[Stung into action by demanding restoration of in…]

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Stung into action by demanding restoration of in which every home com- extracted growing awareness of Because they have A picture shows a prison Such 1 wear prison screw hosing down force beca British imperialism in clothing or do prison work- "fouled" wall in Long Kesh ialism is Tanland I ahanre incinding the cleaning nf with a steam hose: it makes of colo member от ine Labour rarty, so wno regara inemserves as lett This now extends to pre- it is difficult to see how Helin wingers who are collecting rubbish at 50p a bin and dumping it on private ground out by the council owned dump.

This refuse is then collected by McGovern's (private contractors) and taken to Hatfield for incineration.

We sent 30 men up to picket McGoverns on Friday and there were several violent incidents until the police arrived in force and threatened my members with arrest unless they allowed McGoverns lorry's to pass.

Because we were so outnumbered we took a disciplined decision to back down.

But the battle to end scabbing at this tip is going to be crucial as councils increasingly use. scab contractors and ultimately the troops to clear rubbish.

It's crucial in another way because I believe it will provide the point of contact with other dustmen in struggle-Barnet and Brent use the tip as well as us.

• It. also demonstrates in practice how : treacherous Fisher's "picketing code" is.

If we only have six pickets as the police have already instructed us and if we only picket our • own depots and our own members, we can't possibly stop widespread scabbing by these private contractors.

What will you be fighting for in the next few days of the strike?

Well I believe that the most immediate task is to get the whole borough out on strike. There has been a special NUPE Branch meeting called for Tuesday at the Town Hall.

A campaign against the expulsion of socialists from the Labour Party is to be launched in Oxford this waek as the witch-hunters who control the local party machine turned to the press for help.

Delegates to the General Council who voted against the expulsion of Ted Heslin-an executive committee memberhave been invited to a meeting this Wednesdav to launch the campaign against the move, called by his union branch.

Haelin a ralanate tn the Labour Party from the ACTSS 5/833 branch, was expelled by the local GC by 37 votes to 35 for supporting the policies of the Workers Socialist League and for selling Socialist Press.

(See SP135). He is appealing to the National Executive.

The decision to expel Heslin (ASTMS) and Peter McIntyre It's going to be very hard for anyone to vote against all out strike action at this meeting now that half the borough is out anyway.

To make sure however, my men will be urging all those already on strike to mount a strike.

The next task is to begin to link up with other dustmen already in struggle.

I believe its going to be vital that strong strike committees are set up independently of the (NUJ) from admission to the Labour Party is the beginning of a wholesale campaign to rid the local party of all critics of the leadership who are prepared to fight to remove those who support anti working class policies.

This has centred exclusively on supporters of the WSL.

It reflects the growing crisis in the ranks of the local bureaucracy who held on to positions in the Oxford and District Trades Council. last week by wafer-thin majorities.

Anti-Trotskyism

The sole political platform of the Oxford right wing in both the Labour Party and Trades Council is now anti-Trotskyism.

Under the banner of 'unity' they campaign tor expulsion.

Under the title of 'democracy they seek to stifle all paring against rights present Fisher I carried a resolution at the last branch meeting which called on Camden Trades Council to build a council of action based on all the labour movement bodies in Camden, to co-ordinate support for the strike and extend it to other workers if, for example, the troops are brought in.

Last week I and a few of the blokes lobbied the Divisional Council demanding they call all out strike action.

And I supported the Workers Socialist League's initiative in lobbying Fisher at the EC on Saturday morning.

Stung into action by "Minister for Torture" Roy Mason has attempof the IRA.

In an unprecedented and brazen propaganda move, the "Northern Ireland Office" issued a four-page broadsheet to every MP, newspapers, radio stations and TV news rooms, which claimed to show conditions in 'H' Block of the Long Kesh concentration camp, where 350 republican prisoners are continuing their "blanket' protest further witch-hu those who defend of those who are being witch hunted.

Free sheet

The witch-hunters have turned to the press. The Journal-a free distr ibution advertising paper with a of McCarthyism-headlir ved last week's issue 'Mole No. 2 Kicked Out' After agreeing that Heslin was "one of Oxford's leading trade unionists" the announced to its readers:

"Ted Heslin was accused by. local Party chiefs of baing a successor tó Alan ThornettBritish Leyland's infamous lettwing 'mole'."

