Stop Kohl, Strauss and Genscher!
Fight for a socialist program!
Vote SPD and fight against the right-wing leadership!
Force the SPD to form a government of its own, committed to socialist policies!
Build the BSA!

How Can the Kohl Government Be Defeated?

How can the hated Kohl government be fought if the SPD [Social Democratic Party] openly represents capitalist policies and strives for a grand coalition?

This is a question many workers are asking with respect to the national parliamentary elections in January.

The right-wing SPD leadership is the greatest obstacle in the struggle against the Kohl government. In the state elections in Bavaria and especially in Hamburg, many thousands of workers withdrew their allegiance from this right-wing SPD leadership.

The SPD leaders blame the working class for the SPD’s electoral defeat and use the so-called rightward swing as a pretext to move even further to the right and to prepare openly for a coalition with the CDU [Christian Democratic Union].

In doing so, they base themselves on the left wing of the SPD, on the Stalinist DKP [German Communist Party] and on various centrist groups. These parties, too, put the blame for the electoral defeat on the working class and not on the right-wing policies of the SPD. They all seek to subordinate the workers to Rau and the conservative SPD leadership with the slogan, “Unity against the right wing” or by fostering the illusion that a red-green [i.e., SPD-Environment Party] alliance can serve the interests of the proletariat.

The BSA vigorously rejects this perspective!

The problem lies not with the working class, but rather with its leadership. The basic problem facing the workers is the crisis of leadership. Every question in the election must be approached from the standpoint of resolving this crisis of leadership.

There is no defeating Kohl if his accomplices at the head of the SPD are not thrown out of the labor movement.

The struggle against the Kohl government requires a struggle against the capitalist policies of the SPD leadership!

That is why we fight against the right-wing leadership to mobilize the working class for a socialist program and an SPD government pledged to socialist policies. It is a step in the struggle to establish a workers’ government that will put an end to the capitalist system.

The starting point of this socialist program is the defense of all social, political and economic gains of the working class.

The means for carrying it out is the systematic mobilization of the working class in the trade unions and in the factories, including the youth and layers of the middle class.

Its goal is the overthrow of the ruling capitalist class and the conquest of power by the proletariat to abolish capitalist private property and replace it with a planned socialist economy.

All basic industries, banks and multinational companies must be expropriated without compensation in order to establish workers’ control over production.

Only in this way can the foundation for a complete transformation of the economy in the interest of the working class be laid. Only thus can jobs be defended, wages and living standards guaranteed and the youth be given a future. And in no other way can the hard-won rights and gains of the working class be defended.

This socialist program stands in irreconcilable opposition to the reformist program of the SPD:

In place of class collaboration we put class struggle.

In place of parliamentary reform we put the systematic mobilization of the working class for the socialist revolution.

The Capitalist Crisis

The parliamentary election on January 25 is taking place under conditions in which the working class—40 years after the end of World War II—again finds itself at the start of a worldwide economic catastrophe.

Despite the so-called recovery of recent years, the number of jobless has never fallen below two million. At the threshold of a new global economic recession, there are in the Federal Republic at the time of the parliamentary elections, far more than two million without jobs.

The Kohl government does battle not against unemployment but against the unemployed. It exploits the high joblessness for a systematic attack on the unions and their gains.

The “recovery”—with the exception of the export industry, which was able to profit from the high exchange rate of the dollar—occurred not in production, but in the bank vaults. For the sixth consecutive year, the large private banks have now registered record profits, while the number of bankruptcies has climbed in each of these years to new heights.

The chief source of profits for the banks has not been an increase in industrial production—the figure for hours worked annually declined by 350 million between 1983 and 1985—but rather a gigantic expansion of speculation, credit and debt by fictitious capital.

A continuous and ever-increasing sum of paper money races around the planet in search of a rate of profit whose source can only be the surplus value squeezed out of the working class.

Through a wave of enormous mergers (like that of Daimler and AEG), big capital prepares for a new round of competitive and destructive international struggles, while at the same time pitilessly wiping out no longer profitable industries, such as steel, docks, and coal mining.

The mountain of debt in the developing countries, which already surpasses a trillion dollars, the gigantic budget and trade deficit of the USA, and the billions of dollars crammed daily into the banks by speculators all over the world, are causing the international economic and currency system to lurch like a drunken tightrope walker at the edge of the abyss.

