No need for Tories to fake dole queue photo PRESS GANG IS GANG HES G

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Barely since Henry II sent his soldiers to murder Thomas Beckett in Canturbury Cathedral has priest managed to get so far up the noses of the ruling class.

Doctor Thomas O Fiaich, is about as progressive as a dinosaur, and a representative of an international organisation that spreads misery, poverty, ignorance and savagery. In other words, he is Primate of All Ireland, and a future Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.

His pronunciations on H Block prison conditions at Long Kesh concentration camp have been made, no doubt, to restore his position inside the Catholic belly of the republican movement but the impact of his statement was dramatic.

"The stench and filth in some of the cells, with the remains of rotten food and human ‚excreta scattered around the walls was almost unbearable. In two of them I was unable to speak for fear of vomiting."

O 'Fiaich forced the conditions in that prison upon the consciousnesses of the British working class and indeed internationallylike few other statements could have done.

When the Primate of all Ireland-previously a reliable propaganda weapon , against the IRA-not only condemns conditions but appears to say that the prisoners are political prisoners, then the British Press no longer has the option of silence.

They answered fire with captions of contine on fire. But they also printed : criptions of conditions in the torture camp.

The Archbishop was not calling for the reintroduction of political His role is not dissimilar to that played by the trade union bureaucracy in economic wring enougn concessions rom the authorities to tak he head of steam off th powertul campaign which is now building up.

These considerations did not spare him the scorpion whiplashes of the British Press.

Like every other Fleet Street paper, with the sole exception of the Sunwhich spared us its hysteria only because the journalists had shut it down-the Times took its editorial tone from the Northern Ireland office.

In a leader headed "The Prisoners' Friend from Armargh" (Wednesday Auguste 2) the Timeshop: support for the stand being oners, his impud endorseoners. his impled ment of their claim to represent the tradition of militant Irish republicanism, his view that blame of the admittedly foul conditions in parts of the Maze prison lies in the inflexibility of the Northern Ireland government in response to a justified demand-all this serves to retard the slow process of rejection by the Irish community of the resergence of the IRA, its indiscriminate violence, perverted justice and false historical claims."

The Mirror ('Lost in the Maze") put it more sharply:

"They have done these revolting things to themselves because they want to be treated as 'prisoners or war'. Free to wear their own clothes. Answerable to their own 'officers' "Though they have murdered and bombed, kneecapped and crippled, they demand special privileges. And the gullible Dr. O'Fiaich support them The gangsters in the Maze are criminals and should be treated as such."

The Express told "Dr. Fee" that he should "take the opportunity to be silent"

"These men are not in the Maze for holding their political convictions. There is free speech in Northern 'They are in prison for their criminal acts and there is no reason in law or morality why they should be treated any differently from other criminals."

•The response from Fleet Street was not a jot different from Henry II: "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?"

Such policies would involve the nationalisation without compensation of the major industries and the banks under committees of workers' management, and the implementation of a programme of useful public works to create new jobs.

But to implement such a programme in the teeth of opposition from the employers means a decisive break from the parliamentary reformist programme advocated by the Labour It means mobilising the working class in each factory, each combine, each industry in the struggle to open the books of the employers and reveal the waste and private greed inherent in the capitalist system of exploitation, and show the need for a socialist planned economy.

It means driving out the present rightwing trade union and Labour leaders who seek to preserve their cosy relationship with the employing class at the expense of their members' jobs and living standards.

ENTRANCE HO CLOSED

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Labour intensive industrial operations are the rule in China to this day. Here workers are Since the overthrow of the 'Gang of Four' in the months after the death ice the overthrow of the 'Gang of Four' in the months after the donth of Mao Tse-tung, a substantial reorientation of the Chinese economy has been introduced by the 'capitalist roaders' who came to prominence.

What do these developments represent? Are they a setback for workers and peasants? Can either wing of the Chinese bureaucracy forward for the 800 million Chinese workers and peasants.

Godfrey Webster examines the developments which have taken place since the purge of the Gang of Four and sets out to answer these questions.

At first sight it might appear that the defeat of the "radical" Shanghai group in China by Hua Kuo-feng and Teng Hsiao-ping was a major setback to the Chinese working class.

Hua's slogan "Bring great order across the land" is a catchphrase for re-asserting managerial control industry, teachers' authority in schools, and for strengthening the army and police.

