INDONESIA
as part of a worldwide moratorium against the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and in solidarity with the liberation fighters of Fretilin. British complicity is particularly blatant-Indonesia receives more British aid than any other country outside the Commonwealth except Pakistan. BFI to give them a further grant means that they will be unable to finish it without more money. So they are mounting two benefit shows on Wednesday 31 March and Friday 2 April at 7 p.m. in the Collegiate Theatre, 25 Gordon Street, London W.C.1. (near Euston) where On the side of the people, Housey Housey. and part of the unemployment film will De shown, Jolowea Dy discussion.
Tickets are £1.20 or 80p for subscriber-members of the Other Cinema. We urge all our London readers to support these events.
Newsreel's films can be hired from: Other Cinema, 12-13 Little Newport street, London W.C.. 01-134 8308/9)
КТОЧТО This picket of the Indonesian Embassy in London was mounted on 18 March On the side of the people. the Newsreel Collective's latest film about Portugal, traces in a clear and well documented way the events leading up to the events of 25-26 November. As in the Collective's other film about the revolutionary upsurge in Portugal, which dealt with te suruggie ar acpuouca, me stars are not Gomes, Azevedo, Carvalho, soares, Neves or Cunnal - they are the workers and peasants in the factories, on the land and in the barracks. It is there that history is being made, and the Collective have done an excellent job in capturing tie mood or we masses 1!
The film picks up very well the often spontaneous attacks of the workers and peasants against the Portuguese ruling class. It deals not only with the bastions of the working class, such as the Setenave shipyards and Repblica, but also with occupations of empty houses and the establishment of a creche in which local soldiers work. The Portuguese workers and peasants have no 'welfare state' - instead, they have been attempting to create and run their own social services.
Such moves begin to pose an alternative power to that of the bourgeon stare aobama us, ane nave mererore run into increasing opposition from the Sixth Provisional Government. Following 25 November, reliable soldiers and para-military police have been used to break up attempts at self-organisation. One local clinic has been raided several times under the pretext of arms searches, but it still survives.
No film on Portugal can be taken seriously if it does not mention the question of the agrarian reform and the contrast between the north and the south. This film makes the comparison vividly.
In one series of shots we see people crawling on their knees to the Catholic shrine of Fatima, who supposedly appeared in 1917 to warn against the specwe or communism. on the oner nand the film shows a thousand armed southern agricultural workers mobilising to take back a herd of cows that their former boss had stolen from them. These different scenes highlight a division and unevenness that the revolutionary movement in Portugal cannot ignore On the side of the people is easily the best film available on the events in Portugal, but it does have certain political weaknesses. Firstlv, while it does cover the mass actions of the workers and peasants, it doesn't underline the fundamental failing in the inability to organise, coordinate and centralise the organs or popular power. now eise is 1 possible - having explained the collapse or discipune in the army and the inability of the ruling class to impose its soluLOUS - to understand une ranure or une working class to challenge the bourgeois state in a systematic fashion?
Secondly, the film makes very broad generalisations about the politics of the Communict Party and the Socialist Party, as well as nataly mentoning the role ol the PUR (Revolutionary United Front). The worst mistakes occur in relation to the Socialist Party, where the film falls prey to the trap of the ultra lefts and centrists in Portugal who dismiss the SP as social fascist. By using shots of a joint SP and PPD demonstration, the film gives the impression that the SP is a party with no base in tae working class Obviously the SP has a thoroughly bourgeois leadership, but nevertheless it also has an important base in the workers movement. If you do not understand this point, how can you explain the growing divisions within the SP? For example, some recent elections with In the SP have seen a contest betweer two slates, one backed by Soares and me ourer put up by worker mintants unhappy with the party's present course.
Points such as these need to be clarified within the workers movement in this country, and the film can certainly play a major role in opening up such discus sions. As an introduction to meetings it is excenent. we would urge all our read ers to ensure that it is snown in thei ared as soon as possible.
Ric Sissons
Mar of ts a fusion bete en a core of relutiona JULIEN, who edits the section on French • What sort of experiences arising from the work of the Ligue made you decide to launch a daily paper?
