Cut Price Nostalgia!

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Andrew MacDonald reviews the album Rock Against Racism's Greatest Hits released this massive Anti Nazi League influences were meeting huge put it on the stereo for the first LP is a track by the Carol time. Grimes Band which is neither It just shows what can punk nor reggae but a Joan happen in two years; both Armatrading/Pattie Smith type. politically and musically. of thing.

were at at" least. spared the comes at a peculiar watershed Rock concert at the end of the Anti Nazi hnev gets a helving hand from West German leader Schmidt Socialist Press doesn't often review records but we could hardly miss the Rock Against Racism Greatest Hits album released earlier this month.

"It's not a compilation on vinyl, it's the theme tunes of a movement" says Andy Xerox in highly dubious sieeve notes. -This is an accurate statement of what the album is and as such it could have caused a nuclear explosion in the tipsy-turvy rock scene if it had been released two years ago when the Rock Against Racism movement was at its zenith.

Minor ripple

Today, however, its release only caused a minor ripple with predictable reviews in the Guardian critic ticking it off as "the best British(!) compilation album of the month" (How many compilation albums does the recession-torn record industry release a month anyhow?)

The album is one big dose of nostalgia-which isn't such a bad thing (though it's not what it used to be, Ed...

The 'long hot summer' of growing unemployment and racist violence of 1977 and the «Communists slam Gdans! wreckers".

So ran the headline of New Worker, paper of Britain's New Communist Party.

As the most brazen mouthpiece of the Kremlin leaders and the Stalinist bureaucracies of the deformed workers states, New Worker did not trouble to hide its bitter hostility to the independent struggles of the Polish masses.

While the Morning Star more tactfully tail ended the shifting positions of the Polish Stalinist leaders, New Worker plunged right in, denouncing:

"Irresponsible, individuals, anarchic and anti-socialist groups"

The readiness of hundreds of thousands of Polish workers to fight the dictatorial rule of the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy was branded as "efforts by the Polish right":

And New Worker-perhaps incautiously-threw its weight unambiguously behind the now ousted Edward Gierek.

•This no-holds barred explanation of current events in the region is the one given by the man in the best position to know-Edward Gierek" • Even as the strike movement grew to the verge of a General Strike, New Worker was assuring its readers that:

"Gierek's outline of a solution is one sure to appeal to tens of thousands of ordinary Polish workers".

Lickspittles Unfortunately for Gierek, his outline-despite the endorsement of New Worker-did not go down so well with ordinary Polish workers as it did with the Stalinist lickspittles who lead the NCP!

Subsequent developments have made a nonsense of the claim by Néw Worker that:

"The Polish United Workers' Party has the programme and policies to sort out present month.

Carnivals and the Lib-Lab pact „success. came rushing into my head as I Punk music and Anglicised reggae was nearly everything then. If you left school you still stood a chance of getting a job; and if van went on strike vou provisions of Prior's Employment Act if not the hostility of the police.

In Autumn 1980 Heavy Metal music is running wild again while ska is on just about its last knees and could possibly survive the winter. (The new music cults always seem to start -or rather are re-started in the spring or summer).

But. the album catches superbly the end of 1978 where nunk music had heroicaliv ended its most fruitful year and VULn JANIVATIJ the English-born-and-bred reggae groups with their distinct differences from their Jamaican problems".

But more interestingly the NCP finds itself caught in an impossible contradiction when it attempts to conclude that:

•The wreckers trying to whip up the difficulties only have plans to aid the boss-class world-wide".

The problem the Stalinists face in such a formulation is that of course the major imperialist powers actually rushed to the assistance of Gierek and the Polish bureaucracy.

The US and West Germany hurried through new loans to prop up the sagging, mismanaged Polish economy, sooner than risk a further escalation of revolutionary struggle in Europe and the possible loss of their already. heavy investments and financial commitments in New Worker of course succeeds in dredging up a quote from right wing West German politician Franz-Joseph Strauss condemning the new loans-but the fact is that the loans were made by the imperialists-to The freak exception on this Watershed Actually RAR's first album (and hopefully not their last)

for the movement.

It has been able to carry its mass support into a Rock Against Thatcher movement, which seemed the natura development.

And a crisis of perspective has loomed up, resulting in the RAR'S extremely odd magazine temporary disappearance Temporary Hoardings (well at least it's living up to its name!).

