Socialist Party strengthens
SWEDEN like Göteborg today the employers are desperate to find more labor because of expansion. So we have had an increase in union membership, both in the private sector and especially in the public sector. • What sort of fightback has there support in trade
The first wave of protest came in the public sector, because the government and the bosses tried to use the situation unions to create a split between workers in the private sector and the public sector.
The first pretext they came up with was to say that workers in the private sec-
LONG FROZEN in the grip of an almost totalitarian social democracy, in recent years the Swedish labor movement has been shaken by important challenges from revolutionaries. More than a year and a half ago, however, the revival of militancy in the unions was slowed down by shock at the unsolved murder of Premier Olof Palme.
In a way this event marked a watershed in the political history of Sweden, which had seemed more civilized in comparison with most other capitalist countries. In an interview with Gerry Foley in July, Göte Kilden, a leader of the Socialist Party, Swedish section of the Fourth
International, described its evolution since Palme's murder.
OW MUCH does the shock at
H
Palme's murder still affect the union movement?
We used to say that workers in
Sweden were hit by the ricochet of the bullet that killed Olaf Palme. The employers, the social-democratic government and the union bureaucracies together exploited the situation, exploited the shock and mourning among workers. Before the murder, there was a reactivation of some social movements, and especially in the case of oppositional currents inside the unions. The momentum was broken.
The period has also been marked by several filthy scandals, which is is something that Swedes are not used to. The most important one is connected with Palme's murder. That has to do with the way the police chief of Stockholm handled the investigation. He did all his sniffing around the
Kurds and other refugees in Sweden. He said that one of their parties, the PKK, was probably responsible. But after a year he had to resign. The police were able to find no evidence whatsoever that the PKK or any other Kurdish organization or individual was respon-
In the meantime, they had neglected all the other trails, in particular those to involvement by elethat pointed in the the Stockholm police ments themselves, such as right-wing groups inside the police force, connections with the World Anti-Communist League and other right-wing forces.
During the same period, the peace movement in Sweden uncovered big illegal arms deals by the Bofors firm with various countries. Moreover, in with this, one public arms inspector was killed by a train in the
Maybe it was murder, maybe it was suicide. He had informa-
The next scandal came in connection with a big arms deal with India. Local officials were bribed. This has become a big problem for Rajiv Gandhi. Some of his close associates are alleged to have accepted payoffs.'
Our ombudsman for justice had to resign because of misuse of money, junkets, private luxury dinners and so on. We have seen all these things - the murder of Palme and the scandals -strengthen the feeling masses of disgust and distrust with politics and with politicians, but also with big employers.
We have also seen some defeats for the workers in this period beginning in February, one year after the murder. They came in areas that do not have a large population but are important for their industry - the steel-producing areas, the mining areas. There have been defeats. In these places, there is a big problem with unemployment.
On the other hand, the situation has been quite different in the big cities, like Stockholm and Göteborg, where there is less unemployment. In a place tor should get more pay because they had less job security. Of course, this big campaign was related to the question of taxes and re-privatization.
The nurses reacted in a good way. They carried out a long fight for their wages, but also in defence of their value as a workforce. The question of also. They compared what they did with
However, even if we have had an increase in membership of unions, whole period was marked by a decline in activity by workers. Although members of the unions are not at all content, they do not engage in activity because they are dissatisfied with their leaderships, and they see no real alternatives to them.
In the political field, there has been an expression of this attitude in the opinion polls. The percentage for the Green party for example has mushroomed from 2% in 1985 to as high as 10% in the polls today. In the unions this search for an alternative was expressed in a more modest way in elections where we ran candidates - party members or SP members together with independent forces close to our union positions. • What has this meant for your work in the unions? This year, there were big possibilities for winning support, although we still have the problem of drawing people into activity. People are prepared to vote for a new leadership, but still not prepared to take militant actions. For us at Volvo, this has meant breakthroughs in two places.
We have had a long tradition in leading the union at the Volvo truck plant in Göteborg. In the auto plant, the union opposition built up a tradition of involvement in daily struggles over ten years, but it had never been able to win a majority in any one of its local union bodies. But now party members and independent workers close to our union positions have won an election victory 1. On the Bofor scandal in India, sce Rajiv's Fading 1 1 star", IV 121, June 1, 1987. September 28, 1987 • International Viewpoint
SWEDEN for the first time and taken the majority leadership of the daytime assembly line at the auto assembly plant.
