Revolution no. 6

| FIGHTING PAPER FOR WORKING CLASS YOUTH ISSUE 6 * PRICE 20 P

“CRIMINAL JUSTICES

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TOWER HAMLETS 9 Self Defence

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Revo: Whose idea was the Mark Harris campaign?

Paul: It was mine. The day after my brother died, I didn’t want to know... but the way the police were saying we had to telease the body, something inside me said no. They never explained anything to us. I met Leroy Thomas, who had a campaign going for his brother (Marlon Thomas). Leroy educated me and I decided to set up the campaign. We held a public meeting and said we needed people to set up a committee, and a whole heap of people came forward.

Revo: What has the campaign involved for you personally?

Paul: I’m a quiet person, I’m not the kind of person to be a public speaker. But it seems to come natural once you feel it. And I’ve learned about other people’s plights. It’s educated me in a big way. I thought I knew what was going on, but I was just on the edge of things before.

Debbie: We'd see something like this on the telly, the injustices, and we'd think, oh well, get on with things, but now...

Paul: I went up to the Criminal Justice Bill demo because it concerned injustices happening to all kinds of people.

Revo: What would you say is the main aim of the campaign?

Paul: To know how my brother did actually die, and to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.

Revo: How has the campaign affected your life Debbie?

Debbie: I live with Paul, so I’m involved with everything he does. If Paul can't go to a meeting, I go to give Marge (Paul’s mother) support. I phone up and arrange interviews and give information about the campaign. I do flyposting, and the stall in town on Saturdays.

Revo: What kind of attention have you

Five months ago Paul Harris (23) and Debbie Wilson (19) were living a quiet life in Tongwyniais, near Cardiff. Then came the death of Paul’s brother, Mark, in a Bristol police cell. The police claimed suicide: the * family suspected murder. Overnight the young couple (ebbie is white, Paul is black) were at the centre of

one of the most important anti-racist campaigns in Britain. REVOLUTION interviewed them.

“Che way the police were saying we had to felease Che body, something inside me sald

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had from the police?

Paul: I’ve been followed everywhere in my car... then (on 14 November) I came down with Debbie to my mother’s house ... the next thing I knew, police covered the whole of the street . .. They smashed a hole in my mother’s door, they let three dogs in, then fifteen riot police came in with shields, helmets, the whole kit. I just put my hands up and they took me away. When I got to the station they said I was going to be charged with malicious wounding. Before I went to courtitall got dropped.

Revo: They did all this the day before the coroner’s inquest. Was the aim to prejudice the jury?

Paul: Yeah... they really wound meup. This copper said to me, “You're doing something about your brother, are you? You should leave it, it’s only one less on the statistics.”

Revo: You've seen the corruption of the police, of the whole system - do you think it can be reformed?

Debbie: No. Till the government's brought down, I can’t see the police force being reformed at all.

Paul: It’s not just one party, it goes further than that. It’s in society. I think

campaigns like this, doing something about it, might start hitting holes in the system ...I don’t think it’ll be through the government. It'll be people, and things happening in their own areas.

Revo: What have been the best things that have come out of the campaign?

Paul: Knowing there’s people there who care...and I’ve seen more unity in my own campaign than the parties in it ever have normally.

Debbie: And another good thing was the verdict that we got (the coroner's jury recorded an openverdict , not suicide) All the things that have been done haven't been done in vain.

Paul: No other family has challenged the police in Bristol and got a different verdict from what the police wanted. I’ve been able to put all my anger and frustrations into something and get something out of it.

Revo: Could you imagine going back to not being active?

Debbie: Oh no.

Paul: Anything I’m interested in now, I just get involved in. I feel for things much more now ... it’s sad that it takes something like this for people to come to their senses.m

The campaign now intends to prosecute the police.

Contact the campaign at 45, Allerton St, Grangetown, Cardiff. More details are in this month's Workers Power newspaper, i. Op.

Nazis off our

S REVOLUTION goes to press, A= Beackon is standing as the

British National Party candidate for an election on 15 December in Lansbury ward, East London. Meanwhile in Leeds, the BNP have been linked to a massive increase in racist attacks and attacks on socialists.

