Newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
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The Coming Election: Not a Change of Ruling Party but a New, Democratic System Is Needed
British Government's "Modern Vision of Europe"
Actions in East London against the Anti-Social Offensive
Studying, Selling and Writing for Workers' Weekly
The Campaign of the TUC for "New Unionism"
IN THIS PERIOD of the run-up to the announcement of the general election, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are making promises to the electorate. They are each claiming that they have the interests of the people at heart and at the same time that each will cut public spending, while keeping taxes low and reducing the budget deficit.
The electorate can believe neither party. They only know they want an end to a system where they continually find themselves at the sharp end without having the ways and means to change the situation. This is what is making the people dissatisfied with and even cynical about the old type of political parties and the archaic political processes and institutions.
The answer cannot be to call upon the people to have faith in the unrepresentative system of parliamentary democracy because big issues are at stake. The opposite is true. It is hardly a credible alternative that can call on the workers to vote for the party that is supposed to be the least detrimental to their interests. In reality, all the evidence points to the fact that, whatever the big parliamentary parties say while in "opposition", in government they behave in the same way. The fact is, as long as they cling on to the same outmoded political system which neither puts the people's interests but those of "business" at the centre, nor puts people in charge of their own lives, the status quo will remain.
The workers, the youth and all other concerned sections of the people should therefore reject the big parties who are determined to maintain the status quo and keep the people out of power. The central feature of the coming election is whether to reject this system and fight for a system which puts a pro-people, pro-social programme at the centre, or not. In such a new, democratic system it is the people who have sovereignty. The election must be used by the working class to strengthen its fight for the creation of such a new system.
In the last few weeks the government has begun an international campaign to restate its policy towards the European Union and present what it calls its "modern vision of Europe".
Malcolm Rifkind, the Foreign Secretary, spoke on this subject three times in as many weeks, addressing the French Chamber of Commerce in London, the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Bonn. His theme was that the ideas of the British government are "in tune with the British people" and at one with the aspirations of the peoples of Europe; and that the future of the EU "is a debate for the people of Europe not just the governments".
The Foreign Secretary is attempting to strengthen Britain's bargaining position with other EU members ahead of the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) later this year, when the British Government will come under increasing pressure to sign the Social Contract and implement the EU's Working Time directive. His concern is neither with the British people nor the peoples of Europe, but is solely with the interests of the British capitalists in their contradictions with their European rivals. At the same time, his "modern vision" of the future of Europe amounts to nothing more than how best to develop a Europe of the monopolies; how best to enlarge the single market and develop Europe's competitiveness in rivalry with the other major trading blocs in the so-called global market.
John Major also spelt out the British government's concerns in a speech to the European Policy Forum at the beginning of February. Major argued that the other EU economies need to be more like the British economy, that they must all adopt what he referred to as the "enterprise approach" rather than the so-called "European Social Mode", favoured by some other members of the EU, which he claimed had led to massive unemployment and made Europe as a whole uncompetitive. Major therefore argued that the anti-social offensive should be stepped up throughout the EU; that there should be less spent on welfare provision, education and health care. He argued for more privatisation; that trade unions should be "tamed" as they had in Britain, and that it should be made easier for workers to be sacked. In fact Major argued against any measure which might provide working people with any employment rights at all, claiming that granting such rights would encourage the monopolies to relocate elsewhere.
The reality is that the European Union remains the reactionary organisation of the monopolies, in which, as Major's speech shows, the various governments on behalf of the financial oligarchies contend and collude with each other to strengthen their own positions within the EU, but also aim to strengthen the EU against other rival trading blocs. The EU stands against the sovereignty of the peoples of Europe, including Britain. The working class must have no truck with the European Union. They must oppose the manoeuvres of both the Conservatives and the Labour Party with regard to strengthening and supporting the European Union and demand that Britain withdraws from it.
HEALTH WORKERS and community organisations in East London have in the last week been holding marches, rallies and meetings in campaigns to defend local health services against desperate lack of resources with planned further cuts and against privatisation of services.
This winter has seen unprecedented numbers of people needing emergency admission to hospital with the London Ambulance service receiving more calls than ever in its history. Many general hospitals have simply not had enough beds to admit patients to or staff to care for them. Conditions in Accident and Emergency Departments have been as one might expect with a major incident or disaster, not a regular January cold spell. In hospitals in several parts of London and others in the country such scenes have been repeated day after day.
