Sis in Europe's Steel Industry

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the bourgeoisie.

Two weeks ago a massive 87% of steel workers voted to take strike action in support of their claim for a 5% wage increase and a 35hour working week.

The 200,000 workers in the West German steel industry are organised in IG-Metall, the metalworkers union, which earlier this year called strike action in other industrial sectors on the issues of new technology and job security.

Now Eugen Loderer and the other officials have once , again been forced to hold a ballot which predictably revealed the enormous militancy of workers and their readiness to fight against the attacks of employers.

But within a day of announcing that the strike would begin on Tuesday 28 November, they leapt at the chance to re-open negotiations with the employers.

Inadequate

These new talks at Duisburg were not a conflict over the 5% wage claim, which is generally agreed to be "moderate'-in other words, hopelessly inadequate to protect workers' living standards against the ravages of inflation.

Although the employers have offered only a derisory 3%, they have refused absolutely to negotiate on the 35-hour week.

Last week .37,000 workers came out on strike at seven plants in the Ruhr There is something a little sick about revelations of 'corruption' in a country like South Africa.

• Just as the American Indians were surprised to find that the place they had been quite familiar with for some time had in fact only been 'discovered' as recently as 1492, black workers in South Africa woke up a few weeks ago to find there was corruption in the South African government.

Cabinet Minister Connie Mulder had to resign following the emergence of the fact that government money had been used to finance a pro-government newspaper.

Caught

The only significant thing about this is that Mulder was caught.

• For a moment the thin facade of respectability with which the white population try to conduct their dealings with each other was torn aside.

Power base

Mulder has gone from the Cabinet but remains an MP with a significant power base to call on.

If the event had led to a The whole dispute, and the positions taken up by employers and union bureaucrats, is not restricted to West Germany. It is yet another example of the international crisis of the steel industry.

• State ownership Belgium has been the latest. in the line of bourgeois states driven to step in and attempt to restore some order on the industry's chaos.

The plan proposed by the coalition government amounts to a form of state ownership such as operates in British Leyland.

Along with state control of investment and planning, go promises for the reemployment of the 15,000 workers who will be made redundant as one-third of the total workforce is rationalised' out of a job. Such pledges are only to be expected from a government which faces elections next month.

As the economic crisis of imperialism has produced a catastrophic fall in orders for steel, capitalist employers and governments have scrabbled around for measures to meet both their short-term • and long-term problems.

Within the Common Market, the Davignon plan of the Steel Commission has been an attempt to coordinate and pian these moves in a 'fair' way.

French President Giscard : But individual producers have steadily refused to cooperate in the scheme, which aims to share out the reductions in sales so as to prevent the collapse of the weaker national sections of the steel industry.

This utopian plan has foundered on hitting the fundamental realities of capitalist competition.

By dumping their surplus commodities, rival producers have attempted to undercut internationally agreed pricing and so force less competitive sections to the wall.

While these methods have intensified the crisis in some countries, they have not been able to overcome the problems of even the strongest competitors.

In both France and Spain the state has been forced to intervene and organise a wholescale rationalisation' Schmidt of the industry.

These moves have taken place against a background of increasingly militant resistance from workers to the redundancies proposed to ease the capitalists' profitability slump.

At the Solmer plant near Marseilles, which is jointly owned by France's two major steel companies, a lock-out was imposed on the 7,000 workers who have tion' cancelled Central to the government's plan is the cancellation of the vast debts owed to the state by the private steel companies. This' is just one of the symptoms which reveal the true character of such 'nationalisation' process.

The Social Democrats, who dominate the coalition numerically have not taken these measures to advance the interests of the working class. Their concern has been to preserve " the structure of Belgian capitalism by rescuing from collapse a crucial section which the capitalists cannot continue to organise themselves profitably.

As with the mines, railways, shipbuilding or steel industries in Britain, it is this factor which has determined the course of the labour leaders. • The Social Democrats and their allies cannot have forgotten the mass rallies and demonstrations earlier this year, where steelworkers showed their opposition to any redundancies and demanded the introduction of a 35-hour week.

Same crisis

But once they have taken the responsibility of running the steel industry from the capitalists, the state employers will find themselves driven by the same crisis of capitalism which forced the private owners into a state of chronic unprofitability.

The Social Democrats will then turn inevitably to plans for 'restructuring' and rationalisation' , for redundancies, closures and speedup.

Although such 'nationalisations' are in one sense phoney-nationalisation for the bourgeoisie, not for the proletariat-they do represent an important, but one-sided gain for the working class.

Driven by its own inner contradictions, imperialism is forced to reveal in practice how private ownership is unable to organise production to satisfy human needs.

In developing state ownership and state control of the steel industry, the imperialists themselves have to take steps towards building the very organisation of production which is required as the basis of a socialist planned economy.

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been engaged in a series of struggles against 'rationalisa-