First Published: As an editorial in The Worker, No. 9, May 15, 1975.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul Saba
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Capitalism is aggressive and expansive or it is nothing. The Common market is the way the declining capitalist powers of western Europe in their abysmal stupidity believe they can create a new imperialism.
And British capitalism, more cunning than the others, hopes to be the survivor of this competitive clutch of decadent states and see the world map once more spattered with pink areas on which the sun never sets.
The main prop of British monopoly-capitalism in this neo-imperialist design is social democracy. Just as British workers in their struggle to defend themselves created a unique trade union movement, so in their unwillingness to carry the struggle forward from defence to attack they also created a unique social democratic organ the Labour Party.
The Labour Party Conference decides to “oppose” the EEC but the Party then proceeds to stifle such opposition.
Benn and Healey represent the two faces of this two-faced Party – phoney opposition to and real support for EEC. In the same way they represent two tactics towards the working class in capitalism’s crisis which are really the same – shooting the working class with “sugar-coated bullets” of ’workers’ participation’ and by way of buying up bankrupt firms with the workers’ own money and mowing down the working class with massive unemployment and belt-tightening till the buckles come out of our backs. Both faces, the false smile and the grim threat, are set against everything our class believes in and must strive for.
All those supporting the Common Market also support NATO – the military aspect of US penetration of the economy of all West European countries. How then can the Common Market be a defence against the superpowers? How for that matter, after Vietnam, can these western European capitalist powers think the US can defend them?
As for us, the workers of Britain, we have to throttle British neo-imperialism right here in Britain. Our slogan is: OUT OF EUROPE and OUT OF IRELAND!
Our Party, the CPB(ML), to enable the working class to carry out its own part of the worldwide proletarian struggle by overthrowing capitalism Britain has to give back to working class its own heritage – revolutionary ideology. The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.
We have to make the working class from which we and of which we are a part realise just how powerful they are. If they all sigh together it is like a mighty wind. If they all stamp their feet it is an earthquake.