«Spend our money on social welfare, not on war.» Slogan of the FOR party.
A vote for the Peace and Justice party (FOR) is a vote of protest against the war consensus and imperialism.
Parliamentary elections in a bourgeois democracy will never fundamentally change the system or the power relations. Ultimately, it is a matter of which faction of the bourgeoisie's trusted representatives gets to run the state apparatus – alone or in coalition with other bourgeois or petty-bourgeois parties.
In certain situations, disagreements within the bourgeoisie can also be of importance for the masses of the people. The choice is not always between plague and cholera. Sometimes it is a matter of having to choose pneumonia over plague. But in this general election, the bourgeoisie is completely aligned: Armament and war are the only things that matter.
There is no clear revolutionary, communist alternative in this election. Yet there is an alternative that raises the most important of all demands of our time: Fight against war and war preparations! The Peace and Justice Party (FOR) says no to NATO armaments and demands that the billions for war be spent on social welfare. No other party with a chance of winning a mandate says this.
FOR is not a socialist party, nor does it pretend to be one. But the party is declared anti-imperialist. FOR embraces people far beyond those who consider themselves socialists, even though there are both socialists and communists in its membership. It bears the hallmarks of being a popular electoral front. However, anyone who reads the party program will find a long list of observations and demands that socialists and class-conscious workers will identify with.
Europe and Norway are in war mode. War hysteria is being used as a means to take away our democratic rights. A flood of new laws pave the way for mass surveillance and martial law. When the authorities talk about “preparedness”, it is not food security or shelter that they mainly have in mind. They are contemplating about how to gag and crush the “enemy within” – the masses of people who oppose war policies and censorship – in cooperation with NATO.
All parliamentary parties are supporters of the rearmament plans. The Socialist Left Party (SV) and the Red party (Rødt) unreservedly support the Long-Term Defence Plan, the Defence Settlement and billions in transfers to Ukraine. They thus support NATO and the preparations for an all-out war against Russia.
Both of these parties say yes to being government partners with the war criminals and Israel apologists in the Labour Party leadership, with NATO and the EEA as the invariable foundation of the government. It does not depend on the will of Marie Sneve Martinussen (chair-woman of Rødt) and Kirsti Bergstø (chair-woman of SV), but on whether Prime Minister Støre and (Minister of Finance, former Secretary General of NATO) Stoltenberg believe that SV and Rødt are sufficiently meek. It goes without saying that these "socialist" parties are not an alternative to vote for. This is true despite the fact that some parliamentary candidates from Rødt in certain counties are in opposition to the NATO line. As part of the parliamentary group, they will be knocked into place nonetheless.
A vote for ‘Red' or SV is a vote for a war party
A vote for Rødt or SV is a vote for a war party. Such is the reality. A vote for FOR is a protest vote against the war consensus and imperialism. A possible parliamentary mandate for FOR would give the war opposition a platform and force the question that all parliamentary parties are avoiding: Who will pay for the war policy and the NATO demand for five percent of GDP, equivalent to 13% of the Norwegian state budget?
SV and Rødt are repeating the historical betrayal of the Social Democrats before the outbreak of World War I. It may create confusion among their old supporters when these parties have placed themselves in the enemy's camp. But for those who want peace and not war, it makes the choice easy.
