Free the Unions! Workers unity still the key

by Alex Kempshall

EVER SINCE society divided into classes the all-important question of remuneration for work done has loomed larger than any other in the political economy of human society. When capitalism became the prevailing mode of production its integral component, wage labour, made this aspect an even greater issue in the arena of inherent conflict between labour and capital.
The ruling class and all those who serve it have evolved more sophisticated methods to contain and reduce wages as a share of the proceeds ofproduction. In 1949 workers got 57 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).By 1975, through the strength of the trade unions, this had increased to 65 per cent of GDP dropping back to 52 per cent by the end of the Tory government in 1997. By 2006 the gross operating surpluses of corporations(profit) totalled £301 billion and compensation of employees was some £721billion or 55 per cent of GDP; so some of the profit has been clawed back from the ruling class but there is still a long way to go to reach the 65 per cent of GDP that was achieved in 1975.
The British labour movement, during the 30 years from 1945, succeeded in building a fairly comprehensive system of social services and monetary benefits. This represented a social wage and was a means of recovering for the working class part of the profits that employers of labour had extracted from workers at the point of production.
This only came about because of the collective strength of the working class, organised through the trade unions pushing successive Labour Governments to legislate is favour of the working class, by establishing a comprehensive tax systems to pay for the social wage. In this way part of profits made from exploiting workers was recovered from the ruling class. Even so it should be remembered that the substantial proportion of the social wage was funded by taxing the working class. The social wage, as with wages, is an ongoing bone of contention between the classes.
The capitalist class seeks to ensure that more and more of these profits are retained after taxation, either by Government strategy to pass the burden of taxation increasingly onto the working class, or simply by tax avoidance.
According to the Government’s National Audit Office analysis of tax raised it was found that almost a third of the Britain’s 700 biggest businesses paid no corporation tax at all in the 2005-06 financial year. Some even received tax credits – J Sainsbury, the supermarket group, instead of paying corporation tax received a credit of £3 million in 2005-06 and in the following year it received another £9 million tax credit. For those financial years it made profits of £352 million and £429 million and distributed to shareholders dividends of £136 million and £165 million.
When the Government takes steps to increase the taxation of private equity firms from its current 10 per cent, the ruling class complain bitterly about the abolishment of taper relief on capital gains tax (CGT) in favour of a single 18 per cent rate. When Labour came to power in 1997 this tax was a single 40 per cent rate; the following year Gordon Brown reduced it to an effective rate of 10 per cent. Only £2 billion is paid in CGT, so even after doubling it the amount of tax paid will still be less than half of the bonuses paid to city bankers in any one year. The Government should revert to the 1997 position of treating CGT as income tax at the present higher rate of 40 per cent.
Corporate profits and capital gains are not the only form of income that accrues to the ruling class and their side-kicks. An examination of the division of wealth and incomes shows that the top fifth of the populationowns by far the biggest ratio of wealth in Britain. Historically income has always been grossly unequally divided, now it is even more so.
Income Data Services, a research organisation, recently revealed that chief executives of FTSE 100 companies saw their average total remuneration (pay,bonus and long term incentives) increase to the end of June 2007 by 16 percent to £3.17 million, doubling over the last five years. Meanwhile those in the FTSE 350 rose by 20 per cent during the same 12 months. Also in a poll of pay experts “drawn from human resources managers and compensation and benefits specialists conducted in September 2007, Income data Services found that more than half thought that executive directors of listed companies were “overpaid”.
Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary, commenting on this report said:“Britain’s top directors clearly have no shame. Year in, year out they have been paying themselves far bigger rises than they are prepared to pay their staff, while lecturing the rest of us on the need for low taxes. It beggars belief that they are somehow working twice as hard as five years ago. Confirming the unpopularity of fat cat salaries an opinion poll conducted during the summer of 2007 for the Financial Times found that almost 60 per cent of British citizens thought that the Government should cap the earnings of senior executives.The description “fat cats” also extends to bankers and traders in the City who took home £8.8 billion in bonuses in 2006 and a further £7.4 billion in 2007. This is anticipated to drop, on the basis of the current monetary crisis, to a paltry £6.2 billion in 2008. These bonuses pushed up the average earning index from 3.3 per cent to 5.4 per cent during the month of February 2007.So there’s plenty of money for those with their noses in the trough!