Never a member

(Thornett has never been a An article in the Observer (Feb 4) came to the conclusion that the Westminster Hospital strike was partly caused by the press and complained that management had turned the hospital into "a sort of Fleet Street circus"; While this is an exaggeration of the power of the press, the Observer reporter had clearly been , repelled by the way patients in the hospital were , being used as a battering ram 'against the hospital workers.

As its battering ram, the Daily Mirror "Have Mercy on My Son" used one of the medical cause celebres, marrow transplant patient, Anthony Nolan.:

A front page article suggested that Anthony might be killed by the action without saying how or why.

The Sun headlined 'Mum's Army' and pictured well-heeled woman posing with a duster on the floor of the • hospital.

According to the story:

"Angry Mothers rolled up ; their sleeves and went into action against hospital strikers threatening the safety of sick i children."

The Daily Mail could not demanding restoration Prisoner of War status. Prisoner of War status.

Because they have refused to wear prison clothing or do prison workincluding the cleaning of their own celis-these prisoners have been subjected to the most barbaric illtreatment by prison screws, who have left them clad in only a single blanket in unheated, filthy cells, with inadequate food and little or no medical care.

Prisoners have been denied any privilegesincluding exercise and reading matter-and subjected to beatings and torture.

Yet if Mason's broadsheet is to be believed, they have deliberately set about fouling near-luxurious cells could succeed him as • an 'infiltrator' but no doubt some Journal readers will make the connection the paper intends).

The paper quotes an anonymous 'spokesman' for the Labour Party as saying:

"Everyone has a right to their own views, but those people are not eligible for membership of the Labour Party"

It is no coincidence that on the same day the Oxford Mail ran a similar witch-hunt over the Trades Council elections.

It quoted Trades Council president John Power, as saying e had faced 'threats 01 nolence and condemning all his opponents in that night's Trades Council election.

As the usual unholy alliance of Labour right wingers and the lory press. gang up once again to bar, gag or expel socialists within the Labour Party those opposition find room on its front page for the Westminster Hospital (it was given over to attacking the gravediggers under a headline 'They won't even let us bury our dead') but made up for that omission inside.

With macabre detail over the heart disease affecting former Spitfire test pilot Charles Dershaw, reporter James Edwards used his own apparent medical expertise to say that nursers assurances that he should not worry were probably bluff.

Asked what he thought about the strikers, this poor 'victim" demonstrated his concern for the welfare of humanity:

"I'd like to put them all in a plane, set it to automatie pilot and make sure it ran out of fuel over the sea."

Apart from trampling on the patients the reporters for the Mail also found a word or two for the gallant heroines scrubbing the floor, but spoiled the image by giving more informa. tion than was really necessary.

The same angry mum" who epitomised the workers' backlash in the Mirror, appeared in in which every home comfort is available. fort is available.

A picture shows a prison screw hosing down a "fouled" wall in Long Kesh with a steam hose: it makes mention of those "blanket' men' who have suffered scalds and burns when boiling water was directed at them.

It claims that 90 of the 350 are convicted "murderers' and 100 convicted of explosives offences-but makes no reference to the fact that many of these were framed up in no-jury Diplock courts on the unsubstantiated word of a single police officer, or on statements extracted under torture.

These courts have a 94% conviction rate,, 80% of which convictions are based exclusively on statements Callaghan's anti-working class policies must rally to the defence of Ted Heslin and any other witch hunt victims.

If not, in a week or a month they could find themselves to be next on the list for expulsion.

Power the Mail as:

Mrs. Beryl Cameron Webb, a lady with a five bedroom flat in ritzy Chelsea, on her knees, swabbing the floor with soap and disinfectant. This was not something you would find her doing by choice.

"A medallion on a gold chain kept flopping into the pail of water and her cluster pearl earings were snagging her hair when she had to squeeze under tables, beds and chairs to scrub them.

Adding no doubt to the victims of the strike. All in all it must be a matter of some ,medical surprise that the patients survived their ençounter with the demon surgeons of Fleet Street.

Certainly one woman had been frightened out of her wits by the press stories.

She had slept two nights at the foot of her daughter's hospital bed and told the Mail:

'I rushed here on Monday night because somebody told me the strikers and the pickets might start to attack the children...They won't do that will they?"

