The actions of British imperialism within the EEC have precipitated a crisis within European imperialism. Since the Dublin summit of the heads of state in 1979, the visible signs of disunity have multiplied each year. The constant wrangling over the UK’s budget rebates, French intransigence over reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and growing protectionist measures within the EEC backed by the reactionary demonstrations and demands from trade union leaders and small farmers, are but the most visible signs of inter-imperialist tension.
The nature of the EEC
The EEC is made up of four major imperialist powers and their subordinate minor imperialist and semi-colonial satellites. Its character is therefore that of an imperialist economic alliance closely interwoven with the European wing of the NATO military pact. The EEC was formed in 1958 after West Germany, Italy, France and Benelux signed the Treaty of Rome. The main aim of the Treaty was to further economic integration of the member states which had already begun under the aegis of US imperialism with the Marshall Plan and the establishment of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation in 1948.
The formation of the EEC has to be seen in the context of the Cold War. American imperialism had, since the formation of NATO in 1949, taken the lead in encouraging the European bourgeoisie to form a powerful capitalist European bloc as a frontline fortress opposed to the USSR and Eastern Europe. The aim of the various bourgeoisies was to create a customs union (i.e. free trade within, common tariffs without), to establish the free movement of labour and capital and move towards the elaboration of a common plan for transport, scientific research, energy, currency, industry and agriculture. The period of success along this road begins with the introduction of the CAP in 1962, matures with the final abolition of internal tariffs in 1968 and comes to an end with the formation of the European Monetary System in 1978.
The Treaty of Rome represented a deal between, on the one hand, West Germany and its satellites (Benelux) and, on the other, France and Italy. In return for a rationalisation and subsidisation of French and Italian agriculture, West Germany would get access to the huge markets of France and Italy. British imperialism refused to sign the Treaty of Rome for two reasons. For the original Six the formation of the EEC was but a logical step given that between a quarter and a half of each country’s trade was with each other. But in the UK only 15% of its trade was with the original Six. Most of its trade continued to be with the old Empire and Commonwealth. Hence, the fraction of the bourgeoisie most tied to the continuation of this pattern of trade successfully resisted the moves towards closer integration with Europe. Secondly, the British bourgeoisie was reluctant to subsidise a large and inefficient European agriculture when the UK agri-capitalist class was small but highly productive. The Southern Irish bourgeoisie in the mid to late 1950s had no independent line separate from the UK view, given that at the time the trade of the twenty-six counties was still locked into the British market.
Imperialist cartel
The EEC was a creation of the imperialist epoch. As a result its formation cannot be considered in the same light as the tendencies within the pre-imperialist epoch towards bourgeois unification. In fact, the EEC is, in the main, a stunted and partial reversal of the general tendencies of imperialist stagnation and decay. For example, the European bourgeoisie did not unite Europe in 1958 but merely the rich club of imperialist powers. The member states reduced the weaker states (e.g. Spain, Ireland, Turkey) to the status of cheap providers of labour power. Also, although the EEC was a customs union it erected high tariff walls to the rest of the world, thus intensifying the problems of industrialisation experienced by the semi-colonial world. Finally, despite the fact that the EEC implied a degree of economic co-operation, this did not extend so far that each of the major imperialist powers were prepared to give up its special ‘spheres of influence’ in the semi-colonies.
The EEC did not create the post-war boom in Europe, rather it arose out of the deepening of that boom. On the other hand, the EEC did inject further life into the boom. Trade massively expanded. Output increased as well although not by the same amount. The major facet of the development of the EEC was to extend co-operation between the European imperialist powers at the economic level, and to increase the weight of European imperialism within world capitalism. The EEC accounts for 34% of all world trade, by far the single biggest bloc in world trade. On the eve of the formation of the EEC the three largest EEC countries had some 20% of their trade with EEC partners. By the 1970s this figure was over 50%. Today, the total output of the EEC is larger than the US and twice the size of that of Japan.
Britain and Ireland join
Between 1958 and 1973 British imperialism attempted to join the EEC twice (1962 and 1967) but their entry was blocked by France, suspicious that the UK was but a Trojan horse for American imperialism. The development of the EEC and its predecessor, the Coal and Steel Commission, was seen, especially by the French bourgeoisie, as an opportunity to construct a cross-European alliance to act as a counterweight to the predominant influence of the USA in the world economy. In 1959 the USA only had 16% of its stock of foreign investment in Europe. By 1968 it had risen to 30%. The US wanted a political advocate for its growing interests. Britain’s entry would also allow its UK operations to function without trade barriers.
