Guyana Faces Showdown

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Acute political crisis has gripped the South state of Guyana.

The revolutionary' government of the People's National Congress (led by Forbes Burnham) now faces a serious threat to its existence, and has begun a new wave of repression against the opposition.

The PN C government (notorious for its ballot-rigging and other corrupt election practices) has been responsible for implementing the 'austerity' measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund.

A wage freeze in the dominant public sector has in turn led to an explosion of militancy on wages which has been most violent in the bauxite After a local dispute had begun at one plant; all 5,000 members of the Guyana Mine Workers Union were called out on July 23.

While management argues that to meet the claim would break the freeze, the union leadership is insisting that it has no intention of behaving so irresponsibly, and has found a way round the problem.

So far talks are still deadlocked and on Friday the government and union bureaucracy both suffered a further blow when workers in the sugar industry and throughout the public sector struck in support of the bauxite workers and against the wage freeze.

This situation has brought little comfort to the Stalinist 'Marxists' of Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party.

Discredited

The PPP can see its call for a 'national' government to include the PNC being discredited more day by day, while its own position as the major opposition party is challenged by the young Working People's Alliance.

Formed five years ago from a group of left-wing intellectuals and politicians who has broken for various reasons from the PPP and P.NC, the WPA has now emerged as a major pole of attraction for militants, especially youth and above all students.

Showdown

• The Alliance has sworn to force a showdown with the government before the year is out.

Already it is the major force in a broader grouping of even less political clarity, which aims to launch a campaign of 'civil resistance and civil disobedience' to bring down the PNC administration.

Burnham has responded with threats of employing the National Security Act for the round up and imprisonment of opposition militants.

Already major steps have been taken to silence the opposition press with police raids, seizure of equipment and blocking of newsprint supplies from the state monopoly.

Such acts have succeeded in provoking the opposition to a new level of violent determination.

Within this crisis, one factor which must alarm . both Burnham and Jagan is the apparent success of the Working People's Alliance in breaking through the sectarian divisions which have characterised politics in Guyana.

Traditionally, the PNC has based itself on the communities of African ancestry and the PPP on the communities of Asian ancestry:

But the WPA seems to draw its support from both sectors, so long driven into dangerous antagonism by their leaders.

Even if the WPA succeeds in coming to power through. the downfall of the PNC and the formation of a new coalition, such a new left government could offer no way forward for the masses of Guyana to achieve their needs and aspirations.

Temporary break

Alien to the principles of proletarian internationalism and locked in a nationalist perspective; the WPA could at best institute a temporary break with the dictates of imperialism.

Such an interlude can serve only as the introduction to new setbacks and defeats if it is not filled with the struggles to develop social revolution throughout Latin America and internationally. •. "

Without the revolutionary Transitional Programme developed by Trotsky and the Fourth International, left rhetoric and socialist ideals will collapse under the pressure of national isolation and turn into: their opposite. permitted the establishment of a pluralistic democratic government which is all we want at the moment."

Meanwhile the Simon Bolivar brigade established by the Colombian PST of the USFI is recruiting far and wide leven in Britain) so that it can "join in the tasks of reconstruction-in the interests of the workers and poor people" , according to Socialist Challenge:

Such a reconstruction can only be socialist reconstruction; it can only be achieved by building independent organs of the working class and challenging the capitulation to imperialism by the bourgeois Junta and the FSLN leaders.

*As we go to press, news is coming in from Managua of the expulsion of members of the Simon Bolivar Brigade from Reuter reports that 500 are involved; but Agence France Presse puts the number at 60.

The Brigade is charged with agitation against the government, organising workers' militia groups, and organising the seizure of property.

It is not yet clear how the members of the Brigade will respond to the expulsions.