East Europe il economic crisis

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Troops out of "Many critical remarks have recently been diverted at the management of the economy and especially at the government. We do not reject these criticisms".

The words, uttered almost exactly on the 9th anniversary of the workers uprising in Poland which toppled the government of Gomulka, are those of a Stalinist bureaucrat under very serious pressure.

They were the response of Polish Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz to a new wave of workers' hostility to the stagnation or worsening of their living standards resulting from the bureaucracy's management of the economy.

The criticisms are bound to sharpen next week when Poland's 'parliament' is called upon to ratify next year's economic plan, which envisages the country's slowest rate of growth in any year since World Wa lIl.

Failures This will come after a year of striking economic failure, in which the rate of growth of production has been well below the 2.8% originally planned.

Workers' living standards are once again being squeezed very hard to pay for the interest charges on Poland's gigantic $17 billion debt to capitalist banks.

But Poland is not the only East European Stalinist-led state whose economy is in crisis.

Tro manice ago the tatest Soviet 5 year plan was officially declared unachievable, and Brezhnev launched a demagogic and hypocritical attack on economic mismanagement.

And many announcements last week proved that the economic crisis was a generalised phenomenón in the Stalinist-ruled countries.

lin Hungary was announced last week that this As . we go to press it appears as if Patriotic Front leaders Mugabe and Nkomo have made their final ostenaccept a Tory compromise arrangement on military bases in Zimbabwe as the basis for a cease-fire.

It has been the continual retreats by those petty bourgeois leaders rather than any weakness on the part of the guerrilla fighters in the field or any intrinsic strength of the racist state. or British imperialism which have brought about the pro-imperialist settlement.

Neither Nkomo nor Mugabe had any serious intention of mobilising the Zimbabwean proletariat in the struggle for a socialist state.

Capitalist

Their objective from the outset was a "democratic" capitalist Zimbabwe in which black capitalists and petty bourgeois could establish themselves as exploiters, alongside. or instead of the whites.

There is no scope for such a reformist development in The danger now is that Patriotic Front militants, betrayed down the line by their leaders and by their Stalinist and "front line state" allies, will find this out to their cost. year's growth in the economy fell to 1%-also the lowest since the war.

Inflation had been instead of the planned 4%.

Workers' resistance to this meant that wages rose by instead of the planned 1%.

But that still meant a fall in real wages of workers. Yet another fall is intended by the Wages are planned to rise by 4.5% during 1980.

But the vast number of price rises of consumer goods already announced and due to go into force on January 1 will wipe out the whole of the year's proposed wage increase before it has happened.

The latest of the Stalinist bureaucracies to impose sweeping price increases Ön consumer goods is the East German regime of Erich Honecker: Last week it announced price increases on all but a few basic food items.

It chose almost to the day the anniversary of the 1970 uprising in Poland.

Polish workers and intellectuals hostile to the bureaucracy intend to mark the anniversary for the third year running with peaceful demonstrations outside Herded into convenient "assembly places" under the supervision of British troops, they will become a sitting target for the Rhodesian state forces should they attempt to pursue the struggle against imperialist oppression.

Meanwhile the hefty imperialist figure of Lord Soames will attempt to utilise the confusion sown by the Patriotic Front leaders to press through the consolidation of a stable, capitNkomo Brezhnev the Gdansk shipyards where workers were killed in the brutal repression which followed the 1970 protests.

But it will not be only in Warsaw that the bureaucrats look on in alarm at these protests.

In East Berlin, in Budapest and even in Moscow bureaucrats will also be wondering when the next uprising of workers will occur. They know that it cannot be long, since even they themselves Dove ang that their bureaucratic "socialist' economy-even with the immense advantage of nationalised property relationscan meet the needs of the working class, produce rapid growth control inflation and so on.

They know today that if they said such things nobody would believe them. With the "planned"

economies increasingly out of the control of the planners, the bureaucracies increasingly stan exposed as obstacles to meetin the needs of the working class.

They begin to look more like wage cutters and debt-collectors for imperialism. alist state machinery.

British workers-whose Labour leaders have scandalously endorsed the "peace" moves must demand the withdrawal of the troops, whose sole task is to ensure the smooth transition to orthodox bourgeòis rule in Zimbabwe and the continued repression and exploitation of the Zimbabwean workers and peasants. ay

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tatious display of intransi- gence, and seem likely to