Brussels: two days of protest against the European Union summit
Workers Power Global, London

The European Confederation of Trade Unions have called for a mass international demonstration at the Laeken summit of the EU leaders in Brussels for 13 December. The next day a coalition of anti-capitalist groups from across Europe will hold another march to the summit.

School and college students in Germany, Belgium and Holland have called strikes during the summit. That's why anti-capitalist organisations across Europe, like ATTAC and Globalise Resistance, have called for a blockade. The LRCI and REVO youth will be there.

Here are just some of the reasons why British trade unionists, students and anti-capitalists should join their European sisters and brothers on the demo:

ð The EU demands that all member countries raise high taxes on medium and low paid workers while giant corporations and the rich get tax cuts and offshore havens.

ð The EU wants public services to be privatised and subsidies removed from education and healthcare. A specific proposal at the summit says all public transport systems in major cities should be privatised and run for profit.

ð The EU allows free access for capital across its borders and demands the right for its bosses and bankers to operate freely anywhere in the world. But should any worker or refugee try to come and live here, they face razor wire, imprisonment and discrimination. Only if they have the right skin colour or skills that can boost profits are they welcome.

ð The EU is creating an autonomous army ready to intervene to defend its global profits anywhere in the world and has co-ordinated police tactics via Europol against strikers and anti-capitalist protesters.

ð The EU is run by unelected bodies like the European Commission, European Council, Council of Ministers and Committee of Permanent Representatives while its parliament has no real powers.

ð The EU is a bosses' club. It is lobbied successfully by bosses' unions like the European Employers' Association and the Round Table of European business leaders while the trade unions are left in the cold. The Commissions sees its jobs as tearing down of all health and safety, labour and environmental legislation that stands in the way of profit so that EU businesses can compete with their US counterparts in a race to the bottom.

ð Europe, especially eurozone, is now in recession. This will deepen as we move through next year. Tens of thousands across Europe have already been chucked onto the scrapheap since 11 September. Sabena workers from the collapsed Belgian airline will be in the front ranks of the demo. The response of the European Commission in the face of this is typically pro-business: they turn a blind eye to their own rules to allow subsidies to be handed over to failing airline businesses, (i.e. shareholders) while allowing thousands of jobs to be destroyed in these same airlines.

For all these reasons the EU is every bit a legitimate a target for protesters as the G8 or the World Trade Organisation. D13/D14 must stand in the tradition of the international anti-capitalist protests begun in Seattle against the WTO in 1999, Prague against the IMF and World Bank last year and Genoa against the G8 in the summer.

These protests have rocked the capitalists. Their response has been to try and split the movement by a series of reforms and repressive measures.

But the 'reforms' are cosmetic. The EU says it has launched an in-depth "Future of Europe" reform process, yet its Charter of Fundamental Rights excludes the rights to work, to social housing and to welfare benefits while the rights of capitalist property are enshrined. And if even this proves too much for our masters, any country can suspend articles of the European Convention of Human Rights on the grounds of a national "emergency"-thus Britain suspended the right to liberty on 10 November so that it could lock up asylum seekers even though it has not been attacked. Those who want to use freedoms of speech, assembly and direct action-on the streets or the picket lines-have to be silenced, repressed and imprisoned.

Meanwhile, unarmed protesters at the EU summit in Gothenburg in June were subjected to a shoot-to-kill policy by the police, while Carlo Giuliani, a young trade unionist and anti-capitalist, was killed in Genoa and hundreds hospitalised and tortured in a night of terror. No one has been charged for these murderous offences.

In these circumstances it is criminal for the leaders in the ETUC to try and keep the trade union march on D13 separate from the anti-capitalist demo on D14. Far from playing into the bosses' hands, the anti-capitalist movement, with its tactics of direct action and confrontation, has forced the globalisers to address the issues of global injustice. Trade unionists must defy their leaders and stay in Brussels for both protests.

A dynamic combination of the disciplined mass ranks of the labour movement and the creative courage of the anti-capitalist movement can stop the bosses in their tracks and consign their system to the dustbin of history. Brussels D13/14 must be another step along that road. We'll be there. Join us!