union's conference - and to leave just before the merger target date. He thereby leaves the way clear for a younger, more vital replacement from NALGO's hierarchy, to ward off any effective competition from NUPE's higher-profile challengers. Speculation is rife about Daly's likely successor, and about the size of his golden
handshake.
He won't be the only bureaucrat to benefit handsomely from the streamlining of staffing in the merger process. Large payouts for people at the top are increasingly common in the trade union movement, much to its discredit. Self-confessed property millionaire and former ASTMS leader Clive Jenkins hit the headlines last year when he left the newly merged Manufacturing Science and Finance union MSF with £213,000, leaving the top job safe with Ken Gill, the "tankie' communist former leader of the engineering white collar union TASS. The TASS takeover of the merged union is almost complete: they now have the general secretaryship and three out of four assistant general secretaries.
The movement is currently gripped by merger mania. MSF itself. like the National Union of Mineworkers, is now looking for another potential new partner in the Transport Workers (TGWU). But moves to 'workers' unity' are not always in the workers' best interests - born often of necessity, combined with self-protection and self-aggrandisement on the part of top officials and driven by the manoeuvres of high TUC politics.
When such proposals are put
to the members, real politics sometimes invervene: The Engineering Union (AEU)'s policymaking National Committee delivered its leadership a bloody nose earlier this year when it voted to halt all merger talks with the EETPU, the scab electricians" union. The delegates insisted instead that talks should procede only with TUC-affiliated unions.
Given a chance, politics sometimes also make it onto conference floors and agendas, giving the members the chance to • engage in the popular conference sport of 'overturning the platform' (or just attempting to). Their scores in this sport are a useful measure of the union's internal democracy, as well as the degree of member's confidence and level of organisation.
This is just as difficult as it sounds - and in some unions almost impossible. GMB - Edmonds' 'new
model union'
The newly-merged (or submerged) clerical workers' union APEX and general and municipal workers' union GMB met for their first conference in Brighton this summer. Living up to its well-eamed reputation as possibily the most undemocratic organisation in the movement, the overbearing GMB trod all over SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
not only the smaller and weaker APEX but over its own ranks too.
GMB general secretary John Edmonds has inherited a strong regional and officerdominated structure, combined with a uniquely undemocratic decision-making process. The regional barons' grip extends even to granting (or refusing) permission to members of their delegations to address conference. This year a young woman delegate from the London Region was almost reduced to tears as her local boss dainto subjected her to humiliating half-hour avne : public harangue. Her crime? She had dared to go to the rostrum to complain about sexism in a GMB promotional video shown at conference. Her contribution was well received, even by the overwhelmingly male conference. But she hadn't asked for his permission to speak.
The GMB's ruling body, the Central Executive Council, makes its recommendations on conference motions to its regions well before conference itself. Most other Labour movement executives wait until eve-of-debate meetings and deliver their deliberations to delegates on the conference floor. The GMB method might have a consultative gloss, but it is, of course, a stitch-up. Under their system, Regional Secretaries (who under GMB rules can - and do - dominate the ruling CEC as elected as well as paid officials), use the time to go back to push through their own recommendations to their members for a rubber-stamp which binds conference delegates. This way, votes on the conference floor are almost entirely accounted for weeks in advance. Emergency motions put directly to conference tend to be the only possible spanner in the works of this otherwise monolithic machine.
This year the platform, as ever, suffered only a few minor defeats. The rejection of the CEC's recommendation that conference be a non-smoking event, predictably trounced by the SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
UPDATE/ UNIONS GMB leader Edmonds: inherited a uniquely undemocratic structure massed ranks of male middleaged and smoking delegates, can hardly be acclaimed as a step forward for the working class. Two other defeated recommendations, concerning numbers of visitors' tickets issued and the organisation of industrial conferences were, in the scale of things, also of little importance.
But one significant blow was delivered to the GMB bosses, who suffered the humiliation of having to back a conference floor attack on one of their own officials.
Excelling in its ability to bend over backwards until it falls down, the Labour Party NEC has surpassed last year's decision to allow the scab Royal College of Nursing (RCN) a stall at Labour's annual conference (COHSE opposed - NUPE's Tom Sawyer abstained). This time they voted to let the pro-privatisation Water Authorities Association have a stall (a move supported by Tom Sawyer as well as the GMB). But at the June GMB Conference, an emergency motion from the London Region sent the union's NEC rep, Tom Burlinson, back with his tail between his legs to the NEC to overturn its position - which he had previously supported. A special emergency Central Executive Council meeting called during conference had decided to sup-
port the move rather than face certain defeat.
