There Is No Peaceful Way to End Apartheid

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In the aftermath of the murder of black leader Steve Biko, Vorster's racist government has given a dramatic new turn to the screw of repression in South Africa.

In a surprise move on October 19 Vorster's secret police descended on virtually every black organisation which was still legal.

BANNED

Seventeen organisations related to the "black consciousness' movement have been banned outright. Just as the African National Congress and the Pan African Congress have been banned in the past. Also banned was the Christian Institute, an event which evinced a protest from as unlikely a source as the Archbishop of Canterbury!

Over forty leaders of the organisations were arrested and a number of others 'banned' (put under house arrest and robbed of a political rights). Those banned and Weekend World as well as the white editor of the Daily Dispatch.

This new repression does not mark any qualitative change in Vorster's policy. Mass black organisations have been customarily banned and the arrests and individual bannings which came in the one day added up to what has become normal over a few weeks. For years, no opponent of apartheid, however mild, has been safe from South Africa's daily repression.

But the manner of the bannings, in one swoop, was evidently a conscious change of tactic by Vorster, fearful of agitation over Steve Biko's death in prison about which the banned newspapers have continued to ask increasingly embarassing questions.

illegal even those black organisations whose leaders had shown themselves ready to compromise and talk to Vorster and tha alarmed the American and British imperialists and the white "liberals' in South Africa. They are alarmed that Vorster's actions will make more and more blacks realise that only through anticapitalist revolution can racism in South Africa be overthrown It is this which accounts for the hypocritical outrage from the US State Department and from British Foreign Secretary David Owen. The same fear has led the 'democratic capitalist press throughout the world to react sharply accusing Vorster of acts of 'suicidal paranoia'.

CONCESSIONS

But it is very unlikely that Vorster's tactic is based On irrationality. While it is true that his racist regime has something to gain from the development of a collaborationist black leadership, such a leadership is unlikely to last very long unless it can hold out a serious prospect of concessions. which Vorster has no

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IRISH WORKERS BLI + Since 1968 the anti-imperialist struggle in the north of Ireland has tended to eclipse struggles by Irish workers over wages and conditions.

But with the recent wage settlement at the engineering works of James Mackie and Sons we are reminded that economic questions are indeed very real to Irish workers - particularly when both North and South wages are on average lower, while unemployment and inflation are higher, than that in Britain. weeks, though, show that the Irish working class are as willing to fight economic questions they are to fight army repression week, (October 18) workets at the Tyrone crystal Dungannon (Northern Ireland) occupied the factory and management renresentatives past the gates in a protest against the lav-off of 43 men the previous Friday.

The managing director of the prominent politician Paddy Duffy, denied that the lay-offs are permanIn the South, Duffy's co-thinkers, Fianna Fail-who currently hold governmental office-are likewise pursuing a strident anti-working class policy.

Unemployment is now 17% while inflation is averaging 18%, with a whole series of wage cutting deals in the pipeline. And in the past week there have been threats by two major imperialist concerns to put the shutters up and pull out.

At Anacotty, Co. Limerick, the Dutch based Ferenka steelcord works is threatening closure with the inevitable loss of some 1,500 jobs.

The ostensible reason for the proposed closure is the strike by 850 workers in the Marine Port and General Workers Union (MPGWU) over union recognition.

Formerly these men were members of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) but transferred to the MPGWU because of the ITGWU's sleepyheaded do-nothing attitude to wages and conditions in the plant.

On the basis of the information available, we oppose the decision to switch unions.

There is no qualitative difference between the bureaucracy within the ITGWU and that in any other union. Everywhere these union leaders play a key role in dampening down militancy.

Those warnings however should not divert attention from the employer's strategy which is to advantage of the situation in c to close down the plant.

NO COMPENSATION Workers in Limerick should lay plans now for occupation of the factory with the demand that it be nationalised without compensation and placed under direct workers management.

Another target for such action is the Canadian-owned Tara mines at Navan, where 220 workers have been sacked and a decision taken to close down the £90 million factory there.

The mines, which contain the richest lead and zinc deposits in the world, have long been a centre of militancy in Ireland.

The recent failure to secure acceptance of a productivity deal has obviously precipitated Tara's closure plans.

The task of revolutionaries is to elaborate a programme of transitional demands capable " of integrating economic and political questions, and on the basis of such a programme to construct the revolutionary party which is alone capable of ridding Ireland of all imperialist oppression.

Intervention by the boss of Australia's TUC, Robert Hawke produced a short lived return to work in the Victoria power workers strike which has now led to half a million lay-offs in the state.

Hawke persuaded the 2,300 maintenance workers that if they went back to work their wage claim would be seriously negotiated. It took four days to see this was a trick and the workers came out again last Wednesday.

The response of the authorities was swift and brings a decisive confrontation closer between the Leader of the right wing Vanguard Party, William Craig, has just been given a key post in an investigation by the Council ot Europe as to whether the scope of the European Convention of Human Rights should be widened. Craig, who is a member of the Legal Affairs Committee of the Council, has been appointed Rapporteur representing Britain.

Revolutionaries will recall that Craig was the man who ordered the police to attack the first civil rights march in Derry in October 1968; who advocated UDI for Northern Ireland and who called on loyalists to "shoot to kill Catholics in the six counties. The appointment speaks volumes both about the Convention and the Callaghan Lib-Lab coalition government who made the appointment in the first place. Australian working Tory government.

The State Electricity Commission sent letters to the strikers saying that if they did not return to work by the end of the week they would be sacked. Advertisements were sent out for non-union labour to fill their jobs.

At the same time the government, threatening to call a Who rules?' election on the lines of Edward Heath in 1974, rushed a major anti-union bill through parliament in two days. The bill restricts the right to strike and tries to enforce compulsory arbitration. It widens conditions under which strikers can be sacked, unions can be deregistered and their funds confiscated.

Another set of strikes has broken out simultaneously. Dockworkers have refused to load uranium exports, resumea recently after they had been banned by Whitlam's previous Labour government, unconstitutionally removed from office by the Governor General in 1976. In Brisbane hundreds of striking dockers were arrested and accused of illegal industrial action.

Australia's union leaders must be forced to call a general strike, the objective of which would be to throw the Tory government out of office and install a government pledged to annul all anti-union legislation and wages policy.

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As has been widely observed, the latest wave of bannings makes