Crisis Rumania

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:. The results of the brtuguese general election of 5th April have shown very tearly indeed the strength and impetus which remains in the parch of the Portuguese Porking class.

This was despite all the pressure com the capitalist class and its pokesmen, the handing back of the media to the parties of the right, ad the bombing attacks on the forkers' organisations.

The Socialist Party obtained 87 million votes, 35%, and 106 rats in the Assembly. The Sommunist Party, with 780,000 eceived just short of 15% with 40 rats.

The capitalist CDS and PPD arties got 16% and . 20% ispectively, with 41 and 71 seats.

MAJORITY

: This means that the mass parties I the working class have overcome te effects of a protracted witchint in the capitalist press to win Leasy majority. i This is a considerable blow rainst the right wing and the imployers, though the election belf now reopens all the questions I political leadership in the worki class. … It means that all the repressions ince the atleged "coup' attempt of | Events are dragging the ełuctant leadership of the talian Communist Party down deir so-called "Parliamentary bad to Socialism"

If it had been left to Party *ecretary Enrico Berlinguer and his Thon Stalinist chiefs there would are been no nation elections on one 20th, the Christian Democrat* Horo government would not ENQUIRY COMMISSION Jis to an citor, our report m he bat i insue failed to make clear - Michel Varga was a leading ber of an organisation known ry dhe initials LIRQI, which now itself the Ligue Ourriere vitationaire.

The address of the Enquiry Poremission is c/o Lutte Ouvriere, 233, 75865 Paris Cedex 18, rance.

We would appeal to other groups o consider themselves to belong the revolutionary workers' ment to support the efforts of commission. In Britain they can Dadau LEFT SWING IN ELE CTIONS building in Lisbon in November 1975.

25th November have failed to break the unity and strength of the working class.

The votes of the parties to the left of the main workers' parties also increased. Overall it has 144,320 or 2.72%. The Maoists of the UDP increased their vote from 44,000 to 90,507 (1.7%) and again elected a deputy.

Two other Maoist groups, the MRPP and the AOC, who did not stand last time, got 35,/51 ana 15,506 (-67% and .29%, though is it difficult to know what signiticance to draw from this, since the Maoist groups, especially the latter two, campaigned exclusively on an anti-communist basis.

The centrists of the MES and FSP groups had reduced votes of 30 and 40,000. The two groups claiming to be Trotskyist, the ICI and PRT received 16,093 and 5,144, 3% and 1% of the vote.

This was an increase from the 10,732 received by the LCI last time, when the PRT did not stand.

SLOGANS

the LCI was putting slogans calling for a workers' government of the CP and SP. The PRT fought on a similar basis.

The votes show not only the strength and determination of the PARLIAMENTARY nave fallen, nor would the exact identity of 'Antelope Cobbler' the leading Christian Democrat who in the late 1960s pocketed over a million dollars in Lockheed bribes have become the central and explosive mystery of Italian The Lockheed scandal was the last straw for the Moro government. A US Congressional enquiry showed that one of three men was paid off by Lockheeds to guarantee the purchase of 'Hercules' aircraft - Prime Minister Moro, his Foreign Minister Rumor, or the President Leone. (Each indignantly denied he was guilty and expressed total confidence in his colleagues!)

Yet despite • accelerating inflation, unemployment and shortages, daily right-wing political violence and a whole galaxy of lesser political scandals, at no point did the Communist Party leadership call for elections. The Christian Democrats fell of their own weight at the point where the tacit support of the CP leadership could no longer protect them.

The Communist Party entered the election campaign on the most reactionary platform imaginable.

They favour that cuts in both and public spending will working class, they also place the leaders of the Socialist Party and Communist Party on the spot.

CP chief Cunhal has been calling for a government including representatives of his party. He is certainly not opposed to alliance with the capitalist parties, though he is against any socialist policies for such a government.

The greatest pressure, however, is on Socialist Party leader Mario Soares. For him, the majority for the workers' parties means that he cannot any longer look directly to bourgeois PPD and CDS parties to hold on to the 'democratic', i.e. capitalist order.

This is the meaning of his current aim to set up a minority government based on the SP alone.

In an interview published in The Times on 1st May, Soares showed support of the military to maintain his minority government.

He told the Times reporter that the existence of such an administration:

"involves the authority of the President backed by the armed forces, and the President would have the support of the governint, party in order to maintain order.

The President, who will be elected in two months time is expected to be from the military, probably with the support of the Socialist Party, possibly Azevedo, the current Prime Minister.

The reformist leaders of the working class, despite all the forces massed behind them, have been determined to avoid that break with the capitalist order involved in repudiating military support.

The weakness of the main political parties of the "bourgeoisie has made it necessary for the capitalist class to look more than ever before to the military for A powerful President from the military will aim to hold the fort for the capitalist order against the mass movement expressed through the workers' organisations.

The necessity for the working class parties to break from the AFM will be even greater than before.

They will have to build their own independent organisations in order to do this; redevelop the workers' committees and all their own special forms of struggle.

order' is to be defended.

Italy is to remain within an unchanged NATO and, of course, within the Common Market. The CP will not seek the "sensitive' Ministries of Defence of Foreign Affairs.

They have no block with the Socialist Party despite the fact that a united platform could almost certainly give a Parliamentary majority to the workers' parties.

In fact the Stalinists are pledged in advance to enter no government without the Christian Democrats.

