No Joy for

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While workers seeking to defend their rights and living ; standards run headlong into an acute crisis of leadership, the imperialist leaders themselves face a profound economic and political crisis.

The latest report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) covering 26 countries, forecasts a continued growth of recession with a further 10% increase in unemployment in the next 18 months-from 23 million to 25.5 million.

The OECD's most optimistic predictions look only for some signs of a weak recovery beginning at the end of 1981, bringing a slow increase in output.

But in three major member countries-West Germany, Italy and Britain-output is expected to fall in the next 12 months.

Unemployment in France is now at a record 1.6 million; it has even topped the million mark in West Germany.

In Britain, the unemployment figure is predicted by the OECD to rise to three million by mid-1982, with a staggering 20% of workers under 24 being unemployed.

Company profits are expected to fall still further-and speed-up and rationalisation make it likely that even the beginnings of an increase in output would bring few new jobs for the mass army of unemployed. Meanwhile inflation would remain at 9%.

Even North Sea Oil revenues are not expected to bail British capitalism out of this slumpwith the OECD prediction that the balance of payments will be back in deficit by 1982.

And to round off the picture of decline and disaster, surveys indicate that capitalist investment in the decaying British economy will plunge by 13-15% next year. Already the continuing wave of closures of manufacturing plants across the country has brought an abrupt drop in prices for second hand machinery and scrap metal on the British market.

On an international scale, certain basic industries have been hit particularly hard by the slump. The car industry in particular has seen a dramatic fall in sales, with lay-offs, shorttime or closures in nearly every major manufacturing country with the exception of Japan.

In the USA the failure of the much heralded new "K" car to sell the numbers anticipated has raised a new question mark over the survival of the bankrupt Chrysler - Corporation. Production of the "K» car has been cut back in the facę of huge unsold stocks and a further £400 million has been sought in government assistance.

In France the Peugeot/ Talbot group is laying off workers and cutting production -while in Britain the crisis of the car industry is virtually daily news.

But if the imperialist coun tries are in economic disarray, the crisis is even more acute in those neo-colonial countries whose economic backwardness is exploited as a source of cheap labour and raw materials.

The indebtedness of the underdeveloped, countries to imperialist banks and governments is expected by the OECD to rise yet again from $50 billion to $60 billion in the next 18 months.

Difficult

Simply maintaining the interest payments • on these debts is becoming increasingly difficult for many underdeveloped countries-while the level of exploitation of the working class and poor peasantry is already so acute that further attacks can be expected to produce substantial resistance.

It is in this context that the foreign policy of the incoming Reagan administration and the other imperialist leaders must be assessed. • Beset by political and economic problems in their own countries, they are determined at all costs to maintain and increase their exploitation of the underdeveloped. economies.

This means they must use

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John Lister surveys the struggles of 1980, draws a balance sheet of class forces at the end of the year and looks at some of the problems facing the working class internationally in the battles Bolivian prisoners-at least 2,000 political prisoners thought to be held in jail Anti-war movement a threat to Reagan's interventionist plans political violence continues but no substantial party within the workers' movement is put/ ting forward an independent line for the working class.

Setbacks

And there have been serious petbacks, too. In Bolivia a savage nilitary junta has ridden to ›ower in the wake of the results if the farcical "election" Bolivian union leaders and nilitants have been jailed, torured and murdered and the jeadquarters of the COB (the Bolivian TUC) has been demolshed And in Turkey the military oup led by General Even has ie necessary political and lilitary means to retain control ay furiner detrats at the hands i these I mass struggles as took place i Iran and Nicaragua.

The last phase of Carter's reign policy had recognised iis necessity. The establishient of a large US Rapid Develpment Force, the escalation of litary spending, and the loves to prepare for the introuction of conscription are part nd parcel of a recognition by S imperialism that use of med force may well be the nly way to stem revolutionary ruggles in Central or Latin imerica, Africa or the Middle last in the next period.

The flow of US arms and advisors" to the vicious junta I EI Salvador has been mainlined and may be increased by eagan: the Turkish junta has ten installed with full NATO ecking.

US imperialism can now be rpected to make its peace penly with the bloody Bolivian ictatorship and with other wage Latin American military gimes.

And to further intimidate he masses of the world, Reagan as appointed General Haigknown protagonist of the soilled "limited" nuclear war-as ecretary of State. ! But while Reagan will seek every way possible to lengthen imperialist control • a world scale, it remains Wednesday 7 brought to power a bonapartist dictatorship balanced uneasily between the conflicting class forces within Turkey and internationally.