The BNP are Nazis. They say that all the problems in Britian are caused by black people. They claim they want to fight for ‘rights for whites’, but in reality ” they want to do away with all our rights. If they get to power they would run Britain in the same way that Hitlerran Germany, with storm trooper gangs and death camps. They want to destroy all trade unions so that workers can’tdefend themselves. If they got to power they would take away all our democratic rights.

In the meantime they are trying to build up street gangs to attack black people, gays and socialists. In all areas where the BNP have been organising there has been dramatic rises in racist attacks. Around Welling, where they have their headquarters, there have been four racist murders. After Beackon was elected last year on the Isle of Dogs racist attacks rose by 300%. Recently in Leeds, the Nazi terror group Combat 18 which is linked to the BNP has been stirring up attacks on socialists in their homes and fire-bombings of cars. Two young Asians have been attacked - one of them nearly lost an eye when racist thugs seta blowtorch on him.

Fascists are not like other right-wing parties. They try to terrorise and physically destroy their opponents by building up a violent mass movement on the streets. If they get stronger they will use their street gangs more and more. That is why we cannot allow them to organise at all.

Every single time they try to give out leaflets, sell their newspapers or organise demonstrations we have to mobilise as many people as possible not just to show our opposition but to drive them off our streets. Young people, school and college students, black organisations and trade unions need to unite to organise proper effective self-defence against the fascists.

London REVOLUTION supporters have been leafleting in Lansbury ward to ex-

streets!

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pose what the BNP really stand for and to call for action against them. We organised a stall at the local market, Chrisp Street, to get the word out about the racist lies of the BNP and why workers and youth, black and white, must unite to defeat them. And Manchester REVOLUTION sent a big contingent over to Leeds

for a march against the Nazis on 26 November.

The fascists blame black people for the lack of housing, for unemployment, and for all the problems of our society. They are lying to divert attention away from the teal enemy - the profit system that leaves hundreds of thousands homeless while building workers who could be building them homes are left on the dole. But people are desperate and looking for answers. That is why the fascist BNP can grow in some areas.

And that is why it is not enough to be

_ Anti-Nazi. Weneed to give people the real

answers to society’s problems: socialist answers. That way working class whites will stop blaming their black brothers and sisters and start blaming the real enemy - the millionaire capitalists. A revolution would do away with the society that creates racism, and do away with the lying thugs of the BNP for good.

Police out schools!

OLICE ARE indiscriminately enterPp: our schools more and more.

In my school, the police come in almost every week, trying to get information from the school about a crime that someone in the school has supposedly done. The police come into schools so that they appear to be doing something to stop “juvenile crime”, a phrase invented by the government to have someone else to blame for their failed system.

We say that police should not be allowed into schools at all! The police force is one of the government's repressive institutions. It is in place to make sure that the rich capitalist ruling class maintain its position in society. The police are not there on our behalf and they should have no right to interfere or disrupt our education and freedom within our schools and colleges.

There are links made by the management in schools with the local police forces. These links and secret connections should also be gotten rid of, so that our schools serve the purpose of education and not blocking us from involvement with the outside world.

of our

by Adam, South London

Before the summer, the head teacher of Langdon Park school, a secondary school in East London, gave the names, addresses and photos of four Asian students to the police. The four have been charged with GBH becausea known white racist youth was slightly hurt in a fight outside the school. The four Asian students were fighting back against racism and because of this, they could now be charged with long prison sentences. This we must stop now!

How can we allow the police to enter our schools and intimidate us so that we are afraid to go to school through fear that the police might arrest and charge us with false allegations? If the police come into our schools and find out that there are plans about any political activity we are doing, they will use this information to stop us, and attack our rights. We are continually suffering from police harassment out of school so we can’t stand for the same discriminatory treatment inside our schools.

We must fight to get the police out of every school!

[Soar

You only have to go on a march against the Criminal Justice Bill to see that anarchist ideas are having a lot of influence on young people at the moment.