Probably not Mrs. Rodrigues...but keep watching the papers. They still have hopes. extracted from defendants under "interrogation" under "int Such measures are in force because British imperialism is fighting a war of colonial repression against republican forces in Yet Mason and his reactionary • Labour cabinet cronies have attempted to portray the republican movement as no more than criminals.

In fact the role of the real, invading criminals in Ireland was highlighted last week by news from the IRA that one member of British imperialism's undercover murder squad-the SAShad been found shot dead by them not in the occupied six counties, but in. the Duolin mountains.

Meanwhile two SAS thugs who shot dead 16 year old Catholic youth John Boyle last July are to be charged with murder.

It emerges from post mortem reports that these "heroes" of imperialism were brave enough to shoot this unarmed youth in the back of the head, before he even touched the hidden gun he was at first accused of "aiming" at them.

This vicious incident is of course only one aspect of the repressive work of the British army in the occupied six counties.

Remove Mason But it makes even more essential campaign throughout the British workers' movement for action to force the removal of Mason and the right wing Callaghan cabinet, the . restoration of the Pow • status to the 'H' Block prisoners, and the immediate withdrawal of British troops to make way for the self determination of the Irish people as a whole.

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Stalin Throughout the history of the Trotskyist movement the concept of political revolution has come under repeated attack from both inside and outside the ranks of the movement itself.

At each point it has been necessary to establish the Marxist analysis of the Soviet Union.

Because of the profound contradictions embodied within the USSR today, and because many of the questions are complicated, requiring a historical understanding of the evolution of the Soviet state after the 1917 Revolution, the temptation is simply to rely on surface impressions and to regard them as offering an analysis.

Replying to the question whether the USSR is a workers or a capitalist state, Trotsky made the following points:

"In the last analysis the question will be decided by a struggle of living social forces, both on the national and the world arena.

Doctrinaires will doubtless not be satisfied with this hypothetical definition. They would like categorical formulae: yes-yes and no. no.

Sociological problems would certainly be simpler if social phenomena had always a finished character. There is nothing more dangerous, however, than to throw out of reality for the sake of logical complete. ness, elements which today violate your schema and tomorrow may wholly overturn it.

In our analysis, we have above all avoided doing violence to dynamic social formulations which have had no precedent and have no analogies.

The scientific task, as well as the political is not to give a finished definition separate its progressive from its reactionary tendencies, expose their mutual relations, foresee possible variants of development, and find in this foresight a basis for action."

(Revolution Betrayed, From 1928 onwards one of the most common forms of perversion of the Marxist analysis has been the declarThe Workers Socialist League bases itself on the struggle for the reconstruction of the Fourth International as the basis for the overthrow of capitalism and of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the deformed workers states of Europe, Asia and Cuba.

The problems posed in each case are different. Workers in the capitalist countries are faced with the task of social revolutionthe expropriation of the means of production from the capitalist class through the building of independent organs of workers' power.

But in the deformed ation that the Soviet Union under Stalin was transformed into a "state capitalist" regime, surmounted not by a parasitic bureaucracy, but by a new ruling class.

Fought nationalism

Recognising the necessity for an international revolution, the Bolsheviks had from the outset fought any tendency towards nationalism. Lenin had broken decisively with the Second International when the majority of its leadership supported the capitalist class in their "own " countries at the outbreak of World War I.

The Bolsheviks pointed to the opportunities for revolution that would emerge from the War, and the dangers of any form of national divisions within the workers' movement.

And they continued to see the epoch of imperialism as one in which the question of the socialist revolution was posed on a world scale, offering the possibility of ending the isolation of the new Soviet state.

In fighting the first signs of the development of bureaucracy within the Soviet Union-the, attacks workers' states, private ownership of the means of production has already been eliminated. State power however is monopolised by a parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy.

The task in these countries is political revolution-the overthrow of this reactionary bureaucracy and the establishment of workers' management of the This article will concentrate on the problem of political revolution, and point to elements of programme necessary to prepare for it.

on the monopoly of foreign trade, and the emergence of Stalin's chauvinist national arrogance in the Georgian affair-Lenin and Trotsky were intent on conducting a holding operation while looking to the parties of the newly-formed Communist International to lead revolutions in other countries.

