[The enormous hostility of the French working class…]

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The enormous hostility of the French working class to the austerity plan of the Bi rre government was shown on the one-day general strike on The mobilisation on that day was comparable only with the strike wave exactly nine years ago in May/June 1968.

Ports, factories, power supplies and nearly all transport was stopped for the day. Nearly ten million workers came out on strike and according to reports in the CGT union paper, as many as 2½ million were involved in numerous local meetings and demonstrations.

DEMONSTRATIONS

There was not just the usual huge procession in Paris but large demonstrations in every centre of population.

At the tiny port of Le Havre, 20,000 people, according to reports, were on a demonstration, including dockers not normally known for their militancy.

At Marseilles, 50,000 marched according to the local trade unions.

At Bordeaux, 15,000 marched and 100,000 struck while at Rouen there were 40,000 demonstrators, twice as many as on the last national mobilisation.

Among the demonstrators in many towns were large numbers of trade union members in the police force, mainly in the Stalinist dominated CGT. Most of them were calling simply for "freedom of expression for the police" but some joined in the main slogans of the Communist Party and Socialist Party-"Union, Action, Common Programme!" (the reformist policy Mitterand the CP and the SP).

What lies behind this enormous movement? It is not just purely industrial grievances against the wage control policies of the Barre plan, but is also part of the trend revealed in local elections and opinion polls of the call for new policies and a real alternative.

This underlines the treachery of Communist Party leader Marchais Sm ment obviously hoped to prevent the guerillas from getting their war effort off the ground by nipping them in the bud.

But this strategy may well have backfired. Despite claims tht they had seized huge quantities of armaments and ammunition, the and Mitterand of the Socialist Party in keeping a low profile on the day, thus deliberately keeping separate a fight against the economic policies of the present government with the search for political solutions which is posed in the working class.

WRONG

This is why the 10,000 lettists in the Paris demonstration were wrong to say as the Lutte Vuvrere group "Whether it's a government of the right or a government of the left, workers can only depend on their own struggles" or the LCR "Don't count on Mitterand! Don't count on Marchais!"

The workers on the move will have to try and test their leaders during the course of further struggles and mobilisations that lie ahead and the apparently inevitable march to a CP/SP In order to burst the bonds of one day mobilisations it is through placing demands on these leaders that the necessary task of developing a new leadership will begin. Rhodesian forces have only been able to produce a few shotg Ins as signs of their "victory"

In addition, reports from Mozambique indicate that three Rhodesian aircraft were shot down in the Tete province to the north east of Rhodesia, a costly k ss for Smith's forces.

ESCALATING

Moreover, by attacking LANLA far within Mozambique, Rhodesia may have forced the Frelimo regime into giving more active support to the guerillas.

This attack will by no means be the last in the fast-escalating war in Southern Africa. But what it signifies is the increasing pressuresinternal and external-Rhodesia is now facing.

Whether that pressure will manage to overthrow Smith's racist regime remains to be seen.

One thing however is certaina long, hot summer of preventive strikes, "hot pursuit" actions and guerilla raids is about to begin. Alfonso Peralta Reyes-a founder member of a university staff union and a leading member of the Mexican Workers Revolutionary Party (PRT)-was assassinated as he left a classroom with his students.

It is not difficult to guess who in Mexico should want Peralta dead.

Lopez: Portillo's government, like so many others throughout the world, has been forced to resolve its economic crisis by attacking the living standards of the working class.

AUSTERITY

In imposing his austerity plans he has been helped by the fact that most Mexican trade unions are tied historically and by the politics of their bureaucratic leaders to his ruling "Institutional Revolutionary Party", , the only party on the ballot paper at the last "election").

The Union of Workers of the Autonomous National University of Mexico were an exception, a union whose leadership was dominated by members of the Communist Party and organisations to the left of them and which had organised demonstrations against government austerity measures.

As such, it had become a focus of opposition to the government. Alfonso Peralta was a member of its General Representative Council.

A leaflet found beside his body pointed to the involvement of the League"

This is a supposedly Maoist guerilla group which terrorises other elements in the workers' movement on the grounds that they are reformists and police spies.

RIGHT WING

Yet even bourgeois journalists suspect that Peralta's enemies are more likely to be in the extreme right than the extreme left of Mexican politics. Already another General Council member of Peralta's Union has had his life threatened and his house raided by In this situation it is essential that Mexican workers and students fight in the labour movement for a workers investigation into the events surrounding this assassination and into the political credentials of the "23 September Communist League"

No other force can be trusted to carry out this task.

But the PRT is calling for an inquiry by the State, saying "OUT party demands an immediate investigation of the murder, along with

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HE POCE DE LA ORCITE GARDEN IE CNPADOCEN OIS MITE

LIN On May 12, in Mexico City,