Tories attack housing and jobs

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THEM OUT WITH A GENERAL SIRIKE!

The massive TUC demonstration on 9 March against the Tory anti-union laws which brought over 100,000 out on the streets of London was yet another indication of the willingness of the working class to fight and defend itself against the attacks of the Thatcher government.

This followed on previous demonstrations against the cuts and the anti-abortion Corrie Bill, each of which drew new layers into the fight against the Tories. At the same time all over the country workers have taken to the streets in local demonstrations. Trade unionists have joined with housewives, parent groups and school students in united opposition to the attacks on their basic rights and living standards.

The question now is, where does the fight to defend living standards, jobs and social services go from here? How can we most effectively carry forward the fight to defend basic rights?

The TUC has been careful to issue the usual quota of protest statements (and boxfuls of glossy stickers and badges!) to the extent of calling people out to demonstrate their anger on a Sunday.

LAME SCHEME

However, they have shown no sign of calling further action. Instead they want us to get bogged down in yet another protest with their lame scheme for "taking time off" and lunchtime stoppages on May 14. In the meantime they have stepped in to squash the call for a general strike in South Wales and worked might and main to keep the steelworkers isolated and out on their own.

What is needed is not a lunchtime protest in May but mass strike action now to defend the stee/workers strike, on pay and closures and unite all such struggles against the government And what are our Labour leaders doing? Instead of fighting to make the bankers pay by cutting interest charges, Labour Councils in Lambeth and Lothian, having refused to implement the cuts find their 'solution' in raising the money from rates rises which in effect is just another cut. The only bit of local authority spending not being cut is the interest charges. In fact with the increases in the bank lending rate to 17% and further increases likely, these will rise drastically.

Of course all this flies in the face of reality. The Tory government is absolutely determined to extract the full cost of their economic crisis from the working class. Not content with the already massive cuts in public spending they have now moved in to slash the housing subsidies to local councils effectively putting a stop to new council house building in many areas. City Councils like Leicester-a Labour council pledged not to implement the cuts-have begun announcing an end to ail council house building for the foreseeable future!

KICK This comes at a time when rents, rates and mortgages are already soaring, driven up by the Tories' monetarist policies. Many working class and even middle class families will be forced to sell up and to seek housing in a market dominated by speculators and Rachmanite landlords.

With thousands of families already homeless and council waiting lists bulging, the net effect of Tory policies of selling off the best council housing and chopping subsidies will be to further drive up rents and intensify the problems of the homeless. And the only peopie to benefit will be the private building firms and the financiers who will rake in huge new profits.

We demand that Labour councils don't implement rent or rate increases and where this has already taken place tenants associations should start to organise rent and rates strikes.

For these attacks on basic rights like housing. education, health and social services all have one aim. To divide and weaken the working class and boost the profits of capitalist big business. That is the logic behind the Tories assault on the Welfare State.

At the same time the Tories drive to restore profitability and rationalise ailing firms has deprived hundreds of thousands of workers of their right to work. Latest unemployment figures reveal the number of unemployed for more than a year as the highest since the war.

Meanwhile recorded female unemployment has increased by 62% over the last four years from 254,000 to 412,000. And these figures do not of course include the vast numbers of married women who have been driven back into the home by cuts in staffing and lack of nursery provision and who now constitute an 'invisible' army of unemployed.

But women are prepared to fight to defend their rights as reflected in the thousands who demonstrated against the Corrie Bill in October and against the Tory cuts on October 28 and March 9.

This strength must be mobilised into mass action and linked to strikes on pay, redundancies and closures through councils of action to build.for a general strike to remove this government.

But we cannot return the same Labour government as before. We must fight to remove the right wing leadership who agree with the Tory cuts and former 'lefts' like Neil Kinnock who state that they can't restore the cuts in public spending. We must have a workers' government pledged to socialist policies to meet the crisis.

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Page 2E education for the under fives, : No educațional grounds were given an was no consultation with parents or teache 3.000 children will be affected the nur •workers will be made redundant and classe Fir: • 1 :5 larger, Ealing council claim they. can save €285.000 by 'restricting admission of chil primary school before the age of five.

Compared to the other London. bo Ealing is the worst hit by cuts in this directi At the beginning of the year, a group of affected by this decision formed a group ca Ealing 3-5 Education Action Group (E3-5AI They have recently re-organised into groups so that people are able to work throughout the borough.

•Since its formation, the group ha extremely active in making people aware of • happening in their borough. They have Ealing education committee and local MP: House of Commons.

