Part 1 - DW062 001 029 001

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NEW AGE 10p MONTHLY PAPER OF THE COMMUNIST WORKERS' MOVEMENT. No.4. June, 1978. ZAIRE: KREMLIN STEPS IN ZAIRE (SHABA) Kolwezi Lubumbashi ANGOLA ZAMBIA Recently, an attack was launched against the south- ern part of Zaire (formerly Belgian Congo) by a group of mercenaries. Behind this attack was the Soviet Union. The area of Shaba (formerly Katanga) is very rich in cop- per. In preparing to launch a third world war, the USSR want to lay its hand firmly on the key sources of raw materials. HISTORY OF MERCENARIES The same ethnic group is spread over Shaba provinve, the northern part of Angola, and north-west Zambia (this is because the African empire which used to exist in the area was carved up by the co- lonialists of Belgium, Britain and Portugal). When Belgium was forced to bow to the national liberation movement in the Congo at the beginning of the '60s it dre- amt up the idea of playing on the tribal sympathies of the southern Congolese and fomen- ting a secession of the copper rich area. This was carried out under the puppet leadership of Moise Tshombe using an army of "Kat- angese Gendarmes", with Afric- ans as cannon-fodder, European mercenary officers and headed by the sinister "general" Mbumba. NEW MASTERS After the secession collap- sed and then Mobutu took power (continued on p. 7) CONTENTS Hackney Abortion Campaign.........P.3. CWM/RCLB: Determined to Unite.........P.4. East End Murder..P.5. Liverpool F.C. V. Councillors......P.5. Cameron Was Right............P.6. Ireland..........P.6. Protests in Georgia..........P.7. Being Ill in China............P.8. (A longer article than that on the left about recent events in Zaire will appear in our next issue, as will a review of "Why Paul Foot Should Be A Soc- ialist;"this was held over because of short- age of space.) THE WAY FORWARD In recent months, var- ious sections of the work- ing class who have gone into struggle for trade union rights or economic demands have suffered setbacks and defeats: Grunwicks workers and the firemen are obvious examples. Some other workers have accepted 10% pay deals, including recently the post- men. These things have to be faced up to as setbacks-it is no use pretending they did not happen. However, if many workers and working people learn from them, then these bad things can become good things. A growing number of workers are seeing through the Labour Party and the trade union leadership which supports it. At one time, the Labour Party could call on the working class for support at elec- tion time and get it-now that support is steadily falling. Many are not in- terested in voting at all, while others cast about for alternatives, and still others vote Labour, not be- cause they hope for anything good from it, but as a way of keeping out parties they feel are worse. Trade union bureaucrats have also come in for grow- ing criticism from the peo- ple they misrepresent. Some, like Roy Grantham of APEX, who let down the Grunwicks strikers, (he wanted to stop mass picketting at least in part because he was afraid that "industrial unrest" would upset Labour's chances of being re-elected), or Tom Jackson, one of the leading architects of the Social Contract, are well known supporters of the Lab- our government. Others, who have taken a more critical line towards Labour (like Reg Birch of the AUEW) have finally been shown up as EDITORIAL hatchet men for capitalism when they have tried to hold down workers' demands. All these people have been ex- posed partly in the process of sections of the working class suffering setbacks. We, as Marxist-Lenin- ists, are of course not happy that the working class has had to pay a bit of a price for the deeper know- ledge of the trade union and Labour bureaucrats, but, all the same, we welcome the fact that there is a move away from these people going on. Our attitude is completely different from that of the revisionist counter-revol- utionaries of the "Communist" Party of Great Britain, the slavishly pro-Moscow New "Communist" Party revision- ists and the various trot- skyite groups, who try to make out that the Labour Party is somehow better than the other parties of capit- alism. More and more, the words of these defenders of social-democracy are being disregarded. These developments make certain tasks more urgent. Firstly, the building of a revolutionary party of the working class-a Marxist-Len- inist party-which alone is capable of leading the struggle for socialist rev- olution in Britain. That is the only real alternative to the politics of the various parties of the ruling class. British Marxist-Leninists should work hard to unite the M-L movement and to lay the political, ideological and organizational bases for the single M-L party-all those who really want soc- ialist revolution should work with and/or join the Marxist-Leninist organ- izations working on this task. Secondly, we must work to make unions into organ- izations of class struggle, not of class collaboration, as they are, in general, at the moment. This will take a lot of hard work by revolu- tionaries and militant work- ers. Unions need to be made more democratic, and demo- cratization has got to begin, not from the top, but from the bottom-the branches. They need to be made inta organs of struggle against capitalism, against pay re- straint, bad conditions, long hours of overtime and for a shorter working week, higher pay and better con- ditions. (Continued P.2.)

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