The bourgeois and pre-bourgeois parties in Pakistan are at the moment completely and wholly absorbed in the pre-election campaign. In other words, manoevres, secret alliances between landlords, lies, counter-lies, intrigues, press conferences and public meetings dominate the political scene in Pakistan today. As the press is under the control of a semi-fascist, exJustice of the Supreme Court, few reports of the left or its activity get into the The demagogy and rhetoric used by all, except the extreme right-wing parties, is virtially the same: we are all it seems in favour of nationalising all the major industries, drastic land reform, an anti-imperialist foreign policy and ofcourse regional autonomy. We also are all anti-Indian, though some of us are more anti-Indian than others. And the anti-Indianism used by 99% of the political parties in Pakistan is blind and undiscriminating. It does not differentiace between the Indian ruling class and the Indian masses-the workers and poor peasants who will overthrow the Indian bourgeoisie and make the socialist revolution in India.
The freedom which the military regime of General Yahya Khan has extended to the bourgeois political parties and to ALL well-known political figures, does not by any means extend to the rank and file militants in the student movement or to militant workers. There are over 400 political prisoners in West Pakistan today. Most of them are completely unknown. The current regime has learnt some lessons from its predecessor and is not interested in creating * The general election promised for October 5, 1970 serves a dual purpose. In one sense it is clearly a genuine concession as it is the country's Irst ever general election on the basis of adult ranchise. On the other hand it is undoubtedly a diversion meant to steer the masses clear from the ath of direct action and autonomous struggles t is an excersize in forced amnesia: the soone the masses can be made to forget the fivemonths struggle which they launched in November 1968 and which resulted in the overthrow of the dictator Ayub Khan. Despite the impositon of Martial Law in March '69, the new feat on the masses, The combativity of tf ne has not been able to inflict a decisiv workers has remained at a very high level in both bast and WEst Pakisten. In 969-70 strike wave in West Pakistan marks a qualitative change in Pakistani politics. It eflects the growing maturity and class consciousness of the urban proletariat. Despite the virtual non-existence of independent trade.
West Pakistan. THe regime has moved in to protect the capitalists and many militant cities recently. Information about these groups comes from the most recent issue of the Chronicle of Current fied the KGB for two full years. The translation The appearance of Marxist-minded youth groups i the Soviet heartland is a sign of great importanc r indicates an advanced trend within the broad and rather diverse Soviet opposition movement. And it re-emphasises the general truth that the Soviet state cannot remain immune from the world-wide youth nadicalisation, however well-developed a police apparetus the bureaucracy has for "immunisation" perposes Sarator groups clementinee desert ing the Sarator group's programme as cratic" needs to be clarified. Obviously-since its authors describe themselves as "true Communists"-it foes not mean pro-capitalist, as the term would b aken in the West. It should be understood to meat to bureaucratic and dormatic" would presumably refer to socialist democracy, that is, freedom for differing views within the framework of support to and defence of the Socialism. If this document is an attempt to analyse are the surest sign of that.
labour leaders have received jail sentences and the requisite number of lashes (yes, workers are being whipped for going on unofficial strike).
Also despite the well-disciplined attacks by the semi-fascist Jamaat-i-Islami (which is financed by the CIA) and its allies neither the workers nor the peasants have been intimidated.
The peasants rally at Toba Tek Singh earlier this year where over 40,000 peasants from all parts of WEst Pakistan assembled is one sure Sign of this. Despite the fact that the leadership the rally (the pro-Peking National Awam Party) mismanaged the conference and could offer no real perspectives for the anti-feudal struggle (instead they bored the dhotis off the peasants with their stale, cliche-ridden speeches)
he Toba Tek Singh conference remains an extremely significant development. This was followed up by a massive display of social-democratic and general left unity. A call made initially by Bhutto's People's Party to observe May Day was transformed into a massive display of force by the urban proletariat throughout West Pakistan. This was the first time that May Day has been celebrated in Pakistan by the workers and despite the propaganda unleashed by the right-wing parties against the occasion it turned out to be a tremendous success.
In Lahore over 100,000 workers marched with red flags chanting anti-feudal and anti-capitalist slogans of which the two nost popular ones were: Only He Wh Bills Shall Eat, Capitalists Stand Baci and Che Guevara in addition to the ones mentioned above. Raja Anwar, the Trosk yist student leader of Rawalpindi told the meeting that the dictatorship ould not prevent the people of Pakistar rom w ending capitalism and feudalism in Pakistan.
