SHAH Out! Owen Labour end support for the Shah! These will be the main demands national demonstration called 17 December by the Committee against Repression in Iran.
STEVE POTTER reports.
The GemonsTSHOn already received the backing of a numper of Labour Mrs and trade union leaders. CARI organisers are hoping for a big the student EUTHOUL movement fresh Iral conference the week before. Out! The campaign in solidarity the Iranian reached a high point over the last few weeks. for been organised in every major town with speakers from trade union movement and the left.
Links are being established between Iranians and dockworkers to Try ana acmeve te same degree of blacking of goods to Iran that was achieved in solidarity with the Chilean people. the Inside the Labour Party left MPs are organising to put the heat on Owen and Callaghan's craven support for the Shah. masses has The need is now for a broad based non-exclusive solidarity Meetings have movement which can link up all those people already Demonstrations organised nearly every weekend in London over the past tew weeks.
A big activity is needed to worKers launch that movement on To do this, common practice of excluding people trom must be ended.
This is the main reason why the Communist Eon ratner wan active. organised have been student coming weekends.
CARI has committee to are invited. the rather too speakers from CARI, demonstrations Free.
Party and International Marxist Group have put their efforts behind the 17 December demonstraIsraelis. these ronibe by the societies over the organised this too." plan for the march, to which all organisa- The tions of the workers movement Posters, leaflets, films and can all be obfained Box 4, Rising Upper Street, boycott London NI. (01-800 8958). official unions munist) Party paper, with a 70,000 circulation.
If imperialism tries a direct intervention, Gilani says, they will have another Vietnam on their hands.
But it is unlikely that they The claims, because American and Israeli troops are already operating with the •We have pictures of soldiers on Black Friday with long hair. None of our soldiers have long hair - they were Americans or *I read in your paper that the on Shah's speech was drafted by the US ambassador. I believe this and the people understand problem the workers face is the absence of political or even trade union organisa tion. More militant workers such as the better-educated oil workers, have long fought to the SAVAK-run They have organised discusSocialist Challenge 30 November 1978
Detente' versus solidarity THE plane connection between London and Beriin did work. writes OLIVER MAC DONALD, and I had to spend the night in a Dusseldorf hotel other travellers: the defence correspondent of the Observer' and a British executive who does big business with East Berlin.
executive seriously explained to the journalist how typically German East Germany was - authoritarian, efficient and sd explained with amusement how the regime deals with "its own kind" - the Marxists.
An economic expert he had known had been jailed for eight years for writing a Marxist criticism of the regime. name, lasked.
*Bahro, Rudolf Bahro the rubber industry, grinned.
CONCERT The next morning I arrived in West Berlin for the biggest demonstration of socialist solidarity with opposition Eastern Europe ever held in Western Europe: HEnC national Congress for Rudolf Bahro, organised by the Bahro Defence Committee in Berlin.
The conference funded through a concert with Wolf Biermann three weeks attended by . Successful Bahro conference people. When the concert was the radio the streets across the wall in the East were deserted population had tuned in. PLENARY Some three thousand people crowded into discussions of the conference and the nine working groups discussing vanous aspects Rudolf Bahro's book Alternative, a Critique of Real, He Existing Socialism (just out in hardback here from NLB).
Ernest Mandel Fourth International debated an official representative of the Italian Communist Party on the significance of the October His Revolution for the struggle for soda Is today.
Jiri Pelikan, Czech Socialist journal Listy, along Mihaily Vajda, a Hungarian Marxist, discussed the signifiof •In slovakia with representatives of the Western Rossana Rosanda Manifesto and Rudi Dutschke.
The last night of the congress was devoted to the character of socialism and speakers included representatives of the Jusos the West German Young Socialists OLICE organisations 7,000 Europe and socialist the the plenary The -Ine editor of the Opposition Czechoincluding of Rossanda on the right. sitionists from Eastern Europe The congress ended with a rally of about 1500 people in socialist Western the centre of West Berlin after it had unanimously adopted a über RUN BAHR Bahro. THE Berlin Bahro Congress: Mihaily Vajda is on the left, Jiri Pelikan fifth from left and Rossana resolution in solidarity with the event demonstration The West German media gave extensive coverage to the the West. proceedings at the congress and powerful was against the desperate measures taken bi the East German Politburo to silence Rudolf Bahro. But its significance was much greater It drew together militants of Fourth representatives of other Marxist organisations, left democrats and one official representative from the Euro.
- the PCI communist Parties spokesperson.
front of this scope, committed to mass action in defence of the anti-bureaucratic oppositions in Eastern Europe, could begin to change the political map in Europe disorganising the military and repressive lobbies East and It could begin to replace a *detente of the regimes against the working masses of Europe growing political solidarity socialist forces This is not a prospect that the Eurocommunist parties or the social democrats.
numbers of supporters not only on the revolutionary Marxist left but at the base of the mass parnes unemscive.
Rudolf Bahro's lonely stand for socialist democracy in the GDR is reverberating across the continent.
German by Thies Christo-
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Fastern REVERBERATING