[From 1968 to 1971 Trade Union activity flourished…]

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From 1968 to 1971 Trade Union activity flourished. In 1970 industrial workers were federated on a provincial level, while students and peasants were gaining 1n consciousness.

The lett wing, however, virtually accepted Bhutto's leadership, worked for him and in 1971 Bhutto came into power in two major industrialised provinces; Punjab and Sind.

The National Awami League took over East Pakistan.

There was a clear-cut division -East Pakistan became BanglaDesh and Bhutto formed a coalition government in West Pakistan.

Bhutto promised 'Roti, Kapra aur Makan' (Food, Clothes and Shelter) to every citizen of Pakistan, and as an antidote to rightwing propaganda, invented a new formula called 'Islamic Socialism'.

This cross-breed made it convenient for him to preserve all decadent and bureaucratic institutions of the system.

As a result, in a few months there was a clear-cut division between the opportunist element of the PPP, and the genuine left.

Instead of joining the Government, Marxists sided with the people, stayed with them and slowly took over almost all the Trade Unions and other progressive forums.

Within a short period of time, people began to realise that there was no essential change in the system.

PPP members supporting Yahy This realisation led them to frustration and, under the guidance of Marxists, they started agitations and strikes which were not just trade unionism but had an obvious political significance - they wanted a complete change in the entire superstructure. Now Bhutto was faced with his real enemy - the people — conscious people!

Bhutto started his operation very cautiously. He had to crush the crux of the problem - the Marxists.

Some of the happenings are stated here in order to give some idea of the situation in which Marxists of Pakistan find themselves today. 1. Bhutto slowly purged the its left-wing. 2. He amended the trade 3. He made the MPO (Maintenance of Peace Ordinance) and the DPR (Defence of Pakistan Rules) more effective and convenient to operate with. 4. Leftist trade unionists are extensively victimised under. both the DPR and the MPO. 5. Workers were wounded, arrested and tortured when they demonstrated in Karachi in July 1972. 6. In Karachi, in October 1972, workers went on strike, and two were killed. Next day there was a bigger strike and more than 100 were killed. 7. Workers in the Punjab agitated against this blood-shed and 500 were fired from their factories. 8. Peasants were brutally murdered in the interest of the landlords in Hasht-Nagar, also in 1972. 9. Baba Riffat, a leader of the People's Labour Front was abducted, kept and tortured in ShahiKilla Lahore: 10. The Fourth Army Division was sent to Baluchistan to fight with guerrillas. 1l. During 1973-74, the language issue was initiated in Sind to distract the people from anti-state particularly from the MMMA, PLF and the PMM (Punjab Labourers Front) were falsely charged and arrested for putting bombs in Wapda House.

15. NAP was banned and the PPP took over Baluchistan in 1975.

16. In the same year, 32 Sindhi publications were banned in one day.

17. Leftist trade union activity. 1s sabotaged by compromising with the puppet unions.

18. Workers who were suspected of being lettists, were forced out of their jobs. In Lahore alone 1150 workers lost their jobs in this way in three months earlier this year.

19. More than 500 people in the Sind just disappeared. Nobody saw them again.

20. All mass media (TV, radio, press) is under the very firm controí of the Information Ministry. Only one opposition paper is allowed to survive, and is used by the Government as the strongest weapon to take action against the progressive intellectuals, educationalists and trade union leaders.

21. An ex-PPP man, Miraj Mohd.

Khan was arrested, kept in Shahi Killa and tortured to the extent that now he is said to be blind and mentally retarded.

THE PRESENT SITUATION the past four years the Government has been successful in limiting. Trade Unions to JILCIC z Khan against Bangla Desh.

economism. It has been effective in curbing every situation where trade union activity could be politicised. Marxists are in a constant rush to meet workers demands, combat puppet unions, handle legal procedures, and try to resolve their family contradictions without compromise with the Government and fight infiltration into their organisations.

This state of affairs does not leave them with enough time to concentrate on the ideological front concrete long-term planning. This vicious circle will lead them to exhaustion, frustration and inertenc pre wants them to be. impotence and exactly Until now, the Marxist movehas limited within provincial or regional boundaries. This has inevitably resulted in a comparatively narrow outlook which unable to view the situation in Pakistan in toto and which bars the possibility of a wider united front so badly needed today.

There is a desperate need for joint planning and joint action on a national level. There has to be country-wide discusssion and debates amongst the Marxists Pakistan, to evolve new tactics, new forums and a wider united front, with women, small industrialists small landowners, intellectuals, civil servants - even with the revisionists, along with a closer contact with the Communist Parties and communists of other countries, especially India and Bangla Desh.

Marxists should retreat from their open fronts, and arm themselves with more effective weapons, for this is the time to be on the defensive in order to enhance the proletarian cause in Pakistan, simply because we cannot afford to be on the offensive.

Our reply next edition.

The function of the 'Militant' group as a more radical variant of the "Tribune' group has for years been to rationalise the desire of some 'left-wingers' within the Labour Party to build positions on verbally opposing the betrayals of the right-wing while in practice doing nothing to remove them.

in carrying out this task the Militant group seeks to enlist some younger workers who genuinely do want to fight the Labour Party bureaucracy, and tame them by equipping them with the Militant "perspective" of an impending "split" in the Labour Party and the supposed prospect of an imminent mass influx of militant workers into the Party's ranks which it is hoped will resolve the question of programme and leadership.