Over the last five years, London has lost 14.2% of its acute beds – 2,786 out of a 1991 total of 19,628. A number of prestigious organisations representing health professional, service users and health policy and research have been warning of the serious consequences not only of the reduction of beds for acutely ill people, but other vital services such as mental health.
Far from responding to this alarming deterioration in the health of the population and the incapacity of the services to meet need, those responsible for the health service in the government are imposing further reductions in funding for the areas in most need.
On Saturday February 15, health workers and local people marched from Hackney to The Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel where a rally was held. They were protesting against £18m of cuts proposed which would result amongst other closures in the closure of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Sick Children and a 20% cut in School Nurses with vital health screening tests lost in an area where diseases of poverty such as TB have reappeared and are fast becoming endemic. The health service in this area also faces the prospect of a huge Private Finance Initiative deal to build a £310m new hospital on the grounds of the London Hospital which it is feared could prove so costly that routine admissions would not be sent there. Speaker after speaker condemned these health cuts in the two poorest boroughs in the country.
On Monday February 17, a meeting was held in Walthamstow, a neighbouring district in East London, to publicly launch a campaign against the critical underfunding of the health services in that area that had led to a prolonged state of the crisis in Whipps Cross A&E that has hit the local and national news. The campaign is also against privatisation of services, in particular the planned privatisation of support workers at Whipps Cross. It has been initiated by health staff who are calling on organisations in the community and representing people using health services to join with them. The meeting was well attended by staff, pensioners, relatives of patients in threatened services, other trade union activists and other groups.
A leaflet from the East London Branch of RCPB(ML), "People's Health and Wellbeing Must Be a Central Aim of the Economy", distributed by supporters participating in these two events, raised the economic and political context in which these attacks are being made and the question of how this movement should be built to be effective in securing the future for a health service that has the funding that will meet people's needs.
The leaflet pointed out: "People's health and well being should be a central aim of the economy, and provision for this and continual advancement of health science and standards of care are of necessity society's responsibility. Health professionals continue to advance their knowledge and thinking on the best method of delivering care, but in almost every field their ability to give people access to this care in sufficient time and quantity that it can make a real difference to the health of the population is blocked by lack of resources.
"We are told that the economy cannot afford to fill the 'bottomless pit' of healthcare that people need. This is a political assertion which economic facts contradict. Contrary to the governments repeated assertions about health spending increasing their own statistics show since 1992 it has in fact gone down by £1 billion in proportion to the growth in national wealth.
"This raises the question of where this wealth is going and what is it being used for? The reality is that while the fate of our health care is a matter of crucial importance to the whole population, its future is being dictated by a handful of economically powerful and extremely wealthy people whose interest in it is to amass greater wealth and control. The government strategy on health care is to ensure that wealth is channelled in the direction of the financial oligarchies, through withdrawing funds from public services to service the national debts, and to secure long-term profits for the fast growing consortiums of service, construction and finance companies, many of the multi-nationals, as the NHS is opened up as a market through PFI, market testing, and placing contracts for care in the private sector.
"Health workers and people in the community are marching, campaigning and fighting powerful and determined battles to defend their local health services. But the question people are asking is how can we secure the future for a health service which has the resources it needs? Confidence that any of the main political parties will do this has fast faded. None of them challenge the assumption that repayment of debt to the financial oligarchy must take precedence over the needs of the people, they do not even talk of a significant increase on the existing funding for health.
"What is clear is that the drive to secure this future comes from the people themselves and it is this movement that must be built. A central demand should be that healthcare and other essential needs of people should have prior claim on funding held by the government and debt servicing and repayment to the financial oligarchy should be halted to achieve this, that health funding must be spent only on patient care and the staff and other resources needed to achieve this, not to provide private profit.
"We must find ways to organise so that such movements and the people themselves become politically empowered to be able to make this happen."
THE PROJECT OF developing the technical base of RCPB(ML) within the programme of improving the content and extending the readership of Workers' Weekly is going ahead. Next Saturday, March 1, will see the first of the regular monthly editions of the newspaper in A3 format. We call upon all the members and sympathisers of RCPB(ML) to prepare for the dissemination of this edition of Workers' Weekly, which will contain important articles on the coming election and on International Women's Day, among others.
