Stop arms to Israel!

 While Boris Johnson and other Tory has-beens join Netanyahu and the rest of the Zionist chorus in condemning Britain’s ‘shameful’ decision to suspend some arms exports to Israel others point out that past Labour and Tory governments, including those of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and even David Cameron had imposed similar sanctions on Israel in the past.
The decision to block 30 arms export licences for Israel is, in fact, a very small step forward for the Starmer government and though some pundits say it marks a breach with the Biden administration it is hard to believe that Sir Keir Starmer would do anything against Israel without clearing it in advance with the White House.
This week we’ve seen waves of protests and strikes sweep across Israel as the demand for a cease-fire grows even in the heart of the Zionist state. We see millions upon millions throughout what the imperialists call the “free world” demanding a halt to the genocide and justice for the Palestinians. We see this in London and on the streets of all our major cities and we must keep up the fight to economically and politically isolate Israel to stop the the fighting and ensure that the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs are restored.

After Grenfell

Following years of interviews and evidence, and after repeated delays, the families, bereaved and survivors of Grenfell fire have, at last, obtained an official account of the causes of Britain’s deadliest residential fire since the Second World War. The blaze that roared through the tower block in one of the poorest parts of Kensington & Chelsea, the wealthiest borough in London, took the lives of scores of people and devastated the local community.
Some years ago, when the Corbynistas were at the helm of the Labour Party, the Kensington Labour Party Research Unit published their own report which said "the borough of princes, Sultans, plutocrats and billionaires” was actually the most unequal borough in Britain'. How, in what one Councillor called “the richest borough in the universe”, with three billion pounds in reserves, could 72 people burn to death in a fire which, even in the earliest days, was blamed on 'cheap cladding'?
The borough has the highest life expectancy in the country, but across the borough the gap in years lived is a massive 27 years. Even more shocking, since 2010 – when a decade of austerity began to pay for the 2008 banking crash – average life expectancy in Golborne Ward where the tower block stood, fell by six years, the worst decline in the country.
On Wednesday, the final 1,700-page report of a six-year public inquiry into the fire was published. The report, as Matt Wrack the leader of the Fire Brigades Union says “demonstrates beyond doubt that central government’s deregulation agenda cost lives. Decades of ministerial failure to regulate the building industry gave the green light for businesses to prioritise profit over human life”.
The report makes over 80 recommendations, which the FBU will assess in detail over the weeks to come. But the union wants much more than that. The fire-fighters rightly highlight the need for national standards set by a statutory advisory body on fire policy, giving a voice to firefighters and control staff and drawing on the best expert advice.
It also exposed a deliberately created system that provides genuine health and safety for the rich but not for the poor. Endless chains of sub-contracting and downgrading of checks made a tragedy like Grenfell virtually inevitable, and the only surprise was the horrific form in which it came.

Revolutionary Democracy

 by Robin MacGregor

Revolutionary Democracy Third Series, Volume One, number 1 (April 2024) £7.50 including P&P from NCP Lit, PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ

 The latest edition of Revolutionary Democracy, the twice yearly Indian Marxist-Leninist journal has appeared in its regular tripartite format of articles on contemporary Indian politics, materials reflecting the views of International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Political Organisations (ICMLPO) and archival materials. 
 Published in April it appeared before the Indian General Election which saw the fascist BJP government return, albeit with a reduced majority. However, we have a survey of the results of the earlier elections to five State Assemblies where the BJP consolidated its position in Hindi speaking areas. A disunited opposition from the left and Congress is blamed for this situation. 
 The BJP’s latest national Budget comes under scrutiny. While the BJP boast that the Indian economy has drastically changed in the past decade, they fail to point out this has seen the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, and real term cuts in desperately needed welfare and infrastructure spending.
 While the BJP likes to talk about the growing aviation sector a quarter of second-class train seats have been lost and replaced by expensive air-conditioned seats reflecting a growing inequality. Likewise, the growth of numbers employed in agriculture is simply a case of urban workers forced back to the land.
Another crime of the BJP government is recent paramilitary action against the tribal peoples whose lands sit on huge iron ore reserves. These violent actions are falsely justified by the need to repress Maoist terrorism, and are part of a decades long strategy.
From elsewhere on the subcontinent there are articles with self-explanatory titles like The Rot Among the Communists of Nepal is Helping the Hindutva Takeover and Will Pakistan achieve economic and political stability? The latter piece presents an unsurprisingly depressing picture including the fact that the economy is heavily dependent on remittances from workers forced to work abroad.
 Next Rafael Martinez, a regular on these pages,  denounces Russia’s actions in the Ukraine as being a war between two imperialist factions, deploring the Communist Party of the Russian Federation as openly national chauvinist.
An interesting article on the Partition of India by Badruddin Umar briefly surveys thousands of years of immigration into India and blames James Mill’s famous History of British India for causing India’s communal problems which led to the separate states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. 
We have a 1937 article by A V Shchegolov on Lenin’s and Stalin’s Exposure of Bogdanov’s Tektology and Equilibrium Theory which was part of the important Soviet debates on economics. 

