The Socialist Equality Party of Britain and the World Socialist Web Site are pleased to announce that Bill Van Auken, the American SEP’s presidential candidate, will speak in London on October 16.

Van Auken will address the vital political and historical issues raised by the US-led war against Iraq and the 2004 presidential election.

The SEP campaign is of immense importance for working people internationally. It takes place within the context of an eruption of American militarism and an assault on the rights and conditions of US workers which serves as the model for governments all over the world—and nowhere more than in Britain.

The illegal war of colonial plunder being conducted by the Bush administration against Iraq marks a turning point in world history. It is now indisputable that it had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, or with liberating the Iraqi people. It was aimed at securing control over Iraq’s oil and establishing US hegemony over the entire Middle East, under conditions of an unprecedented economic, political and social crisis of American capitalism.

While millions of Americans oppose the war, the two major parties—the Republicans and the Democrats—are working to block them from expressing their opposition in the forthcoming US elections. Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has explicitly declared that “even knowing what we know now”—i.e., that all the justifications were lies and Iraq posed no threat whatsoever to the US—he would still have voted to authorise Bush to invade the country.

The Democratic Party has not only endorsed the war and the continuing occupation of Iraq, it has embraced the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war, which proclaims the right of the US to use military force against any nation regarded as a potential threat to its interests.

The conception that the foreign and domestic policies of the Bush administration can be overturned by voting for “anybody but Bush” is dangerous and false. The struggle to end the war in Iraq and defend the rights and conditions of ordinary Americans at home can be conducted only on the basis of a political break with the Democratic Party and the entire two-party system.

The US Socialist Equality Party is running in the 2004 election to advance an independent socialist alternative to war and social reaction. Its campaign is aimed at establishing the political and programmatic foundations for a genuinely global mass movement against imperialism, and for the revolutionary transformation of American society. At the very centre of this perspective is the fight for the international unity of the working class, in opposition to all forms of nationalism, whether based on religious, ethnic or national identity.

We urge all those who recognise the need for a genuine and progressive alternative to capitalism to make plans to attend the London meeting.

Saturday October 16, 1.30 p.m.,
Committee Rooms 1&2,
Camden Town Hall,
Judd Street, WC1 H9J
(Opposite Kings Cross station)

Tickets priced £4/£2 unemployed, students and pensioners