Pay boost for strikebreakers

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Howe The thrusting of additional cash into the already bulging pockets of the policefand army -at an annual cost of £160 million-stands in stark contrast to simultaneous Tory moves to attack the most downtrodden sections of the working class:

Social Services Secretary Patrick Jenkin has launched an offensive against supposed "scroungers" who needlessly remain unemployed.

The objective here is to exploit unemployment by forcing some of the 1½ million now on the dole into the most degrading and low paid jobs.

At the same time leading Tories are looking for ways of effectively destroying even the flimsy reforms embodied in Labour's Employment Protection Act, in the hopes of making it even easier for employers to sack unwanted workers.

Selling off Plans are also well in hand to begin dismantling the system of council housing by selling off existing council houses at knockdown prices to tenants, This is aimed at removing these houses for all time from the low-rent public sector. It will compel thousands of young working class families to pay extortionate prices to private Tory landlords in order to obtain a roof over their heads.

Even now Tory Chancellor Geoffrey Howe is drawing up a list of swingeing public spending cuts designed to finance the pay rises to police and army scabs, and to pay for the tax handouts he plans to give to the rich.

Every one of these spending cuts will hit the working class, whether through cutting back on jobs, or slashing public services that are a part of workers' living standards.

The Tories know this. And they know that the rest of their programme-new legal attacks on trade union rights; racist attacks on immigrant workers; denationalisation of profitable sections of state-owned industry and further rationalisation, of industry at a cost of thousands more jobs-will also provoke mass resistance from a militant and undefeated working class.

And they remember all too bitterly that such mass resistance brought down the Heath government in 1974, and defeated Callaghan's 5% pay limit.

This is why they are so keen to enlist the wholehearted support of the police as picketbusters and strike-breakers; and in Ireland the army will be called upon to step up repression of the growing anti-imperialist struggles in the occupied six counties.

The Tories are not the only capitalist government faced with the problem of waging such attacks on their working class: last week saw a conference of police chiefs from 17 European capitalist countries gather in London.

They were not discussing crime. Called together by Metropolitan Police chief McNee, they centred their debate on methods of "crowd control" and the policing of mass political demonstrations and protests.

Whitelaw, addressing the conference, spoke of the need for the police to cater for "social problems"

The "social problem" faced by the working class is the naked rule of crisis-ridden capitalism exercised through the Tory Party.

Yet many of the policies now adopted by the Tories for attacking workers simply build on the precedents set and decisions taken in the last five years of anti socialist Labour In building the mass movement to defeat the Tory attack and remove this bosses' government, the workers' movement must also: drive out the right wing Callaghan leadership and build a principled socialist alternative.

tion pledges in the 1974 manifesto; its deal with the IMF; entry into the Common Market; and Phase 4 (not 1, 2 or 3) of wage control.

Yet at no point did Benn wage any serious campaign against Callaghan or Healey on these questions: least of all did he fight for their removal.

NEB investment

And all he has to offer now as alternatives is the tawdry Tribune policies of investment in industry through the NEB and import controis.

Last week in the aftermath of an election defeat his collaboration had helped cause, Benn allowed Callaghan to go forward once again unopposed as Party leader.

Then he made his play for the limelight. While this has delighted the Stalinists of the Communist Party-the Morning Star praising his "valuable asset I!! of being in the Cabinet"it has nothing to offer socialists in the Labour Party.

There the task is to take forward the fight to expose Benn and every other 'left' faker and to construct a revolutionary alternative capable of ousting. the Callaghan-Healey leadership. | 'Lefts' revel in blues-page 5.

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The Italian general election campaign opened on 3 May with an explosion-of a bomb, placed (allegedly) by the Red Brigades in the Rome headquarters of the ruling Christian Democratic Those who placed the bomb escaped, killing a policeman in the process.

Apart from its somewhat devastating physical effect, the bomb was symbolic of the collapse of authority of the Italian capitalist class at just the moment when more than ever before it needs to impose more rigorous discipline and more austerity on the working class.

It has been used as a further pretext for • massive police surveillanse and repression, including the recent frame-ups of the illeged kidnappers of Moro.

The first reaction of the Stalinist, reformist and Catholic leaders to the bomb was to call a strike-not in defence of the interests of the working class, but in defence of the Tory Christian Democrats against the terrorist attack!

It was a symptom of the purpose to which the CP leaders are putting this election campaign.

It has become a massive propaganda exercise to prepare the way for the CP's direct entry into Christian Democratic government after the elections.

• Italy, says secretary- general Enrico Berlinguer every hour of every day, is ungovernable.

