things Botha wants to hide SWINGEING new police powers | to muzzle press coverage oi the scale of the blackool by no means a sign confidence from South Africa's apartheid regime.
Similarly President Botha deliberately decided to call for a "white only" election this spring (April Fools' Day?), rather than witness certain humiliation of the "representatives" of the Indian coloured population in what would be
Seven more massive boycott than during the last elections in 1984.
There is no doubt that the apartheid rulers can still unleash a substantial weight of military and repression: but the extent to which they feel obliged to gag all including the white "liberal confirms that they do themselves to be in complete charge.
A further symptom of this can be seen in some of the targets singled press censorship, among which is any reporting on the functioning alternative local government structures
street committees and other bodies - in the black townships. Also banned are coverage of gatherings and any speeches made at them, and reports on consumer, rent and eduction boycotts.
One of the main reasons for the press clamp down to prevent further embarrassing disclosures of the torture. detention without trial and imprisonment of youth and children ollowing waves of arrests last year
The vocal Detainee Parents' Suppor Committee had claimed as many 1,600 children were in detention, to 4.000 if those as old as 18 were IDAF
South African repression
included. The regime claimed that only 256 children aged 11-15 were in jail. focussed concentrations in the townships. has December's the near stooge and was not matched by the decisions of police opponents. press, feel not tanks that crushed a out for of such iin 1968. "restricted" Soviet that armour deployed helped crackdown strong Solidarnosc. mass preventing any Russian tanks find its own ways of controlling events The recent overthrow General Secretary Hu as aftermath of December's от up
Meeting. ( Press criticism of army conscription has also been outlawed following the which troop Meanwhile on the solidarity front in Britain, the positive lead given by Birmingham conference campaigning for trade union sanctions to halt trade with the apartheid regime debate oI Anti-Apartheid the Why Hu had to go IN Hungary 1956 it was Russian political European challenge to the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy: they did the same to repress what appeared to be a bureaucracy of the rails and wholesale out of control in Czechoslovakia marginal. In Poland 1982, the implicit recognition bureaucracy could be collaboration again General Jaruzelski's which gagged the 10-million monopoly of But the Chinese Stalinist leadership has While expended great resources and energy in by • and mus SEEI of Chinese CP Chinese Yaobang in the mass student functionaries protests offers us a further reminder of the seeking to put a lid on the revolt Socialist Viewpoint No. 15 February 1987 p9
Movement at its Annual General
There, even sections of the left
opposition to the platform, led bi
supporters of the City of London Ai
group. failed to focus on the necessity
for the AAM to wage a campaign in the trade union and labour movement.
The AAM leadership have always resisted this - and any policies which might bring them into conflict with their pals in the trade union bureaucracy
Once again they were allowed to evade the sharp issue.
With another round of trade union conferences taking shape, movers of motions and amendments should look for ways of focussing the fight for practical solidarity, while at workplace level, militants should seek trade unior action which can begin to shut the doors to apartheid. fact that Chinese Stalinism, like its
counterparts, represents bureaucratic balancing act.
Though it suits Reagan, Thatcher and Japanese Premier Nakasone to convey the impression that China is on the verge of a
capitalist restoration, the inroads of the multinationals into the Chinese economy are relatively small and
The power of the ruling rests not upon its with imperialist governments or multinationals but upon its
Apolitical power within the nationalised Chinese economy.
some capitalist methods and limited inroads by private industry may be
Deng Xiaoping and other "reformers" as a way to spur on a flagging
economy, any full-scale restoration would render droves of party
Tand the state bureaucracy irrelevant and ultimately redundant.