AWL Scotland

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Neither euro, nor pound!

A referendum on the euro would give a choice of voting for the euro or for the pound. Voting no to the euro means voting yes to the pound - not yes to the abolition of money, or yes to some future socialist currency.

As Clydebank branch puts it, the working class 'are more interested in the distribution of wealth than whether its monetary form is in pounds or euros'.

True, for the pro-euro capitalists the introduction of the euro is linked in with their efforts to 'privatise public services and drive down working-class living standards'. The anti-euro faction, led by the Tories and the Murdoch press, and reflecting US-oriented or little-ritain sections of capital, link the retention of the pound with equal efforts to squeeze the working class.

In a referendum on the euro, therefore, socialists should explain it gives no real choice to workers. We should vote neither for the euro nor for the pound. Instead, we should build cross-border workers' unity to counter the growing international integration of capital.

Palestine

In the territories occupied after the 1967 war, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army rules over a 90% Arab population.

In recent months, even the limited patches of autonomy granted to the Palestinians since 1993 have suffered repeated Israeli attacks. The current Israeli government, under Ariel Sharon, seems to want to crush the Palestinian Authority and close off the possibility of negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians for many years to come - years in which the Israeli government would create yet more 'facts' by planting militarily-protected Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.

The Palestinians, like any other nation, should have the right to self-determination. Socialists everywhere should support the PLO's demand for Israel to get out of the occupied territories and allow the Palestinians to establish a fully independent state there.

We should also, obviously, support demands against anti-Arab discrimination in Israel.

But the Israeli Jews, too, are a nation. Most of them were born there. Many of the rest came there because they were driven out of the countries where they lived before, in Europe or the Arab world. They have a right to self-determination too. Military conquest of Israel by the Arab states, and the reduction of the Israeli Jews to the status of, at best, a tolerated minority in an Arab state, cannot possibly produce a democratic solution - whatever arguments may be used to justify it in terms of revenge for past injustices.

Palestinian and Israeli workers' unity is the key - and can only be made reality around a programme which recognises the democratic rights of both nations: two nations, two states; a socialist federation of the Middle East, with rights to self-determination for minority nations like the Israeli Jews and the Kurds.

Fifty-fifty

'Gender balance' makes a dull slogan in comparison with the old one of 'women's liberation'.

There is nothing wrong with the aim of having 50% women on the SSP lists for Holyrood. But there is something wrong with the fact that debate on this aim, and ways and means to achieve it, takes up almost half the time of the conference.

Election work should be an important part of socialist activity, but not the centre of it. We believe the SSP should give more attention to industrial work - organising SSP trade-union fractions, producing workplace bulletins, running unionisation drives...

Act now to stop war on Iraq!

An urgent mobilisation now by the British labour movement could stop the USA's planned war on Iraq.

The US administration is divided. Almost every government in the world except Britain's is opposed to US attacks on Iraq.

US intervention carries immense risks for the USA's role as 'globo-cop' of world capitalism. If the British labour movement mobilises, and forces Blair to stop backing Bush, that could rein in the warmongers.

Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, like the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, was initially helped to power by the USA. The CIA backed a coup in 1963 which brought Saddam's right-wing faction of the Ba'ath party to power. In the later stages of the war between Iran and Iraq which went on from 1980 to 1988, claiming over one million lives, the USA leant towards Iraq, considering any problems that Saddam might cause to be a lesser evil than Iranian victory.

Western powers, including Britain, supplied Saddam with arms, and turned a blind eye when he massacred large numbers of Iraq's Kurdish minority.

Since Saddam tried to grab Kuwait's oilfields in 1990, however, the USA has seen him as a source of instability. It went to war to push Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991, and since then has imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. The sanctions have not visibly damaged Saddam's power, but they have plunged the Iraqi people into desperate poverty, massively increasing the rate of deaths from disease of babies and children.

Saddam Hussein's regime is one of the most vicious dictatorships in the world. Its military machine is a standing threat to other peoples in the region. The US government is not wrong about that. It is also quite possible that Saddam has given aid to Al Qaeda. The sooner Saddam joins Hitler and Stalin in hell, the better.

