acasy balance on the ABU Ex4 'arioderates') away from the Communist Party's own he Party leadership tried to @Minlassive rank and file on'strole. But in Manchester i Scanlon's non-leadership durthe gear) the Party seemed to ad file membership about to organise it. masped it is easy to see both by the Party leadership and ants to. on asked earlier: how is the indsechand on what political basis? rugh the Communist Party met with its report of the January tear instead of banishing the aim ofra Labour Goverment, it call of the TUC, and furthermore REAL ANSWER d coordinate all the current res, shows that the real purpose lift the Communist Party off in with the need to prevent ak and file with the trade Dommunist Party. Gollan, the bat "the importance of the sow.and a government comsot be overstressed". The NEXT STEPS movement.
politics. trial action is to be reduced to protest and pressure: even in its own terms such a move is self-defeating. The strength of protest actions diminishes as the practical point of such actions becomes less and less obvious. By failing to raise the demand to organise and develop industrial action to a General Strike, even the chance of changing the balance of forces between the left and the right inside the trade union leadership is probably lost. No mention is made of the way in which it is proposed to develop industrial action, or who is All of these proposals are combined with the woolly demand for "mass industrial action", combining this with scuttling behind any section of the trade union bureaucracy which offers the same line as the Communist Party. On Tuesday, 23 January, the Morning Star headline was "Mobilise Mass Opposition to Tory Policy, Recall TUC, Demand Scots Miners". Again the point is obvious. We see another attempt to reduce the tension between the developing struggle of the rank and file and the 'left' bureaucrats.
What role can the Liaison Committee Conference play in the labour movement? The clear test for the Liaison Committee is (and always has been) how far it is prepared to organise working class militants for the next confrontation over the freeze with the Tories. Here the Communist Party should take some lessons in practical politics from the rank and file of the working class. First, it is the lower-paid workers who were first into battle. Organisation of the leading sections of the working class around struggles like that of the gas workers can make all the difference to the outcome of such a struggle. Equally the battle of the shop-workers against their frozen rises can be turned into first attempts by the working class to organise for their solutions to the problems of rising prices.
More and more workers are taking practical steps along these lines. In London the initiative has already gone out to organise a conference of London workers against the freeze. Supported by rank and file hospital workers, teachers associations, local government workers and others, the object of this conference will be to plan a series of practical steps towards the kind of united action which can carry the whole movement forward. Very important ideas for the labour movement as a whole have already been floated. For NALGO workers to stop implementing the Housing Finance Act as a direct blow against the Goverment's attempts to redistribute the burden of housing finance within the working class instead of making the capitalists pay for the social problems capitalism has crated, shows the way the working class can struggle for every sector's interests. Equally the proposal for USDAW workers to mount a campaign, together with local trade unionists, to suppress price rises by refusing to sell at higher prices shows a practical means of tackling the rising cost of living of the great mass of the population, not just the industrial workers.
The local conferences, started in London, but now beginning to be organised in other areas like Edinburgh, Rotherham and Oxford, offer a way of bringing together large numbers of workers to plan demonstrations and practical lines of action. Those supporting such conferences represent only workers engaged in various struggles, but also other groups of workers at the centre of the labour These conferences point the way in which the Liaison Committee conference can be used. When militants mobilise for the conference in April these local initiatives should serve as a guide for action at the level of national rank and file organisation. The most important lesson here is to abandon the whole notion of protest The following resolution was passed at a meeting of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International on 21 January. Once more it is reported that a cease-fire agreement is imminent in Vietnam. So we must stress again the vital role that the international movement in defence of the Vietnamese revolution is called upon to play, regardless of the results of the current negotiations. Every analysis of the present situation, all information available, points to the conclusion that the Vietnamese revolution will not come to a halt, no matter what the outcome of the cease-fire negotiations. There will be no truce in the struggle of the masses of Vietnamese workers and poor peasants for their national and social liberation, The savage attacks perpetrated by the American air force in late December 1972 on the Hanoi and Haiphong regions, the unprecedented bombings of the liberated areas of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which are still apntinuing as of this writing, confirm the determination of the American imperialists to utilise all the means of terror at their disposal to prevent the collapse of the puppet regimes installed in Saigon, Pnompenh, and Vientiane, Considerable amounts of arms and ammunition are still being sent to these puppets. Thousands of Thie's U.S. "advisers" remain in South Vietnam. And even if the American troops are really withdrawn, powerful imperialist air and naval forces will remain on the alert in Thailand and off the Vietnamese coasts.
