[On August Ist, rulers and representatives from every…]

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On August Ist, rulers and representatives from every European country (except Helsinki to sign a book ful of resolutions, at once vague and compromising, on ity' and 'cooperation'.

Just thirty years ago, at the Potsdam conference following the defeat of Germany, the Soviet Union treacherously agreed with the Western capitalist powers to a partition of Europe, ensuring their own bureaucratic control of the East European countries while consciously committing Stalinist parties to a policy of holding back the revolutionary tide in the West.

The Helsinki agreement, which the Soviet Union began to work towards as long ago as 1954, is the apotheosis of detente. confirms Moscow's willingness to sell out the working class of western Europe and determination to keep a firm thumb on her satellites.

TEXT

The Helsinki text is full of pious sentiments and much of it is downright meaningless. The section on trade, which ran into particular difficulty during the pre conference negotiation, is a model of how to say nothing at great length.

The articles on non-agression mean just what such statements always mean: they express a balance of forces, an assessment of mutual advantage, and would not survive for a moment any substantial change in that balance.

More interesting is the clause on sovereignity: "The participating states mutually respect their sovereign equality and their individuality, as well as all the rights inherent in and comprising their sovereignity, including; particular, the right of each state to juridical equality, territorial integrity, liberty and political independence. They respect as well the right of each of them to choose and freely develop its political, social, economic and cultural system, as well as the right to determine its laws and regulations.

ACCEPTANCE

For the Soviet Union ti Lese high-sounding phrases mean the acceptance of the right of European capitalism to solve its problems at the expense of the working class, whether through the sitalin or ine Labour government and the class collaboration of the trade union leadership in Great Britain or by General Franco's fascist repression in Spain.

Instead of helping the working class of the Western European countries to defend its vital interests by struggling for state power, the Soviet Union - true to the Stalinist policy of socialism in one country - embraces the status CRISIS The world crisis of capitalism hardly figured in the c inference's formal agenda, although it was very much at the centre of the flurry of talks between heads of state in the days before their converging on the Finnish capital.

Events in Portugal, Greece and Turkey, however, show clearly that the working class is little interested in the machinations of the thieves kitchen in Helsinki.

This latest betrayal by Moscow Stalinism points up once again the urgent need to build a Trotskyist revolutionary leadership in every European country, in order to fight for the independence of the working class and to lead it to power.

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Albania), the United States and Canada, gathered in

quo as part of the price for its own "stabiity" political and econ-