As part of this policy the workers' militias in Shanghai and Peking have been disarmed.

Differentials

Similarly the shift away from the outlook "Better red than expert" means the restoration of wide differentials between workers and technicians in industry, and will probably mean bringing back payment by results.

It mears entry to higher 201030-- Casis exam resis ances for class and educational background.

This will obviously favour the children of intellectuals and bureaucrats.

The changes certainly met with fierce resistance from sections of the Chinese working class.

Production lost

Reporters from the Economist who recently visited Manchuria in North China were told that the Harbin turbine factory employing 10,000 workers lost 50% of its production in 1976 owing to industrial disputes caused by • the political struggle.

Wuhan in Central China was the scene of continual conflict from 1975 to 1977. The giant Iron and Steel Complex was on strike for two months from January 1977 in protest at the strengthening of managerial authority and discipline.

But although numerous cases of armed conflict have been reported in the Chinese press, there is no record of co-ordinated resistance by the workers militias.

Did the "radicals" really have an alternative to offer Chinese workers?

the Chinese offer a way Or was it just a leadership squabble among the bureaucrats who rule China?

The answer must rest on an understanding of the problems of Chinese economic development and the relationship of the classes in Chinese society.

The Chinese economy is still dominated by the agricultural sector. 75% of China's 950 million people live in the country.

Unmechanised but intensive production is the rule. Increases in production have been achieved by labour intensive schemes to improve irrigation and bring new land into cultivation.

Yield increased

Yield per acre has increased to about double that in other parts of Asia and Africa, but is still only half that in Japan and the But in spite of these efforts production has only just kept pace with the growth of population. Total production of foodgrains has remained close to 0.3 tonnes per person per year ever since 1952.

This is about the lowest possible consumption to keep people alive and in reasonable health.

It allows no possibility of net agricultural exports, and makes the production of meat products on a large scale impossible, because using grain as foodstuff is wasteful of nutritional value.

Production is organised largely on collective lines.

Work-points

Peasants are allowed individual plots of land for small scale production of livestock or vegetables.

But they are members of work teams which are responsible for the production of foodgrains and commercial crops, as well as for irrigation schemes and small rural industries.

Members of work-teams are allocated work-points on the basis of the number of hours labour they contribute to team work.

They are paid a proportion of the total revenue of the work team according to their work points. Much has been made by bourgeois commentators of the supposed capitalist nature of this payment system.

Creamed off

But there is no way peasants can use workpoints to accumulate the ownership of land OI capital, or to employ other peasants.

Equal pay for équal work, although a slogan much endeared to capitalist ideologists, can in fact only be implemented if property is collectively owned.

The radical group also attacked the work-point system, saying it should be replaced by the communist principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"

This sounds principle, no doubt land but the peasants remembered the lAST attempt to use this policy during the "Grea Leap Forward" of 1958.• What was interpreted as "need" was the very barest necessity possible to live on The surplus was creamed off by the state to finance the industrial adventures o that period such as back yard steel furnaces.

The peasants were expec ted to work these rura industries • as part of their "voluntary" contribution to the Great Leap Forward.

A showpiece moder

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Modern scientific methods including the use of tractors is essential. șeen constructing a reservoir - ro • It was no longer poss for them to work si additional hours and their extra work-points buy consumer goods.

Capitalist sector In other words the policy of the radical group stripped of the fine phrases meant production by moral and physicál coercion rather than by economic incentive.

The struggle over this question was about how to increase the production of the peasantry when both anan-plating process ble me use to capital and consumer goods are scarce:

It is impossible to define one method as capitalist and the other socialist without looking at the overall development problems of the society.

On the other hand the private plots do represent a clear capitalist sector of the Chinese economy.

It is a sector entirely subject to market forces and outside the control of state or even local economic planning.

Much of the hostility of the peasants to the radical group was based on their proposals to abolish private plots.

The peasants find these plots an important source of secondary income which they can individually control.

They fear that the introduction of central planning would give them production targets that were impossible to achieve and take away their freedom to work on the plots when they please.

Under • the present bureaucratic planning system this is no doubt perfectly true.

Private Until the state can guarantee the peasants a supply of consumer goods in return for their normal collective work, they will strongly resist any attempt to take away the private plots.

