TRADE UNIONISTS has he ever existed. The only good capitalist is a dead capitalist. An effective struggle aimed at making the employers pay for the crisis must begin from the premise that to eliminate crises the capitalist system must be brought down. In a situation as grave as ours, even a simple struggle to defend wages and employment cannot bear fruit if it is not accompanied by a general attack on the capitalist structures. This struggle, whether defensive or offensive depending on the moment, must therefore be centered around the objective of workers control at all levels as the objective that unifies the sliding scale of hours and wages. The companies that are in difficulty must not simply be handed over to one of the big state combines to get enough aid to maintain some jobs; they must be expropriated without compensation and under workers control. The goods of the speculators must be confiscated and placed GREECE TROTSKYIST APPEAI The following manifesto, released by the Vanguard Organizing Committee, was published in the August 10 issue of Ergatike Pale (Workers Struggle), the newspaper of the Greek Trotskyists. During the years of the military dictatorship, Ergatike Pale appeared as a mimeographed monthly produced clandestinely. After the fall of the junta, it began coming out as a printed, four-page weekly. We have taken the English text from the September 9 issue of Intercontinental Press, a Trotskyist weekly news magazine published in New York. The translation from the Greek is by Intercontinental Press. Comrades: After nearly eight years of ruthless persecution of all trade-union activity in our country, when every attempt to represent the workers' interests was suppressed with bullets, prison, exile, and torture, today as a result of our patient struggle and the struggle of all the oppressed strata of society a breach is opening up. In order to fulfill our responsibilities, which are to defend, advance, and consolidate the interests of our class, we must systematically exploit this opportunity. To do this, we must form trade-union groups that really defend our interests -The first step toward this is to form a Vanguard Organizing Committee in every category, in every city, and in every branch of industry. These groups must serve as provisional leaderships that can impel and direct the struggle to drive out the opportunists appointed by the junta, the labor skates who for years collected big salaries for their betrayals and whose solé mission was to send contratulatory telegrams to the murderers of our fellow workers. These committees will launch a campaign to sign up all the workers in every category. They will set up leading bodies in a democratic way as quickly as under workers control. To achieve this, secret banking must be eliminated immediately and the companies account books must be opened. Only a program of struggle that goes in this direction will be able to avoid useless and frustrating experiences like the struggle for investments in the South. Who today remembers any longer the "great victory" won on paper a few months ago (which cost the workers thousands of hours in strikes) -- the "victory" of the "definite pledge" of the big private and public companies to invest in the Mezzogiorno? What are all these pledges worth in face of the unemployment that is now bearing down? For the workers, the only thing that can pay off is a general struggle for the defense of their jobs and standard of living and for workers control at all levels. possible, taking every step necessary to assure that. they really represent the will and the choice of the workers in that category and give expression to their demands. We must not lose sight of the current crisis and we must not rely on promises. We must be on our guard and organize this vigilance systematically. Only the working class itself has the capacity and the genuine will to defend and consolidate the interests of the workers. It is certain that attempts will be made to replace the junta's designates through the appointment of new opportunistic labor skates of the Markos breed. Likewise, the pre-1967 hacks who brought such misery to the working class are bound to try to take the places of the junta's appointees. The workers of the country must resist such attempts in a determined and organized way. In no case can appointed leaders be tolerated at any level of the trade-union structure. In the base units, the leaders must be elected democratically by the workers. And leaders at higher levels, including the highest, must be chosen by such elected representatives of the workers. Moreover, all elected leaders must be subject to recall by the ranks at any time. We appeal urgently to all veteran trade-union activists to take the lead quickly in this movement to form Vanguard Organizing Committees, drawing around them all our young brothers who have proved themselves under fire in these last eigh: years but who have no experience in legal trade-union work. Taking into consideration the general picture of the situation in which our class finds itself and the technological advances that have occurred, the central demands for each category should be the following:
--Immediate democratic election of leading bodies, which
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