Gandhi deals herself back into the aame

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The USSR, for instance, is now the world's biggest importer of New Zealand lamb, while Poland has recent'y raised a loan of $50 million from the military government in Argentina to finance food imports.

The 1979 Soviet Union grain harvest is disastrously low and will have repurcussions throughout Comecon.

The latest estimate for this year's grain harvest is 185 million tonnes, which compares with a target of 226.8 million tonnes, and last year's bumper harvest of 237 million tonnes. The USSR has already made an agreement with the US (where there has been a bumper crop) to import up to 20 million tonnes, and another 10 million will be imported from other countries.

Inevitable

These imports should prevent serious shortages within the USSR, but they do not solve the Stalinists' problems.

A trade deficit is almost inevitable because of these extra food imports, and the Soviet bureaucracy has to find a way to finance this.

One option is to raise a foreign loan, thus involving the capitalist financiers even more deeply in the Soviet economy.

Another option would be to cut the import of industrial goods, which would impede industrial expansion (already under strain) even further.

is also questionable whether the Soviet bureaucracy will be able to avoid increasing food prices.

In Hungary, where the pricing system is more flexible than other Eastern European countries lapart from Yugoslavia, where inflation runs at over 13%) food prices were recently increased by an average of 20%.

This included a 50% rise for bread, and 30% for meat.

The experience of Poland in 1976, where a Stalinist government was overturned as a result of riots against food brice rises.

'India-the world's largest democracy. For decades that was how the bourgeoisie packaged its class dictatorship in India-as imperialism's alternative of 'freedom' to the Yellow Peril of Red China.

The image has been damaged over the years by the cruelties of history and the uncompromising reality of the class struggle.

Gandhi's 'Emergency' dictatorship exposed the vile apparatus of repression which served the needs of the ruling class. 2½ years of Janata government have done little to restore anybody's faith in the strengths or virtues of parliamentary democracy.

Permanent Corruption scandals flourished in an environment of permanent political crisis. While the workers, poor peasants and national minorities found no relief of their poverty, starvation and oppression, the Janata came to depend more and more heavily on the brutal force of laws designed like Gandhi's as a blunt instrument to batter and crush every independent struggle of the oppressed layers.

And on top of this Caretaker P.M.-Sing monstrous edifice, the Janata ('Unity') leaders writhed and wrangled in a spectacular display of perpetual incompetence.

United only by their opposition to Gandhi's power, Desai, Singh, Ram, Fernandes and their crew could not even agree on what general course they should take to defend capitalism în India.

Without a shred of political principle between them, lacking even the courage of their opportunism, they remained locked together in their grotesque dance of self-destruction.

The splitting of the Janata put an end to this black farce, and it was Gandhi herself who finally pulled down the curtain when she refused to support Charan Singh's bid to form a government.

The new political constitutional crisis was calmed by the calling of a general election.

The venerable fools who lead the warring factions and parties of professional opportunists are now settling down to a long period of uninterrupted manoeuvring, rotten deals, faithless promises and an orgy of lies.

Singh has already gained the temporary advantage of installing himself as caretaker prime minister.

Sordid trade

But it is Gandhi who stands to gain most from the elections, and she will bring to the forging of new party alliances all the subtle tricks of a sordid trade she mastered long ago.

The working class. of India will not gain one grain of rice from all the antics of these virtuoso performers, for all the hopes of 'progressive' popular fronts held out by the reformists and the Stalinists of the CPI and the CP(M).

The ending of their misery and oppression can be won only through the building of a revolutionary Trotskyist party to sweep aside the vicious charade of bourgeois democracy in India and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for international socialist revolution.

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The Notting Hill Metro Club has been occupied by local black youth in a bid to save it from closure for a month.

In an area of . high unemployment and gross lack of community facilities, this action is of paramount political significance.

It shows how working class youth can fight for their rights by mobilizing in an independant way against the Tory cuts.

Two weeks before 28th July, the senior youth club organiser Emmerson Moore was sacked from his post because of previous criminal conviction.

One week later, another youth leader from the Metro was informed by the locai education authority (ILEA) that they no longer required her services.

Although the reasons for this were not made clear, it was revealed that the club would be closed forthwith for "redecoration" purposes.

Hence the youth voted to stage a sit in to show their opposition towards the ILEA's proposals.

On hearing this decision the local education authority refuted any proposal of permanent closure and maintained that when youth leader replacements were found, and the club redecorated, the Metro would re-open.

