The AGM of the Chile Solidarity Campaign last Saturday took two important decisions which effect. ively blocked the manoeuvres of the Communist Party to gain complete control over the campaign.
First, a resolution was passed making the coring Trade Union conference the major priority for the campaign, and stating that the Conference must he focussed around three issues: a fight against the Labour Goverment's appalling position on Chile, the extension of the boycott of Chilean trade, and the adoption of political prisoners.
This clear policy is in direct contradiction to the rest of the programme of the campaign produced by the CSC Executive. The latter not only fails to prioritise any issues for the campaign, but also talks wistfully of how we must concentrate on winning liberal opinion". HUMAN RIGHTS Some delegales were so enamoured with this line that the AGM had to put up with considerable talk about how to win over arch bishops and nuns, It is quite obelous that it is only the active presence of revolutionaries inside the campaign that prevents the CP from following this strategy to its local conclusion and reducing the CSC to campaigning only on the question of "human rights".
Communist Parties in other countries of Europe have already The national press has now dropped adopted this line, and are now attempting to use its innocuous content to snupale up to the bourgeois Christian Democrat parties in search of an alliance with them.
The decision of the AGM to fight for an extension to the trade boycott (which, as an IMG delegate pointed out, is not even mentioned in the CSC programme!) and to fight against the role of the Labour Goverment by mobilising the org anised working class, has put the campaign on the right road. The task now is to ensure that this policy is actually put into practice. BOYCOTT We must be particularly clear that a Trade Union Conference on its own cannot do this. It will certainly not achieve anything if, as some delegates seemed to want, it confines itself to issuing a call to the TUC to organise a boycott. The Conference must lake as is first priority the immediate job of nationally co-ordinating and fighting for a boycott of Chilean trade rep ardless of whether or not the TUC has agreed to support it. Indeed, it is only if such steps are taken that there is any chance that the TUC will respond to the call.
The second important decision of the AGM concerned the structure of the campaign and the power of the Executive, The CSC has always operated on the basis that between AGMs the nationas meeting of all the local CSCs is the policy ares his aim to be to bind together