AROUND THE WORLD SENEGAL Regime's increasing isolation ON APRIL 4 the main opposition party, the Parti democratique senegalais (PDS, Senegal Democratic Party), called a demonstration in the capital, Dakar, on the twentyninth anniversary of the country's independence. The PDS made no serious effort to organize this event however, and the party leadership did not turn out for it. Nonetheless, the majority of the city's population came out onto the streets to express their determination to put an end to Abdou Diouf's regime. Diouf had, of course, prohibited the demonstration, and the police were out in force in the centre of the city. There were a number of confrontations and the police made 180 arrests.
Confidence in the regime has fallen to its lowest point ever. The country has been devastated by an economic crisis, reinforced by rampant corruption at the top (see /V 153). There is nothing out of the ordinary in such a situation in a third world country, but what makes Senegal unusual is that the ruling party is a member of the Socialist International, and the country is protected by a strong French military presence. Dominated by French imperialism, Abdou Diouf's Senegal enjoys the total support of the French Socialist Party.
This purported showcase of Socialist International-style democracy in Africa is
OBITUARIES example of pluralism and parliamentary democracy. The reality is that, despite this, Senegal has been pillaged shamelessly by the ruling class. While arrogant displays of wealth can be found in some districts of the capital the rest of the population has been sinking ever further into poverty. Strikes and demonstrations are usually prohibited or repressed. Around 25,000 French nationals live there, a large number of whom work in business of one kind or another, with others in the state apparatus. Several hundred French military personnel are encamped in the capital.
Virtually every sector of society is hostile to the regime, and a strike of university teachers has been going on since February 11. There is also conflict within the army and the police. The timidity of the opposition becomes apparent when we take this background into account.
The PDS, the party of the liberal bourgeois opposition, refuses to organize the thousands of people who respond to its calls for demonstrations. Along with two pro-soviet organizations it has formed an alliance that restricts itself to demanding a government of national unity with the existing regime. At a time when the majori-
James Kutcher (1912-1989) AMERICA's most effective agitator for socialism during the McCarthy era in the 1950s, James Kutcher died February 10 at Veterans Administration Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. He was 76 years old.
Kutcher was the celebrated World War Il veteran who lost both legs to mortar fire in Italy in November 1943 and lost his job at the Veterans Administration to witchhunters in this country in August 1948. He was fired because he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, an organization on the attorney general's "subversive list" at the time.
He had joined the Trotskyist movement as a member of the Socialist Party in Newark, New Jersey, in 1936, and was a founding member of the SWP in 1938 and of the Fourth International later that year. He remained a member of the SWP until October 1983, when he was expelled. (This expulsion, as well as the wave of which it was part, was condemned by the Fourth International.) For the rest of his life, he continued to be a supporter of the Fourth International as a member of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency.
He won his job back in 1956, and two years later he won back pay. For almost ten years, Kutcher — the "legless veteran" - campaigned tirelessly against the political repression of the time. He became the most public and best known representative of socialism in that decade. Kutcher's long fight in defense of socialist ideas and the SWP's right to function legally as a revolutionary Marxist party was a setback for the witch-hunters, a victory for civil liberties and for the labor movement and for oppressed minorities. This son of immigrant workers was a true hero of the American working class. * Milt "Alvin" Genecin (1908-1989) 26 MEMORIAL meetings for Milt Genecin, known in the socialist movement as Milt Alvin, were held in San FranInternational Viewpoint #162 • May 1, 1989 cisco and Los Angeles, respectively on February 4 and 19. He died on January 26.
Genecin was born in Sebastopol to an upper-class Jewish family. They came to the US because the quota for Jews in good schools was filled. Genecin first worked as a stock broker and made money, but became disillusioned with capitalism as a result of the 1929 crash. He discovered Marxist writings in a public library. When he found himself being called a Trotskyist, he looked up the US Trotskyist organization. He entered the Socialist Party with the Trotskyists in the late 1930s and left with them, becoming a founder member of the Socialist Workers Party.
After the second world war, he became an SWP organizer and educator in Toledo, and builder of the party's fraction in the auto workers' union. During the 1950s, he made an important contribution to keeping the party alive in those witch-hunt years. He served on its National Committee and was a frequent contributor to its public journals and internal discussion.
In 1983, he was expelled in a wave of expulsions condemned by the Fourth International. Despite illness, he continued to work actively to build the Trotskyist movement in the United States, in the ranks of the Socialist Action branch in Los Angeles.
