The Feminisation of Poverty

WFTU conference

The feminisation of poverty

by New Worker correspondent

LOW PAY, discrimination, long hours, domestic responsibilities, harassment, violence and lack of opportunities are the major problems facing working women all around the globe. Ninety-five women delegates from trade unions and progressive political parties in 62 countries reported a very similar picture of the situation in their own countries to a two-day conference in Brussels last week organised by the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).
It’s an old, old story but the common themes in the contributions stood out; most countries have equal opportunities legislation and protection for women from violence – but these laws are rarely implemented.
The spread of liberal economic policies, described as global imperialism by WFTU, is having a devastating effect on working class standards of living, wages and working conditions around the globe and women workers are feeling the brunt of this.
These same economic policies have increased the commodification of women, leading to an alarming increase in the trafficking of women and enforced prostitution.
Women living in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who once enjoyed high standards of equality and protection now face some of the worst conditions.
But women living in China, Vietnam, Cuba and Venezuela are enjoying rising standards, though delegates from these countries explained there are still improvements to be made. Maria Fabregas from the Cuba Construction Trade Union reported that the situation for women in Cuba is improving; barriers to equality have come down and government funds have been earmarked to improve the situation for women further.
Wang Xuemei from the All China Federation of Trade Unions, which has 170 million members, of whom 61 million (36.4 per cent) are women, reported that China’s legal system protects women’s employment rights. The shift from rural to urban work in China has led to a greater diversification of women’s employment. But in some sectors the trade union membership of women is low and women who are not in trade unions are vulnerable to exploitation and discrimination.
Amarjeet Kaur from the All India TUC reported very serious problems that are exacerbated by imperialist globalisation, leaving many woman working in slave conditions. She spoke of remnants of feudalism, though there are emerging traces of socialism in a few areas.
She said: “The shenanigans of the neo-liberal economic globalisation, mass privatisation and deregulation have bulldozed the domestic markets, destroying the employment potential of the industries.
“Unemployment, under-employment, casualisation of jobs, sale of state-owned enterprises, mergers and acquisitions of industrial enterprises, exploitation of cheap labour, shifting of jobs in the ‘race to the bottom’, denial of hard-won legislative entitlements including social security, heath care benefits and so on are the worst onslaughts against the workers.
“While the phenomenon of globalisation is pernicious to the whole of humanity, the capitalist system with its inherent characteristic of creating subjugation and slavery is intrinsically anti-women, resulting in the ‘feminisation of poverty’.”
Amarjeet Kaur went on to speak of a rising rate of farmer suicide in India – and among women farmers. But no statistics are kept on women – so they do not get any benefits or relief.
Many are forced into prostitution from as young as 14 and become commodities of men.
She also spoke of deteriorating working conditions in call centres where many Indian women are employed by foreign banks – now making big job cuts in the current global banking crisis.
One delegate from West Bengal spoke of fighting in the streets happening as the conference was taking place, centred on a trade dispute by women in the textile industry. Men trade unionists had come out in force in solidarity with the women in struggle and this was leading to the fighting as police tried to break up marches and support rallies.
Nemat Hassan from the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions told the conference that Arab working women still have very few constitutional rights; their role is considered to be housewives and they lack civil and personal rights. She said that Arab societies are generally dominated by men and that many women lack political awareness. Those fighting for women’s rights find themselves in conflict with religious ideas.
Anastancia Ndhlovua from the World Federation of Democratic Youth spoke of the diverse backgrounds and problems of delegates – but with common themes.
She also spoke on the effects of imperialist globalisation – of unemployment, the casualisation of work and young girls forced into prostitution. “Prostitution isn’t a job,” she said, “it’s slavery”.
Noluthando Sibiya of the South African Confederation of Trade Unions told the conference that in South Africa a woman’s average life expectancy has dropped from 57 years to 47, largely because of the HIV-Aids pandemic.
She said that the overthrow of apartheid had been a great step forward but now the overthrow of capitalism was needed. Neo-liberal economic policies have increased all kinds of social ills.
She also said that in the trade union movement in South Africa there were many women at rank and file level but too few at leadership level.
Natalia Lisitsyna from Russia Zaschita Truda spoke of the shocking collapse of conditions for working women in Russia now. She said that mass poverty has become a stable phenomenon that has altered the mentality of people.
Women now face a choice – to be employed or to give birth, they can no longer be expected to be able to do both. Working women now have no rest days and no breaks at all during their shifts for meals or to use the toilet. They are expected to spend full eight-hour shifts standing at their lathes. Natalia also told the conference that the population of Russia has decreased by around 30 million since the early 1990s.
Nanuli Kvavadze painted a similar picture of life now in Georgia. She said the privatisation process had been a shock therapy with the International Monetary Fund destroying all economic sectors.
“Society is being destroyed; the education system is so expensive now; it is so different from the Soviet system.”
Daphne Liddle, from the Central Committee of the New Communist Party of Britain, spoke on the devastating effects of high levels of personal debt on long hours, health and child neglect and how such debt undermines trade unions.
Other common factors from the delegates were high levels of political awareness and a deep understanding of the class struggle. All were well aware that the disadvantages of working women arise from a class-divided society and not from any inherent quality of either men or women.
And the evidence showed that where men and women trade unionists stood firmly together in solidarity, conditions improved for both. There was not a trace of bourgeois feminism.
Ncumisa Kondlo from the South African Communist Party called for a different kind of debate in future conferences. She said it was not enough to define the problems of women in struggle everywhere – the problems are the same. What we need is to exchange experiences in combating these problems so that delegates can go away from the conference with constructive strategies and tactics to implement in their own conditions.
Ncumisa is an SACP Member of Parliament in South Africa. She told the New Worker she had first become politicised as a teenager by the Soweto school strike against apartheid in the 1970s.
The conference also included delegates from Afghanistan, Basque, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Colombia, Congo, Cuba, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Gabon, Galicia, Greece, Guinea, Hungary, Germany, Iran, Ireland , Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal Serbia, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Tunisia, Venezuela and Vietnam.
There were apologies and messages of good will from many other organisations. WFTU paid all accommodation costs but the price of air fares was prohibitive to many struggling organisations.
The general secretary of WFTU, George Mavrikos, left political campaigning in the Greek general election for a few hours to come and address the conference. He told of the recent revival of WFTU following its 15th congress.
In May 2006 WFTU organised a trade union conference on the “Social phenomenon of economic migration in the 21st century” also held in Brussels and involving dozens of trade union organisations and academics from around the world.
It also organised a European trade union conference of “The truth about Darfur” with representatives from 24 European countries.
There was a solidarity conference with the people of Lebanon held in September 2006 in Athens, which condemned the imperialist policy of Israel and the United States.
In the International Labour Organisation WFTU mounted a defence of Cuba and Venezuela against slanderous attacks. And WFTU took part – along with the AFCTU, OATUU and ICATU – in organising the International Trade Union Forum of Beijing.
WFTU also participates in the United Nations in New York, in Unesco in Paris and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN in Rome.
George Mavrikos told the conference last week: “For us in the WFTU, in the class oriented trade union movement, the role of the working woman is crucial. The role of working women in the production process, in the trade unions, in the political struggle can provide additional strength to the popular struggles now and in the future.
“The class oriented trade union movement has always had a firm position and fought for equal rights for working women, for equality at work and in every aspect of life.
“It struggles to stop the enslavement and trading of women, for the right of women to vote, for their right to participate in unions, in political parties, in government and state positions, for the participation of women in social and cultural activities.
“Many of these rights were realised in socialist countries, where the working woman achieved the status she was entitled to.
“Unfortunately, following the counter-revolutionary developments in the period 1990-91, the international correlation of forces changed to the detriment of the progressive forces. The US and its allies enforced a new imperialist world order and in this way many of the rights and gains of women were taken away.”
He told the conference that the conclusions of the conference will be discussed in all trade unions that are members of WFTU and secretariats for working women will be formed in all trade unions to plan and coordinate struggles.
The conclusions will be sent to international organisations and governments and conferences of working women will be held in every continent next year. The proceedings of the conference will be produced in book form and Comrade Mavrikos called on every trade union to see that it is translated into the language of its country.
The conference produced a final statement that was subject to amendment (mainly additions) during the debate, that described the position of working women and listed essential measures to improve things.

Engels on the English Revolution

Oliver Cromwell
1599 - 1658

Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the English Revolution, died on 3rd September 1658. Cromwell, the MP for Huntingdon, was the leading Parliamentary commander during the English Civil War which began in 1642 and ended in 1649 with the trial and execution of Charles Stuart and the abolition of the monarchy. The Republic of England, or Commonwealth as it was styled in English, was proclaimed soon after. In 1653 Oliver became head of state, the Lord Protector.
The republic he led included England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland as well as colonies in New England and the Caribbean. Cromwell died in 1658 and his son, Richard, succeeded him. Richard was neither a politician nor a general. The new Protector was unable to reconcile the republican generals with the demands of the rich merchants and landowners that wanted to curb the influence of the New Model Army. Richard resigned in 1659. The government collapsed and the monarchy was restored in 1660.
Frederick Engels looked at the English revolution in this article published in Vorwärts! [Forward!], a radical paper based in Paris associated with Karl Marx, in 1844.



