For a people's Europe

On international Workers' Day 15 communist parties across the European Union came together to agree a common position against the Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination and Governance in the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). All the parties call upon workers throughout the EU to mobilise and resist these treaties and the anti-people policies of the EU and its allies.

All signatories expressed their solidarity with Irish workers and supported the call for a No vote by the Irish people in the referendum due on May 31.

Eugene McCartan, general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland

The European Union and the ruling classes of the member states are determined to make working people pay a very heavy price for the deepening crisis of the system.

We communist and workers' parties of the member states of the European Union call on workers across the EU to resist and oppose the adoption of the Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union and the revised Treaty on the European Stability Mechanism.

These two treaties would make eurozone member states and practically all other countries signing these agreements into permanent regimes of economic austerity involving deeper and deeper cuts in public expenditure, rises in indirect taxes, reductions in wages, sustained liberalisation of markets and privatisation of public enterprises, services and vital national assets.

The strategy is to have low wages, low public spending, mass poverty and workers having few rights.

The treaties are designed to make these measures into a permanent feature of the EU that is impossible to reverse.

The impact of these treaties will not be confined to the member states of the eurozone.

They will provide the benchmark for further attacks on workers' rights and conditions across the whole of the EU.

The ruling classes have declared open warfare on workers in a generalised offensive.

These treaties are designed to neutralise the potential of national working-class formations to influence or change national economic and social policy.

They, along with previous treaties, are about blocking any avenues for the working class to defend itself or to promote policies of social progress and a socialist alternative.

They will make austerity permanent by continuous external interference of EU institutions in the affairs of member states in relation to economic and social policy in the interests of monopoly capitalism.

In this they have the active collaboration of the ruling class and its political representatives in each country. These treaties will further negate and deeply undermine national and sovereign rights.

Any policies that the ruling classes across the European Union can deliver will inevitably make the people pay for this crisis of capitalism. Promoting the interests of the working class is only possible by confronting and breaking with this destructive system.

We communist and workers' parties value and salute the mass response from the workers and other social strata affected by the measures and policies of big capital, in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy and call upon workers and their trade unions, and people's mass organisations, to resist these renewed attacks and to mobilise and assert a working-class response to the crisis of state monopoly capitalism.

In the immediate battles of today our parties will present the vision of socialism as the answer to the crisis of the capitalist system.

The statement was signed by:

New Communist Party
of the Netherlands
Workers' Party of Belgium
Communist Party of Britain
Portuguese Communist Party
Communist Party of Finland
Communist Party of Denmark
Communist Party
of Luxembourg
Communist Party of Ireland
Hungarian Communist Workers' Party
Communist Party of Greece
Party of Italian Communists
Communist Party of Malta
Communist Party of Poland
Communist Party of Spain
Communist Party of Sweden