Small wonder. Anarchism appeals to people who are sick of being pushed around by the coppers, who are enraged by laws that stop us holding free festivals and raves, who are furious at a system where the rich have several enormous homes while thousands live on the streets. Above all anarchism has a lasting appeal to anyone who has had to put up with pointless, petty controls meted out by figures of authority in the school and in the family.

Its message is direct: an end to authority in all its forms. Above all, an end to the state: an end to a system that means power for the few while the majority

have no real say over their lives.

REVOLUTION wants to build a movement that can overthrow this system and create a society based on equality and freedom. But it is not an anarchist paper. We are Marxists. This article explains the difference between Marxism and Anarchism on one crucial question: the state.

NARCHISTS WANT toabolish the state. To many people, this seems thinkable. After all, runs the “common sense” argument, without state authority to hold things together, society would just fallapart. Without government, we are told, everything would grind to a halt. Without the courts and the police, everyone would be on the make, ripping each other off, robbing and abusing each other. These are the most usual arguments against the anarchists.

We reject these criticisms completely. Our criticism of the anarchists is entirely different.

Weagree with the anarchists that States do not exist to hold things together or to protect ordinary people from crime. They exist to defend the property and privilges of the rich. In a society based on real equality, a genuinely communist society in which scarcity, poverty and class divisions had been overcome, it would be possible to administer the economy, and to plan the production and distribution of goods, without the need for any special state apparatus separated from the population. As for crime, most of it is directly caused by poverty anyway. Any genuinely anti-social crime such as rape or violence could be dealt with much more effectively by the community itself than by any police force.

Our difference with the anarchists is not about what might be possible in a future society. It is about how to geta new society in the first place. That is why we do not believe that the state can simply be abolished. Before we can get rid of the state altogether, it will at first be necessary to create a new type of state.

This sounds like a contradiction. But in reality it is the only revolutionary way

forward.

Our starting point is to understand everything in terms of class. Under the present system, society is divided into two main classes. The capitalists are a tiny minority - they own factories, banks and land, all the main blocks of shares . . . in short they control the overwhelming majority of wealth in society. But the wealth is produced by the other main class - the working class. The workers are the overwhelming majority. They have nothing but a few possessions paid for out of hard earned wages. Unlike the capitalists, all they have to sell is the ability to work. They produce everything - the capitalists own it.

We view the state from this standpoint. The entire state apparatus - the army, police, judges and faceless civil servants - is nothing more than an instrument for the tule of one class by another. Stripped of all the usual flowery phrases about democracy, patriotism and the rule oflaw which are used to cover up what the state is really about, we want to see it for what it is. At the end of the day, the state is nothing more nor less than armed force in defence of property.

Before we can abolish classes and plan production for need instead of greed, the private property of the minority must become the public property of the majority. This means that the capitalist state will have to be smashed and the capitalists’ property will have to be confiscated. The division of society into classes will not disappear immediately - instead the working class will need to use new laws and direct force to stop the capitalists from holding onto their wealth and from trying to get it back.

In short, the working class will become

MARXISM OR

the ruling class. We will need our own armed force in defence of our property -a workers’ state.

At this point anarchists will object. Wouldn't this just be as bad as the old state? We say it would not - it would be radically different. Unlike the capitalist state, a workers’ state will be an instrument for the rule of the overwhelming majority over a handful of former exploiters . Such a state will need no special apparatus of secret repression, no standing professional army set up against the people, no secret permanent bureaucracy. It will base its power on the armed population and on the broadest democratic control by the working class through democratic workers’ councils, able to directly elect its delegates and recall them as soon as the workers want to.

To anarchists who are serious about wanting to change society, we pose a question. How will you deal with the capitalists once they have been driven from power? Will the people be entitled to organise to stop them raising private armies and resisting the will of the majority? If so, then that organisation - whatever you might prefer to call it - would to all intents and purposes be a state. It would be an apparatus designed to enable one class to rule over another. But this time the tables would be turned. The state would be nothing more than the organised power of working people.

But - runs the last-ditch defence of the anarchists - power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely! How could we stop that happening?