What about the workers?

A report published in October 2007, by uSwitch – the online gas and electricity price comparison organisation, based on figures produced by the Office for National Statistics figures, showed that disposable income in Britain is at its lowest level for a decade with net household income as a proportion of gross household income down five per cent compared with 1997,mainly due to utility bill and tax increases.
Despite this, consumer spending rose 3.0 per cent in the first three monthsof 2007 compared with the same quarter the previous year. It is therefore not surprising that consumer debt has reached a record level of £1,345 billion, almost double the gross annual wage of all employees in Britain.
In April 2007 median gross weekly earnings for full-time employee jobs on adult rates was £457, an increase of 2.9 per cent on the previous year, with25 per cent earning less than £326. In the private sector the median was £439, in the public sector the comparable figure was £498.
The median gross weekly earnings rate for all employee jobs was £362 per week.
However, if we look at average earnings, as the Labour Research Department(LRD) does, average earnings in April 2007 were £554, up about 3.5 per cent on the previous year. This disparity illustrates the difficulty in assessing what wage rates are and demonstrates the old adage that there are lies, damn lies and statistics. Average wages can easily be distorted by high paid workers. Incidentally the Government is introducing a new “experimental”method of calculating average wages that attempts to show that wages are actually rising at 4.5 per cent, which the Financial Times claims is “closer to the levels likely to trigger inflationary concerns”.
So according to National Statistics Online, wages are rising at either 2.9 per cent, 3.5 per cent or 4.5 per cent, which just goes to prove that an across the board flat-rate monetary increase of substance is the only way forward to unite the class in fighting for higher wages at the expense of the ruling class.
The following example illustrates the difference between the mean and median when analysing statistical information. Most people use mean and average interchangeably.
Suppose in a factory eight workers get paid £1 per week, one gets paid £2 and a further eight get paid £5. The total wage bill for the 17 workers in the factory is £50. If the total wage bill was divided equally among the workers the average wage would be £2.94. The median of the wages paid can be found by arranging all the wages paid from the lowest wage to highest and picking the middle one. In this factory it is the worker with the eighth highest wage which is £2 because, of the 17 workers, there are eight workers paid less than £2 and eight paid more than £2. By contrast, the average wageof £2.94 is not at all typical, since nobody in the factory is paid a wage approximating £2.94.
Looking at real wages the LRD, in its survey of wage agreements, reported that a worker on the Nissan assembly line could earn a maximum weekly wageof £489. At Airbus UK a skilled worker earns £400 per week. At ArrivaNorthWest an experienced bus driver earns £307 per week and at BAe SystemsSurface Fleet Solutions a skilled worker could earn £350 per week. To earn more than the average wage at Nissan a worker would have to be in a supervisory engineer role, in the other agreements none of the workers earn a wage approaching the average.
In a survey produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, reported bythe Financial Times on 5th November 2007, showed that more than one in five male and more than a quarter of female graduates in full-time work are still on less than £336 a week 3½ years after graduating – well below the full-time National Statistics Online average wage of £554. Interestingly this Financial Times article reported that the average wage was £423!
So whether it’s the Financial Times’ average wage of £423, ASHE’s median wage £447 or the £537 average wage publicised by the Government some, trade unions have negotiated seemingly significant percentage wage increases that have included a 7.9 per cent rise for 600 workers at Drax power station inYorkshire, a 5.35 per cent pay rise for 10,000 Network Rail workers, a 4.7 per cent increase for 60,000 BT staff, and a 4.5 per cent rise from April at BAE Systems Submarines – proving that the higher pay rises go to the best organised. But the 7.9 per cent awarded to workers at Drax power station based on the Financial Times’ average wage would still leave workers £80 per week short of the average wage, as publicised by the Government.
