Bern Aids Wilson's Jo Bs Fraud

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Last week Harold Wilson and Denis Healey launched a two-pronged attack designed to ensure that this week Labour Party Conference endorses their policy of using deliberately-created mass unemployment as a weapon to drive down the living standards of the working class.

Last Thursday ex-'left, Energy Minister Antony Wedgewood Benr voted with Wilson and Healey on the key inemployment resolution at the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Labour Party.

This resolution gives the initiative to the right wing of the conference and virtually ensures that Wilson's policies will be endorsed. It has the advantage of being garnished with 'left-sounding phrases, making a call for the reactionary policy of selective import controls.

THREAT

This policy resolution, forced through by Wilson's arrogant threat that the Cabinet Ministers on the NEC would refuse to sign any resolution critical of government policy, thus splitting the Executive.

Wilson's tactics of gaining the support of the 'lefts' at NEC level and then using them as a cover against any opposition at the conference means that oppo had announced the other prong of the attack - a rag-bag of sor called measures against unemployment..

The £170 million package was entirely aimed at the conference and calculated to give the right wing something to argue and the left wing somewhere to hide.

It is clear that as measures against unemployment the proposals are worthless. - they will not even significantly alter the rate of increase - but they do raise important questions of principle.

PUBLIC WORKS

Wilson conciously avoids financir the necessary programme of publi works - schools, hospitals, council housing, etc., to create new employment at full union rates. Such a programme must be under the management of the workers and contained completely within the nationalised sectors.

Instead, the E: 70 millio: whit: made available is to be handed out not to the nationalised industries or to the social services but paid straight into the bank accounts of private employers in the form of cash bonuses if redundancies are avoided.

This shows the wholly reactionary nature of the Wilson leadership, who act entirely for capitalism. Social services are cut and the money cynically handed to private industry as a manoervre to ensure that the Labour

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talking of alliances with NATO the EEC.

It was in this situation that a new organisation was set up in the barracks called Soldiers United Will Win. (SUV) This body did not meet with the approval of the Army Commander in Chief Fabiao, who had two of its members arrested on 19th. September for possession of leaflets in support of it.

This provoked the biggest military demonstration yet in central Lisbon on 25th. September, with over 20,000 soldiers, supported by workers committees and left-wing political organisations chanting "estant will not he another Chile' When the demonstrators met at the end, it was proposed to have a further meeting the next day at the prison at Trafaria, a few miles away, where the soldier prisoners were held. Then the proposal came, 'why not go there now?' The demonstrators at once went to a nearby bus station and got the agreement of the bus workers that they should drive their buses across the great Tagus suspension bridge to the island fortThey show clearly the beginnings of a break by rank and file soldiers and the working class from the Armed Forces Movement, the officer corps who hold the real reins of power, and from the treacherous leaders of the Communist Party and Socialist Party who follow behind their coat tails.

Now, surely, is the time for revolutionaries in Lisbon to fight for the setting up of a city-wide organisation of workers, tenants and rank and fike soldiers whc alone can safeguard the future of the revolution, and who will struggie against the actions of the new military security force.

These new developments confirm the correctness of the policies put forward by the WL on the London demonstration on 20th September in solidarity with the Portuguese revolution. Only the WSL clearly called for a break from the Armed Forces Movement and the defeat of the new provisional Although the demonstration was dominated by the popular front policies of the Stalinists and the dangerous, ultra-lett and anti-working class slogans of the International Socialists, it was essential to intervene to bring out these issues.

THE CRISIS - FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH The obstacle to renewed capital accumulation in the United States "are formidable, perhaps insuperable"

That is the conclusion of a detailed supplement on "Capital crisis" in the September 22nd issue of the influential American weekly magazine Business Week. The supplement foresees that "prolonged business upswings [will be impossibie, but prolonged recessions easy" and that "social unrest and class conflict would become endemic because income gains will be thin to non-existent"

Business Week attributes this crisis for capital accumulation to the dramatically falling rate of profit - collapsing from around 16% in 1965 to little more than 5% today.

This collapse has forced companies increasingly into debt. In 1965 they borrowed 50 cents for every $1 invested from their own