For a sliding scale of wages- across the EEC

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Italian workers face the same price rises as British workers SOCIALIST Organiser fights to act as a real campaigning paper which can organise

Martin

BY A vote of the EEC states on May 19, food prices were increased by 16p for a kilo of cheese, 5p for 250g

of butter, and 3p per kilo of sugar.

Drama was added by the fact that the EEC was overriding Britain's use of a veto power which, though based only on custom, is usually respected.

No doubt the EEC states felt, after the support they have given through economic sanctions to Thatcher's war in the South Atlantic, that Britain was in no position to ask further favours.

Budget

Indeed, a few days later, obviously in exchange for a decision to extend sanctions indefinitely, Foreign Secretary Pym agreed a figure for Britain's budget contribution far higher than had been sought.

TinAnaline thin avicio in unuenywg wus crisis 1s the inability of capitalism to develop a rational system of agriculture. The EEC agricultural policy is based on fixing prices to support the incomes of small producers like the French peasants. it thus creates high prices, thumping profits for big capitalist farmers, and huge unsold surpluses amidst want and poverty.

Despite all that is claimed for it, the EEC in no way surmounts the contradictions of capitalism, but reproduces them at a new level. It does not transeend national rivalries, and the reactionary obstacles set by those rivalries to the development of society, but gives them new forms of expression.

Today. as they wallow in a slump, each capitalist class looks to its own profits, and the bright talk of international cooperation fades away. A Europe-wide economic plan, restructuring agriculture on the most efficient basis while safeguarding the livelihoods of the small peasants and providing new useful jobs in industry, can only be the work of the working class.

A Europe-wide working class struggle is needed, to sweep away the EEC, the capitalist states on which it is based, and the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe, replacing them by a Socialist United States of Europe.

And an immediate step towards this should be a fight for a sliding scale of wages - an agreement guaranteeing regular cost-of-living wage in -creases in line with a working class price index -across the EEC, in response to this EEC-wide price rise.

Such demands will obviously in most cases arise first in particular firms in individual EEC countries. But many of the major firms - particularly in the automotive, electronics, engineering and chemical industries - are themselves part of multinational combines with subsidiaries across Europe.

A fight on wages in any one branch of such a firm should be extended in scope to draw in active support and common "struggle on a European basis.

Millions more workers throughout the EEC - particularly public service workers and those in nationalised industries -face the same problems of soaring prices. They, too, should be drawn in to the struggle to defend living standards.

If Europe's feuding capitalist classes can eventually find agreement on price rises throughout the EEC, is it too much to demand that the European trade union movement combine to put forward a common demand for a sliding scale of wages to protect their members?

Solution

Though the fight for such a policy will have to take place in diverse countries under varied conditions, the objective must be the same: to defend the independent interests of the working class.

Many on the Labour Left, however, have drawn different conclusions. For them the May 19 vote confirms the validity of the call for Britain to get out of the EEC.

Whether this would be a British solution to the price rises is doubtful. (The British government was not opposed to the price rises, but only wished to use its veto as a bargaining counter to reduce its budget contribution). But certainly it is not a working class solution.

Reversal

The price rises affect workers throughout the EEC. How can British withdrawal be an answer for French, or German, or Italian workers?

Should they then demand that France, and Germany and Italy all withdraw? That would hardly reduce food prices - the same SAAWU irrationalities of capitalism would continue to operate in the newly walled-off states.

And in any case a socialist attitude to the reversal of the limited economic integration achieved by the EEC cannot be centred on the question of the price of butter.

That workers in each EEC country must fight first for the overthrow of their own ruling class, and that a victorious workers' government would have to cut through the Treaty of Rome as through all the capitalist property safeguards of sits own nation-state, is one thing. That socialists should campaign for the withdrawal of the existing EEC states from their limited agreements to cooperate is quite another.

Our complaint against the capitalist classes is not that they try to organise economic integration, but that they do so inadequately and at the expense of the working class.

The development of monopolies, cartels, and multinationals has simply reproduced, in new forms, the vices of the old capitalism of relatively free competition. Yet the answer of socialists is not to break up the monopolies and multinationals, but to go forward, through the monopolies and multinationals, by struggle against them, by expropriating them and seizing control, and by building on and.. transforming the economic integration achieved by them, to socialism. Our attitude to the EEC must surely be based on the same method. quarters and biggest plant of the Rowntrees empire. Other meetings and demonstrations will be held in the same period to mark the sixth anniversary of the uprising of the black working class that began in Soweto.

must immediately fight in trade union and Labour Party branches for support for blacking action, for large contingents on the York demonstration and for delegations to the Rowntrees shop stewards conference. The following model resolution should be put wherever ays: