The second elections for the European parliament will be held in June 1984. The first were in 1979. Although the European parliament is only a consultative assembly without any real powers, these elections will not fail to have an impact on the political scene.
The parties that directly represent the bosses want to make these elections into a plebiscite in favor of the antilabor and warmongering policies that they support, a plebiscite in favor of austerity and installing the intermediate-range missiles, In Britain, they are represented by Margaret Thatcher; in France by Simone Viel, Giscard d’Estaing, and Jacques Chirac; 334 in West Germany by Helmut Kohl; in Belgium by the Martens-Gol duo; in the Netherlands by Lubbers; in Italy by the Christian Democrats; and in Denmark by the bourgeois coalition in power.
As for the reformist parties of Francois Mitterand, Bettino Craxi, and George Papandreou in power in France, Italy, and Greece, they are also applying the line of austerity and stepping up the arms race. But they are doing it in a bit more moderate style and are politically on the defensive, unable to put up any sort of credible alternative against the capitalist offensive.
No to the EEC, instrument of the banks and trusts
The EEC is a Europe of the bosses. The Common Market was not set up for the benefit of the workers but to bolster the power of the European trusts and multinationals. The EEC institutions act against the interests of the workers. The European Commission is coordinating the attacks on steelworkers throughout Europe. It is promoting an austerity policy in all the member countries.
Voices are now being raised in favor of equipping this Europe of the bosses with a European army. Such a force would be just as dangerous for peace and the future of humanity as the army of American imperialism or the “national” armies of the European imperialist powers.
The Fourth International appeals to the workers of Europe to put no faith in capitalist integration of this region. European capitalism is no more progressive than that of the United States. In line with this fact, we support the campaign of our comrades in the Spanish state and in Portugal against the entry of their countries into the Common Market. We are sympathetic to the campaign of the British Labour left and the Greek left for the withdrawal of Greece and Britain from the EEC.
However, falling back on the capitalist “sovereign national state” scarcely offers any better deal for the workers in the member countries of the Common Market. This would in fact only provide a justification for still harsher austerity policies under the pretext of defending national industry against foreign competition.
Against the two mirages of capitalist integration and bourgeois national sovereignty, the Fourth International calls for a struggle for a Socialist United States of Europe, a common fight, a common solidarity, and a common socialist objective for the workers of all countries.
Austerity does not create jobs
With the support of all the existing governments, the bosses in the ten member countries of the Common Market, as well as those in Spain and Portugal, have been able to direct very wide-ranging attacks on workers, recipients of social benefits, women, immigrants, and youth. In defense of their austerity policies, the governments have invoked the demands of international competition. But the same argument has been used in every country, leading to an unceasing downward spiral in buying power and social benefits.
It is sufficient for one country to lower “labor costs,” and a neighboring country will justify an ever sharper cut in the name of “the national interest,” that is, in fact, of class collaboration, to the sole benefit of the bosses. Indeed it is false to claim that austerity creates jobs. Since this policy started to be applied in Europe, unemployment has more than tripled, going from 4 million to 17 million. And no variants of this policy of reconversion will halt the drain of jobs. To the contrary, the experts of the bourgeois institutions themselves predict that in a few years the number of jobless in West Europe will reach 18 million.
For European-wide action for the 35-hour week now, without loss of pay
A different sort of economic policy, with different priorities, is perfectly possible. But it would have to be based not on the rationale of capital, of competition and profit, but on the logic of labor, of solidarity among the exploited. Priority has to be given to full employment and meeting the basic material needs of the masses.
At the time of the first European elections in June 1979, the Fourth International call said: “Almost forty million of us are organized in unions. If this power is mobilized, it can win the 35-hour workweek with no cut in pay, new hiring to make up for the lost worktime, and workers control over the rates of work to prevent a speedup. ”**
This call reflected a real need, since today the West German metal workers union IG Metall has launched a vast campaign of action, including strikes, for the 35-hour week. Many unions in other countries have come out in support of this. The time has come to organize, alongside the West German metal workers, a West European—wide campaign of all categories for the immediate introduction of the 35-hour week. It is now or never.
Now is the time also for all members of parliament who claim to represent the working class to introduce simultaneously in the national parliaments and the European parlia- * “For Socialist United States of Europe,” /ntercontinental Press, March 5, 1979, p. 219.
ment bills that would reduce the legal workweek to 35 hours. Now is the time for the West European unions to call on the American and Japanese unions to join in this campaign. This is the only effective way to stop the drain of jobs, to avert the divisive and demoralizing effects of massive structural unemployment on the workers movement, to force international capitalism to pay the bill for the crisis for which it alone is responsible.
