTION WHICH WAY

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"The present programme is n.33 'MIRACL