U.s. Elections Bureaucrats Back 27% Carte

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Workers from all the major Skelmersdale factories recently demonstrated outside the Courtauld factory, due 1 be closed as part of Courtauld's rationalisation' plans. Delegations came from Peter Blond, Hartwell Hosiery, Dunlo1 Turtle Wax, and among the banners carried on the demonstration were Dunlops T&GWU, Skelmersdale Trad Council, Skelmersdale Communist Party and Skelmersdale Unemployed Workers Committee. A factory gate meeti trat alano to nantoot anainot tha alrora which will raics the leval of unemnlaument in the toam to 75% "I'm gonna be President dream" of equal opportunity for all, and which would seem to be borne out by Jimmy Carter's spectacular rise from obscurity to the Presidency of the most powerful imperialist country in the world.

But behind Carter's magic is a collection of cheap tricks - cheap oia tricks. He owes his victory to the old 1932 Democratic coalition of Franklin D. Roosevelt - the votes of the south, the biacks, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, trade union members.

MACHINES And it was the "machines" of the Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO trade union' confederation which got out the votes on November 3rd to give Carter his 5196-48% majority of the popular vote - though only a meagre 27% of those eligible to vote in tact supported Carter.

why cid the AFL-CIO and the local Democratic Party apparatuses join forces to get Carter elected?

Because for the American working class the main issues of the campaign were inflation and unemployment - issues which ope 1 up the whole question of class inte rests and the inability of the Ame ican two-party system to represent thing but the interests of . the capitalist class.

NO ILLUSIONS The union bureaucracy has no illusions that Carter has any loyalty to them; his record in opposing the unions in the South demonstrates his position.

No, they acted in self defence, to prevent the American working class from taking up the call for the building of a Labour Party.

Even the tiny and sectarian Workers Loague (US sympathising section of the International Committee, led by the British WRP), were able to pul nearly 20,000 votes for their 14 congressiona candidates nationally.

And in one industrial city in the mid-west their autoworker candidate polled 4,000 votes in support of a break with the Democratic Party and the building of a Labour VULNERABLE This iustrates clearly vulnerable position of the union bureaucracy and the I cratic Party as the capitalist deepens.

And Carter's election will the trade 'emocrisis only make things worse as he tries to cope with unemployment, inflation and rising oil prices.

There is no sleight-of-band trick which will enable Carter to convince the American working class that he is representing their interests as the crisis forces him to adopt policies which protect US capitalism and the stranglebold of the trade union bureaucracy.

BETRAYALS

Just as in Britain the betrayals of the Labour government and TUC leaders provide the conditions where workers can be broken from their old leadership, so the return of the Democrats to the Presidency and their enormous majority in Congress lays the basis for exposing theit deceptions and. the class nature of their party.

Wine storage tanks in California -UFW fighting officials and frowers Thus the fight for the American Labour Party is just beginning, and must continue alongside the fight to oust the corrupt UK labour The Presidential election has overshadowed the numerous other state-level decisions taken by voters on November 3rd.

For example, in California - the centre of student rebellion in the 60s - the present leadership void enabled forces of reaction to win two victories.

First voters elected to the Senate the Republican right-winger S.I. Hayakawa, aged 70, best known for smashing student-faculty revolt as President of San Francisco State University, and for his wholehearted support of Ronald Reagan.

More important, though, was the defeat of Proposition 14, which would have given clear-cut recognition of labourer's rights (collective bargaining, secret balloting in union elections) to the farm workers.

UNION RIGHTS

The United Farm Workers (UPW), led by Cesar Chavez, nave oen fighting the union bureaucracy and the big growers for years in their attempts to secure basic union rights.

Yet they have failed to draw wide-scale support from the trade union movement. A State-wide strike in support of the farm workers would crush the growery' power overnight - much more effectively than legislation can ever do.

But this has not happened. Instead the Anti-Proposition 14 growers coalition triumphed, paying for an advertising campaign which played on the fears of petty-bourgeois small • property owners by suggesting that if the Proposition was accepted it would mean invasion of their farms by union organisers.

If the forces of the left (and especially the Socialist Workers Party, US sympathising section of the "United' Secretariat) had fought in the 1960s to draw the student movement into working class struggles on a principled basis there would be some foundation laid now for united action against Hayakawa and the grape growers.

But the fate of the student Ri AFL-CIO leader George Meany activists is best represented by Tom Hayden, ex SNCC leader, then Weatherman, who this year joined the Democratic Party to stand in the primaries against the incumbent Democratic Senator.

ERRORS Hayden and his wite Jane Fonda failed to learn the lessons of the 601 and thus the old errors live on in their support for the limited campatien of the UFW through the loge.

We support the UFW's call for: world boycott of all Californi campaign which will alte call for but we also call for : workers with other sections of th working class in California (an nationally) in strike action to wil these basic union rights for al especially oppressed section of thi working class.

We intended to analyse the vote for the SWP but no figures have yet been published. However they did succeed in getting on to the ballot in 30 States, collecting over 600,000 signatures to do so.

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when I grow up." A common place declaration for American kids, reflecting the "American