By 1973 the pattern of the UK’s trade had changed dramatically. Over 30% of its trade was now with the EEC. Joining was to give recognition to the fact that future developments lay in that direction.
In the twenty-six counties, from the late 1950s two developments took place which pushed the Irish bourgeoisie into seeking membership. The market for Eire’s agricultural commodities was increasingly to be found in Europe. Secondly, Ireland had been opened up to foreign capital investment after 1958. US interests were served by the EEC, and substantial West German and other EEC capital investment in the country made it logical for Ireland to be integrated within the whole trading system. On Ireland’s part, the relatively large and powerful agrarian bourgeoisie anticipated many benefits from CAP should the twenty-six counties be added to the European bloc. In the end, by 1973, West Germany, France and Italy agreed to allow Ireland to join. The former anticipated, correctly, that they had little to fear from British industry, but that on the other hand the three new additions would provide a further market for their goods and the UK’s contributions would help offset the growing cost of CAP. In the last analysis, the EEC has been hegemonised by West Germany which—with Benelux in tow—has grown rich and powerful at the expense of the other European imperialist powers.
The ‘multinationals’
Underlying the post-war tendency within Europe towards greater trade was the decisive factor of the centralisation of ownership and control of capital and the internationalisation of the division of labour. At the time of the Treaty of Rome there were only a few multinationals (or, in reality, transnationals tied in the last analysis to one or other state). The main ones, in the UK and Holland, were resistant to the Common Market idea in that they were mainly concentrated in one state and hence benefited from the existence of protective barriers. After 1958 it was the USA and West Germany which sponsored the growth of multinational capital in Europe. France under De Gaulle resisted this tendency in the vain hope that French national capital would prove strong enough to hegemonise Europe under its own sign. By 1969 the French bourgeoisie had paid enough for this vanity and got rid of him.
One of the overwhelming reasons pushing the British bourgeoisie in the direction of the EEC in the 1960s was the recognition that it was a declining imperialist power, that the old Empire markets were insufficient to sustain growth of exports, and that British multinationals would be squeezed between American and European imperialism if it did not decide to cast its lot with the latter.
On balance the EEC has proved a greater success for the growth and extension of US imperialist capital than it has for the growth and extension of a unified European capital. Most of the attempts at cross-state mergers (e.g. Dunlop–Pirelli) have failed. Nor have inter-government state-capitalist ventures (Concorde, Airbus) been much better.
The failure of integration
This limited success or outright failure to develop a specifically European cross-state capitalism has determined the outcome of various attempts to forge a political unity within the EEC. In the 1960s and early 1970s it was the fervent hope of sections of the European bourgeoisie that closer economic integration would lead to the creation of a supra-national European state. This state, based upon a European integrated capitalism, would have sovereign political powers, thus capable of subordinating the narrower interests of each national state to the wider collective interest. Even centrists such as Mandel thought this probable.
However, the impressive tempo of economic integration in the 1960s was not sustained. The renewed period of world imperialist crisis engulfed Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s before this integration had gone far enough. This has meant that European imperialism has not been able to develop a cohesive political outlook to rival US imperialism in world politics. The lack of a common approach to the Middle East war and the oil crisis in 1973 was indicative in this respect. One could hardly multiply examples since, where the US has split the EEC camp.
Since the late 1970s the new period of crisis has tended to undermine and fracture the economic gains of the EEC. For example, trade barriers between member states are increasingly being re-introduced. The lack of any fundamental union between the member states has meant that they have adopted unsynchronised and often disparate policies to deal with the recessions of 1973–5 and 1980–2. The reflationary policies of Mitterrand in 1981–2 and the deflationary policies of Thatcher in the same period are symptomatic in this regard.
CAP—cornerstone of the EEC
Just as the EEC accentuated the tendencies within the post-war boom, so it has typified and even exaggerated the features of the new period of imperialist crisis. All the characteristic features of the imperialist epoch—parasitism and decay—are now pronounced in the EEC. Top of the list in this regard is the CAP. CAP was and remains the cornerstone of the European Community. One of its aims was to make the EEC self-sufficient in major foodstuffs. Given the boom, this was achieved by the early 1970s. But in the new period of stagnation, what was the EEC’s chief success has now become its heaviest millstone. CAP illustrates perfectly the contradictions inherent within capitalism whereby the forces of production collide so grotesquely with the social relations of production.