The Bolsheviks had to tackle that problem when they established a workers’ state after the Russian Revolution of 1917. They adopted four principles:

1. No privileges. No official could receive more in wages than the average skilled worker.

2. Rotation of official duties to stop a fixed layer of bureaucrats emerging.

3. All working people were to bear arms so that the revolution could be protected from threates from both the outside and from within.

4. All power was to be in the hands of

ANARCHISM

hich way to freedom?

workers’ councils, whose delegatesshould =e be elected = from the workplaces and working class areas, who would have to report back to mass meetings and who could be replaced by the workers at any time, not just once every five years like in British elections today.

The Russian revolutionary V. I. Lenin summmed thisall up when he said “when everyone is a bureauczat, no-one is a bureaucrat”. The whole idea was that once all private capitalist property was abolished and once attempts by the capitalists to recapture their property had been defeated, the old capitalist class would gradually die out. Their children and descendants would be forced to work like everyone else. The whole need for a special apparatus to rule on behalf of one class over another - even on behalf of the working class - would disappear. The government of persons would become replaced by “the administration of things”. The workers’ state would gradually wither away altogether.

The Russian revolution went wrong. Stalin and his supporters abolished every shred of working class democracy and control - power passed into the hands of a monstrous regiment of bureaucrats. But the reason for this was not that the mass of the workers were corrupted by having too much power. It was that the workers’ councils and mass control were undermined because of Russia having to fight to defend its revolution against the armies of 14 capitalist countries in a devastating war, and because the revolution did not spread. Russia was a backward

country and could not build socialism on

its own, A whole layer of middlemen and bureaucrats emerged.

The way to avoid this in the future is to build a strong international movement so that the next country in which the workers take power will not be isolated for long, but will soon be joined by other countries. By contrast, the anarchist conclusion is not to build any sort of state in the first place - not even a democratic workers’ state. But that way the capitalists will never be stopped when they try to get their property back - something they will definitely try to do.

By opposing the whole idea of the state in case it goes wrong, the anarchists are rejecting something which is essential if the workers are to have a chance of beating the bosses and building a classless socialist society. This is like a football team refusing to kick the ball. That way you are guaranteed against scoring an own goal - but you stand no chance of winning the match.

This is not just an academic argument. During the Spanish revolution of 193639 the influence of anarchists helped to prevent the working class from winning victory. In the Spanish Republic, the working classresponded to a fascist rebellion in 1936 by seizing control of the factories and taking arms into their own hands.

Meanwhile the peasants took control of the land away from the rich landlords. The opportunity was there for the working class to take power and build socialism.

The anarchist movement was very strong in Spain at the time, in the form of the anarchist trade union the CNT. But the government of the Spanish Republic was made up of parties that wanted to stop the working class taking over political power - including Stalin’s puppets in the Communist Party. By 1937 the government felt strong enough to try to break the control of the workers over the factories and workplaces. In Barcelona - the heart of the revolution -the governmment sent troops in to drive the workers out of ther telephone exchange. But the workers weren't having it. They responded with a general strike.

This was the time to bring the revolu-

‘tion to a head. The workers’ own demo-

cratic organisations needed to launch an uprising and take political power, establishing a workers’ state. That would have been the only way to secure their control of the factories and land and stop them being handed back to the control of the capitalists. But the anarchist leaders (yes, in reality they do have leaders, just like every movement!) rejected this. Because they were anarchists, they were against the whole idea of a workers’ state. But there was no other way forward. So they ordered their supporters to return to work, and some anarchist leaders even joined the capitalist government!

The opportunity was missed to build a democratic workers’ state. Exactly as the Trotskyists (Marxists who were opposed to Stalin) warned at the time, this left the capitalists free to regain control. The workers were defeated and the fascist revolt won out in the end. Spain had to suffer over 30 years of fascism, and it remains a capitalist country today.

The lesson is that there can be no lasting victories for the working class and no chance of socialism without the working class fighting for workers’ power and a workers’ state.

Despite sounding very revolutionary, the problem with anarchism is that it is not revolutionary enough.