They got the Ealing branch of the A circulate a questionnaire to all first; midd nursery schools to, ascertain how many c would be affected by the cuts in Septemk thev have contanted atl the enhants in thab, via the Parent Managers, asking them to ri MINT IUT issue with parents in their schools They. have asked tor financial and support trom various locar organisations in all. Trade Union branches affiliated to the council. And they have written letters indiv sand collectively to local MPs, councilors the chairman of the education committee.

A letter has also been written to Mark I asking him to comment on the Ealing B ¡Council's decision, in the light of his rem. the debate on the Education Bill on Februa to the effect that he would like to see e South Oxford Nursery occupation, March-April 1S lecic ded Own sion I of id th jere ers. O Iver nher nf 200• full incill ary SWill I be abx out dren Iroug on. pare nts Iled 1 the ser ven loca ally s been what is lobbied s at the JUT lle, a :hildr jer a innec aise t act cludi • trac ridua and Carli:

Drou arks existi facilities in primary schools used for the under 5's.

As the group's activity has escalated, so has the support they have gained. 100 peopie attended a lobby of the education committee at Ealing Town Hall, on February 5:

Every Saturday on the streets of Eating they collect names and let people in the borough know what is happening. They also go round on a doorto-door basis to inform people and get them to sign petitions PUBLIC MEETING At their first public meeting on March 6 they drew an audience of over 700 to hear speakers from the Ealing 3-5 Action Group, a reception class, teacher and the secretary of the Ealing branch of the NUT.

At the meeting the group urged the audience to come out with them under their own banner on Tuesday March 11, to march to Ealing Town Hall to join with the NUT in their half day strike. Mrs Jenny Myers of the E3-5AG urged parents to keep their children at home that afternoon if the school they attended were not to be closed. She said that this was the first time that teachers and parents had united. "We must all go out onto the streets in the afternoon to persuade the council. We must make sure they are never allowed to drop this subject."

UNION POLICY

Martin Gerald, secretary of the Ealing Branch of the NUT, said the union was firmly committed to fight against the under 5's policy and that the shortage of nursery facilities within the borough would be aggravated by the council's decision. "The Ealing Council is totally out of touch. It is preserving a policy that is going to devastate the schools.

At the meeting, a resolution was passed unanimoușly stating opposition to the decision. of Ealing council and calling for its removal. 278.

Kollontai Many of the (admittedly very few)

women who became prominent in the Bolshevik Party at the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution came from upper-class families.

This was no accident. The oppression of women from the petty-bourgeois working class or especially the peasantry was SO severe that few were able to break out of it.

Alexandra Kollontai was no exception to this rule-she was born with all the privileges that an upper-class family bestowed on her. This background enabled her to go .to university -an education which few Russian men, let alone women, could achieve.

However, Kollontai was, from an early Lage, a very untypical upper-class woman.

Unlike the British suffragettes who drove men off to fight, she saw her main task as agitation against the war, and for the workers to turn their guns on their oppressors at home, instead of their fellow workers in rival armies. As she commented later on:

"So long as the war continued, the problem of women's liberation obviously had to recede into the background since my only concern, my highest aim, was to fight against the war and call a new Workers' International into being."

Kollontai returned to Russia from a lengthy exile after the February revolution and played a valuable part in the developments that led to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in October 1917. Lenin complimented her on her skills in propaganda work, and she was elécted onto the Central Committee in July 1917 CLASS MOVEMENT Even before she arrived at university at the age of 16, her sympathies were with the growing working class movement, and she reacted instinctively against the, injustices and hardships she saw around her in Tsarist Russia.

She married her cousin at the age of 20. It was a love-match, opposed by her parents, but the restrictions of married life soon came into conflict with Kollontai's aspirations and desire to become actively involved in the revolutionary movement.

As she put it in her autobiography: "I still loved my husband, but the happy life of a housewife and spouse became for me a "cage'."

This contlict between an active, independent political life and the expectations that a -continual theme of Kollontai's life, and her •spouse or lover has of 'his' woman was a writings on sexuat morality and women's liberation.

: Woman Worker, March 191980 It this awareness of the "personal' aspect of sexual oppression that has endeared Kollontai to the feminists, who have adopted her as their own. She certainly devoted à substantial part of her writing to these questions.

However, Kollontai would have been appalled if she knew that she was being identified as a feminist-she always saw herself as a communist, and was hostile to the feminist notion that men as a sex, rather than class society, are. the primary oppressors of women.

She recognised the importance of he views on sexual relations and what she calle‹ 'communist morality" , and battled agains conservatism within the Bolshevik party 11 order to raise them. But she regarded thi practical work of organising among womer winning these women to communism, as he most important task.

She built a 'women's movement" , bụt i was no classless 'sisterhood'. It was a move ment of working class women who followe a revolutionary programme.

She joined the Bolshevik party in 1915

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