The following message was sent to the memorial meetings by Livio Maltan, for the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
"The Fourth International salutes and pays tribute to the life of Comrade Milt Alvin, a founding member of the Fl, a life-long revolutionary socialist. Comrades such as Milt helped to keep the revolutionary concepts of socialism alive for the future generations.
"He is now gone, but his life's achievements will be remembered and his vision of a socialist world will endure.
"Long live his memory. Long live the Fourth International." *
ty of the population is ready to fight, the main opposition forces restrict themselves to vague propaganda.
Only some small revolutionary currents, among them the Organisation socialiste des travailleurs (Socialist Workers' Organization, Senegalese section of the Fourth International) are attempting, with forces that are at present still weak, to offer a way forward for the popular movement. They propose mass organizations at a district level, giving an anti-imperialist content to the mobilizations, rejecting the idea of a government of national unity and taking part in the various strikes, which the PDS has so far refused to support. * YUGOSLAVIA Kosovo Albanians THE PAPER of the Swedish section of the Fourth International, Internationalen, carried an interview with Kosove Rexha-Bala, the chair of the Kosovo Albanian organization in the city of Göteborg in its April 6 issue. The Albanian immigrant leader said, among other things:
"What can you do when even children are being killed? The socialist organizations and the League of Yugoslav Communists [the official CP] are participating in attempts to organize resistance. Even Albanians who have lived in Sweden for many years are protesting, despite the fact that they risk not being able to visit home.
"If it goes on this way, there will be a civil war. They are shooting down people in Kosovo, and at the same time festivals are being held in Serbia to celebrate the triumph in Kosovo.' "
Rexha-Bala denied that any Albanian "irredentism" was involved in the protests: "That is pure propaganda! The people in Kosovo want to rule themselves. I wonder if Albania would really want to take in these Albanians. The Albanians in Yugoslavia have been born and bred there, and would hardly want Stalinism back." * BASQUE COUNTRY Pravda backs campaign against ETA IN RESPONSE to the breakdown of the negotiations between the government and ETA, in its April 10 issue, an article in Soviet Communist denigrated militant Basque nationalism and identified with the "anti-terrorist" campaign against it. The article was entitled: "The axe or the dove — the roots of Basque separatism."
V. Volkov, Pravda's correspondent in Madrid, ended his article with a flourish:
"The symbol of the terrorists is a snake's head and an axe blade. The terrorists paint these sinister symbols on the walls of homes, on fences and decorate their leaflets with them...It is hoped that the dove of peace will prove stronger than the snake and axe. The Basque country, like the rest of Spain, longs for peace and concord." *
SURE, WEVE HAD SOME FAILURES-
IN SHIP DESIGN...
'Great ... First the greenhouse effect - now this.'
EXON
BUT LET'S NOT LOSE SIGHT OF THE
SUCCESSES -
... PERSONNEL, CLEANUP PLANS, AND
RESPONSE TIME
OIL PRICES ARE
9 THE BOSTON GLOBE
TY LA TIMES SYNO.
LOOKING UP!
/ASSERMAN
EXXON VALDEZ
158.0
STUDENT DRIVER
CONF
HE LO
INTERNATIENAL
MARXISTREVIEW
Special issue on Europe:
Spring 1989
£2.50/$5
Vol. 4. M0.'
• Stages in European integration
BRUXELLES
- Pierre Bron
• European bourgeoisie: crisis of leadership — Ernest Mandel
• What social dimension to 1992?
— Claude Gabriel
• The workers' movement and 1992
- Livio Maitan
• Europe and women's rights
- Penny Duggan
• Socialist answers to the crisis
- Catherine Verla
Europe -
• Towards military integration?
horizon 1992
— Angela Klein
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USSR
Soviet bureaucracy tries out
"democratic" methods of repression THE MASSACRE in Tbilisi on April 6 has clearly become a dangerous embarrassment for the Gorbachev leadership both inside the USSR and worldwide. Moscow has quickly retreated from bloodcurdling threats of a general crackdown to an oily discourse about new, more democratic methods of handling the problems caused by the "excesses" of the state security forces. GERRY FOLEY years in prison and deprivation of all civic rights."
The official tone shifted with the publication of foreign minister Eduard Shevarnadze's speech to the August 14 plenum of the Georgian CP in Pravda of April 16. It was couched in hypocritical terms such as those so beloved of British Conservative governments, in particular. Perhaps the "restructurers" in the Soviet government consider those as just as worthy "democratic" models as the "anti-state laws" in the US or belated Francoism in Spain.
Walking the perestroika tightrope