If you want a future free from capitalism, inequality, and ultimately free from classes and states, turn to Marxism and join REVOLUTION.»

BRITISH BOSSES AND THE ARMS TRADE IN 1992 Britain went to war with Iraq. The reason was not to protect “democracy” but the unelected billionaire oil Sheiks of Kuwait.

lraq was supposed to be under an arms embargo, because ofthe [ran-iraq war in the

FACT FILE

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Hi The world arms trade is worth $22 billion a year Wi Each year third word countries spend $125 billion on their armed forces. 4% of this could give primary education to all. 12% could provide health care and safe drinking water woridwide.

@ Britain, France, the USA, Russia and China make up the United Nations “Security Council” which is supposed to stop war. Meanwhile they supply most of the weapons to third word

countries!.

@ Officially world arms spending has fallen, But arms markets are awash with second hand weapons and prices have plummeted. *

1980s. But British soldiers faced arms, including chemical weapons, made with British equipment and British help. The reason was money for British bosses. In 1989 Britain channeled $9.75 million of loans to Iraq to buy British tools for Iraqi chemical weapons plants.

What we Think

There is a stench of hypocrisy surrounding the arms trade - and a stench of death. But wars don’t happen because arms exist. A gun on its own won't kill anyone - it has to fired for that. Wars happen because capitalist governments fight each other over territory and resources. The biggest capitalist powers are imperialists - they dominate the world economically and politically. They use armed force to smash any third world government that steps out of line, and especially any attempt at revolution.

So should we call for a ban on all arms production? Imagine you are Kurdish. You live under the military occupation of your country by Turkey. The government bombs your village with napalm and rounds up the young men for torture and interrogation. You might join the guerilla resistance. But you will need a gun. The Turkish army has plenty, supplied by Britain, Germany and the USA. The last thing you need is western liberals telling you “the arms trade should be stopped, starting with you”.

Calls to ban the arms trade miss the point. So do individual acts of protest like putting your money ina “humanitarian” bank which doesn’t finance arms deals. This will change nothing.

It is the hypocrisy of the capitalist arms trade that stinks. We call for the arms industry to be nationalised under workers’ control to stop this obscene profiteering in death. And we want an end to all secret government deals so we can all know just what our rulers are really doing. Aid - including arms if necessary- should be sent without strings to people fighting back against oppression, torture and dictatorship.

REVOLUTION is not a pacifist paper. Our aim is to overthrow capitalism, the system that causes war. That will have to be done through a revolution, and the bosses will resist. At the end of the day the masses of the working class will have to be armed to defeat the bosses and the rich. If we are not, they will use their guns on us anyway.

War is a permanent symptom of the sick profit system. It will only disappear when the working class builds a new, socialist society throughout the world.=

In 1991 Tory Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said that repressive regimes shouid not expect Britain to “support their folly.” Weeks later the military regime in Indonesia shot 400 unarmed demonstrators in East Timor. The same year British aid to Indonesia increased by 250%, to £81 million a year. Now Britain is their biggest arms supplier.

Britain used over half its money for “overseas aid” to fund the Pergau Dam in Malaysia. In return they got a huge arms deal with the military dictatorship which runs Malaysia.

The British capitalists and their government are not friends of democracy. They are friends of money - especially their own.

When it suits them, our rulers are also quite prepared to stop peapie getting hoid of guns. Forthe last three years the Bosnians have been defending themselves and their multi-ethnic towns and cities against genocide and “ethnic cleansing”. So Britain and the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on all three sides in the Bosnian war to stop them getting weapons. But the Serbs have their own arms industry. Britain has really only stopped the Bosnians from getting arms by sending the Royal Navy to search every ship bound for Bosnia.

If you want to buy arms from the British goverment, you had better be an unelected dictatorship fighting your own people, not defending yourself from a racist holocaust in Bosnia or East Timor.

FACT: In 1987 Margaret Thatcher negotiated the biggest arms deal in history between Britain and Saudi Arabia [an

unelected, brutally repressive regime]. Her * son, arms dealer Mark Thatcher, raked in an estimated £5 million “commission” for

closing the deal.=

HE STRUGGLE for socialism T doesn’t stop at the white cliffs of

Dover. Workers and youth all over the world are facing attacks on their rights and their living standards.