The century of revolution has to all appearances passed England by, causing little change. While on the Continent an entire old world was shattered, while a twenty-five-year war cleared the air, in England everything remained calm, neither state nor church were in any way threatened. And yet since the middle of the last century England has experienced a greater upheaval than any other country — an upheaval which is all the more momentous the more quietly it is brought about, and it will therefore in all probability attain its goal more readily in practice than the political revolution in France or the philosophical revolution in Germany. The revolution in England is a social one and therefore more comprehensive and far-reaching than any other. There are no fields — however remote — of human knowledge and no conditions of life which have not contributed to it and which in turn have not been affected by it. The only true revolution is a social revolution, to which political and philosophical revolution must lead; and this social revolution has already been in progress in England for seventy or eighty years and is rapidly approaching its crisis at this very time.
The eighteenth century was the assembling, the gathering of mankind from the fragmentation and isolation into which it had been driven by Christianity; it was the penultimate step towards the self-understanding and self-liberation of mankind, but just because it was the penultimate step it was still partial and remained within the contradictions. The eighteenth century collated the results of the past, which had previously been scattered and appeared to be fortuitous, and laid bare their necessity and inner connection. The jumble of countless scientific discoveries was put in order, classified and the causal connections shown; knowledge became science, and the sciences approached their perfection, that is to say, they took philosophy on the one hand and practice on the other as their point of departure.
Before the eighteenth century science did not exist; the study of nature assumed its scientific form only in the eighteenth century or, in some fields, a few years earlier. Newton created scientific astronomy with the law of gravitation, scientific optics with the decomposition of light, scientific mathematics with the binomial theorem and the theory of infinity, and scientific mechanics with the analysis of the nature of forces. Physics likewise acquired its scientific character in the eighteenth century; chemistry was only brought into being by Black, Lavoisier and Priestley; geography became a science with the establishment of the form of the earth and the many voyages which only now were of benefit to science; with Buffon and Linné natural history too became a science; even geology gradually began to struggle free from the whirl of fantastic hypotheses which threatened to engulf it.
The concept of the Encyclopaedia was typical of the eighteenth century; it was based on the awareness that all these sciences were interconnected but it was not yet able to show these connections, so that only a simple juxtaposition could be achieved. History was in a similar position; now for the first time we find voluminous compilations of world history, as yet without any critical comment, and entirely without a philosophical approach, but nevertheless universal history instead of the previous historical fragments limited both in time and place. Politics was given a human foundation, and political economy was reformed by Adam Smith. The culmination of science in the eighteenth century was materialism, the first system of natural philosophy and the consequence of this development of the natural sciences. The struggle against the abstract subjectivity of Christianity forced the philosophy of the eighteenth century to the other extreme; it opposed subjectivity with objectivity, the mind with nature, spiritualism with materialism, the abstract individual with the abstract universal or substance. The eighteenth century represents the revival of the spirit of antiquity as against that of Christianity. Materialism and the republic; the philosophy and politics of the ancient world, arose anew, and the French, the exponents of the ethos of antiquity within Christianity, assumed the historical initiative for a time.
The eighteenth century thus did not resolve the great antithesis which has been the concern of history from the beginning and whose development constitutes history, the antithesis of substance and subject, nature and mind, necessity and freedom; but it set the two sides against each other, fully developed and in all their sharpness, and thereby made it necessary to overcome the antithesis. The consequence “Of this clear final evolution of the antithesis” was general revolution which spread over various nations and whose imminent completion will at the same time resolve the antithesis of history up to the present. The Germans, the nation of Christian spiritualism, experienced a philosophical revolution; the French, the nation of classical materialism and hence of politics, had to go through a political revolution; the English, a nation that is a mixture of German and French elements, who therefore embody both sides of the antithesis and are for that reason more universal than either of the two factors taken separately, were for that reason drawn into a more universal, a social revolution.
This will need to be elaborated in greater detail, for the position of nations, at least with regard to recent times, has in our philosophy of history so far been dealt with very inadequately, or rather not at all.
That Germany, France and England are the three foremost countries at the present moment in history, I can doubtless take for granted; that the Germans represent the Christian spiritual principle, the French that of classical materialism, in other words, that the former represent religion and the church and the latter politics and the state, is equally obvious or will be made so in due course; the significance of the English in recent history is less conspicuous and yet for our present purpose it is the most important.
The English nation was formed from Germanic and Romance people at a time when the two nations had only just separated from one another and their development towards the two sides of the antithesis had scarcely begun. The Germanic and Romance elements developed alongside one another and eventually formed one nation which contains the two unmediated sides. Germanic idealism retained abundant scope so that it was even able to turn into its opposite, abstract externalism; the fact that women and children may still be legally sold, and indeed the whole mercantile spirit of the English, must definitely be attributed to the Germanic element. In a similar fashion, Romance materialism turned into abstract idealism, inwardness and piety; hence the phenomenon of Romance Catholicism persisting within Germanic Protestantism, the Established Church, the papacy of the sovereign and the thoroughly Catholic manner of disposing of religion with mere formalities.
The English nation is characterised by this unresolved contradiction and the mingling of the sharpest contrasts. The English are the most religious nation on earth and at the same time the most irreligious; they worry more about the next world than any other nation, and at the same time they live as though this world were all that mattered to them; their expectation of heaven does not hinder them in the slightest from believing equally firmly in the “hell of making no money” and in the everlasting inner restlessness of the English, which is caught up in the sense of being unable to resolve the contradiction and which drives them out of themselves and into activity. The sense of contradiction is the source of energy, but merely external energy, and this sense of contradiction was the source of colonisation, seafaring, industry and the immense practical activity of the English in general. The inability to resolve the contradiction runs like a thread through the whole of English philosophy and forces it into empiricism and scepticism.
Because Bacon could not resolve the contradiction between idealism and realism with his intellect, the intellect as such had to be incapable of solving it, idealism was simply discarded and empiricism regarded as the only remedy. From the same source derives the critical analysis of cognition and the whole psychological tendency within whose bounds English philosophy has moved from the outset, and in the end, after many unsuccessful attempts at resolving the contradiction, philosophy declares it to be insoluble and the intellect to be inadequate, and seeks a way out either in religious faith or in empiricism.
Human scepticism is still the form all irreligious philosophising takes in England today. We cannot know, this viewpoint argues, whether a God exists; if one exists, he is incapable of any communication with us, and we have therefore so to arrange our practical affairs as if he did not exist. We cannot know whether the mind is distinct from the body and immortal; we therefore live as if this life were the only one we have and do not bother about things that go beyond our understanding. In short, this scepticism is in practice exactly the same as French materialism, but in metaphysical theory it never advances beyond the inability of arriving at any definitive conclusion.
However because the English embodied within them both the elements which were responsible for historical progress on the Continent, they were therefore able, even without having much contact with the Continent, to keep abreast of development there and at times even to be ahead of it. The English revolution of the seventeenth century provides the exact model for the French one of 1789. In the “Long Parliament” the three stages which in France took the form of Constituent and Legislative Assembly and National Convention, are easy to distinguish; the transition from constitutional monarchy to democracy, military despotism, restoration and juste-milieu [middle way] revolution [The French revolution of July 1830] is sharply delineated in the English revolution. Cromwell is Robespierre and Napoleon rolled into one; the Presbyterians, Independents and Levellers correspond to the Gironde, the Montagnards and the Hébertists and Babeuvists; in both cases the political outcome is rather pitiable, and the whole parallel, which could be elaborated in much greater detail incidentally also proves that a religious and an irreligious revolution, as long as they remain political, will in the final analysis amount to the same thing. Admittedly, this lead the English had over the Continent was only temporary and was gradually evened out again; the English revolution ended in juste-milieu and the creation of two national parties, whilst the French one is not yet complete and cannot be so until it achieves the result which the German philosophical and the English social revolutions have to achieve as well.
The English national character is thus substantially different both from the German and from the French character; the despair of overcoming the contradiction and the consequent total surrender to empiricism are its peculiar characteristics. The pure Germanic element converted its abstract inwardness into abstract outwardness, but this outwardness never lost the mark of its origin and always remained subordinate to inwardness and spiritualism. The French too are to be found on the side of materialism and empiricism; but because this empiricism is the primary national tendency and not a secondary consequence of a national consciousness divided within itself, it asserts itself nationally, generally and finds expression in political activity. The Germans asserted the absolute justification of spiritualism and hence sought to set forth the universal interests of mankind in religious and later in philosophic terms. The French opposed this spiritualism with materialism as something absolutely justified and consequently considered that the state was the eternal manifestation of these interests.
The English however have no universal interests, they cannot mention them without touching that sore spot, the contradiction, they despair of them and have only individual interests. This absolute subjectivity, the fragmentation of the universal into the many individual parts, is admittedly of Germanic origin, but, as we have said, it is cut off from its roots and therefore only takes effect empirically, which is precisely what distinguishes English social empiricism from French political empiricism. France’s actions were always national, conscious of their entireness and universality from the start; England’s actions were the work of independent coexisting individuals — the movement of disconnected atoms — who rarely acted together as one whole, and even then only from individual motives, and whose lack of unity is at this very time exposed to the light of day in the universal misery and complete fragmentation of society.
In other words, only England has a social history. Only in England have individuals as such, without consciously standing for universal principles, furthered national development and brought it near to its conclusion. Only here have the masses acted as masses, for the sake of their interests as individuals; only here have principles been turned into interests before they were able to influence history. The French and the Germans are gradually attaining a social history too, but they have not got one yet. On the Continent too there have been poverty, misery and social oppression, this however has had no effect on national development; but the misery and poverty of the working class in present-day England has national and even world-historical importance. On the Continent the social aspect is still completely hidden by the political aspect and has not yet become detached from it, whilst in England the social aspect has gradually prevailed over the political one and has made it subservient. The whole of English politics is fundamentally social in nature, and social questions are expressed in a political way only because England has not yet advanced beyond the state, and because politics is a necessary expedient there.
As long as church and state are the only forms in which the universal characteristics of human nature are realised, there can be no question of social history. Antiquity and the Middle Ages were also therefore without social development; only the Reformation, the first, as yet biased and blundering attempt at a reaction against the Middle Ages, brought about a major social change, the transformation of serfs into “free” workers. But even this change remained without much enduring effect on the Continent, indeed it really took root there only after the revolution of the eighteenth century; whereas in England the category of serfs was transformed during the Reformation into villeins, bordars and cottars and thus into a class of workers enjoying personal freedom and as early as the eighteenth century the consequences of this revolution became evident there. Why this happened only in England is explained above.

