workers press

The Socialist Labour League's press: The Newsletter, Workers Press, Labour Review and Fourth International, 1952–1973. A searchable archive of the scans

Six weeks end B52s

By John Spencer

Workers Press no. 958, 30 December 1972 · scan pages 3, 4

Topics: Vietnam and Indochina, Communist Party and Stalinism, Revisionism and the left groups

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A film made by ACTT showing the five Right-to-Work marches trom from Glasgow, Liverpool, Swansea, Deal and Southampton to London ending with a huge Rally at Empire Pool, Wembley on March 12, 1972. of surface-to-air missiles in the expectation of knocking out at least some of the US air armada with the proximity-fused Each i of the bombers costs $8m, though they are of Korean war vintage. And the cost of the bombers does not include the expense of training the pilots who are killed or captured by the North Vietnamese.

The B52 is one of the delivery vehicles for the US hydrogen bomb system, and administration officials are boasting that 97

of the International Committee Fourth International Mobilize to defend Vietnam revolution Parate nit 15 sh thinevirkie claco ee, yi working class. The anti-strike laws anc cratic rights, their anti-trade union laws, mark the imperialist response to the irre- their counter-revolutionary preparations. versible deepening of the crisis of their Nothing could better exemplify the death of reformism than their utter failure to organize even the slightest opposition to the ÜS attacks. The severity of imperialism's crisis reveals them for what they are—-its lackeys. They are indicating to the working class the hangman's role, which they will play against the working class in Europe itself in the new stage of the struggle.

World Stalinism bears the main responsibility for the fate of the people of Hanoi and Haiphong, and for the absoluworking-class internationally against the refusal mobilize the new stage of imperialist attack.

Ever since Nixon's measures of August 1971, ending the convertibility of the dollar and launching the trade war, everything has depended on preparation of the working class to challenge for state power: all possibility of reform has vanished. The only alternative to the revolutionary struggle for power was and remains a series of wars and counter-revolutionary dictatorships, the only method by which the imperialists can deal with the working class.

But Stalinism, both in Moscow and Peking, draws closer to imperialism. Having betrayed the French revolutionary struggle of 1968 and suppressed the Czechoslovak working class, with imperialist blessing, the Stalinist bureaucracy now accelerates its plans for the European Security Pact and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, all the time continuing to encourage the secret diplomacy over Vietnam.

New long-term Soviet agreements with US imperialism, together with the new approaches of the Chinese bureaucracy, left Nixon free to enter the present bombing campaign. Thus the Vietnamese workers and peasants were sacrificed to the privileged interests of the Stalinist STOP and its governments in a struggle that would lead to proletarian state power.

Successful revolutions in these countries would be the greatest blow of all against US imperialism in Vietnam. Those who hold the working class back from these revolutions are deliberately isolating the people of Vietnam and condemning them to death. The numerically powerful Communist Party of France epitomizes this role in its 'popular front alliance with the reformists and bourgeois radicals.

All those revisionists, and particularly the Pabloite 'Unified Secretariat', its sections like the British International Marxist Group and supporters like the US Socialist Workers Party, who accepted the ideology of the 'third world' as 'epicentre of the world revolution' and consequently restricted the role of the working class in the advanced countries to that of middle-class protest, share directly this responsibility of the Stalinists.

These revisionists propagated the lie that Stalinism had changed its nature and was no longer counter-revolutionary. But on the contrary, Stalinism was preparing its greatest betrayal. These Pabloite revisionists showed their bankruptcy by joining the liberals and Stalinists in announcing that Vietnamese 'victory' was at hand in the period of the US presidential elecOnly the International Committee, starting from the insoluble nature of the international capitalist crisis, could warn and prepare the working class for the new stage of the struggle. The only force which can stop US imperialism in Vietnam is the organized strength of the international working class in solidarity with the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese workers and peasants.

In every trade union, every factory, every socialist and working-class organizaVICTORI VIETNAMESI REVOLTIRE left unchecked, of their Common Market imperialist strategy, their attack on demoThe fight against the US in Vietnam is the same fight as that to mobilize and educate the force which can lead the working class to the overthrow of capitalist governments in every country.

To mobilize working-class action in this the 'Pay Board' are only the beginning.

Once again! The Vietnam bombing raids economic system. They signal the preparation of historically unprecedented destruction of the productive forces, above all of the working class itself.

There must be an end to secret diplomacy. Just as the 1954 Geneva agreement was the formula for depriving the Viet-

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