We in REVOLUTION are internationalists. We do not see the youth and workers of other countries as our enemies. We believe they are our brothers and sisters. The real enemy is the international capitalist system.

Evena successful revolution would collapse in the end if it did not spread to othercountries. That is why international organisation is not an option extra for socialists. It is a matter of life and death for us all: we stand or fall together.

That is why REVOLUTION supports the League for a Revolutionary Communist International. As its name suggests, the League is fighting to build a worldwide party of working class revolution.

We print here some messages of support we have received from youth organisations across Europe - East and West.

France

Congratulations on your excellent paper. Weare a group of French youth - we read Revolution and we produce our own papera contre courant (Against the Stream). We even translated your stuff on the Criminal Justice Bill for our last paper. The police and the government are attacking young people here too - they have tried to cut the wages of young workers and the racist government have banned Muslim women from wearing headscarves at school! We thought your example of driving the police away from your demonstration was a brilliant one to follow.

All over Europe the police and the capitalists are getting together to attack the working class and the youth - we should do the same and link up our resistance. International links make us stronger! We wantto meet Revolution supporters from Britain - why not have an International Camp next summer?

A Contre Courant

Ireland

Weare a group of revolutionary students in Ireland. We have the same aim as REVOLUTION in Britain - to build a youth movement against capitalism. We bring outa paper called Fightback and we are getting organised!

Our main campaign has been fighting for proper places on courses for all students. In Ireland courses and colleges are divided into levels. Some third level students have been forced todo their courses

in second level colleges because of a lack of places - like being forced to do your university degree at a sixth form college. The government have even said that students in that position should not be given grants - because they're at the wrong sort of college! Meanwhile, the government have managed to find money for “more important” things than education - like increasing their own salaries to £76,000 a year - that’s £1,500 a week!

Fightback has collected six hundred signatures on a petition and we have got into the press and been on the radio. We are holding pickets of Ministers’ meetings to attract attention.

Weare also fighting other injustices in the Irish education system: the fact that students are treated as children, the lack of proper sex education because of the influence of the Church, the absence of condom machines (the Pope thinks condoms are a sin!), the lack of abortion rights not to mention terrible overcrowding in the colleges.

Abortion is illegal in Ireland, leaving young women desperate and having to rely on dangerous backstreet abortions. We postered the city of Galway with phone numbers for proper abortion advice centres and we are holding a public meeting for abortion rights and against the influence of the Church.

Keep on fighting back!

Ukraine Dear friends!

Our organisation is called the Committee of Young Workers. We are carrying out active propaganda among the other workers trying to create our own independent trade union.

We would like to continue our connection with your organisation, and with your help establish contact with other workers’ organisations in Great Britain and the world.

We will be glad to establish friendly relations with young English workers, and also to receive your paper.

With great respect,

The Committee of Young Workers of Ukzaine, 252005 Ulzaine, Kiev - 5, PO Box 110, CYW

Austria We wish you success in establishing a revolutionary youth paper in Britain. In Austria - as all across Europe - working class youth, and school and university students are being hit hard by government spending cuts. But the youth are at the forefront of the fightback. Ata recent student demo our youth group Intakt (Internationalist Action) distributed loads of leaflets calling for students and workers to link up to stop the cuts. The youth snapped them up, which shows they want to fight back. But it also shows the need for a revolutionary youth movement to direct the anger against the whole capitalist system, here and abroad.

Intakt

for more subversive revolutionary propaganda read...

hers es & 3

monthly newspaper of the Workers power group

available from the address on page 8

and the League for a Revolutionary

Revolution is written and produced by youth

supporters of Workers Power (Britain)

ONE SOLUTION:

Communist Intemational.

E LIVE in a world full of injustice, oppression and poverty. While

millions starve, food is destroyed in order to keep its price up. The

latest technology in health care cannot be used in many countries because of the payment of foreign debt.

