Main Document Index | ETOL Home Page
Copied with thanks from the Workers’ Republic Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Ministry of Food welcomed VE day by announcing reductions in the fat and meat ration. Other items in the workers’ standard of living are to be cut unless new markets are found to absorb British goods. Where will these markets come from? Britain has already lost a third of her pre-war foreign markets. Ruined Europe cannot pay for British goods. Meanwhile. the poverty stricken Colonial peoples are striving to break the Imperialist chains. The USA, strongest power on earth, plans to oust Britain everywhere.
A third world war already casts its shadow over the “PEACE”. Recently the Moscow PRAVDA warned its “friends” as well as its enemies to beware of organising war against Russia, stressing that the Red Army is militarily dominant over the entire Continent.
SHRUNKEN MARKETS • A HUGE NATIONAL DEBT • THE BURDEN OF MILITARISM
MEAN: LOW WAGES • A MISERABLE DOLE • MILLIONS OF UNEMPLOYED.
Cashing in on the VE day atmosphere and on the fact that unemployment has not yet reached mass proportions, the Unionists have decided on a “smash and grab” election. Every vote for these representatives of the landlords and capitalists is a vote for hunger, pogroms and police repressions against the workers. A stable Unionists majority would be a long step towards fascism.
Remember that while some of the war-time anti-working-class measures of the Westminster Government have been withdrawn in order to restore faith in “democracy”, the Northern Government still keep[s] the Special Powers Acts on the Statute Book and still maintain[s] the auxiliary police force and keep[s] the RUC armed. To-morrow it can use these to coerce the workers. Remember that the RUC chiefs have been especially chosen to hold down the Greek and German workers.
The capitalists tolerate parliamentary rule only so long as it works in their own interests. Through the monopoly of the Press and radio they succeed in bluffing the middle classes, the agricultural workers, and the backward section of the town workers into supporting them. But only for a time. In face of declining market they can only preserve their profits by placing the full burden of the crisis on the small people and the workers. To achieve this they must cripple the Trade Unions and stifle the influence of the working class parties. If the workers defend their democratic rights the capitalists use fascist gangs, police, Army officers and foreign armies against them. Remember Spain in 1936 and Austria in 1934, when the capitalists organised an uprising and bloodily brought an end to democracy. Remember how, in 1917, the Russian capitalists united with foreign armies to crush Bolshevism. Be prepared! Don’t give the capitalists a legal covering to crush democracy when the crisis comes. Weaken them by voting against the Unionists.
Voting is not enough! Even if a government of genuine socialists were returned, socialism could not come through parliament. If the capitalists find themselves in a minority they will [throw] legality to the winds. Remember Carson’s sneers against legality! Only Workers’ Councils, under a revolutionary leadership, mobilising the common people against the factory bosses, the landlords and food profiteers, can organise the transition to socialism.
The Revolutionary Socialist Party is in favour of using parliament as a platform to expose capitalist policy and to preach mass action. But our party is new and still lacks the financial strength to run candidates.
This in the mass political movement of the workers, but its structure, bureaucratic leadership and purely reformist programme makes it a hopeless instrument for achieving socialism. Houses for the People is its main election programme. But so long as the banks, land, factories and means of transport remain in the hands of the exploiters the people will continue to live in hovels. And how can bureaucrats, who have aided and abetted Imperialism in its crimes against the Greek and Indian workers and lent support to the atrocity campaign against the German workers, be expected to wage a serious fight against vested interests?
“Work – Homes – Security” is their election slogan. Yet throughout the war years this party shamelessly supported the Unionist Government of capitalists and landlords. In England Pollitt calls for better housing and full employment but, at the same time favours a new Coalition with those Tory representatives of the slum landlords and capitalists who profess agreement with the decisions of the Yalta Conference.
The Stalinist “Communist” Party, is the leading strike-breaking agency in the country. It rivals Vansittart as an exponent of race hatred against German workers. These political weather-cocks are concerned not in furthering the interests of the Irish and British workers, but solely serving the needs of the Kremlin bureaucrats and rouble millionaires.
The Midgleyite Commonwealth Labour Party also join in the call for Homes for the People! However, its leader found a comfortable berth in the capitalist-landlord Cabinet for over two years. Above all, the Commonwealth Labour Party is concerned with “protecting” Northern Ireland against the republican “menace” by means of the Special Powers Acts. This party is recruited on a sectarian basis and cannot be called a part of the working-class movement.
Beattie and the Socialist Party claim that the main issue confronting the workers is independence from Britain and the ending of partition. However, it is not the Border but his social welfare that the worker considers to be the burning issue. Forge Irish working-class unity around the struggle against the landlords and capitalists on both sides and national unity will be won along with social emancipation.
The Labour leaders have connived with the Imperialists. Nevertheless, throw your whole weight behind the Labour candidates. Weaken the Tories! Undermine their confidence! Deprive them of the strategic vantage-point of a stable parliamentary majority which they would use to undermine democracy.
The Labour Party will not lead us to socialism. But it will place socialism on the order of the day in the minds of the workers by arousing their expectations and increasing their political interests. The workers believe that Labour has never had a chance.
Put them to the test and judge them by their conduct as an opposition. Vote them in and demand that they agitate:
NEITHER IMPERIALIST NOR NATIONALIST EXPLOITERS!
JOIN THE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST PARTY and FIGHT for a SOCIALIST UNITED IRELAND, A SOCIALIST UNITED STATES OF EUROPE.
Lectures • Questions • Discussions every Sunday night at 8. 36 Gresham Street, Belfast.
Marxists’ Internet Archive | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Document Index Page
Last updated on 20.5.2004