Don't look now but the cracks are showing

This article is based on an opening delivered by Alex Kempshall, New Communist Party National Chair, to the July 2007 Central Committee meeting.

IN Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, chapter three, Engels illustrated how capitalist crises continually recur: “Little by little, the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again.
“In these crises, the contradiction between socialised production and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of commodities is, for the time being, stopped. Money, the means of circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. All the laws of production and circulation of commodities are turned upside down. The economic collision has reached its apogee. The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of exchange.”
It’s been five or six years since the last crisis, which was evoked by the exuberance over the roll out of the internet; so are we now overdue for another crisis?
All eyes are focussed on banking institutions as they announce profit warnings as result of the collapse of the US housing market. Indeed on 29th July a group of publicly and privately owned German banks had to step in to bailout IKB, a German investment fund, which managed to turn, within 10 days, a €280 million operating profit into €3.5 billion of debts five times it’s market value. On the previous Friday share values of a number of US house construction companies collapsed.
So possibly the “steeplechase” is heading for the ditch but in the last five years has it been the “perfect steeplechase”?The short answer is No!

Poverty and debt

One in 10 children lives in severe poverty, according to a report, published in June 2007, by the charity Save the Children. The report classified 1.3 million children as living in families earning an average of £7,000 a year against the national average of £19,000. Based on the Government’s more limited definition of households with incomes below 60 per cent of the national median, during 2005-2006, 2.8 million children were classified as living in poverty. This is an increase of 100,000 on the previous year and is still higher than during the 1970s. Let’s note that child poverty is poverty for families with children and we should add to the 2.8 million the children’s parents, carers and extended family members. Overall 16 per cent of the population live in poverty.
A recent Unicef report on child welfare stated that the worst two industrial countries in which to grow up are Britain and the US!
Income inequality is marginally worse than when Labour took power, mainly because the rising incomes of the top 10 per cent have continuously outstripped everybody else. According to Income Data Services directors at AIM-listed companies awarded themselves average increases of 13.2 per cent.
The average British family now spends more of its household income on servicing debts than at any time over the past 10 years, with the total personal debt now accounting for 164 per cent of their annual income, the highest figure in the developed world, and the highest figure in Britain’s history. In 1997, the figure stood at 105 per cent. We shouldn’t blame workers for getting into debt, after all the Bank of England’s former governor told MPs on 20th March 2007 that personal debt levels are the legacy of a deliberate policy to stimulate consumer spending.
This debt can take two forms – credit cards for daily living expenses such as food and clothes or mortgages for housing. In respect of mortgages this looser lending has shown itself in higher advances as a multiple of income levels. In February 2007 the median loan was 3.13 times the income of the median borrower, up from 2.99 a year earlier and well above the average of the 1980s and 1990s when it was 2.25.
Even with these multipliers, workers are struggling to find affordable homes as the price of an average house is currently 11 times a worker’s annual salary; the price of an average house, even with the Government building programme, is expected to rise to £300,000 within the next five years. In only seven out of 400 local authority areas across England do the cheapest homes cost less than four times average earnings and in London it is 13 times.
With interest rates having risen to 5.75 percentage points, the affordability of mortgages for first-time buyers and home owners has fallen to its lowest since 1992. Interest payments now account for more than 16.6 per cent of gross income, below the peak of 27 per cent in 1990 but much higher than the 11 per cent recorded in 2003.
In the first half of 2006, banks in Britain wrote off more than £10 billion in their retail arms as increasing numbers of consumers defaulted on loans and credit cards, with many opting for bankruptcy or individual voluntary arrangements.
Mortgage debts are rising, The Council of Mortgage Lenders, the industry body, on 3rd August 2007, produced figures showing a 30 per cent jump in the number of properties taken into repossession in the first six months of 2007, compared with the same period in 2006.
Even though banks have to write off these bad loans, banking still remains a very profitable business.
In February 2007, Barclays reported 2006 profits of £7.14 billion but saw bad debts rise 37 per cent to £2.15 billion. Lloyds TSB, which reported profits of £4.2 billion, said bad debt provisions rose by 20 per cent to £1.55 billion.
Earlier in 2007 HSBC said it would take at least two years to fix its portfolio of bad home loans in the US, as the meltdown in that country’s housing market continued to gather pace. Its bad debt provisions increased to £5.5 billion in 2006 but still it managed to report a record pre-tax profit of £11.5 billion.

Wages

Over the last few years the “steeplechase” economy has been growing quicker than household income; for many workers the result of higher inflation and low pay rises is, reduced or stagnant living standards.
In the five years to the end of 2006 real household income grew by 9.3 per cent whereas GDP grew 12.4 per cent. Higher taxes, rising corporate profits and high inflation from energy price increases explain the divergence.
Annual growth in take-home pay during March 2007 was 3.6 per cent whilst annual retail price inflation was 4.8 per cent. Real living standards are declining whilst GDP and corporate profits are rising.
It is not only wages that are being cut back. The Pensions Act of 1995 required pension schemes to ensure that retirement incomes on pension benefits accruing after April 1997 rose in line with RPI up to an annual cap of five per cent. However this has since been cut and now any pension accruing after April 2005 is only subject to a lesser cap of 2.5 per cent. With RPI at 4.8 per cent pensioners are seeing their income, from their company pension schemes, reduced on a year-on-year basis.
Elsewhere, pension schemes are introducing other changes to reduce the costs of honouring their pension promises. This can mean that only a percentage of future pay rises – in the case of IBM 50 per cent – is taken into account for pensions purposes. Others are lengthening the periods over which final salary benefits are calculated from, say, the last three years to the last five years. As salaries tend to rise annually, this effectively cuts benefits. In more extreme examples, some companies are moving to career averages, trimming the positive impact of salary rises later in life.
Whilst worker’s wages and pensions are under attack, British businesses operating outside the financial sector made a net rate of return of 15.2 per cent in the last quarter of 2006, the highest level since 1989.
Roger Bootle, economic adviser to Deloitte, the professional services firm, said companies appeared to have increased their pricing power while they enjoyed lower costs, thanks in part to their success in keeping a lid on wage growth.
Service sector companies made a net rate of return of 20.6 per cent in the last quarter of 2006 and for the same period manufacturers’ net rate of return was 9.8 per cent.
So with record profits Cadbury Schweppes announced, in June 2007, plans to cut about 7,800 jobs and close 10 factories globally.
British Airways has reduced its workforce by about 3,100 jobs, or seven per cent, in the year to March 2007, and expects to cut at least another 3,000 jobs in the next two years and this in spite of record profits.

Fightback

But workers are starting to fight back to defend jobs and livelihoods with 754,500 strike days in 2006, of which more than 80 per cent were strikes involving public sector workers. Also in 2006 there were 1,341 ballots calling for strike action, of which 1,290 voted in favour of a stoppage.
However, this was still well below the number of strike days in the 1970s with an average of 12.9 million days annually and in the 1980s with 7.2 million days annually. There were 29.47 million strike days in 1979 during the so-called “winter of discontent” and a record 162 million strike days in 1926.
Although union membership has fallen, almost half of workers in Britain are still employed at workplaces where a trade union is present, while a third of employees, the majority of them in the public sector, have their pay and conditions affected by collective bargaining. Hourly earnings of union members were also higher, averaging £12.43 in 2006, compared with non-union members who averaged £10.66 an hour. Negotiators in the unionised private sector industries are getting pay rises far in excess of those being achieved in the public sector.
The biggest annual increase recorded during the three months to the end of June 2007 was a 7.9 per cent rise for 600 workers at Drax power station in Yorkshire. Other increases include a 5.35 per cent pay rise for 10,000 Network Rail workers and a 4.7 per cent increase for 60,000 BT staff. It should be emphasised that these are for workers who are highly organised. The other 80 per cent plus unorganised workers in the private sector are lucky to get rises at all.
In the public sector the Government has sought to keep public sector pay rises in line with the Treasury’s inflation target of two per cent; with retail price inflation currently at 4.8 per cent, public sector workers are taking a substantial pay cut.
If we consider GDP, which is increasing at 12.4 per cent, even the 7.9 per cent increase for Drax workers is a pay cut!

