ULRIKE MEINHOF Murdered bystate

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Its fiercest electoral propaganda is directed leftwards against Proletarian Democracy - the alliance of the PDUP (Democratic Proletarian Unity) and Avanguardia. Operaia (Workers' Vanguard) with support from Lotta-Continua (Permanent CP candidates do not even have to subscribe to the party's nominal programme. In headlong retreat from attacks from the Christian Democrats and the church, the CP has wooed 'independents" , especially Catholics, to stand as its candidates.

One tenth of its candidates are of this kind; they include the former director of the Christian Democratic newspaper Il Popdo and another former editor of a Like many capitalists he is following the call of his brother Giovanni (Fiat President and exPresident of the employers' organisation Confindustria) for capitalist leaders to take a more direct part in government.

Giovanni Agnelli is himself standing for the Republicans, also in Turin. This is a clear sign of the determination of the capitalist class to move towards a government more adequate to their needs.

These, according to Uarerto Agnelli, are for ăn increase in productivity of ten to fifteen per cent over the next year. He himself has not ruled out that the CP may produce the government best able to realise that.

There is no call, he said, The funeral of Ulrike Meinhof in West Berlin last Saturday was attended by a crowd of many thousands. The death • - officially labelled 'suicide' - of the 41 year old leader of the West German anarchist group follows almost four years of judicial torture of her and her fellow lation, incarceration in cells kept almost totally silent through special sound insulation.

In 1974, another member of the Baader-Meinhof group, Holger Meins died in jail following a hunger strike against conditions there.

The family and defence lawyers of Urike Meinhof have charged that she was assassinated by thé state. They have demanded an independent autopsy and defence lawyers have - after official obstruction - secured a postponement of the Stuttgart trial of the surviving accused members of the group.

As one lawyer pointed out, the death of Meinhof comes at a convenient moment for the prosecution, "at a time when the defence is attempting to introduce a political content into the proceedings"

The mistreatment inflicted on these prisoners is one of the clearest signs of the police methods in use behind the "democratic" facade of succeed, has virtually free-for-all.

Until early this month, most of the leading bureaucrats were bettine two days of Jackson's on Henry Jackson. But withdrawal active campaigning after losing the Pennsylvania primary, they were on the phone to Carter in the hundreds, asking and offering terms.

Whatever the outcome for the image-mongering presidential "personalities" , American workers can only lose.

Only the struggle for a labour party, independent of the bosses' interests, can give the US working class the weapons it needs to defend itself against capitalist crisis. ITAIN sules.. issues issues West German state.

Like the laws recently brought into operation to ban those lacking "loyality to the constitution" from jobs in public services and education, it demonstrates the direct responsibility of the Social Democratic government for legal and police violence against the labour movement and the left wing.

The Workers Socialist League is fundamentally politically opposed to the methods of anarchism and individual terror associated with the Baader-Meinhof group.

This is because we can see that such methods in no way assist the struggle for leadership within the working class movement which alone can prepare the mass revolutionary upsurge necessary to end capitalism.

But we do not for one moment confuse our disagreements with terrorist methods with support for the repressions of the bourgeois state which act only in the interests of the capitalist class.

We therefore unequivocally condern the barbaric and brutal murder of Ulrike Meinhof at the hands of the German capitalists, police and Social Democratic leaders.

Only the mobilisation of the working class in Germany can bring these, the real criminals to account.

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ADDRESS . EUROPE 6 issues. 12 issues 24 issues subscript issues, 1. the Armed Forces Movement as an essential instrument of rule on behalf of a weak capitalist class in the face of a strong workers' movement.

And secondly the support by Eanes for a Socialist Party minority government is an attempt by the Armed Forces Movement to prevent the tendency as in previous coalitions for the government to fall apart. This is to attempt to reestablish parliament and the Cabinet as the focus of politics as opposed to the independent organs of the working class - the workers" and factory commissions.

This manoeuvre takes place in the context of a massive economic crisis facing Portuguese capitalism bringing the need for the capitalists to slash living standards even further in an attempt to restore the rate of profit. The Bonapartist AFM itself is unable to carry through this task against the organised power of the working class.

The working class has yet to be confronted and. defeated by the capitalists and their military defenders. That is why the latter are pinning all their hopes on the ability of Soares and Eanes to restore 'parliamentary government'.

But this is also the reason why the massive Socialist Party vote in the recent election was in no way an endorsement by the working class of Soares' manoeuvres.

The question of an independent working class leadership based on the independent organs of working class power is therefore still the central question.

The demand must be for the SP and CP to break from the AFM and form a workers' government based on the workers' commissions.

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prisoners at the hands of the state, tacludingensory deprivadon and