Leeds Factory Rundown

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months has seen a gradual running down of the engineering firm Crabtree-vickers. Every couple of weeks 50 or so workers have been made redundant - and the process is still going on.

The firm, part of the giant Vickers group, makes big printing presses which, in the present recession in the print industry, are unsaleable.

In opposing the redundancies repeated WSL leaflets into the plant have urged the shop stewards committee to launch a campaign to force Vickers to open the books as first moves towards an all-out fight for nationalisation, beginning with calling a mass meeting of the factory to enforce official AUEW policy of opposition to all redundancies.

But the response from plant convenor Terry Jacques, AUEW in the local press his personal determination that "there will be no fight, no work-in and no occupation."

Having announced he was handing over his members bound hand and foot to the employers, Jacques went on to beg the management to tell stewards "what was happening" to the factory.

The sole action by the stewards to date has been to approach local MPs and the government to ask for help - which hasn't come.

The AUEW District Committee led by Jacques - a 'left' Labourite - contains a large 'broad left' group, all of whom are now paralysed the face of large-scale factory closures and cutbacks in the Leeds area.

In line with complete refusal of the broad left' to defend jobs, the Stalinists of the Communist Party play a leading role in attacking the political independence of the As we go to more workers Crabtrees.

At the January 6th meeting Stalinist delegates voted down an ASTMS 507 branch resolution condemning TUC support for the Government's cosmetic "youth unemployment scheme"

Though delegates pointed out that the scheme was in line with local government cutbacks, replacing trade union labour with unorganised youth paid only pocket-money rates, the Stalinists were already up to their necks in the scheme through the regional TUC, and were actually assisting in distributing the Yorkshire allocation of finance under the scheme.

Stalinist principles are certainly cheap on the market - the amount they have to distribute in Yorkshire is the princely sum of 35 pence per week per unemployed!

press, we hear 250 face the sack at

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SOCIALIST 'RESS, Wednesday January 28th, 1976 The Ivanovo-Vosnesensk Soviet of workers deputies. leading revolutionary to leave his exile in Geneva and return to Russia. after the first wave of rebellion. He brought with him an understanding of the dynamics of the revolution, developed jointly with an old European socialist called Parvus, which, while still far from complete, went much further than any • other Marxist of that time.

TROTSKY

The question that Trotsky had been considering was this: Oi course, the revolution is a bourgeois revolution and the working class is a small minority of the population, but the capitalists are refusing to lead the struggle and the working class has taken the lead in the struggle against the Tsar.

In the event of this struggle being successful is the proletariat to hand over its conquest to the capitalists? Isn't it more likely that the working class will wish to retain the power it has just won?

In other words, Trotsky was for the first time laying claim to power on behalf of the Russian working class. Parvus went even further and argued: "The revolutionary Provisional Government of Russia will be the government of a workers' democracy . . • As the Social Democratic party is at the head of the revolutionary moyement... this government will