ballot for all-out strike action in the local government pay campaign. And in a close vote the NALGO black workers' group proposals for autonomous self-organisation were just lost - whilst conference went on overwhelmingly to reject the NEC's preferred option.
TGWU and MSF: last line of defence?
A divided TGWU leadership leaves more openings for a fair fight between opposing forces on the conference floor. Thus the defence debate confounded the new realists: the union's unilateralist stance was narrowly retained. Though the 1.1m strong IGWU will cast its votes, together with MSF (whose conference earlier this year voted, at its leadership's recommendation, to take a unilateralist stance) against back-tracking on defence, Labour's leaders have done their sums and know they have it in the bag. The implications of the vote, as a blow to Kinnock's grip in the movement, have been talked up out of all proportion.
Everything else in the TGWU conference will have given Kinnock a great deal of comfort. Delegates pulled back from demanding that a future Labour Government would reinstate full trade union immunities, and rejected a call for Labour to reinstate and extend nationalisation. 'We will not do ourselves any favours by promising much more than we can realistically hope to deliver," warned TGWU general secretary Ron Todd, stepping back firmly into the Labour leader's camp. Conference also voted overwhelmingly to take public money for ballots, and ended the union's opposition to EC membership.
New realism
It would be easy to see the summer of discontent as a slap in the face for the new realists and the end of their ascendency. It is certainly a measure of the mood and the members' willingness to fight always underestimated and played down by those who lead them.
But beyond the first stage of getting the troops out, lies another hurdle. 'What do we do now?'. Until the left advances a convincing answer to that question and fights for it consistently in the trade unions, it will continue to lose the political battles for leadership, and we'll witness yet again the waste of a frustrated militancy, translated only into meaningless composites and manouvres rather than channelled into effective ac-
Jane Wells
U PD AT E ITALY:
Euro-Elections
Every other year it seems there is a government crisis in Italy at the beginning of the summer months. More often than not it is sorted out before the annual holidays, since the politicians are anxious not to share a hot and sticky Rome with the tourists.
This year Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi made the first break in the five-party coalition ('pentapartito') in the run up to the Euro-Elections. He thought a sharp turn to attacking Italy's number one party, the Christian Democrats, would bring in some more votes.
In the event, the Christian Democrats lost around one per cent, polling 32.9 per cent, while the SP vote increased by about half of one per cent.
Craxi lost out: the Christian Democrats have regained the initiative within the coalition, and that wily old stager, former Prime Minister Andreotti, is set to lead the same, reshuffled group of coalition partners.
The modestly good performance for the CP follows the launch of an increasingly social democratic CP programme under party leader Ochetto at the recent Congress, and more vigorous activity by the party in campaigns against health cuts and mafia corruption (and their Christian Democratic friends). Nevertheless the last CP congress saw the formation for the first time of an opposition current around an alternative document.
Many militants who do not particularly share rebel leader
Cossutta's nostalgia for the
Russian bureaucracy voted for this document, since it did at least maintain some notion of class and struggle - concepts almost totally absent from the majority text.
The left regroups after
The Green vote of 6.2 per cent represented nearly threefold increase on 1987. They were very divided, between a more 'leftish' Rainbow slate that included some forces from the right wing of the fragmenting centrist movement Democrazia Proletaria (DP - Proletarian Democracy), and the official, more Britishstyle, Green slate.
The hard left wing of DP must have breathed a huge sigh of relief, because they managed to hold on to the same support as in the last Euro-elections - 1.3 per cent and made the quota for one Euro-MP. They were under the most pressure from the Greens since most of their parliamentary representatives were supporting the Rainbow slate and hoping to profit from a DP disaster.
Inside DP, which is a little like a reservoir of the post1968 revolutionary experience, there has been a very sharp political crisis for nearly years now. DP's main historic spokesperson, Capanna, along with nearly all their MPs bat one, and most of the other public officeholders, wants to abandon any strategy for change that includes action and conflict outside of bourgeois institutions.
Despite a lot of wooliness about DP's programmatic statements over the last years it has maintained references to marxist notions of the class struggle and the state. The right wing want to abandon
DP as a structure, name and tradition and build some sort of new rainbow alliance with the Greens and the Radical party.
The centre and left of the party have a majority for maintaining the DP tradition. Unfortunately precisely because DP has been a bit of a catch-all grouping without very coherent norms it is vulnerable to this sort of offensive. Movementist green-type currents have coexisted with the traditional working class strongholds of DP in places like Milan. The relationship between the party and its MPs was rather fluid.
Since the development of this crisis, the only other significant left group in Italy, the munist League), Italian section of the Fourth International, decided to involve itself in this political struggle between the right wing and the left majority of DP. When the Capanna grouping went all out on the offensive refusing to support the DP election campaign or the referendum campaigns sponsored by their own party, the LCR decided to have a discussion about joining forces formally with the left inside DP.
