A socialist manifesto for Europe

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At and around the Labour Party conference, starting on October 2, the EEC will be a major topic for rethinking. Meanwhile local Labour Parties are well advanced in the process of selecting Euro-candidates for the June 1984 election. Martin Thomas looks at Scargill gets it right Inside *The labour movement should come out as the boldest campaigner *We should base our policies on the reality of international capitalfor a united Europe. Leave little England' and 'national sovereignty' to ist integration, rather than trying to turn the clock back. That does not mean approving the existing EEC institutions; on the contrary, we must In the last Euroelection, the slogan of a French revolutionary socialist slate was, 'Long live workers' Europe, without fatherlands or Immediately - full sovereign powers for the EEC Parliament over frontiers'. '. Something similar should be the heading for our manifesto the bureaucratic machinery of the EEC, annual elections. *Replacement of the existing capitalist Common Agricultural *A united Europe means west and east. Solidarity with Solidarnosc Policy by a plan drawn up by workers' and small farmers' organisations, and all real workers' movements in Eastern Europe, break links with the to provide low food prices and economic security for small farmers at Stalinist state 'unions' •'A united Europe will be created only by the overthrow of both capitalism in the west and the bureaucracies in the *European labour movement support for anti-imperialist and national liberation movements in Central America and elsewhere; opposition to overseas intervention by the armed forces of the EEC capitalist states. A socialist Europe should hand over the property in the Third World of EEC multinationals to the people of those Get SOCIALIST ORGANISER each week delivered to countries, cance! Third World debts to EEC banks, and plan together with the workers of Third World countries for a massive programme of - 'Levelling up' to generalise throughout the EEC the best conditions, services and rights won by workers in individual EEC countries. - Work-sharing at full pay, to create jobs for all. *Keep out Cruise and Pershing! Expel US bases, remove all nuclear - A clause in all wage agreements to guarantee monthly pay rises in *End all immigration controls. Full voting rights for migrant - Defend all jobs. Open the books of all the EEC-wide operations of the multinationals. The trade unions in cars, steel and other industries *For a European workers' government. No working class policy Please send me .... months' sub, I enclose £ ... should prepare for a European workers' government by working out today can be a solution to the problems of any single European nation their plans to develop and reorganise their industries throughout if it does not pose the working class reorganisation of the European To: Socialist Organiser, 28, Middle Lane, London 8PL Europe. Fight for workers' control and for EEC-level public ownership; economy (at least) and build European working class unity to achieve without compensation, of the main multinationals and monopolies. 'EUROPE: saying no is not enough' is the headline of a major article by Michael Barratt Brown in the latest Tribune (September 23).

'Saying no' is, unfortunately, a fair summary of the Left's established wisdom on Europe. For many years Europe has figured in the Left's thinking only in the shape of the EEC Klasn Sloan Subs door by post!

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Economic policies have been resolutely nationalist and isolationist. Internationalism has figured in the Left's thinking as an issue of solidarity with people fighting oppression elsewhere, quite unconnected with policies on jobs or cuts.

The undeniably international Join the Socialist Labour Fight the NUM Cuts Women *JOBLESS KEY TO ITebbit By Harry Kent's Sloan appear to for some Euro-manifestos., nature of capitalism's current crises has prompted some rethinking. Next year's Euro-elec-" tions have concentrated many comrades' minds. Barratt Brown's presentation of a draft Euro-manifesto for Labour is a welcome new contribution to this discussion.

Capitalism, Barratt Brown argues, is now highly integrated the Tories!

this time.

east.

*Immediately, our united workers movement to fight national governments.

Workers' unity for:

- A 35 hour week throughout Europe.

line with a working class price index.

internationally. No economic policy confined to a single nation-state can be adequate.

•'When the wicked combine, the good must unite... (round a) Programme for Socialist Unity in Europe."

Barratt Brown proposes:

*The EEC Commission should draw up a plan for concerted Europe can only be a united European both the bosses* EEC and the bosses' reflation, to be considered the Council of Ministers;

*Planning agreements between the EEC and multinationals or state concerns, with trade union involvement;:

*A European nuclear-free zone. • Unfortunately, there is a tinge of 'Euro-chauvinism' in Barratt Brown's manifesto: reduced economic links with the US and Japan are also part of it.

Mainly, however, I think the proposals are at fault in being too timid. It's all a matter of nudging capitalist governments to be slightly more expansionist, put the fight against them on a proper footing.

the expense of the bankers and the bosses. reparations and aid.

weapons from Western Europe. workers throughout the EEC.

it. slightly more benevolent.

Nowhere is the idea that the united workers of Europe could actually take affairs into our own hands: And that, I think, should be the central idea of a socialist manifesto.

Below are some proposals for such a manifesto. They are not the sort of proposals likely to be accepted in 1984 by the established leaders of the big working class parties in the EEC - but the role of the Marxist left, especially on an issue where the broad labour movement is so ideologically befogged, is not to play the game of 'realism' . It is to blaze a trail.

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Socialist Organiser, 29 September 1983, Page 14

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