monstrated a number of times in front of the police line. In the afternoon, workers from several places...came to demonsstrate.
"The cops were bombarded with everything the workers could get their hands on, and a police car was overturned."
But the action was not sustained. Schmidt quoted a local activist:
"It was a very strong demonstration. But it could have been stronger. were a lot of us. We could have cleared the area of cops without having to use violence, just by marching forward in columns and sweeping them
"The problem was that the whole thing was too unorganized. scabs were stopped from working, the crowd broke up. scabs could resume work on the weekend and Monday."
In the B&W shipyard in Copenhagen, the use of police and scabs led to a sympathy strike of the ship-repair work-
Schmidt described how the action developed in the February 10 Klasse-
"The crane sirens started screaming. It was a signal for the 1,100 workers on the day shift. It meant there were police in the yard. A few minutes before a small bus of cops had come clear away the dockers who were block-
"Work stopped everywhere. gan moving toward the gate. They went outside and would not return until the
Shortly after that, the gate the last workers. They had been locked out.
"The atmosphere had been tense in the yard from the early morning. confrontation was shaping up. That was
"On Monday, protest strike against the yard management permitting the scabs and foremen to load steel plates that had been blacked by the dockers. The loading was done under police protection. tations continued Tuesday and Wednes-
La workers assembly decided to resume work. But at the same time it decided to continue support for the dockers and to refuse to work under police surveillance. On Tuesday, the police came in and cleared out the dockers. The second time, they were stop ped by B&W workers. The workers had had enough....
"At a short meeting on Thursday morning, the leadership announced that the management had told them that if the workers walked out, they would be locked out."
The next time the police came the workers walked to the gate but did not go out. However, when they returned to their workplaces, they found that the gas and electricity had been cut off. The management told the workers they would not be paid until they "normalized" work, that is stopped protesting the presence of the police.
Unfortunately, the shop stewards in the other main B&W branch, the marinemotors production section held back the workers there from supporting those locked out in the other section. This is despite the fact that in marine-motors production itself there were a number of spontaneous work stoppages where the workers came into direct contact with the police.
These cases illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the dockers strike. The dockers were determined to fight. Their example attracted groups of workers and the unemployed to join them, even without leadership and at great risks. The impressive solidarity actions that occutted showed that there already are elements of an alternative, militant leadership in the workplaces.
The shop stewards represent a distinct layer in the Danish unions, much closer to the workers and more militant than the union apparatus.
However, the national shop-stewards organization and most of the lowerechelon organizations are dominated by
Party, which basically tails the Social Democratic leadership. It has not tried to make these bodies into an alternative leadership with an alteruses them as a back-up system for the Social Democratic bureaucracy.
For example, the shop-stewards organization in the marine-motor production section of B&W, which let the lockedout ship-repair workers down, is dominated by the CP.
The other main political force in the shop stewards movement is the Socialist People's Party (SF), a sort of precursor of Eurocommunism.
Actually, the CP and SF have worked out a symbiotic relationship. Since the SF is not associated with repression in East Europe, it is more popular with the voters. In fact, it has emerged as the main electoral alternative to the Social Democracy. But, as an electoral party, it does not bother much to organize its supporters in the unions. It leaves the union work to the CP, which in turn relies on the SF for parliamentary operations.
Copenhagen workers support dockers (DR)
In fact, the workers parties in parliament did little or nothing to help the dockers during the strike. The CP made a proposal that the workers party deputies meet with dockers representatives. But then it "clarified" its position, saying that it would be best if the dockers union leaders themselves set up such a meeting.
The CP itself has no seats in parliament. Besides the SF and the Sp, the other left party in parliament is the Venstresocialisten (Left Socialists), a federation of various left and countercultural groups without a coherent alternative policy for labor.
The attitude of the Social Democratcontrolled national labor confederation (the LO) to the dockers strike was direct-
13
ly hostile. In fact, the LO chairman made a statement that the labor organization should adopt rules making it easier to expel groups of workers who do not "listen to advice" from the labor tops.
Thus, despite the support of rank-and-file workers and numbers of shop stewards throughout the country, nationally organized support for the dockers was absent. The general sympathy and scattered support actions were not sufficient to enable the dock workers to beat the government in a head-on con-
The dock union leadership ended the work stoppage, without getting any concessions from the bosses or the government. Negotiations are continuing, but in various places the bosses have said that they will not allow strikers to return to work.