However, trom the workers' point of view the private plots deny them a regular and sufficient supply of pigs, poultry and vegetables.

For instance it takes a Chinese industrial worker seven times as long to earn enough to buy a pound of rice as an American worker.

But it takes him twenty five times as long as an American to earn enough to buy a chicken or a pound of carrots!

, Ihis is the price paid for what bourgeois commentators regard as the "highly efficient" system of private plots.

But abolishing the plots would only be of benefit if it was accompanied by mechanisation and capitalisation of this part of agriculture.

Battery hen farming may be obnoxious to British animal lovers but it does provide a supply of chicken *and eggs at prices workers can afford.

Further improvements in the productivity of collective production also depend on the introduction of modern scientific methods i.e. tractors and chemical fertilisers.

Without much more rapid development of industry the radical group's proposals for agriculture amount to little more than an attack on the peasants' present standard of living.

35 million But it is precisely in industry that the role of the bureaucracy in stifling growth has been most clearly demonstrated.

Although over 200 million Chinese live in towns, the industrial working class numbers only about 35 million.

This is a similar number to the industrial working class in the USA and Japan.

Of the 35 million some work in small, privately owned co-operatives, but the majority work in large state factories.

Until the Cultural Revolution the management of these factories was similar to the Soviet Union.

Production targets were set by the central bureaucracy in accordance with the current economic plan, and it was then up to the manager and engineer to decide how this target would be achieved.

This system allows no scope for the creativity of the working class. The bureaucratic planning methods mean that production is constantly interrupted by raw material shortages and breakdowns, as all visitors to China and the Soviet Union remark.

Isolated

Most important, production is not based on need because workers have no means of controlling the state and the economic However, it would be incorrect to regard the economy as capitalist production.

Prices and wages determined by the market but by planning decisions.

This means that open unemployment is unusual.

It also means that the Chinese economy is to a large degree isolated from the booms and slumps of the capitalist world, and that the ravages of imperialism which afflict other backward countries can be prevented.

Until the Cultural Revolution most workers were paid on piece rates, so that breakdowns caused wages to be very unpredictable.

Workers had little control over their working environment because trade unions were dominated by the bureaucracy and limited themselves mainly to social security provision.

Add to this that pay differentials between managers and unskilled workers were as high as 15:1 and it is easy to see the basis for the sharp conflict which developed between workers and the bureaucracy.

Mortal The leadership group around Mao Tse-tung were continually afraid that this resentment contained mortal danger to the bureaucracy as a whole.

And they were aware that the stifling stranglehold of bureaucratic management in industry was a major obstacle to production.

Mao's solution was to turn workers' resentment against a section of the bureaucracy, and to attempt to draw workers into participation in management decisions.

Objections to the privileges of managers and to large differentials between different workers could be used to try and replace material incentives by moral coercion.

Abolishing incentives would mean lower consumption and this should allow greater investment.

Piece work was largely abolished and replaced by the eight-grade system. The Shanghai group later called for the narrowing of differentials in this grading scheme as well.

Promotion from one grade to another became very much a matter of political attitude, cooperativeness.

The new pulicy was also reflected in the technical field. Drawing workers into management meant that more reliance could be placed on creating ways of making primitive equipment work and less on the import of modern machinery.

"Better red than expert"

was a slogan representing this outlook.

At its worst it became a reactionary and chauvinist contempt for foreign technology.

But at its best it did save on scarce capital resources, and promoted a healthy distaste for the authority of technocrats.

Local bureaucrats and managers at first fought strongly against the undermining of their authority by Red Guards and so-called Revolutionary Committees.

Pitched battles were fought in many Chinese cities.

But it was only when workers began to draw out the logic of the situation that the central bureaucacy took fright.

Revolutonary -workers began to realise that the obstacle to development was not just the local bureaucracy but the whole bureaucratic planning system.

Changing the method of control at factory level did nothing to change the overall objectives of state planning, which were not and never had been based on the needs of the masses.

On the contrary the objectives had always been to extend and protect the power of the Chinese bureaucracy-as the huge resources devoted to developing atomic weapons • It was at this stage that the bureaucracy began to withdraw its support from the mass movement and to begin its suppression.

Millions of young workers and students who had "gone too far" were sent to remote parts of the countryside.

