Angolan Workers Fight S. African Invasion

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backed up by massive artillery and air cover, invaded and occupied the southern provinces of Angola last month.

According to the MPLA regime in Angola, the invading force included 6000 troops, scores of tanks and long-range cannon, helicopter gunships and French Mirage fighter-bombers.

This is the biggest of the ongoing cross-border raids launched by the South African government since the full-scale invasion of 1975-76, when the weapon of amperas, tale the its bid to crush the new Cubanbacked MPLA regime that had come to power on the back of a mass mobilisation of Angolan workers.

Invading forces

Sources in SWAPO, the Namibian nationalist organisation, stated that the June 1980 invasion involved the largest S. African military operation since the second imperialist world waI.

Last week the Angolan government reported that over 370 Angolan civilians had been massacred by the invading forces, which continued their sweep through Angolan territory, carrying out economic sabotage and installing the antiMPLA forces of UNITA in strategic positions near the border.

This was denied by the S. African government, which claimed that its forces had withdrawn after successfully completing their mission-to smash SWAPO's military network in southern Angola.

Heavy blow

S. African generals claimed that nearly 400 SWAPO fighters were killed and hundreds of tons of equipment captured or destroyed, for the loss of 16 South African soldiers and one helicopter.

Despite the undoubted exaggeration in these bloodstained boasts, the guerrilla army of SWAPO has clearly been dealt a heavy blow.

The indications are that S. African military chiefs were taken aback by the scale of resistance put up by SWAPO. But in the absence of determined support from MPLA and Angolan-based Cuban forces, the balance was heavily tipped against the SWAPO fighters.

The MPLA regime, and the Kremlin bureaucracy which supports it in the maintenance of capitalist relations in Angola, incapable of providing consistent defence of SWAPO or Angola against S. African The MPLA government is driven into deepening reliance on imperialism by its inability to meet the demands of an increasingly militant Angolan working class.

The S. African government, with imperialist connivance, is thus able to exploit the instability of the MPLA regime. The military attacks are designed to increase MPLA pressure on SWAPO to further compromise in the anti-colonial struggle.

The Kremlin's concern is to Botha Angola as part of its world-wide military/diplomatic balancing act with imperialism.

So both reformists and Stalinists largely confined their response to the invasion to within the halls of the UN.

The courage of SWAPO fighters, contrasting sharply with the treacherous class collaboration of their leadership, found an echo in the militant solidarity aroused in the Angolan working class by the predatory attack of the apartheid-capitalist regime.

The fighting instincts of the Angolan proletariat were force. fully demonstrated last week in Luanda, the urban industrial heart of the country, when over 100,000 workers and youth turned out for a rally in protest against the invasion of Angola and in support of SWAPO and the ANC.

The combativity of the Angolan masses sounds a warning to the S. African regime and the imperialist powers, who cannot rely too far on the diversion and control of the working class by the MPLA and its Stalinist backers.

In showing their anger at the S. African attack and their solidarity with SWAPO guerrillas and with the struggles in Namibia and S. Africa itself, Angolan workers and youth are actively seeking a way forward in the struggle against imperialism.

Only revolutionaries armed with a Trotskyist programme and perspective can take forward this spontaneous class solidarity and anger as part of the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism in Angola under revolutionary proletarian leadership. Angola akid su to, terence on lin the cetence oi ary Marxists must stand in the forefront of the military struggle against S. African imperialist aggression.

At the same time, they must take up the political struggle, against all currents of reformism and Stalinism, that is necessary to develop the political and organisational independence of the working class around a revolutionary programme and under a revolutionary leadership.

A key demand to be raised in today's conditions in Angola is for the arming of the working masses, and the fight must be taken up to develop a workers' militia to secure the immediate defensive tasks posed by external aggression, and to prepare the way for moving onto the offensive against state power.

• In Namibia, the working class has emerged undefeated from a period of struggle in which the S. African state and its agents launched an offensive that effectively crushed SWAPO's internal organisation.

Steeled in the experience of struggle, and facing growing attacks on its already miserable living standards, the working class is charged with explosive militancy and combativity.

Confidence

The massive development of struggle in S. Africa must have dramatically strengthened the confidence of workers and youth in Namibia.

These developments pose a threat to the reformist ambitions of the SWAPO leadership. The reformist strategy of guerrillaism is the central weapon of this leadership in its attempts to divert working class struggle and control militant workers and youth.