However, only one week after the sacking of Emmmerson Moore all credit facilities to the club were severed and suppliers were informed to terminate all further sales.

Four weeks later the occupation still holds strong despite a gross lack of money, threats of court injunctions and attempts by the ILEA to finalize the closure of the only black youth club in the area.

The youth believe that if they don't take it into their hands to defend the community's interest, nobody will!

Fight

Meanwhile these youth urge other young people to stand up and fight for their rights in other areas, for although its mainly black clubs under attack today, it will be all youth facilities tomorrow.

When asked what they thought of the cuts one black youth exclaimed:

"Its just Thatcher orgainizing against the working class, with the black people in the middle. The Tory Government attacks youths, trade unions, the old-and whatever branch of society we live in we must come to recognise this and fight it."

To do this the Metro desperately needs support and financial aid. So far, the local Labour Party has remained silent and only one T&GWU shop steward has come forward to support their struggle.

These youth are determined to win and they will, if enough financial and political support is given. This means that each week the youth have to raise over €100.

Send donations either by care of Socialist Press or to The Metro Club, St. Lukes Road, Notting Hill, London.

The rejection by Tory Northern Ireland Minister Humphrey Atkins of New York Governor Hugh Carey's offer of talks has done little to appease Orange demands on the Tories for a rejection of all talking and a stepping up of repression.

Atkins and Thatcher would dearly like to be able to : arrange talks with the US bor urgeois leaders over the best v vay to stabilise imperialist rule north.

The economic crisis is hitting Ireland north and south particularly harshly.

¡he vEco report on the TI. "rAr South, published on August 20, predicted rising inflation, falling growth rate and a balance of payments crisis.

Slump policies Two years of governmentinspired boom is now being replaced by siump policies.

The working class in the occupied six counties of the North has always suffered the most depressed living standards in the British economy.

Unemployment, even according to official figures, is now 13%-over twice the British average. This overall figure obscures the fact that the jobless rate for Catholic workers is over 2½ times that for Protestants.

The crisis of profitability in the manufacturing industry caused the workforce to be slashed by 16% in the years 1974-77 alone and 41% of all male workers earn less than £60 a week (compared with 27% for Britain as a whole).

Over a quarter of all families live below even the bourgeoisdefined poverty line. Electricity and gas costs exceed those in Britain by three times. According to an official survey, half the housing in Belfast, and a third of all housing, is substandard. All of these figures conceal the fact that the burden of capitalist tyranny falls heaviest on the Catholic workers.

'Poor productivity'

The last few months saw around 1,000 Catholic workers in Belfast lose their jobs in a spate of factory closures.

At the end of last month, 8,000 Protestant workers at the Harland and Woolf shipbuilding yard (the north's biggest single employer), were told that 1,800 jobs would be axed by early 1980. The yard's bosses blamed the deepest recession in shipbuilding since the 1930's and the poor productivity of the workforce.

The man-made fibre industry (the biggest in the six counties, employing over 9,000 workers) has already started lay-offs, and threatens • more to discourage wage strikes and force up productivity. Bosses blame cheap US imports and workers' "unreasonable"' wage claims for the falling rate of profit.

Around 1500 jobs in the gas industry are in danger, as the 9 state and 4 private gas plants face complete shutdown. The imperialist rulers • have withdrawn subsidies and turned down plans for a North Sea gas pipeline to save the profitability of the industry. These moves are designed to force a switch to electricity, in which there is heavy British investment.

Showing a willingness to fight to defend their positions, workers have responded readily to strikes called by their unions.

Over 2,000 workers (mostly women), came out on August 1 in the first six county-wide strike in the textile industry.

Further strikes followed on the 8th and 15th. The Monday strikes called by the CSEU have twice brought the engineering industry in the north of Ireland to a halt.

The road ahead is fraught with dangers for imperialism. But while the Tories hint at political reforms, the repression of the working class is firmly pushed ahead. If necessary, imperialism is always ready to call on the fascist solution, which incubates in the loyalist movement.

The upheavals shaking the working class will not in themselves spontaneously create a basis for class unity. The crucial subjective factor-the revolutionary party-does not exist even in embryo.

As more workers and youth seek a way out of the impasse under capitalism, both the IRA and the Democratic Unionist Party (Paisley's loyalists) will deepen their influence in the divided working class.

Class unity can be won only on the basis of a struggle for demands that link the solution of the national question to the material conditions of the working class as a whole.