For wage settlements negotiated in July 2007, as reported by LRD, 25 per cent secured a wage increase of 4.58 per cent or more, 25 per cent secured awage increase of three per cent or less with a median of four per cent.
It should be emphasised that these figures are for organised workers. Those workers in areas where there is no strong union would expect pay rises substantially less than these negotiated rates. Even so the median of four per cent is barely above the increase in the cost of living and 25 per cent have suffered what is effectively a pay cut. Overall average earnings roseby 3.7 per cent driven mainly by bonuses in financial services, namely bankers.
Postal workers will have decided, by 27th November 2007, whether to accept a headline pay increase of 6.9 per cent over the next two years. Effectively what is actually on offer is a 3.8 per cent offer for the year ending March 2008. A further 1.5 per cent increase plus £400 for 2008/09 is on the table,to be made locally, when new flexibility arrangements have been implemented.
The agreement between the CWU and the Post Office states the flexibility arrangements as: “To cover for one another and develop sensible options toabsorb absences and increased workload, where time exists within normalhours”. The reward for this is to be implemented on a local level; again quoting from the document: “Local offices will be entitled to the 1.5 per cent pay increase from 7th April 2008, subject to deployment of these new arrangements. Any offices where deployment is deferred will receive the additional 1.5 per cent from the date of deployment”. In addition the pension scheme will be closed to new members and existing members will have their retirement age raised from 60 to 65.
As a reward and no doubt and in anticipation of the postal workers acceptinga pay cut, Royal Mail directors’ pay increased from £4.3 million to £7.3 million in the year to the end of March 2007, with chief executive Adam Crozier receiving a pay rise of £69,000, plus £140,000 in lieu of pension and £1.1 million paid into his incentive plan. A delivery postal worker is paid as at the end of March 2007 a maximum of £311 per week or £16,172 peryear.
With inflation increasing at 4.2 per cent per year, according to National Statistics in October 2007, even the median trade union negotiated pay settlement of four per cent is effectively a pay cut. Inflation is expected to increase for the foreseeable future, primarily though food and fuel inflation. World food prices have risen in the past year by 11 per cent and non-food inflation runs at a rate of about seven per cent, according to International Monetary Fund estimates.
Back in 1996 the International Labour Organisation criticised the rise in wage inequality particularly in the US, Britain and New Zealand, which it argued is partly due to the decline in trade union density and decentralisation of pay bargaining.
The mean total weekly paid hours of full-timers was 39.4 hours in April 2007 and the percentage of full-time employees working paid overtime in was 22.5 per cent. At our 2006 Congress we noted that some 4.76 million workersworked an average of 7.4 hours unpaid overtime every week, saving employers £23 billion a year. This is only part of the picture as an increasingly significant amount of time is spent travelling to work.
The TUC produced a report in October 2007 which revealed that the number of people travelling for more than an hour to get to work had risen by more than 22 per cent since 1996, with an average of 54 minutes to get to and from work each day. More than 1.3 million people working in London travel for more than two hours each day and half a million do so in the north-west.All this adds significantly to the stresses and strains of the working day.Is it little surprise that 1.09 million people are on incapacity benefitsuffering from “mental and behavioural” problems?