In the Federal Republic the crisis has been exacerbated by its extraordinarily high dependence upon foreign markets for export, raw material, and capital. In the recent period, this dependence has deepened and made the German economy extremely vulnerable to the crisis in the world economy.

It is this crisis of the capitalist world economy that is the driving force behind the virulent attacks levied by all the capitalist governments—Reagan, Thatcher, Chirac and Kohl—against the working class, the youth, the pensioners and the socially dependent. It is the driving force behind the systematic military rearmament of the counterrevolutionary contras in Nicaragua and of the apartheid regime in South Africa, with whose aid the imperialists seek to exploit the workers and peasants of Latin America and Africa like colonial slaves. It is the driving force behind the insane rearmament program of NATO, with which the ruling class, impelled by the historical bankruptcy of its system, intends, as in 1914 and 1939, to hurl mankind once again into the abyss.

The capitalists, however, cannot carry out their reactionary designs without provoking an enormous confrontation with the working class—that has again been demonstrated by the most recent events in the Philippines, in South Africa and, in December, in France.

In this situation everything depends on the construction of a revolutionary, Marxist leadership that has a program and a perspective to lead the working class out of the capitalist blind alley.

The Role of the SPD

While this crisis has deepened the class divisions of society—the government has aimed ever new attacks on the working class, the courts pass draconian class sentences on striking workers and pickets, and the police prepare mass arrests and train to forcibly evacuate occupied factories—the right-wing leadership of the SPD preaches the politics of class collaboration.

Rau, the son of a preacher from Wuppertal who likes to be called “Brother John,” expresses this program with the words “reconciliation in place of division.”

In the face of mass unemployment and the threatened bankruptcy of pension funds, Rau demands a “national effort” and an “alliance of all social forces.”

In the SPD governmental program, passed with unseemly haste at the party’s election conference in Offenburg at the end of October, Rau pleads for an “alliance of reason,” for the cooperation of the state, the economy, and the partnership of employer, employee and the Bundesbank [the national bank].

This policy of class collaboration is the SPD leadership’s answer to the mobilization of large sections of the working class against the Kohl government. While millions of workers participate in strikes and trade union protests to defend the right to strike, the economic expert of the SPD executive board and ex-Juso [the SPD Young Socialist] Wolfgang Roth declared in a strategy paper that the “ruthless disposition of social conflicts” was a “destructive factor” and that “class struggle from above as from below is, at the end of the twentieth century, an anachronism that no one can any longer afford.”

With this policy of class collaboration, the SPD binds the working class to the capitalist system and its state at a time of capitalism’s greatest crisis.

In so doing, the SPD continues the role it has played since 1914, when it voted war credits for the imperialist world war and thereby became the most crucial supporter of the capitalist system in Germany.

Capitalist rule is most intimately connected with the betrayal of Social Democracy. The SPD is a bourgeois workers’ party. Founded under the influence of Marx and Engels 130 years ago, it was transformed at the beginning of this century into an agency of the bourgeoisie against the working class.

The bourgeois republic was founded in 1918 by the Social Democrats Ebert, Noske, and Scheidemann, whose hands dripped from the blood of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and tens of thousands of revolutionary workers.

Ever since, the SPD has defended capitalism in every crisis against the working class.

With the passage of the Godesberg Program in 1959, it eliminated every trace of pro-working class measures from its program, and with its vote in favor of rearmament and the Emergency Laws, restored the government’s ability to rule in the interests of German imperialism.

Many workers who had placed great hope in Willy Brandt as chancellor at the beginning of the 1970s were bitterly disappointed by his capitalist policies. Schmidt took over the government with the declared intention of stopping the offensive of the working class.

He appointed 25 leading union functionaries as ministers and secretaries of state in order to make them responsible for government policy. Based on this collaboration with the trade union leadership, every struggle of the working class was then suppressed when the Schmidt government carried out drastic cuts and economic measures against these workers.

Thus the SPD government became a stepping stone for Kohl and Lambsdorff in 1982. The resistance of the working class against the attacks of this government caused the unbroken series of crises and scandals of the Kohl regime, which to this very day holds office only because of the direct or indirect support of the SPD.

Even at the height of the metal workers’ strike, when 250,000 metal workers demonstrated in Bonn in favor of the 35-hour week and against the Kohl government, demanding a general strike, the SPD leaders refused to call for new elections and, instead, organized a compromise with the Social Democrat Georg Leber to end the strike and keep Kohl in power.