CAP guarantees big and small farmers that anything they produce will be bought up at ‘target prices’ which range from 200% to 600% higher than prevailing world prices. The major beneficiaries of CAP are the largest capitalist farms which have a high productivity of labour due to the application of massive capital equipment. Since the CAP encourages the massive overproduction of commodities it is the large West German, UK and French agribusinesses that benefit from the extraction of super-profits. At the same time, the small-scale family farms, typical of parts of France, Ireland and Italy, while incapable of super-profits due to the low level of productivity, have been saved from extinction by the CAP.
Unanchored by demand, supply has accelerated with the emergence of these huge profits. This has created massive ‘overproduction’ in beef, milk, butter, grains, vegetables. This subsidy to the agrarian bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie (mainly in France and Italy) is paid for by the European workers through high prices. Over 70% of the Community’s total budget is spent on CAP. Over half of that (about six billion pounds a year) is spent on storing and destroying this surplus and discounting it to Eastern Europe. And this in a world where some 450 million are estimated by the UN to be undernourished.
Developments within US agribusiness in the last eighteen months threaten to set a future pattern for the EEC and demonstrate the truly reactionary character of the present social relations of production of capitalism. In 1983 over 18.5 million acres of agricultural land was destroyed to eliminate potential production, a land area equivalent to the whole of Ireland. If the European bourgeoisie as a whole forces its agrarian sector to cut back, this must soon occur in the EEC too. Meanwhile, the refusal to lift the undercutting of traditional US markets threatens to release a massive trade war, the first skirmishes of which occurred at the start of 1983.
Crisis in the EEC
CAP is not the only manifestation of the decay of the ‘European ideal’. Attempts to develop cross-state policies on industry, transport and energy have effectively run aground. Worse, the threat of protectionism haunts the major EEC industries including steel.
The present crisis originates in 1979. At this moment British imperialism felt the contradictions of the EEC more sharply than any other of the Nine. It decided to act. When the UK joined it was taking a risk but it had little alternative and the prospects seemed promising. In 1970 the UK ran a balance of trade surplus with the rest of the EEC despite the tariffs. It believed its ailing industry could revive and compete with West Germany and France. A five-year transitional period, accompanied by a series of concessions, alleviated the pains of the first few years. But UK industry went into a spiral of decline faced with European competition. By 1975 the country was already trying to cope with a £2 billion deficit on trade in manufactures with the rest of the EEC. But worse was to follow. Meanwhile, the UK’s budget payments mounted each year until by 1980 they were over £1 billion. At this time declining British imperialism was making the second largest net contribution (after West Germany) and yet was proportionately the third poorest (after Italy and Ireland). Two years of rebates have delayed the present breakdown. Thatcher has insisted on a long-term revision of Britain’s contributions (to about £500 million) and reform of the CAP.
West Germany is the only net contributor to the EEC budget. But its position is fundamentally different to Britain’s. While the West German big agrarian bourgeoisie benefits greatly from the CAP, the West German state, on behalf of the whole ruling class, is prepared to underwrite the net EEC revenue contributions as a price it must pay for the total dominance it enjoys in the EEC market for manufactured goods. It is even willing, within limits, to bear the extra burden of the EEC budget that must necessarily fall on it if the UK contribution is cut.
France and Italy are the most desperate to preserve CAP not only because of the interests of the big agricultural bourgeoisie but also because of the electoral weight of the class of small farmers and peasants who would be plunged into ruin if subsidies were reduced or eliminated.
CAP and Ireland
The EEC succeeded in imposing limits under CAP on the production of milk in March 1984. Only by the exercise of a formal veto on the whole package of budgetary measures under discussion was the Irish government able to beg an exemption to allow up to a 4.7% increase in milk production and year-long opposition from the other states.
The antagonism of the dominant member states to the Irish exemption ignored the dependence of this, the most backward member state, on its dairy sector (9% of its GNP), and demonstrated the tendency of the main imperialist powers to attempt to settle their differences, in the first instance, on the backs of the imperialised semi-colonies, even such as Ireland within the EEC.
In Ireland it was the dairy and beef bourgeoisie which pushed the country into the EEC, drooling at the thought of huge profits under CAP. Irish agricultural capital made major profits and large sections of the small-holders were raised marginally above their subsistence level of farming. However, membership of the EEC accelerated the decimation of 40% of native Irish industry, its replacement by mobile transnational capital using Ireland as a source of super-profits and as an Irish-subsidised production base for EEC markets for US and Japanese capital. Significantly, native Irish food processing industry was also retarded in its development by the growing dominance of rival transnational agribusiness, leaving the mass of Irish agricultural commodities to be exported with relatively little added value from a state suffering the worst structural mass unemployment in the EEC.
