Organise to Block the Slide to Meltdown and War!
Let’s Fight for an Anti-War Government!

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Organise to Block the Slide to Meltdown and War!
Let’s Fight for an Anti-War Government!

Stop the War Coalition Statement on Georgia Crisis

Statement of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), September 20, 2008

The crucial task of the working class and people of Britain is to put an end to the warmongering and belligerence of the government and the political system which protects and brings to power the warmongers. Empowerment of the people is at the heart of the solution.

We give the call that in preparation for the next election, whenever that may be, steps must be taken to stand anti-war candidates. The crucial thing about such candidates is that they come from the ranks of the people themselves, the millions of ordinary youth, women, workers and other sections of the people.

Our Party calls on the electorate to reject that the solution to war and crises lies in handing over the initiative to parties which have no solution, and have demonstrated that they have no solution but aggression, violence, and privatising social programmes while "nationalising" and bailing out finance capital in all its baseness.

Our Party calls on all democratic people to reject the rotten theory of universal values which states that it is only the system of representative democracy, monopoly right, and financial greed which is the hallmark of civilisation. The opposite is the truth. This system is demonstrating its bankruptcy daily in a spectacular fashion. It must be rejected that only parties can capture political power. The people are the force for change. It cannot be accepted that, while the people have little or no say in how such parliamentary parties are run and organised or what their policies and programmes are, the only thing to do is to vote for them. It cannot be accepted that this system must be exported throughout the world, and only that is democracy. This is a programme and these are values full of hypocrisy. Is this a moral compass? Let’s fight for our own values – fight for the rights of all!

The warmongering of the parties in power is that of a discredited system. The crisis of party government is also that of a discredited system. Is this a system to be emulated and imposed that is in such financial meltdown, in which the rich wish to get super-rich not by producing for the people’s needs but by fleecing, stealing, gambling and by international usury? By impoverishing the poor of the world even further, billions of the world’s people?

Especially the workers must prepare to turn things around. While demanding an end to the destruction of the economy, and fighting for justice and the rights of the working class as a whole, and that security lies in fighting for the rights of all, they must organise also against the wrecking which comes in the form of war and warmongering. Workers must take up as an urgent question to select candidates from amongst themselves to take a stand for the independent programme of the working class and to uphold the banner of an anti-war government.

All democratic people must also take up this banner. The collapsing financial world will make the warmongers more dangerous, just as the horror of 9-11 internationally, and of 7-7 in Britain, ushered in a period and were used as pretexts for dark reaction and a declaration that there were no solutions to the problems of the progress of society, but only that the rules of the game were changing, and that hysteria should prevail.

Our Party calls on all progressive people, all the forces of the left, all communists, to take up this issue for solution. Organise and hold discussions among your peers, in the workplace, in the communities, in colleges, schools and universities, as well as among retirees. Discuss what is the way forward. Build committees, clubs, discussion groups on the question of preparing to stand anti-war candidates, who are able to represent the opinions and sentiments of the people on this matter. Where this work is under way, further develop and popularise it. Build on the work that was done in standing anti-war candidates against the Blair government. Support the heroic stand of the military families against the war.

This must be done in the course of fighting for what is just, that troops should be pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan, indeed that there should be no troops on foreign soil and no youth should be sent to fight in unjust and imperialist wars. The British government should end its warmongering stands vis-à-vis Russia, and should end its interference in the Balkans, in Africa and throughout the world. It should openly dissociate itself from the warmongering and rapacious escapades and war crimes of the US, and adopt a foreign policy independent of US imperialism and its drive for global hegemony and ensure that governance is at one with the will of the people. For an immediate break with US aggression, hegemony and all that Anglo-American imperialism represents!

This is the change which is required. It starts from the grass roots, from among the people, from breaking down the doors that remain shut to the people’s empowerment, from respecting the power and the sentiments and the experience that lies in the working class and people of Britain, their nations and their communities.

It is said that we are living on the edge of an emergency. It is through the pro-activity of the people, workers, women, youth, that this emergency, this catastrophe for the people can be averted. It is through rejecting with contempt all that this government and previous governments of the rich have been standing for and pursuing, that a way will be found out of these present and impending crises. This is the way forward by which the people will advance along the road to a new society, with a government drawn from the people’s forces which is anti-war, pro-social and pro-worker. This will end the wrecking of the fabric of society, put an end to the spread of war, and deny the ruling class the ability to mobilise sections of the people as its reserves. The first step is for all to take up the task of the moment, as many are doing, of electing anti-war candidates.

This is not just a question for the anti-war movement. It requires the engagement of the whole polity. The crimes against peace can only be ended by the working class and people taking up for solution right now the issue of electing an anti-war government, and preparing to stand anti-war candidates from among the people at the next election as an immediate and urgent step. Not a single youth for imperialist war, not a single worker or intellectual for war production! Stop the government taking the society further down the road of meltdown and war!

No more wars!
Britain out of NATO!
No troops on foreign soil!
Organise now to elect an anti-war government!

Statement on Georgia Crisis, written by Stop the War Coalition, Sunday, 17 August 2008

The outbreak of war in Georgia is a disaster for the people of the Caucasus, creating thousands of casualties and refugees and further destabilising a region already beset with tensions.

Georgia marks a new stage in the growth of instability around the world, threatening confrontation between the United States and the Russian Federation.

The immediate issue behind the conflict was that of national independence. The government of Georgia claims that the military attack it launched on South Ossetia was to "restore constitutional order" and assert its independence from Russia, while the people of the two disputed regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, do not wish to be ruled from Tbilisi.

Ultimately, the cause of this war – like the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, and the threat of military action against Iran – lies in the ambition of the USA to exercise global hegemony.

Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s pro-western president is an important ally of the US in the region. The US seeks to integrate Georgia into its sphere of influence through membership of NATO. Saakashvili took US support for Georgia’s membership of NATO as direct encouragement of its conflict with Russia. NATO’s eastward expansion to Russia’s borders, together with the siting of US Missile defence bases in Poland and the Czech Republic and the new US bases established IN Central Asia, is seen by Russia as a direct threat to its interests.

Disregarding the implications of NATO expansion, the western media attributes the conflict in Georgia to "ethnic hatreds" and "historical grudges". In doing so, it forgets the long experience of great power rivalry in the locality where Europe and Asia meet, which is now the hub of an important energy transit route.

Georgia is a key participant in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline developed by a British Petroleum-led consortium, which bypasses Russia AND IRAN to take oil westward from the Caspian basin.

These are all the circumstances in which the outbreak of war has taken place.

Few people can have failed to register the breath-taking hypocrisy of George Bush’s denunciation of Russia for "invading a sovereign neighbouring state". The originator of the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq already bears responsibility for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and the daily misery and suffering of the peoples of those countries.

As in Afghanistan and Iraq, the British government is following in US footsteps over Georgia, with Gordon Brown and David Miliband repeating US assertions that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered".

The anti-war movement must once again make its presence felt by bringing to bear every possible pressure on the British government to break with US foreign policy.

Add your voice to the call for No More Wars. Join the demonstration at Labour Party conference in Manchester on 20th September.