The State Of The Vanguard The number of Marxists in Pakistan is without doubt on the increase: so much so that this correspondent could have a semi-publie polemic with a leading Stalinist theoretician, Sardar Shaukat Ali Kasuri on the GUESHOT ot a meeting sponsoled by the Peoples was Thinkers Forum...a new group which has nerged and which invites representativ (ALL left tendencies to come and spea before its members. It is obvious that there has been a tremendous leap in consciousness which has resulted in a growing radicalisation.
It would now be accurate to say that the Pakistanis in Britain are less vulnerable to evolutionary propaganda than Pakistani The reason for this is th fact that they experienced a victory in the overthrow of Ayub and they are agitation -articles 70* and 72 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic student at the juridical institute). The others were as The head of the organisation i was named Senin (a the physical education division of Saratov State University, and, at the time of his arrest, a gymnastics coach there); Kirikin (a student at the juridical institutel: Bobrov (the same); and Fokeev (a night student at Saratov State University)
Kulikov-the oldest of those being tried-was 28. All the accused acknowledged themselves guilty and expressed repentance.
During the trial some fifty witnesses appeared.
nost of them students. According to unverified infor nation, the organisation called itself The Party of True Communists", had a programme of liberal-democratic persuasion, and set itself the goal of creatively studying Marxist literature in the original sources as well as other works by Soviet and foreign authors, both forbidden and published ones.
At the trial the accused stressed in particular that hey were carrying on propaganda ("many ideas for ow rather than agitation ("a few ideas for many" and that new members were taken into the organisation only after their familiarisation with this propa gandistic literature and only in the event of agreement or views The trial was organised on the model of analogous trials in Moscow (a specially invited audience, a few relatives). Outside the courthouse there was a crowd ot 100-150 people, mostly young.
n the second half of 1968, in the city of Ryazan, si› tudents of the city's radiotechnological institut formed an illegal group, The Marxist Party of a New Type". They were Yuri Vudka, Valeri Vudka, Shimonas Grilius, Frolov, Martimonov, and Zaslavsky.** Yuri Vudka la correspondone...
aware of their own strength. It is ofcourse La very real possibility that when no clear change s visible after the General Election, the masses regime to continue we could well see a Nasserite type military coup to preserve the essence of the social structure and also to make some concessio.
ns, which would have the effect of containing the mass movement for a certain period.
For Marxists, therefore, the central task which should guide and determine their strategy in the coming period should be the creation of a revolutionary Marxist cadre.A development which could speed up the formation of a revolutionary Marxist party which would be able to seize the initiative and provide leadership by intervening in the struggles of illions of poor peasants and workers. Particularly when the latter see after the General Election that while the new vulture might have a smile on its face, it nevertheless remains a vulture.
The Pakistani bourgeoisie are today facing a very serious crisis and they are unable and has pulled their chestnuts out of the fire of the masses is its beginning to change its class character. The influx of petty bourgeois elements from the cities into the urmy to replace the progeny of smal andlords is bound to have an effect insid the army in a Nasserite direction. In addition the bourgeoisie is faced with the unsolved 'national question' as regards Bengal and grammatic document of the group In August 1969 the group was arrested by the KGB. The arrests were precipitated when two members of the organisation, Martimonov and Zaslavsky, turned themselves in to the authorities with confessions and denunciations of their fellows. The charges vere under articles 70 and 72. The case was tried in February 1970 in the Ryazan Region People's Court Building. There were witnesses from the Moscow area, Leningrad, Kiev, Saratov, and other cities.
Apparently, the Rvazan aroun had connection: with various cities. The group headed by Senin, trie a month earlier, had the same 'Downfall of Capital"
(all under a strict regime). Zaslavsky and Martimonov (who had been freed under surveillance) were given suspended sentences?
n Gorky the case of Mikhail Kapranov, Sergei Pono narev, and Vladimir Zhiltsov and the related case o Vladlen Pavlenkov have continued.
M. Kapranov was formerly a student at the Gorky State University. (He was twice expelled from the university for statements he made about the politics and economy of the USSR -once at a Komsomol moaning and once in a personal letter./ He is the father OT TWO DOyS. 5 Prome essenter of alocal plant and ther nember on the newsletter o or a four year-old girt V. Zhiltsov is a fifth-year student in the history division at Gorky State University, an exceptional student during his entire time there. At the time of his arrest his leg was broken. He was arrested just before he was to defend his dissertation All three were arrested in the summer of 1969, and the charges against all three were changed in January Mir Afzal, a militant working-class leader, who is serving a sentence of 1 year rigorous imprisonment (& 5 lashes) for leading workers strike. He was photographed secretly in Kot Lakhpat Jail by a red mole.
also "Azad" Kashmir.
