The reformist dream of "peace"

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Last week's TUC Congress debate on military disarmament highlighted the attempts of reformism to defend British imperialism, through politically disarming the working class.

The Congress motion on peace and disarmament called o on the general council to take a new initiative to alert the trade union movement and the public to the need for abolishing nuclear weapons and for reducing arms spending in general.

It went on to call for a future Labour government to be committeed to cancel the £5billion Trident missile order, to remove US Cruise missiles from Britain, and to use savings from a cut in defence spending for relieving youth unemployment.

In moving this vague and toothless motion, TGWU delegate Larry Smith urged that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) be "revitaliased"

NUM President Joe Gormley seconded. Pointing to moves by the NUM leadership to organise an international conference of mineworkers' unions on pcace and disarmament, Gormley declared that the unions "should be willing to give a lead to convince the people of the world that only peace can guarantee the future of mankind"

The working masses of the world, including the British working class, need no convincing of the necessity for peace. They need a fighting programme that shows the way forward in the struggle for peace and plenty.

The reformists of the labour movement, both left and right, together with the Stalinists, offer no such programme.

What they do offer is the criminal illusion that capitalist militarism can be destroyed without a socialist revolution. Just how this pie-in-the-sky dream is to be fulfilled is not spelled out.

But the reformist calls for disarmament and peace do not only fail to give a practical way forward. They are in fact an attack on the political independence of the working class.

They seek to turn the working class away from its historic task of overthrowing the decaying capitalist system of oppression and exploitation.

vol educol In place of international working class solidarity against world imperialism and its war machine, the reformists put forward national class collaboration in defence of "British" interests.

Militarism Militarism and wars are just as much the products of capitalism as unemployment, starvation and military-police dictatorships. To call on the bourgeoisie to lay down its arms is as utopian as asking the capitalists to hand over their plunder to the exploited masses. must be armed and led in an insurrection to seize state power. • The working class will have to remain armed to protect its dictatorship from capitalist, counter-revolution and so pave the way for planning and organising the economy to meet the needs of the people, not the profits of the bourgeoisie, Only the unfolding of workers revolution on a world scale-including the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the degenerated and deformed workers' states-can lay the basis for world disarmament and peace on the basis of material plenty possible under planned world economy.