Ill reply in two ways. Firstly, the development of the Ligue had reached a point where we were clearly strong enough to initiate struggles and even affect the course of events.
The PTT (Post Office) strike in November 1974 is a good example, where we had a very important influence through the Red Mole Taupe Rouge) groups.
But the problem was that this possibility of influencing the course of events was limited by a publication system centred around a weekly. We saw during that strike how difficult it was to respond to the developing situaBOT - a daily could have been a decisive weapon for influencing the course of the struggle.
But secondly, the daily fits into a certain conception of how to build a revolutionary party. This conception was advanced in the Theses of the Tenth World Congress of the Fourth International and taken up by the First Congress of the LCR.
Very briefly, we have the conception that the way in which a revolutionarv party will be built will not take the form of a quantitative growth of a single organisation, but will arise Marxists and what we call the broad vanguard through a process of splits and fusions within to us absolutely essential to wield a political weapon, namely the daily, which would allow us to reach and influence these militants of the broad vanguard.
We think there exists in France today an audience large enough to keep the paper alive - that's to say, between 10-20,000 unorganised militants who are looking for political answers and aren't getting them from the Stalinists in L'Humanite nor more generally from the Union of the Left [the electoral bloc between the Socialist and Communist Parties and a few Left Radicals], nor in the pages of Liberation [a libertarian daily sponsored by Sartrel whose political project is rather unrelated to the concerns of trade union militants. This layer of up to 20,000 militants needs an instrument which will enable it to intervene in a daily fashion against the reformists.
• What kind of debate has there been on the role of the paper?
Within the Ligue the debate on the paper very quickly misfired because it was begun on the wrong footing. It was around two positions; one said we need a Trotskyist daily, and the other replied that we need an open daily. In the end it evolved a bit, and we reached virtual unanimity on the following conception.
We want to bring out a daily which will be the organisation's paper, which doesn't hide its colours. The articles will defend the line of the Ligue.
But, and it's a very important qualification, we want it to be a paper to which the different components of the broad vanguard can relate: a paper where different political currents can express and defend their points of view, in which trade union branches, action committees, struggle committees, women's groups and so on can argue their point without thinking that we'll go and cut an article, etc. We want to have a militant daily for the organisation in which, at the same time, a large place is reserved as an open tribune where all those who in some way represent the broad vanguard can express their point of view.
rouge LA RETRAITE UNCHIEN DE GARDE A 60 ANS!
DEVANT LE TRIBUNAL As for the extreme left, there's hardly been any debate with other currents. Lutte Ouvriere published an article welcoming the daily Rouge and encouraging us. The group which is the most worried is certainly the PSU (Unified Socialist Party 7 MARS 197 centrist organisation, nominally double the size of the Ligue). The daily will give us a formidable weapon for influencing certain militants of the PSU and winning them over and they know it. • How were you able to collect such a large sum as 2 million francs (over £200,000)? What effect did such a campaign have on the Ligue itself and its relationship with its periphery? The final sum was 2.3 million francs, which is an enormous amount for France. No group to the left of the Communist Party has ever collected more than 30-40,000 francs before, and we collected it in only eight months.
This confirms that there exists today a potential public, very large in relation to us, which has accepted the financial effort necessary to make sure the daily will come out. The money was not collected in the form of large sums from a few -was made up of small sums from very many people prepared to make a sacrifice for the fund-drive.
Those involved came from a far wider circle than our sympathisers in the Red Circles. Once these people start reading the Cent from the Red Circles.
- a classic cussions with these people such a far flung audience? set out in a code.