The Turkish junta has jailed over 60,000 political prisoners, including the leadership of the left-wing trade union confederation DISK, and illegalised all political activity. Such firm steps to crush working class resistance and lay the basis to implement the demands made of Turkish capitalists by the IMF have been welcomed by every section of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

Yat the new Turkish regime has at the same time been forced by its economic plight open to doubt whether he has the ability at present to wage a major military intervention even as close to home as El Salvador.

His monetarist policies will unleash further unemployment and falling living standards on US workers at home: and a full scale war would require conscription at a time when American youth have already shown resistance to the draft.

The combination could produce substantial mass struggles by US workers.

A US intervention in El Salvador would also have unpredictable implications in terms of the stability of the whole Central American region-and trample on the toes of the Mexican and other bourgeois nationalist governments who continue to seek a way out of the El Salvador crisis and to neutralise the Nicaraguan revolution through class collaboration rather than confrontation.

We can expect the Reagan government at the very least to be strong on words in their struggle to retain control of the neo-colonial countries.

The extent to which the imperialists succeed in their strategies, however, depends to a large extent on the success which revolutionaries in the USA and throughout the world have in mobilising the working class-the class internationally exploited by capital-against imperialist oppression. and political weakness to seek alliances with key Arab oil states, entailing a break of diplomatic relations with the Zionist state of Israel.

The final outcome of the struggle is far from settled in Turkey oi even in Bolivia.

In both countries a powerful proletariat has shown itself to be still ready to fight-but denied a revolutionary leadership.

Development

But no assessment of the growing class conflict on a world scale would be complete without an analysis of these ahead in 1981.

setbacks.

Yet if the struggles directly against imperialism have faced increasing problems in the last year, the biggest development of the working class in struggle in 1980 took place in Poland.

Strikes in support of wage demands grew into the fight for independent trade unions, demands for measures that would mean the abolition of the power and privilege of the Stalinist state bureaucracy and demands for the release of political prisoners.

The threat of general strike action has forced the bureaucracy to concede time and again to the demands of the workersthreatening the very police powers on which their privileges are based within an economy in which major industry and banks remain nationalised.

It is with this in mind that the Kremlin leaders, together with Stalinist regimes in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, hąve maintained an intensifying political offensive against the Polish workers.

Military force

And they have increasingly backed up their verbal attacks with the implicit threat to use military force to crush the Polish struggles.

Troops: have been made ready on Poland's borders.

A Warsaw Pact summit has made it plain that the Polish Stalinists have one last chance to put their own house in order before the tanks roll in.

And, under this pressure, the Polish leadership under Stanislaw Kania has attempted to take a stronger line against the demands of the workers.

In this Kania has received the active assistance of the capitalists-both directly, through loans and trade deals to prop up the tottering Polish economy, and less directly through the appeals for calm issued by Catholic church leaders-which reached crescendo as the Polish state-run media were turned over to the Church for the broadcast of mass and other religious messages over Christmas.

Illusion

There is no doubt that the Polish leaders and their fellow Stalinists feel at their weakest in the face of the mass movement of the working class. They are most encouraged to press home their counter-attack at those points where the working class apears more passive.

But we must not fall into the dangerous illusion that somehow the Stalinists will simply become weaker and weaker, eventually to fade away altogether in the face of growing workers demands and struggles.

The material privileges built up over decades by the parasitic ruling caste within all of the deformed and degenerated workers' states depend upon the repression of the working class and depriving workers of any independent means of expression.

The emergence and forced recognition: of independent trade unions in Poland: the direct and successful challenge to police powers that brought at the end of the year the release of jailed Solidarity members stand as a threat not only to the Polish bureaucrats, but to every Stalinist bureaucracy.

Sooner than lose their power and privileges the Kremlin Pc leaders would embark on the desperate step of invading Poland-no matter what the cost of such an action in economic, political and military terms.

And a large section of the Polish leadership has shown that, sooner than face the loss their own power and privilege, they would invite Soviet tanks to invade Poland.

The unstable balance of power that has emerged in Poland in the latter half of 1980 cannot continue indefinitely. Either the power of the independent unions must be mobilised, in concert with the working class of other East European states, in the struggle for Policieat revolution or they mast usuoved pollal military means.

It is in this sense that the Polish proletariat, despite the colossal struggles and gains of the last few months, faces, like the workers in the capitalist countries, an acute crisis of The leaders of Solidarity have been able to conduct struggles for reforms within the existing framework of bureaucratic rule in Poland: but they have not grasped that even the existence of a genuinely independent union as a vehicle for workers' political and economic demands is incompatible with Stalinist rule.

A revolutionary leadership is required which can offer an internationalist programme and perspective for the political overthrow of the bureaucracy and the defence of the nationalised property relations of the deformed and degenerated workers' states.

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Wednesday 1981

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