65,000 Jobs Endangered

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Wage and Price Stability.

This found that US steel problems are primarily due to structural weaknesses rather than competition from Japanese imports and that there will be little benefit from controls unless prices were allowed to rise significantly.

NO SOLUTION Significantly the report found that large-scale modernisation of the industry through the construction of new integrated plants would not provide a simple solution due to the high costs involved. The report puts emphasis on the fact that productivity gains have been lower and wage increases higher in steel than in other industries.

Evidently the accent will be placed on speed-ups and lay-offs.

The report found that Japanese steelmakers could export profitably to the US, pay transport costs and existing US import duties and still undercut US steelmakers by about The drive tor import controls will in no way detend jobs Protectionism can forward the threat of retaliation.

a reduction in world trade and more unemployment.

Moreover: the companies, in trying to mobilize support for import controls within the workers* organisations are seeking to tie workers to the future of compart 700 =:

"FOREIGNERS Steel union bureaucrais purg d prejudices-are self-evident.

The crisis in the US steel industry is reflected in a whole range of closures and lay-ofts. the On September Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company announced closure of its Campbell Works at Youngstown, Ohio, resulting in the loss of 5,000 jobs.

Bethlehem Steel has announced a 10% cut which has led to 7,500 sackings (3,500 at its Lachawanna facilities outside Buffalo and 4,000 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

US Steel has announced the layoff, by December, of 1,000 administrators at five plants in Indiana and Illinois, while its South Works complex in Chicago is rumoured to "farpioners not steel bosses for lay-offs 15'10 be in line for partial or complet closure.

This company has als announced 200 lay-offs at it Youngstown plant.

In Southern Ohio, Amco Ster has announced 600 layoffs at 1l Middletown plant. 3,000 worker have jost their jobs at Alan Woo Steel, Philadelphia.

Instead of putting forward independent workers' answer these threats the leadership of tl United Steelworkers of America involved in a campaign amongst i members to raise support for t! companies' demands for impo controls and exemption fro pollution laws.

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DEFENCE OF Carter Balanoff Lloyd McBride, recently elected to the leadership of the union in succession to I.W. ('no-strike') Abel is leading this campaign.

He recently said that he doesn't blame the corporation for shutdowns because "profitability is the name of the game."

USWA District 28 which covers the Akron-Cleveland-Lorain area of Northern Ohio held a mass rally in Cleveland:

... to show how important it is to keep steelworkers jobs from being given away to foreigners."

District 28 Director Frank Valenta and Lloyd McBride were the featured speakers and the Steel Corporations aided the campaign by ending shifts early on that day.

WORLD WAR

In a recent speech Valenta conjured up memories of World War 2 making continual references to "sneak attacks" and "Japs".

While the union leadership behave like this the Cleveland steel companies are using the import scare to demand speed-up.

The Republic Steel district manager has warned of closures:

"We have to increase productivity. Do jobs in 15 minutes not 30 minutes. We recognise some of you have mortgages, some families. We don't want this to sound like a threat, but...

(Quoted in Militant [SWPI)

It was this same union leadership which brought in the Experimental Negotiating Agreement (ENA) which prohibits strikes between pay agreements.

IRON ORE STRIKE

The ENA, however, does allow for disputes on local grievances and 18,000 iron ore workers (members of the USWA) on the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota and Michigan have been on strike since August l over a whole series of issues mainly connected at a rare centitions Amang The resisting on the g conflicts clause.

employers hav been ¡egotiations until gently ounds that this mand with the ENA strike TENACITY The USWA leadership support for the strike has been limited to $30 a week strike pay.

The tenacity of the USWA strikers in this dispute-the employers have brought a suit for $1 million a day damages-shows the feeling amongst steel workers which could be channelled into an all out struggle on jobs throughout the whole industry if a clear lead was given by the union leadership.

Not all the union • leaders have fallen in with McBride's strategy.

Jim Balanoff, director of USWA District 31 (Chicago) says that there is nothing in the companies anti-imports campaign for steel workers:

"The fact of the matter is that even if there was no Japan, no Environmental Protection Agency, they would still have closed the Campbell works and moved to Chicago.

I told them installing pollution equipment would have created 5,000 jobs, but they don't really give a damn about jobs or steel workers.

They want import controls only to protect their monopoly price structure and monopoly profits. The companies have prices themselves out of the market, with three price increases this year alone but they are trying to stampede the country into trade restrictions.

