[can be halted without its defeat ment, and…]

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can be halted without its defeat ment, and the accompanyat the hands of the mass ing literature made plain, To this end the Workers associating itself directly Socialist League will continue with the anti-Soviet thrust to press for the development of of Carter's 'human rights' the steel strike into a general crusade.

the removal of the right and Soviet Union and the 'left' wing traitors in the labour. deformed workers' states movement. (the 'socialist countries') French Communist Party workers on May Day parade Strike' has rubbed off more easily on the IMG than on the SWP, they seem unable to work out whether they favour a General Strike to "Kick out the Tories" (headlines on 10, 17 January) or simply to "halt the Tory offensive" (headline Jan. 31, Editorial Feb. 7).

•A more extended article on January 3 argued the need to "Prepare for confrontation with the Tories" , and balanced delicately between the two perspectives, while tending towards the notion of a general strike to bring down the Tory government.

«The steelworkers' strike is a defensive struggle, but it can be turned into a movement to pave the way for removing this ... The lesson is that the trade union leaders are terrified of centralising a movement against Tory policies that would threaten the existence of Thatcher's government and take on a socialist direction.

"That sort of movement has to be fought for,...

.. The logic is towards unified and generalised strikes against the Tories." (Emphasis added).

But so keen are the IMG to prove to themselves that the necessary policy somehow arises automatically out of the "logic" of the developing struggle that the article refrains from actually calling for a general strike.

The IMG appears unable satisfactorily to resolve a central question in the raising of the General Strike demand.

Should the General Strike call be taken up casually in the manner of the SWP, and used to refer to "one-off, one-day" token actions designed simply to pressurise Thatcher's Cabinet into changing course?

Or should it be recognised that the call for a General Strike is in effect a call upon the working class to mobilise its full strength in confrontation with the government representing the class enemy: a cali that must be linked therefore to the demand that the government be brought down, and that the representatives of the class enemy in the leadership of the Labour Party be rooted out?

The dilemma of course is a real one for a movement like the IMG that always tends towards a protest, propagandist perspective.

The IMG continues to vacillate between the two stools, with a particularly crass lapse into protest politics in the February 23 Socialist Challenge:

"Only when a Sunday demonstration is followed by one on Monday, and then Tuesday and then Wednesday and then Thursday and then Friday -and every day of the week until the Tory offensive is smashed-will Jim Prior's law be no more than a bad dream."

This exhausting view of the way the IMG feel a government can be beaten back is not improved by the confusion of the final paragraph:

"Organise for 9 March, but organise demands to be shouted at the TUC leaders . . . One demand in particular should be in the forefront—a general strike against the Tory offensive."

Here the General Strike call has clearly become completely detached from the mass struggle actually underway at this moment: it has become an empty, propaganda demand, clearly aimed not at bringing down the Tories but at "killing the bill"

And this is made worse by an editorial article which completely fails to grasp the scale of the treachery of TUC leaders.

"The role of the TUC in the last few months has been negligible . . . True they have called a national demonstration against Prior for 9 March, but that being a Sunday it will have nothing like the effect a national demonstration during a working day would have."

Far from being "negligible" the role played by the TUC leaders in the previous seven weeks has been the major factor in isolating and weakening the steel strike.

Murray, together with Gormley, Weighell, Sirs, Basnett, other steel union leaders, and top union negotiators in BL in particular, have worked might and main to prevent other struggles erupting alongside the steel strike, and to forestall moves to a General Strike.

Any assessment which, like Socialist Challenge, fails to start from this must end up spreading confusion, and, however unconsciously, tail ending the reformist, protest politics peddled by the TUC leaders themselves.

But while the IMG and the SWP toy with the call for a General Strike and ponder its objectives, Workers Action at least has a worked out-if wrong headed-position.

Workers Action has consistently argued for a General Strike: but equally consistently argued against it being a strike designed to topple the Tory government. This, they claim, would "restrict" the development of the strike.

The rather tortured argument required to defend this point of view is spelled out in Workers Action 166 (Feb. 9):

"A general strike could stop the steel cutbacks and the public service cuts, and kill the Employment Bill.

it would also probably topple the Government, though a focus on kicking out the Tories as the main aim of a general strike would be a snare, making it easier for the ruling class to sap the energy of the strike by promising elections and shifting the terrain from the factories and streets to the ballot box-as in France 1968."

