[In Greece the wages strikes that have covered…]

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In Greece the wages strikes that have covered Europe have brought militant action by school teachers, by miners, and by leather workers. Here, workers and peasants of Alexandropolis, on a one day general strike. march demanding an increase in goreroment spendinę.

But the reformist and Stalinist leaders of the Union of the Left have made it clear that they want to do nothing to threaten that Wait, they tell the workers who have voted for them, untii the parliamentary elections of next year after which we will form a governmental alliance with President Giscard until his term of office expires in 1981.

What they should be doing is to campaign through independent working class action for the immediate dissolution of the National Assembly, calling for the resignation of the President and the convening of new elections.

This policy, however, would collide with their overall strategy of tying the workers to the coat-tails of the bourgeoisie.

Already • their alliance includes the "left" radicals and disaffected Gaullists (the David Steels and Enoch Powells of France).

COLLABORATION

In the local elections, however, working class voters began to show what they thought of such class collaboration.

in two places, Brive and Toulon, he major Gaullist participants of the Union of the Left (ex-minister Charbonnel and Sanguinetti) were to have led the electoral slates.

But, against the wishes of the CP and Socialist Party leaders, the members of the workers' parties forced local leaders to put up separate slates of the workers' parties exciuding the capitalist parties.

Pressure to repeat this is now growing within the rank and file of After a week of 'political clarification' the fate of the minority Andreotti government remained as obscure as it has been during its last months of tenuous existence.

Lacking a majority of votes in the Lower House (the Chamber of Deputies) Andreotti's Christian Democratic ministry remains in last presidential election.

But, in a few towns, however, (Orleans, Caen, Nancy and Rouen) they received between 6 and 10 per cent of the poll.

The results (though exaggerated in size by the Red Weekly of March 17) also have some significance as an expression of hostility to both the Giscard regime and to the collaboration of the bureaucracy.

PROPAGANDIST

We do not believe, however, that this form of propagandistic intervention in elections is at present the way to advance the main task facing the French working class.

This task is to force the main workers' parties to break with the bourgeoisie, and to build a revolutionary party, based within the working class, which can decisively intervene in the organised labour movement. those responsible for carrying them through, lies behind Italy's political crisis.

For their part, the leadership of the Communist Party are divided on the next step.

COLLAPSE

In recent weeks differences on the Central Committee have been publicly aired - and have been sharp enough to drive General Secretary Enrico Berlinguer close to 'nervous collapse'!

The majority want - like the Socialist Party - early entry into the government, on virtually any terms whatsoever.

There is, however, an important 'left' minority in the CP leadership which fears the outcome of a CPChristian Democratic bloc taking on the working class in too direct a fashion.

These differences, however, are entirely tactical. The Stalinist and reformist leaders are united in their enmity to the 'ultra-left' demonstrations which began in the universities, and which saw the Stalinists number one trade union chief, Luciano Larma, humiliated at the hands of students and young workPLOT The bureaucrats spread the Lie that all left opposition to them right-wing plot.

The CP mayor of Bologna (a city controlled by the Stalinists since