NUPE
The platform at the notoriously officer-led union NUPE was defeated on only one key conference debate this year, when conference backed a call for coordinated national industrial action to defend the health service: the report of the year's activities in the health sector was also referred back, in a clear gesture of no-confidence from the membership. The apparatchniks will no doubt comfort themselves that since the resolution calls for joint action with other trade unions it never need be implemented, as they have no intention of building for such solidarity. But the vote nevertheless indicates not only the growing mood of industrial militancy, but, more importantly, a broader dissatisfaction with the leadership's "batten down the hatches' new realism.
This dissatisfaction was demonstrated too, in the results of the ballot for NUPE's Deputy General Secretary. Militant supporter Nick Bradley polled around 30,000 votes to Tom Sawyer's 48,000 - leaving Sawyer a surprisingly slim majority and an even slimmer turnout. Just 13.5% of the union's 650,000 members bothered to vote at all. The left on the union's NEC was also reinforced in this
year's elections: Sawyer is not getting things all his own way. But of course the most significant platform victory at NUPE conference this year was the reversal of its non-nuclear defence policy. The vote represents a victory for Sawyer's own brand of new realism in the union and bodes badly for prospects for the super-union to be created by the merger with NALGO. NALGO Due to a combination of a particularly top-heavy but politically weak bureaucracy, and a relatively stroppy, organised and confident membership, the odds are slightly better for platform defeats at NALGO. This year the mood was to the left, although victories for the conference floor were modest - confined basically to those issues which would not require the union to confront the Government or the employers.
The ruling National Executive Committee was defeated on its proposal to hold only a 'confitmatory ballot' (ie. do what the union officials tell you) for the election of a new General Secretary. It was defeated too in its opposition to affiliation to the "Time To Go' campaign on Ireland, and on a number of rule changes. As a iesult NALGO women's conference will now send motions through to national conference - a breakthrough in bringing women into the heart of union policy making and a considerable advance on the Labour Party structures, for example.
Despite only small gains and defeats on some key issues, (including the conference rejection of a proposal to write some democratic safeguards into the NUPE/NALGO merger discussions), the NALGO left took comfort in the size of its opposition vote. A third of delegates voted for a position of non-compliance and non-implementation of the law in the poll tax debate. A quarter of the delegates supported the call for an immediate
Page 5
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
Cof 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
Page 6
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 Na-
tional Secretariat drew back
from the earlier decision and
postponed the formal integra-
tion until after the elections. Disputes also arose about standing well-known com-
rades from the Fourth Interna-
tional like Allain Krivine SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
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 SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989
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
Page 7
Second World War did provide a space for resource-rich and relatively developed countries like Argentina to build up import-substitution industries and profit from favourable terms of trade. Imperialist industrial exports were disrupted by war, and foodstutis and other raw materials were needed desperately. The Argentine ranchers, industrialists and workers could all gain. Quite an advanced health and social security system was established. Absolute hunger and deprivation, commonplace in the majority of Latin American countries, were much reduced.
Thirdly the resilience of Peronism is its nationalism. Argentina remains a semi-colonial country. Despite its development, the economy is still dependent on, and distorted by, imperialism. The 60 billion dollar foreign debt is the clearest expression of that. So Menem's nationalist rhetoric finds a ready audience. But Peronist nationalism continues to be premised on an alliance of working people with an illusory national bourgeoisie. In the 1950s, new national bourgeois interests did develop which had some conflict of interests with foreign companies. This sector of the bourgeoise is much weaker today, and is assimilated into the dominant pro-imperialist ruling class.
Working class identification with the gains of Peronism was seen in 1955 when the masses took to the streets to defend Peron's government against the military coup. Many were killed while Peron negotiated his own safe passage to Spain.