Rau and the right-wing SPD leadership are the fifth column for Kohl.

Their call for class peace under conditions of a declaration of war by the ruling class and its government on the working class is directed to the “common sense” of the petty bourgeoisie, the artisans and tradesmen. In short, it is an appeal to the German philistine, who sees his peaceful business threatened, but also to the conservative layers of the working class, who hope for a return of the so-called social partnership from the years of the postwar boom.

This maneuver is intended to isolate the advanced sections of the working class and create the conditions to crush them.

Such a policy of class collaboration finds its logical conclusion in the formation of a grand coalition (such as that which ruled from 1966 to 1969) in order to enforce the Emergency Laws against the resistance of the working class.

Even when leading Social Democrats for tactical reasons challenge the setting up of a grand coalition, it is already being practiced in fundamental political questions:

With its arming of the police, the Hamburg Social Democratic Senate took the lead by being the first to introduce a new police law patterned along [Interior Minister] Zimmermann’s model, and with the illegal encirclement of 800 protesters, it took the initiative in attacking the right to demonstrate.

In the campaign to limit the right to asylum it was a member of the SPD Executive Board, Egon Bahr, who as negotiator for the Kohl government, came to an agreement with the [Stalinist] Honecker bureaucracy to stop the unrestricted entry of political refugees from East Germany into the Federal Republic.

The SPD has repeatedly offered its cooperation to Kohl in restructuring pensions. In practice it can only signify that the SPD, together with the CDU, is prepared to carry out an attack on retirees.

The Role of the Trade Unions

The SPD Executive Board bases itself on the reformist trade union leadership and in this way exercises its control over the working class.

These reformist union bureaucrats are tied by innumerable threads to capital and are committed to the maintenance of the capitalist economy.

For decades they have sat on the directorates and leading committees of industry, drawing salaries several times that of a wage worker and through codetermination have worked intimately with big capital. They are infinitely closer to the bourgeoisie and its managers than to the working class.

The most right-wing union bureaucrats—such as the chairman of I.G. Chemie [the national chemical union], Rappe, who is at the same time an SPD deputy in the Bundestag [national parliament]—openly call for a grand coalition. Like Horst Niggemeyer of the executive board of I.G. Bergbau und Energie [mining and energy union], who is well-known for his anticommunist tirades, Rappe too is an intimate member of Rau’s circle of advisers.

The leaders of I.G. Metall [metal workers union] and of the O.T.V. [union of public workers, transportation, and communication], who have often come into conflict with the Kohl regime, have made it clear that they are not prepared to mobilize the working class to overthrow the chancellor’s government.

“Governments are changed on election days,” ran their stereotyped argument when numerous union members demanded a general strike to prevent a change in Paragraph 116 [law on the right to strike]. Using this argument, the union bureaucracy left the initiative to the fifth column, i.e., the right-wing SPD Executive Board under Rau.

The scandal surrounding the Neue Heimat [the housing cooperative administered by the unions] has shown the real magnitude of this bureaucracy’s corruption.

For decades they have preached the reconciliation of classes to workers and invented fables of how their basic interests could be safeguarded within the framework of capitalism by parliamentary reforms, economic democracy, codetermination and cooperatives.

Now one of their ideological pillars, cooperatives, has come crashing down. The union bureaucrats, however, do not conclude from this the necessity of coming out for the expropriation of the corporations and banks—on the contrary, they give away union enterprises to precisely those speculators and banks against whom they had previously glorified coops as an antidote! The victims are the union members: both as financial contributors and as tenants.

We call on every class conscious worker to take up the struggle against this corrupt, reformist leadership in the unions. Demand a special conference of the DGB [German equivalent of AFL-CIO] to call the responsible leaders to account and bring them before a workers’ tribunal.

The struggle to mobilize the working class for a socialist program and a workers’ government is inseparable from the struggle for a new leadership in the unions.

This struggle cannot be limited to the advocacy of greater trade union militancy. At its center must be these goals:

Full and unconditional independence of the unions from the capitalist state. No collaboration of the union leaders with the employers and the state. Against wage guidelines, agreements on freezes and against concerted action, no matter what the form.

For complete trade union democracy and the right of every political tendency (except for those whose goal is the destruction of the unions) to champion their political positions.

Defense of basic democratic rights, such as the right to strike; defense of union and social conquests through the independent mobilization of the working class and not through bourgeois courts and other institutions of the capitalist state.

