CP and scandal of trade with Pinochet

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CP General Secretary McLennan speaking at their last Congress : in huge profits new drugs is to take their development out of the hands of the capitalists.

Established drugs of proven value that continue to be usetul, can be substituted, so that cheaper equivalents may be used But with capitalist production these cheaper alternatives have often been produced by cut-price methods which ensure a doophole in the market for a late coming entrepreneur..

In Denmark and Sweden pharmacists have set up their own preparation and distribution of drugs because of this situation.

In/ Canada there IS mandatory substitution; trademarks are v.dely banned in Pakistan; Ngeria similarly restricts branded drugs and there is a iotal Iban in Peru.

Drug company int

defend brands on the ¡that consistent qualit effectiveness can on maintained with b! drugs. In the present : this may be true.

However, there ¡the fundamental between the interests of the lunder capitalism needs of patients.

This article can only iscratch the surface of the relationship of the private drug companies to the NAS and the cost in terms of the health care budget.

The questions raised can Branded Proportion dispensed : Total cost of prescriptions All companies British owned US owned Swiss owned rests basis and ! be nded ingle remains conflict financial producers and the total in 1961 19.2% 14.4% 24.6% 14.9% oniy be answered by workers in the pharmaceutical industry, on an international basis, and by health workers.

The innermost workings ot the pricing mechanisms must be exposed and price fixing agreements between parent and sunsidiary companies tully investigated, together with detailed costs of production.

We call for elected committees of trade unionists to open the books of the capitalists in the pharmaceutical industry, to expose these secret agreements and demand that the separate and otten duplicated research efforts are rationalised with no loss of jobs, under workers' control.

The supply of drugs to the health service must then be agreed with elected committees of health workers and professionals.

In fighting for this control over manufacture and distribution the call for nationalisation of the industry must be raised; and the technical skills of workers must be expanded into those necessary for management so that the capitalists can be expropriated and drugs produced according to the needs of the health service. • The resources liberated must be used for the proper financing and expansion of the service in the interests of the vast majority of the population.

1949 1971 80% 95% interest sales. in 1965 20.7% 22.5% 23.2% Recent coverage in the Tory press of the increasing trade between Eastern Europe and Chile has proved an acute embarassment to the British Communist Not only has the CP been active amongst the exiled Chilean community in. Britain, but it has also consistently used talk about Chile as a means of preserving a left' face, while refusing to struggle against the betrayals by the TUC and Labour leaders in Britain.

On previous similar em barassing occasions-such as the time when scab coal from Poland was used to break the Asturian miners' struggle against the Franco dictatorship in Spain, or the revelations of trading links between East Germany and the Greek military junta -CP tactics have been to ignore the embarassing facts.

Minimise involvement But in this case they have attempted to ride the tiger-and to divert hostility away from the disgraceful actions of the East European bureaucracies.

A half-page article in the Morning Star of September 18 entitled "Who's Trading and Aiding the Chilean Junta? sets out to minimise the level of involvement of the deformed workers' states in this trade by comparing it to the much higher levels of West. Germany, the USA and Britain.

It points out that China has been condemned by the USSR for maintaining full diplomatic and commercial relations with Chile.

But Rumania also has full relations with Pinochet, while East Germany maintains an economic mission i in Santiago. These have not been condemned, the article admits.

Increased

It goes on to reveal that over 5% of Chilean exports go to the deformed workers states. But it claims that this compares with 7.02% in 1972-the last full year before the coup.

However the article also quotes a Soviet ministry spokesman who claims that "we have no trade of any kind with Chile." If this is true, then trade with other Eastern European countries must have increased since the coup!

At the end of the article Jack Woddis, head of the CP's "international" department says: • "My view is that, even if such economic arguments Ladvantages for socialist or capitalist countries in trade with Chile | had validity, the political advantage to Pinochet from trade deals outweighs the economic advantages other to countries.

"Chile under junta Pinochet a pariah state and it should be treated as such."

The issue is of course not one of rival "arguments" but a point of principle in which workers states should be expected to take a different line from capitalist regimes.