This position is clear in all of Lenin's later writings and those of Trotsky at this time, and recorded also in the minutes of the Comintern.

Pressures

But when no such revolutions took place, then the pressures of nationalismrationalised in Stalin's "theory" of building "socialism in one country" began to predominate within the growing bureaucracy.

Trotsky links the development of bureaucracy to the growth of shortages, food queues, and generalised want.

This position was effectively challenged by Trotsky in his correspondence which forms the book In Defence of Marxism.

At that time, as Trotsky pointed out, the advocates of this view had not yet drawn it out to its logical conclusion-a refusal to defend the Soviet Union 9S61 Xл08иnH against imperialist attack.

But today those such as the British Socialist Workers Party, who argue a "state capitalist" position are in general correctly regarded as outside the Trotskyist movement, since few of them declare themselves willing to defend the USSR, China the other deformed workers states against imperialism.

The SWP's split with Trotskyism actually has its roots in the abstentionist position of founder member Tony Cliff on the question of the war between North Korea and the capitalist South, backed by the United Nations.

Dangers

But while a "state capitalist" analysis of the USSR has obvious dangers, so too does any analysis which simply latches on the superficial aspects of the Soviet Union and concludes that all that is needed are "reforms" to the system and not political revolution.

The "state capitalists" saw only the tyrannical lack of democracy, the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, and the crushing of political revolts in East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia as "evidence" of their view.

The apologists of the bureaucracy however see in the various left' gestures of the Stalinist clique and its defence of nationalised property relations "evidence" that it remains a progressive force which can be pressured to the left by the masses.

Neither view is able to present an objective analysis of the contradictions of the Soviet state or offer an independent road forward for the working class.

The Workers Socialist League is often criticised for directing back to history in analysing the present crisis in the world Trotskyist movement in its understanding of Stalinism.

But the Marxist method insists on the necessity of understanding all phenomena in their historical context and historical development, and, most important of all, grasping the contradictions which drive forward that development.

Only on this basis can we decide our conscious intervention. The fight against Stalinism must be therefore taken up in this way.

1917 and after The history of Trotsky.

ism is one of struggle against the degeneration of the Soviet Union. Not only are we proud of that history, but it is the source of our understanding of the Soviet bureaucracy as a material force in society, and not simply a body of wrong ideas.

What happened after the October Revolution?

In Revolution Betrayed Trotsky analyses the backward economy of pre-revolutionary Russia. He shows how this related to the small size of the working class, and thus the small number of Bolshevik cadres who had to both run the country and also stand in the front-line in the Civil War, fighting 23 imperialist armies of intervention.

But paramount in the list of factors in the subsequent degeneration of the revolution, Trotsky places the isolation of the new workers state, and the failure of revolution to spread into an' industrialised country such as Germany.

Recognising the necessity for an international revolution, the Bolsheviks had from the outset fought any tendency towards nationalism. Lenin had broken decisively with the Second Infernational when the majority of its leadership supported the capitalist class in their "own" countries at the outbreak of World War I.

The Bolsheviks pointed to the opportunities for revolution that would emerge from the War, and the dangers of any form of national divisions within the workers' movement.

And they continued to see the epoch of imperialism as one in which the question of the socialist revolution was posed on a world scale, offering the possibility of ending the isolation of the new Soviet state.

In fighting the first signs of the development: of bureaucracy within' the Soviet Union-the attacks on the monopoly of foreign trade, and the emergence of Stalin's chauvinist national arrogance in the Georgian affair-Lenin and Trotsky were intent on conducting a holding operation while looking to the partners of the newly-formed Commue nist International to lead revolutions in other countries.

This position is clear in all of Lenin's later writings and those of Trotsky at this time, and recorded also in the minutes of the Comintern.

But when no such revolutions took place, then the pressures of nationalism rationalised in Stalins "theory" of building "socialism in one country" began to predominate within, the growing bureaucracy.* Trotsky links the development of bureaucracy to the growth of shortages food queues, and genera lised want. The bureaucrat is the policeman who arrivos to control the queues-but

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lobby outside urging the rest of the membership to join them on

growing awareness of the savage role of British imperialism in Ireland, Labour's

ted a grand-scale cover- up operation, aimed at refuting the arguments

to an unfinished process, but to follow all its stages,