Monopolisation

Monopolisation continues to pick up speed. The volume of merger and acquisition activity worldwide surged 50 per cent to reach $2,780 billion (£1,390 billion) during the first six months of 2007. Buy-outs by private equity groups amounted to $568.7 billion, about 20 per cent of the overall total.
This activity includes banking and insurance, where the $100 billion (£50 billion) battle for ABN Amro, the Dutch banking group, is a continuation of consolidation in Europe at all levels of industry and banking. When the bosses talk about consolidation what they mean is job losses – not for directors but for workers.
In Engineering, Babcock International has agreed the £350 million acquisition of Plymouth’s Devonport dockyard – a deal that gives it a dominant position in support and maintenance work for the Royal Navy’s submarine and warship fleets.
Babcock already owns the Rosyth shipyard on the Firth of Forth and runs the navy’s submarine base at Faslane on the Clyde.Babcock will pay for Devonport through debt and a £90 million share issue. In the year to 31st March, Babcock sales rose 18 per cent to £988.3 million and pre-tax profits rose by 38 per cent to £57 million. They are also expected to win a £3.9bn contract for two aircraft carriers, to be assembled at Rosyth.

Housing

House prices have doubled over the past five years, far outpacing the growth in earnings and Britain has now the world’s second most overvalued housing market, according to a report by Fitch Ratings, the credit rating agency. Rising interest rates have added to the strain. A couple with two incomes buying their first home at the end of 2006 would have found mortgage payments absorbing 34 per cent of their take-home pay, the highest level since 1990. That’s of course if they could afford the deposit, an average first-time buyer now has to save up more than three quarters of one year’s salary to afford the initial cost of buying an average home.
A typical mortgage holder has to spend 17 per cent of their income on paying the interest on their mortgage, compared with 15 per cent a year ago and this does not take into account repaying the capital.
The four interest rate rises mean the cost of servicing an interest-only mortgage with a variable rate has risen 22 per cent since August 2006. Add to this house price growth of, say, 10 per cent, and the cost of getting on to the property ladder has risen by almost a third in less than a year.
The financial press and money lenders encourage “shopping around” for the cheapest interest rates and warn prospective borrowers not to get tied into long duration deals. Although mortgage lenders may have low interest rates their arrangement fees can be up to £1000, so it is no wonder, as Alistair Darling the Chancellor pointed out, that lenders encourage these deals, as borrowers come back every two years to arrange a new mortgage instead of every time they move house. In 2005 150,000 of this type of mortgages were being taken out every month. Today they total almost 20 per cent of all mortgages and are currently having to be refinanced at appreciably higher interest rates. The Royal Institution of Surveyors estimates that these borrowers will have to pay an extra £100 per month on a typical home loan.
What is making the situation more difficult than in 1988, just before the last housing crisis, is that workers are far more indebted and therefore will feel the interest rate rises much harder. Today total personal debt now accounts for 164 per cent of their annual income; in 1997 it was 105 per cent in 1988 it was considerably less that 100 per cent.
The main reason why house prices and rents have increased so significantly is that not enough houses of the right quality, affordability or for rent are being built. The 2004 review of housing supply found that during the last 30 years of the 20th century, house building rates halved, while demand for new homes increased by a third.
Reports have indicated that affordability is likely to deteriorate under current regional house building plans. This is despite a planned net rise in the number of additional homes from 150,000 to 240,000. The measure of affordability is calculated by dividing the house price of the cheapest 25 per cent of homes by the incomes of the lowest 25 per cent of earners. This ratio has moved up from 5.2 in 2003 to 7.1 in 2006.
According to official estimates, the number of households will grow by 223,000 a year up to 2030. That compares with 166,000 a year during the past 20 years.
The solution is to build more houses, since lack of supply has played a big part in pushing up prices. Brown as Chancellor promised to raise new building from 160,000 homes in 2006 to 200,000 by 2016. Brown as Prime Minister, 11th July 2007, has promised to now increase that to 240,000 by 2016. Out of this total, the Government wants at least 70,000 more affordable homes, including 45,000 social homes built a year by 2010. The logic of this is that they expect that the remaining 170,000 homes built annually will be unaffordable!
In 2001 house building almost reached a post war low of 129,500. That increased to 160,000 by 2006 of which 277, yes two-hundred-and-seventy-seven, were council houses. To put this into perspective, in 1951, the Conservatives’ target of 300,000 new houses a year was achieved in 1953 – taking two years to raise output by 100,000 – as opposed to the current Government’s 10 years to raise it by 80,000.
Labour’s 1960s target of 500,000 houses a year gross was not achieved, but it did manage a peak of 425,000 new houses in 1968.
It remains to be seen whether the Government will meet its own limited targets; it will not unless massive pressure is placed upon them by the labour movement to:
• end the privatisation of council housing, whether it be the sale of houses to private landlords or housing associations;
• allow councils to build decent affordable, secure and accountable council housing backed by government borrowing;
• give councils more rights to manage empty houses;
• allow councils to use the surplus in their housing revenue accounts to enhance the management and maintenance of council housing.
• bring housing association stock under council ownership.
• oppose the marketisation of housing rents.

Pensions

In respect of pensions, the deficits of the Britain’s 200 largest pension funds have fallen by about 40 per cent in the year to March 2007, reducing a deficit of £48 billion to £29 billion. Currently as many as 30 per cent of them are in surplus and there is a 60 per cent chance that all will be by 2010.
The turnaround from the huge deficits of a few years ago has come on the back of rising stock markets. In some cases it has come from rising contributions from employees and employers and reduced benefits.
So with the potential of occupational pensions having a surplus and therefore able to enhance pensions, the Engineering Employers Federation asked the Government, in May 2007 to change the law to allow companies access to pension fund surpluses. The issue is being considered as part of a deregulatory review the Government has set up, which is due to report shortly. This must be opposed; pension fund surpluses should be used only to enhance pensions.

Corporation tax

Of late there has been much talk about the use of the taxation system to fund acquisitions. Tinkering with the tax system is one of the Government’s favourite tools to encourage so-called entrepreneurs and investment – it never achieves the expected results. Time and again, a tax break that is big enough to make a difference to the behaviour of entrepreneurs and investors ends up being exploited in a way that was not intended. Tax officials are left scrambling to close loopholes after too much money ends up subsidising low-risk assets, supporting businesses with no intention of expanding or cutting the tax bills of wealthy individuals.
Early on in this Government the tax regime was changed to exempt from corporation tax all small companies with taxable profits of less than £10,000.
What was the result? Thousands of new companies were formed by individuals, the majority of whom had the sole goal of cutting their tax bills. The beneficiaries ranged from self-employed traders to thousands of affluent middle class parents who set up companies through which to pay their nannies.
Another was taper relief, which reduces capital gains tax over time, resulting in effective tax rates for business assets of just 10 per cent after two years. This ended up costing the Treasury £6.02 billion in 2006-2007, much more than the £3.9 billion collected in capital gains tax. This is the preferred tax saving device used by private equity when buying up companies but it also used by public equity companies like BA, BAe, Virgin and News International. At our Congress in December 2006 the New Communist Party drew up comprehensive demands for the taxation system, under the slogan: “The rich have plenty. They must pay,” to ensure that taxation is progressive.

US subprime

Back to our steeplechase. Over the last few years vast amounts of money has been lent to sections of the US population, encouraging them to move out of the rented sector and to buy their own homes. This strategy by the world’s banks and financial institutions is referred to as the subprime bubble. We have to wait to see what the fallout is from this lending boom and the collateralised debt obligations (CDO) bubble that financed it.
The subprime lending boom was where US and foreign banks and financial institutions provided mortgages to financially stretched borrowers who had no savings and no proof of income. So what is a subprime mortgage?
A worker in a low paid job with no savings, living in a rented property is encouraged by financial institutions to borrow money to get onto the “property ladder”.
Their mortgage broker sells them a mortgage with low initial payments, suggesting that this will allow them to take out other loans to buy furniture and so on. In 2004 interest payments on this type of mortgage were fixed at a “lowly” seven per cent for two years, since short-term interest rates were low in 2004.
By 2006 US house prices started dropping when the two-year deals started to expire and mortgage payments were adjusted. The seven per cent fixed rate goes up to 10 per cent, with a further rise to 12 per cent in prospect. The borrower cannot pay and goes back to the lender. As house prices have fallen there is no equity left. The lender repossesses the property. The house is boarded up and possibly auctioned, which pushes down the prices of other houses in the area even further.
As long as prices rose, equity could be extracted by the lender each time the worker refinanced. Indeed, they had a vested interest in ensuring the loan was unaffordable, thus requiring refinancing as this got them another round of fees.
The scale of the problem is huge; some 52 per cent of loans made to black people in 2005 were subprime. It is estimated that 2.2 million families could lose their homes to repossession because they are unable to pay their mortgages.
The money that was lent to borrowers was backed by among other things collateralised debt obligations (CDOs). These are financial instruments which are designed to be held until they mature and are valued using complex mathematical models and other non-market techniques.
As these CDOs are not traded in the financial markets, fund managers and bankers have shopped around to find the theoretical formula that places the highest value on the paper that they hold, as it is this value that ultimately determines their bonuses at the end of the year. And as the value is not tested in any market who is to know whether the value booked on a financial institutes balance sheet is realistic or not. That means that on the rare occasions that CDOs are traded, a large gap can suddenly emerge between what a buyer is prepared to pay and the book value that the seller has recorded that it is worth.
What makes the CDO sector important is that it has exploded at an alarming rate with about $1,000 billion of CDOs issued in Europe and the US during 2006.
These bubbles, where an over estimation of values has taken place, are rarely corrected in an orderly manner. If banks and other financial institutions are forced to slash the value of the CDOs they hold, panic sets in and a broader repricing of other similar financial assets also takes place, with the process spiralling down without control and with no one able to predict when it will stop.
The last week of July 2007 saw the worst losses on the FTSE 100 and Dow stock exchanges in four years, as banks and other financial institutes were forced to abandon £20 billion of debt sales for two of the biggest private equity deals of 2007 – Alliance Boots and Chrysler. Even so US banks are still looking to offload a further $300 billion of debt obligations. The cost of insuring against a borrower’s default doubled during July 2007 and has triggered a credit crunch were banks want to offload their own debt but are loathe to issue new debt.
The knock-on effect is that financial institutes are selling “good” debt to cover their losses on “bad” debt. With “bad” debt pushing up the cost of borrowing combined with increasing interest rates cheap loans may have had their day and is may kill off private equity acquisitions as they will no longer be able to raise the debt that funded their deals. When the bubble finally bursts the losses could be higher because the parcelling out of risk to so many parties across the financial system makes it more difficult to arrange a rescue, such as that done for the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998.
At the beginning of July 2007 Standard & Poor, the credit ratings agency, threatened to downgrade the credit ratings on some $12 billion (£6 billion) of bonds backed by US subprime home loans. This resulted in the dollar tumbling to a record low against the euro, hitting $1.37; it also fell against the yen and sterling after speculation that the continued slump in the housing market would slow the US economy.
To cap the feeling of uncertainty US companies, including DR Horton, the biggest home builder, Home Depot, the home improvement chain, and Sears, the retailer all announced profit warnings. To compound their problems oil prices increased to hit an 11-month high.
In an understatement an analyst from Standard & Poor said: “The level of loss continues to exceed historical precedent and our initial expectations.”