The basic organisations of RCPB(ML) are placing on their agenda the extremely important programme that the Party has set to organise the advanced elements of the working class, as well as the youth and students, and women and others, to study, sell and write for Workers' Weekly. It is crucial to the building of RCPB(ML) and the waging of the class struggle that this programme is seriously discussed and implemented by the basic organisations, which are the mainstay of the Party. The work of the basic organisations must begin from this programme to Improve the Content, Extend the Readership of Workers' Weekly which involves the studying, selling and writing for Workers' Weekly and organising workers, youth and students, and women to do the same.
THERE ARE innumerable problems which the working class and people face both in the short term and in the long term. It could be said that the most important single purpose in life is overcoming these problems in the course of working to ensure that the way becomes opened for society to progress instead of being more and more bogged down in material and spiritual crisis. There can be no lasting solution to these problems without society being on the road to progress, which means that society has to take responsibility for its members and that people must control their own lives. In short, society must become socialised.
There can be no two ways about it – the Party, RCPB(ML), is the indispensable and number one factor for preparing the subjective conditions for bringing about this socialised society through social revolution. That is why the work to build the Party can never be downgraded. As well as being a question of being organised in the work to strengthen Workers' Weekly and organise around it, which is the essential work around which the Party gets built, it is also a question of gearing all one's thoughts and actions to serving the movement of the working class for its emancipation. The Party does not agree that a person's life can be compartmentalised into a section dedicated to social revolution and a section dedicated to the pursuit of individual interest. In particular, it upholds that Party members cannot on the one hand claim to be revolutionary in words while at the same time withholding their physical, financial and social commitment. To put it another way, they cannot live their lives with their social culture being detached from their politics. It is the view of RCPB(ML) that the work of building the Party and the work to Improve the Content, Extend the Readership of Workers' Weekly will not be transformed without this problem being tackled head on.
THE TUC HAS ANNOUNCED that it is stepping up its "New Unionism" campaign, started last year, to reverse the slide which has seen membership fall from over 12 million in 1979 to just under 7 million today. The TUC task group, set up by the General Council to oversee the campaign, is calling on unions to "boost investment" and make organising the unorganised their top priority. It has organised a special TUC conference on March 17 in London to mark the stepping up of the campaign. The TUC is presenting the problem as one of training "dedicated organisers" to carry out aggressive recruitment drives and has invited from the US as the main speaker Andy Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), to speak on how unions can "tackle falling membership by a new drive to recruit and organise".
There is no doubt that the workers must get organised and that years of neglect of the unorganised workers, the unemployed, youth, etc., must be reversed. But organised for what? That is the key question that should be discussed at the Special TUC Conference on March 17. Should workers be organised around, as the TUC is saying, the aims of making British companies successful in the global market, the disastrous path which is destroying the national economy, which is increasing tension internationally and leading in the direction of war? Or should they have their own agenda of building their resistance movement to all the attacks on them around themselves as modern leaders of society who must present their own pro-social programme to rebuild the national economy and society and lift the society out of the crisis. Only if the conference seriously addresses this question can it make a positive contribution to developing a genuine new unionism that can organise and inspire the working class.
EIGHT LEADING STUDENTS of the student movement in Ankara, Turkey, were sentenced at the end of January to a total of 76 years in prison by the State Security Court.
Since October 1995, university students in Turkey have been engaged in various activities, including demonstrations, to oppose fee increases of 350 per cent and privatisation policies at the universities.
Eight students who were expelled from their universities as a result of refusing to pay their fees held a demonstration at the Grand National Assembly and shouted slogans demanding the Right to Education. The students also rallied in front of the National Ministry of Education. They held an interview with the Minister and told him they could not attend the university due to inability to pay fees.
It is reported that sixteen students were arrested on December 25, 1995, and over 11 days they were interrogated and tortured in the Anti-Terrorist Branch of the Security Department. Based on students' complaints of torture and threats of rape while in custody, human rights organisations raised alerts. Police officers are also alleged to have placed Molotov cocktails in the homes of the students. They planted evidence to convict the students and the court refused to take into account the charges made by the students of torture while in custody and the planting of evidence. The Court also refused to hear the testimony of eye-witnesses.
It is clear that these students in Turkey have been convicted for political reasons, using violation of the law as a pretext. Even then, the evidence is fabricated.
Students in Turkey are waging an international campaign for the release of the student leaders and condemning the interference of the police during the trial and pointing out that statements acquired under torture shall not constitute evidence before a Court of Law.
Faxes of protest can be sent to President S. Demirel of Turkey on 0090 312 427 1330.