According to the New Musical Express: four of RAR'S ten-strong central committee have resigned.

Nevertheless for £3.99 you could be the proud owner of the Brezhner greets Gierek prop up a tottering Stalinist And of course the NCP despite its ostensible posture of standing to the "left" of the Communist Party of Great Britain, is completely committed to supporting such loans as an integral part of the Stalinist strategy of "peaceful coexistence' with imperialism.

It makes little sense for the NCP to condemn imperialist manoeuvres in Poland. The biggest single material influence exercised by the imperialists in Poland takes the form of the massive debts to the imperialist banks run up by the Gierek bureaucracy as a result of its inability to develop the potential of the Polish economy while opposing revolutionary struggles elsewhere in Europe.

The debts and the economic crisis in Poland are the bitter fruits of three decades of "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism.

l'heré is no doubt that the working class in Poland and the deformed workers' states. has .... www.vv.y.i іном. неслчене:....с. сеом....

14-track album. And with the Clash, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Xray Specs, Tom Robinson Band,_ Stiff Little Fingers, and the Gang of Four amongst others from the punk contributors and Matumbi, Steel Pulse and Aswad contributing reggae tracks you could hardly go wrong.

On one side there are epochmaking classics by Xray Specs, Tom Robinson and The Members mixed in with not too hot tracks by Elvis Costello, The Piranhas and the Mekons.

It doesn't do anybody any made some gains.

They do not suffer the scourge of unemployment, and workers in the advanced capitalist countries should also bear in mind the economic backwardness of the East European states prior to the nationalisation of property and the establishment of deformed workers' states in the post-war period.

Privilege

But the fact remains that 30 years after the expropriation of capitalist property in these countries and 63 years after the working class smashed the power of capitalism in the Soviet Union, the ruling Stalinist bureaucrats have still not created anything approaching a socialist abundance of wealth for working people..

Instead they have defended their own power and privilege by consistently seeking deals with imperialism to carve up the world into peacefully coexisting "spheres of influence" • and harm to hear the liberating words of Poly Styrene:

"Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think H BONDAGE, UP YOURS! 1,2, Once you've heard that you never forget it! And Tom Robinson lias got some excellent things to say about 'the winter of '79"

On the other side comes the heavyweight stuff from the Clash and Stiff Little Fingers, along with a non-starter called "Why Theory?" by the Gang of By John Lister and Da opposing the independent revolutionary struggles.

In the post-war settlements of Yalta, Teheran and Potsdam, Stalin cynically handed over Greece and Indo-China to the imperialists, and Stalinist parties sold out massive post war revolutionary opportunities in France and Italy.

The economic isolation that has so warped the nationalised economies of the deformed workers' states is thus no accident: it is the outcome of Stalinist policy as a privileged bureaucracy struggles to preserve its power.

And, as events in East Germany 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 and Poland 1970 have shown the Stalinist leaders will use whatever force they consider necessary to preserve their position and repress workers' struggles.

The NCP explicitly supports each of these military interventions-and would certainly have supported a similar crackdown in Poland 1980 if the Gierek bureaucracy or the Kremlin had Learue's first Carnival. 1968 Four. (What do you expect anyway from that clique of capitalist roaders and running dogs of yankee imperialism?)

I once said to a friend that you can tell a lot about someone's personality by the records they buy.

He replied "yes I can tell a lot about yours-you're on dead low wages".

So if you're skint and selective like me, RAR's greatest hits is a must for your record collection!

464 t resorted to such measures.

But as the working class in Britain comes increasingly into conflict with its own bureaucratic leaders-who refuse to mobilise mass action to defend workers against the Tories-the basis is created for a far widerreaching understanding of the phenomenon of bureaucracy as a whole.

It is in these conditions that the NCP's frantic headlines amount to little more than a Canute-like attempt to stem the forward movement of the working class at a time when even the Polish Stalinists have grasped the need for flexible tactics to defend their power and privilege.

Such Stalinist formations must be confronted by the Trotskyist programme for revolutionary defence of the deformed workers' states against imperialism; and for political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies and establish the power of the proletariat organised through independent workers' councils.

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INDUSTREUL NEWS

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ew Communist Party slams "Gdansk wreckers"