Conclusion

The chaos of capitalist society is there for all to see and its nature hasn’t changed since Engels wrote his analogy about the steeplechase. What has changed is the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands, a process described by Lenin at the beginning of the last century.
Every aspect of capitalist control must be opposed whether it be big or small, whether it appears benign or malignant because if we don’t we will end up in the ditch as well but with the capitalists on top of us.
The signs of the next crisis are appearing and already workers are being exposed to the consequences – falling living standards, pay and pension cuts, job losses and sub-standard housing.
As communists we are able to explain that there can be a new and better world: a society where there are no classes, no exploiters, no bigotry and no war. We are also able to explain that that world can only be attained after a bitter struggle against all elements of the capitalist class.

Appeal by communist and workers' parties of the EU

Let the people decide!
We say NO to the new EU Treaty

The European Union is on the way to become a political, economic and military "Great Power". The leading politicians of the EU, who are not representing the people but rather the interests of the great industry, of the banks and of imperialism, have taken the necessary decisions for this development.
The so called "Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe", that was meant to speed up this strategy, has collapsed due to the vote of the people in France and in the Netherlands as well as due to the broad resistance of the people in the EU countries. The ruling forces are now aiming to adopt a so-called "reform treaty" or "EU Treaty", aimed to implement and to force a policy of social destruction and of militarisation in a more reactionary direction and on conventional basis, against the interests of the people. The military policy of the EU goes in direct concurrency with the aggressive policy of the USA and is at the same time deepening the dependence on the US policy. With the aim of depriving the peoples of their vested right to directly decide, the new text will be called "EU Treaty" instead of "Constitution". This treaty shall be discussed and adopted by an Intergovernmental Conference behind closed doors.
The undersigned communist and workers parties of EU countries say NO to such new Treaty as well as to the method of its adoption behind the people’s back. All people – be they workers, peasants, employees, unemployed, homeless, pupils or students – must have the same right to decide as the politicians, no matter whether in the national legislation of their countries the possibility for a referendum is given or not.
We demand the total disclosure of the entire content of the "EU Treaty" including all supplementary previsions.
We demand to put the "EU Treaty" for decision by the peoples of all EU countries.
We call upon the citizens in all EU countries:
Say NO to the organised social destruction and to the further militarization of the EU!
Say NO to the new "EU Treaty"!

Belgium
Communist Party of Belgium Wallonie Bruxelles
Communist Party of Flanders
Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB)

Britain
Communist Party of Britain
New Communist Party of Britain

Bulgaria
Communist Party of Bulgaria
Party of the Bulgarian Communists (former Bulgarian CP G. Dimitrov)

Cyprus
The Progressive Party of the Working People-AKEL (Cyprus)

Czech Republic
Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia

Denmark
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Denmark

Finland
Communist Party of Finland

Germany
German Communist Party (DKP)

GreeceCommunist Party of Greece (KKE)

Hungary
Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party

Ireland
Communist Party of Ireland
The Workers’ Party of Ireland

Latvia
Socialist Party of Latvia

Lithuania
Socialist Party of Lithuania

Luxembourg
Communist Party of Luxembourg (KPL)