Although we do not support the Irish state in its fight on behalf of its agricultural bourgeoisie against their imperialist overlords in their quarrels, we point to such conflicts as demonstrating the character of the EEC as an alliance dominated by a cartel of imperialist nation states. In Ireland we argue that the organisations of the working class should be won to championing the exemption of non-exploiting small farmers from limits on their production which would undermine their means of subsistence, as a step in allying them on the side of the working class.
Reactionary European utopia
In the face of all this, the notion—implicit at least in the Treaty of Rome—of a political union of the European bourgeoisie is further away than ever. What is on the cards is a further disintegration of the EEC into rival blocs, and through this into single antagonistic nation states, and even the destruction of the EEC itself. It is important to understand, however, that no bourgeoisie in the EEC desires or aims for this. Not even, or least of all, the British. With a weak, uncompetitive industrial base, life outside the EEC would be much worse than life within it. No serious section of the British bourgeoisie today contemplates withdrawal.
On the other hand, in the present period, the demand for a supra-national state in Europe on the terrain of bourgeois democracy is a reactionary utopia. As part of the programme of the liberal bourgeoisie or of social democracy, it is a utopian concept when the economic foundations of that democratic ideal are crumbling. If it were ever to be implemented it would be under the crushing blows of an aggressive and expansionist European imperialist power and would see bourgeois democracy swept aside in the process.
At present, the European bourgeoisie has not been forced to choose this road as the price of facing up to US imperialism. Such a time may come. For the moment, Europe chooses to compensate itself for the lack of real integration and union by simply adding more units to the EEC: Greece in 1981, Spain and Portugal in the next few years. In the absence of the material basis for real and lasting union, however, these additions of decayed powers merely build more contradictions into the European Community; more grasping hands for CAP, more markets for the consolidation of West German, French and British industry.
Meanwhile, the bourgeoisies of the EEC will have to content themselves with the faint shadow of democracy that they have invented. First, there is the European Commission which, unelected though it is, is charged with the formulation of policy. Real power is invested in the imperialist clique called the Council of Ministers, who make decisions and insist on unanimity, thus guaranteeing stalemate and political stagnation and inertia as the norm. Finally, there is the European Parliament, elected for the first time in 1979 and due for re-election in June 1984. A toothless body which can, in extremis, demonstrate its impotence by blocking the EEC budget in toto and sacking the Commission. It has no sovereignty over Europe or its member states.
Throughout its history each member state has been unwilling and incapable of surrendering political power to a supra-national body. Even the principle of majority voting in the Council of Ministers was abandoned at De Gaulle’s insistence in 1966 when the first major dispute over the ‘national interest’ exploded.
European union of decay
The fate of Europe cannot be entrusted to the EEC bourgeoisie. At present they rule over some 272 million people, a majority of them workers and small farmers. Of these, capitalism has consigned over 11 million to the misery of unemployment. The number out of work in the Community has doubled since 1979. The junior semi-colonial partner—Ireland—suffers the worst, with 17% in the South and 20% in the North. The stagnation in the EEC is evident even though 1983 was hailed as the year of recovery in the world economy. In fact only in Britain and Denmark was there something of an upturn in 1983. Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Luxembourg all experienced negative growth rates. Production and capacity have been slashed across Europe in the major industries of coal and steel. The CAP continues to guarantee massive profits for the rich farmers yet has done little to overcome the plight of the smaller farmers in France and the chronic condition of the peasants of southern Italy with their small-scale and inefficient methods. Only an alliance of workers and small farmers can put an end to this European union of capitalist decay.
International workers’ unity
An independent working class programme is necessary if this is to be achieved. As the system plunges further into stagnation, false solutions by the score are being and will be offered up by friends of the bourgeoisie. The chauvinism, not to say xenophobia, of the French farmers illustrates the nationalist poison that can infect also the body of the proletariat. Against the calls for import controls, beloved of the trade union bureaucracy throughout Europe, which transfer unemployment from one nation to another, we demand trade union unity in action to defend jobs from attack. From the French miners’ strike of 1963 to the British steel strike of 1980, the lack of united trade union action on a European scale was a key fact that helped undermine the effectiveness of workers’ action. It will be important in the current British miners’ strike. Capital is international and its operations depend upon the weakness of the European labour movement. The Ford Motor Co. plays off one national workforce against another. They pull out of production in Ireland altogether; they plan to close engine-making in the UK and concentrate in Cologne. The trade union bureaucracy is impotent in the face of this and allows the Irish, British and German workers to blame each other for their plight. Against this we must pose the need for class answers: occupations to prevent closures; Europe-wide strikes to prevent job losses seeking to impose instead a sliding-scale of hours with no pay cuts; the nationalisation under workers’ control of any threatened plants or whole industries.