The Role of the “Lefts” in the SPD

Can the SPD be reformed? Can any confidence be placed in the SPD “lefts,” who occasionally criticize the right-wing leadership?

Our answer is NO. We regard their criticism as a deceptive illusion.

These “lefts” subordinate themselves to the right wing in all decisive questions. This has, to be sure, a long history.

As long as Schmidt was in office, they adapted to the discipline of the right-wing with the argument that the chancellor must not be jeopardized. After the fall of the Schmidt government, they declared with fanfare that the time had now come to pressure the SPD to the left. But the closer the parliamentary elections came, the more slavishly did they submit to Rau.

To unmask the real role of the “lefts” like Schroeder in Lower Saxony and Lafontaine in the Saar, it is absolutely necessary to demand of them that deeds follow their words and that they wage a struggle against the right wing.

We turn to the politically advanced sections of the working class with the demands:

Force these “lefts” to fight for a socialist program!

Call on them to support an immediate special party conference to throw out Rau and the right-wing leadership and to fight for an exclusively SPD government committed to socialist policies!

In this political struggle for a socialist program the working class will learn the indispensable lesson that it is impossible to reform the SPD and that the crisis of leadership can be resolved only by the construction of a new, revolutionary party on the basis and principles of Marxism, which, in its present form, is Trotskyism.

Hence our call for the election of the SPD in January is directly connected with the struggle for a socialist program against the right-wing, capitalist policies of the SPD leadership.

The role of the DKP

Alongside the “lefts” in the SPD executive body, the SPD leadership has found another defender: the Stalinist DKP [German Communist Party].

The DKP’s role consists in supporting the right-wing social democratic policy of class collaboration through the Stalinist policy of the people’s front, and thus covering up the betrayal of the SPD.

The people’s front means the rejection of all revolutionary perspectives for the working class and subordination of the class interests of the workers to the capitalists and their government.

After the electoral defeat of the SPD in Hamburg, the DKP presidium declared:

“Now it is essential for the forces to the left of the CDU/CSU to more vigorously go on the offensive. They must redouble their efforts and make their alternatives even more conspicuously persuasive. They must draw closer together and, opposing any divisiveness, conduct a public election campaign against the CDU/CSU.” (Quote appeared in the Stalinist UZ November 12, 1986)

This is little more than another way of formulating the perspective of the SPD: Unite behind Rau!

In the elections the DKP is waging a campaign on the Peace List together with bourgeois liberals, pacifists and preachers.

Its political program consists of petty bourgeois outrage at the capitalist policies of the Kohl government and illusions in the democratic renewal of capitalism.

In 1915 Lenin had declared: “Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class. Under capitalism, particularly in its imperialist stage, wars are inevitable ... the propaganda of peace unaccompanied by a call for revolutionary mass action can only sow illusions and demoralize the proletariat, for it makes the proletariat believe that the bourgeoisie is humane, and turns it into a plaything in the hands of the secret diplomacy of the belligerent countries.” (Lenin, “The Conference of the RSDLP Groups Abroad”).

The DKP is today the high priest of “pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract.”

These policies correspond to the interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow and East Berlin, which because of the growing economic crisis, seeks an ever more cozy collaboration with imperialism against the working class.

This bureaucracy arose in the 1920s on the basis of the isolation of the first workers’ state in the world. It brought the state apparatus and the Bolshevik Party under its control, destroyed workers’ democracy, revised the theoretical heritage of Lenin and murdered virtually all his comrades-in-arms. It is a bureaucracy that is counterrevolutionary through and through.

The Role of the Greens

The Greens [Environmental Party] are a petty bourgeois reformist protest party, which accepts capitalist property relations and rejects a socialist perspective.

Even radical demands in their program do not in any way change the fact that the class content of their politics is bourgeois. At the basis of their hope to reform capitalism, in an alliance with the SPD, lies above all their rejection of the working class as a revolutionary class.

Voting for the Greens, therefore, is no more an answer to the betrayal of the SPD than is abstention from voting. Both are ways of avoiding the most important task: directing the political attention of the working class to the question of leadership, i.e., to mobilize the working class in a struggle against the right and left reformists for a socialist program.

Behind these positions lie parliamentary illusions and the hope of resolving the crisis of leadership in the working class by intensified union militancy. The struggle of the working class is thus limited to protest.

