South Africa Shows Way Forward

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South African policeman crouching with drawn gun while his colleague clears rubbish from Support strikes through blacking action!

In South Africa a major strike wave has developed in the Port Elizabeth area-one of the country's biggest urban industrial centres where much of the motor industry is located.

Beginning at the Volkswagen motor assembly plant last week, the strike action rapidly spread to at least eleven other factories.

Within days around 10,000 workers had come out, paralysing production at the Goodyear, General Motors, Ford Cortina, General Tyre and other factories.

Wages

The central demand being raised is pay-at the Volkswagen plant 3,500 workers are demanding an increase from 65p to £1.20 an hour, while workers at the Goodyear tyre factory are demanding a rise from 63p to £1.70.

The strikes reflect the rising state of militancy and combativity throughout the South African black working class.

Facing daily attacks from bosses desperate to maintain profitability, workers throughout the country are seizing the initiative and developing organisation, action and demands around their economic exploitation and political oppression.

In Cape Town, the focal point of mass struggle recently, the class strength underlying the youth boycott of schools has come to the fore in a whole range of struggles around the day to day issues tacing the the roadway in Cape Town working class which, by mobilising the coloured population alongside the blacks leaves the apartheid capitalist state dangerously exposed.

In the past month alone there have been major strikes in Cape Town's textile and mining industries.

In addition to an ongoing strike by fruitworkers in the West Cape, over 800 Cape Town meat workers have also been on strike over wages, conditions union recognition -a struggle which has been supported by a widespread solidarity boycott of meat products.

And in response to increases of up to 100% in transport prices, there have been bus boycotts centred in Cape Town.

Squatters

Meanwhile the continuing struggle to defend the squatters' settlement of Crossroads highlights militant opposition directed at rising rents, the vicious network of influx controls and the absence of adequate housJALE This wave of action repeatedly demonstrated the enthusiasm, determination and willingness of the workers to struggle in a way which decisively outflanks the reformist straight-jacket of their misleaders.

It is clear that just as the Soweto events four years ago followed on the defeat of imperialist puppet forces in Angola, so the self confidence of the black masses in the present wave of struggles in South Africa has been enhanced by the recent Continued page 2

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initiated the moves to "criminalise" republican prisoners in 1976.

The Commission declares it necessary for the prison authorities to "keep under constant the prisoner.

Republicans in' Long Kesh and Armagh-casualties in the ongoing war of liberation against British imperialism-are quite right to press forward