South Africa Week: Protest Not Enough

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A picket last week outside the South African Embassy The week of protest against the pr ›licies of the South Afric ian government is due to begin on 13 March.

Students in particular are likely to be deluged with calls from Stalinists and social democrats to boycott the "bad". capitalists in favour of the "good" ones, to place confidence in the thieves kitchen of the United Nations and to support various 'peaceful roads' to neo-colonialism in Southern Africa.

-SYDNEY It is vital that a clear view should be put in meetings and in preparations for this week about the inextricable links between racialism, neo-colonialism and the imperialist system and about the need to fight for revolutionary leadership in the working class to overcome them.

The fight to mobilise the working class for blacking of communications and trade is the central fight in Britain.

The Workers Socialist League therefore fully supports the call for the labour movement in Britain and internationally to express solidarity with the struggle of black workers in South Africa against apartheid and capitalism.

Maximum support, material and political must be given to all forces engaged in that struggle, to assist in the building of the independent organisation and programme of the working class.

Responsibility

But we insist that such support is an ongoing responsibility of the labour movement, and cannot be collapsed and dissipated into symbolic "weeks"

The WSL does not oppose, out of hand, any token and symbolic acts of solidarity. Buy it does reject the substitution of mere symbols where real acts of solidarity are possible.

And it does reject the belief, invariably underlying such substitutions, that only British capitalists have the power to affect the course of events in Southern Africa.

Unlike the Stalinists and reformists who believe that the only real contribution the labour movement can make is by pressurising omnipotent capital to reform itself, and pull back from its supreme activity-the extraction of maximum profits-we believe that developing the independent political struggle of British workers can lead to real solidarity.

Vulnerable

The struggle to show such solidarity demands a rejection capital to reform.

As we have consistently pointed out, the crisis of leadership facing the workers and peasants of Southern Africa is rendering the gains Mao culture.

The details of the third stage of the plan, up to the end of the century, were not spelled out.

Foreign trade is also to be a major area of development and the new emphasis on workers motivation through wage incentives and a commitment to improve the standard of living were ratified.

Resurrected

"Popular mass • organisations" such as youth and women's groups, suitably cleansed of undesirable elements, are to be resurrected by Peking's Stalinist A new text of the national anthem was also agreed.

Details of the changes are not as yet available but it is presumed that these will be to delete unfavourable references to the Japanese, with whom a trade agreement has just been signed. few years increasingly vulnerable to a state-imperialist offensive.

At the present time a certain impasse has been reached in South Africa itself where the working class lacks the leadership and programme to develop and consolidate the gains of Snweto Manoeuvres In this situation the dangers of demoralisation become increasingly real and can be very strongly affected by the general development of the struggle in southern Africa.

The manoeuvres of imperialism in seeking to secure neo-colonial solutions in both Zimbabwe and Namibia thus threaten not only the interests of workers and peasants in those countries, but the continuing combativity of South African workers, even in the face of a vicious, growing state reaction.

Defence and development of the gains won by workers and peasants in struggle in southern Africa thus involves an all out struggle against the manoeuvres of imperialism.

British Foreign Secretary the struggle of British workers to regain and defend their living standards.

Real solidarity

Only the independent action of workers in Britain can achieve real solidarity with their class brothers and sisters in South Africa, just as it is only independent action which can defend their own immediate interests.

The Lib-Lab coalition, and the bureaucrats wedded to it stand as obstacles to that independence.

And in precisely the same way that the "left wing" Labourites make every sort of radical noise but serve merely to protect the persistence of this anti-working class government, so too the constant expressions of abhorrence, outrage, condemnation of the vileness of apartheid serve merely as masks behind which the real struggle for solidarity is reduced to mere symbolism.

"Horror"

Thus it is that "lefts" stand up as a man to express their horror at the viciousness of a regime which murders Steve Biko, while they take up no struggle against a government which is so.

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CAHIANGI FREE FIGHTER AGAN SOLU DADTILLA