NetherlandsNew Communist Party of the Netherlands

Romania
Socialist Alliance Party Romania

Spain
Communist Party of Peoples of Spain

Sweden
Communist Party of Sweden

30 Fighting Years of the New Communist Party of Britain

30 Fighting Years!

THE NEW Communist Party was founded in July 1977 by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, under the leadership of Sid French. They opposed the revisionist line of the CPGB as expressed in its programme, The British Road to Socialism. They had fought within the party for many years against this departure from Marxist-Leninist ideology through the CPGB’s internal democratic centralist structure.
But that structure was not functioning as it should. Instead of high level debate about the correct ideology and the way forward in Britain, the old CPGB leadership gagged proper debate and engineered congress voting so that it would never be possible to hold it to account to its members through its internal structures. At the same time a lack of Marxist-Leninist education ensured that a large part of the membership did not understand why the revisionist parliamentary road to socialism could never work.
The driving force behind the formation of the New Communist Party in 1977 was Sid French who had been the CPGB’s Surrey District secretary for many years. Sid came from a working class, and class conscious family. He was born in 1920 and joined the Young Communist League when he was 14 in 1934. In 1941, during the Second World War, he was called up and served in the RAF. Promoted to Sergeant in 1942 Sid was posted to Gibraltar and later to North Africa and Italy.
While on active service Sid wrote an article for Labour Monthly about the problems facing the Gibraltarians under war conditions. He also met Henri Alleg in Algiers, the French communist journalist who later joined the Algerian resistance against French colonialism, for which he spent five years in prison.
After demobilisation when the war ended Sid’s commitment to the communist movement led to his appointment as Secretary of the newly formed Surrey District Committee of the CPGB in 1950. He remained in that position until he resigned, together with other supporters to establish the New Communist Party on 15th July 1977.
Sid French was a member of the General and Municipal Workers’ Union (GMWU) and an active co-operator. He was elected to the Political Purposes Committee of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society (RACS) in 1967 and elected to the RACS Members’ Council in 1968.
The CPGB leadership embraced Krushchov’s denunciation of Stalin’s “cult of the personality at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 and further distanced itself from Marxism-Leninism.
The dangerous levels of ignorance of basic Marxism-Leninism and revisionism that gripped the CPGB became dramatically manifest in 1968 when the Young Communist League magazine, Challenge, published a strong attack on the Warsaw Pact intervention against counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia.
The CPGB was becoming more and more a social democratic party in its ideology and structure but since there was already a mass social democratic party – the Labour Party – the reason for the CPGB’s existence was diminishing. The party’s declining membership and influence were inevitable.
The growing crisis in the party also affected the credibility of its leadership, as formerly senior and influential members left its ranks. In 1976, four of the party’s top engineering cadres resigned. Bernard Panter, Cyril Morton, Jimmy Reid and John Tocher, who had all been members of the Political Committee, jumped a sinking ship. At the base of the party the crisis in organisation was even clearer.
Thousands of members were no longer organised and many did not even pay their nominal 25p monthly dues. Warring camps emerged within the party. The Gollan leadership sought to prop itself up by aligning itself with the “Eurocommunist” forces further to their right.
But the crisis came to a head the following year in the run-up to the Congress in November. The leadership of the CPGB had redrawn the British Road to Socialism aimed at adopting a left social democratic platform that sought the respectability and acceptance of academic and intellectual circles. It was the party’s entrance fee into the reformist and social democratic traditions of the official labour movement. The publication of the draft and the beginning of the pre-Congress discussion period led to furious arguments within the party.
Sid French was an outspoken critic of the British Road and the new draft. And it became clear that the party leadership intended to expel Sid French and a number of others in the Surrey district before the Congress met. The formation of a new party became inevitable.
On the 15th July 1977 the New Communist Party was established at a meeting in London called by French and other members of the Surrey district committee.
Sid French became the first General Secretary of the NCP and Surrey became its strongest area. The first national chairman was Joe Parker, a full-time official in the National Union of Sheet Metal Workers and Coppersmiths (NUSMWC) until he retired in 1982. Joe Parker stepped down as Party chair soon after but remained an active NCP member until his death in 2004. Sid French died in 1979 and was succeeded by Eric Trevett, a close comrade who had worked as a CPGB full-timer with Sid for many years.
Within weeks the NCP’s weekly paper, the New Worker, was up and running, and the first pamphlets printed.
Initially the NCP operated from the old Surrey District office but the Party soon moved to a small office in south London. In 1979 much bigger premises were purchased near Clapham Junction station, together with a press which has continued to print the New Worker to this day.
The Party’s line developed rapidly by the Second Congress in 1979. The Party called for the end to partition in Ireland and full support was given to the Irish national liberation movement while the NCP’s electoral strategy of not standing in elections but supporting Labour based on working class unity was clarified.
The election of a Tory Government in 1979 brought Margaret Thatcher to power at the vanguard of a global shift in capitalist policies – away from Keynesian solutions to economic problems and a return to the liberal, free market policies of the late Victorian era. This involved a direct assault on trade unions – the organised working class – followed by drastic cuts in the social wage, denationalisation of the public sector and the privatisation of state-owned assets.
The NCP and its paper, the New Worker, were in the forefront of the resistance against this attack on the working class. The 1984-85 miners’ strike was perhaps the most important element of this struggle and the NCP gave full support to the miners from the very beginning.
Our members played a full and active role in collecting money and goods to support the miners’ struggle in their local communities, through the miners’ support groups that grew up in every locality in the country.
This set the tone for the NCP’s approach to broad movement work throughout our history. We support existing trade union and broad working class community campaigns and oppose divisive ultra-left efforts to set up separate organisations. We play an honest and hard-working role in building such campaigns without trying to take them over or dominate them. At the same time, in discussion with other members of these campaigns, we try to inject class-consciousness and a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the struggle, using the New Worker along with party leaflets and pamphlets. We seek to win respect for communism within the broad movement for our honesty, hard work and political analysis.
Throughout the miners’ strike we organised support meetings and for over a year every issue of the New Worker carried a banner headline and front-page lead story supporting the strike.
The miners came very close but did not win and that was a major set back for the whole labour movement in Britain. But many working people throughout Britain had a shocking lesson in the ruthlessness and brutality of the state machine, especially the police, in suppressing working class militancy.
It was followed in 1986 by the Wapping dispute where printers and journalists went on strike in protest at Rupert Murdoch’s removal of the production of his newspapers – The Sun, The Times – from Fleet Street to “Fortress Wapping” in London’s East End. In the process Murdoch made hundreds redundant and derecognised the unions. Once again the NCP and the New Worker gave full support to the workers in struggle.
Throughout the NCP’s existence we have given full support to and our members have played an active role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, when it existed, the British Peace Council. The party has always recognised that peace and socialism come together as a package and that modern war is a product of capitalist and imperialist rivalries, in which the great powers use the working class as canon fodder to increase their wealth and power.
But we are not pacifists; we recognise the right of workers in struggle against oppression or in defence of working class gains to take to arms if necessary. We give support and solidarity to workers fighting for national liberation and against imperialist occupation – deeming that those on the front line of such struggles are the best judges of what combination of political and/or armed struggle is necessary.
We have always supported the peoples of Palestine and Ireland against illegal imperialist occupation and forged friendship with their fighting organisations. The Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was, in fact, the first movement to establish relations with the NCP, six weeks after our foundation. And we have also forged close ties with the peoples of Korea, Cuba and other places fighting to defend their socialist revolutions.
The NCP gave full support to the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa and to the ANC. When the South African secret police bombed the ANC’s London printing press we allowed them to use our printing facilities.
In the 1980s the NCP established fraternal relations with the ruling communist and workers parties in Afghanistan, Cuba, Ethiopia, Vietnam and south Yemen and a number of anti-revisionist parties in western Europe and the Middle East.
At home the NCP has always played a full and active role in combating fascism and racism. We have always encouraged our members and supporters to become active in whatever anti-fascist or anti-racist broad movement group is active in their locality and to support broad unity on this issue. And we have forged a lasting friendship with the Searchlight organisation and have shared photographers with Searchlight.
Margaret Thatcher’s proposals in 1987 for a universal poll tax to replace the rates system hit the working class like a bombshell, when they realised what the costs would be. The change in local government taxation systems covered up a huge cut in central government funding to local authorities and put the burden of making up the difference on the shoulders of all local residents, regardless of their ability to pay. The tax was set to be imposed even on people who had absolutely no income of their own, like housewives and members of religious orders. The Tory government later backtracked a little and dropped the imposition of the tax on people in religious orders – which led to a sudden growth in new religious orders.
NCP members threw themselves into the fight on this issue, often taking a leading role in setting up local anti-poll tax groups. We recognised that this tax would provoke a great deal of working class anger and that it depended on mass compliance to work.
The tax required first of all for everyone in the country to fill in a registration form. And the broad anti-poll tax movement that grew up rapidly recognised that if thousands or even millions of people dragged their heels or made difficulties over this, it would be impossible to administer. Newsletters, some produced with New Worker expertise, were sent around the country, swapping tactics from one locality to another.
When it came to paying the tax we recognised that masses of people delaying or being awkward a bit would have more impact than just one or two martyrs going to prison for refusing – but that all forms and degrees of opposition were needed and valid. The point of the campaign was to give the masses confidence to disrupt the administration of the tax.
Campaigners produced pamphlets giving legal advice about what would happen at various stages as people held out refusing to pay, so they would know exactly what they were letting themselves in for. At the same time mass anti-poll tax protests were erupting on the streets of London and the other major cities.
The mass actions and protests succeeded. The poll tax was defeated and not long after her own Cabinet members forced Thatcher from office. This was the first major victory for the working class in Britain for many years.
Around the same time on the world stage the working class was suffering a huge setback as the treacherous policies of Gorbachov led to the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of eastern Europe. It was a fall that shook communist parties around the world; many communists had at first welcomed Gorbachov’s policies of “glasnost” and “perestroika”. It was a testing time and communist parties survived or went under according to how badly they were infected with revisionism. Those whose communism was based mainly on support and sympathy for the Soviet Union were vulnerable but those who had a firm basis in Marxist-Leninist ideology and an understanding of dialectics and the class struggle survived and became stronger.
The rot stopped when the Workers’ Party of Korea, led by Comrade Kim Il Sung, took the initiative and organised an international conference of communist and workers’ parties in Pyongyang. NCP delegates attended that conference and our Party was one of the first signatories of the Pyongyang Declaration that came from that conference.
In 1990 the genuine communist forces began to rally throughout the world. The NCP sent delegations led by Eric Trevett and International Secretary Andy Brooks to Cuba, south Yemen and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Fraternal relations were established with virtually every genuine communist and workers party in the world.
In the early 1990s fraternal relations were established with the Communist Party of China and the New Worker established a close relationship with the Xinhua news agency.
Major delegations have frequently gone to Democratic Korea, People’s China and Cuba and the Party plays a full part in the world communist and workers parties conferences organised by the Communist Party of Greece.
We can now say that the process that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union cleared away a lot of parties that had been masquerading as communist but had long since ceased to be communist.
The NCP survived and was ideologically strengthened, though there were calculated attempts to sabotage us at a time when the confidence of our membership could have been undermined if had we not been so strong ideologically. Many predicted we would not last longer than a year or two after the fall of the Soviet Union – one pessimist said we were “merely rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”. But we have not only survived but we are now thriving.
The NCP began internally to criticise the Soviet Gorbachov leadership in 1988 and following the collapse of the Soviet Union the party established relations with communist and workers’ parties throughout the world.
In the 1990s party congresses adopted resolutions repudiating and denouncing Krushchov’s anti-Stalin 20th Congress speech. The NCP defined its ideology around the “great revolutionary teachers of humanity, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin” and the “great revolutionary leaders of the struggling masses, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh”.
The year 1991 also saw the first Gulf War, when the imperialist powers led by the United States and Britain attacked Iraq when it refused to evacuate oil-rich Kuwait, an imperialist puppet feudal Arab state that had been annexed by Iraq in 1990. The Baathist government in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein had previously been a compliant tool of imperialist America when it launched attack on Iran in the 1980s. It had a poor human rights record and many groups on the left were confused and ended up supporting the imperialist war – just as in 1914.
But the NCP, following an analysis of the situation by our international secretary Andy Brooks – now our general secretary – took a correct position of opposition to the war. Subsequent events have borne out the correctness of our line.
Throughout the 1990s the NCP opposed the imperialist interventions that dismembered and destroyed Yugoslavia, opening up the region to the full blast of capitalist exploitation.
At home we continued to fight the policy of privatisation and the introduction of market forces within the National Health Service. Comrades have taken an active part in local broad movement groups to defend the NHS and fought hospital cuts and closures.
And in 1995 we supported the Liverpool dock strike and noted that it led to the first ever global solidarity action, as the new internet technology allowed dock workers around the world to coordinate solidarity strikes and the boycotting of ships loaded by scab labour.
Also in 1995 Eric Trevett retired from full-time Pary work and resigned as general secretary and was elected honorary president of the party. Andy Brooks, a founder member of the Party, was elected to the general secretaryship.
In 1997 we saw the election of the first Labour government for 18 years. The NCP had taken a correct stance of supporting Labour in the election – not under any illusion that Blair was a socialist or would make any dramatic change in ruling class attacks on the working class. We supported Labour because its victory raised the expectations and the morale of the working class and because the organisational link between the trade unions and the Labour government can be an instrument of working class pressure exerted directly on the Government. It all depends on the strength of the trade union leaderships – who are elected and accountable to the workers.
But supporting the Labour Party in elections is not the same thing as giving the Labour leadership carte blanche when it carries on with the same old ruling class policies.
Like the rest of the British communist movement the NCP from the beginning had to deal with ultra-leftist and right-wing deviation. All were defeated at Congresses over the years and many were expelled for factionalism. In 1977 a right-wing social-democratic tendency was expelled. An extreme pro-Soviet revisionist faction went the same way in the early 1980s. In the early 1990s another small revisionist group was expelled. All were guilty of factionalism.
The NCP has never stood candidates in general or local elections and calls for support for Labour candidates. This policy was amended in 2000 to permit support for independent Labour candidates with mass support and the NCP backed Ken Livingstone’s successful bid for the London Mayorship.
The NCP soon found itself with a right-wing faction active inside the Party opposed to the Livingstone candidature, with supporters on the Central Committee that refused to accept democratic centralist decisions and campaigned against them through anonymous circulars and other factional material.
They too were defeated and expelled at Congress but in the process we took a long, hard look at our rule book. In 1977 it had been based very much on the rule book of the old party and contained many flaws. We also looked at the rule book first adopted by the old party when it was formed in 1921 – as a Leninist party of a new type. The early rules were much more stringent and demanded that members should be active within a party organisation.
The central committee undertook the arduous task of drafting us a new rule book much more in line with the original Bolshevik principles, and based on the guidelines of the Communist International.
The proposed rule changes were thoroughly debated at every level in the party and some amendments made before they were presented to the NCP’s 13th congress in 2003 and adopted.
The changes now apply Bolshevik democratic centralism throughout the NCP with the aim of building a monolith Party of the working class. The new rules allow us three years between congresses instead of the previous two. We have found this has allowed us much more time for debate and the serious examination in depth of all our policies on a wide spectrum of issues. We had anyway long since stopped taking for granted what is deemed the broad consensus view of the left on various issues.
When the NCP takes a political position on any issue, comrades want to know why and what are the full implications at all levels.
We have also set up New Worker Supporters’ Groups that allow an informal but structured involvement for readers and friends who are in other progressive parties or no party at all and for a variety of reasons, do not want to commit themselves to applying for full party membership These groups are working well and have allowed up to expand the paper’s influence in many places where we have few members.
Now, in the “post 9/11” world we are exposing the “war on terror” as an attack on civil rights and a licence the imperialist powers have granted themselves to maraud around the globe attacking less powerful nations at will.
At home we are fighting advancing fascism in the form of draconian new laws, including the right to detention without charge or trial for long periods and the attempted imposition of expensive biometric identity cards backed by a database containing detailed information on every person in the country.
But abroad the heroic resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought the imperialist war machine to a halt; the courageous peoples of the north of Korea, of Cuba and of Iran defy the imperialist powers with impunity and many of the nations of South America are making a strong stand against imperialism. In Africa China is offering trade and economic support that provides a real alternative to the one-sided “partnerships” and exploitative trade with strings that the imperialists try to impose.
The Soviet Union may have gone but Russia is now no longer a milch cow for US imperialism. The country has taken back control of its own oilfields and is once again offering trade deals that will allow potential targets of imperialism to defend themselves.
We live in a rapidly changing world, where the power of the working class is rising while the power of imperialism is waning. The future is unlikely to be smooth and simple, especially in the imperialist home countries like Britain.
But so far adversity and challenge have done nothing but strengthen the New Communist Party of Britain.