In order to achieve these things against the inertia and obstruction of the trade union bureaucracies, Europe-wide rank and file organisation needs to be built up that can respond to co-ordinated attacks of multinationals like Ford.
Agriculture for need not profit!
On the land the oppression of non-exploiting small farmers by farming capitalists and by agribusiness (which more deeply subjects the rural toilers and workers to its profit just by the fusion of farming and industrial capital), can be resisted only by their mobilisation under the lead of the organised working class.
Among farm labourers this includes mobilisation to resist redundancies by the shorter working week without loss of pay, and the fight to expropriate and nationalise capitalist farms under workers’ control.
In the case of the smaller farmers and peasants, the proletariat cannot take responsibility for their eternal preservation under capitalism, whose unimpeded inner laws doom them to extinction. Nevertheless, the working class does possess enemies in common with the small farmers: the banks, and industrial and agrarian big capital. The working class demands the cancellation of the debts of the small farmers, the nationalisation of the banks, the extension of free credits, of cheap agricultural equipment and fertilisers etc. to these farmers whether individually or in co-operatives. The working class further fights for the expropriation of the exploiting middle-men and the agribusinesses and the provision of alternative facilities by the state. We also demand the extension of full health, education, pension rights and welfare conditions enjoyed by the urban masses, together with cheap public transport and communications, to the countryside.
Only the proletarian revolution can save the small farmers from their oppression and, via co-operative organisation within a workers’ state, lead to the full socialisation and planning of agriculture for need and not for profit in a socialist Europe.
European unity through revolution
Class unity against the bourgeoisie in the EEC must have as its goal the creation of Workers and Small Farmers Governments that lead the way, based on the organisation of independent struggle, in breaking the spine of the ruling class. A successful revolution in one member state is not envisaged, let alone sanctioned by the Treaty of Rome. A Workers and Small Farmers Government would not let itself be tied by any of its stipulations but would use any and every forum available to rally the rest of the European proletariat to its side.
The division of Europe after the Second World War must be overcome by social revolution in the West and political revolution in the East if the goal of a United Socialist States of Europe is to be reached.
In or out the fight goes on!
In the coming June elections to the European Parliament, it is around this analysis and with this perspective and programme that we will make propaganda. The bourgeois workers’ parties of France, West Germany and Britain serve up a different dish. In their majority (i.e. the right wing and centre) they aim to use the pallid democracy the bourgeoisie has allowed them in the EEC to debate the small print of the Commission’s proposals and make speeches about a far off ‘Socialist Europe’. They hope the addition of Greece, Spain and Portugal will allow them one day the prospect of a parliamentary majority.
Only in Britain and Denmark does popular opinion persistently reveal a desire to withdraw from the EEC. In these countries, which entered at the dawn of a new period of stagnation in imperialism (1973), it is easy to understand why this decline is associated with entry into the EEC. For many years the British Labour Party pandered to this consciousness and to the small section of the bourgeoisie opposed to entry and in favour of withdrawal in the referendum of 1975. The bourgeoisie told the Labour Party to change its views when it came to office in 1974 and the Wilson leadership obliged, recommending staying in, in 1975. Only the ‘left’ of the Labour Party around Benn advocates withdrawal, believing the Treaty of Rome is a fundamental obstruction to socialist advance.
The truth of the matter is that decay and stagnation within imperialism had long set in for British imperialism before entry. Outside of the EEC this would have continued. Entry merely altered the terms of that stagnation and decline. For that reason Workers Power in Britain called for an abstention in the 1975 referendum and will not add its voice, nor will the Gruppe Arbeitermacht nor the Irish Workers Group, to the campaigns for withdrawal, which are chauvinist in their inspiration and utopian and narrowly nationalist in the solutions they offer for ailing European capitalism. For the same reason we would have been unable and unwilling to advocate either a yes or a no vote in the Norwegian referendum on entry, or any future ones in Spain or Portugal, or even in a referendum on withdrawal in Greece. On each occasion the proletariat is asked to decide on the merits of two purely bourgeois programmes which contest the form of the relationship each of the European powers has with the others.