Trotskyism

The defense of the working class as the only revolutionary class in society and the struggle for the political independence of that class is the essential core of Trotskyism.

On this principled foundation Leon Trotsky waged the struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and in 1938 founded the Fourth International. In the Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, he wrote:

“The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. This historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.”

Today the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), whose German section is the BSA [League of Socialist Workers], embodies the tradition and continuity of Trotsky’s struggle.

Under difficult and to a degree adverse conditions the International Committee has defended Trotskyist principles against the class pressures of imperialism, which assumed the form of revisionist attacks on the program, the theory and perspectives of the Fourth International and repeatedly culminated in the attempt to find a substitute for the revolutionary role of the working class.

One of these revisionist groups that arose is the GIM (Group of International Marxists), which until recently belonged to the United Secretariat, which as early as 1953 had broken with Trotskyism.

A few weeks ago the GIM decided to eliminate what remained of the last shreds of a Trotskyist perspective from its program and to fuse with the most degenerate of all Stalinist groups, the KPD [Communist Party of Germany] forming the United Socialist Party (VSP).

The open break with every Trotskyist principle is inseparably connected with GIM’s abandonment of any perspective of constructing a new, revolutionary leadership in the working class. A commentary appearing in the first edition of their new paper states quite aptly that:

“The revolutionary left will remain in its ghetto for a long time and will need a long breath. And, finally, the unification of the KPD and the GIM is an expression of this view. For despite all the programmatic understanding and common action, this process of unity would probably never have taken place if there had existed in either of the organizations the old fantasies about a breakthrough on the working class front or the infantile competition for the most factory cells as was so much a part of the scene in the 1970s.” (Emphasis added)

Politically this means utter capitulation to the reformism of the SPD. Concerning the elections the VSP declares: “Here two social camps are up for election,” on the one side “the politics of change” (i.e., those of the CDU/CSU) and on the other “politics in the interest of the workers and salaried employees.”

This is equivalent to saying that the capitalist policies of the SPD leadership and of the Greens are labor policies.

In contrast to that we stress that the real conflict between the social camps consists in the fact that all the bourgeois parties and the SPD leadership are collaborating in the interest of the capitalists against the working class and that the working class can uphold its class interests only in a struggle for a socialist program against the capitalist policies of the SPD leadership.

Indeed the League of Socialist Workers last year conducted a successful struggle against a revisionist tendency in the oldest section of the ICFI, the Workers Revolutionary Party of Britain. The leaders of this party—G. Healy, C. Slaughter and M. Banda—had since the mid-1970s pursued an obviously nationalistic course, leading finally to its capitulation to British imperialism.

The BSA emerged strengthened from this struggle. Our strength consists in our principles, which are based on the scientific world view of Marxism, and on the knowledge gained from the victories and defeats experienced by the revolutionary workers’ movement over a period of 140 years.

As a section of a world party we collaborate intimately with the sections of the ICFI in other countries. That forms the most important basis for developing a steeled and entirely principled cadre, which will not bow to the pressure of national conditions.

There is no way to resolve the crisis of leadership outside of a determined, protracted and patient struggle for the building of a Trotskyist party in the working class

Socialist Program

Expropriate the banks and the big companies!

Three major banks dominate the economy and make millions in profits through speculation and the destruction of the productive forces. They dictate the closing down of whole branches of industry, such as steel and the docks and, thereby, wipe out jobs en masse and destroy the basis for the existence of millions of people.

Put an end to the economic anarchy of capitalism! Expropriate the banks and credit institutions and centralize the financial system in a state bank under the control of the working class!

Pay no compensation to the capitalists, whose wealth has been created by the working class!

Make expropriation without compensation the basis for the establishment of workers’ control over production and the construction of a planned, socialist economy!

Defend every work place!

Occupy the plants!

The struggle against unemployment begins with the defense of existing jobs. Therefore, put an immediate end to the selling off of jobs for social schemes.

Factories threatened with closure or mass layoffs must be occupied. The workers have the right to protect the plants and machines that the capitalists want to destroy and to preserve them for the next generation. The union leaders must be forced to fully support plant occupations.

Employment for all!

35-hour week with no reduction in pay!

The working class does not bear the slightest responsibility for the capitalist crisis. Hence, we reject in principle any wage reduction, any cuts in social services or in unemployment compensation, etc. and support every struggle for higher wages and the shorter work day.