Even the most basic provisions of a good water supply and decent sanitation are denied to people all around the world. Meanwhile ever greater ecological disasters loom on the horizon.

REVOLUTION does not believe there is anything ‘natural’ about the state of the world. We believe that what is happening is because of the world wide system of capitalism.

It is a system that runs with the sole intention of making money fora tiny handful of capitalists who own and control industry and the land.

We believe that it is possible to create a new and better world system, a socialist system. It would be an international system which means the fight to achieve it must be international and is why Workers Power ( Britain) is part of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International that organises groups from Bolivia to New Zealand.

Because we are internationalists we support all struggles by people oppressed by imperialism - including the struggle to get British troops out of Ireland.

Because we are internationalists we oppose imperialist militarism: we say not a penny or a person for the defence of this system.

A socialist system would be based on common ownership and would produce and organise society to provide the necessities and luxuries of life for all according to a democratically worked out plan.

This means instead of having people homeless because the privately owned land and building companies only build houses when they can make money, we will all own the land, collectively and we will plan that to use the bricks that lie unused and the building workers who are unemployed to build the homes needed.

To get this, industry and land will have to be taken out of the hands of the few. But this group of people, the ruling class, will never allow us to do this without a fight. The government was prepared to mobilise thousands of police to attack the Unity Demo last October, just imagine what they would be prepared to do to protect their whole system of wealth and power. That is why we believe we need a workers revolution.

But we cannot wait until then, we have to fight against exploitation and oppression now. We support all workers’ struggles. We support the struggles against women’s oppression, racism and homophobia.

Whether it is workers on strike, women fighting for abortion rights or black people fighting against racism it is often young people who are leading these struggles.

We fight for action that will win and in such a way that the struggles of today can prepare us for the revolution of tomorrow. We try to turn today’s struggles into a struggle for power by fighting for workers control, workers self-defence etc.

REVOLUTION stands in the tradition of over 150 years of revolutionary socialism. Our movement is based on the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, applied to today’s conditions.

REVOLUTION aims to build a revolutionary youth movement, to win thousands and thousands of youth to supporting and building a revolutionary party that can lead the working class to power.

So don’t just sit there sell REVOLUTION and become a supporter! @

ISSUE 4 OCTOBER 1994

RAGE against the Tories

Once again we sold out of the last issue of REVOLUTION . And we know why. People are angry with this government and this system . They have a right to be.

Major and the Tories were finally forced to drop their plan to put even higher taxes on household fuel. Even some of their own MPs wouldn't support it - too many voters seemed to be bothered by the prospect of the thousands more pensioners freezing to death this winter because they can’t afford proper heating. So what happened instead? The Tories are taxing beer, fags and petrol. So working class people will be paying more anyway.

We say: tax the rich to pay for decent homes and proper heating for everyone.

Meanwhile the Criminal Justice Bill is now the Criminal Justice Act - and the coppers have already started using it against travellers. As if there weren’t enough homeless people already, it is now illegal to squat! So protesters from all over the country have been squatting the Tories - descending on Tory Michael Howard’s posh home in the country and on Major’s “secret” Chequers hideout.

We say: every time they try to use the Act they should be met with mass defiance. Blockade every squat they try to break up, and defend every rave and demo against the police in an organised way. Defend your rights!

Above all, we have got to use the anger to organise and build a youth movement that really wants to fight this rotten system. You won't be able to do it on your own - but you don’t have to. Link up with people who think the way you do;

+ Show this copy of REVOLUTION to your friends

+ Send us letters, articles and graphics

+ Set up a REVOLUTION croup in your school, college or area

+ Get in touch with us - we can give you masses of ideas about how to get a group started, we can send you posters and extra copies of REVOLUTION to sell, we can link you up with other REVOLUTION supporters.

Faas JOIN =" wey - REVOLUTION! :. | «! want to join Revolution 3 Hl ¢Please send me { Jcopies to seil at i | 20p a copy i] | q | g Name: 5 Add ; 4 ress | HE Tel: a es oes eo el : Send to

Revolution BCM Box 7750 London WCIN 3XX