THE STRUGGLE FOR UNILATERAL DISARMAMENT
Editorial Notes
While eternal wranglings on disarmament are going on at official conferences, action from the masses have produced not only wavering or even the spectacular overthrow of bloody dictatorships like those of Menderès in Turkey and Syngman Rhee in South Korea, but have also constituted the only effective means of struggle for peace, by opposing the continual and growing preparations by imperialism for war.
From the Far East to the Near East, the foundations of the three bastions of American Imperialism's military apparatus have recently been profoundly shaken by the revolutionary action of the masses. In Japan the struggle against the treaty which ties this country to the Yankee chariot of war, has produced vigorous and repeated demonstrations by the dynamic revolutionary student vouth, supported by important sections of the working class movement. In South Korea also, the student youth, encouraged by the example of Japan, set in motion the first mighty wave of the new revolution in this martyred country. This wave was immediately swelled and given a another dimension by the participation of the working class from the urban centers in the interior and from the ports.
In Turkey this same youth has fearlessly arisen to face the forces of repression, to challenge the open dietatorship into which the politico-military clique, who have bound the country hand and foot and delivered it to the criminal NATO strategists, are seeking refuge.
With mortal anguish, Yankee Imperialism has registered the extreme shakiness of the dictatorial regimes to whom it had given its mighty support, and now awaits the worst.
Here and there, even in Europe itself, there are signs of a new reinforced pressure from the masses against imperialism's military plans.
Action against nuclear weapons and for unilateral disarmament has met with remarkable success over the last period.
During April, anti-nuclear marchers in Belgium and especially in England, have attracted an important number of student and working class elements. It is also in England that the conscious movement for unilateral disarmament is gaining in proportion, and has now become the line of the great majority of the Labour Party against the official policy of its leadership.
In April two annual conferences, those of the Coöperative Party, and the Shop Workers' Union, and in May those of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, have passed resolutions reversing their previous policies on disarmament. The two unions are among the six biggest in the country, with a combined vote of about one and & quarter million at the Trades Union Congress, and a million at the Labour Party Conference. Those votes, together with Cousins' Trade Union, some 750,000 votes in the Constituency Labour Parties, will undoubtedly ensure the defeat of the official non-nuclear club policy drawn up by the Labour Party and the TUC last summer, during the next Labour Party's Conference.
The half-defeat suffered by the Gaitskell tendency in its vain attempt to suppress the famous Fourth Clause of the Party's programme, which concerns the nationalization of the means of production, has now become complete with the new defeat inflicted on them over the question of disarmament.
So the way is now open for the rank and file to expand and gain a very important victory for the whole European working class movement, by eliminating the opportunist right wing from the Labour Party's leadership, and by imposing the only effective transitional policy of disarmament: unilateral nuclear disarmament accompanied by a walk -out from NATO.