Not on any terms!
Socialist Press1975 1975-03-20Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 8 →
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ening up, on the televisior and in the capitalist press. over the Common Market referendum is a fraud, to give some credibility to the Labour leadership's smokescreen of "renegotiated terms". What all the media and the reformists are anxious to obscure is the class question of the Common Market - what it, and in whose interest does it operate?
The European Economic Community, as it is otherwise called, is a strategic aim of European capitalism to find some common ground on which they can rally their joint economic political and military strength in order to confront the competitic of Japan and the USA under con ditions of slump, and in order to combat the rising militancy of the working class.
TARIFFS
le dropping of internal tariffs, meside the erection of barriers to imports from non-EEC counte ries is an attempt to give Euronean capitalism an advantage, though at the same time it opens the door to the start of trade war and economic nationalism within the USA and Japan. Equally as important to the employers is that as recession and unemployment begin to grow throughout Europe, the Common Market opens up the scope for this way production would be moved to the most weakly organ ised and impoverished areas in Europe in order to break strikes and drive down working conditions. Such moves are already beginning -as can be seen in the threats of Fords and Chryslers to close down British plants in orde to operate from Burope, if speed up and redundancies are not acc. epter. 'OLITICAL STRATE!
Yet the Common Market is aiso a political strategy for the bourgeoisie, which goes hand in hand with a strengthening of military alliances and cooperation. The concept of "European Parliamen and of centralised economic decision-making is of course to provide instant sanctions against governments which show weakness in the face of the working class. Thus any planned policy of nationalisation would be open to control from Brussels. At the sams time any eruption of the class struggle in local areas could be dealt with, under BEC strategy, by "neutral" troops from other BEC countries. In every way the Common Market shows itself as th bourgeois preparation for recessio:
These class issues show why any opposition to the Market must be along class and not nationalist lines. We reject the fake idea of British sovereignity peddled by reformists, Stalinists, and antiMarket Tories alike (often from the same platform). This means merely the sovereignty of British capitalists over the working class We reject any attempt to turn as super-exploitation of the workers na peasants in the ex-colonia.
and Commonwealth countries.
Our call to vote "NO" to the Common Market is based then on opposition in principle to what the Market stands for. The Labou leaders consciously divert away from such a stand with talk about "terms". We say "NO - on any terms". The interests of the working class cannot be defended by retorming capitalism, but only by attacking it, weakening it, and destroying it. An important step in this is therefore to attack the employers strategic line of defenci - and pull Britain out of the Common Market. This can then open up the way for the fight for socialism in Britain and every European capitalist country. To the EEC we therefore counterpose the struggle for the United Socialist States of Burope.
CLASS LINES
Only if the Common Market is fought on these class lines can the role of the 69 traitors within the Labour party who preserved the Tories in office and sold out their own members by voting for the BBC entry be exposed, and these men driven out of the Labour movement.
For these reasons we reject the reactionary nationalist platform of the "Get Britain Out" campaign (patronised jointly by Tories and trade union leaders like Clive Jenkins) and call on Trades Councis, and trade union bodies to join with Labour Party constituency organisations in leading a campaign for a massive rejection of the Common Market by the working class. FOR POWER (continued from front page)
Trotsky described in 1936 the main traits of Bonapartism as: "the independence of power rom parties and programmes, the aquidation of the parliamentary legislation by means of emerg ency powers, the rising of the Government in the guise of the "arbiter" above the struggling cemps, i.e., factually above the nation. [France at the Turning Point] Only from this class standpoint, secing through the left demagogy is it possible for the working class to understand the Portuguese regime. Thus although leading figures, such as COPCON commande General Carvalho, make vociferou attacks on the US Ambassador in Lisbon Fran: Carlucci (who is denounced in Paris and Berlin as a CIA official), these speeches remain shadow-boxing, to cover the regime's decision to remain in the reactionary NATO alliance and to allow Carlucci to remain in Lisbon.
PARLIAMENT
The bogus netureof the regime and its lack of programme makes its leaders seek to set up the cover of a parliament. But the parliament of April 12th will be the servant and not the master, of the Armed Forces Movement, and behind them, of the capitalist class. The AFM will keep a power of veto over all legislation, and the power to propose and carry through measures of its own. The day-to-day ruling of the country will be through the AFM's direct nominees on the "Revolutionary Council" - a cabinet imposed on a parliament before it even exists. The parliament can be nothing but a fraud, ompotent to act, under the control of the officer corps.
The Socialist Party, led by Soare has been greatly discredited by its attitude to the March 11th coup. The main politica. support given to celebrate the defeat of Spinola coup, rellecting the impact of these events, which will redouble and surge throughtthe millions of workers already posed with class battles in defence of jobs and wages throughout Burope. This situation makes concrete the call for the United Socialist States of Europe to be fought for in opposition to the capitalist Common Market.
Just as in 1968, when the MayTune General Strike in France was followed by revolutionary struggles in Czechoslovakia, this development, beginning in the fascist and the capitalist countries can rapidly spread to the deforme workers' states of Eastern Europe and to Russia itself, threatening the very existence of the Stalinist bureaucracy with the prospect of political revolition.
Thus the Kremlin dreads the prospect of revolution and seeks to head it off, operating directly through Cunhal and the Portuguc: ese CP. In this counter-revolution. ary stance they end up in the same camp as the US capitalist class who also fear Portugal as the class who also fear the events in Portugal as the seeds of the overthrow of capitalism in countries throughout Europe. This coincide with the enormous gains of the liberation forces in South-East Asia, which are striking further hammer blows at imperialism.
It is precisely for such conditions as these and the need within them for revolutionary leadership that the founders of the Workers Socialist League first took up the struggle for Trotsky's Transitional Programme within the sectarian Workers Revolutionary Party, and precisely why it became necessary to maintain the continuity of the fight for Trotskyism in the building of the WSL.
The most critical question in Portugal is the crisis of leadership in the workers movement. As any