The leading representative of the Bengali etty bourgeoiusie is (Chiang Kai) Sheiki Mujibur Rehman and despite his radical rhetoric at mass meetings and despite the serious social explosions in the province and an army intervention could have serious consequences Also the Pakistani-controlled section of Kashmir is ruled tyranically by West Pakistani bureaucrats and unrest is on the increase. The elements who favour an Independent and united Kashmir are growing in number and refuse to accept the choice between two oppressots.
All these facts coupled with the deteriorating economic position are an indication of what confronts the overnment after the General Election As far as revolutionists are concerned they should use the pre-election period to make revolutionary propaganda where they can and prepare to work hard turing the immediate post electio eriod. Those who have buried themselve deep inside the social-democratic parties will have to come out and assume a public face f the task of chalking out a programme fo a Socialist Pakistan is ignored in the comin period it could result in a severe and serious setback to the revolutionary socialist movement from which we might not be in a position to recover for the next two decades.
Tarig Ali (In spring 1968 at the time of Gorky University's 100th anniversary celebration, leaflets were distributed and basic vo oiler civ streets, tsoecially opposite the Kob bullding and at the university bullding. They contained an appeal with the following points: - A demand for the full rehabilitation of those convicted in ne political triais ot ine nirties зпоти oublic disclosure of the true character of those trials.
A demand that the conditions under which political prisoners are currently being held be improved. - A demand for democratic liberties.)
They are also charded with an attempt to form an anti-Soviet organisation. (Possibly there was the intent to found a group for combating violations of legalityHOLING THOTC In October 1969 Vladlen Pavlenkov was arrested He was a history instructor at the university, born in 1929. It is not known to the Chronicle what Pavlenkov is charged with or whether his case is tied with the case of the other three, or whether it is simply one and the same case The investigators turned V. Pavlenkov over for psychiatric examination.
His wife Svetlana (an earlier issue of the Chronicle had reported her also arrested, but issue No. 11 cor report] wrote to the KGB senior investicator A. M. Khokhlov that she would answe any finding that her husband was mentally incompe own self-immolation. She sent the same declaration to the USSR Prosecutor General Rudenko ana to une nub chairman Andropov. V. Pavlenko was declared sane.
* Article 70 forbids "anti-Soviet" propaganda and acitation ** The Chronicle gives no first name for three of the students.
mergers under monopoly capitalism the cinema liberation front The concentration and centralisation of capital do not proceed in an "orderly way", at even and continuous rates. but on the contrary, due to the uneven and combined development of the formation and evolution of capitalist enterprises, they oceur in discontinuous waves, reaching heights in certain periods, receding even in others.
Because the two forces operate simultaneously and are mutually reinforcing, it is difficult to determine the relative importance of the effects of the concentration and centralisation of capital (Le. firms tending to get progressively bigger and bigger, and fewer and fewer, respectively). It is clear, however, that over the last period, of say four or five years, the advanced capitalist countries have experienced a rapid and extensive capital centralisation, of historically vast dimensions. Indeed, with respect to the U.S. "merger movement" , Sweezy and 1969, . we in states: there have ben *here have beet merger movements in the U.S. before. One began in the 1890's and another in the 1920's;
each lasted about a decade. But the current merger movement is lasting longer and is immensely bigger." For example, only five companies with assets of more than $250m. were taken over in the U.S. in the years 194866; yet in 1968 alone 12 such companies were merged In Britain also, the 1960's witnessed a marked intensification of merger activity, and this has resulted in a corresponding rise in capital centralisation. January 1968's total value of bids of over E1m., of about E750m., was alone more than six times the E121m. total for the whole of 1958, , almost two and a half times the E307m. of 1963, and about 70% more than the E447m. of 1966. In 1968, the 28 largest manufacturing companies had 50% of total net assets, 11% more than only seven years before. In the years 1967-68, no less than £6,100m. was offered in takeovers and mergers, 25% of companies worth more than S10m. taken over, and the number of companies with a valuation greater than £100m. rose from 39. to 65.