We ought to be fighting for a public works programme for those laid off, for legislation against price increases and for some way we can check to see if what US Steel is saying is true."

(Quoted in Militant, [SWP!)

Balanoff's demand for public works is correct-but it is up to the trade unions to draw up a plan for such works.

The demand for the opening of the steel companies books fits in very well with Balanoffs point about checking the truth of US Steel's assertions.

But the opening of the books campaign must not be diverted into the dead end demand of price restrictions.

The only way forward is the campaign for the nationalisation of steel companies linked to the demand for public works.

This perspective can only be fought for alongside a struggle to build a Labour party to represent the interests of workers who at present are mainly tied to the bourgeois Democratic Party.

Trotskyists in the USA must exploit such correct points as are made by leaders like Balanoff to fight for a correct programme to defend jobs.

But the two major self-styled Trotskyist groups in the US each fail in different ways, to take up a correct fight:

Balanoff is the hand-picked successor to Ed Sadlowski who unsuccessfully fought McBride in the recent USWA Presidential Election.

Fake-left Sadlowski, who led the Steelworkers Fight Back campaign got over 300,000 votes from workers who saw in him someone who would defend their interests against the Abel/McBride procompany leadership.

The sectarians of the Spartacist League stood outside of that development and refused to give Sadlowski critical support.

NO ATTEMPT In a major article on steel they mention only the over-pricing comments from Balanoff and make no attempt to draw out the implications of his more useful statements.

The Spartacist policy for the steel crisis consists of plant seizures, a national strike against mass layoffs, expropriation of bankrupt steel companies, maintenance of all jobs at full union wages and conditions and a workers party based on the trade unions.

Yet if these demands are simply chrown in with no method of connecting them to a struggle to remove the curreni reactionary saleshis within #e USWA che:

subjective weakness of their union leadership must be bridged by a struggle to expose the real positions of these bureaucrats and a programme that begins from the existing state of consciousness in the threatened plants and directs towards the necessary policies.

Central to such a programme of struggle is the orientation of the Transitional Programme towards workers control. Conspicuously the Spartacists make no call for the opening of company books to trade union committees; no demand for work sharing on full pay; no demand for trade union committees to formulate plans for public works.

But it is only through the struggle for these demands that the question of expropriation can be raised in any other than an abstract way and it is only through these demands that the plant occupations could find a practical way forward PRACTICAL The struggles around the steel cuts opens up a good opportunity for practical rather than abstract moves towards the building of a Militants taking up these struggles should demand the establishment of labour slates in the elections and fight for that slate to adopt a socialist programme in defence of steel and other jobs.

There is no sign that the Spartacists have any intention of putting their demand for a Labour party forward in such a way.

While the Pabloites of the Socialist Workers Party gave support to Sadlowski and worked around the Steelworkers Fight Back campaign, in many ways they provided the opportunist mirror image to the Spartacists' sectarianism.

While the Spartacists paper Workers Vanguard repeatedly stressed solely the reactionary aspects of Sadlowski's platform and campaign, the Militant, (paper of the SWP) virtually omitted any reference to these wrong positions, and gave support which was only in the very vaguest sense "critical"

As a result the SWP ended up with a position almost indistinguishable from Sadlowski on nearly every issue.

Sadlowski Such a position of course flows from the SWP's long Pabloite history of liquidating into "radical' movements rather than taking a critical orientation towards them.

PROPAGANDISM

But such opportunism does not mean that the SWP is free from Spartacist-like propagand ism.

The editorial of the SWP Militant of October 7 made a series of abstractly correct demands • including open the books- but it is difficult to find evidence that these correct demands are being carried in practice into the USWA.

And like the Spartacists the SWP's conception of a Labour party is sectarian.

They do not fight for labour slates in elections-but simply stand their own candidates.

The crisis in steel, in short, brings out clearly the leadership crisis confronting the American working class as a whole. The highest point of that crisis is the false method employed by both major "Trotskyist" groupings in the US This problem must be confronted if a way forward is to be found to the construction of Trotskyist SPIRES in the working The work of the International Marxist Group in recent months has consisted almost exclusively of attempts to dissolve the remaining differences and "fuse" with the motley array of degenerate centrist and semi-Stalinist groupings that speckle the landscape of the so-called "far left" in Britain.

In pursuit of this objective the IMG has been one-by-one discarding the various outward trappings of Trotskyism and donning instead the multi-coloured jester's tunic of a fully-fledged centrist group.

