100,000 trade unionists and youth marched in Athens yesterday against the EU-IMF savage cuts programme being carried out by the Papandreou ‘socialist’ government.
Today millions of workers are going to the polls determined to fight the same savage cuts programme that is being prepared by the British ruling class for the UK workers.
The News Line calls on workers and youth to vote WRP where our party is standing and to vote Labour elsewhere to keep the Tories out.
It is very important to vote WRP since a Labour government, although it is objectively based on the trade unions, bases itself on satisfying the needs of the bosses and the bankers.
This role will force them along the same path as is being being blazed by the Papandreou ‘socialist’ government. When push comes to shove, i.e. when the speculators collapse the pound and demand action to save the currency, Labour will do the same as Papandreou.
It will respond to the crisis by attempting to unload it in its entirety onto the backs of the workers and the middle class as the ‘socialist’ Papandreou is doing.
This is why it is not enough to vote Labour. Reformism is bankrupt. It has no allegiance to the working class and, despite its trade union base, will carry out what the bankers want.
Only the WRP is calling on workers to prepare for a general strike to fight whatever government emerges out of this crisis election, Tory, Labour, a coalition or a national government, as it proceeds with its cuts programme.
We add that a general strike in itself will not solve the crisis on behalf of the working class.
The general strike will bring the working class face to face with the question of taking power, that is of going from the big strike to a conscious revolutionary action to take the power and smash the capitalist state into smithereens, in order to bring in workers power and socialism.
This is the only way out of the crisis. This is the only way to lay the basis for the introduction of a planned socialist economy that will produce to satisfy people’s needs, not to fill up the coffers of the bankers and the bosses.
This means that in the days ahead a new and revolutionary leadership must be built to organise and lead the working class to the taking of power.
Only the WRP can provide the leadership for the struggles that will emerge directly the ballots have been counted, and the bankers and bosses order decisive action be taken against the working class.
Britain will then be pushed by the crisis along the Greek road of massive working class resistance and revolution.
In fact, this will be the road that the workers of all of the EU’s states will be forced to take as the euro collapses and Greek medicine is administered everywhere by the IMF-EU junta.
Voting WRP is only the first step in building up the revolutionary leadership that is so necessary.
This is the lesson from the history of the workers movement, including that of the 1926 general strike.
Then, the trade union bureaucracy was forced to call the strike when the bosses cut the miners’ wages and millions came out on strike, only to be sold out after nine days by the TUC leaders whose treachery prepared the way for the ‘Hungry Thirties’.
The UK today is a much weaker capitalist state than it was in 1926, when it was still a great imperialist power with limitless resources.
The ruling class is qualitatively weaker and consequently all the more desperate and anxious today. It is capable of the most ruthless and desperate measures against the workers to save capitalism.
The working class is the strongest class in society. What it needs is the conscious revolutionary leadership to lead the successful struggle for power.
Vote WRP tomorrow where the Party is standing and elsewhere vote Labour to keep the Tories out. However, understand what lies ahead is the struggle for workers power and the struggle for the socialist revolution throughout Europe.