Common Market: racism, trade war & anarchy

Scan page 4

The policy so beloved of Labour's so-called 'left wing' Tribune Group-import controls' -has been eagerly taken up by the European Commission in a confidential report on trade with Japan.

The report is garnished with open and strident racist attacks on the Japanese "national character", describing Japan as "a country of workaholics, living in what Westerners would regard as little more than rabbit hutches" . and pointing out that the country has only recently emerged from feudal society.

Cars

It proposes punitive action to cut back the Japanese surplus on trade with Europe, and is believed to envisage import controls on cars and electronics in U1l particular.

The EEC Commission, headed by one-time British Labourite Roy Jenkins, suggests that it is possible to slash Japanese imports without unleashing an all-out trade war.

It anticipates, however, that imports driven out of Europe will increasingly be diverted to the USA -where employers have long believed in using protectionist measures to preserve their markets and profits against competition.

But since the dollar last year fell dramatically against the yen, US employers have an advantage over European anitalicte in comneting for EEC headquarters at Brussels sales in Japan.

Of course the whole concept of import controls on the massive scale envisaged by the EEC amounts to little more than a game of Russian roulette-with the prospect of an all-out trade war at any moment.

Such measures reflect the growing tensions between national sections of capital in this period of acute world crisis and mounting The EEC as an alliance of European capitalists is driven into conflict with the US and Japan-while within the EEC itself rival capitalist interests produce continuing conflicts.

Nothing could show more clearly the impossibility of arriving at a common, "rational" solution to the crisis within the context of world capitalism.

Unless capitalism is overthrown in the European countries and elsewhere, the prospect facing the working class is an uncontrollable lurch towards trade war and even physical war as desperate national capitalists seek to defend their own markets, encroach on the markets of others, and eliminate their competitors.

The Tribune Group's import controls policy would put workers onto this slippery slope just as surely as the EEC Commission.

It must be rejecied out of hand by the labour move.

ment. in the functioning of the EEC.

Last week brought the revelation that £2.3 billion -40% of the EEC's total farm budget-was spent in 1978 on buying up surplus dairy products.

The bulk of this surplus has been wilfully destroyed. This wholesale vandalism, at a time when workers face rising food prices throughout the world, takes place in order to prop up the EEC's ludicrous Common Agricultural Policy.

Its cost is now so high that a new milk tax-to fall largely on efficient dairy tarms, including most of those in Britain, is to be levied to cut back production.