A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY CONFERENCE

Preparations for an allEuropean Security Conference are rapidly gathering speed following the conclusion of the treaty between East and West Germany ratifying the country's division. , The preliminary consultations aimed at drawing up an agenda for the conference opened in Helsinki, Finland, on Wednesday. They were preceded by a two-day meeting of Common Market ministers in an effort to draw up a concerted platform for the conference — probably staged in the Finnish capital in June next year.

For months there has been intense diplomatic and preparatory activity between the various European governments.

They have all been invited to take part, as has the United States. The only government which has not yet agreed to attend is Albania, but the proPeking Enver Hoxha regime may well send an observer to watch China's interest.

The Spanish fascists have not only been invited, but according to Madrid sources they have already held preliminary consultations with 16 other European governments, including Soviet bloc except East Germany.

The colonels' military dictatorship in Greece has also taken an active part in the preparations for the conference, including cordial diplomatic exchanges with representatives of East European Stalinism.

These facts alone indicate the conference's character. According to the Soviet government it will bring together the European states to discuss their 'common problems' in the realm of security.

What are the "problems' which unite the bureaucracies of eastern Europe, the 'democratic capitalists of France, Germany and Britain and the military and fascist dictators of Greece, Spain and Turkey?

The spokesmen of the Soviet bureaucracy invariably answer this all-important question with vague generalities which conceal the very concrete reasons driving the Kremlin to seek a deal with the European bourgeoisie.

Kiril Mazurov, a member of the Soviet Communist Party's politburo, speaking in Moscow on the 55th anniversary of the October Revolution, said the successful staging of a security conference will create new possibilities for all-European co-operation based on principles of equality, non- interference good-neighbourliness'.

Again, the Novosti Press commentator I. Plyshevsky, writing from Helsinki, says: 'There now exist prerequisites for establishing a firm and lasting peace on the entire continent.

"The key to this peace lies in introducing into the practice of international relations the principles of peaceful coexistence between states with different social systems. Many problems in Europe have been and are being solved on the basis of these principles.' The basis of this 'firm and lasting' peace is the division of Europe agreed between Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman at their wartime conferences in Yalta and Potsdam. The Soviet leaders want this division confirmed for all time.

The landmarks along this road are the Soviet-German treaty, the German-Polish treaty, the four-power agreement on Berlin, the traffic treaty between West and East Germany and the normalization treaty signed this month which brought all these into force.

On the backs of the divided German working class the bureaucracy plans to erect a whole edifice of 'peaceful coexistence' which, in its very essence, is directed against the interests of the entire European working class.

They aim at the eventual dissolution of both the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the institution of a single security With the aid of the western communist parties, the Soviet leaders are deluding the European workers into the idea that war can be abolished by the manoeuvres of diplomacy.

But war is inseparable from imperialism and the decay of monopoly capitalism in Europe is daily laying the basis for war. Treaties and mutual security pacts are no more able to prevent this objective process than prayer and fasting.

The Soviet leaders hope to placate the imperialists by guaranteeing them against revolution in the west. That is what peaceful co-existence means. For these bureaucrats the struggle of the working class is the main threat to 'European security'.

For many years the Soviet Union has been calling intermitently for the staging of a European Security Conference. Its plans received a new impetus only with the almost simultaneous upsurge of the French and Czechoslovak working classes in 1968. France, May 1968 showed the question of power was on the agenda. Inset: police trained to deal with the working class.

The . European employers recognized that May-June in France marked a new stage in the working-class struggle. For the first time since the war the question of power was firmly on the agenda. • At the same time the Stalinists saw in the Prague Spring the threat of the political revolution not only in eastern Europe, but in the Soviet Union itself, The purpose of the European Security Conference is the organization of counter-revolution in Europe. This will not ensure the security of the USSR or guarantee peace in Europe. On the contrary ot new more bitter conflicts.

Defence of the Soviet Union is inseparable from the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism all over the continent and smash the political stranglehold of the bureaucracy in the deformed workers' states.

The only way forward for the working class lies in the construction of revolutionary parties to realize the demand for a Socialist United States of Europe in struggle against capitalism and Stalinism.

Friday