Biko: One More Murder in Programme of Repression

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The Workers Socialist League is a Trotskyist organisation fighting to build a revolutionary leadership in the working class to lead the mounting opposition to the betrayals of both 'left' and right wing Labour and trade union leaders and the Communist Party, as they attempt to enforce wage control, sackings, speed-up and public service As workers take up the struggle against these policies they are forced by the sheer weight of forces opposing them to confron political questions. Only with an understanding of the role of the labour bureaucracy and a programme to unite the broadest sections of The Workers Socialist League is the only movement that sets out to do this, fighting consistently in the working class for transitiona! demands, which go beyond simply trade union militancy to raise the political questions to workers and prepare the forms of organisation and the knowledge necessary for the struggle for socialism.

As a result we have been at the forefront of struggles against the cuts, against wage control, for unionisation, and against redundancy. We have done more than any other tendency to fight the introduction of 'workers' participation' in industry. And we have strongly supp orted the Campaign for Democracy in the Labour Movemeni, at c has set out to show the link between the reactionary policies of t Social Contract and bureauciatic dictatorship in both the unions arc method of Trotsky's Transitional Programme - == A=. = Ise sorfined to Britain. It requires an attention and 110-= - =e struggles of the working class internationally, and the i g: is -scorSo there has been a consistent drive within the iS.:: desser and enrich the movement's understanding of the history enc Je present crisis of the Fourth International as an essentia Dat of sur "e urge ail readers who agree on the need for revolutionary teac ars= a and ine demands we pu! forward io find out more about the The death in detention last month of Steve Biko, a prominent leader of the black consciousness movement in South Africa, is one more event in the systematic programme of murder and repression being carried out by the South African state to crush any popular resistance to apartheid and the capitalist system which it maintains.

Biko was a founding leader of the independent black students organisation, SASO, and later became a leader of the Black People's Convention, one of the organisations of . the black consciousness movement.

Over the last few years Biko suffered from continuous police repression. He was put under house arrest, banned lie deprived of political and personal rights) and on a number of occasions held in jail.

His latest arrest came only a few weeks before his murder.

NOT UNUSUAL In itself, Biko's death is unusual for South Africa, Hardly a month goes by without the recorded murder of a black liberation fighter inside a South African jail.

A recent report by the South African Institute of Race Relations puts the number of political prisoners killed in detention since 1961 as 41, 18 of those being since March of last year.

And these are merely the known deaths; many others have simply 'disappeared'.

Biko's death, however, has been given particular prominence, not Because, ultimately, that struggle against imperialism as a whole.

Apartheid is the particular form in which capitalism needs to maintain itself in South Africa.

And racist South Africa is a vital strategic fortress, market, producer and cheap labour pool within the international capitalist network.

The laying of a wreath on Biko's coffin by the United States ambassador was a cynical insult to the struggle to which Biko was committed.

While the functionaries of international capitalism attended the funeral to express their concern and abhorence, the system they represent continued to maintain the system which led to the murder PIOUS And while they compere with each other in pious protestations, their secret police co-operate with the South Africans to help them capture their future victims.

The face of the British Foreign Secretary was grave enough at the memorial service to Biko which he attended in London.

But it was much graver the next day when the Labour Party conference passed, against his impassioned pleas, a resolution calling on the labour movement to give material and moral support to the freedom fighters in Zimbabwe.

Unfortunately missing from that resolution was any call on the government to prevent the activities of Smith's and Vorster's extensive security forces in Britain.

The hypocritical moralising of the imperialist governments, through trying to mask the real role of imperialism in sustaining capitalism to reform one of its inevitable consequences, but on its own independence and programme to destroy the system of which Steve Biko was one of countless victims.

SPONTANEOUS The black consciousness movement of which Biko was one of the leaders, like all spontaneous movements with strong petty-bourgeois influence, does not involve a clear committment to the independence of the working class.

It is a movement which filled some of the political vacuum which followed the demoralising defeat of played a progressive role in the ideological and organisational mobilisation of the black masses.

Objectivély it represents the groping of the black working class towards the building of new weapons of struggle-political, theoretical and organisational-alter the catastrophe of Sharpeville.

But because of its petty-bourgeois limitations it cannot forge those weapons adequately.

While saluting the courage of Steve Biko, as a liberation fighter and a leader of the black masses in struggle, we believe it would be wrong not to make at the same time the necessary criticisms of the black consciousness movement. armed.

It is only the theory permanent revolution, a revoluti ary programme of transitio demands and a Trotskyist re' utionary party, as a section of international revolutionary par which can fully meet the need: the South African working class take the struggle forward to socialist revolution.

The struggle in South Afi must be a central concern in rebuilding of the Fou -ORKERS