Soclalist End Racist Kllings! Arm African Workers

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As the black revolt in Southern Africa grows in scale and intensity, now attaining a new scope with the three-day general strike in South Africa itself, the white racist regimes of Smith and Vorster move to still greater depths of brutalitv and savagerv in their efforts to repress the liberation The strike has been 80% successful, showing the massive basis for the revolutionary movement in South Africa. This support is despite the intimidation of the South African police - one picket was shot dead on the first day of the strike as part of the police moves to stop picketing of stations and roads out of Soweto.

CIVIL WAR

This has brought South Africa to the point of a civil war of considerable scale. Every major area has been convulsed by riots and demonstrations. And the police have launched a spate of mass killings, leaving so far 240 dead - 33 of them in two days of repression last week.

This links up with the news that United Nations observers had confirmed that Rhodesian troops massacred an entire refugee village of 600 men, women and children in Mozambique - lyingly claiming it was a "guerrilla camp".

Amid this carnage, and while wave of Jimmy Kruger announced on Friday that after 300 years:

"The black man knows his place, and if not I'll tell him place.

BLACK POWER

The unrest, said Kruger was the result of the "importation" of Black Power ideology from America, but the white man would overcome it.

And (reluctant to admit the slightest political independence of South Africa's black majority) Kruger hinted that there is a "white brain" behind it all.

Yet for all the bloody reprisals, shootings, beatings and floggings they carry out against the rebel ling mass of black African youth and older workers, Kruger and the barbaric regime he defends confront not just a series of local skirmishes but the accelerating momentum of the full-scale revolutionary liberation struggle in Southern Africa.

This is what makes Kruger's words seem not so much a statement of confidence but more an attempt to shore up the morale of the racist white minority as Canute-like they attempt to hold back the tide of history.

Indeed the new upsurge of revolt in Southern Africa itself can now be seen as part of a world-wide revolutionary process.

KEY ROLE

It was the resistance of the black African masses to Portuguese colonial rule, waging prolonged wars of liberation, which played a key rolf in putting the fascist regime in Portugal itself under acute straini creating conditions for the overthrow of fascism in April 1974.

This overthrow in turn resulted in the granting of independence.to Mozambique and Angola, which was followed by the sharp struggle by the MPLAin Angola to oust the pro-imperialist forces of UNITA and the FNLA (backed by both South Africa and the CIA).

The defeat of imperialism's allies in Angola has had an immediate impact on the whole of Southern Africa, strengthening every fighter for black liberation and striking fear into the hearts of the racist minorities in Rhodesia and South Africa itself.

And this forward movement in Africa will in turn strengthen those forces fighting the latest rightward shift in the regime in Portugal, as it must also boost the confidence of class conscious workers throughout the world.

The tens of thousands of African students and workers taking to the streets in huge protest demonstrations, strikes and riots in South African cities know full well they are in grave danger of being killed or wounded by armed police.

Yet even a huge new wave of political arrests has not succeeded in stemming the surge of resistance to apartheid, The latest arrests have been made either under the old Suppression of Communism Act or the new, even more repressive section 10 of the Internal Security Act which legalises indefinite detention without charge, and is now operational in all South African provinces, in a vain attempt to stamp out resistance.

Among the hundreds arrested last week were such national figures as Winnie Mandela, leader of the Black Parents Association in Soweto; L. Appies, president of the students Representative Council of the "Coloured" University of the Cape; Barney Pityana, president of the South Africa Students' Organisation Jennie Noel, a leader of the Federation of Black Women.

But while these repressions continue, what really concerns South Africa's racist regime is that many of those who were formerly accepted as leaders of the black community are now being swept along or brushed aside in the political ferment of black revolt.

The signs, particularly within the movements of youth and continued on back page, col 4 Despite the fanfare of publicity in the Tory press heralding a supposed fight by Jack Jones to restore free collective bargaining, the agenda of next week's TUC is. a tar cry trom any • serious attack on the Labour Goverment or the present pay policy.

While prices continue to rocket there is scarcely a resolution which faces up to the fall in working class living standards.

A few exceptions stand out -notably the Furniture, Timber and Allied Trades Union resolution, which denounces both the £6 and the present 4½% pay policy as having:

*led to a deterioration in minimum wage rates, effectively lowered living standards, and failed to prevent the numbers of unemployed reaching an unacceptable level.

In such circumstances, Congress therefore opposes the continuation of wage restraint in any form and affirms its belief in: free collective bargaining."

WE REALLY APPRECIATE THE WORK YOUR But this, together with th Cine and Television Techniciar (ACTT) resolution, which calls o the TUC to "reject the secon stage of the Social Contract an the abandonment of free colle tive bargaining for another year is the only resolution to pos sharp opposition to the pay limi endorsed by the TUC Specia Congress in June.

All other resolutions are care ful to accept this deal, while th T&GWU amendment which i claimed to call for free collectiv bargaining next year in fac explicitly rules out such ar arrangement declaring that "wages free-for-all" would b "injurious" to "weaker member of the community"

In reality Jones" position or wage control is identical to that o Jackson, who has swung the UPV workers' leader Ton into a position of actually oppos ing free collective bargaining.

The struggle for even such basic trade union principle as fre collective bargaining must there fore now confront the trade unio bureaucracy at national level. continued on back page, col TIM

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boe z SOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesday 25th Auzust 1976 L DEUES

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T.U.C. CHAPS ARE DOING LEN!