Guerrillaism serves to turn the working class away from rellance on its own i massive independent strength, towards reliance on the illusion of salvation by the guerrilla army (hand in hand with the UN).

And it acts at the same time as a militant cover for the reformists and Stalinists to draw militants away from the day-to-day struggles of their class and into the bureaucratic command in the guerrilla army.

While broad layers working class look to SWAPO for leadership in struggle, mintary setbacks like the one suffered in the S. African invasion threaten to demoralise the working class.

And guerrilla actionswhether they involve military setbacks or gains-can divert and thus politically weaken the working class at a time when it is set to move into major open struggles against the state.

It is only by seizing on the consequences of reformist and Stalinist misleadership of the working class that the S. African state and imperialism can currently hope to secure state capitalist control in Namibia.

Last week the S. African government gave the tribalistbourgeois DTA party a signifANGOLA Roça Cun Rua Dam Pan Outjol Walvia Bar F:A] Atlantic Maltähöhe, :Lüderite → D] Kesti icant extension of political and military powers in Namibia.

At the same time as it seeks, with imperialist connivance, to strengthen its local agents, the S. African government is forced by the continuing strength of the working class to hold open the door to a form of incorporation of SWAPO into the administration of the capitalist state in Namibia.

The deepening crisis of political control posed for the S. African state and imperialism by the movement of mass struggle in Southern Africa-spearheaded by the mighty black working class of South Africa itselfprovokes growing frenzy amongst the big bourgeoisie in its search for stable capitalist control.

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contributions from the floor Peter McIntyre (Oxford individual should follow their NUJ) described the fight at both conscience, NUJ members fightnational and local level for sup- ing for action at the Oxford porting action by journalists Mail and Times had battled during the recent NGA dispute. successfully for a united policy While the NUJ right wing of support for the NGA..

Debate on policy Steel strikers outside the BL Cowley plant "Moss Evans is brought into friendly chats with BL boss Michael Edwardes because he starts, like •In this way Tony Richardson from the organising committee of the Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement opened its one-day conference on July 5 by highlighting the role played by the reformist trade union and Labour leaders.

"The crisis is not some kind of natural disaster in which we are 'all in it together'. It is a crisis of a specific system of production for profit", he went on.

Opposed A society organised on the basis of exploitation and private profit cannot be planned. And the interests of the exploiters and the exploited are not united but opposed to one another.

To drive up the rate of profit for the employer means to drive up the rate of exploitation of the working class. This is why:

"There is no difference between arguing for import controls and arguing for speedup on the lines. In each case it means fighting to increase employers' profits at workers' expense"

Richardson went on to expose the twin attacks embodied in the Tory policy of high interest rates.

"Money does not make money: only the exploitation of workers increases capital. The 17% interest rate must be extracted from the working class"

On the other hand the Daily Telegraph among others had underlined the Tory strategy of using the interest rate as a means of forcing employers to hold down wage settlements and attack their workers in order to survive.

Resistancer Echoing this, Michael Edwardes was now forcing the pace of attacks in BL's component suppliers-Lucas and Adwest.

But even with unemployment rocketing towards two million the Tories were meeting growing resistance from the working class, whose readiness to fight runs time and again into conflict with the timidity of union leaders in Steel, BL and the public services.

The CDLM conference, concluded Richardson, was designed as an arena within which workers could discuss the independent programme and what kind of new political leadership that are necessary to lead the struggle to defeat the Tories.

The line of the main conference resolution was challenged by two counter-resolutions from the Workers Power group, and by an amendment from the Socialist Labour Group, British section of the Parity Commission.

The speaker proposing the Workers Power resolution "For a Revolutionary Rank and File Movement' that Marinad that the CDLM programme was "wrong and inadequate" on the question of women; in demanding nationalisation under workers management, and in calling for a General Strike to kick out the Tories.

Rank and file

Pointing out that reformism saturates the working class at every level" , he moved a document • that pinned the blame not on the bureaucracy but on the "crisis of polițical leadership amongst the rank and file-at the level of shop floor militants" , and which while in general simply echoing CDLM demands, specifically restricted fits general strike demand to the objective of defeating the Tory Employment Bill.