Still finding it hard to consummate the longed-for "unity" with these groups which balk at the very hint of Trotskyism, the IMG has now gone a bold step further.

In Socialist Challenge of 8 October appears a 'Battle of Ideas' article entitled 'A Draft Statement of Aims', in which an explicit break is made from any notion of building a Trotskyist revolutionary As the Socialist Challenge editorial board puts it:

"Socialist Challenge has consistently campaigned for a unified revolutionary organisation. We do not believe that such a unity can be brought about simply by agreement on the immediate tasks confronting us today. Nor, on the other hand, do we believe that only Trotskyists supporting the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International, which was adopted in 1938, can be considered as revolutionaries."

TROTSKY'S ANSWER

For those who do not agree with the IMG that we should discard Trotsky and Trotskyism simply because Trotsky was murdered in 1940 and the Fourth International founded (on the basis of the Transitional Programme) in 1938, there is a clear answer from Trotsky's pen:

"The Fourth International, we answer, has no need of being 'proclaimed'. It exists and it tights. Is it weak? Yes its ranks are not numerous because it is still young. They are as yet chiefly cadres. But these cadres are pledges for the future. Outside these cadres there does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really meriting the name. If our International be still weak in numbers, it is strong in doctrine, programme, tradition, in the incomparable tempering of its cadres. Who does not perceive this today, let him in the meantime stand aside. Tomorrow it will become more evident."

(Transitional Programme, p. 42.)

The IMG leadership, however, set Trotsky aside as a diehard old sectarian, and proceed to abandon precisely those aspects of the International which Trotsky described as its key strengths.

In terms of doctrine, the IMG long ago followed the leadership of the 'United' Secretariat in discarding the scientific method of Marxism and embracing in its place analysis based on the most superficial appearances of events, resulting in wild zig-zags of policy.

This abandonment of doctrine means also throwing aside established positions of the Trotskyist movement-in particular the analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state which for all its deformations must be defended unconditionally agains: attack :: imperialism.

This fundamental tenet of the Transitional Programme and Des W ands no:

with such bankrupt groupings as Big Flame and the Workers League both of which reject this Trotskyist position.

The programme of Trotskyism is of course explicitly rejected as nothing but a hindrance to 'unity' by the Socialist Challenge Editorial Board, and in place of the transitional demands they substitute a series of vague formulations that most left reformists would accept.

And the tradition of Trotskyism -the decades of struggle against Stalinism and all forms of bureaucracy within the labour movement which laid up the rich heritage of the Fourth International-receives not so much as a mention in the 'Statement of Aims' PABLO'S METHOD As for the 'incomparable tempering' of the cadres of the Fourth International, this is a concept that has never applied to the IMG. Instead the IMG was born in Britain as a movement in the late 1960's, under the leadership of the 'United' Secretariat of the Fourth International.

Tariq All The USFI's main distinguishing characteristic is that it traces its political method not from Trotsky but from the centrist revisions of Ernest Mandel and of Michel Pablo. who was Secretary of the International in the early 1950's.

Pablo's conviction-endorsed by Mandel-that the Communist Parties of East and Western Europe would break from their counterrevolutionary policies and "project a revolutionary orientation" under mass pressure, brought the Fourth International tc + split in 1953.

Since then the Pabloite current has looked for similar "ready-made" revolutionary forces among petty bourgeois nationalist forces in the colonial and ex-colonial countries, among students. feminists, black nationalists and now even the "eco-freak" fringealways avoiding the tough fight for firm cadres in the organised working class.

"CHILDREN OF 8961 In the search for such "ready made" revolutionaries, the IMG nas now turned decisively towards what the latest Socialist Challerz: euphemistically terms 'the childreof 1968"—that degenerate milieu o: jaded ex-student "revolutionaries" and armchair theorists that clutter the stage of the so-called "far leit" Any attempt to build a movement based on such characters can or! result in complete political liquidation and isolation from the orga=ised working class.

The task of building a grinsiples leadership cade aro s Teases:

.... :::23 reconstrue: the Fow*= League

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ienced. With Guevara the difference emphasis. While Guevara cannot be was that he resolved in a very indis- directly held to blame for the tinct way to do something about it. economic adventurism and idealism His first intention was apparent- which led the Cuban economy to ly to do some kind of missionary- serious crises in the late 1960s and But on a later trip Guevara of his policies when he held econmoved in more political circles. He omic power established the had contacts with the "left-wing" precedents on which later disasters of the Peruvian populist movement were based. in Guatamala at the time of the not some error of theoretical American invasion which overthrew emphasis but the petty bourgeois the reformist government of character of the politics of Guevara - Pose 8 At the age of 16, thousands of working class youth face the dole, harassment by the law or a short lived job creation place well below union rates.