It would be wrong, however, as Sweezy and The American Dream Our cultural heritage is one of the mediation of experience and activity-we were born victims of a scroen, a page, a canvas, reflecting not the image of ourselves but of aliens living our existence for us. An urban generation was fed Hollywood in bottles, then weaned on Godard, and is now seeking to define itself in terms that bear as much relation to reality as Nixon rhetoric to politics. Our minds are colonised by the American Dream, and the only horizon is one of a struggle for liberation, for the surfacing of human characteristics in a consumer culture that denies our every creative potential.
A destructive starting point: the commercial feature film is a ninety minute slogan of domination. We queue up outside a black hole, and pay for the privilege of watching a masquerade that exploits our emotions, our commitment, our insecurity. Look around at what's going down in the art-houses todaylook at the Movement subverted by such gems as Zabriskie Point and The Strawberry Statement, the drop-out by Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, Chicago by Medium Cool and Prologue, the impotence of revolutionaries travestied by Leo the Last and Praise Marx... The sickening catalogue could go on and onlove, revolution, joy-all words made obsolete and meaningless by an industry dedicated only to its self-perpetuation and the cultivation of needs which only itself can satisfy.
A constructive sequel: advances on different fronts within the context of the screen-viewer relationship. Godard's Le Gai Savoir and the early Tattooist films: a declaration of war on our conditioning, on the screen as death. David Larcher's Mare's Tail: a cinema of selfexpression taken to the point where the screen becomes a flickering mosaić of thought patterns, a complement to life. All these films have been shown recently at The Place, and will no doubt make sporadic reappearances.
What Is An Image?
What is an image? Think of a pine forest and a mountain lake. The trees are reflected in the lake, forming an image. Take away the trees, but keep the image, and the lake becomes a screen. Now imagine an audience in front of the lake. What they see is their reflection. Replace this reflection by the screen and its pine trees, and you have the standard cinema situation. In Le Gai Savoir Godard breaks with this convention, and makes a film about people watching each other. The boy and girl staring out from the screen are, in Godard's terms, the reflection of the audience. And the fragments of the rhetoric of mass-communication he Magdoff point out for the U.S. experience, to attribute this increase in the relative importance of the giant corporations entirely to the merger movement. Capital concentration, or the internal accumulation of capital within firms, is also involved (though the big rise in share prices is itself a factor here). But in the present period, merger activity would seem, on balance, to be of decisive importance.
This re-emergence of merger activity as a major phenomenon of economic life has led to something of a revival of interest in questions relating to mergers and takeovers, especially the nature of monopoly capitalism and the giant corporations which operate within its sphere (Notable among these recent works, despite its revity, is Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff he Merger Movement, A Study in Power referred to above, which first appeared in the June 1969 issue of Monthly Review). Not all of these present-period works are Marxist, however, and nor are they the only important ones. A recent study of Britain's experience of the merger boom of the late 1960's, by a bourgeois economist, Gerald Newbould*, is a striking vindication of the Marxist theory of monopoly capitalism, that is, as a qualitatively different market structure from that of nineteenth-century "competitive capitalism", resting not upon competition, but upon its absence.
According to the mythology perpetrated by hose who have vested interests in the extension and survival of Big Business: the purpose of a merger is to secure cost-saving "economies of scale" and re-deploy "scarce resources" into more efficient (Le. more profitable uses). Thus, for instance, the White Paper proposing the establishment of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation emphasised the "need for more concentration and rationalisation to promote the greater efficiency and international com petitiveness of British industry." But the reality of the situation does not recognisably correspond to the rhetoric which surrounds it. Newbould's study, though this certainly was not his intention, has convincingly shown the Marxist proposition, that the monopoly capitalist firm achieves its profits by eliminating competition rather than through competition, to be indispu selves and our reflections. Between "our" and "selves". Godard's anger is sophisticated and and largely ineffectual he brutalises film stock as an expression of the brutalisation he has suffered by the "spectacle" society. The Tattooists Closer to the pragmatic English mind is the contained rage of the Tattooist films. Printed letters across the screen-You came here expecting enlightenment, atmosphere, art, but you didn't bring any with you, DID YOU? Or a close-up of a microphone, and the captionNow it's your turn to speak. And after a couple of minutes of silence-There, you didn't have much to say after all. Of course, such terrorism is outrageous-if someone did stand up and talk, he'd probably be cat-called by the audience for "spoiling the film". The Tattooist critique is develop the characterisation potential of the audience, to smash the limits of a situation rather than define it. As such the film is not an entity in itself-it is just the constant factor in a variable situation. And some of these have been very funny (see Cinemantics 2). The Tattooists are perfectly at home with a technological means of communication-their political communication is: don't be drugged by the media-use it.