The struggle for the 35-hour week with no reduction in pay is the first step to dividing available work among all.

Reject all forms of flexibility, which under capitalism always means intensification of exploitation!

Open the books of the employers and banks in order to discover how the capitalist system really functions and to prepare for expropriation!

Defend the trade unions and the right to strike!

The attack on the right to strike by changing Paragraph 116 is an attack on the trade unions as independent organizations of the working class.

Force the union leaders to organize the struggle to defend unconditionally the right to strike!

Establish workers’ control over the funds of the labor offices!

Struggle for the complete independence of the unions from the bourgeois state!

Reject all talk about the “social state”! The social gains were created in decades of struggles by the working class, and can only be defended today in a struggle against the capitalist state.

The state is never neutral. It is an instrument of domination by the capitalists. Behind the cloak of “democracy,” the apparatus of state forces—composed of the police and army with their special units, the courts, prisons and government authorities—is always armed and ready for use against the working class.

We struggle for the defense of the democratic basic rights of the working class even when this means a conflict with the laws of the bourgeois state.

Workers’ control instead of codetermination!

All collaboration of the union leaders with the Kohl government and the capitalist state must be decisively fought against.

We say:

No to any kind of “concerted action,” no matter what its name or form!

Down with the limitation, imposed by the shop organization law, on union representatives’ ability to carry out their duties and down with the oath of silence imposed on workers’ representatives by plant shop committees!

Likewise, abolish the duty to keep the peace, called for in company-union agreements!

In place of codetermination, expropriation of the factories and continuation of production under workers’ control!

Defend the pensions!

Every working man and woman has the right to a decent retirement life. The minimum pension must be raised by mobilizing the unions and open or hidden cuts in pensions must be prevented.

Lower the retirement age with no reduction in pension and comprehensive retirement benefits! Defend the seriously disabled!

Take the funds for these benefits out of the military budget and from expropriation of the wealthy! Confiscate profits! Let the capitalists pay for the social problems which their profit system caused!

Defend the foreigners!

The BSA struggles for the unconditional defense of all foreign workers and political refugees. Racism and anti-foreign agitation are a conscious policy to split the working class.

The working class is international—it has no fatherland.

Any attack on foreign workers and political refugees is an attack on the working class as a whole and must be repelled in a common struggle against the government.

Organize the foreign workers and political refugees into the unions! Form union defense committees against racist attacks!

A future for the youth!

Fight for a future for youth! Demand the immediate elimination of every form of cheap and forced labor for youth such as: unpaid or low paid “public work”, training schemes without education, domestic service contracts (i.e., minimum wage and dead-end jobs), etc.

We demand permanent job placement after serving apprenticeship.

Organize the youth, both the employed as well as the unemployed, into unions!

Defend all existing vocational setups! Provide vocational sites paid for by the state and the employers and under the control of the unions, with minimum wages set according to firmly established union standards!

Fight against imperialist war!

The struggle against war is a class question! Only the overthrow of imperialism by the working class can prevent a third, nuclear world war.

Reject any subordination to the bourgeois, pacifist program of the peace movement, and mobilize the working class on the basis of a socialist program against capitalism and war!

In place of “disarmament in the East and West,” the working class must disarm the imperialists! Confiscate the armaments industry and convert it to production of useful things!

Unconditional defense of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China against the war preparations of the imperialists!

Immediate withdrawal from NATO and the UN!

Support the national liberation movements!

Defend the right of self-determination of nations against imperialist attacks and surprise assaults like the US bomb attack on Libya and the CIA financed contra-terrorists against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua!

Force the unions to organize boycotts by the working class against the apartheid dictatorship in South Africa and to support the African working class in every respect, including the furnishing of weapons!

Against the European Common Market!

For the Socialist United States of Europe!

The European Common Market in Brussels is today the center of conspiracies by the banks and corporations against the European working class. It is organizing the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs, as in the steel industry, and at the same time seeks to play off the workers of the separate countries against each other.

Against the Europe of the capitalists, the BSA fights for a Europe of the workers, that is a united, socialist Europe with a planned socialist economy.

We call upon all workers and youth who agree with this program to:

Become a member of the BSA!

Come to our election meetings!

Subscribe to the weekly newspaper of the BSA, Neue Arbeiterpresse!

Participate in the construction of a new, revolutionary, that is, Trotskyist, leadership of the working class!