At the age of 16 William Hague, from Rother Valley in Yorkshire, has won instand stardom from Fleet Street as the youngest election asset for the Tories.

Hague won his spurs at the Tory Party conference by producing one of the most reactionary speeches of the week, questioning whether the Tory leaders had the will to press through their anti-working class measures.

He was front page news, Churchill, evidence that the Tories had captured the imagination of the young.

Front benchers flocked to be photographed with him, TV commentators asked him his opinion of the economy, the unions and anything else that he wanted pronounce on. NAFF recruited him.

Atticus in the Sunday Timesannoyed by missing the speech while in the bar-reported acidly on the celebrations.

*MT. English (editor of the Daily Mail)... hustled the youth away, seemingly wishing to put him in his pocket.

Wherever I went for the next couple of hours, there was Mr. English producing William as from beneath his coat, to be patted on the head by a photogenic Shadow Minister.

The Daily Mail has signed him to write some union bashing articles and although Haigue may not last long, he will be well squeezed before being discarded.

Napoleon said that each one of his troops carried a field marshal's caton in his knapsack. Hague has seen presented with Keith Joseph's ratchet in his.

There is however one qualiticChe addressing the revolutionary army. from applying for the job boy wonder of the Tory Party.

Haigue's parents own a soft drink company. Only those with similar qualifications need apply.

The Tory press enjoys the Tory Party Conference. Margaret Thatcher's speech was pushed off the front pages by the sudden death of Bing Crosby, but inside the papers showed their approval.

The Daily Mail headlined her closing speech 'Let us restore power to the people-Maggie'. A strapline over the top deciared: "Tories clap and cheer as Labour's policies are labelled mean and Marxist"

The Express declared her: "Maggie the Magnificent" and in smaller type "Tories acclaim triumph of her working class touch."

Thatcher's contention that the pay controls, cuts, and unemployment of the coalition government are "Marxist' policies goes unchallenged in her fan magazines of Fleet Street.

The Express was its usual model of objectivity. In its main story on her speech (not supposed to be comment), George Lockhead, drooled:

"Mrs Margaret Thatcher took the Tory Party firmly by the hand at Blackpool yesterday and led it cheering back to Power Land.

"That is to say the land of the back streets and the back parlours where Jubilee Union Jacks hand on the wall, and where two pennies have still somehow got to rub together...

*It was&.a triumph of the working class. Her kind of class...

"Every aspect of Mrs Thatcher reflected her remodelled authority.

"For example the clothes she wore. She opted for a quite ordinary outfit in navy blue-the sort, one might say; that women often send away for.

Like everything else around Blackpool that week, the fleet Ernesto "Che" Guevara was killed 10 years ago by the Bolivian army, after being cornered along with his tiny, exhausted group of guerrillas near the village of Higuera.

His death came only 13 years after the start of his political life It marked his final conversion into a political legend. His fellow leader, Fidel Castro of the Cuban revolution said of him:

"If we wish to express what we want the men of future generations to be, we must say: Let them be like Che!"

In Cuba, where Che passed the bulk of his political lite, he is revered in a sentimental manner which is reminiscent of a religious saviour.

TEE-SHIRTS

And outside his adopted Cuba it is Che Guevara's face which probably looks out from more student's walls and tee-shirts than that of any other political hero.

It is not necessary to deny his remarkable personal qualitiescourage, asceticism, military ability, administrative talent-to dismiss these judgements of Guevara as grotesque idealisation and absurd over-estimation of Guevara's true importance.

But much more serious than exaggeration has been the uncritical adulation of the politics which Guevara represented.

The BBC film shown on the anniversary of his death, though marred by some inane commentary, had the virtue of explaining in some detail what is known about the origin of Guevara's political committment.

It began, when as a young doctor from a petty-bourgeois Argentinian background, he toured the Andes on foot and by motorcycle and was deeply impressed by the material and moral degradation of the poor Indian' population.

INDISTINCT WAY

It was a reaction which no doubt numerous oner tourists nave capesstyle medical work APRA. And then in 1954 he was Arbenz.

