Mugabe Faces Masses' Demands

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Shackled to the restrictions of preserving capitalist profitability by its reformist petty bourgeois nationalist meet the most basic demands of the working class and rural poor in Farmworkers, industrial workers, miners and women workers in the service industries moved into action against their bosses fully expecting the support of those nationalist leaders whose militant manifestoes had won mass support in March.

At every turn, however, Mugabe and his cabinet have abandoned their mandate for a "socialist Zimbabwe' and have sided with the plantation owners, mining * magnates țactory owners and bankers.

'National interest'

As their calls to workers to go back to work in the name of the 'national interest' have increasingly fallen on deaf ears, the Mugabe government has sent in the police to break strikes and force the strikers back to work.

The police-the same force that served Smith so loyallywere also sent in to the Salisbury townships to make 800 arrests in order to stop workers dealing with the informers and hired killers of the Smith regime.

Police also baton charged 400 women protesting outside parliament against brutality.

While acting to reassure the capitalists inside Zimbabwe, Mugabe has sought meetings with key South African employer Oppenheimer and other leaders of international capital in order to establish closer links and assure them that there will be no nationalisation.

Borrowing bureaucrats At the same time Mugabe has drafted in hundreds …of advisers from the BBC and the British civil service, army and police to oversee the restructuring of the state apparatus.

There is even talk of borrowing bureaucrats from the TUC to organise official trade unions on behalf of the capitalist state LIAISON COMMITTEE DISCUSSION BULLETIN •No. 2 TILC Declaration Price 40p plus 15p p&p from WSL, BM Box 5277, London WCIV 6XX of Zimbabwe!

The undefeated Zimbabwean working class that has for years faced the blows of a viciously repressive capitalist state in crisis is now set to move into escalating levels of struggle, with the potential of giving a powerful leadership to the broadest layers of the oppressed masses.

Defence

As growing numbers of workers come to realise through the experience of struggle that Mugabe's government acts as the first line of defence for big capital, "left" reformists and Stalinists will emerge around demands relating to government, the economy and foreign policy.

Whether they seck to lead opposition to the government or simply to become its 'left face' their objective role will be one of heading off the development of the independent struggle of the working class.

Workers and militants must fight for the building of independent organisations in the townships and workplaces which can mobilise the mass oppressed around a transitional programme of demands that start from their independent interests and point the way forward in the struggle for a workers' state.

In taking up such demands, the working class will come to assert increasing control over leaders seeking to represent its interests, exposing the hesitations and betrayals of the fake "lefts' and clearing the way for a revolutionary leadership.

Central to the programme is the demand for a workers and peasants' government on a platform of nationalisation without compensation and a massive development of public works There could scarcely be a more striking reflection of the mounting militancy and tenacity of the anti-Zionist struggles on the West Bank than the action of the Mayor of Nablus, Mr Bassam Sharka.

Even after having had both legs blown off by a Zionist car bomb attack, and suffering from gangrene, he adamantly refused to be treated by doctors from the Zionist occupation forces: shouting "Long live the PLO!" and services under workers' management, together with free credit and assistance for small farmers, and collectivisation of the large capitalist farms.

Through such a programme the fight can be taken up to give decisive working class leadership to the rural poor.

Now that the imperialists have created the conditions for the petty bourgeois nationalists to take over the administration of the government and thereby poliitcally confuse and militarily demobilise the mass struggle, they will not sit in paralysis while all the advantages they have gained are taken from them.

For while Mugabe attempts painfully to balance between the implac ably opposing interests of capital and the working class, imperialism looks even now for means to defeat racist oppressors against Palestinian people is a mark of strength but of weakness: growing international reco tion of the PLO, and polit isolation of Israel are an im the not the gniical jerMugabe the working class in order to increase profitability and reassert stable capitalist control in the region:

Under these conditions that exist today in Zimbabwe workers' militia is vital to provide the working class with the organised defence necessary to defend and extend its interests.

To this end it is crucial that workers and militants with military training oppose Mugabe's efforts to integrate the ZANU and ZAPU guerrillas into General Walls' army.

Instead they must be urged to place their arms and training at the disposal of the independent organisations of the working class and rural poor, united around the programme of the socialist revolution! ialist attempt to head o f the anti-imperialist struggle Nich can only attain its goals i y the destruction of the Zionist state, and the establishment of a secular Palestine.

What might have been by far the biggest item of US and world news on two occasions last week-computer failures that twice put American nuclear bombers and missile bases on alert and brought the USA to within 25 minutes of all-out war-was in each case averted in the nick of time.

But as military chiefs re-emerge blinking from their bunkers, pocketing the keys that could launch a devastating battery of intercontinental and submarine-launched missiles against the Soviet Union, the false alarms raise important political questions.

Speed

Firstly, the impact of Carter's frenzied cold war campaign against the Soviet Union can be seen from the speed at which the armed forces responded to these false alarms as compared with the last such incident seven months ago.

Despite the fact that there was absolutely no political basis to assume that any form of military attack should be forthcoming from the USSR, the computer signals last week found crews leaping into 116 B-52 nuclear bombers, starting their engines preparing to take off; Air Force command planes were alerted-and one actually took off; and missile launch officers unlocked their launch keys and awaited the order to fire.

Yet last November a similar false alarm which lasted twice as long did not even lead to the B-52s being manned.

Carter's bluff and bluster in the wake of the Afghanistan invasion has therefore been accompanied behind the scenes with real preparations for all out war.

In this situation it is important to look at the kind of situation that could develop if such a computer fault were not so quickly detected.

Command plane

In the final analysis the decision as to whether to strike back against what appears to be a Soviet "attack" before any of the supposed missiles actually lands in the USA is entirely in the hands of the Us President, circling high in his personal command plane.

Defence experts claim that it is certain that no President would give the order to fire until he was vinced that genuine.

But we ar current Presid: personal appro military fiasco dithered and wildly on political issue.

completely conthe attack was : dealing with a ent who gave his val to the lunatic in Iran, and has lurched around virtually every Geriatric And, if the pundits are correct, the front runner in the Presidential elections this autumn is geriatric reactionary Ronald Reagan, whose willingness to contemplate nuclear attacks on any and every opponent of US imperialism is exceeded only by the frenzied jingoism of his advisors and top military supporters.

Reagan is scarcely a man with a reputation for checking his facts. The primary elections have brought repeated press revelations of his tendency to trot out the most absurd and unverified "facts" and allegations in major speeches-many of them culled from Readers Digest or odd news clippings.

Examples have included his false assertion that Vietnam veterans are not eligible for the GI Bill of Rights on education; his claim that US Occupational Safety and Health Administration has "144 regulations on climbing ladders" (it has 21); his confusion of Indochina with Indonesia; and his claim that General Motors employs 23,000 people just to do Federal paperwork (the real figure is 5,000, mainly dealing with tax returns).

Challenged by a reporter on one of his more picturesque 's such a lovely story, I'd really love it to be true."

Between now and the elections the US bourgeoisie must decide whether it can afford the prospect of such a man holding

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programme, the Mugabe government is unable to

Articles on Nicaragua, Parity Commission, and

blunders, Reagan's reply • Was: true. I don't tell me that's not