This is a unit with 1,500 workers. It is a very modern unit, known heart of the assembly plant. In the shift line (there is the daytime line and the shift line) there is a stalemate now. We still do not have a majority, but even so comrades close to our tions have a big influence in the lead-
• What are the perspectives for the next round of bargaining?
think that now there will be new negotiations at the end of the year and the beginning of 1988. Already the gov-
Internationalen ® ership. At the same time, we have held our bastion in the truck plant, where we now get around 65% of the vote, holding all the posts in the union leadand nearly all the shop steernment has taken a very aggressive stance. It is saying 3% and nothmore for the
AFRIKAS STÖRSTA in another Volvo plant was important for us. In the early and mid-1970s we had a broader network of workers at the Göteborg plant. Then, we were weakened, and there was a tendency to become isolated in the truck plant. The victory in the auto plant gives us possibilities for broadour network once again, and maybe for picking up enough forces to challenge the central union leadership of 14,000 metalworkers in Göteborg.
Also in Umeå, in the far north, two comrades were elected to the union leadership for the first time in a plant of 700-800 workers. In all these elections, the social democrats ran candipublic sector, and if they want more, there has to be rationalization and a trimming Sid 3 down of the workforce. They can take their choice. But no more than
On the other hand, in the metal industry and in the private sector, we think the workers are in a mood for revenge. There has been a
STREJK dates against us.
The same possibilities were reflected in several other workplaces. For the first time, we ran candidates at Atlas
Copco, a metal plant in the Stockholm area. In those units where we had comrades, we got a majority. But overall we got only about 35%. Still, as a first effort, it showed an encouraging potendramatic redistribution of wealth in Sweden during the years of two bourgeois coalition governments and the five years of democratic
Ungdomsm
SI
Internationalen, weekly journal of the Socialistika Partien
(Socialist Party), Swedish section of the Fourth International
In other unions, such as among hospital workers in
Göteborg, comrades were elected to the leadership of a union organization of several thousand workers. Comrades were elected to bod-
Saab-Scania plant
In Stockholm, where we have had a long experience of working together with other oppositional forces in the local transport union - a big organization with various sections - we are reaching equality with our oppo-
We have been a minority that had important positions, but now ning a bigger and bigger base. And this has been important for taking more general initiatives.
This year especially, comrades in that union have been able to carry out some anti-racist activities, to support antiracist organizations. The skinheads and fascists have been carrying provocations in the underground, they have been confronted by the anti- racists. So, it was important that the a of the anti-racist groups.
International Viewpoint • September 28, 1987 ernment. This has been the biggest redistribution value since the general strike of 1909, which started things going in the workers' favor.
Now there has been a turnaround. Export companies are swimming in money and profits made in this last period. This government started its term with a 15% currency devaluation. M How much has the standard of living of workers declined? It amounts to something like 10% of real wages. The standard of living was at its peak in the middle of the 1970s. For Volvo workers, it was 1976. Since then we have lost the equivalent of a month's wages. In the last two or three years we haven't lost much. But we didn't take back anything either. Now, for some time, peak of a boom, and the workers want to regain some of what they lost in the
The crucial problem is leadership. All the indications are that when people do something, wherever a group of workers gives leadership or puts forward a proposal for action, it will be supported. The problem is the weakness of the union opposition nationally. • Does that mean that what is decisive about Göteborg is not Göteborg but you? The subjective factor for the moment is very important. But the objective situation is also that in Göteborg you find concentrated huge forces of labor, a lot of metalworkers; it is a proletarian town, the leading working-class town in Sweden. There are traditions, and there are other left forces at work that have traditions. • What are the other left forces? The official Communist Party, the VPK, is a weak influence in the unions today. I think we can say that our union influence is stronger than that of the VPK. I'm sure that they have more members altogether. But they do not act as socialists or communists in their
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unions. • What about the Moscow loyalists, the Workers Communist Party, the AKP? It was supposed to have taken a lot of the old working class base of the Yes, but it is withering away. It exists. They are able to produce a daily paper, I think with big subsidies from East European countries. Their biggest base today may be among immigrant workers, people who were Communist Party members in their countries of origin, from places such as Chile, Greece, Finland and so on. Exile organizations. • What about the Maoist groups that were very large in the 1970s? The biggest group were the "popular front" Maoists, the KFml. There were the leading organizers of the very strong Vietnam movement. Today, it is a tiny group calling itself the Solidarity Party. It has two main objectives. One is to support the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. That has to do with its background. They concentrate on fight-
"Soviet imperialism." They have difficulties in giving total uncritical support to the Mujahadeen forces, to Islamic fundamentalism and
Their second objective is to support workers' mobilization for democratic demands and also for defending the standard of living. On that level, we can collaborate with them. In general, this is a demoralized group looking for a future.
