[Vorster As we go to press it seems…]

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Vorster As we go to press it seems certain that the one day national strike, called by all the main unions against the government's policies for May 24, will be France's largest strike since 1968.

Following hard on the heels of the last national stoppage, it reflects the growing impatience of the French working class with the policies of the Giscard-Barre regime and the increasing difficulty which the Stalinist and reformist leaders are having in holding back their angry rank and file.

The militancy of the working class has been reflected in several recent strikes particularly in the crisis-torn steel industry.

In Dunkirk, dockers recently returned to work having successfully prevented the steel firm

BIGGEST STRIKE

SINCE Usinor from transferring jobs to lower paid workers.

They were supported by a whole series of national supporting strikes in the ports.

And in Thionville a proposal by Usinor to make 3,000 workers redundant was met with a determined response by the workers including a plan • for an all-out occupation of the factory. • The parties of the Union of the Left popular front alliance are reacting to these developments by mouthing more and more demagogic words about the "common programme" on which they intend to fight next year's parliamentary The programme is designed to offer only words in place of the necessary fight for a united, indefinite general strike to bring down the Giscard-Barre government now, and force a government of workers' parties into office.

FINLAND

A deep fissure has developed in the Communist Party after the leadership's decision to return into the new government coalition pledged to policies of "economie stabilisation"-which means anti-working class policies. Many rank and file members of the party reject this collaborationist Popular Frontism.

ITALY

Interior Minister Cossiga's policy of open war against student and unemployed demonstrators has claimed its first victim-a girl student in Rome. This murder has provoked many more violent demonstrations. The Communist Party, closer than ever to political accord with the right-wing Christian Democrats, and the CGIL (the Party's union federation) continue to give uncritical support to Cossiga's violence. They attack the "provocateurs" of the far left but offer no perspective at all for any struggle for the rights and conditions of workers in Italy's rapidly deteriorating economic crisis.