But that does not justify another US-led war. We want Saddam overthrown by the people of Iraq, not by B52 bombs.

In the first place, a war on Iraq is unlikely to be as quick and easy for the USA as the Afghan war turned out to be. It would claim many more than the approximately 4,000 civilian lives taken by the US bombing in Afghanistan. It would provoke bigger backlashes.

In the second place, the US military machine has its own agenda. Even if a US-led war produces some good result - like the defeat of the Taliban - it does it in its own way, for its own motives, as part of an overall policy of consolidating and policing a world system structured for the profit of the big banks and multinationals.

Afghan Workers' Solidarity Campaign

The Afghan Workers' Solidarity Campaign is an excellent initiative of the SSP, and should be fully supported.

It will help our comrades in the Labour Party of Pakistan give irreplaceable assistance to the small Afghan socialist groups now working to build a base for progressive politics amidst the devastation and warlordism of Afghanistan today.

The political precondition of this campaign is a clear recognition of the folly of supporting Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban as some sort of 'national liberation' or progressive anti-imperialist force.

Farooq Tariq, general secretary of the Labour Party of Pakistan, put it like this in a meeting in London on 25 January: 'We see fundamentalists as a new sort of fascists who have to be opposed. There is nothing progressive, there is nothing anti-imperialist in the strategy of the fundamentalists against America. We have seen in practice that the fundamentalists are an outrightly extreme right-wing, suppressive, anti-democratic force who have nothing in common with progressive ideas.

[After the defeat of the Taliban] we saw a total collapse of those forces of the left who thought that maybe for the time being we can align with those forces among the fundamentalists who are making a lot of noise against imperialism'.

In the same way, opposition to US war against Iraq should not be confused with any sort of support for Saddam Hussein's regime.

Support Ukrainian socialists

The Ukrainian Workers' Tendency have launched an international appeal for assistance to help them operate - the total income of their organisation is only $50 a month - and to enable them to get basic Marxist and socialist texts translated into Ukrainian.

Please support this appeal by sending cheques, payable to 'SOSF', to P O Box 823, London SE15 4NA, or by making out a standing order to SOSF, account number 50424830 at the Co-operative Bank, 1 Islington High St, London N1 9TR.

Zimbabwe socialists

The Solidarity tendency also urges support to the appeal for aid launched by the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe.

Donations can be sent to the First Direct Bank, 40 Wakefield Rd, Leeds LS98 1FO. Account name: John Page; sort code 40-47-78; account number 1118 5489. Please email details of deposits to isozim@hotmail.com.

To receive email updates from the Zimbabwe ISO, send a request to isozim@hotmail.com.

No Sweat

The 'No Sweat' campaign against sweatshop labour launched itself with a conference, and a speaking tour by Indonesian independent trade union leader Dita Sari, last November.

It is now campaigning for multinationals like Nike and Gap to do business only with contractors who allow free trade unions to organise in their workplaces, and for the introduction of a 'union labour' mark on footwear and clothing.

It is also joining up with the GMB trade union in a campaign to unionise sweatshop labour in East London.

More information: www.nosweat.org.uk, 07904 431 959, or P O Box 36707, London SW9 8YA.

For a democratic federal republic!

To call for a 'democratic federal republic' is the simplest, most straightforward way of saying that we are for a democratic recasting of the British political system; we have no brief for the existing British state; but we oppose parochialist separatism. We are for maintaining the existing British-wide unity of the trade-union movement - and extending it to Europe-wide unity - rather than reversing it.

Calling for a federal republic would not put us in a position of supporting, or appearing to support, increased separation or barriers between the nations on this island. We simply explain that we are for the closest possible links, but on a free and democratic basis.

'Republic' alone is not enough, though. The USA and Switzerland are already federal republics! We should argue for the trade unions to assert themselves politically and to aim for a workers' government, based on and democratically accountable to the labour movement, which would push through such basic measures, for a start, as: a workers' charter of trade-union rights to strike, to picket, to take solidarity action, etc; taxation of the rich, and expropriation of the big banks and monopolies to finance the rebuilding of the Health Service, education and other public services.

2 March 2002.