This is the second time inside 18 months that the Soviet bureaucracy has come to Nixon's aid when he needed it most.
Last year Brezhner helped Nixon to ward off the effects of the mining of North Vietnamese ports and the bombing of the cities by inviting him to Moscow, Last week Brezhnev's trip to the US helped to take some of the pressure out of the Watergate hearings, which have created an extremely severe political crisis for the Nixon administration.
Indeed there was more than a touch of irony in Nixon - a corrupt, second-rate bourgeois politician whose political cureer was built on the basis of a crude anti-communism and the politics of the witch-hunt - being comforted publicly by the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
ROOTS OF THE SUMMIT The Nixon-Brezhnev summit has been greeted almost to a man by the American ruling class aind its press. The few Senators such as Henry Jackson, who represent a small minority of the WOR sa, with appests for take the head of a move st youth have been blaming the and vice versa. All day Striking workers in Sanciago, the Chilean apital ruling class (Jackson himself is a well-known spokesman for the Seattle-based bomber manufacturers) have found themselves ssolated and subjected to rebukes by both Republicans and Democrats.
The reason for this is not difficult to understand. It lies in the crisis which has gripped the Imperialist system and which bas been expressed most clearly in the crisis of the capitalist cconomy. The 1969 recession in the United States, the monetary crisis of 1971, the enormous competition between the different imperialist countries, has compelled the United States to redefine its orientation to the workers* states. John Hardt and George Holbday, two leading specialists on Eastern Europe and the USSR, expressed this quite bluntly when reporting to a special Senate sub-commitice: *The US domestic economic recession of 196970 and the recurring balance-of-payments deficits gave rise to a far-reaching review by. the Nixon administration of foreign economic policy. Expanded trade with Communist countries was considered as a means of increasing US exports and stimulating domestic production and unemployment.
It is this extremely important fact of imperialism's economic life that has necessitated the new orientation to both Moscow and Peking But the Brezhnev-Nixon meeting was not just a matter of mutual trade agreements between US Imperialisin and Soviet coonomy, The talks are part of a detente on a wide ranging political front, The heroic resistance of the indochinese people has compelled Nixon to seek the assistance of Brezhnev and Chou en Lai in order to contain the impact of the Vietnamese revolution on liberation forces struggling in other parts of the world. On these issues, the Soviet and Chinese buresucracies have proved time and time again that they are only too willing to sell their political birthright. DANGERS The revolutionary movement must therefore be conscious of the real meaning of peaceful co-existence." What it means is that the Soviet Union and China will actively aid in preserving the status quo in different paris of the world In that sense the united action by China, USSR and the USA to keep the Bandaranaike regime in power in Ceylon in 1971 Is merely a taste of things to come Nixon can sign as many deals as he likes with Brezhnev and Chou en Lai. The situation in many parts of the world, however, is such fights and skirmishes batween rival Peronist groups. They have united only in attempts to blame forow allen to the Paronist movement', Whataver the is being used to intensify the campaign of intimidation warned that thare was no place for a revolutionary reactionary forces responsibla for the provocation, It and repression launched by Peron against the ERP [People's Revolutionary Army, led by the Argentinian part, they said, if the Campora government did not section of the Fourth International).
The Peronist leadership aims to suppress the ERP, divide the working ciens from any potential Marxist leadership, and contain the war within its own ranks, return to Argentina, of strained relations with the Thus the right-wing CGT trada union leaders have issued an appeal to workers to and the current wave of occupations of factories and government officesin which many Peronist groups have been active -on the grounds that they may be used by 'those out.
side the movement". The Peroniet trade union youth have been made the spearhead of the attack on the for every Peronist. The lives of known relatives of ERP members have also boon threatened if kidnappings, such as the one which recently won S 1 million out of Ford's, do not case.
The loft Peronist guerrillas, for their part, have ovirwhelmingly capitulated,to bourgeois Peronism: on B that we will continue to witness mass upbeavals, insurrections, general strikes, etc. in many instances both imperialism and the bureaucracies will find it difficult to contin these struggles, particularly where those leading them understand the nature of the bureaucracies and their role.
Furthermore the detenze opens up contradic tions within the imperialist and bureaucratic camps themselves. The effect of the new orientation in South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines (three client states of US imperialism) bas been catastrophic. Similarly: inside the USSR and Eastern Europe more and more oppositionists will stop looking towards Western bourgeois democracy and will begin to turn elsewhere for solutions, June the FAP (Peronist Armed Forces), FAR (Ravalu tionary Armed Forces and Montoneros gave a press conference in which, though they dissociated them selves from anti-communist attacks on the ERP, they group 'outsida the Peronist movament". For their work out well, they would give their support to Paron himself. It is to encourage just such illusions that the old fox has put on a show, in Madrid and on his new President. Peron still has two trump cards to play in the game of popular demagogy - a presidential takeover, and the raturn of the body of his popular first wite, Evita.
Capital, meamwhile, is biding its time. For the foreign monopolies it it crucial that Perom moves quickly to smash the ambryos of an independent working class ERP, and threats have been made to kill 10 Tratskyiets landership. That is why they are quite encaureged by the current activities of the Paronist youth. The Wais Street Journal reported one businessman as saying: We may and up being onlookers in a battle between the ERP and the young Peronists, but it may be the onty way. We should put them all out on a football field to kill thamselvas so that no one else will get hurt.' ers were wounded by police on demonstrations and
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TOUTLOOK ERP under attack