What of jobs?

At the end of August 2007:

The employment rate for people of working age was 74.4 per cent or 29.10 million – a rise of 82,000 over the year; in the previous 10 years employment was growing at 300,000 a year. So in the last year employment prospects have reduced significantly.
Of the economically active 400,000 were in temporary employment solely because they could not find permanent work and more were self-employed due to the loss of a salaried job.
There were 7.97 million people of working age who were economically inactive, 1.65 million were classified as unemployed, 835,000 were claiming unemployment benefit and a further two million who, although not actively seeking work, would do so if jobs were available.
There are also 200,000 16 and 17 year-olds looking for work. The Treasuryhas estimated that the number claiming unemployment benefit will rise to 930,000 over the next 12 months. Thus there are probably four million people looking for work, most are unlikely to find a job as there currently only 668,800 job vacancies.
These numbers of economically inactive are the highest since comparable records began in 1971.
In the later part of 2007 xenophobia has been lifted to be the number one tool to attack the unity of the working class.
This should come as no surprise when one considers that the British capitalism has failed to maintain economic growth compared with itscompetitors. To this end they have elevated statistics to “prove” that foreign-born workers are cutting “British” workers out of the jobs market. It has been claimed that the 1.5 million foreign workers, who arrived since1997 and have filled more than half of the new jobs created since 1997.
So what? If one is trying to persuade people that immigration is good or bad, one has to analyse its impact on the gross domestic product and its distribution, after subtracting the incomes earned by these foreign workers.The closest we get is a report, highlighted in a recent edition of the New Worker, produced by the Treasury, Home Office and Department of Work andPensions, which showed that on this basis they contributed £6 billion a year to the British economy. What isn’t discussed in the bourgeois media is:

• why has job creation collapsed by 220,000 jobs this year?
• why has inequality increased?
• why are workers working longer hours?
• why do workers have to commute ever greater distances to find a job?
• why are record profits being made at the expense of wages?
• why are the ruling class taking more and more from the economy to furnish their lavish lifestyles?
• why are workers having to spend future earnings (go into debt) justto maintain their standard of living?

The reason why the media isn’t posing these questions? It’s because the truth is too unpalatable – namely that capitalism isn’t working. When capitalism is in difficulties the capitalists have to find scapegoats and at the moment what better scapegoat than a foreign worker. Therefore we should support the TUC resolution adopted at the 2007 TUC Congress which stated:

“Congress recognises the benefits to the economy, public services and local communities of the presence of migrant workers but believes that more must be done to tackle exploitation and abuse by unscrupulous employers, to encourage recruitment of migrant workers to the trade union movement and to improve and enhance support services provided to migrant workers and theirfamilies.”

Manufacturing is the most important sector of the British economy as this is the main wealth-creating sector. Manufacturing currently generates around£147 billion of export revenue a year. The success of manufacturing within Britain is essential for future prosperity. Although it accounts for only a fifth of the economy it generates 60 per cent of all exports and 80 per cent of spending on research and development.
However, among the ruling class and their representatives in Government, the predominant school of thought is that it is the financial sector that is the key to Britain’s future. One would have thought that the events during the summer of 2007 should have dispelled any belief in that theory. To quote Ken Lewis, Bank of America’s chief executive officer: “I’ve had all the fun Ican stand in the investment banking business at the moment. You can’t have a business where you make money for five years, then give it all back in one year”. Well the financial sector doesn’t magic up money from thin air, all it does is move around the value added by workers to raw materials, in other words those workers who work in the extractive, agricultural, engineering and manufacturing industries.
So what is happening in manufacturing? In the last two years the haemorrhaging of jobs from the sector has continued at an alarming rate. In 1997 there were six million employed in manufacturing; by May 2004 employment had dropped to 3.3 million. Two years later in May 2006 that figure has dropped to three million.
But seen in context, the gross value added in manufacturing in 2005 was £148billion, almost 20 per cent higher than in 1979. So with a considerably reduced workforce and increased use of new technology it was still able to add significantly to the British economy. In relative terms it has grown more slowly than that of other developed economies – being out performed during the last 25 years by the US, Japan and Western Europe.
Britain’s manufacturing decline has been exaggerated, by as much as 20 per cent, by the outsourcing of functions such as accounting and delivery services. When these activities were an integral part of manufacturing they were defined as manufacturing activities and not costs. Once outsourced to service companies they are recorded as part of the service sector and are recorded in the profits of that sector and this has been used as a tool to divide the industrial working class.
It is no coincidence that the Tory attacks on trade unionism went hand-in-hand with the dismantling of the coal industry, manufacturing and agriculture. The only way to redress the balance and defend manufacturing is for a stronger trade union movement. No amount of legislation, hand-wringing or any Alternative Economic and Political Strategies is going to force the ruling class to reverse their direction.
The TUC, at its 2007 Congress, resolved to call upon the Government to:

“Establish a fair trading environment for British manufacturing byaddressing, in particular, the excessive costs of energy; inappropriatetrade and public procurement policies; and the failure to utilise available European Union resources to promote British manufacturing advance.”

