In France, the week began with lorry drivers blockading ports and motorways, and on Tuesday 50,000 railworkers went on strike against privatisation, attacks on pensions and cuts in public spending. Busworkers, Metro staff, nurses and postal workers struck too.

Together they took part in a 60,000-strong march through Paris and were joined by delegations of trade unionists from Germany, Britain, Austria and Belgium, affiliated to the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF).

Across the Rhine, in Germany, where there is 10 per cent unemployment (four million unemployed), workers’ trade unions are in a battle to defend job security and unemployment benefits. Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is attempting to force through parliament the recommendations of the Hartz committee, which would open the way for an expansion of temporary casual work and ‘mini jobs’, with few employment rights.

Labour premier Tony Blair’s closest political ally in the European Union (EU), Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is also engaged in a direct confrontation with the trade unions. Berlusconi has already provoked an 11-million-strong general strike earlier this year, over his plans to scrap Article 18 of the Labour Code, which gives workers some job security.

In Spain, Prime Minister Maria Aznar’s right-wing government has provoked general strikes over its proposals to deprive hundreds of thousands of workers of their unemployment benefits.

The Blair-Berlusconi-Aznar axis has a political agenda, which is deregulation, privatisation, breaking up public services, slashing of welfare benefits and running the EU on casual cheap-labour. With this axis forging the way, Chirac and Schroeder are only a few paces behind.

These leaders know that the crisis within the EU is part of the world crisis of capitalism, which is the driving force within every country, as Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown was forced to acknowledge in his pre-Budget statement last week. They are organising to make the working class pay for capitalism’s crisis.

Under these conditions, it is not surprising that workers from across Europe should have come together on the railworkers’ march in Paris. They know they face a common enemy and common problems within the bankers’ and monopolists’ EU.

The ITF delegations on the Paris march were an important gesture indicating that united class action across Europe is necessary to defeat the plans of the capitalist EU. But more is needed than this! The working class requires a revolutionary socialist strategy and leadership to defeat the EU and to go forward to a Socialist United States of Europe.

The reformist Labour, Socialist, Social Democratic and Stalinist ‘Communist’ parties have got workers into the present mess. They are pillars of capitalism in Europe and have even given up their ‘socialist’ rhetoric.

The Stalinists in the Olive Tree Coalition opened the door for Berlusconi and the Socialist-Communist coalition smoothed the way for the Gaullists to return in France. In Britain, former Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s ‘new realism’ prepared the ground for Blair’s Thatcherite ‘new’ Labour, with Kinnock himself ending up with a well-paid position in the European Commission.

The Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution, offers a ‘spotless banner’ behind which workers must organise revolutionary parties to lead their struggle for socialism in Europe.

The urgent task confronting workers and youth in every country today is the building of the sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International, including the ICFI section in Britain, the Workers Revolutionary Party.