[While they continue to press for a massive…]

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While they continue to press for a massive further build-up in the nuclear armoury of US imperialism, both President Carter and Ronald Reagan are this week hypocritcally parading disguised as apostles of 'peace' and detente.

Even while installing new and lethal long range Cruise and Pershing missiles in European NATO countries, Carter has sought electoral support by reviving the idea of endorsing the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT 2).

NATO Alliance

At the same time the new military junta installed in Turkey with the blessing of US imperialism has agreed conditions for the readmission of Greece to the anti-Soviet NATO alliance.

Wherever you look, aggressive preparations are being made by the imperialist countriés in order to strengthen their position in relation to the deformed and degenerated workers' states.

But this war drive is not intended directly as a threat to attack or invade Eastern Europe and the USSR: rather it is a part of the struggle by the imperialists to maintain or restore its control over the semi-colonial countries and nationalist regimes in Central and Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

To intimidate and if necessary crush anti-imperialist struggles in these parts of the world by overwhelming military force is the only option left for a world capitalist class whose insoluble economic crisis means starvation and abject misery for countless millions of oppressed workers and peasants.

Working class

And the war drive is also part and parcel of the attacks on the working class in the imperialist countries themselves. In the USA Carter is to spend $100 billion on the new MX missile system while slashing back spending on education, hospitals and social security.

And in Britain, too, Thatcher's £5,000 million plan to buy four Trident submarines CARTER means still further and social services.

But it is not only the cost of the new war moves that represents an attack on the working class: the recent Operation Square Leg made it clear that in attacking the deformed workers' states the British capitalist class intends also to impose dictatorial military rule over any British survivors of the nuclear holocaust.

The main tasks of the armed forces would not be to fight any external "enemy" , but to repress and contain the British working class, while the bosses and their clique of generals and administrators live safely in their secret bunkers.

World War Just as in World War Two the British imperialists imposed dictatorial laws against the unions while supposedly fight"fascism" so today Thatcher and leading imperialist chiefs plan to crush the workers' movement in the name of opposing Soviet "totalitarianism"

They are driven increasingly towards such a position by the logic of the capitalist crisis. So great is the overproduction that has developed in the anarchy of capitalist development that only a wholesale destruction of the productive forces of capitalism on a world scale can offer the surviving sections of capitalists the prospect of restored and Stadt-Anzeiger, assured profitability in the the longer term.

The Thatcher government's monetarist policies-traumatic as they seem for workers and for weaker sections of capitalists-fall short of the devastation needed to restore 'healthy' profits.

Yet the fact is that for the overwhelming majority of mankind there is no crisis of "overproduction" • On the contrary there is simply grinding poverty and a chronic lack of the most basic necessities of life. It is the capitalist system, based on production not for need but for profit, that is unable to utilise and expand the productive To end the war danger; to detend and extend the productive potential developed under capitalism; to end the appalling poverty and deprivation in the underdeveloped economies, capitalism must be overthrown.

In Britain this means that those marching against nuclear weapons on October 26 must join forces with those sections of workers fighting the Tory spending cuts, the tens of thousands faced with redundancies and closures, and the millions suffering a fall in living standards, in mass struggle to bring down the Thatcher No amount of "pressure" will stop this Tory government acting as an imperialist government: the task of every antiwar campaigner now is to fight in every way possible to defeat Thatcher and carry forward the fight against Labour's leading clique for a workers' government based on a planned socialist economy.