No mention here of reversing the Tory anti-trade union laws, no mention of increasing wages – so that workers can buy back the goods that they produce.
Then in November 2007 in response to the Government’s proposals for apprenticeships the TUC issued a press statement : “The TUC welcomes measures to improve the number of apprenticeships on offer to young people starting out in the world of work and to older workers looking for a change of direction.
“If apprenticeships are to offer meaningful career opportunities, they must be of good quality, where apprentices are treated well and earn a decent wage. Legislative powers to regulate and promote apprenticeships give the opportunity to do just that, and it is important we get it right. The Government should ask the Low Pay Commission to review the current minimum wage exemptions that apply to apprentices.”
Contrary to this legalistic approach by the TUC, the key to the defence of manufacturing and apprenticeships is more trade union rights and higher wages. The struggle to raise wages would go some way towards strengthening trade unions and giving greater confidence to their members and encouraging young workers to join. It would place the unions in a more favourable vantage point to secure the restoration of free collective bargaining and tow in back other working conditions that have been lost over the last 30years.
A resurgent labour movement would have renewed power to offset the effects of imperialism and to bring pressure to bear on the ruling class to reverse the decline in manufacturing and wages.
The lifting of the morale and class consciousness through struggle would play a positive role in improving the stance of the Labour Party, making it more responsive to the needs of the working class.
It may be objected that such a strategy would be doomed to failure. The answer is that it is the struggle itself that is crucial and the activity it engenders. Through the struggle some immediate material benefit may accrue to the working class, and it might hinder the ruling class’s offensive against long-established conditions. More important, the objectives of the struggle will serve as a focus, a direction, for the class helping the cohesiveness of its activity. In this the question of fundamental change is bound to surface.
After all it was Lenin who said:

“However, strikes, which arise out of thevery nature of capitalist society, signify the beginning of the working class struggle against that system of society.
“But when the workers state their demands jointly and refuse to submit to the money-bags, they cease to be slaves, they become human beings; they begin to demand that their labour should not only serve to enrich a handful of idlers, but should also enable those who work to live like human beings.
“When the workers refuse to work, the entire machine threatens to stop.Every strike reminds the capitalists that it is the workers and not they who are the real masters – the workers who are more and more loudly proclaimingtheir rights. Every strike reminds the workers that their position is not hopeless, that they are not alone.”

As part of the struggle to defend the class we should give full support toand demand that the TUC lives up to its decisions to:

• give full support to unions taking action to defend jobs andservices and to win fair pay;• ensure that no Remploy factory is closed;
• oppose the two per cent pay target for public sector workers byco-ordinating opposition at national and local levels, including co-ordinated joint industrial action;
• organise a national demonstration against any furtherprivatisations;
• defend the welfare state;
• fast-track action on equal pay.

If the TUC can be pushed to take up these demands in a forceful way, the confidence to take on bigger tasks will be immeasurably strengthened. In doing so we must demand that the TUC does not take the “honest broker”approach as it has done in other recent struggles. TUC general secretary Brendan Barber chaired the recent talks between the CWU and Royal Mail; instead he should have been on the picket line.
Trade unionists, Labour Party activists and Communists must act to reverse the direction taken by Brown and Blair in their desperation to run capitalism.
Trade Unions and the TUC exist to defend workers. They are not revolutionary organisations to bring about the overthrow of capitalism. But neither do they exist to hand workers over to capitalism on a plate.
Trade unions should coordinate bargaining by launching simultaneous and substantial increases in pay. Other demands should include the 35-hour week, full employment, health and safety, training, the protection of core skills and safeguards for labour mobility, flexibility and productivity.
Prior to 1997 most trade union conferences agreed not to support “wage restraint or an incomes policy under the next Labour government” and to“oppose any attempt to undermine free collective bargaining.” A united struggle, in which the TUC coordinates the movement to win wide support for each struggle and on a number of these fronts will inevitably lead to confrontation with the law. On this basis the law can be challenged by a movement united around these common set of goals – pay, hours and jobs.

