The Struggle Against Nato

1. The crisis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation presents an opportunity for the labour vanguard to specify its political attitude towards NATO. 2. NATO, created in 1949 by the Treaty of Washington, is the military expression of the solidarity of the principal capita list countries of Europe and North America, its economic expression being the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). 3. This alliance was constituted to prevent any change in the proportion of class forces in the European capitalist states, and to strengthen the potentialities of aggression of these states in opposition to the block formed by the socialist countries and therefore calling into question again territorial status quo defined at Yalta and at Potsdam in 1945 and creating a tighter co-operation between the European ruling classes who continue to exercise their domination over the colonized peoples of Africa. 4. The military and economic superiority of the U.S.A. in the alliance results in the U.S.A. determining the politics and the functioning of the alliance. 5. France, in regaining her power over military questions, has weakened the alliance which was conceived to work in an integrated manner and thereby implying that military questions are removed from the control of its partners. This withdrawal is the result of the place taken in the world by French capitalism. This is valued in the proportion that it establishes an objective weakening of the alliance in which the American bourgeoisie constitutes the central point. 6. Considering the ties between NATO, SEATO and CENTO, every fight against NATO becomes opposition to the aggressions perpetrated by the USA and her allies against revolutionary movements. 7. Consequently, the youth organizations taking part in this conference consider that the struggle against NATO is a struggle for the uni-lateral disarmament of their own bourgeoisie; they feel they must systematically avoid equating NATO, the Treaty of aggression, and the Warsaw Pact, founded in 1955 as an answer to the rearming of the West German bourgeoisie. 8. The possibility--completely theoretical if it is not considered in the framework of an anti-capitalist struggle--of dissolving NATO or of withdrawing from it in 1969, provides an opportunity of posing right now, as a real question, the problem of withdrawal from the alliance in all the member states. 9. As to slogans for a campaign against NATO we consider as essential due to, their popularity among the soldiers, slogans which demand the withdrawal of © foreign troops from one's own territory. 10. In any national campaign against NATO it is essential to denounce the direct or indirect complicity with the American aggression in Vietnam implied in belonging to NATO and the Atlantic solidarity.