Testing U.S. labor PLO

Scan page 11

(continued from page 2: “Greyhound strike tests U.S. labor”)fight on the side of the strikers. Inis can set an objective limit to the bosses' use of force. so long as clubs are sufficient, the bosses will not use guns against strikers. To do so would entail paying a heavier price than the results gained are worth. But since bosses and their hired hands are a small minority of the population, they are compelled in the final analysis to rely on their courts, jalls, and guns to force the workers into submission.

The Source of Workers' Power The power of the workers, on the other hand, comes from their vast numbers. The cops could not have dispersed a thousand pickets as easily as they did a few hundred on the first day's confrontation without spilling much blood and running the risk of arousing outrage and more sympathy for the strikers everywhere. This is the key to understanding the potential power of working people. Workers and their allies constitute the overwhelming majority. A strategy that can draw this enormous force into action is the key to victory• This brief outline is no more than the application of the lessons of the past. This strategy of mass mobilization was grasped and set into motion in the 1930s. These mass labor struggles established U.S. workers as the most powerful organized labor movement in the world. The great victories won by workers at that time explain why many There were able to coast along and gain steady increases in living standards without major class battles. The impact of big past victories weighs in the balance a long time after events. But the capital accumulated in past battles has been nearly used up.

New Leaderships Will Emerge The majority of fighters who led the big union battles of the thirties and forties are no longer active participants. The few who are left have become comfortable in their jobs and more conservative, or have been re placed by narrow-minded, self-serving careerists. The current rise of combativity will bring new, fresh forces forward. These new forces can renew the unions and transform them into effective instruments to defend the living standards of working people.

We in Socialist Action will be part of this fight--one that can finally be resolved only by a government made up Continued from page 4 What the Assad cabal, for al cunning, have not yet learned now that they have performe service, they are next on the Arab states to be balkanized.

The Omnipresent Saudis A nice irony is that the funds come from one source, the real instrument of imperialist control, the petro-dollars the Saudi monarchy. Saudi Arabia has subsidized the Syrian regime to the tune of nearly $10 billion since the Lebanese civil war. The Saudis, Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. And they are also the paymasters of the have as well been the primary supplier of funds to the Palestine Liberation Organization, to which Abu Musa has taken such proper exception.

Moreover, Saudi funds have been delivered directly to Yassir Arafat who maintains control over PLO purse strings to the disadvantage of other tendencies.

Apart from Saudi or Kuwaiti money, a principal instrument of Arab governmental backing for the PIO has been King Hassan of Morocco. Thus the PLO has become dependent upon the very regimes in the region who fear its SUCcess and act for American interests.

The tragedy being enacted, in the Palestinian camps of Nahr Bared and Bedawi on the outskirts of Tripoli is that of the crisis of nationalist leadership, not not only in the country-selling regimes of the Arab East but in all factions of the PLO.

George Habash, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Nayef Hawatmeh of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine are the left leaders of the PLO. They have maintained for years that the Syrian and Libyan regimes were "progressive," unlike those of Jordan or Saudi Arabia, and that the Syrian leadership had seen the light after Camp David.

I have spent time suggesting to them that the only light seen by Hafez al Assad was that reflected off coins. The primary programmatic difference between the Popular and Democratic Fronts and the pro-Saudi advisers to Yassir Arafat had been to urge upon him a working relationship with Syria or Iraq.

The summer of 1982 at least, put end to these illusions about Hafez Assad, except, it seems, on the part Continued from page eir hat eir of an al of Abu Musa and his comrades. It was Ezra Pound who wrote that the technique of infamy is to invent two lies and get people arguing heatedly over which one of them is true.

Neither the "moderate" leadership of Yassir Arafat, the "progressive" leadof the Popular and Democratic Fronts, nor the "dissident" Fateh rebels have formulated a strategy for the Palestinian people independent of the rotten regimes the region. These regard the Palestinian revolution as a clear and present danger, because the extraordinary struggle of the Palestinian nation--even under nationalist leadership--is the living reminder to their own suffering populace of what is to be done and who is in the way.

It has never been possible for the Palestinian revolution to be made by substitution--neither by small and random military operations from outside or by reliance on corrupt Arab governments. The failure of the PIO in all its currents flowed from its inveterate incapacity to use the one weapon crying out to be brought into play: the mass of the Palestinian people who inhabit the occupied territory of the West Bank, Gaza and of pre-1967 Israel.

They have, in all this, been abandoned and are, in consequence, in constant jeopardy. In Chile and the Philippines we have the living proof of what socialists must seek for the Palestinian cause--the self-activation of the masses. A people deprived of land, rights and civil liberty, subject to racist exclusion and the menace of expulsion punctuated by imprisonment and torture, can mobilize mass marches, and strikes. They can project their vision of a democratic and sOcialist Palestine by sustained popular struggle. A PLO faithful to its promise of a secular state will include in its leadership those anti-Zionist Jews who have fought the settler-coloniial State. In this way, the Jewish masses themselves will be able to who really speaks for them, who offers them a way out of perpetual war, insecurity and deprivation.

The Palestine Liberation Organization will, through the crucible of its presagony, find its way to a strategy mass struggle or pass into history having left a legacy of indisputable achievement in dignity and hope, but also a pattern of terrible and avoidable pain. O