For the East European Stalinist regimes to carry on trade with the Pinochet regime while the workers' movement internationally fights for solidarity blacking action is no more than a stab in the back for the Chilean working class.

Why doesn't the British Communist Party demand Rumania and East Germany break all links with the junta?

Because as a Stalinist party itself the British CP is in no way opposed to the reactionary opportunist line of "peaceful coexistence' carried out by these bureaucratic regimes.

Internal consumption Its criticisms of fellow Stalinist leaders are strictly for internal consumptionto head off militant anger among CP members and sympathisers-and not in the least linked to the fight for international proletarian solidarity.

For the same reason the Morning Star article accuses the CIA and "US big business" for assisting the Pinochet coup, but makes no criticisms of the criminal role of the Chilean Communist Party whose "peaceful road to socialism" led to involvement in Allende's popular front government the political and even physical disarmament of the working. class and opened the door to the junta.

British Stalinists themselves share the catastrophic political positions argued by their ill-fated Chilean brothers and sisters right up to and even after the bloody events of 1973.

And they are at a loss to explain why the Eastern European states carry on their deadly trade with Pinochet.

Parasitic

This can only be understood on the basis of seeing the historic process through which the gains of the October 1917 revolution in Russia were limited by the emergence of a parasitic bureaucracy-originally under Stalin-which bases. itself on peaceful coexistence' with capitalism in the interests of supposedly building 'socialism in one country'.

This nationalist position -an outright rejection of Lenin's struggle for proletarian internationalism-has. led the Kremlin bureaucrats and their subordinates in the Eastern European states to put their own narrow interests above any consideration of the interests of the world's working class.

Such cynicism can be fought not by a few moral platitudes in the press of fellow Stalinists, but only by the construction of revolutionary parties in every country based on the lessons of Trotsky's life-long struggle against Stalinism.

The Morning Star, daily paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, last month revealed that its crisis is getting worse.

In a message from the editor Tony Chater announced that it is likely that the price will have to go up to 14p from Januaryand that, as well as this, increasec readership is needed.

This is despite the fact that vast numbers of the Star go to Eastern Europe and the paper also receives considerable government money from advertisemants The present home circulation is 21,000 daily copiesseveral thousand less than the claimed membership of the CPand to clear up the losses Chater says they need 9.10,000 new readers at 14p per copy. In the present state of the CP this is clearly no easy task.

The Star's tireless support of the so-called 'left' and 'progressive' forces within the British labour bureaucracy found its most naked expression recently in its praise for this year's electioneering TUC Congress which it described as a move to the This opportunist orientation has time and again over the years led the CP into an open political alliance with the right wing of the bureaucracy against any form of opposition that offers an independent road of struggle for the working class, making leading Stalinists like Leyland convenor Derek Robinson a crucial part of hamstringing the struggle against Phases 1, 2 and 3 of wage control, and of derailing struggles against redundancy.

Even unionisation struggles such as Grunwicks, Desoutters and Garners, Stalinists have stood in the front rank of bureaucratic sabotage and confusion.

And in its efforts to head off practical action against unemployment, the Star has championed the reactionary, nationalist call for import controls, lining up with right wing TUC bureaucrats and weaker sections of the British employing class.

The Morning Star has combined this. record with complete subsarvience to the international diplomatic manoeuvres and treachery of the counter-revolutionary Kremlin As such the paper is no more than an obstacle to the working class in its struggles and a barrier to militant CP members breaking from the bankrupt positions of their leadershipl As Trotskyists we welcome the news of the Star's decline, and look forward to its eventual, inevitable, fall.

By Tony Richardson SAS: 00030 232222289933

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SOCIALIST PRESS. Wednesday I Ocober i9g A Review of the four recent television films which presentation of the Nazi annihilation of the Jews in Europe together with the novel Holocaust by Gerald Green (Corgi the films were based. Also reviewed is the recently-publish‹ Against the Jews 1933-45, by Lucy Davidowicz (Penguin, £1 were from £1.25 ed bo 95) a fictional 1933-1945 ) on which ok The War