The "third period," or ultra-left Stalinist Maoist group, the KFmlr, is different. They still have a real stronghold in Göteborg, though it is weakening. Moreover, they are getting more and more pro-Soviet. In this situation, they even tend to criticize Gorbachev for being too democratic. They cling to the Stalinism of the past. only have a very modest influence on that all prospective immigrants from Africa should be tested for AIDS. Yes, they have very reactionary positions concerning homosexuals and the AIDS question. They make a point of denouncing "petty-bourgeois homosexuals" in their paper. • Is the Solidarity Party a factor in the union movement at all? No. They have some activities. And usually we can agree with them around proposals to fight for union democracy, which they have always seen as very important.
We act politically — not only carrying out a political fight concerning wages, unemployment, racism, international solidarity and so on, but we Socialist Party, in most cases well-known members of the Socialist Party. They don't. They prefer to be politically anonymous. • Can you recruit people directly to the party in the factories? Yes. We have had some recruitment. But last year, membership stagnated. We recruited some, some left. That is it is difficult to organize youth. You can get support, but for the members of left organizations. tend instead to support Greenpeace or • What about the circulation of your press in the factories? For example, would it be read by a much wider circle than your membership? Oh yes. But it has had its ups and downs. In some periods, we are very active. In other periods, we are not that active with the press. The big difference is that today our weekly has a content, a line that is possible for politically interested workers to follow.
SWEDEN At the VPK convention some months ago, we got a very nice complement. The main reporter about their press was a worker from Dalarna, and represents a left current in the party. He said: "I am not ashamed to say to you that my coworkers and radical left social-democratic people in the steel plants in Dalarna read Internationalen, not our weekly.
"I also prefer it, because it gives more leadership, more information, more discussion about problems concerning workers than our weekly. Our weekly is more a journalists' project, but not a political project for strengthening our union work."
But I think much more can be done. We have problems with a slowing down of our activity, which also affects the distribution of the press. That comes both from the aging of our cadres and our difficulties in recruiting a younger people. We have some young people around us in the truck plant, in the union. But we have had difficulty in educating them and convincing them to become party members.
The leading cadres of our party are becoming more occupied with their families. So, they don't have the same energy when it comes to selling the press and so on. That is a problem as a whole for our party.
We need more young people who can spend a greater amount of time on activities like that. In the first years of our work in the Volvo plants, we spent more or less all night on union work, producing leaflets. And now, many of us are middle-aged with families and we cannot keep up that pace. We have a more solid base. We have more solid work that's much more related to concerns of workers, but the old energy is lacking.
We need more rebellion, so to speak, more youth coming in. * politics, because they deliberately re- Notebooks for Study and Research main outside union activities. They REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY TODAY refuse to run in elections.
IN THIS new NSR 4, Daniel Bensaïd reviews some of the fundamental • Where do they recruit, in the fac- positions of socialist politics: the role of the state, the evolution of tories or among the unemployed? proletarian class consciousness, the notion of revolutionary crisis and I would say that if they recruit today it dual power. He attempts to demonstrate their relevance to current is among public workers and intel- debates on left governments, the welfare state, self-management lectuals. and democracy, and in the light of experiences in the 1960s and
1970s in Southern Europe and Latin America. Also included are ex• It seems strange that a Stalinist tracts from articles by Ernest Mandel and Nikos Poulantzas. cult like that would be attractive to in- Also available: tellectuals. "The place of Marxism in history" Ernest Mandel They were well organized. They had a "The Chinese revolution, Part I" Pierre Rousset lot of actors. They produce in some NSR 3, "The Chinese revolution, Part II" Pierre Rousset aspects a very good paper. In other regards, it is political pornography. Individual copies: 20FF (£2, $3.50). Subscribe to NSR (9 issues): 180FF, £18, $31 (airmail: add They had a tradition in Göteborg with former Communist Party members. • There was a right-wing aspect, wasn't there? They had this campaign
20%) Indicate beginning issue of subscription.
