[defeated when they argued against the policy of…]

Scan page 2

defeated when they argued against the policy of a 35 hour week, Stockpiles gone The final sell-out came just in the nick of time, as the dispute was about to take on far greater importance. With their stockpiles being rapidly eaten away, employers in the motor industry had already announced plans for short-time working.

Such an escalation would almost certainly have forced the Social Democratic Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, to intervene and so expose the supposed 'neutrality' of the state in industral disputes.

The international character of the steel crisis has produced the same effects throughout the world, as capitalists attempt to cope with a slump in demand and a crash in profitability by imposing speed-up, redundancies and piant closures.

35 hour demand In response to these attacks on jobs, workers in many countries have raised the demand for a 35 hour week, It was, this situation which made the strike such a fearful event for: other steel employers, particularly k in neighbouring France and Belgium.

But while *employers have up concerted resistance to movement for a shorter The week 8-14 January was scheduled for a full meeting of thé International Bureau of the Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (OCRFI) in Paris.

The OCRFI is the international grouping based on the large French "Trotskyist" group the OCI, leaded by Pierre Lambert.

Healy

• It was formed after the OCI split in 1971 from the International Committee which had until then been jointly dominated by the OCI and the British Socialist Labour League headed by Gerry Healy (now the Workers Revolutionary One of the complaints raised at that time by the OCI against Healy was his refusal to implement democratic centralism in the running of the International Committee.

Statement

Readers will be interested to learn therefore to learn that a major split took place last week at the OCRFI meeting, after which the following statement was issued by the Bolivian Parti Ouvrier Revolutionnaire (POR); Politica Obrera (Argentina) and the Comite de Liaison des Militantes Trotskyistes (Chile):

"1. The organisations Politica Obrera and Liaison Committee of Chilean Tratskyist Militants LCMTC) have been expelled from the Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International without any type of political discussion, and under the accusation of being "provocateur guarddogs of fascism"

2. The POR has walked out of the OCRFI with the following declaration:

"By a mandate of the last plenum of the Central Committee of the Bolivian POR, we make the following declaration:

Considering the methods employed in the discussion with Politica Obrera and in this very meeting of the International Bureau, characterised by their verticalism [verticalisme] and the substitution of administrative measures for the necessary political discussion, totally foreign to Lambert Trotskyism; these methods are related not only to organisational questions but above all principally to political aspects.

The norms which have come to be imposed in the OCRFI do not permit any genuine Trotskyist struggle in its ranks.

For these reasons the POR abandons this organisation"

9.1.79 Further details on the issues involved in this split are still emerging, and we are unable to report any formal statement on the question by the OCI leadership as we go to press.

Scan page 3

At the end of December the Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea (Cambodia) permitted something which had not happened for nine years.

A party of foreign tourists-mostly capitalists from Thailand and a few journalists-were allowed for 45 minutes to visit the world-famous ancient temples of Angkor-Vat.

The tour was a conscious concession to the reactionary Thai dictatorship from whom Pol Pot hoped for material support against Vietnam's expansionism. But it was too late. This visit to Angkor-Vat was the last.

The lightning invasionby the Vietnamese army and the scarcely more than symbolic forces of the Hanoi-sponsored Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS)-had • already begun. ASEAN heads of state in conference In spite of vehement hypocritical Soviet and Czechoslovak protests that this would be interference in Kampuchea's "internal affairs", China got the support of the imperialists and the debate went ahead.

The Soviet tactic was then to demand postponement of the debate until a Nonetheless, the SovietVietnamese success Kampuchea is already being exploited by the Chinese bureaucracy to boost its unprincipled search for allies among the reactionary regimes of the anti-communist Association of East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

ASIZAN

THAILAND This body called an emergency meeting last weekend " to discuss the implications of the growth of Vietnamese power.

A separate regime has been set up in Phnom Penh by the KUFNS but it is clearly a puppet of Hanoi.

Also the country has been rechristened the Democratic People's Republic of Kampuchea.

The Hanoi bureaucracy can now be expected i to accelerate its plans for an ASE Indo-Chinese federation with Laos (which it already dominates) and Kampuchea.

This, however, would be an entirely bureaucratic construction, very distant from the revolutionary possibility of a United Socialist States of IndoChina as a step towards a revolutionary socialist unification of all Asian countries and of the world.

One of the lessons of the recent events in Indo-China has been that it highlights the bitter contrast between the nationalist rivalries of the bureaucratic parasites who rule all the workers' states and the gigantic potential which exists for the unification and mutual strengthening of those states which could be pursued by an authentically revolutionary leadership.

Instead of revolutionary socialist, internationalist unity, the existing bureauPol Pot cratic cliques threaten to destroy all the gains made by the workers' states by a rivalry in which they vie with each other for the favours of the imperialists.

And then they fight out their battles in capitalists' forums like the UN so that inter-"socialist" rivalries become the imperialists' sport.

The masses of workers and peasants in Kampuchea and Vietnam can point the way towards destroying the bureaucratic obstacles socialism by demanding the unconditional and immediate withdrawal of all Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea and by building in each area independent workers and peasants' soviets to combat the rule of the bureaucracy.