With this perspective, the importance of any real struggle today for principle and for the removal of Callaghan is minimised. Why take a chance of "isolating yourself"

today - even being expelled from the Party - when the "great day"

when workers will flood in and take up all the questions themselves is just round the corner?

NO FIGHT The Militant group therefore refuse to lead any real fight either in the Labour Party or in the unions against the spending cuts and the battery of anti-working class policies brought in by the Labour government. And yeft addition, they support the MPs of the Tribune group who have repeatedly voted for these policies.

As Socialist Press reported, Militant expressly approved the recent vote by Tribune Group MPs in favour of Healey's last package of , cuts - which by Tribune's estimates will create 200,000 redundancies! «The Militant group inside the Labour Party Young Socialists (who even call themselves Trotsky.

It would be a serious mistake, group recognises, to vote in such a way as to bring down the government. As Arthur Latham said, the Labour government might be like a bad meal, but another Tory government would be like a dose of arsenic for the workers."

The WS says that the central question is the mobilisation of the strength of the working class, not as a pressure group but in a way that declares workers will not accept capitalism's crisis put on their backs.

(Socialist Press, August, 976).

LEFT FACE Yet the Militant group, to retain any credibility in the labour movement has to put forward some kind of 'left' face. It does so in two main ways - toothless attacks on the Labour leadership and its policies on the one hand; combined on the other hand with demands which insind lila trannitinen dam... WITH A SOCIALIST APPROACH.

should carry them out?

A classical • example of both these techniques is to be found in the 27th August edition of Militant in which the headline on unemployhave been acting for the last two and a half years, and have decided to put 1½ million on the dole is skipped over in this way, putting a headline even Jack Jones and Len Murray trooping in to meet Callaghan last week, could hardly disagree with.

TUC Special Congress.

After the ritual set of statistics and crocodile tears at the unemployment levels, the Militant leadership gets down to the serious issue - diverting from the main and turning the demands necessary to fight unemployment into meaningless abstractions. They write:

"With the TUC Conference and the Labour Party Conference both taking place in the next month, the labour movement has the opportunity precisely to pressurise the government into action. Unfortunately, it seems that the Labour leaders take more heed of advice from the board-rooms......

•....as far as we know the bankers and industrialists, the people whose ystem has caused the unemploynent, are not Labour voters nor do they pay the political levy. Yet they are calling the tune. It is time the labour movement was listened to."

This avoids absolutely every sharp Issue. Firstly the illusion is fostered that the "labour movement" has a voice at the TUC and Labour Party Conferences - both of which are intricately stage-managed assemblies completely dominated by the bureaucracy.

Only at the Labour Party conference do rank and file members genuinely stand even an outside chance of attending OI speaking, and, as past practice shows, wherever an opposition resolution is passed there, it is simply ignored by the leadership.

Only a conscious fraud could refer to these conferences and not bring out these factors. But the fraud goes even further, when we realise that the 'left' rhetoric about the Labour leaders taking instructions from the board rooms is not linked to any call for conference action to remove these right-wing

OF THE LABOUR

THEIR POLICIES a fight to throw out the Callagh right-wing clique from start finish of the article - nor, indee from start to finish of the Militar So how does the Milita manage to sound left-wing? To r so. they include a series of fi reaching demands around the iss of jobs:

"But to make our voice hear and to really have an effect e government policy !!!!, a cryst clear alternative policy must be p forward. No one would dispute th the capitalist economy is on ti rocks, but why should the worke be expected to go down with ti ship?"

This is followed by a number demands summed up at the end:

*The working class must for the government's hand. M demand:

Work-sharing without loss i wages.

* A massive programme of usefi Public Works.

* Work or full pay.

* Nationalisation of the banks an 200 monopolies under worker control and management."

NOT SERIOUS We will leave aside for thi article the confusion rampant in th last two demands - because th demands are obviously not seriou anyway.

These demands are being put b!

Militant not as a call to action bu as an "alternative" - to be imple mented by the Callaghan govern ment! What other conclusion car be drawn from their cringing desire to "have an effect on governmen policy."

And the trade union demand: are presumably to be fought for by Len Murray and Jack Jones, the architects of the present record unemployment and the wage-cutting 4% policy - there is no call for new leadership in the trade unions!

STOLEN To use these demands, stolen from the Trotskyist Transitional Programme, as such abstractions is the crudest deception of the working class and less experienced Militant group members by a leadership which long ago abandoned any fight against reformism.

The struggle for work sharing on full pay, the struggle for defence of all jobs through factory occupations, the fight for opening the books of the employers to elected trade union committees, and the demana ior nationalisation based on the figures exposed in this fight is one that can only be taken forward if it centres on exposing the bureaucrats and building new leadership in the trade unions.

And the fight for such perspectives in the Labour Party demands an all-out fight to throw out the Callaghan leadership and expose the treachery of the 'left' MPs who refuse to fight its policies.

Neither fight can be waged along the lines of the Militant group.

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MABOUR MUST AC500,000 - The fact that the Labour leaders

ON REFORMISM