Stopping the H-Tests Is Not Enough

Tue Socialist Labour League opposes the manufacture and testing of the hydrogen-bomb, and all the other war preparations of the capitalist powers.

We do so because we adhere to the fundamental proposition of Marxism about imperialist war: that it is as much part of the capitalist system as profit-making and unemployment are.

We believe that it is impossible to separate the manufacture of the H-bomb from the capitalist system—and that those who try to do so are blinding themselves and others to the realities of capitalism.

The Soviet Union has now amassed large stocks of H-bombs. It has carried through a great many tests. Fall-out from Soviet and American tests is theatening the people of Japan.

Macmillan has announced that fall-out of strontium 90 -over Britain has doubled in the past year.

DECIDING FACTOR Socialists fully understand that in the face of a hostile capitalist world the Soviet Union cannot deprive itself of the military defence necessary to keep capitalist armies at bay.

But the defence of the Soviet Union is not just a military question. It is not simply a matter of large armies and hydrogen-bombs.

The fate of the Soviet Union can be finally decided only when the working class, particularly in western Europe and the USA, has overthrown capitalism and established working-class power.

To achieve this, the socialist movement must base itself on the ability of the working class to take power and reorganize society; it must base itself on the class struggle as the only means of achieving socialism.

But this is not view of the present leaders of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev and Mikoyan—and the leaders of the British Communist Party—speak of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between two social systems. — This conception throws overboard a fundamental socialist principle: that the prosecution of the class struggle is the only way in which capitalism can be ended and socialism introduced.

The Soviet leaders do not rely on the working class and do not seek to rouse it into action against world capitalism. And so they are forced to engage in the hydrogen-bomb rat race with the imperialists.

The Soviet bureaucracy fears the working class because once the working class begins to attain political consciousness as a class and come into action as a class, then it will collide with the anti-democratic régime in the Soviet Union and the bureaucracy will be menaced, as it was in Hungary.

CROSS ROADS.

As long as the working class is not brought into action against imperialisro the stocks of hydrogen-bombs grow, test follows test, and the air we breathe is gradually being poisoned.

Mankind today is at the cross roads, because, though imperialism is in crisis, the Soviet bureaucracy is unable to lead a struggle of the international working class against Failure to face up to these facts is responsible for most of the confusion and mystification surrounding the question of how to fight the H-bomb menace.

Bevan wants to keep the bomb but stop the tests. The history of all past armaments drives shows that weapons are manufactured to be used.

If the imperialists invest large sums of money in the manufacture of H-bombs in order to help their economy, then the time will come when the driving forces of that economy determine, not merely the manufacture, but the use of these bombs.

BRANDS THEM Gaitskell wants to keep the bomb but suspend the tests. He will not fight against Wall Street’s war preparations. He wants a partial truce—but he has no intention of frusirating the imperialists’ war plans by leading a resolute struggle for Gaitskell and Bevan were in the Labour Cabinet which voted the appropriations for Aldermaston. If today they recoil from the horrors they have helped to bring about, this brands them as objects of contempt to all. thinking people.

The Communist Party leaders say the main thing is to convince the powers to get rid of the bomb. This assumes what it seeks to prove.

How can imperialist America be persuaded to stop being

-—_—_———_--——-—--—__-_ eee — imperialist—to renounce the weapon which imperialism in decay has fashioned to safeguard its plunder and its profits?

The Communist Party leaders might just as well try to persuade the tiger to turn vegetarian.

What none of these gentlemen will get into their skulls is that the only force which can do away with the bomb is the working class mobilized for socialism—for a socialist America and a socialist Britain.

There is no short cut around this fact. overthrow of the capitalist system that is responsible for the bomb.