The 14 May vote for Peronism was also very much a vote against Alfonsin's Radical government. In the first years of that government people were willing to hold back on economic demands because there were democratic freedoms for the first time for nearly ten years and some limited justice against the military was being handed down. However, Alfonsin, pressured by successive military uprisings, soon scaled down his human rights programme, and implemented more and more austerity measures to deal with a growing economic crisis. Government popularity slumped. Page 8
UPDATE ARGENTINA
At the same time the vote for Menem is not a vote of blind confidence or general illusion in his programme. Many people realise that the old state redistribution formula of the 1950's golden age cannot operate if the economy is in such a mess there is nothing to distribute. To achieve redistributon today would require much more radical measures.
Mass looting of supermarkets took place after the vote, and again on a lesser scale last week. Although illusions do exist, and looting does not in itself provide an organised political alternative,
Menem: no delay in ditching his electoral
promises it does reflect a desperation and a lack of hope that the new government will put bread and meat back on the table.
Menem was careful during the electoral campaign to stick to vague promises about increasing wages, and to adopt a tougher posture on the debt. But he did not call for non-payment, and his basic project is a social pact between industry and workers to produce a 'national' recovery.
His first moves have even surprised seasoned Argentine watchers in their brutal and instant break with his campaign rhetoric. Petrol prices have been increased by up to 700 percent. In order to cut the public sector deficit he has increased prices for public services by between 200 and 640 per cent; state spending will be cut. To try and sweeten the pill, unspecified measures will e taken against speculation an ax evasion. Talks are going o
with industrialists to freeze certain prices and a special wage bonus has been proposed.
Menem's choice of cabinet ministers reflect an almost newlook sub-Thatcherite Peronism. Roig, his choice of economy minister had a brief of restructuring the huge 'lame-duck' subsidised state sector before his sudden death. His successor has pledged identical policies. The richest woman in Argentina is to become a roving ambassador to go cap in hand to the imperialist powers for economic aid.
A lot depends on how Menem
Scan use Peronist control of the trade unions to sell his social pact. Shopfloor militancy is alive and well in Argentina, but it will face sabotage from the Peronist trade union bureucrats and will require a political expression if it is not to run out of steam. Here Menem has another advantage, since the left opposition is relatively weak. Historically the Communist Party squandered its early promise by its sectarian opposition to the national struggle and to Peronism in the 1940s and 1950s. During the war Stalin ordered Communist parties in the third world to ally with their "democratic" bourgeoises against the fascists and to abandon any anti-colonial struggle. Consequently Peronism captured the working class, while the Communists had a base among intellectuals and were barely stronger than the Trotskyist current.
Argentina has had one of the strongest Trotskyist traditions. In general it was less sectarian to the nationalist movement and to Peronism and was able to build a real working class base, which continues to exist today. In the 1960s one wing became the leadership of the PRT/ERP guerillas, which suffered a terrible defeat. The other wing, led by the late Nahuel Moreno - al-
though perhaps over-enthusiastic in its legalistic condemnation of any armed struggle - maintained a strong trade union presence and intervened in elections. Today this wing is called the MAS (Movement for Socialism) and has several thousand members.
In the recent elections the MAS and the CP were on a joint slate called Izquierda Unida (United Left). The MAS had campaigned for this unity for a long period. Internal open elections were held to decide on which tendency should head the joint slates. The CP narrowly won. In the elections the slate as a whole won about half a million votes (or 3.4 per cent) in the parliamentary elections and about 400,000 votes in the presidential elections (2.5 per cent). This represented an increase of about half a per cent for the parliamentary Slate compared to two years ago. The MAS leader, Luis Zamora, was elected as an MP.
The vote for the left would perhaps have been greater if last January's leftist adventure of attacking the Tablada barracks had not taken place. The attack was aimed at provoking a general insurrection. It came after a succession of military uprisings which were as much negotiations as out and out coup attempts. It was led by the MTP (Everyone for the Fatherland Movement) which came out of a national-liberation rather than a strictly marxist or Communist background. It did not even have the sort of social base enjoyed by the PRT of the 1970s. Most of the guerrillas were killed, along with mostly conscript soldiers. The attack was violently condemned by the Izquierda Unida. The MAS, keeping with the Morenist tradition, even refused to let its lawyers defend the MTP prisoners. Of course the media portrayed the guerrillas as "PRT" or Trotskyists, and this must have had some impact on the electoral campaign.
The May rioting and looting also gave the authorties a chance to repress the left. Even the international press has picked up on the alleged role of Trotskyist groups. 1000 people have been detained, including militants of the MAS and another group Politica Obrera (Workers Politics). The latter group has SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 17, Summer 1989