Botha threatens to use "full force of the state

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week In the face of a wildfire spread of protest against racial oppression in South In the wake of the steel Africa, the capitalist aparstrike sell out in Britain the theid state has suddenly union leadership is busy stepped up its repression. feeding members to the dole Two demonstrating school queues and Thatcher is students were shot dead by installing her Michael police and others wounded outEdwardes clone in the side Capetown.

Hundreds of arrests have management chair. taken place over the last two Meanwhile the international weeks. crisis of the steel industry is The most publicised in the nowhere more apparent than in bourgeois press, of course, have the USA. been those of over 50 white and Knocked from pillar to post black priests who were charged by the anarchic whirlpool of under the Riotous Assemblies market forces capitalsm Act for demonstrating against lives and dies by, the American the arrest of one of their steel bosses longer even number. pretend to be able to predici But the majority of the arrests have been of black, coloured and Asian militants in Carter's industrial an effort by the racist authorLewis Foy, boss of Bethlehem ities to decapitate the strengthSteel (second largest America) declared at the comany AGM *T's just hogwash. They just don't know happening any more than anybody else on the street does.

tov's remarks have to be seen in the context of the plight of his own company and, LOIC socctaluidily. tkal of US steel (tne word s second largest eel corporation 1978 US Steel made a $94.6 million profit!

Now, however, the compans is doing its ll or the re ink malerv inno locanau lems In the last quarter of 1979 alone it lost $561.7 million!

line. hAt both inland Stoei and Wheeling-Pittsburgh profits have fallen by over 50%.

The latter has recently had to soak up Federal loan grants to the tune of $63.5 million.

Republic plummetted by a massive 84.6% whie the most successtu olne big ca companies has been Armco over the last twelve months.

The crisis in the casue chat nere industry alone 1s lu uoluil around the corner for steel.

Ford, for example, has never made annual loss but Was down $164 million in the first quarter of this year.

The steel bosses have reacted in the only way they know now -plant closures, massive redundancies anu ware offers well below half the current rate of inflation Steelworkers in the US are cursea, moreover, witn the kind Bil Sirs look good (almst! been of leadership that almost makes Ofticial backing has been ening body of mass protest.

In several parts of the country, armed police have disBotha persed demonstrators much more violently and single mindedly than at first when the present wave of unrest two months ago.

What has provoked this sharp repressive turn by the Botha regime is the way in which the unrest is not only extending rapidly among school and college students in the cities where they first erupted, but also involving other sections of the oppressed masses.

It is estimated that tens of thousands of students throughout the country are now taking strike and other forms of action.

According to the police, 46 schools in the Cape Peninsular and 24 in the Eastern Cape were being boycotted last week.

But similar actions were also reported from •Johannesburg and Bloomfontein.

Several hundred of the students are among the arrested.

The new sectors of the masses involved in the upsurge are sections of the population in the "tribal homelands" and the urban working class.

In the homeland of Qwa Owa 2,000 students and others joined in a demonstration which was violently broken up by the police. Pupils in other homeThroughout Western Europe the development of economic crisis and slump is creating a vast and growing volume of unemployment.

No section of workers is lands also boycotted classes.

And in Durban 5,000 black textile workers went on strike in support of union recognition and higher wages.

Last Friday the regime used South Africa's Republic Day as a pretext for a massive show of armed force as tanks, armoured vehicles and soldiers passed menacingly through the streets of the main cities.

Not confident Botha threatened to use "the full force of the state" against anyone responsible for unrest.

It is not an empty threat, but nor is it a confident one. The upsurge of the workers and students is already, as in 1976, in soweto, outside the control of the repressive forces of the capitalist apartheid state.

And Botha can see that each stepping up of the repression provokes not terror and demoralisation but the extension of protest and resistance. places in order to repress section of the working class.

But why the question of the violation of sanctuary rather than the violation of elementary human rights should concern the Dutch bourgeois press is of course irrelevant to the working class.

It does, however, reveal a scandalous situation in which an oppressed section of workers is forced to look to priests for help against the capitalist state rather than to the bureaucratic leadership of the country's powerful trade unions.