Nonetheless, the dockers strike represented an important first experience in battle by the Danish working class against the general offensive launched by the right-wing government. The dockers put up an impressive fight. And, in a number of sharp actions they and other sections of the working class that came to their aid showed that they could beat the cops the dockers strike represented a continuation and deepening of right-wing government in October, soon after it came into office.
For the dockers, the new government's program of social cutbacks was a direct attack on their pay packets. employed on a casual basis, and work only a few days a week. rest of the time, they collect unemployment insurance.
One of the first measures of the new government was to cut the unemployment benefits for dockers • kroner a day to 226, which will represent a cut in yearly income of up to 20,000 kroner, or close to 3,000 US dollars.
Other unemployment benefit cuts hit building workers and fishermen hard. Workers out of work because of weather conditions will now receive no benefits for the first three days. That means in effeet, as a building worker pointed out in an interview in Klassekampen, people will be forced to work in bad conditions and thereby inevitably undermine their health.
The government claims that the old system of unemployment insurance maintained structural underemployment. In an interview in Klassekampen, a dockers leader pointed out that what the government wants to do is increase full unemployment at a time when there are already 300,000 out of work, about 12% of the workforce according to the official statistics.
There is no lack of readiness on the part of the workers to fight back. The installation of the right-wing government in late September and the announcement of its austerity program prompted one of the biggest protest movements in Danish history. 14
On October 8, fifty thousand people massed in front of parliament. On October 13, demonstrations called throughout the country by the unions and the unemployed organizations drew 120,000 people in all - 80,000 of them in Copen-
For a country the size of Denmark, these were massive demonstrations, the equivalent of about 6 million people in the U.S., for example.
The protests began as local initiatives, essentially spontaneous movement. None of the big labor or political organizations offered leadership. band wagon started rolling, they were obliged to jump on. the wheel and steered it into a blind al-
The trade unions and shop stewards groups organized the protests so that they were after working hours and thereby counterposed to strikes. the actions began to fall off. The final big demonstration in Copenhagen on October 25 was only 30,000.
The way that the right-wing government was established illustrates the problem. It was not on the basis of a rightwing electoral victory. It was through a shuffling of parliamentary coalitions, in which the Social Democratic minority government of Anker Jorgensen effectively handed responsibility for carrying the austerity policy further to a new bourgeois coalition.
The initials of the parties involved in the new coalition spell the word for "toilet seat" in Danish, and so the government is known as the "toilet-seat 'cabinet."
It has become abundantly clear that the Social Democrats want this government to remain in office to do the dirty work. If they had put their weight behind the October demonstrations, they could have forced new elections, with excellent chances of winning.
The Social Democrats left no doubt about their objectives in the December 7 vote on deploying nuclear missiles
There is a powerful anti-nuclear movement in the country, and the lineup in parliament made it perfectly possible to put the government in a
The SF and Left Socialists introduced a motion calling for a cutoff of support for NATO. But then the SP introduced one that in fact accepted the government's present proposal and effectively committed to nothing in the future but was sweetened with the provision that "after this" there would be no money
The bourgeois parties all voted for the SP motion.
the protest demonstrations and the dockers strike, while the workers ex-
"the toilet-seat govfew showed any enthusiasm for the idea of a return of the SP to the seat of power.
the basic problem of both the mass protest movement and the dock-
Facing a general offensive by the bourgeoisie, the workers have no leadership on a national scale ready to
In such a situation, it is nearly inevitable that there will be
However, the reformist machines are not so well integrated nor the workers other north European countries. alternative militant leadership.
the example of the Polish has had an influence in Denmark in particular. Following the military crackdown in Poland, Danish dockers carried out actions in solidarity with their Polish counterparts. dockers strike, the Danish Fourth Internationalists stressed the example of Solirelevant as Danish workers were obliged to work under police surveillance.
In the past four months, gone through a very intense exof struggle. that, under the impact of this, the radicalization shown in these battles will continue to deepen.
peoples. The Tribunal has already held the URNG; the ex-rector of Guatemala
City University, Doctor R.Castillo Montalvo, whose father is currently Guatmalan ambassador at the UN; leaders such as Pablo Ceto of the Frente Popular 31 de Enero and a member of the CGUP (3), Rigoberto. Menchu, Gabriel Ixmata, and Arturo Arias, secretary of the ATCG