Black Arms to I

Scan page 2

demonstrations showed that Assembly to block with the after the Assembly has humiliating concessions. being forced towards calling strike action by workers in the steel industry.

Aș the German capitalists have moved to 'rationalise' their share of the imperialist crisis by seeking to impose mass redundancies, militancy has increased dramatically on the shop floor in the steel plants.

Already under fire from a steady barrage of hostile criticism and even outright rejection from its members, the IG-Metall leadership is in no position to crush these latest developments.

Employees have flatly refused even to discuss the national wage claim, which has been centred round the popular call for a 35 hour week.

The union executive is now certain to allow a ballot on strike action to go ahead next week in the largest steel-producing area, North Rhine-Westphalia.

The ballot is sure to reveal an overwhelming majority in favour of strike action.

For both the. West German steel magnates and Loderer and his colleagues, such a result will black out the last dwindling prospect of a cosy, trouble-free winter by the fireside.

The workers who have strike despite the threats of the new military government.

Although General Azhari's cabinet has now offered a: 22% wage rise, the strikers are refusing to return to work until their political demands have been met.

These demands include a call for the removal of the Shah and the release of all political prisoners, together with a series of measures designed to end imperialist domination of the Iranian economy.

As the scab troops sent in to work the oil fields and refineries have made little advance in their ability to maintain production, the strike is still causing massive economic disruption, not only within Iran but for the whole of imperialism.

. The imperialists are now busy trying to convince themselves that the genérals have been successful in their efforts to restabilise the Shah's dictatorship. But reports from the opposition within Iran agree that the strike wave is continuing in full flood.

The militancy of these strikes is reveaied in a report circulating Tehran of developments six weeks ago in the northern city of Tabriz.

Workers on strike there occupied the match-making and textiles factories owned by a prominent Iranian capitalist, Tavakoli. The employer was ordered by the occupiers to keep away from the factories. When Tavakoli challenged this authority he was attacked by the strikers and had to be removed to a hospital, where he shortly died of a heart attack.

Violent

Alongside these strikes, the huge and violent demonstrations are continuing throughout Iran despite the orders of the generals. These mobilisations are expected to reach a climax on 9 December when Shiite Moslems will commemorate the martyrdom of one of their early leaders on what is probably the major date in their religious calendar.

Far from proving itself capable of controlling these developments, the military government has shown itself confused and divided. First Azhari arrested the head of SAVAK-then he moved to arrest Karim Sanjabi, leader of the bourgeois National Front and potentially one of his most valuable allies.

While the generals cannot decide whether to seek to impose a full scale military dictatorship, or try and install a 'civilian' regime, the bourgeois nationalists and the religious leaders have been driven into a new alliance.

The force propelling the ayatollah Khomeini and Sanjabi together has been the independent mobilisation of the organised strength of the Iranian proletariat.

This movement has presented a daunting challenge to religious and bourgeois democrats alike. From their different positions, each has reached out to the other in hopes of exploiting for their own ends the crisis of the dictatorship and the equally critical weakness of working class leadership.

. Their new found unity has been calculated to attract support from sections of the officer caste who share their perspective on the way to control and suppress the movement of workers and peasants that is daily undermining their political strength.

IN BRITAI, where Foreign Secretary David Owen has time and again declared himself unambiguously in support of the Shah, the protests of Labour 'lefts' have, up to now, been restricted to empty speeches and Parliamentary arm-waving.

The urgent question for the British working class is to take up throughout the trade union movement the fight for full-scale blacking of supplies needed to bolster repression in Iran.

This means calling on the TGWU and other unions in transport and the docks to organise the identification and blacking of cargoes-especially arms and ammunition bound for Iran.

This must be combined with the struggle within the Labour Party for the removal of Owen and the pro imperialist Callaghan leadership who so tenaciously fight against the interests of the world's working class.

Those Labour lefts' such as Sheffield MP Martin Flannery who have spoken out against support for the Shah must be called upon to play a leading role in such a fight or stand exposed as empty wind bags.

----- pull-quotes -----

crippled oil-production in Iran, remain solid in their