Ungovernable, that is, without Stalinist ministers in the bourgeois government.

it was the refusal of the Christian Democrats to accept that which precipitated the present elections.

Unchanged

The public opinion polls at present suggest that the parliamentary situation after the elections will leave this impasse virtually unchanged.

The polls at present give the Christian Democrats 40% (compared with 38.8% in 1976), the CP. 31% (compared with 34.4%) and the Socialist Party 11% (compared with 9.6%).

What the calling of elections did achieve, however, is to ailow both the big parties to readjust the balance of candidates among various wings of the parties so as to make it easier to set up some grand class collaborationist government structure.

Factional battles in the Christian Democratic Party over the candidates meant that they were last to present their lists.

But in the event Party secretary general Beningo Zaccaguini failed in his bid to get a larger proportion of candidates on the CD lists who might be more favourable to a deal with the CP leaders.

Independents

The CP meanwhile has ised the opportunity to fill its lists with non-members, "inde benBerlinguer dent' fellow-travellers of the These could then be put forward as the CP's representatives in the Cabinet should the die-hards of the Christian Democrats not accept actual CP members.

Meanwhile unemployment is growing fast; wage demands of 10 million workers remain unsatisfied; and the Confindustria (Italy's CBI) is stridently calling for an all-out attack on wage costs and rejection of union demands for wage increases and cuts in hours.

There seems little chance therefore that, even if the CP does get its nominees into the Cabinet, Italy after the elections will be, any more governable for capitalism than it was before.

Zaccagnini Part Two:

Continued from last week After two hundred executions of members of the Shah's regime, Iran's would-be Islamic dictator Ayatollah Khomeini, has abolished the death penalty for all crimes except murder, This move is part of an effort to hold together the increasingly split leadership which is trying to rule Iran today.

The capitalist government under Bazargan, is increasingly fearful that the executions, fostered by the most zealous Islamic leaders, will carry away some of their own close collaborators and collaborators in Iran's ruling class.

Discontent

But more than that they fear the growing discontent of the working class and the oppressed nationalities who are less and less impressed by spectacular executions of their former oppressors when the job is being done by new oppressors.

So far the government has still failed to take any steps at all to solve the acute and pressing material problems faced by the 34 million unemployed or by employed workers combatting inflation.

Instead of tackling these problems, the regime is obsessed with how to enforce its own authority against militant demonstrations, especially by unemployed workers and the oppressed nationalities (Kurds, Turkomans, Arabs, Baluchis).

Still unable to reconstruct the Shah's army and police in a credible way, the regime has now been forced to declare the islamic militia, the Guardians of the Revolution, an official arm of the state.

This militia has been responsible for some of the worst attacks on "communists" which has now become a synonym for all opposition to the reactionary Islamic regime.

The "communists" themselves, however, have certainly not reacted to growing anticommunist attacks by putting forward any resolute policy of resistance to Islamic reaction or any kind of programme behind which the oppressed masses could unite to carry the antiShah revolution through to a socialist conclusion.

The Stalinist Tudeh party, for example, continues to welcome publicly the Islamic republic-it had called for a 'yes' vote in the referendum.

It organised one of Tehran's four separate May Day demonstrations-not in its own name but behind a trade union front organisation.

Its leaders did not appear in person and its members carried no banners.

Certainly this was in marked contrast to the other nonIslamic demonstration (repor• tedly mobilising a similar number-100,000-to the Tudeh's demonstration) organised by various left wing organisations.

Guerrillas held

•These included the "Marxist Leninist" Fedayin Khalq (People's Guerrillas, 40 of whom are currently being held by Khomeini's militial, the "Trotskyist" Socialist Workers Party (supported by both the Bazagan French OCI and the USFI), as well as organisations of unemployed workers, of women and of trade unionists.

Also on this march were the petty-bourgeois National Democratic Front-led by the grandson of former Premier Mossadeq -and numerous students.

On this demonstration the main siogans demanded the nationalisation of foreign capitalists, the right to strike, democratisation of the mass media, and the participation of workers in drawing up the constitution.

Evidently the political line of the demonstration was dominated by the bourgeois democratic programme of the National Democratic Front which coincides with the two-stage "revolution" strategy of the "Marxist-Leninist" guerrillas.

for repression The four main features of the Iranian situation are: the growing confusión and disunity of the reactionary Islamic forces; their plans to step up anti-communist repression against all left opposition; the grave economic and political problems of the oppressed masses and their willingness to fight; and the failure of the Stalinist and guerrilla leaders to offer any way forward for the mass struggle.

These four facets of the situation emphasise both the urgent need and the opportunity which now exists for the building of a revolutionary Trotskyist party to lead a successful struggle for socialism in Iran.