THE Editorial Board of the News Line, the daily socialist paper of the WRP, sends its greetings to the workers and youth of the world, especially to the embattled workers and youth of Iraq and Palestine fighting against occupation by Anglo-American imperialism and Zionism.
The Iraqi uprising against the occupiers is intensifying, not diminishing, while the split and mutually antagonistic puppet forces are desperately seeking to fashion a ‘government’ to serve the interests of the US ruling class.
The character of the puppet regime can be seen by the fact that it has just announced that its interim Oil Minister is Ahmad Chalabi.
He is still wanted by Jordan for racketeering, and is infamous as the collaborator who supplied the US with the fake ‘evidence’ that Iraq had WMD, so helping to prepare the 2003 March 20 invasion.
Chalabi would gladly privatise Iraq’s oil industry for US imperialism, in return for a share of the profits, if he is allowed the opportunity to do so.
However, the massive people’s insurgency bars the road to that, while the hostility of the working class of the UK, the US, Italy and Eastern Europe to the war and the occupation is forcing a withdrawal of the occupation armies onto the agenda of the imperialists.
When they are forced to withdraw, the puppets who are skulking inside the ‘Green Zone US fortress’ will have to cut and run with them.
There is no doubt that the Iraqi people will liberate themselves. There is also no doubt that an alliance of the Iraqi masses, with the people of Palestine, the Lebanon and Syria, will drive the imperialist powers out of the Middle East and liberate all of the occupied lands.
A feature of the last two years of struggle has been the way that the deepening world crisis of capitalism has forced the working class of the US and Europe into action against their ruling classes in a way that has united them with the Iraqi and Palestinian masses.
Berlusconi and Blair are damaged goods. Their struggle to privatise at home and to seize the oil reserves of the Middle East and the Caspian Sea as the US’ junior partners, has rebounded on them, turning their dreams of conquest and rich pickings into nightmares.
Bush is about to draw the sword to privatise US social security, while he encourages the export of millions of US workers’ jobs. He will experience the same fate as Berlusconi and Blair.
The hunter will become the hunted once the US working class pushes forward to defend its interests. In fact, the collapsing dollar, ever higher US interest rates and the huge inflation that is taking place in crude oil and raw materials prices, is deepening the crisis and the capitalist slump and sharpening the knives of the class struggle, especially in Europe, in the most revolutionary way.
In Britain, the general election is taking place with both the Labour and Tory parties competing to see who can impose the biggest cuts and sack the most public sector workers. This is while they are allowing the manufacturing industry to collapse, a massive trade gap to widen, and the middle class to be throttled by its over £1 trillion of debt.
Labour is posing as the true Thatcherite party. In reality, its job is to prepare the way for a Tory comeback that will give the bosses the opportunity to seek to complete the privatisation of the NHS and education, and eradicate the Welfare State.
We urge workers to keep the Tories out and to organise to deal with Blair and Brown by going forward to a workers’ government.
The way to do this is to sharpen the class struggle during the election, not diminish it. We urge MG Rover workers to immediately occupy their Longbridge plant, and to demand that the TGWU and Amicus trade unions take national action to secure its nationalisation under workers’ control, to safeguard every job.
We also urge workers to vote WRP where we are standing and to vote Labour in all other constituencies, except in Bethnal Green, where George Galloway is standing, and Sedgefield where Reg Keys is standing against Blair and East Kilbride, where Rose Gentle is standing against Adam ingram, the Blairite Armed Forces Minister. These fighters against imperialist war must be supported.
Their victory will be a blow against imperialist war and the deception of the masses by Blair.
A returned Labour government will immediately initiate major battles with the working class as its seeks to sack 100,000 civil servants, end the final salary pensions of 1.5 million public sector workers, continue with the destruction of manufacturing industry and impose further cuts as the world crisis deepens.
The working class will take on the Blair or Brown government in a series of very big struggles. These will create the conditions for the WRP to take the leadership of decisive sections of workers and go forward to bring down the Blair government and bring in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies, including withdrawing all British troops from Iraq. This will give a gigantic impetus to the struggle for socialism all over Europe.
This is the way forward. The working class must deal with Blair. There must be no return of the Tories.
