New Cuts Lobby

Scan page 5

Cent nine public sector unions has called for yet another Lobby of Parliament and rally against the cuts.

In accordance with the unwritten six month rule for defusing working class hostility to the cuts this has been scheduled for the Autumn.

According to the recent announcement of the committee (which was originally set up to organise the 17 November day-ofaction last year), the lobby will be held at the end of a week-ofaction'.

It remains to be seen this action is to take.

Public sector workers should demand the opportunity to determine the policies of the Steering Committee rather than finding them imposed from above.

Most active union members in the nine unions know nothing at all about its composition, its terms of reference or its mode of operation.

Its policies to date suggest determination to head-off any real fight against cuts and limit the struggle to Parliamentary protest.

Resolutions should be sent through all pubhic sector unions to the Steering Committee demanding a policy of extended strike action to stop the cuts, hand in hand with a fight to link social service spendassaulted and some hospitalised by frenzied police:

"Police were subjected to sudden and violent attack...

Mark spends a lot of time analysing the Notting Hill Carnival, where, he claims, the riot was not due to the massive number of Yet he alleges successive attempts by large gangs of black youth to rescue their friends from the grips of the almost exclusively white police.

On the Trico dispute, Mark claims:

"an aggressive note was introduced by members of student and socialist organisations with no connection whatsoever with the union concerned."

VENOM On the Smiths Industries computer operator dispute Mark also reserves special venom for the pickets and for the fact the dispute was won:

"Picketing organised by political extremists resulted in their reinstatement on 16 September."

Other facts to be gleaned from the report show that:

*The hated Special Patrol Group -which even "ordinary" police regard as animals--stopped over 19,000 people and over 41,000 РНОТО: John Sturrock (Report)

vehicles for arbitrary searches in 1976.

Bilt they only managed to make about 4,000 arrests from this wholesale intimidation.

*591 further officers qualified in the use of revolvers. How long before these weapons appear openly on picket lines?

*Over 7 ,400 complaints were made against the police. However. the police ensure that they invesligate all complaints themshes.

NEW!

insider All letin M2: SeN Aer UA• 1Nc0 •=0: as2549I TROTSKYISM TODAY * → tr TROTSKYISM TODAY 'heoretical Journal of the Workers Socialist League OUT NOW!

Price 50p

Features include:

The RCG and the Women' Faction and Party: A Rep and Party: A to the IMG Cuba Order trom 4 SL rtmouth Pa

Scan page 6

Parcelona demonstration in support of the Asturian miners.

Minister of War Franco with Major Doval, a prominent leader of The emergence of revoluanary struggles in Spain day gives a new sharpness d urgency to the lessons it must be drawn from the trious struggles of Spanish akers which ended in defeat d forty years of fascism. The reformists and Stalinists ose role was so crucial in during those defeats cannot ke such an analysis. : The task of Marxists therefore :: =x=2se their treacherous Hes then and now, and to ate pose a correct programme nice Spanish masses. | Franco's seizure of power was * only a conclusion to the Civil it signified the temporary iciation of a process which had veloped in Spain from the beginag at the century, and which was Diz: in the specific character of • S-anish nation.

I= the war of 1898 against the БА :he entire Pacific Fleet of the Spanish navy was destroyed in one hour. The one ship which survived the bombardment of the Atlantic Fleet was the only steamship of the navy. It was very soon capturedwhen it ran out of coal.

CRITICAL

For all its farcical qualities, this humiliating defeat symbolises the critical weakness of the Spanish ruling class in the age of imperialism.

Already the vast American territories from California to the southern tip of the continent had broken from Spanish rule in the early 19th century.

The remaining empire was an early casualty in the inter-imperialist rivalries which culminated in the First World War.

Spain itself had been characterised by Trotsky as a state of 'degenerated absolutism, limited by periodic military coups'. Capitalist development of the productive forces was extremely backward.

1917 was originally called by the Modern industry barely existed Socialists, with the support of the outside Catalonia and the Basque Anarchists. provinces, and the economy was dominated by primitively inefficient agriculture.

The crisis caused by this economic backwardness was duced as instability in every other sphere.

