Sell-out Leader Ousted

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Meanwhile within the US labour movement the bureaucracy is facing a growing, if confused and politically misleading opposition.

Clearest example of this was this week's revolt by 2,000 workers at the newly organised US Volkswagen plant in New. Stanton, Pennsylvania.

A mass meeting at the plant voted by 1,235 to 94 to reject the new contract freshly signed by United Auto Workers' leader Doug Fraser and Volkswagen boss James McLernon, and to take strike action to force an improvement.

Hundreds of pickets gathered outside the plantforcing management to abandon efforts to get in to their offices, and the whole plant-organised into the union only three months ago-is now idle.

Booted out

While Fraser contemplates how to discipline this major revolt and force a return to work, postal workers' leader Joseph Vacca, President of the National Association of Letter Carriers has been ignominiously booted out of office in elections following his sell-out of the post workers' pay struggle.

Vacca was replaced by militant talking rival Vincent Sombrotta from New York in the biennial election.

3-year sell out He had capitulated to compulsory arbitration on the pay claim, which had led to a three-year 21.4% sell-out settlement.

Meanwhile even the gangster-ridden and notoriously corrupt Teamsters union bureaucracy faces mounting problems as the rank and file' Professional Drivers Council (PROD) launches a series of internal union moves and wrongheaded law suits against union President Frank Fitzsimmons.

'Fitz' has been summonsed to union tribunals charged with misconduct and harried by Congressional inquiries and Labor Department investigations into Teamster finances spurred on by PROD.

And in one union local alone, Local 688, PROD members are bringing two lawsuits, seeking a total of 495,000 dollars against secretary treasurer Ron Gamache.

Legal suit

At the same time the "rank and file' grouping Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) has also filed a legal suit demanding equal treatment for ThIl electinn Fitzsimmons candidates in the International Teamster Magazine.

TDU Presidential candidate Pete Camarata has established a murky record over the last two years of invoking the machinery of the US capitalist state to intervene in the Teamsters Union.

As a result of his complaints to the Department of Labor, the Department is to sue the officers of Teamsters Local : 299 in Detroit, seeking to overturn an election held last December.

The corruption of the Teamsters leadership has become an international legend.

Camarata has had to endure physical beatings and threats to his union membership and his job in order to pursue his fight against Fitzsimmons.

The top 10 Teamster families that control the bureaucratic network of the two million-strong union made a total of $1.7 million in salaries alone in 1976with the top five familiesFitzsimmons, Provenzano, Schoessling, Williams and Presser-themselves making well over a million dollars.

But in fighting such a bureaucracy there is no substitute for the patient, principled mobilisation of the union's membership independently of the capitalist state.

Illusion

To spread the illusion that the state apparatus that imposes Taft Hartley legislation, protects scabs and harrasses workers can defend or impose genuine democracy in the Teamsters union is to pave the way for never-ending bourgeois intervention in the labour movement.

In breaking from such methods, Teamster militants must also take up the fight for their union to break from the bourgeois Democratic party and play a role in the struggle for a Labour Party in the USA, based on the unions, and representing workers' independent class interests.

Pinochet Those were the words of the Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Yu Chan on October 1 to a visiting delegation of French provincial journalists.

Yu Chan said there were still differences with the "Eurocommunists", for example, on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

. But his generally friendly tone made it clear that he regarded such differences as a. mere formality.

It was inevitable that the Peking bureaucracy should attempt to intervene in the public rift between the "Eurocommunists" and Moscow.

But it does so entirely in its own interests.

As in the rest of Chinese Stalinism's international interventions it shows no shred of political principle.

Nowhere has this been more shamefully borne out than in the case of Chile.

The reactionary Peking bureaucrats scarcely disguised their pleasure when General Pinochet overthrew Allende's Popular Unity government in 1973.

'Since then, Peking has continued to cultivate its butcher friend. Pinochet receives birthday greetings from the Chinese And now, it is reported, he is shortly to be invited to China and feted in the manner of recent predecessors like Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger and King Juan Carlos.

Pinochet may be the murderer and torturer of tens of thousands of Chilean workers.

But the only thing that matters to the class criminals 'in Peking who profess to stand for the dictatorship of the proletariat is that Pinochet is an implacable enemy of the rival band of opportunist betrayers of the working class in Moscow.

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SOCIALIST PRESS, Inesday 18 October 1978 'age 201-22