CP woos the middle classes

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The split in France's main capitalist political grouping, the UDR, between Gaullist supporters of dismissed Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and backers of President Giscard d'Estaing has reached an acute point i with the runaway success of. Chirac in by-elections in his own. constit uency.

His supporters are now planning a national campaign to build up the demagogic, anti-working class support among the middle classes from which Gaullism has traditionally drawn its strength.

At the same time the government, headed by Giscard d'Estaing's appointee as Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, is preparing the ground for wage cuts, giving support to the demands of the employers' federation (the French equivalent of the CBI) for further legal limits on pay rises.

Despite accelerating inmation, orice controls on the products ol major industries are expected to be relaxed at the beginning of January, leaving controls only over services and small businesses.

The government intends to throw its weight with a vengeance behind the demands of big capital for higher profits.

So Chirac looks to build a basis of support among shopkeepers, small businessmen, farmers - all the middle class layers who will be squeezed in the process.

What is the reaction official 'leaders' of the labour movement? Far from leading any struggle for working class unity which could draw behind it the intermediate social layers who are threatened by the economic crisis and inflation, they are busy seeking new allies from the disintegration of the ruling class "majority" in „Parliament.

NEW PLATFORM At the beginning of November, Communist Party leader Georges Marchais announced proposals for a new electoral plattorm of the 'Union of the Left' - the loose bloc of the Stalinists, Social Democrats and Left Radicals through which the CP leadership are seeking to reconstruct a Popular Front' on the model of the 1930s.

And he added an explicit invitation to 'dissident' Gaullists who are unwilling to support Chirac to join the 'Union of the Left', undertaking that their 'contribution' to the joint platform would be valued - provided they were genuinely concerned "for the economic and political salvation of The Popular Front policies of French Stalinism, far from giving any protection against the development of the Right, represent the most dangerous political trap for the French workers' movement.

INDICTMENT

In the attempt to outfl ank ultra-reactionary nationalism or its own ground, Marchais and his accomplices in the bureaucracy in fact pledge themselves to oppose tooth and nail any independent mobilisation of the working class to defend their basic wages and conditions - a mobilisation which would immediately bring workers into the sharpest opposition to Gaullists and 'Radicals' of every stripe.

The fact that, in the period since 1968, a section of Gaullism has regained the elbow room to begin rebuilding its reactionary political basis is a thorough indictment of the class collaborationist line followed by the "democratic' leaders of the French Communist to cict According to General Pinochet there are now fewer political prisoners in Chile than there are in the United Kingdom.

Chilean troops round up 'suspects' claiming dramatic successes in pitched battles with the "left" Peronist guerillas, the Montonerds.

There is evidence, however, that the suspiciously high ratio of guerilla to police casualties is

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