The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.32           September 14, 1998 
 
 
Sweden: Communist League Issues Campaign Manifesto Against Imperialism  
Below we reprint the election manifesto issued by the Communist League in Sweden under the title, "The Communist League in the Elections 1998 - A campaign against imperialism and war."

Defend democratic rights

Shorten the workweek

Affirmative action

Cancel the Third World debt

Defend the Cuban Revolution
The Communist League is running a national slate of candidates in the September 20 elections for parliament, the county elections in Stockholm, and the municipal elections in Stockholm, Sodertalje, and Jarfalla. Where the league does not have candidates it is calling for a vote for the Social Democrats or the Left party.

Against imperialism and war
The worldwide capitalist system is in a deep economic crisis that today is ravaging Japan and what had been called the "tiger economies" in Asia, with devastating effects on millions of toilers. In the coming period this crisis will also bloom in Europe. The capitalists who rule Sweden, Germany, Japan, the United States, and the other imperialist states are increasingly driven to attack workers' wages and expectations in order to reverse this crisis and salvage their profit system. The attempts today by the wealthy rulers across the European continent to roll back the social gains conquered by working people over decades are a harbinger of what is coming.

In addition to trying to squeeze more from the working class at home, the finance capitalists hope to restore capitalism in Russia and the Eastern European workers states, and once again open that part of the world for them to exploit. But as workers across Russia paralyze mining, transport, and other industries demanding their paychecks, it becomes clearer that capitalist rule will only be reimposed by military means. That is why the Clinton administration is pushing the extension of NATO to the regimes in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary now and the Baltic states, Finland, and Sweden down the road. The NATO-led occupation of Yugoslavia is an important step toward the encirclement of Russia. The same is true of the U.S.-led aggression against Iraq and moves to establish Washington's hegemony in the area around the Caspian Sea.

This encirclement of Russia is aimed at strengthening the imperialists' positions for the day when they will be forced to not just send debt collection notices, but move militarily to break up the social relations formed by the 1917 Russian revolution. These social relations are still an obstacle for capitalist exploitation of the workers and natural resources in a huge part of the world, stretching from eastern Germany to the former Soviet republics, China, and north Korea.

The Swedish finance capitalists and their governments during the 1990s - both Social Democratic and Conservative - have been deeply involved in this encirclement of Russia. They play a leading role in the Baltic Sea area to prepare the road for membership in the European Union and NATO for the Baltic states. For them the question of a Swedish membership in NATO is not a question of if but when.

The decline in profit rates is once again fueling rivalries among the big imperialist powers over their prerogatives in exploiting the labor of working people the world over. Paris in particular is trying to take the lead in the European Union against Washington. As these contradictions grow, and as more virulent rightist forces come to the fore, the question of war between Washington, Bonn, Paris, London, and Tokyo will be again posed to humanity - if the working class does not stop them by taking power. In such a showdown smaller imperialist countries like Sweden will be drawn in to one or the other side.

The Communist League is against any country joining imperialist war pacts like NATO or imperialist economic and trade pacts like the European Union. Therefore we demand that the Swedish government leave the European Union and that NATO and the EU be dissolved.

Defend rights - strengthen solidarity
The capitalist rulers' desperate attempts to buoy their sinking profits also explains the extensive attacks on democratic and social rights and the growth of right-wing currents in politics in every single imperialist country in the 1990s.

The finance capitalists and their governments try to break down human solidarity and limit the possibilities for working people to fight back these attacks. The right to asylum, the right to demonstrate, the right to strike, and freedom of the press are restricted. Social rights like unemployment benefits, sick leave, and pensions are being cut.

These attacks open up space for extra parliamentary campaigns from the ultraright demanding further limits on the rights for immigrants or cynically using the pretext of child pornography to give the police the arbitrary right to search homes. This in turn paves the way for the incipient fascist forces that today physically attack immigrants, gays, and cultural expressions they dub as "decadent," but will later especially target the basic organizations of the working class-the trade unions-and try to smash them. In France, Italy, and Austria incipient fascist movements with Bonapartist leaders like Le Pen, Fini, and Haider already play a big role in bourgeois politics, while in Germany and Sweden this development is at an earlier stage.

But working people are also increasingly putting up resistance to the attacks on their rights.

The Communist League defends these rights and demands their extension. We demand that the borders be opened for all refugees. We demand the cancellation of the Third World debt, to unite workers in imperialist countries with those facing the worst of the economic crises today in the semicolonial world. Against nationalism and racism, we put forward internationalism.

The most fundamental division among wage-workers is between the employed and the unemployed. That is why it is important to demand legislation for the six-hour workday with no cut in pay and that the government launch a program for public works, to increase jobs. To counter the discrimination of women and immigrants, we propose the labor movement fight for affirmative action with quotas in education and hiring.

Defend the Cuban Revolution
To stop the world's finance capitalists from dragging the world into a devastating third world war, workers and farmers in every country must take the power from these warmongers and create their own government - a workers and farmers government.

Working people formed such a government in Cuba after the revolutionary victory over the Batista dictatorship in 1959 -a government that sides with the workers and farmers, not only in Cuba but all over the world. The socialist revolution in Cuba is alive and still fighting 40 years later. The Communist League defends this victory for workers and farmers all over the world. The Cuban revolution is an example to emulate in the coming class battles.

 
 
 
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