Stark Signs of Trade War

Scan page 4

on effects a practical *rotherhood of the capitalist ass... so that each shares " the common loot in proportion to the magnitude of is share of investment.

But as soon as it is no Jonger a question of sharing profits, but of sharing losses, weryone tries to reduce his win share to a minimum and ban as much as possible upor he shoulders of some other tompetitor.

However, the class must nevitably lose ... competiion then transforms itself nto a fight of hostile mothers".

It was to his hostile prothers that Japanese temier Fukuda was speaking ast week when he gave the ravest warning against trade var yet uttered by a capitalist tader.

The world economic situaion, he said, reminded him marched down the road to the second world war"

Chaos in the world economy, he said, would lead to social and political chaos.

Fukuda as the guardian of Japanese capitalism has the strongest reason to express this concern.

Disruption

During the last few years of disruption of world trade, Japan is the major industrialised capitalist country to have succeeded most in keeping up its exports and keeping down its imports.

Japan's massive trade balance surplus has had its counterpart in big deficits in Europe and above all in the last year in the United States.

Both the EEC and the US have been trying to force Japan (as well as many other countries) to reduce its own high levels of protection to let in more imports from Europe and the USA, and to "voluntarily" curb its own exports to the European and American markets.

Last month Japanese officials were pushed into a general agreement to this effect with the US Trade negotiator Strauss.

Fukuda "welcomed" this deal but he well knows that it is protectionism against Japanese capital. but by a nicer name.

Fukuda knows that he has to accept this "agreed" protection to avoid the imposition of an even more savage enforced protectionism.

Uncontrollable

And that kind of competitive tariff war could easily become uncontrollable, leading as it did in the 1930s to a sudden and catastrophic collapse of world trade and the growth of mass unemployment beside which even today's massive dole Fukuda tively echoing, from the special interests of Japanese capital, a whole number of doom-laden warinings about a full-scale trade war.

These have come from the head of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

Victims

But is is not the warnings of such international functionaries which can stop a war whose victims as in the 1930s will be the world's working class.

It is not only the capitalists who are demanding these measures:the reformist betrayers of the working class are clamouring with at least as much fervour as their capitalist masters for nationalist and chauvinist policies.

These policies are totally unprincipled. By trying to protect the jobs of the workers of one capitalist show themselves to be implacable enemies of the international working class.

But this is the policy of the fake 'lefts' of the. Tribune Group and numerous left-talking union leaders like Clive Jenkins of ASTMS.

And in the USA it is the policy of most of the leaders of the main trade union tederation, the AFL-CIO.

A truly internationalist policy for the working class in the face of the capitalist crisis must include principled opposition to all nationalist policies which pit one worker against another, and which try to tie the working class to the interests of 'their own' national capitalists.

In inter-capitaïist economic war, as in military war, the only principled policy for the working class is to fight its own capitalist class-class against class internationally.