PARTY HOLDS SECOND CONGRESS ee
Brussels
The Walloon Workers party held its second congress on Septem ber 19 in La Louviére. The presiding committee consisted of Robert Nicolas of Charleroi; Dramaix, a worker of the Borinage; and Louis Goire, a well-known shop steward at the giant Cockerill-Ougrée steel works in Liége.
The main points on the agenda were adoption of party statutes. (presented by Henri Vaume of Li&ége); consideration of two reports, one on the political situation, presented by Jean Rombaux of Centre, the other on the confederation of the Walloon, Brussels and Flemish left socialists, which was presented by Frans Legros of Nivelles; and the election of the party's central committee. Observers from Brussels included the left-socialist member of parliament Pierre Le Gréve and Ernest Mandel, editor of the weekly La Gauche.
_ The congress, attended by some one hundred delegates, was proof enough that the split engineered by Frangois Perin (a member of parliament from Liége who joined a former trade-union secretary, Robert Moreau, in setting up a nationalistic Walloon party) failed to draw away any of the essential forces of the Walloon Workers party. The working-class strongholds of Liége and Charleroi, for instance, showed that they had stayed practically, unanimously with the Walloon Workers party.
The delegates approved the political line worked out at the founding conference of the party last February. This is centered around a program of anticapitalist structural reforms, workers control of industry, nationalization of the banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, coal mines, electrical plants, gas works, oil refineries, and socialization of building plots.
The party reiterated its support for federalism but stressed that only direct action by the working class can break the stranglehold of the centralized bourgeois state over the Walloon people.
_ The congress unanimously adopted a motion in favor of setting up a confederation to include all the Walloon, Flemish and Brussels left-wing socialists on the basis of a common program.
The founding congress of this projected Socialist Workers Confederation is scheduled to be held October 10 at Liége. It will bring together the Walloon Workers party, the Union of Brussels Left Socialists, and an organization of Flemish left socialists which is in process of formation, into a single: party advocating a resolutely anticapitalist program.
The October 10 congress will provide a good measure of the consequences of the split in the Belgian Socialist party which the right-wing bureaucracy provoked at the end of 1964 by banning
La Gauche and the revolutionary socialists associated with it. The new party, it is expected, will begin with a membership of several thousand, most of them militant workers.
BELGIAN PRO-MAO