Act now against Euromissiles
The governments of capitalist Europe are cutting social spending. But they are coming up with more and more money to finance arms spending, to finance their imperialist military interventions in the Malvinas, Lebanon, Chad, and Ireland. They apply the rules of profitability and return to spending on education and health, but no government assesses the “return” from its military spending.
The working masses of Europe are more and more rejecting this insane arms race, which threatens sooner or later to reduce our continent to radioactive ashes. The demonstrations against the installation of the missiles brought out unprecedented numbers of people — millions in West Germany, more than a million in Britain and Italy, more than half a million in the Netherlands, and 400,000 in Belgium. In Britain, the Greenham Common women are continuing their struggle against the NATO base.
This mass opposition to the missiles is clearly oriented in the direction of anti-imperialism and unilateral disarmament. This dynamic must be stimulated, reinforced, and generalized by specific action proposals more and more coordinated on the international level. Among the proposals that could be made, two are particularly opportune. One is the call for a referendum against installing the Euromissiles on the territory of each country or keeping them there. The other is for the unions to organize a general strike, on a West European—wide scale, against the presence of the missiles.
For an anticapitalist alternative, for the
United Socialist States of Europe
The workers movement must organize its opposition to the Europe of the bosses, of the trusts and the multinationals, to the Europe of austerity and greater militarization. It must do this on an international scale, The trade-union movement has not yet managed to do this, either in the case of the steelworkers fighting for jobs or in the case of the struggle for the 35- hour week.
In recent months, there have been big workers struggles, such as the public workers strikes in Belgium and the Netherlands, the exemplary mobilization of the Italian workers in defense of the sliding scale, the miners strike in Britain, the Spanish workers’ resistance to austerity, and the strike of the Talbot-Poissy plant in France, But in all these cases the fighting spirit of the workers has run up against the divisions among the traditional leaderships of the workers movement, their refusal to organize the struggle and to support an anticapitalist alternative, their capitulation to socalled international constraints and “constraints of competition,” that is, their capitulation to the rules of the capitalist game. Neither in France, nor Spain, nor Italy, nor Sweden, nor Greece, nor Portugal, nor only yesterday in Germany, have the big Social Democratic and Communist parties in government fought back against the attacks on the workers who are struggling against austerity and NATO's ultramilitarist policy. The reason is that these parties and trade-union leaderships refuse to attack the roots of the evil. In order to throttle the effects of the crisis, it is necessary to break the power of the banks and the financial combines by nationalizing them definitively and without compensation under workers control. The goal must be to put in power workers governments backed up by the workers mobilized and organized in their workplaces and neighborhoods. This means aiming for the expropriation of the economy based on democratic planning by the workers. This struggle is linked to the fight against the bureaucracy in the Eastern bloc countries, which is reflected in the growth of an independent peace movement. (And it is necessary to declare our solidarity with this movement against the repression to which it has been subjected.) This struggle will open up the way for a Socialist United States of Europe, the only real alternative to the divided Europe of today, prey to parallel crises of capitalism in the West and of bureaucratic rule in the East. A Socialist United States of Europe will not only offer an effective solution for the working masses of this continent. It will also offer a powerful assistance to the superexploited peoples of the “third world” in their struggle to free themselves from the morass of poverty in which imperialism and capitalism has trapped them. A socialist breakthrough in Europe would offer hope to all of humanity for a way out of the deepening shadows of hunger, unemployment, dictatorship, and war, a road to progress and an assured future. Forward to active solidarity for all workers in Europe fighting for their class objectives! Forward toward worldwide solidarity for all exploited and oppressed, in particular those in Central America, the Near East, and Southern Africa, who are the target of direct imperialist action! Forward to the world socialist revolution!
United Secretariat of the Fourth International Belgium: Socialist Workers Party; Spanish State: Revolutionary Communist League; France: Revolutionary Communist League; Britain: British Section of the Fourth International; Greece: Organization of the International Communists of Greece; Ireland: People’s Democracy; Italy: Revolutionary Communist League; Luxembourg: Revolutionary Communist League; Netherlands: Socialist Workers Party; Portugal: Revolutionary Socialist Party; West Germany: International Marxist Group; Denmark: Socialist Workers Party.