June 16th : The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) vehemently protests the brutal attack by Swedish police--shooting into crowds and savaging demonstrators with attack dogs--during the European Union (EU) summit in Gˆteborg! We demand the immediate release of all arrested protesters!

The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) vehemently protests the brutal attack by Swedish police--shooting into crowds and savaging demonstrators with attack dogs--during the European Union (EU) summit in Gˆteborg! We demand the immediate release of all arrested protesters!

This is the first time in memory that cops in any West European country have fired live ammunition at demonstrators. One young protester was critically wounded and may die. Those bullets that struck anarchist youth were aimed at the working class of Europe, which increasingly is combatting through strikes and protests the all-sided effort to eliminate jobs and social services. The shootings in Gˆteborg were a deadly message by the European Union to the workers of Europe.

To a man, the social-democratic heads of state gathered in Gˆteborg saluted the cop attack and denounced the young protesters. Taking hypocrisy to new heights, British Labour prime minister Tony Blair denounced the "thuggery" of the protesters. German Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schrˆder railed, "We have to pursue these rioters with all the might of the law." Their law is to protect their capitalist order and their whole system of exploitation and injustice.

The mask is off--this is the real face of "social Europe." After this, who can believe the lies pushed by the labor misleaders and reformist leftists who peddle illusions in this gang of murderers and thieves? The blood on the streets of Gˆteborg reveals what the masses of the semicolonial world and ethnic minorities in the imperialist metropolises experience all the time. Now it is increasingly becoming the norm for cop assaults on "anti-globalization" protesters. With international economic recession looming, what's necessary is to mobilize the labor movement in defense of its own class interests and the interests of all of the oppressed against the rapacious capitalist rulers.

The bloody attack on anarchist youth came only a day after U.S. president George Bush visited Gˆteborg to push his crazed plans for nuclear first strike capability through a "national missile defense." The Bush visit underlined the growing divisions between U.S. imperialism and its would-be EU imperialist rivals. Goran Persson, the Swedish prime minister and current EU president, stated, "The EU is the only counterweight against the raw game of market forces and the world domination of the U.S.A."

The ICL solidarizes with the protests against imperialist warmonger Bush. However, workers and youth must be won to the consciousness that the main enemy is at home--their own ruling class! The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet workers state has ushered in sharpened competition among these imperialist powers for markets and spheres of exploitation which is driving the world toward nuclear war. Already we have seen, in the NATO onslaught against Serbia (and the continuing occupation of the Balkans), the first war on European soil since 1945.

The youthful anarchist protesters who lashed out against the symbols of capitalist exploitation in Gˆteborg have their hearts in the right place. We understand all too clearly such acts of outrage and frustration against this brutal system. All our sympathies are with the self-sacrificing protesters, even though we do not share the same political perspective. A single isolated hero cannot replace the mass struggle.

We revolutionary Marxists seek to mobilize the power of the multiethnic proletariat in class struggle, not just to protest the capitalist system but to eradicate it. We fight to forge the Leninist vanguard parties needed to lead the working class to sweep away the capitalist exploiters and their state and to build a workers state and an egalitarian socialist society.