Labour and Plaid strike deal in Wales

by Lorraine Barrett

Labour Welsh Assembly Member for Cardiff South & Penarth

ON 3RD MAY this year, we had elections to the National Assembly for Wales. I was re-elected for the third time as Labour & Co-operative Assembly Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, which is also represented by Alun Michael who became our MP in 1987 after Jim Callaghan stood down.
Unfortunately Labour failed to get a majority, winning 26 out of the 60 seats. In Wales we have 40 First-Past-the-Post constituency members, and 20 regional list members, which means that, depending on how many votes individual parties get, and how many constituency seats they have in a region, they can pick up on the regional seats. Unfortunately,with the Proportional Representation system we have, the BNP only needed another 2,000 votes in the North Wales region and they would have had a seat in the Assembly.
Our Labour Leader in Wales is Rhodri Morgan and after the election he started negotiations with the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru to see if a deal could be struck to ensure a stable Government with Labour in control.
Talks took place around the idea of stability pacts rather than coalition, but in the background was the spectre of a so-called "Rainbow Alliance" made up of Plaid (15 seats), Lib Dems (six) and the Tories (12) – there is one Independent member.
Rhodri Morgan had always made it clear that we would never work with the Tories. At one point it looked as though we could come to an arrangement with the Lib Dems which was our preferred option as there are so few of them and we had worked with them in the previous Assembly, but in true Lib Dem style, they couldn’t make up their minds, so Labour put down a motion to elect Rhodri Morgan as First Minister and it went through.
Rhodri appointed his Cabinet and prepared to run a Minority Government, but knew it would only be a matter of time before the three opposition parties would put down a vote of no confidence and set up their "Triple Alliance" (Rainbow is too nice a word to describe a group which has Tories in it). Rhodri then opened talks with the leader of Plaid with a view to setting up a formal coalition and those talks have been developing in earnest for some weeks. There have been voices of dissent in both parties where feelings run deep on historic grounds.
Some in the Labour Party feel that Plaid will try and "force" nationalism on us whilst there are those in Plaid who believe the Labour party will just try to dominate and use them.
I have been an active member of the Labour Party for over 30 years but this has been the most difficult issue we have had to deal with. The problem is that, whilst we have this form of PR in the Assembly, it will be very hard for Labour to get a majority, so we will have to accept that some form of coalition or co-operative way of working, will become the norm.
Running a minority government would mean putting forward only those policies that were guaranteed to get through and the opposition parties, as a group, could just keep voting everything down, which would not be in the interests of the people of Wales.
Whilst there will be huge challenges facing us in the Welsh Assembly, having to work with another party, particularly one that has been our sworn enemy for decades, we will now have stable Government and can get on with the job – something we’ve been waiting to do since 3rd May!

JUSTICE CANNOT WAIT

By Len Aldis

On 18th June in the Court of Appeals in New York, lawyers for the Victims of Agent Orange made their arguments against the ruling of Judge Jack Weinstein and sought to overturn that ruling thereby bringing the manufactures of the chemicals used in the US War on Vietnam to trial before a jury.

Lawyers for the 36 chemical companies, headed by Monsanto and Dow Chemicals, argued as part of their defence that they were carrying out the instructions of the US Government. Readers will no doubt recall the pleas by the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg “we were only obeying orders”.

The ruling by the three judges: Judge Robert Sack, Roger J. Miner and Peter Hall, is now awaited. When this will be announced is unknown but it is expected to be some months. Meanwhile the suffering will continue for the victims – over three million in Vietnam – their families, other relatives and their communities.

During the ten-year period of the spraying of the chemicals - in the main Agent Orange that contained Dioxin – from 1961 till 1971 the horrors of abnormal births began and has continued to this day thirty-six years after the spraying stopped. Near to 5 million Vietnamese were sprayed and over 3 million have been seriously affected with illnesses and disabilities all of which are painful to witness.

Photographs and films have shown the many victims and their tragic circumstances, but neither a photograph nor a film can show you the pain felt by the victims, their parents, brothers and sisters. You have to see for yourself to begin to understand how the crime of using chemicals as a weapon of war has affected so many people.

On South Vietnam 82 million litres of chemicals were sprayed, destroying the forests, crops, and vegetation. The chemicals also contaminated the lakes, rivers and most tragic of all poisoned the people.

Thanks must go to the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA) for beginning the lawsuit against the thirty-six chemical companies headed by Monsanto and Dow Chemicals, who manufactured the chemicals. Our thanks must also go to the lawyers Vietnamese and American who have given so much of their time and support in preparing the case against the companies.

In March 2005 Judge Jack Weinstein ruled against the Vietnamese thus leading to the Appeal that was heard on 18th June 2007 before three Judges: Robert Sack, Roger J. Miner and Peter Hall. On their ruling, whenever it is made, will depend if justice has been won for the victims of this war crime.

If their ruling goes in favour of the Vietnamese and US Veterans who are also suing the companies, this will mean that the case will go to trial before a jury. This was the essence of the first lawsuit.

However, we know from previous court cases that whenever the verdict goes against Monsanto, Dow Chemicals etc they appeal, as they did when the South Koran High Court ordered Monsanto and Dow Chemical to pay compensation to the Korean Veterans affected by Agent Orange.

It therefore has to be accepted that justice for the victims will take a long time. Meanwhile the suffering for the millions of victims will continue.
Further, and sad to state, before justice is finally won, thousands of present day victims will die from their illnesses and disabilities, and many thousands of new victims will be born.

The legacy of Agent Orange has already gone into the third generation. In my recent visit to Hanoi at the VAVA press conference I was pleased to meet with the four victims who were due to go to the US for public meetings and to attend the Court of Appeals hearing. One, young Nguyen Muoi is a second-generation victim; his father served in the A Luoi Valley and was sprayed by Agent Orange.

Muoi suffers from the painful Spina Bifida an illness that the former President Clinton in his statement in the White House on May 28th 1996, said was due to the use by US forces of Agent Orange. For the sons and daughters of the US Veterans who come down with Spinal Bifida they will be compensated. For young Muoi, he must wait for the ruling of the Appeal Court. His struggle is the struggle of millions of Vietnamese Victims.

Such is the extent of the crime carried out by the chemical companies who manufactured Agent Orange and the US Government for allowing its use on Vietnam.