Guevara apparently fought in leaders. the resistance to the invasion and then escaped to Mexico.

In was there in 1955 that he made contact with the Castro brothers and their followers. He joined their guerrilla training programme and set out with them to invade Batista's Cuba in the rickety motor-boat, "Granma".

82 men landed from the Granma in 1956 and only 13 survived the first ambush by Batista's forces.

PHYSICIAN

Guevara, who was there in the first place as the rebel army's physician, soon became a military commander and in the last year of the revolutionary war he commanded the important Las Villas front.

In the first year after the flight of Batista, Guevara's role was in the rebel army. But with the end of Castro's coalition with the "liberal" bourgeoisie, Guevara was appointed to the crucial post of President ot the Central Bank and was later given special responsibility for the development of industry.

This is the period when Guevara had a major impact on the course of the Castro government.

From a commanding position in the state apparatus he pushed for a more radical nationalisation programme, for a plan for accelerated industrialisation and the establishment of closer links with the Soviet Union.

ON THE "LEFT"

This period was the height of Guevara's political power. He stood clearly on the "left" of the Castro leadership and his policies were largely followed.

But the period also shows up clearlv the limits of Guevara's His conception of revolution was basically a petty-bourgeois idealist one. His period as Minister responsible for Industry was his first intimate contact with the working class.

Guevara's writing during this period was prolific and shows an impressive grasp of theoretical issues about economic questions.

But it fails to avoid an idealistic 1970s, there is no doubt that some The fundamental problem was along with the rest of the Cuban The Cuban rebel army had based itself on the peasantry and the urban petty-bourgeoisie and Guevara continued to look to these groups as the material out of which the Lain American vanguard would be built.

Guevara' superficial "Marxism" shows up in his political impressionism and inconsistency.

This was especially evident over the Soviet Union. In 1960 he returned from his first visit to the USSR fired with enthusiasm for Soviet planning methods and became the most notable pro-Soviet protagonist in the leadership.

Stalinism and the destruction of workers democracy in the Soviet Union seem to have posed no problems whatever for Guevara.

The class nature of Guevara's politics is revealed most tragically in his romantic conceptions about the Latin American revolution.

By 1965, Guevara's power in the Cuban leadership had waned.

For reasons which remain a mystery he left Cuba and disappeared from the public eye.

IGNOMINOUS DISASTER Then in 1967 he arrived in Bolivia to start a guerrilla army modelled on the war in Cuba.

The ignominious disaster of this venture has been blamed by Guevara's followers on special circumstances and particular mistakes.

But this failure, along with so many other in Latin America, was no isolated accident. It was the inevitable result of the revolutionary strategy (associated primarily with the names of Castro, Guevara and Regis Debray) which begins with the "armed struggle" and invests it (particuarly small-scale rural guerrilla war) with almost mystical powers to catalyse a successful revolutionary struggle.

This "guerrillaism" turns the Marxist strategy of revolution on its head: armed struggle first, mass struggle second; army first, party second.

No Marxist has any doubt that imperialism cannot be overthrown without armed struggle, taking the form in some cases of guerrilla warfare.

But armed struggle is not a catalyst of the mass movement; it is a tactic which derives from the needs of the mass struggle.

It is the inverted Guevarist conceptions of the armed struggle which have for years dominated large sections of the "revolutionary left" in Latin America and have been adopted too by the "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International.

Whatever its specific fort?, has brought disastrous consequences and has set back rather than advanced the revolution in Latin America.

In the 1963 "reunification" document of the USFI the Castroite leadership of Cuba were characterised as "unconsciously And much is often read into the fact that Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution was found among Guevara's possessions in Bolivia.

Che Guevara himself however leaves no doubt on this score: Trotsky • from the thought of the a number of things even if, in my judgement, he was wrong in his fundamental concepts and if his later action was mistaken...

Despite his role in the overthrow of Batista, Guevara was not an "unconscious Trotskyist" but a conscious opponent of Trotskyism and thus ultimately an obstacle to the fight for world revolution.

Der ENDIATE AI VADFO

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Suddenly, what has become of the crisis?

Inflation is coming down, the pound has strengthened and Healey starts 'giving away' money.-

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PROTILT RIGHT STRI

IMG DROPS USSR

GUEVARA: IDOL WHU OPPOSED TROTSKYISM PRESS GANG Little boy Blue