- on the contrary, it France the next morning.
the paper. for it. side. to do this. paper we will have to discuss whether to set up Readers Circles which would be differTake Italy as an example: we are sure that a paper like Lotta Continua finds it is selling 5-10 copies in practically every small town and large village in Italy. We'll probably find the same. People will be buying Rouge in is going on. a town where we don't have a single militant or even a sympathiser. The problem is to arrange some way of meeting and having dis• How is it that the paper will have In France there's a unique nationalised system for distributing papers called the NMPP which distributes papers to shops and kiosks throughout France. All the papers go through it, and it's obliged under law to distribute any paper which conforms to a certain number of criteria The daily Rouge starts coming off the presses at 11.30 pm, is bundled, labelled and taken by lorry to an NMPP centre which despatches them by train and plane to the provinces. The later copies go to the Paris region. It should mean that we are in every kiosk in of ideas That's true, and we've tried to resolve it in two ways. Firstly, many militants will arrange with a kiosk to buy four or five papers every morning.
which they will sell later at their place of work to sympathisers, and anyone else interested in Secondly, we'll be bringing out a 16-page paper on Saturday which has more the character of a magazine - like the old weekly Rouge.
This can be used for all sorts of sales by militants over the week-end in the markets and so on.
How is the paper structured internally?
Has there been any discussion on the division of labour and that sort of thing?
Let's first distinguish the editing from the prod uction side. Editing is made up of two main editors - Alain Krivine and Daniel Bensaid These have the mandate of the Ligue's Central Committee to resolve any political problem which may arise in the course of editing the paper. They basically have the final decision if, say, an article doesn't reflect the line of the organisation. And of course they are responsible for the overall thrust of the paper.
Beneath these editors, the paper is divided into five sections: French Politics; Workers Struggles; International; Daily Life; Culture.
which then has several journalists working Once the articles are written you've got the Editing Committee which exists on all papers two comrades who cut, correct and decide where the articles will go, etc. Then you've got composition, lay-out, plate-making and finally printing, bundling and despatch.
Our general thrust is to try as much as possible to suppress the division of labour.
But we are faced with two constraints. The first is that certain types of work involve a high degree of skill - for instance, those who work on the web-offset printing machine can hardly be replaced by those on the editing On the other hand, there are a whole series of jobs which could be handled collectively by all the full-timers. The journalists' job is a lot more interesting than composing all day or doing the lay-out, so we want to see that the Journalists have manual tasks to do in the course of the day. But the problem is that so far we don't have enough journalists to do anything else than write up the newspaper otherwise it won't come out.
What would be good is if they could handle the switch-board, do the cooking in the canteen etc. as well. But today we don't have the means • Don't you feel that the existence of but also sometimes very competent analysis is a major problem?
Yes, it's a big problem. Generally speaking, we are trying to produce a daily paper which is serious and informed, which carries analysis and which doesn't necessitate having to buy another one. But we have to compete with other papers at the level of information notably Le Monde I might say, however, that while Le Monde is particularly well informed on international affairs, it doesn't have people all over the world who are engaged in struggle. Often we will be able to pull scoops on Le Monde and everyone else by being part of the Fourth International. Just when Le Monde begins to feel a bit marginalised, a bit of a spectator -that's to say when the real struggles break out — we will have first hand information of what Our main advantage is that Le Monde is an evening paper while ours will hopefully arrive in the morning. So there isn't a total competition between the papers. But what we must avoid like the plague is to turn Rouge into a morning paper made up of last night's supper (Le Monde) dished up with some Trotskyist sauce. That would be a caricature of a daily.
To conclude: we want a paper which contains all the news necessary for the public we are writing for — a real daily paper which can compete with anyone at the level of news and information. But secondly, we define our paper in relation to three things.
1. It's got to be a militant paper which states its position, which campaigns.
2. It's got to be a weapon for struggle; in other words, by its analyses, by its news, by the proposals it makes, it must serve its public, notably worker militants looking for answers in a situation where they are already breaking from the reformists.
3. It must provide an arena for debate; a paper where there is a continual confrontation
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15 March marked a historic step forward for the world Trotskyist movement with the start of a daily publication by the French paper Rouge (organ of the Ligue Communiste Revo- lutionnaire, French section of the Fourth International). John Watts asked PIERRRE
• But if members of the Ligue will not be selling the paper, won't there be a
problem in integrating it into the life of the organisation?
a bourgeois newspaper, Le Monde, which provides not only detailed information