Sri Lanka

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food shortages and reported strikes by• Russian workers, as well as the costly war in Afghanistan.

Yet we must remember that the Kremlin bureaucrats would invade Poland if they could, sooner than risk the overthrow of their fellow bureaucrats by the working class.

• There are already signs of a split on tactics within the Polish bureaucracy. The Observer has quoted one Polish MP speaking in opposition to the present setup.

But the reformist intellectual groups around the self-defence committee KOR are quite consciously trying to limit the struggles to seeking a reform of the bureaucracy rather than its overthrow.

This means that, for all its mass support as a focus of opposition (their paper 'Robotnik' (The Worker) sells 45,000 copies) the KOR cannot help but lead workers towards the trap of support for 'left' talking Stalinist bureaucrats.

Poland is not a capitalist country. Its bureaucratic leaders depend for their economic privileges and political power not upon the ownership of the means of production, but upon their existence as a parasitic bureaucracy feeding off nationalised economy, within which there is a state monopoly of foreign trade.

Without its dictatorial political control, the bureaucracy stands to lose the basis on which its material privileges rest.

They will defend their privileges to the last. A few cosmetic changes might be nade to curb the excesses of the special shops; a few particularly unpopular bureaucrats may be sacri ficed as scapegoats in order to protect the others: but such changes will not end bureaucracy or its privileges.

Such a profound challenge to the regime can only take place through a political revolution which defends the nationalised property relations while fighting to secure political power for the working class.

The fight for political revolpolitical and practical experience of the struggle against Stalinist bureaucracy from its first emergence in the Soviet Union in the 19/20s.

It is clear that the major danger in Poland today comes from a crackdown or left' manoeuvie by the Stalinist leaders.

This is not to say there is no Unless the new independent bodies that are formed are given a revolutionary lead, they will die. They live now only as a result of the involvement of the masses-which points towards political revolution, and establishing the rule of Poland by democratic workers' councils.

Trade unions in themselves would not be able to act as such councils: but through the experience of independent organisation, workers will come--perhaps very rapidly-to grasp the need for soviets to unite the masses in struggle and place the working class firmly in the leadership of the fight to seize state power from the bureaucracy.

In this light we call for the building and consolidation of independent trade unions and of workers' councils as a step towards soviets.

To defend such organisations against the violence of the bureaucracy, genuine workers' coitrol of stee orkers councils. under the Build soviets in the armed forces to control the officers! Link the soldiers' soviets with the workers' militia.

End. all bureaucratic privileges! Close the special shops and the dollar shops; stop the tourists taking food and goods denied to Polish workers!

For workers' control over the press and'mass media, exercised through workers' councils.

Release all political prisoners except proven agents of imperjalism convicted before workers' courts. Disband the secret For the right to free speech, to strike and to assembly for all workers' parties and newspapers.

Open the books of the economy! For a workers' plan of production formulated not by bureaucrats but by factory committees, consumers and soviets.

• No secret diplomacy!

Publish the talks between Gierek and Brezhnev, plotting against the workers of Poland and the USSR! Full support to revolutionary struggles throughout the world. Break the isolation of the deformed workers' states through the international struggle for socialism!

Defend the Polish workers against Stalinist attacks: defend the workers' states against imperialist attack! For a revolutionary Marxist party to lead the struggles of the Polish workers as part of a reconstructed Fourth International! general strike to begin on 18 July.

The government immediately responded by declaring a State of Emergency on 16 July and attacking the most basic democratic rights of the workers.

Virtually all strikes were declared illegal, strict press censorship was imposed, preparations were made to use the armed services to man essential services, the right of assembly was denied, some trade union funds were seized, and potential strikers were threatened with dismissal.

Undeterred by this naked display of state intimidation, over 40,000 combative public workers struck on 18 July in support of the Action Committee's demands for the restoration of food subsidies and a wage increase of 300 rupees (£8) per month with a sliding scale of 5 rupees for every 1% rise in the cost of living for all workers.

Although the government retaliated by dismissing the 40,000 workers immediately, the momentum of the strike quickly spread and wave upon wave of public and private sector workers have come out in support of the demands.

Workers committees, repres enting all the local : striking unions sprang up in towns, spread throughout the island and committees were established in the rural areas to draw the impoverished peasantry into the strugy last week over 65% of public sector workers and numerous sections of private sector workers were taking"

strike action.

The prime obstacle to a total general strike has been the pernicious brake of the Stalinist (CP), bourgeois (Freedom Party) and "Trotskyist' parties on sections of the trade union movement.

The level of. independance and solidarity forged by the striking workers sent panic and fear not only into the hearts of the ruling classes, but also into the hearts of these reformist, reactionary and revisionist misleaders in the working class.

With the sole exception of the Nava Sama Samaji Party (who call for the convention of a workers delegate council) these various components of the Joint Action Committee have shied away from the task of drawing together the local urban and rural workers committees through the struggle to build a mass Council of Action to unify the independent struggle of the workers throughout the island.

Vacillating Fearing the independent strength of the working class more than the repressive might of the state, these vacillating elements have turned everywhere but to the working class in their search for a quick solution to the strike.

The most glaring example of this has been the strike-breaking role of the so-called Trotskyist' leader of the Ceylon Mercantile Union, Bala Tampoe, a leading member of the USFI's revamped Sri Lankan section, who actually ordered his memberswhen some had already come out-not to join the strike because of their lack of preparednéss"!

But the Sri Lankan workers demonstrated that they are "prepared' for far more than the likes of Bals Tampoe could ever conceive of.

Although the government sacked over 150,000 workers, detained hundreds of leading trade union and political militants, closed down the headquarters of the Government Clerical Service Union and the NSSP (the two organising centres of the strike), sent in troops to break up sit-down protests and street demonstrations and threatened to ban all strikes and outlaw the trade unions, they have nevertheless been forced to retreat trom several of these actions and have been unable to crush the spontaneous development of the strike.

The heroic Sri Lankan workers have shown by their actions that they are willing and able to wage a revolutionary struggle against the system that oppresses and exploits them.

The task of Trotskyists is to

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ution requires a Trotskyist party, embodying the long