Anticapitalist European left: make the capitalists pay for the crisis
Socialist Resistance and the International Socialist Group have joined the Socialist Workers’ Party, Socialist Party and the rest of the European anti-capitalist left in endorsing a statement for the European elections. The statement was agreed at a conference in Strasbourg on April 3, 2009.
It’s not for people and workers to pay for the crisis, the capitalists should pay!
The next European elections will be held during the worst crisis capitalism has known since 1929.
Economic, social, financial, banking, food, climatic, it is a global, general crisis.
Once again, the ruling classes want to make workers and peoples pay for the crisis. Governments have given hundreds of billions to banks but at the same time millions of layoffs fall on employees. Unemployment is going through the roof. The purchasing power of wages is falling. The destruction of public services continues.
It’s not for people and workers to pay for the crisis, the capitalists should pay!
This policy of European Union institutions has been rejected by the “No” votes in France, the Netherlands and Ireland.
We reject the plans of EU governments that save banks and not people.
We put forward an emergency social and democratic plan:
* No layoffs! A stable and secure job with decent pay for all!
* For an increase of wages and incomes in every country for workers, unemployed and pensioners!
* Harmonisation of social rights in Europe upwards: minimum wages, reduction of work time without wage cuts, pensions and social security!
* European cooperation in promoting social protection for the unemployed and the poor, and for common policies for the sustainability of public pensions!
* For the defence and extension of public services, across Europe!
* For a public health system guaranteeing equal access to medical care for all!
* For the defence of public education: withdrawal of the Bologna reforms!
* No to the payment of the deficits of failed Banks, and for the creation of unified public banking and financial system under public and popular control! For the closure of all offshores! European countries must give the example starting to close the offshores located in their own territories which are responsible for 2/3 of the world offshore business!
* For the cancellation of the third world debt!
* For the defence of the undocumented and for equal rights for all residents in Europe, whether “national” or from a foreign country!
* For the legalisation of all undocumented immigrants!
* For equal rights between men and women!
* For women’s rights, the right to free and safe contraception and abortion!
* For LGBT rights and equal rights for heterosexual and homosexual couples!
* For the repeal of antiterrorist and laws and exceptional procedures!
* For an ecological Europe, to fight effectively against climate change, we need a public service of energy production and distribution under the supervision of employees and consumers and we need to develop transport and housing public services!
* No to war! Disbanding of NATO and all European militaristic bodies! Withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq and Afghanistan! Israeli army’s withdrawal from the West Bank! End to the blockade of Gaza! Recognition of all national rights of the Palestinian people!
In these circumstances, and taking into account the particularities of each country, we are committed to building convergences in opposition against employers’ and governments’ attacks and at the same time to creating the conditions for a political alternative and an anti-capitalist pole based on the popular mobilizations, one which would stand for a Europe of social rights, and refuses any support of or participation in social liberal governments with social democratic parties or the centre left.
Indeed, what is needed is to break with capitalism and its logic. In this sense, the anticapitalist European left put these aims in the perspective of the struggle for 21st century socialism, and commits itself to restarting the debate on questions of a new distribution of wealth, of property and of democracy.
On this basis, and in the framework of the choices of each organisation, the undersigned will intervene during the next weeks in the electoral campaign for the European Parliament.
The signatory organisations :
Belgium : Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, Parti socialiste de lutte
France : Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste
Germany : internationale sozialistische linke, Revolutionär Sozialisticher
Great Britain : Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, International Socialist Group, Socialist Resistance
Greece : Antarsia (Anticapitalist Coalition) and organisations DEA, KEDA, KOE, Kokkino, Roza, Xekinima from Syriza (Radical Left Coalition)
Italy : Sinistra critica
Poland : Polska Partia Pracy
Portugal : Bloco de Esquerda
Scotland : Scottish Socialist Party
Spanish State : Izquierda Anticapitalista
Sweden : Socialistiska Partiet
Switzerland : Gauche Anticapitaliste, Mouvement pour le Socialisme, SolidaritéS
The Interventionistische Linke of Germany and the POR of Spanish State didn’t take part in the meeting and sent solidarity messages.
ENA chant offensive slogan and ''EEDL'' while marching through peaceful independent shop area of Brighton.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK7n-tP_4hM 
Pingback by Wanja Lundby-Wedin försöker snacka bort sig själv | Svensson on 26 April 2009:
[…] en hel del oberoende kandidater startat en vallista inför EU-valet vid namn Arbetarinitiativet. Den ingår i en europeisk kampanj och koalition där de största partierna är Besancenots NPA i Frankrike, PPP […]
Pingback by Dundee SSP » Blog Archive » European Anti-capitalist left on 27 April 2009:
[…] Read the statement here. Parties signed up so far are from Belgium, France, Germany : England, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spanish State, Sweden and Switzerland. […]
Comment by stuart king on 9 May 2009:
Strange times in Britain.