Moreover, maintaining the dictatorial Thieu regime in Saigon in the face of the combativity of the Vietnamese masses means that the revolutionary struggle will continue after the cease-fire agreement is signed, even if the general military confrontation between the two class camps halts for a time. The hard-fought negotiations that took place between October 1972 and January 1973 were centred precisely on marking out the ground for these future revolutionary struggles in South Vietnam, with each camp seeking to gain the best possible position for waging its fight. This is why the negotiations dealt with questions such as the real nature of the demilitarised zone, the size and role of the international control commission, and similar issues. Any concessions that imperialism may have extracted from the Vietnamese fighters in this regard, as the result of inadequate international support for the Metnamese revolution in the face of large-scale aggression by U.S. imperialism, in no way undermine the capacity of the revolution to maintain its momentum in South Vietnam.
The puppet Thieu understands this very well. He is hastily setting up a system of semi-fascist repression, threatening to fire on every crowd of demonstrators, to murder every Communist, and to prevent any return of refugees to liberated villages. At the same time he is holding out the threat of slaughtering the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in his hands.
The popular masses, for their part, are getting ready to take advantage of any military truce to resume their struggle to free the political prisoners, win democratic liberties, defend their material interests in the cities and countryside, bring about the disintegration of the army and regime of the puppet Thieu, and create and reinforce mass-based organs of power.
In these conditions, the signing of a ceasefire agreement will not mean a halt to the revolution in South Vietnam. Laos. and Cambodia, or to the counter-revolutionary intervention by imperialism. These two processes will continue in temporarily modified forms, with the possibility of a new direct military intervention by U.S. imperialism remaining suspended like the sword of Damocles over the heads of the workers and poor peasants of the Vietnamese Revolution!
In these conditions also, the masses of Indochina, confronted with the violence and the manoeuvras of imperialism and the native exploiters, will have a still greater need for the active support of the international working class after the signing of the cease-fire agreement just as they needed this help during the recent weeks of terror bomling by the U.S. Air Force.
The counter-revolutionary role of the bureaucrats of Moscow and Peking, who did not raise a finger to respond to Nixon's bombing of North Vietnam and who continue to refuse to supply the North Vietnamese workers' state with the more modern kinds of defensive weapons made available to bourgeois governments such as those in Egypt, Pakistan, India, or Bangladesh, cannot be condemned strongly enough. By arranging Nixon's visits to Moscow and Peking in 1972, these bureaucrats helped him to weaken the American anti-war movement in the crucial months of the past year. During the cease-fire negotiations they brought the maximum pressure on Hanoi to get the Vietnamese fighters to make concessions to imperialism. They put the crowning touch on this betrayal of the elementary interests of the workers of Vietnam and the entire world by remaining totally passive when Nixon unleashed against Hanoi and Haiphong the largestscale and most barbarous acts of aggression that humanity has seen since the end of the second world war. The whole counter-revolutionary logic of their "peaceful coexistence" strategy has thus been starkly revealed. But, for their part, the working masses of the world, after being deceived by the secret diplomatic manoeuvres of Washington, Moscow and Peking, were awakened by the shock and indignation aroused by Nixon's barbaric bombings. They have responded on an ever larger scale since December 1972. Leading up to the actions of January 20, 1973, the international demonstrations against the imperialist war of aggression have constantly broadened. In many countries, these demonstrations reached new heights. What is more, in Australia, Italy, and Denmark, sectors of the organised workers movement started, or issued appeals for starting, direct industrial action against the war, thereby pointing out the path for the most effective response to the imperialist barbarism.
It is the duty of the international working class to continue to extend this movement of solidarity, no matter what the outcome of the negotiations and the cease-fire agreement, until the complete and final victory of the Vietnames revolution. There can be no halt, truce, or "cease-fire" in our solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution - this is the fundamental truth that we must constantly reiterate to the working masses of the five continents as this turn is taking place in Indochina. The Fourth International issues a solemn appeal to all activists, to all anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist organisations throughout the world. For more than two decades the Indochinese masses have fought with a heroism un paralleled and an energy and endurance unique in the history of this century for the cause of their emancipation and for socialism. They have fought for us all. The least that we can do in return for the great service they have done for the world revolution is to continue unceasingly our actions in solidarity with their revolution, which is also unrelenting. The Fourth International calls on all working-class organisations to make defending the Vietnamese revolution against the terror of Washington and Thieu, whose blows continue and may escalate further, into the cause of millions and millions of workers in all countries.
It calls on all Communists, on all socialists, not to let themselves be duped by the diplomatic manoeuvres of imperialism and by the cover that the bureaucratic betrayers in Moscow and Peking are continuing to provide for these manoeuvres.
Our duty is clear. We must maintain, broaden, extend, and unify nationally and internationally the movement of active and militant solidarity with the heroic fighters and the peoples of Indochina until the final and complete victory of the Indochinese revolution.