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13 September 28, 1987 • International Viewpoint
NICARAGUA
A FTER THE signing of the
peace accord in Guatemala, do you think that there are real prospects for peace in Central America? Nicaragua is a country with a great interest in achieving peace, both for principled reasons and because of immediate needs. We want peace for reasons of principle because the revolution was made to win lasting peace. We are champions of peace out of necessity. We cannot continue to live with a situation of endless war.
In reality, war means a lack of oxygen for us. While it is true that the moral and political reserves of a people involved in a revolution are inexhaustible, the fact is that a certain anxiety has arisen among the people over the question of peace.
The people have not yet become tired. Even when its dynamism seems exhausted, a people engaged in a revolution finds new sources of energy. I think that I represent the feeling of the Nicaraguan people when I say that they are in favor of peace, inasmuch as over these last years they have sacrificed a lot of their blood in the struggle. Nicaragua's biggest and the most torrential river is neither the Rio Coco nor the Rio Matagalpa but the river of our blood. I In June, President Daniel Ortega said that he would not negotiate questions of domestic policy outside the country. Isn't that what he has just done in Guatemala? This accord does not concern domestic policy. It describes our point of view on democracy, and this point does not pose any problems for us, because it
"The government's pledge give impetus to an authentic democratic, pluralist, and participationist process, which involves advancing social justice and respect for human rights, national sovereignty, the territorial integrity of states and the right of all nations to determine their economic, political and social blueprints freely and without foreign interference of kind." (Esquipulas Accord, No. 3.)
We have nothing to add to this document. It is easier for us to document with Guatemala than with any other government in Central America. So, Daniel Ortega was not in contradiction with what he said in June. • Despite the peace accords, it is likely that the United States will not withdraw their support from the contras. And so, it seems difficult to foresee a cease-fire. What is Nicaragua going to do then? I think indeed that the United States in practice holds a veto over the Guatema| la accords. Reagan's intent is to con• tinue his aggression against our counInternational Viewpoint • September 28, 1987 try and to block the peace process in Central America. However, there are a series of important factors that make it difficult for him to carry out his plans. The United States had decided to intervene directly in Nicaragua. But there was the Irangate scandal, the shooting down of Hassenfuss's airplane and other elements that prevented such an intervention.
In the same way, I think that a series of factors are going to emerge that will force the government of the United States to accept the reality of the Guatemala accords. The American government's wish is to liquidate the Nicaraguan revolutionary process. But it has not succeeded in doing this. The fact that this intention has been implicit shows the extent of the difficulties that it faces in trying to prevent the implementation of the Guatemala peace
Moreover, if Reagan intervened with his own peace plan a few days before the meeting of the five Central Ameri can presidents, that shows that he was in a difficult situation that forced him ground to a certain extent. Even though the way the plan is formulated is unacceptable to us, we would be prepared to open a discussion on it. In fact, this plan reflects a certain flexibility on Reagan's part. What is more, one might suppose that Reagan will encounter certain difficulties in retreating from it. • Do you think that this peace accord is a victory for Nicaragua? I think that it is a victory for all the Central American countries and most especially for ours, which is undoubtedly the one with the greatest interest at stake in these accords. It is not surprising that we have already started to implement it. We take account of the fact that we face a real danger of an invasion by the United States.
The signing of this peace accord puts difficulties in the way of Reagan ting congressional approval for new subsidies to the contras. Rejecting new subsidies to the contras would be the best contribution American members of Congress could make to the implementation of the Guatemala peace accords. In this way also, they would open up an honorable way out for the Reagan administration. Moreover, the very fact that the United States agreed to accept dialogue, even if the starting points were unacceptable to us, represents a step forward.
After long internal discussions, the Sandinista leadership decided to open a dialogue on the basis of the American proposition, knowing full well that the United States would defend a position completely contrary to our interests.
It has to be understood that in any negotiation, the parties involved begin
Interview wit
We mu
meal coexisten national s and the r are not ne
AFTER THE signing of the Ce
Esquipulas (see article on pa