The ISG/Socialist Resistance are supporting the NO2EU campaign in the European elections. This anti-EU campaign argues for few if any of the above demands and does not allow the ISG/SR to argue for them in the campaign. NO2EU considers European workers coming to work in Britain as EU “social dumping” and criticises free movement of labour in the EU.
The SWP was excluded from the NO2EU campaign as “ultra left” – NO2EU is politically dominated by the stalinist Communist Party of Britain.
The Scottish Socialist party has correctly refused to support the NO2EU campaign and is standing on the above demands. The ISG/SR is not not supporting the SSP but the NO2EU slate in Scotland.
Of course the ISG can correct me if I have got anything wrong on their positions. Read a critique of the NO2EU campaign at: http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/2688
Comment by Patrick Scott on 10 May 2009:
As regards Scotland, Stuart you are wrong. Socialist Resistance (SR) is calling for a vote for the SSP list in the coming European election. All SR supporters in Scotland are SSP members and the SSP list itself includes one SR supporter, namely Raphie de Santos.
Regarding NO2EU. Of course many though by no means all of the criticisms of the NO2EU platform by Permanent Revolution (PR) are valid. Nevertheless we recognise that for all its political deficiences and shortcomings the NO2EU campaign represents a step forward insofar as it has mobilised and brought together a layer of activists on the left of the labour movement. But PR seems to condemn NO2EU because it fails to present a fully rounded revolutionary Marxist platform, would that life were that simple.
But what is the final response of PR?
The concluding sentence of the PR statement on NO2EU at
http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/2688
says that
“No internationalist or socialist should “lend their vote” to this campaign even for a moment.”
From this I can only conclude that PR will be ‘voting with the class’ by calling for a vote for New Labour in the Euro elections.
An eclectic combination of ultraleft bluster with an opportunist political practise I think.
Would Stuart or anyone else in PR care to respond?
Comment by stuart king on 12 May 2009:
Thank you for clarifying that Patrick because the Socialist Resistance statement of 27 April made no mention of your position in Scotland, or indeed of Scotland at all. What the SSP might describe as the mistake of a “London-based group”?
So in England and Wales, SR thinks the NO2EU campaign represents a “step forward” for the left, whereas in Scotland SR members, to quote the SSP website on NO2EU, think that it represents “’Little Britain’ politics”. The SSP castigate the campaign for having a “right wing concept of ‘British Sovereignty’”, of appealing to anti-EU sentiments and being organised in a “bureaucratic and top down way”.
Maybe this is why the position of Scottish SR/SSP members was diplomatically left out of SR’s statement of support for NO2EU?
No Patrick, we don’t condemn NO2EU because it “fails to present a fully rounded revolutionary Marxist platform” but because, as the SSP says, it panders to a “little Britain”, anti-EU and nationalist trend within the working class. Part of this is its playing with anti-foreign worker sentiments – ie referring to EU workers coming here as ”social dumping”.
SR in England and Wales has trapped itself in the worst of all political positions. It has absolutely no influence on the political content of this campaign but will help in the spreading of these poisonous ideas inside the Labour movement.
I am surprised that you (and Duncan on another thread) find a critical vote for Labour such an outrageous position. ISG/SR and its predecessor political organisations called for a vote for Labour as far as I recall throughout the 1980s right up to calling for a vote for Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997. Are you now saying this was wrong?
As far as I know you don’t think, like the SP, that the LP is now a “bourgeois party”, and no doubt you will be calling for a vote for Labour in the vast majority of constituencies in the 2010 general election where “left of Labour” candidates (however you define them) are not standing.
As you know in circumstances where it is possible to build a mass class struggle alternative to Labour we not only advocate it, but fight to build it, as we did alongside you in the Socialist Alliance. But the politics and democratic structures of such attempts matter. On both counts the NO2EU campaign fails. Which is why the SSP is right on this issue and you are wrong.
Comment by Duncan on 14 May 2009:
Because Socialist Resistance was founded explicitly to campaign for the same sort of party as the SSP, and since our members in Scotland are all in the SSP, it’s obvious that we call for a vote for the SSP. We publish the SSP’s statements (http://socialistresistance.org/?cat=53).
The SSP is a more developed alternative to Labour than No2EU. But in England, No2EU represents a progressive working class alternative to labour. Our statements in March (http://socialistresistance.org/?p=422) and April (http://socialistresistance.org/?p=475) anticipate some of same criticisms of No2EU as the SSP has made, especially in terms of its top-down structure, its approach towards “the so-called ‘free movement’ of labour”, and the need to more clearly separate itself from the much bigger right-wing nationalist campaign against the EU.
These weaknesses, however, are not the centre-point of the No2EU campaign. Its central demands oppose the Lisbon treaty and the attack on public services that result from it. It opposes the EU’s policy, reflected in the Laval and Viking cases, in which foreign employers can undermine agreed conditions in other countries. Those demands are in the objective interest of working people, and represent the views of both a militant trade union and a major part of the left in Britain. It runs quite contrary to the reactionary position of the Labour party which the ‘Permanent Revolution’ group will be backing in the next elections.