IN his letter on the second homes fires in Wales, Rod Jones raises important points - arson is a viable tactic, a mass movement will be bullt through arson and sımılar tactics, our call for a mass movement is an empty formalistic one.
Firstly, arson as a tactic. No doubt the sales of second homes have gone down since the fires. This will last only as long as the arson continues. Is the British bourgeois state going to sit idly by? No, it will put in more police, arrest more miltants, and intimidate particular districts.
Would the arsonists retain the silent support of the Welsh people faced with such intimidation and the inspiring sight of burnt-out houses that they need so badly? As socialists, our aim is not to knock the bottom out of the market, but to take it over and end it by confiscating its goods.
What evidence is there that the isour has increased opposition to% second homes or helped to give it the beginning of mass forms? As the International Marxist Group is restricted to South Wales, our appreciation of how this opposition, mostly in the north and west of Wales, can be organised is limited.
But we believe militants can begin organising a broad movement through such actions as demonstrations. occupations. mass lobbies and sit-ins of county and •se coc. be tied to such demands as a complete ban on planning permission tor second homes: their com pulsory municipalisation; priority re-housing for Welsh people wishing to remain in the area or move back; opposition to spending and job cuts and for a crash programme of council house bulding throughout Wales.
Movement took such an initiative with its recent demonstration in These actions can Wales.
The Welsh Socialist Republican BELLA Cardili Llangranog, and that's why the IMG took part in it.
United actions, by such means and with such aims, are the approach of revolutionary Marxists, because they allow working people to realise their collective strength, and widen their political horizons and goals. A revolutionary organisation will be built within that mass movement, not instead of it in its own isolation. The arson campaign leads militants away trom the source of mass action, the labouring people of rural Rod Jones claims we only take up the second homes because of the arson. But we would have also taken it up, if there had been a substantial mass campaign. In fact;" a mass campaign would have demanded. from us a good deal H CC urusoosuon. DEREK DAVLES and STEVE WALES ENGIAND'S LAST COLONT REFUDUC NOL
THE extraordinary thing television is how little is known about the ideas, the processes, and the individuals who determine what tens of millions of us see on the small screen.
Even the press is more informative about what goes on in newspaper offices than the television moguls reveal about their own industry. From that standpoint the Edinburgh tional Television Festival, held at the end of last month, was an eye-opener to a mere viewer.
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Bolton, sus', InternaPartially and balance anti-working class much documentary output. ist critics. Michael Grade, programme London Weekend Television, suggested that they needed an event where the executives and professionals could discuss 'making Polarisation surfaced in virtually all the discussions. A session on curintroduced by Roger editor of Panorama, edged around the notorious idea of 'consenby which TV presenters and reporters believe they maintain im- the stock-in-trade language of the TV industry.
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