Common Declaration of Communist and Workers' Parties on the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo

The undersigned Parties faced with the self-proclaimed Kosovan independence, promoted by the United States of America, NATO and European Union declare that:
Such a step – that violates the international law and United Nations' resolutions on this subject - will have grave consequences in the Balkans region and internationally.
It bring serious dangers for the peoples, triggering border changes, threatening to engulf the whole region in a new escalation of conflicts, wars and external interventions, and raising a dangerous international precedent.
Our Parties voice against the secession of Kosovo from the Republic of Serbia. We demand that all governments refrain from recognizing the Kosovo independence as well as from dispatching troops in the area.

25th February 2008

The Parties,

1. PADS – Algeria
2. Communist Party of Argentina
3. Communist Party of Australia
4. Workers Party of Belgium
5. Workers Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina
6. Communist Party of Britain
7. New Communist Party of Britain
8. Communist Party of Brazil
9. Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia
10. Communist Party of Canada
11. Communist Party of Chile
12. AKEL, Cyprus
13. Socialist Workers Party of Croatia
14. Communist Party of Cuba
15. Communist Party in Denmark
16. Communist Party of Ecuador
17. Communist Party of Finland
18. Unified Communist Party of Georgia
19. German Communist Party
20. Communist Party of Greece
21. Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
22. Communist Party of India (Marxist)
23. Communist Party of India
24. Workers Party, Ireland
25. Party of the Italian Communists
26. New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
27. Lebanese Communist Party
28. Communist Party of Luxembourg
29. Communist Party of Malta
30. Party of the Communists, Mexico
31. New Communist Party of the Netherlands
32. Communist Party of Norway
33. People’s Party of Panama
34. Communist Party of Philippines (PKP 1930)
35. Palestinian Communist Party
36. Communist Party of Peru
37. Portuguese Communist Party
38. Communist Party of Poland
39. Communist Party of the Russian Federation
40. Communist Workers´ Party of Russia
41. South African Communist Party
42. Communist Party of Spain
43. Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
44. Communist Party of Sweden
45. Syrian Communist Party
46. Communist Party of Turkey
47. Communist Party of Ukraine
48. Union of the Communists of Ukraine

The Last Soviet Republic

by Andy Brooks

The Last Soviet Republic – Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus by Stewart Parker, pbk, 248 pp, Trafford Publishing, Oxford. £9.99

