Statement of the Workers' Communist Party of Denmark (APK), December 6, 2002
The capitalist world crisis has been affecting the European continent with
great force, throwing tens of thousands of workers into the sink of mass unemployment.
At the same time, the EU and the Union governments in the EU countries have
been continuing the implementation of their neoliberal programme of privatisation
and ravaging of the public sector and of social cuts, such as cutting expenses
to pensions and unemployment benefits.
The picture is the same in all EU countries; no matter if it is an openly bourgeois
or Social-Democratic, or so-called "Labour", government, which is
in power. They all know only one single way out of the crisis: to place the
burdens of the crisis on the backs of the working class and the broad population
by making them pay for securing the profits of the monopolies and capital, and
to rearm and make war.
It is not only on the world scale that the gap between rich and poor is widening.
The same process is going on in Europe, in all countries in the EU. The social
progress, promised by the EU, remains a mirage. The millions of working people,
who have risen in struggle in many countries against mass lay-offs, privatisations,
slashing pension arrangements and social benefits, from the Fiat workers in
Italy to the public employees in France and the fire workers in England, underlines
this.
The Bush government and US imperialism are setting the global agenda and have
brought rearmament and permanent war into focus with the "War against Terrorism"
and the concrete wars in Afghanistan and Palestine, against Iraq, and others.
It is the rich world waging war against the world's poor, imperialist globalisation
forced through by bombs, rockets and invasion armies.
And the EU, which is not the Europe of the peoples, but the Europe of the monopolies,
is following this catastrophic course. The EU has unconditionally joined the
"War against Terrorism" and is developing an effective EU army with
an alarm force, which shall be able to make operations all over the world. A
series of EU countries are directly participating in the war in Afghanistan,
while others, headed by the UK's Tony Blair, are preparing to participate in
an imperialist looting war against Iraq, a war which is about oil and control
over the Middle East.
All EU countries have carried out a so-called "anti-terror legislation"
with the aim of stopping and suppressing political protest and the struggles
of the working class. It is especially directed against revolutionary organizations
and movements.
The bill for the war policy is being sent to the working people and is being
paid with social cuts, increased exploitation - and blood.
The EU is dreaming of becoming a superpower, a new imperialist superpower at
the side of the US. Giscard d'Estaing is already speaking of the EU as "the
United States of Europe", a superstate with its own constitution, joint
legislation, police, army, currency and government, with a core of big and rich
Western European countries and with poor Eastern and Southern European countries
in the periphery, the backing of the united imperialist bourgeoisie for its
new global adventures, which now, in the twenty-first century, shall revive
the global colonialist adventure of the nineteenth and twentieth century.
This Europe is being portrayed as a model of democracy, but the peoples have
never been asked if they want this Union. And in the special cases where a referendum
has been held, giving a result not wanted by the ruling, a new referendum has
been decreed in order to get the "right" result, as happened in Denmark
on the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 and in Ireland on the Nice Treaty in 2002.
Because of all these reasons, the top EU politicians hide in their fashionable
conference rooms, surrounded by enormous police forces that are ready to take
action against protests.
In Denmark on May 18, 1993, the police shot 117 times against an anti-EU demonstration
of young people. Thirteen demonstrators and passers-by were wounded. At last
year's EU Summit in Gothenburg, Swedish police repeated the methods.
It is about time that the workers come forward with their own programme for peace, social progress and a socialist future, denouncing the ruling class. The workers' protests taking place in many countries right now are just the beginning.
Let the rich pay the crisis!
Stop privatisations and neoliberal ravaging!
No war against Iraq!
Stop the "War against Terrorism"!
No to the Europe of capital!
No to the EU superstate and superpower!
The Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Workers' Communist Party of Denmark (APK)