Revolutionary committees had their sting removed by appointing previous managers as vice-chairmen.

But discussions still remained in the bureaucracy about what aspects of the new policy could be retained without danger.

The group around Teng Hsiao-ping considered that only a return to the previous situation could ensure stability.

Complete managerial authority had to be restored even if this meant bringing back incentive payments and an increase in wages to buy co-operation.

If a slower rate of growth resulted this could be compensated by foreign loans and by selling oil to Japan.

Developments recently confirm this policy decision. The agreements to exchange new machinery from the EEC for oil and coal, and to accept loans from German banks have been announced in the last few months.

The Shanghai Four considered that some degree of mass involvement could be retained by continuing to send the most troublesome youngsters to the country and using the army to intervene if the situation in any particular area got out of hand.

They also put forward their programme for increasing agricultural production at the expense of peasants' living standards.

In the event industrial production stagnated or fell because of continual strikes against local management.

Steel production in 1976 and 1977 failed to reach the level , of 1973 (26 million tonnes).

Both steel and coal production have increased by only 30% in 17 years, an annual growth rate of 1.5%.

The agricultural reforms could also not be implemented because of peasant resistance.

The swing of the centre faction in the bureaucracy around Hua Kuo-feng;

behind Teng Hsiao-ping and the managers is therefore not surprising.

However the new leadership has no new policies to offer the masses.

It will continue to develop industry to serve the needs of a military and bureaucratic regime. Agriculture will continue to be stifled by the slow development of the crucial areas of industry that serve it.

The Chinese working class may have been forced to retreat as a result of the defeat of the Shanghai group.

But that is not to say the radicals had anything to offer the working class.

indeed it was precisely the growing realisation in the working class of the inadequacy of the radical programme which forced the bureaucracy to finally destroy the power of the radicals.

What the whole struggle underlines is the need for an independent revolutionary leadership in the Chinese Mao working class which can draw out the real lessons of the Cultural Revolution, and provide a perspective for throwing out the whole The fight must be for a Trotskyist party fighting on programme of demands directed towards the formation of independent soviets of workers and peasants as a counter to the bureaucratic power of the Stalinist regime.

On the basis of the struggle of these soviets the Peking bureaucracy can be removed and the way opened up for the planned expansion of the nationalised means of production under elected committees of workers management.

Only in this way can the creative energies of the Chinese working class be released and the scourge of economic backwardness be finally overcome.

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• SOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesday y August, 1Y/8 Berlinguer (right) with Spanish CP leader Ibarruri Pinochet's military terror: Branchero talked of the armed forces taking part in political debate.

In August 1977 Luis Corvalan, General Secretary of the Chilean Communist Party, gave a report to the first Plenary session of the Central Committee since the military coup of 1973.

The speech has since been published as Chilean revolution, the fascist dictatorship the struggle to overthrow it and create a TONY RICHARDSON examines it in the of the supposed policy differences between "Ei Communist Parties and the adherents of democracy".

"Moscow-line".

41 members of the Chilean CP Central Committee were present to hear this report by Corvalan.

Of the other members, six had been murdered, 6 had died and 11 remained missing.

These losses must have reflected the vicious repression of the Pinochet junta against the Party as a whole.

Yet despite this tragic lesson Corvalan's report centres not on the obvious impossibility of a 'peaceful' road to socialism in Chile and elsewhere but on the "mistakes" made by the CP in seeking such a road.

Pinochet "The and new 'ight tro" the And even now, five years after the Junta trampled its way to power, crushing the workers movement, Corvalan still talks of a "peaceful' road to overthrow Pinochet.

Indeed almost every aspect of the analysis of this openly pro-Soviet Communist Party echoes the positions of the "national" roads to socialism argued by "Euro" Communists Berlinguer and Carrillo.

In Italy, Berlinguer props up the Tory Christian Democratic government, arguing for Communist involvement in a coalition.

In Chile, Corvalan now tells us that the major mistake of the parties in Allende's Popular Unity government was that, though they conceded to the CP and brought top military leaders into the government, they held back on bringing in the Christian Democrats.

And today, turning his back on the lessons of the past, Corvalan calls for a Provisional Government made up of "Popular Unity, Christian Democracy and the democratic sections of the armed forces"

According to Corvalan's schema:

"Unity must be built around programme: worked out with the participation of all anti-fascist forces of political, economic, social, moral and cultural reconstruction of our country" . (p.61)

Far from representing an alternative to "Euro" Communism, Corvalan's policy mirrors and even exceeds every aspect of "Euro" Communist Popular Front strategy of tying workers parties into anti-socialist alliances with the parties of the capitalist class.

And Corvalan apes Italian Stalinist leader Berlinguer's support for wage cuts and "austerity" measures.

He now declared that the "problem of increasing production" under Allende's reformist, capitalist government, was sabotaged by the "ultraleftist slogan that increasing production was a matter for the capitalists to worry about". • (p.35).

Businessmen

While "Euro" Communist • Santiago Carrillo puts fo rward a perspective of wi inning over the Francoist ar med forces to the cause of : socialism, Corvalan goes OI 1 to call for a regime where the people are in all ec helons of power through th leir organisations"-includin g "businessmen and industri ialists"! (p.61).

Corvalan's 'road to 'cialism' clearly has room it for the Chilean CBI and agineering Employers ederation!

It is also wide enough to.

clude the Church. Echoing the reactionary moves by Carrillo and Berlinguer towards the Catholic Church, Corvalan proclaims that religious activities" are:

"dangerous for their [the Junta's] regime, simply because they reaffirm the links of human solidarity"!

If the concept of "human solidarity" an d the involvement of "pr ›gressive" generals and indu: strialists is not sufficiently i all-embracing to exclude • any idea of class struggl e or proletarian revolt ition, Corvalan goes on to su iggest that the Christian D 'emocrats themselves can 1 be carried along to socialis «We do not consid ler it inevitable that today's antifascist forces sh lould separate tomorrow with regard to the coun Itry's future, and we shal do everything possible to prevent this happening.

"We understand tha t the Christian Democrats have not definitively aband oned the concepts expresser d by their presidential cand idate in 1970 about the inc: apacity of capitalism to solve Chilean problems". (p.6 16).

Of course Corvalan i s not simply preparing a fi ature sell-out, or attemptin: g to contain potent tially revolutionary struggles i by workers as are Spi anish Stalinist Carrillo and It alian CP leader Berlinguer.

This same bank crupt policy of class collabor: ation led to the defeat of the strongest and best organised working class in Latin America.

Corvalan's continued talk of the "national sovereignty" of the capitalist state in Chile indicates that Stalinism not only threatens catastrophic defeats, but that it is incapable of learning even the simplest lesson from history.

Allende's government was of course a Popular Front, which contained the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the bourgeois Radical Party.

But Corvalan tells us that Allende was not a reformist but a revolutionary. He claims that through its role in the Popular Front the CP held "a part of political power, specifically the Executive power"

But of course in the intact capitalist state, with the repressive police and army machinery intact the "power" held by the workers' parties was no more than an illusion.

If Corvalan's speech is to be believed, the Stalinists opposed Allende's illusions in the Chilean armed forces. He declares:

"The behaviour of the Government and Popular Unity in this field was undoubtedly influenced by erroneous conceptions Carrillo (left) with colleague Ibarruri Castro (right) with Allende deeply rooted in the Chilean mentality (! which, in one way or another, to a greater or lesser extent, affected all Parties.

"Obviously we are referring to the belief that, the Armed Forces of Chile were distinguished by their subordination to the Civil Power and by their abstention from politics and sense of professionalism." (p.28)

Loyalty Who peddled these "erroneous conceptions"? Why, none other than Corvalan himself and his fellow Stalinists! Only days before the coup, Corvalan made a speech published in the British • CP journal Marxism Today, in which he described the defeat of the abortive coup of June 29, 1973 which:

"was quickly contained thanks to the prompt and determined action of the commander in chief, the loyalty of the armed forces and the police, and the manner in which the workers... entrenched themselves in the factories, ready to take part in combat if the situation needed them."

Institution

In the Stalinist journal, World Marxist Review, which was ironically published after the coup, Chilean CP spokesman

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SOCIALISI PRESS iside stagris:

Cathy Sherlock replies to the critics of nuclear power and argues that in the struggle to build socialism on the basis of the advances achieved under capitalism, there is no alternative but to use nuclear power, though necessarily as part of a planned socialist economy.

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