Workers' Action here shows an inability to recognise the enormous development of class consciousness that would be brought about by a General Strike that successfully set out to remove an electetl, government from office. Within such a movement, the fight for soviet-type bodies to advance the struggle could take rapid strides forward.

The ability of any future elected government-Labour or Tory-to impose similar attacks on the working class would be immeasurably weakened. The crisis of the labour bureaucracy would reach new heights.

As Workers Action itself admits:

"A general strike, once underway, would challenge not only particular policies or a particular government, but capitalist class power itself ... which is why, of course, the TUC is so specially anxious to avoid a general strike."

Indeed, to refuse to call for general strike action to topple a reactionary government until such time as the working class has developed sufficient extraparliamentary organs of power to be able to dispense with bourgeois elections is-however 'left' the arguments usedeffectively to accept a longterm reformist perspective.

Reformist fashion

The same Workers Action article actually goes on in true reformist fashion to argue for Labour to launch "a campaign of Parliamentary obstruction" and for the TUC to "start organising to stop the Tories"!

And, elsewhere, Workers Action, to justify its own stance parodies those who call for a General Strike to bring down the Tories, by effectively accusing them of calling for a general election:

"But if a general strike, however it starts, begins to reach even some of its revolutionary potential, then calling a general election or replacing a Tory government by a Callaghanite Labour administration would be a prime capitalist tactic to forestall the progress of the strike.

Unlike specific demands like "smash the Industrial Relations Act" (in 1972) or "stop the steel closures" (now), "Kick the Tories out"' • as an objective posed for a general strike, limits it in advance."

(Workers Action 163 Jan 12) Is Workers Action seriously arguing that the more limited the central demands of a General Strike, the more sweeping its outcome?

Can its authors not recognise that, sooner than politically collapse and resign in front of tha unrkinn rlace a ranitalict government (Labour or Tory) would make almost any tactical concession on specific demands -as with the victory of the 1972 miners' strike, the release of the Pentonville dockers, and, of course, the wage concessions that ended the 1968 French General Strike?

But though they might be (temporarily) checked 'on this or that single issue-such as even cteal einerres-hv mass action there is no prospect that the attacks of the Tory government strength of the working class.

strike to bring down the hated Thatcher government and open up entirely new conditions for A new hero has stepped forward to champion the cause of human rights, and this newcomer in a competitive field is no less than Georges Marchais, general secretary of the French Communist As the leading upholder of Stalinist • politics in France, Marchais may not seem an obvious candidate for this part at first glance.

But of course he does possess, like most prominent Stalinists, the two essential qualities which are needed to play out this virtuoso role: an apparently limitless capacity for hypocrisy, and a sound professional ability to exploit human suffering to further his own narrow political ends.

With this firm grounding in technique, Marchais could go far in his new post.

But how does this latest sideshow mounted by the French Stalinists fit in with the international human rights circus launched by the imperialist Carter?

The answer is, in one sense, that it doesn't fit in at all: Marchais' initiative is in competition with Carter's more spectacular venture, and is designed to draw away the attention of crowds.

Unsuspecting

The 'defence committee for human rights and liberties in France and the whole world' was sprung on the unsuspecting French bourgeoisie by Marchais at a press conference last TIT - 1 wednesday.

As Marchais' announcethe French CP is far from On the contrary, Marchais claimed that the were the best defenders of human rights.

This implausible claim is partly explained by Marchais' argument that 'the communists' (meaning the French CP and its allies in counter-revolutionary Stalinism) have always been the true defenders of 'human rights', but that they have a different conception of these rights from the imperialists, one which includes economic and social rights' It is with this truly 'communist' conception that the French Stalinists survey 'human rights' throughout the world:

And they emerge with the startling discovery that imperialism has violated human rights far more widely, thoroughly and bloodily than 'communism' (i.e. the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies and their immediate allies).

The French bourgeoisie trembling with indignation, has pointed its finger at the omission from this survey of Syria, Ethiopia and Cambodia. But allowing for even major adjustments, Marchais knows very well that he can beat the imperialists at a numbers' game based on tallies of workers and peasants killed, tortured or imprisoned by the forces of imperialism and the forces of Stalinism.