A second Workers Power resolution, moved by Dave

Lucas

Jenkins, fight for file cont including LCDTU Paign"

These opposed diverting workers in Birmingham argued for a position where each Called on the CDLM to a "national rank and erence" sponsored by movement bodies the Stalinist-led and the SWP front Our Unions Camresolutions were from the platform as from the struggle against the bureaucracy in the unions. and offering what is in many uloblal allu abstract organisational solution to the political problems facing the working class The Socialist Labour Group amendment •was dron context of welcoming the CDLM conference and endorsement or int preamble of the draft resolution.

But the resolution was "abstract" claimed SLG speakers, because failed to include the demand of "Labour to power".

Failing to raise this demand, they bargued, the Labour leaders off the hook.

Responding to this, Alan Clinton (Islington N. Labour Party, capacity) nointed out that we di course favouring a Labour victory ove raise the unconditional slogan of "Labour Gerry Casey (Union of power" without coupling it to the struggle for new leadership and for independent struggles left open the prospect of yet another Callaghan-Healey «We do not demand simply a Labour government. We must fight to take up the question of the working class taking power. This means taking up the question of, government in a dynamic way," stressed Clinton.

Returning to the same question in his summing up, Tony Richardson quoted from the Transitional Programme Trotsky's insistence that Marxists should not simply demand reformist leaders form a government independent of the bourgeoisie, but develop agitation for those demands which should form the programme of such a government.

This, argued Richardson, is the content of the CDLM demands to bring down the Tories, remove the Labour and trade union leaders who won't fight, and fight for a workers' Both the Workers Power resolutions and the SLG amendments were defeated by the conference, which overwhelmingly carried the draft resolution. munication Workers, personal capacity) pointed to the continuous role of sabotage played by the union's right wing leaders. During the Grunwick strike, it had been not the courts but the UPW leadership that halted supporting blacking action and actually fined those that had led the action.

And this year the same leadership had ignored a 6-l ballot rejection and a clear conference majority in order to railroad through a productivity The fight for alternative policies means a fight for union democracy against Jackson and co, stressed Bro. Casey.

180 delegates and visitors, representing a wide range of unions, cuts campaigns and Labour Parties, attended Saturday's Birmingham conference of the Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movement.

Dave Pinnington (TGWU, Cowley Assembly) explained that the latest pay negotiating structure agreed between Edwardes and top union bureaucrats means that no BL worker will have a voice in the annual The whole of the BL workforce is now represented by a handful of full-time union officials!

Annie Pile of the Oxford Steel Strike Support Committee spoke of the struggle to force TGWU officials to give. an explicit instruction that would stop lorry drivers crossing steelworkers' picket lines.

At first steel pickets at BL's PRESS, Wednesday July 9,1980 Victimised shipyard electrician Arthur Pearse told the conference of his struggle to mobilise opposition to management's Value Added Bonus scheme at the Vosper Thorneycroft yard in Southampton.

We must oppose all productivity deals on. principle. We must fight instead for workers' control-with a management elected and answerable to the workforce, he said.

"I put out a leatlet opposing the VAB scheme. And despite a £100,000 publicity campaign, management lost the vote in the ballot"

"Because of this, was sacked. I didn't expect promotion!"

Pearse went on to expiain the way in which EETPU union officials intervened, and while admitting that Pearse had been victimised, persuaded the electricians in the yard that it was not necessary to strike in his Instead there had been an industrial tribunal-in which the evidence of 16 witnesses was brushed aside: and an external conference, whose "impartial chairman" accepted by EETPU officials proved to be an exVosper manager!

Now, with the first two stages of the VAB scheme having been imposed, Vosper workers are beginning to pay the price of this betrayal by the EETPU.

The third stage involves complete flexibility of labour and a mat on had-ion conditions. And the British Shipbuilders pay date had been delayed to prevent joint action alongside the steel workers.

Cowley plants had used Moss Evans' directives to halt long lines of lorries: but local TGWU officials had then intervened, and eventually National Organiser Ron Todd called for a halt only to supplies of raw steel, oil and gas.

As a result no major industrial plants had been halted by the steel strike.

Joe Quigley (GMWU, personal capacity), stressed_ the dangers of the new Tory Employment Bill. It is not true that this is any less dangerous than Heath's Industrial Relations Act, he argued.

"Coupled with the new Social Security Bill and the

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Wednesday July Page S

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PHOTO: John Sturock, Report John

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