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| Andy Brooks fourth left |
By New Worker correspondent
COMMUNIST and workers parties from all
over Europe, including the New Communist Party of Britain, met in Brussels last
week to set up a new liaison committee specifically aimed at co-ordinating
workers’ opposition to the European Union. On the 1st October in a
meeting room of the EU Parliament in Brussels the founding meeting was held of
the “Initiative of communist and workers’ parties in order to study and
elaborate European issues and to coordinate their activity”.
The proposal,
which was an initiative of the Greek communist party (KKE), followed the annual
European communist day conference sponsored by the KKE which was opened with a
key-note address by the new Greek communist leader Dimitris Koutsoumpas. Thirty
three parties took part in the general meeting and most stayed on to agree the
founding statement of the Initiative and elect its secretariat.
KKE
Politburo member G Marinos said the Initiative was “a significant step which
serves particular needs… that would strengthen the struggle of the communist
parties for the interests of the working class, the popular strata and the
youth”.
“We are deeply
aware of our responsibility. The problems are sharpening; the capitalist crisis
of overproduction and capital over-accumulation, which is the other side of
capitalist development, has led millions of working class and people’s families
to unemployment and poverty. Labour’s
exploitation by capital is being intensified, the future of the youth is being
undermined,” he declared.
The first tasks
of the new European communist group will be to co-ordinate strategy in the
forthcoming European parliamentary elections and counter the European Left
Party, a bloc of social-democratic and revisionist parties that supports the
European Union.
“We will wage
the battle of the EU parliamentary elections in a determined way with as our
criteria the people’s needs, the people’s interests against the European Union
and its strategy – against the bourgeois, liberal and social democratic parties
which serve the interests of capital, against the forces of opportunism which
support the EU and follow the line of capitalism’s management”, Marinos said.
NCP leader Andy
Brooks supported the proposal while pointing out that the NCP’s opposition to
the European elections in Britain is simply to boycott them. This initiative,
he said, was an important step in building the common communist stand to lead
the fight-back against the bourgeois offensive against the working class all
over Europe and strengthen the anti-war and peace movements throughout the EU.
Thirty European
communist and workers parties, including those from countries outside the EU
like Belarus, Norway, Russia and Turkey, signed up to the Initiative, whose
first steps include preparing an intervention at the EU summit in December;
campaigning for the release of the remaining Miami Five Cuban political
prisoners held in America; preparing for the EU parliamentary elections in 2014
and campaigning against the banning of communist parties and their symbols by
some of the regimes in eastern Europe.
New Worker editorial
New Worker editorial
No to the EU
The Tories are
now fighting on two fronts – one to shore up their support against a resurgent
Labour party and the second against the Eurosceptics inside and outside of
their own ranks. UKIP, along with a growing number of Tory back-benchers, want
a referendum on the EU before the next election, and not the one in 2017 that
will never take place if Labour forms the next government. And that’s a problem
for the movement in itself.
Labour, together
with the rest of social-democracy in Europe and the rag-bag of revisionist
parties within the European Left Party that still claim to be communist, are
steadfast supporters of the European Union and all its institutions. They claim
that a united Europe has benefited working people and that it will do so in the
future. What they fail to point out is one single benefit that the European
Union and all its previous incarnations have produced for workers.
In fact the EU
is a European Chamber of Commerce writ large aiming to build a super-state with
super powers for the industrialists, cartels and banks to intensify the
exploitation and oppression of the millions of workers within its frontiers.
The
establishment of the European communist initiative earlier in the month is an
important first step towards raising the communist answer to the crisis in a
co-ordinated and united way right across the continent. It draws a clear line
of distinction between the genuine Marxist-Leninist forces in Europe and those
charlatans who still pose as communists in France, Italy and other parts of the
Union.
The
European Union is neither genuinely federal nor democratic and every stage of
European integration has been financed by working people through higher
indirect taxes, lost jobs and lost benefits. The European Union cannot be
reformed. It must be dissolved and the Treaty of Rome, which established the
Common Market in the first place, and all addenda repealed.
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