The longest piece is a new illustrated article by C N Subramaniam, Socialism and Education – An Historical Overview from the Anabaptists to the Utopian Socialists, which does what it says on the tin by surveying four centuries of European traditions of progressive education.

 From the Soviet archives we have a Report of a 1947 meeting between Stalin and Maurice Thorez, the General Secretary of the French Communist Party, and a 1949 report from the Communist Party of China to the Soviet party which was annotated by Stalin. The Thorez meeting took place at a time when the French party was fighting against the growing American influence over France. The Socialist Party were faithful supporters of the Americans, selling out French cinema and the efficient aviation industry. The discussion also includes views on the Italian party and some unflattering comments on the British party. Thorez surprised Stalin by saying the French party was financially well off, partly as a result of owing a shipping company, but he was reassured to learn they also kept arms dumps and clandestine radio links, a legacy of the wartime resistance. 
The Chinese report, written just after the main communist victory (but while fighting was continuing) is important for showing Stalin’s successful opposition to Mao’s original plans to shut out all the other parties who had fought against the Japanese. It also shows that Stalin never gave orders but only advice to the Chinese.  
Returning to India the issue closes with two documents from the 1950s. First there is a 1950 Communist Party of India (CPI) denunciation of the then new Indian Constitution which was deemed unworthy for an independent nation because it simply maintained the power of capitalists. It prophesied that the provisions would lead to the rise of the Hindu nationalism which rules India today. 
Finally there is a reprint of a 1951 CPI discussion pamphlet on the concept of People’s Democracy and how it applies to India.  

Greetings to peace activists of the Netherlands

 

We are publishing the contents of this video message from one of our closest friends, Leonin Ilderkhin, because it gives a brief but excellent description of the situation in Ukraine, and of the demands of all Ukrainian anti-fascist democrats and patriots.

Dear friends, my name is Leonin Ilderkhin, I'm from the Coordination Council of the Union of Political Emigrants and Political Prisoners of Ukraine.
We greet with all of our hearts your event in the Netherlands, and the other places where you make your great activities.
I want to speak briefly about the core issue of the present day conflict around and inside of Ukraine.
The roots of this conflict lie in the desire of the capitalist centres, that is the USA and England, to revive their economy and their military industrial complex. Now, by using the present day conflict, they have achieved their goals, partially. They have revived their military industrial complex, and they have raised the prices in the world for weapons.
They have oppressed Western Europe and generally the European Union by greatly increasing the price of natural gas, oil and other necessities. In this they are destroying their competitors in Western Europe, and in this way they want to oppress the Russian Federation.
They don't care about what is happening in Ukraine or what is happening to the population of Ukraine, to the people there. They don't care, they consider the Ukrainian land as a territory where they test their weapons, where they test their military capabilities, in this way they hope to overcome the general crisis of capitalism that started in 2007-8. They are trying to escape from their own internal crisis.
In this situation we want to put forward these slogans: No weapons to the conflict zones, whether it is Ukraine, Palestine or Yemen; No weapons, no military personnel and no mercenaries to these conflict zones - from Western Europe, from the USA, from England or from France.
In this situation we want to oppose all actions which promote the continuation of conflict. The USA and England plan to occupy all the countries of Eastern Europe including the Baltic countries, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, etc. We don't want this, we want peace in Europe, we want peace in the world. In this situation we want to give our great support from our hearts to you, dear friends.