I appeal to all readers and friends of the Victims of Agent Orange, we cannot allow justice for the victims to be delayed too long; they have waited for thirty-six years. Each of us must continue the struggle and increase our work in the campaign for justice. Millions around the world have pledged their support by signing petitions in many countries. We cannot, and must not, fail the victims.

You can help them by signing the petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/AOVN/

Len Aldis honoured by Vietnamese Association

THE VIETNAM Association of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA) held a ceremony on 12th June to admit Len Aldis, secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society as an honorary member.
Len Aldis expressed his pleasure to join the association. He stressed that the active efforts of VAVA helped to attract increasing concern from people at home and around the world about the consequences of Agent Orange and its serious effects on the environment and people in Vietnam.
“Supporters of Agent Orange victims find VAVA a good way of expressing their concerns and raise aid to help them,” he said.
Len Aldis, 76, first came to Vietnam in 1989. Since then he has carried out many activities, even “more active than many Vietnamese people” as noted by VAVA Vice President Nguyen Trong Nhan, to help Agent Orange victims in their daily lives and in the struggle for justice.
He is the author of a website petition, which is designed to collect signatures of those who want to support Vietnamese Agent Orange victims.
Nguyen Trong Nhan said that it would take a long time to list the initiatives worked out by Len to support the victims.
Len has visited colleges in Britain, giving speeches and showing films about Agent Orange victims in Vietnam. He has also mobilised British MPs for support towards the victims.
His website petition http://www.petitiononline.com/AOVN/ has been signed by over 700,000 people around the world, much more than expected. This shows that his patience has helped many people to gain an understanding of Agent Orange and its serious consequences.

Len is the founder of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society which since its foundation in 1992 has, and will continue with its work and projects in raising awareness and funds for the Vietnamese people, especially those suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. BVFS campaigns seeking justice for the victims of Agent Orange has led to Len Aldis being invited to speak at a number of universities in Britain and in Vietnam. He has also spoken on the issue at public meetings in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France and Vietnam.In addition, the Society has shown international award winning documentary films on Agent Orange such as Battle’s Poison Cloud and Path to Justice in which Len appeared. Another film Agent Orange, a personal requiem” by Masako Sakata, has recently been released as has The Last Ghost of War by an American company, Janet Gardner Group.

Perspectives for Scotland

Review

by London Scot

Communist Party of Scotland: Perspectives for Scottish Independence, Glasgow: CPS, April 2007 pp.31. £1.50 plus 50p P&P. Available from the Communist Party of Scotland 4th Floor, Room 3A, 52 St Enoch Square, Glasgow or from Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX.


THE COVER of this pamphlet states that it "reflects the views of some comrades in the Communist Party of Scotland. We do not offer this pamphlet as anything more than a modest contribution to the debate". However this does not discuss the pros and cons of independence for Scotland, but instead forcefully argues the case for Scotland’s independence. It was written before the recent elections to the Scottish Parliament saw Labour lose control to a minority Scottish National Party administration and it is already showing its age.
For those not familiar with the ins and outs of Scottish politics it is worth noting that the CPS was founded in 1992 by a number of veteran members of the old Communist Party of Great Britain who remained within the party until the CPGB dissolved itself the previous year.
There are three main sections to the pamphlet. In the first CPS general secretary, retired architect Eric Canning denounces the present "neo-imperialist" state British state and the "fractured British left" who seek to capture it rather than break it. One wonders why a body which calls itself a Communist Party refrains from making even the mildest criticism of the economic policies of the main pro-independence party the Scottish National Party. The SNP has been has been promising lower corporation tax to benefit big business. The same party has been bank-rolled by several leading businessmen including Brian Soutar, the notoriously homophobic owner of the ruthless bus company Stagecoach. It is reasonable to conclude that many promoters of independence see it has heralding in a future Scotland very different from that promised here. While the pamphlet makes repeated and justified attacks on Labour Party policies it might be worth remembering that it was the same Labour Party which brought the Scottish Parliament into being.
It is worth noting that some sections of the Scottish trade union movement have toyed with left-wing Scottish nationalism as recommended here. Some branches of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union did indeed affiliate to the Scottish Socialist Party. It is not clear what the RMT gained as a result of this dalliance. As a result they were automatically disaffiliated from the Labour Party, thus losing any formal influence. In the event the SSP split as a result of a colourful court case involving their former leader and were wiped out in last month’s elections.
Secondly Maggie Chetty offers "Reflections on an Independent Scotland" in which she finds space to applaud the absurd "Tartan Day" initiative aimed at persuading rich Americans with Scottish sounding surnames to take their holidays in Scotland. The great Scottish communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid rightly poured scorn on that sort of nonsense. Modern Scottish communists should follow suit instead of welcoming it.
The final major article by Rhona Fleming takes an unbelievably rosy view of the Scottish economy, present and in an imaginary future. The author starts by welcoming the fact that Glasgow is a "Fair trade city". This means little more than ensuring that only fair trade tea and coffee is served in the City Chambers. Charity mongering does next to nothing for the tea-pickers of the Kenya and India. The main beneficiaries of such policies are the latte drinking classes who invariably gain a warm feeling of self righteousness. Claims that Glasgow is a presently a "lively vibrant city which has reinvented its image" merely regurgitate the purple prose of glossy tourist brochures. While there are now plenty of trendy wine bars in central
Glasgow, they invariably have homeless Big Issue sellers outside them.
There can be no doubt that Scotland could, if it were carried in a referendum, hold its own as an independent state.
Support for independence can be found among sections of the ultra left and those on the free market. But the CPS assumes far too easily that such a rearrangement of the constitutional furniture will inevitably have progressive consequences.

Stop the deployment of new US bases in Poland and the Czech Republic

Joint statement of European communist and workers' parties

Stop the deployment of new US bases in Poland and the Czech Republic,
Romania and Bulgaria

We, the undersigned European communist and workers parties, express our strong protest on the deployment of the US " antimissile " bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as so called ”ordinary military bases” in Romania and Bulgaria.

These plans, emphatically rejected by the peoples of these countries but also by a growing movement in all European countries are in break with the international agreements on troupes and nuclear arms reduction and with the broad demand for disarmament, collective security and peace.

We reject the official reasons given for this "National missile defense system" as pretexts and its projection as a "defensive" one, as pure propaganda.

The real goal of the NMD project is to further strengthen the military position and supremacy of USA by creating new facilities for attack on other countries without treat of retaliation.

Already the USA is the biggest world producer and owner of weapons of mass destruction. Its aggressive policy, with the support of NATO, causes wars, imperialist interventions and instability. With the doctrine of the "preventive wars" and labeling nations opposing its policy as "rogue states" and "axis of evil" the American war machine is the biggest threat to world peace.

The eventual realization of the "anti-missile shield" will lead to new efforts of the US Administration to strengthen the position of the "sole global superpower" implementing the imperialist ambitions as persecutor, judge and executor in the international relations.

Some initiatives by other European governments, by Nato and the EU in support of these plans are relevant for the dangers in face of all the European peoples, resulting from the same aggressive policy, no matter if it's rooted in the US or EU global ambitions.

From now it's more than obvious that the new US bases will accelerate arms race and militarization, foster the antagonism between the imperialist powers and lead to more massive attacks on democratic and social rights.

This is the reason for the legitimated broad opposition to this policy.

We salute and express our solidarity with the large and effective actions developed by the communists, progressive forces, organizations and anti-war movements in Poland, in the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and other countries against the deployment of the US missiles and imperialism.

This courageous protest is an important contribution to the growing resistance in Europe and in the world against war, foreign military bases and Nato.

Expressing our strong determination to enhance our struggle, cooperation and solidarity we demand:

Immediate stop of the plans regarding the deployment of the new US missile and radar bases in Poland and Czech Republic, as well as the military bases in Romania and Bulgaria.

Immediate stop of any move by national governments, European Union and NATO facilitating the implementation of the US plans.

Ratification of the treaty on troops reduction in Europe and the total ban of all nuclear weapons.

Broad support to all actions against the legitimization and the deployment of the US missiles and bases.


The parties:

1. Communist Initiative of Austria
2. Communist Party of Belarus
3. Workers Party of Belgium
4. Workers' Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina
5. Communist Party of Britain
6. New Communist Party of Britain
7. Party of Bulgarian Communists
8. AKEL, Cyprus
9. Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia
10. Communist Party of Denmark
11. Communist Party in Denmark
12. Danish Communist Party
13. Communist Party of Finland
14. Unified Communist Party of Georgia
15. German Communist Party
16. Communist Party of Greece
17. Hungarian Communist Workers Party
18. Communist Party of Ireland
19. Party of the Italian Communists
20. Socialist Party of Latvia
21. Socialist Party of Lithuania
22. Communist Party of Luxembourg
23. Communist Party of Macedonia
24. New Communist Party of the Netherlands
25. Communist Party of Norway
26. Communist Party of Poland
27. Portuguese Communist Party
28. Socialist Alliance Party (Romania)
29. Communist Party of the Russian Federation
30. Communist Workers¹ Party of Russia
31. Communist Party of Slovakia
32. Communist Party of Peoples of Spain
33. Communist Party of Sweden
34. Swiss Communist Party ­ les communistes
35. Communist Party of Turkey
36. Labour Party of Turkey
37. Communist Party of Ukraine
38. Union of Communists of Ukraine
39. New Communist Party of Yugoslavia