Initially the LCR intervention went smoothly. A DP national delegate assembly agreed terms for integration which included a proviso for the establishment of a Fourth International association enabling ex-LCR militants to maintain organised links with and propaganda concerning the International.
However during the Euro- election campaign the DP National Secretariat drew back from the earlier decision and postponed the formal integration until after the elections. Disputes also arose about standing well-known comrades from the Fourth International like Allain Krivine
Can Menem revive the old
(France) on DP slates.
The latest development prior to this report has been the formal split of the Capanna grouping at a national assembly of his supporters on 8/9 July. Nearly all DP's MPs and public office holders have supported the split. This assembly was called 'From DP to the Greens'. Apart from the Rainbow Greens there was a delegation from the official Greens at the meeting. Capanna wants to unify all the Green forces. This may be easier said than done, since the Greens are very heterogenous politically. Some of the official Greens have put themselves forward as members of the pentaparlito govemment!
All this has concentrated the minds of the DP leadership, and it has now voted definitively in favour of the integration of the LCR, broadly in line with the earlier agreement. The LCR will hold a dissolution conference at the end of July.
Hopefully DP, despite the loss of nearly all its public officeholders, will emerge strengthened after the integration of the LCR in its fight to stop the drift to 'new realism' or vague green politics in Italy.
There is plenty of space for the activity of a party like DP. A new, revitalised DP would have to work out a correct strategy for linking up with the thousands of CP activists dissatisfied with the Ochetto turn. The struggle against the government's austerity measures, particularly in the public sector goes on. The decree imposing charges for hospital care was renewed recently, again without debate in parliament. It still has to eventually be taken in full debate and voted on, so as much pressure as possible is necessary to ditch the decree. Already there has been a half-day general strike over this and the potential for further action is there.
Dave Kellaway
Argentina:
Peronist magic?
A country which is one of the bread baskets of the world and a major meat exporter - but which has seen mass looting for basic foodstuffs.
A country self-sufficient in energy and water, but which cannot maintain continuous supplies.
country with immense natural riches, overwhelmingly urban and largely industrialised, in which a third of its 32 million population live below the official poverty line. Here you car no longer use credit cards because inflation is running at 120 per cent a month. Here the currency was devalued to 650 australs against the dollar in early July, though just a few days earlier it had been 300 against the dollar. The interest alone on the foreign debt is equal to 60 per cent of the value of its exports and the public sector deficit is equal to 15 per cent of GNP.
This country is Argentina. Reality here belies all the superficial analyses that capitalist and imperialist contradictions no longer operate. Neither can it be dismissed as a peripheral undeveloped colonial country having little effect in the imperialist chain. Along with Brazil and Mexico it is one of the most industrialised semi-colonial countries.
UPDATE/ARGENTINA Massive protest against the defeated Aifonsin government: will Menem fare any better?
British capital has both an historic and a contemporary responsibility for the devastation of the economy and the sufferings of the people.
The political and social situation is highly unstable. In the last six months there has been:
•l a failed military uprising;
• a suicidal attack by left-wing guerrillas on a military base;
• the subsequent establishment of a National Security Council headed by the military;
• waves of strikes particularly in the bankrupt public sector;
• a massive 50 per cent-plus vote against the govemment in favour of a populist candidate from the party founded by former President General Peron, now promising better times for working people;
# mass looting of shops in all cities on two occasions, with dozens shot by police.
In the country with 'two Presidents but no government', Carlos Menem, the Peronist leader, took over the Presidency from Raul Alfonsin five months earlier than allowed for by the constitution. The Argentine ruling class are desperately hoping that a revamped Peronism can hold the lid down on an explosive situation.
Why did the people turn so massively back to the Peronists? In conditions during and after the
SO o0P
the savage decade of the military dictatorship which ended only five years ago, the Peronist bureaucracy openly collaborated with the policy of torture, and death squads which left 15,000 'disappeared". Indeed the last Peronist government, led by Peron's second wife Isabel, was already massacring left-wing opposition before the military took over in 1976.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand Peronist populism general terms is to think of Labourism in Britain. Populism obviously is not the same as social democracy but successful varieties do share some features.
First, it has organic roots in the day to day organisation of the working class. Peronism is politically dominant in the trade union movement. Despite the often "gangster' methods of the union bureaucrats, it co-exists with strong traditions of rank and file shop steward organisation.
Second, it is forever associated in the collective memory of the working class with the golden age' of General Peron's redistributive wage and welfare policies beween 1944-1955 - somewhat similar to the way Labour Party militants look back to the Attlee government of 1945. International
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989 Page 7