Denmark Sharpens Crisis

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Tislence as bosses drive strike breaking fuel supplies • (Our brief note [in SP52] on the election in Denmark contained some wrong information. A reader in Denmark has written to clarify the issue).

The Danish government which called the election was a minority Social Democrat hostility to the previous Liberal Party government.

However, they continued in much the same way in dealing with the effects of the crisis, although not going as far as the right wing would wish.

Danish parliamentary life has in fact gone into crisis, as the effects of the world economic crisis deepen.

Various new right wing parties have been formed by a panic stricken bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie and the situation where there was a previous concensus of opinion around "welfare-statist" policies by social democracy and the various bourgeois parties, has ended.

NEW LIFE TO CP The same situation has given new life to the previously discredited Stalinist Party, which has been the main beneficiary of the fight against the attempts to make the workers pay for the crisis.

However the Stalinists stopped even their bureaucratic and limited attempts to lead mass struggles as soon as the Social Democracy took office, and the power of the workers has been frittered away in a series of token strikes and demonstrations.

In May 1974 when the Liberal government pushed huge tax increases onto the backs of the workers and began its series of attacks on the workers' standard of living in general, a mass strike movement broke out with no centralised leadership, but organised from below as a class answer.

It spread over about five days and encompassed 500,000 workers. Some were out one day, others two, others came out again, but its hard core were inbetween three and four hundred thousand who struck and were looking for a lead.

OPPOSED

The Communist Party turned it into a strike for a few kroner an hour more, opposed calls tor a general strike to kick the governto stop it continuing..

100,000 workers demonstrated in Copenhagen, and later in the year strikes to protest unemployment gathered 250,000 in Copenhagen alone.

Also kindergarten and nursery teachers struck against firings and cuts in finance, with huge sympathy from the public.

Despite the Stalinists who limited the movement to days of protest the government was forced into a partial retreat. But when a few months later the negotiations between the unions and employers over the new Collective Contracts broke down, the government was able to pass prolonging old contracts.

This was met by relatively small protest, on the one hand because the Stalinists had no real perspective for a struggle, on the other because of the lingering confidence placed in the social democrats by most workers. The Liberal Party government would not have got away with such a move.

Since then, there has been a general downturn in strike action, broken only by what appeared to be a revolt of the lower paid in November 1976.

TANKER It was not *a near general strike" that almost brought down the government, in November, but a strike by oil and petrol tanker drivers which almost paralysed the country.

The crisis was caused when the Social Democracy backed out of an attempt to criminalise the strikers by new legislation. TUC The Danish leaders wouldn't go along with this, pointing out that the strike was illegal anyway since it broke the law extending the Collective Contracts from 1975.

The police broke the picket lines, not only supported by the TUC chiefs, they even proposed it. (The tanker drivers are in a breakaway, non-TUC union).

The election was called when the government and its supporting rightist parties couldn't agree on a number of issues.

Incomes Policy is of course the centre, whilst questions like housing, rents, and employment stimulation are all issues separating the government and its supporting parties, while the government will have to lean on parties on the left to carry out its policies in cultural fields and education.

STRENGTHENED

The election strengthened the Social Democracy, but on the basis of its previous pro-bourgeois course, and upon continuing in office they made clear their intentions to lean to the right.

The Socialist Peoples' Party lost support in the election and the Stalinists, contrary to their expectations also lost support.

The Left Socialists, however, originally a breakaway from the SPP in 1966,, and calling itself revolutionary-far to the left of the Stalinists-gained one mandate, clearly taking votes from the Stalinists in the urban working class concentrations.

The LSP is the most consequent antiiIncomes Policy party, and made gains because of their clear socialist proposals in fields like housing and unemployment, whereas some people have supported them after seeing through the sabotage of the Stalinists in various struggles since the last election.

There was a re-adjustment of the votes of the bourgeois parties, the Liberal Party mandates being halved, to the benefit of the Conservative Party and CentreDemocrats.

This election solved nothing, it has opened the way for an intensification of the social crisis, inasmuch as sharper polarisation took place and the deep dissatisfaction of the masses was expressed by support for "unorthodox" views of left and right.

Joergensen, the Prime Ministerex-leader of the Danish T&G-said that he would continue as a minority government until after the new Collective Contracts were negotiated and accepted.

He knows the score. Only a Social Democratic government can possibly get the workers to yet again swallow the bitter pill of Incomes Policy.

The most popular demands from the rank and file are for a 35-hour week now and for a minimum wage of 35 kroner an hour, but these were dropped.

For the last few years workers have been fed with pleas to moderate demands which was supposed to help the unemployed, and the lower paid, and unemployment has risen to over 170,000 A possibility is government intervention to make some type of legaliy-binding compromise agreement.

Representatives from Stalinist and left-wing led unions met in conference on 27th February to decide what to do about the TUC sell-out of the workers' demands, and to reject a political intervention into negotiations by the government, but it was clear that no lead will come from them.

They were even opposed to meeting again if a crisis situation should arise-this would necessitate them giving some type of lead and bring them into conflict with the TUC leaders.

PRINT CONFLICT

Meanwhile the latest conflict is at the biggest newspaper and printing establishment of Berlingske Tidende, where 1,000 typographers and lithographers are locked out.

They are fighting a management plan to cut 500-600 Kroner from instead ors wafts get easing the 1? week to 40 from 34 hours, getting rid of 200-300 printers, linked to the introduction of computerised setting, which will mean more sackings still.

Management ripped up the old contract, and presented the new while the workers carried on as before, working to old norms, coming in at the same times, etc, so the firm locked them out and announced to its readers its closure. "guilty» Printworkers were found were lound refusing to accept the management's right ot manage and fined 50,000 Kroner, They announced their refusal to re-start work under these circumstances. They have some significant support already, and have started producing their own alternative paper in 300,000 copies.

The newspaper industry has seen some struggles because of this case. Newspaper production has been disrupted, but the main union has been fined 200,000 Kroner already.

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government, put in office in January 1975 after massive and consistent working class

ment out, coming from its own ranks, and used manoeuvres and lies