Mare's Tail On a radically different front is David Larcher and his two-and-a-half-hour film Mare's Tail. He has come as close as anyone to equating his own life with a personal cinema-a long, unedited film poem, dedicated to those who "have nothing to do and nowhere to go. * There is nothing a critic can say about the content of the film-that is Larcher's sacred territory. All that can be done is to defend his project and his means of accomplishing it.
What Larcher has rejected is the bourgeois aesthetic which demands the organisation of material on a formal level and the rigid censorship of free association on a content level. He has not only refused to negotiate with the conventional fictional psycho-drama has created a viable alternative. Editing is one of the fundamental illusionist devices of the as the moment of truth, and substitutes for it a passive manipulation of processed images. This imposes order where there was only anarchy-every cut is an implicit moral judgement. Or as Godard put it years ago-filming is life and editing death. Larcher as dreamer and tably true.
Newbould's study is based on a statistical analysis of "successful" mergers and takeovers in the 1967-68 period (like the GEC acquisition of AEI, which has led to so much "greater efficiency" that thousands of workers have been thrown out of their jobs) and a penetrating questionnaire to the "triumphant executives" of what motivated them to make the bid. The Sunday Times Business News reviewer (12.7.70) was compelled to admit that: "Together they amount to a slashing attack on management motives and performances out of their own mouths. The study found the most frequent motive for takeover bids (some 27% of the cases investigated) to be, according to the managements of the successful bidder firms, market dominance, either by enlarging their own share of the market or by lessening the "problems" of the competitive environment, but either way by eliminating the competition.
In his study, Newbould has also produced some useful results which relate to the question of the divorce of ownership from control in joint-stock companies. That there is this separaion has been known and proven for many rears: as long ago as the 1930's, for 176 of the 200 largest non-financial U.S. corporations, the median holding of stock by the managers was only about 2.1% of voting shares, and in onl 36 cases did they hold more than 10%. More recently, Professor Sargent Florence has found that, on average, in 268 large British industrial and commercial companies in 1951, only 2.3% of voting shares were owned by the directors, and very few directors appeared among the largest twenty shareholders. The recent trend has been toward further divorce of control and ownership While it has long been known then, that management and shareholders are separate entities in companies, what Newbould has done is to show that these two entities also have separate interests and priorities, and just how much these diverge, as revealed in merger practice. (Incidentally, he also shows how sharply the managers interests differ from those of are in themselves expressions of freedom.
The unsympathetic observer will find only boredom in Mare's Tail. The politically blink blinkered will find only bourgeois individualism.
But Larcher is preparing our minds for the struggles of the future. customers, workers, and the "national interest"). The shareholders are very frequently ill-served by their directors, at least when it comes to the question of a merger. For of the 223 quoted company takeovers of over S1m. 61 went publicly unopposed, yet where bid: were opposed (either by the directors or by rival bidders), the final price paid averaged 75% above pre-bid prices. It would seem that the reason for this absence of public opposition to takeover bids on the part of directors, even when opposition would earn a better price, is often merely the protection of their own jobs!
(according to his own ideologically limited con ception of the possibilities), ranging from laissez-faire to a complete ban on mergers. New bould declares himself in favour of setting up an "Efficiency Commission" (by which he means, of course, a "profitability commission" with power to treely investigate managements and to "publicly expose" (?) any deficiencies discovered. Hor workers and socialists, however. this is not highly relevant. It is not up to us to either prevent or propose the centralisation of capital. The role of the working class, as Mandel puts it in a slightly different context (Euros t monopolisation of industry and the growing domination over the economy of a very few giant firms, and the unemployment which is the usual consequence of "rationalisation" (for it is invariably the workers who are "rationalised"'), is not to advocate this or that policy as being nore favourable, but to counterpose always th lemanding the nationalisation of industry, without compensation, under workers control. To quote Mandel again (ibid., p.134), "socialism offers us the only clear way out Nigel Brown *Gerald D. Newbould, Management and Merger Activity, published by Gustead, 1970.
John Mathews *From the informative programme to the Festival of British Independents published by The Other Cinema.
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soviet union she Maria have poeted on the searing theme.
follows: Romanov (fourth year in the history division at Saratov State University); Kulikov (a graduate of
to solve it. They also realise that the army which has backed them so often in the past