But the political reality beneath these calculations is of course a different matter entirely and one ignored altogether by the French Stalinists. In all their talk of outrages and atrocities committed by imperialism, they never once mention the decades of counterrevolutionary activities practised by international Stalinism across the globe.

Ану ронис assessment Aner aalitiol senacement of the fate of these workers and . peasants must look beyond the hands which pulled the trigger or locked the prison door to examine the forces that created these developments-in particular it must examine the political leadership offered to the revolutionary proletariat.

It is here that the true record of the Stalinists on 'human rights' is revealed The international proletariat and its allies within the peasantry have found themselves betrayed time and again by the counterrevolutionary policies of Stalinist leaderships into the bloody defeats and mass repression of military dictatorships, imperialist reaction and fascist regimes.

Sometimes pursuing ultra-left sectarianism, more often insisting on the treachery of class-collaboration with the bourgeoisie, Stalinism played a crucial role in paving the way for the triumph of fascism in Germany and the imperialist organised coup in Chile amongst its multitude of crimes against the interests of the revolutionary proletariat.

Today, sections of world Stalinism are seeking to build an alliance with the most reactionary- forces from the Islamic clergy in Iran, struggling to achieve the 'historic compromise' with the Italian bourgeoisie and in Turkey, as fascism rises and the generals prepare a new coup, they refuse to build a united front of workers parties but turn instead to support bourgeois 'socialist' Ecevit and his RPP.

Stable relationship

These betrayals are not random mistakes. They flow from the conscious, counter-revolutionary needs of the Kremlin bureaucracy, source and organising centre of world Stalinism.

To preserve its own parasitic interests, the Stalinist bureaucracy in the soviet Union needs to preserve a stable relationship of global compromise with imperialism at the expense of the revolutionary interests of the proletariat, both inside the Soviet Union and internationally.

Ine initiative of the French CP has its place in this world strategy of Stalinism. Although the 'human rights' campaign has been launched entirely within the control of the CP leadership, it is not just the appeal to 'progressives' (i.e. bourgeois liberals) which marks out the class collaborationist character of the exercise.

Political revolution

The French Stalinists merely echo the imperialists' hunting cries when they prate about the abuses of 'human rights' within the Soviet Union.

We completely condemn the suppression of Soviet democracy and the repression of opposition by the political dictatorship of the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin, but we unconditionally defend the degenerated workers? state of 'the Soviet Union against any and every attack from the imperialists.

It is not Helsinki agreements that will end that vicious and corrupt dicatatorship, but the struggle that will be waged by Trotskyists for political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore the dictatorship of the proletariat to its full revolutionary power.

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DUALDITKISS METTENE : HEI* ISTRIAL NEMIS Three months ago, when public sector trade unionists arrived to lobby the Tory County Council in Leicestershire over the cuts, cussion of the contract-for only 15 minutes!

Pullen was immediately reminded by speaker after speaker that the EC had not stood firm in the past and that members had little confidence in them doing so in the futare.

One speaker pointed out their efforts were jeered at by Council leader Geoffrey Gibson. _On February 27, the same Gibson , had to be ushered, obviously shaken, back into his palace of glass and rubber plants alter housewives, teachers, nursery nurses and school students surged forward to halt his prepared statement to Independent Television.

Two hundred police were on duty to hold back more than 2,000 demonstrators who laid seige to County Hall demanding the abandoning of the cuts and the resignation of the Tory Council leader.

The doors were barred at 12 noon, over two hours before the scheduled time for the council meeting, and the public gallery was declared 'open' only to ticket holders! striking teachers who had travelled up from a mass rally at a city centre cinema [although the local NUT leadership was notable by its absence!] All told, over 120 schools were hit by the one-day strike as teachers voted for once with their feet.

In fact, but for a last minute ban on picketing by the Executve of the NUT, it is probable that most of the union's nearly 4,000 members in the county would have been out.

"Paralysis"

NUSS members, however, did succeed in picketing one school and bringing students out.

Yet, despite this massive response, the strike and lobby failed to stir Leicester Trades Council into action.