It is rather as if the British Communist Party, given their long awaited majority of Labour and Communist seats in the Commons, were to insist on a coalition with the Tories to avoid "national divisions"!

Among the activists of the Communist Party's 1.7 million members the political crisis has brought a veiled but unmistakable shift to the left. While official Stalinist posters speak of "democracy" and "unity" ; in Italy, CP mill tes ano by panting spens Rossa!" (Red Spain!) on the walls of their towns.

Mass forces exist with the Stalinist movement for a fight against the bureaucrats' 'historic compromise' and for "Italia Rossa". Not since the war has the landertin writhin The split between the Stalinist leaderships of the Soviet Union and Rumania hardened significantly with the publication last week of a Rumanian book which lays semi-official claim to a large area of territory which, 1s presently part of the Soviet Union.

The book - Political Life in Rumania from 1918 to 1921 -has been widely publicised by the official Rumanian news services. Its key claim (established with "perfect scientific rigour according to the news agencies) is that the whole of Bessarabia is properly part of the Rumanian state.

Bessarabia is an area almost a fifth the size of present-day Rumania, with an estimated population of four million. It lies within more than 300 miles of the present Soviet-Rumanian border, stretching inland from the Black Sea. It was incorporated into the USSR (as the Moldavian People's Republic and as part of an enlarged Ukraine) at the end of the Second World War.

It is therefore of considerable importance that the Ceaucescu leadership of the Rumanian Communist Party have now decided (even if on an 'unofficial' basis for the time being) to stake their claim in a major border dispute.

It represents a new stage in the growing 'independence' of Rumanian Stalinism - a process which started with opposition to Soviet policies for Comecon (the economic 'union' of the USSR and Eastern Europe) in the 1960's. This lead to a separate diplomatic and trade policy towards the US and Western Europe, the refusal of the Rumanian leadership to send troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 and a policy of diplomatic 'balance' between Soviet and Chinese At the Moscow Congress of the Soviet CP in March, Ceaucescu -without explicitly criticising the Soviet leadership - insisted on the right to "independence' individual Communist Parties and "socialist states', , then abruptly left for home well before the end of the Congress ceremonial.

The Bessarabian question has been touched op, in various The Stalinist leadership in Poland faces growing opposition to its policies and its political control within the Union of Polish Students.

A Congress opened in Warsaw on April 28th which had been designed to merge the country's various Stalinist-controlled youth organisations into a single Union of Young Socialists', incorporating the former 'Young Socialists' (over a million members), the "Young Peasants' (also over a million) and the 'Young Soldiers' (over two milion members).

But the student movement (about 300,000 members) refused to join in the fusion, which was clearly a move designed to reinforce and centralise the control of the bureaucracy over the various youth movements in Poland.

In Poland the student bodies and clubs have a long history of generating opposition to Stalinism - even if often in a nationalist and partial form.

• In 1956 it was the students of Warsaw and Cracow who stood -along with the workers in some of the biggest industrial plants - in the front line of the grass-roots resistance which was being prepared against the threat of a Soviet Rumanian publications in recent months. But this is the first time that state organs have given a clear endorsement to such claims.

The quarrel - from both sides -highlights the reactionary and nationalist character of the Stalinist bureaucracies. Bessarabia has been an area in dispute at least since 1812, when the Turkish Empire handed it over to the Russian Tsar.

It changed hands several times in the 19th century, and was seized Stalin toasts Churchill, 1944. by Rumania in 1918, following the military prostration of Russia and the Bolshevik revolution - a seizure dignified by the authors of the latest Rumanian book as integration into the Rumanian state by the will of the masses"!

When Stalin's armies entered Rumania at the end of the war, they restored, with the agreement of the imperialist powers, the borders of Tsarist Russia; though in Rumania they left the extreme rightist King Michael on the throne until 1947!

And now the Rumanian Stalinists, in support of their claims for territorial enlargement are reviving the "traditions' of the Dacian people who inhabited the country at the time of the Roman Empire. Thus the city of Cluj, in central Rumania, has for the last two years been • renamed ClujNapoca, its ancient Dacian name!

Thus, for all the talk of "internationalism" on Moscow platforms, the Stalinist bureaucracies reveal themselves as nationalist castes of the most reactionary stripe, whipping up national and cultural hatreds and keeping Eastern Europe as much divided as did the former imperialist powers and their monarchical puppets.

In March 1968 they formed the spearhead of the mass demonstrations that broke out in Warsaw against police censorship and in support of the Czechoslovak 'spring', demonstrations to which the Gomulka government responded by a brutal crackdown and the launching of a despicable antisemitic campaign in the name of "anti-Zionism' The recent opposition moves among Polish students follow widespread and public protests against the new 'constitution' adopted by the Gierek regime in February. This contained a clause specifying an 'unbreakable fraternal alliance with the Soviet Union: terms which could easily become the 'legal' pretext for the use of the Soviet Army in Poland.

Faced with a mass campaign of petitions against the draft the Stalinist leadership retreated slightly, 'diluting' the clause so that it specified only 'friendship and cooperation with the USSR and the other socialist states' At the same time Gierek's security forces were busly engaged in compiling 'black lists' of those publically opposing the draft constitution - lists which certainly mntained • larop • numher nf

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SOCIALIST PRESS, Matarary May 5th, 1976 • IRANIAN INTERNATIONAL NEWS I