Masses resist French sackings

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'Mobilising the resources of our national solidarity to bring humane solutions to the social consequences' of 'rationalising' the steel That was how the French prime minister, Raymond Barre summed up his proposals for enforcing 22,000 redundancies in the industry.

His audience-an all party delegation of parliamentary deputies-left him as a group of very worried men.

Massive as they are, these job losses being threatened now are only a fraction of the total number sought by the French capitalists.

And workers have responded with violent anger to the barrage of attacks from the bourgeoisie and its government.

The regional strikes called in the steel industry on February 16 were supported by dockers, miners, carworkers, teachers, postal and railway workers and many other sectors. Whole towns and cities were closed down by the strikers.

Hundreds of thousands of workers marched on various local demonstrations. In many towns these were the largest seen since 1968-in some cases even larger, and on a scale never matched before.

This latest wave in the movement against mass unemployment has already spread beyond the main steel producing regions of Lorraine and Nord-Pas du Calais into traditionally less militant areas such as the Ardennes around Sedan.

the Loire region, the mobilisations at Saint-Etienne and Roanne were larger than any previously known. In the first town, 100,000 workers took strike action, and half of these: came on the protest march.

Unemployment in the region has risen by 22% over t le last year.

Unprecedented The vast scale of this action has thrown the union bureaucrats on to the defensive. At Valencienna in the north, the pessimistic predictions of the Stalinists were disproved by 50,000 or more workers in an unprecedented display. of solidarity.

In Lorraine, the union leaders made frantic preparations for scores of protest gestures and gimmicks. Only in this way could they dissipate the strength of their members into diversionary backwaters.. -"Now the CP-led union federation the CGT, has struck out militantly with the bold proposal of a national petition of protest to the government.

While the reformists- and Stalinists are struggling desperately to maintain their hold over the mass movement, groups of militants are already breaking beyond the limits imposed by the bureaucracy.

At Longwy-focus of the movement in Lorraine-workers moved in to attack the local police HQ after being driven out of a television relay station.

Already important moves have been made towards linking the French struggles with parallel developments in neighbouring Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany.

it is essential that this initiative be firmly removed from the control of the bureaucracy, and directed towards a genuinely proletarian movement capable of providing a socialist solution. to the capitalist crisis of the steel