Government was in a state of constant crisis as the church and the army stubbornly blocked all attempts to accelerate the modernisation of industry: 33 entirely different administrations attempted to rule Spain between 1902 and 1923.

PROFITS The increasingly urgent demands of the capitalists were only temporarily satisfied by the immense profits they received when Spain remained neutral during World War One.

But the development of industry in those four years did more than simply enrich the bourgeoisie. It also strengthened the working class, which grew in size and in organised force, principally within two major unions, the UGT and the CNT.

The Union General de Trabajodores (General Workers' Union) had been created by the Socialist the Asturian repression. Party in 1888, as a trade union on the reformist model of those in other European countries, but in 1910 the Anarchists had set up the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour) resulted in mass conscription. which had quite different aims.

The CNT was far more militant, and its main orientation much more obviously political.

STRENGTH throughout Spain.

Its main strength was drawn from the proletariat of Catalonia and the landless labourers of Andalusia; that of the UGT lay in the other industrial areas (Madrid, Asturias, Euskadi) and among the agricultural workers of Extremadura and La Mancha.

Organised in this form, the working class had begun to realise proved uncompetitive.

its own strength in the great waves of strikes which had swept Spain, and largely succeeded in achieving their limited aims. de Rivera, installed by the king.

For the Anarchists, the general strike itself became their primary strategy for revolution, and they argued that it would lead on directly to the abolition of the state. Spain.

PRACTICE In the early years of this century they made four major attempts to Jevelop this strategy in practice, and with the last of these the possibility of the proletariat seizing his reginie.

state power was openly revealed for Compulsory were establishe the and stage.

The demands were partly economic, partly political; specifically it called for democratic control of the army, and an end to the imperialist adventure in Morocco which had Although the strike was smashed -by the army-within three days, it had revealed the potential of united action by the working class In its development, the political forces had taken up the general positions they were to hold again during the Civil War: in fact the officer responsible for crushing the strike of the Asturian miners was none other than one Major Franco.

With the ending of the war, Spanish industry was once more forced to compete for markets; it The continuing governmental crisis was abruptly interrupted by the dictatorship of General Primo Supported by an improvement in the condition of international capitalism, this grandee was able to prolong lor seven ycars his atlempt to restore the tarnished glory of Such project necessarily involved plans to restrict the independence of the working class, and for this Primo turned to the reformists of the UGT and the Socialist Party, who participated in arbitration boards d along with other CNT was driven underground even forced to disband at one But the dictatorship had no mass base, and as a Bonapartist regime could not survive when the recurrence of the acute economic crisis threw the working class once more onto the offensive.

Primo was forced to resign in 1930, but the process which achieved this gain did not stop at that point. General Berenguer, installed in his place, attempted to legitimise the regime by calling elections for a Cortes (parliament) which would have given the dictatorship a democratic cloak while maintaining its powers unshackled beneath.

BOYCOTT

The workers' and petit bourgeois republican parties responded by calling for a boycott, and as this movement gathered momentum it became clear that the regime would be completely unable to gain a majority in such a Cortes.

Berenguer too resigned,, the elections were cancelled, and the King opted instead for municipal elections in April 1931.

Here the established iradition of corruption and coercion virtually guaranteed a victory for the regime in power, but the results cicarly demonstrated the overwhelming support for the Republicans and Socialists Faced with th is combination of working class o pposition 10 the Metatorship. and the hourgeoise

Scan page 7

SOCIALIST ednesd IS ::: °0.002 .06c.:

now by far the largest holder of capital in Spain-the Jesuits alone owned one third of the country's wealth.

The movement leading to the establishment of the Republic had been strongly marked by the anticlerical feeling of the working class, especially in Madrid and Catalonia where churches had been burned in the enormous demonstrations against the corrupt influence of the church.

But the Republicans were only too well aware of the value of Catholicism in restraining and diverting the revolutionary energies of the workers.

The reforms they introduced were trifling, but even these token gestures were sufficient to drive the right wing out of the coalition: Zamora resigned tom become President, and a left Republican, Manuel Azana took over as prime minister.

Demands for the reform of the of the army had long been raised by the workers, and were central to the 1917 general strike.

----- pull-quotes -----

The Steering Committee which is supposed to repres