Stalinists save Italy's vi tottering

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AND THE R HOSPITALS, E a0o. BEST OF THE BERLINGUER!!

UN HOUSING i When is a government 'crisis' not a crisis? In Italy when it results from parliamentary shadow-boxing in the coalition between Christian Democrats and Communist Party chiefs.

Andreotti's Christian Democratic cabinet last week got a vote in Parliament for its wage-cutting policies, seriously threatened by the strike of hospital workers in the "independent' unions.

The Communist Party voted to a man for Andreotti's postponement of negotiations to the end of the year-a proposal that eyen being the small Republi refused to suppor 'too evasive' • Reliance The cynical reliance of the ruling• class on the Stalinists' "reluctant" support was expressed by the head of the Christian Democratic national council, Flaminio Piccoli, at the climax of the parliamentary crisis: "I am pessimistic but confident", he said. "The Communists are not going to break what has been built up with so much trouble."

What can break this Communist Party-Tory conspiracy against workers and: their living standards are the mass struggles, now the three main trade union federations.

While the parliamentary 'debate' unfolded last week 30,000 workers from Calabria in the deep south, demonstrated in Rome against unemployment.

And militant struggle in the hospitals and many other sectors is now led by 'autonomous', often locally based trade union organisations which have broken from the bureaucratised official unions.

But the greatest problem facing the Italian working class remains that .of destroying the political grip of Stalinist and Socialist Party chiefs, now being used to bhudgeon any section of workers who enter into several dead, The incident-confirmed by statements from both sides, each accusing the other of aggression-is the most serious since Sino-Vietnamese conflict came into the open last spring.

According to the , Hanoi government Chinese troops, part of several thousand deployed on the frontier in Caolang province, occupied a pass and surrounded a Vietnamese patrol.

the resulting shooting several Vietnamese were killed and injured.

The frictions on the frontier reflect the fact that the Stalinist government in Vietnam, whatever its wishes, has found itself caught up in the rival political and military policies of the Soviet Union and China South-east Asia.

With the cutting off of Chinese aid (worth an estimated $10 billion) earlier this year, and the continuing frontier war with Cambodia (politically and militarily supported by China), Vietnam has found itself forced deeper into economic and military-and therefore political -dependence on the Soviet Union and Comecon.

The ceremonious arrival in Moscow last week of Hanoi's two top leaders-Le Duan, general secretary of the Communist Party, and prime minister Pham Van Dongmerely confirms: this dependency.

It is above all Vietnam's economic vulnerability that has put paid to the rhetoric of 'national independence' under which the liberation war was fought.

The political tribute demanded by the Kremlin in return for economic aid is not simply a matter of pacifist phrases, but directly ties Hanoi to the Soviet Union's quest for 'understandings' with the reactionary dictatorships of South-east Asia.

It underlines the impossibility of the Indochinese revolution's developing on the basis of 'socialism in individual countries' connive a betrayal of the Zimbabwean: masses, to press conferences at which he hollowly threatens to call for Cuban aid.

The labour movement must couple their solidarity with the Zambian and Zimbabwean masses in the face of Smith's attacks with support for the Zambian masses in their struggle against Kaunda.

Kaunda