France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are all seething as the bosses, getting ready for a trade war with the US, seek to eliminate the 35 hour week, cut wages, cut benefits and speed up production. The common message that is being spelt out to the workers of Europe, is that they must give the bosses what they want or the factories will be moved to Eastern Europe or Asia. There is no doubt that workers throughout Europe will resist their attacks with major class actions.
Meanwhile, the imperialists, after meeting great resistance in Iraq, are turning eastwards to attack the Russian Federation.
With capitalism in crisis, the imperialists are desperate to grab the oil resources of the Caspian sea and the mineral resources of the Russian Federation.
A fortnight ago, the insolent Condoleezza Rice visited Moscow where she demanded that Russia kowtows to the Bush agenda.
She then proceeded to the NATO summit in Lithuania to discuss the fast track entry of the Ukraine into NATO, and a military alliance between the Ukraine and Georgia so that Russia will be surrounded by hostile armies from the Baltic Sea to the Caspian Sea. Rice was shrill in her denunciations of ‘dictatorship’ in Belarus and her support for the right wing Belarusian opposition.
She made clear that any future election that the opposition did not win, would be denounced as rigged, and that the US would champion its Belarusian collaborators, raising the spectre of a NATO intervention into Belarus to support a ‘popular uprising’ against Lukhashenko. Such an attack would be an attack on Russia.
Belarus is a crucial part of the Russian missile defence system, and of Russian gas pipelines. An unhinged Belarus would mean an unhinged Russia. Such an attack would see the mobilisation of millions of Russian and Soviet workers.
Putin, and the remnants of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Kremlin, however, have no answer to the imperialist attack. The bureaucracy continues to try to balance between the imperialist powers and the Russian workers. Despite the thrust of NATO eastwards into the Ukraine, where it is opposed by millions of Ukrainian workers, Putin continues to seek to work with his ‘partner’ Bush.
At the same time, he publicly ‘regrets’ the way that Gorbachev and Yeltsin undermined the USSR, doing the dirty work for the imperialists. Meanwhile, at home he jails that section of the new bourgeoisie that seeks to grab the political power for itself, while at the same time he assures the boss of BP that it will be allowed to buy Russian oil fields, and seeks to eliminate the Soviet benefits of students, workers and pensioners, touching off mass demonstrations of opposition to the bureaucracy. The Stalinist bureaucracy is counter-revolutionary through and through.
Only the mobilisation of Soviet workers for the revolutionary reconstitution of the USSR can prevent the dismemberment of the Russian Federation by the imperialist powers. Only the Trotskyist movement can lead this struggle. It must be built up rapidly in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, to lead the political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and the new bourgeoisie, that it has spawned, and restore rule through workers’ and peasants’ soviets.
This struggle will align the Soviet workers alongside the workers of Europe and America, and the masses of Iraq, Palestine and Asia in the struggle to replace the anarchy of global capitalism with world socialism, through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
The rapidly developing crisis of capitalism is driving forward trade wars, slump, and imperialist attempts to re-divide the world.
It is also driving forward wars and revolutions, including the socialist revolution.
In the Far East, a new front is being opened up as the US allies itself with a resurgent Japanese imperialism against the working classes of China, Korea, and Japan itself. Humanity is at the crossroads. Imperialism is lurching over the brink into economic and military catastrophes.
The working class and the oppressed nations have no alternative but to take on global capitalism, with its anarchy and mass violence, in order to survive. Once again humanity has no choice. It is faced with socialism or being thrust into barbarism.
It must overthrow global capitalism, and go forward to world socialism, under which the productive forces will be planned and organised to satisfy people’s needs and to raise the masses of the world out of a state of hunger, super exploitation and despair – not, as at present under capitalism, to turn billionaires into trillionaires.
The crisis of humanity remains the crisis of working class leadership. Labour leaders, Blair and Brown, boast that they are more Thatcherite than the Tory, Howard, as they deliver a cheap labour, completely deregulated, law of the jungle, capitalist economy.
The trade union leaders, such as Woodley and Simpson, eagerly assisted Blair and Brown to shut down MG Rover.
With that action, they declared their readiness to help shut down the rest of British industry. Under these leaders there can only be betrayal, despair, treachery and very hard times for workers and their families.
This May Day we urge workers to join the WRP in Britain and to establish sections of the Fourth International in every country on the planet. The time has come to overthrow capitalism and to advance to socialism. There is no choice. There is no alternative. There is not a moment to lose!