Especially, we will not advocate a NO vote, or a withdrawal vote as the stalinists and centrists have done and will do again. As marxists, we do not oppose in a STERILE fashion the inevitable tendencies towards centralisation and concentration of capitalism in Europe and its inevitable political consequences. We oppose capitalism from within its own development, counterposing to the bourgeoisie not a utopian backward-looking programme of nationalist development but an international revolutionary communist programme.
The creation of a ‘European parliament’ in 1979 was a partial success for the bourgeoisie in their attempts to overcome their divisions. As the crisis deepens within the EEC there will be a greater tendency for more secret diplomacy, more hidden corruption.
We demand that the parliamentary representatives seek to impose their democratic powers over each and every supra-national bureaucratic body in the EEC; that they obstruct, scrutinise and debate every plan or proposal which presently comes only before the Commission or Council of Ministers. On the other hand, we do not advocate the demand that the European Parliament be given supra-national sovereign political powers over the member states. This would promote an illusion, rather than put an existing one to the test on the basis of institutions that already exist.
While this parliament cannot be an instrument of working class power, it can and must be used by MEPs from the Socialist, Labour and Stalinist parties to expose the secrets of the European bourgeoisie to the workers, and it must be used as a tribune to rally the workers’ struggles outside parliament. We even demand of them that they use what limited powers they have to the full to delay and derail each and every anti-working class proposal.
Tactics in the EEC elections
Lacking the resources at present to put out our own candidates before the working class in the elections in June, we call for a critical-support vote for the bourgeois workers’ parties in the imperialist democracies.
In Ireland we give critical electoral support in the North to Sinn Féin and in the South to the trade-union based Labour Party.
We call for votes for Sinn Féin from all workers in the North, centrally the nationalist sections of the working class who are in open revolt against British imperialism and against the Northern State, overwhelmingly under the political lead of Sinn Féin, a petty-bourgeois revolutionary nationalist party. By solidarising in this way with the central progressive elements of their struggle, Trotskyists can most effectively argue their transitional action programme and the strategy of Permanent Revolution against the programme of Sinn Féin, particularly against their utopian perspective of withdrawal from the EEC which, from the standpoint of the Irish working class, is wholly reactionary. United front tactics, applied in this way to Sinn Féin, are vital if the nationalist section of the working class is to be won to take up action goals that enable the vanguard to put Sinn Féin to the test, to expose their petty-bourgeois character and begin to forge an independent proletarian leadership for the strategy of Permanent Revolution.
In the South, where a stunted reformist Labour Party based on the trade unions poses a major obstacle to the political development of the class, where Sinn Féin does not preside over any significant sections of the class in struggle, where the majority of the workers have habitually fallen in behind the major capitalist nationalist parties in elections, the electoral united front tactic must be applied to the Labour Party, calling on the mass of workers to stand with this party of the trade unions as against the openly bourgeois parties in the election, but making this call only as part of a programme of independent rank and file action to break Labour from its collaboration with the bourgeoisie and British imperialism, to open up the road of struggle for a Workers Government, a road in which the building of an all-Ireland mass revolutionary workers’ party is advanced as the strategic goal at all times both North and South of the Border.
Our aim in each country is to put the workers’ parties and the revolutionary nationalists to the test; to expose the hollowness of their claims to represent the interests of the workers and small farmers in front of those classes. In each case we agitate and propagandise around the elements of our programme.
For Europe-wide working class unity!
- Against economic nationalism. No to import controls!
- For occupations against closures.
- For worksharing with no loss of pay.
- For the thirty-five-hour week without loss of pay throughout the EEC!
- For the nationalisation of threatened industries without compensation and under workers’ control.
- No to immigration controls. No to the expulsion of immigrant workers and their families. For full political and social rights for immigrant workers, including the right of residence for their families.
- Against the guaranteed profits which artificially raise food prices for workers and their families; we demand the sliding scale of wages!
- For workers’ solidarity in struggle and international blacking action.
- Force the reformist and revolutionary nationalist MEPs to delay and block every anti-working class measure, to scrutinise and open up all dealings of the Commission and Council, to use the EEC Parliament to call workers into struggle on a Europe-wide basis.
Against European imperialism!
- Break up NATO!
- Cruise and Pershing out!
- Defend the USSR and the other degenerate workers’ states against Cold War measures!
- Not a penny, not a man or woman for defence!
- For solidarity with the semi-colonial regimes in their resistance to European imperialism. Cancel the debts owed to the EEC.