THE FORMER Soviet republic of Belarus is an unlikely candidate for the “axis of evil”. But this small landlocked republic, wedged between the might of the European Union and Putin’s Russia, has been branded by US imperialism as an “outpost of tyranny” for daring to defend most of the gains of the Soviet era and for refusing to kow-tow to the dictates of Anglo-American and Franco-German imperialism.
Imperialist venom targets one man – Alexander Lukashenko – who rose from the ranks of the old Belarus communist movement as a principled opponent of graft and corruption to win the presidential elections against all odds in 1994 to lead his country along the path of non-alignment and social progress.
Western diplomatic and economic isolation has backfired and attempts to unseat him by bourgeois and phoney “communist” parties funded by imperialism have all failed.
This is because Lukashenko enjoys immense popularity amongst the Belarusians who have been spared the mass unemployment, privatisation and collapse of education and the health service that was the fate of the rest of the former Soviet Union when it took the capitalist road.
This book by Stewart Parker explains why. There are no oligarchs in Lukashenko’s Belarus. There’s virtually full employment and no one has to emigrate to Western Europe to find work. Over 90 per cent of the farms are still collectivised and most of the country’s industry remains in public hands. Health and education are still a priority in Belarus and the state guarantees low-cost food and housing.
When the counter-revolution succeeded in Moscow in 1991 Lukashenko was the only deputy in the Belarusian parliament to vote against the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He opposed the turncoat communists and bourgeois nationalists who came out of the woodwork to dominate the country in the early 1990s.
His record as a collective farm manager and his “clean hands” in the old Belarus communist party and parliament won the trust of working people who comprise the vast majority of the nine million or so Belarusians who live in this land-locked oasis of social justice in Europe.
Last November 80 communist and workers’ parties from over 60 countries, including the New Communist Party of Britain, attended the 9th international communist conference in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, to discuss the relevance of the Russian revolution in the 21st century.
Many of those delegates felt they were stepping back in time when they toured the factories, farms and schools of Belarus. Lenin and the Bolsheviks are still honoured and the socialist sector is still largely intact. But Belarus isn’t in a time-warp nor are its economists trying to create a nostalgia theme-park for those hankering for the “good old days”.
Belarus is a “state of the people” that operates a mixed economy which they call “market socialism” or “social orientation”. Though not on the Chinese scale there are joint ventures with countries like Turkey and the Third World and there is a small self-employed and private sector which caters for some of the needs of the consumer industry.
Belarus bore the brunt of the Nazi invasion during the Second World War and it took the Belarusian people years to recover from devastation. The collapse of the Soviet Union could have led to economic chaos, and for a brief period it did when the tools of imperialism were in charge.
But Parker shows in some detail how the Lukashenko government has worked to rein in hyper-inflation and deal with its energy problems to ensure a secure and decent way of life for the millions of workers and farmers in the country.
And he also explains how genuine mass democracy works in this former Soviet republic and how its government defends the country’s independence; maintains a strategic relationship with Russia – its biggest trading partner – and demonstrates its solidarity with struggling people all over the world.
Though the author is clearly sympathetic to modern Belarus he is not a communist and this shows in his work. His off-hand description of the people’s democracies of eastern Europe as “puppets” and “satellites” of the Soviet Union is simplistic to put it mildly.
He barely mentions the Communist Party of Belarus (KPB) whose eight MPs support Lukashenko’s independent bloc in the House of Representatives or indeed how the other pro-government parties relate to the independent bloc.
But it is an easily readable and important book, essential for any understanding of what is happening in eastern Europe today. It’s well-worth buying or ordering from your local library.

Stalin and the British Road to Socialism

REVIEW

Review

By Ray Jones

RevolutionaryDemocracy Vol XIII No 2 September 2007. £3 plus 50p P&P from NCP Lit PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ.

IN THE OLD Communist Party (CPGB) it was sometimes said that Stalin had approved of the British Road to Socialism (BRS) programme — not often and not loudly because the revisionists obviously did not wish to be seen appealing to Stalin and the anti-revisionists did not like to think that Stalin could have approved of the BRS.
Some argued that the apparent paradox could be resolved because the first version of the BRS (the one seen by Stalin) was essentially sound but the 1957 version slipped into reformism and this seems to be the basic position Vijay Singh takes in his article on the BRS in this issue of Revolutionary Democracy.
He compares the CPGB programme before the Second World War, For a Soviet Britain, with the first and later versions of the BRS and puts them into historical context.
Vijay admits that the first version of the BRS proposes the use of our bourgeois Parliament but implies that this was acceptable because that BRS was a road to socialism via a People’s Democracy, not to socialism directly — similar to the processes taking place in other countries at the time.
The classic example is possibly Czechoslovakia where the Communists built up a strong base inside and outside Parliament until a certain point was reached and then called out the worker’s militia and took state power.
But this People’s Democracy version of the BRS, argues Vijay, was not a “peaceful road” and the essence of the dictatorship of the proletariat was kept. These things were added and cut respectively in the later revisionist version.
Vijay’s arguments are buttressed by his discovery in the Russian archives, and reproduced here, of minutes of meetings and letters between Stalin and CPGB general secretary Harry Pollitt.
I think that it was assumed by many of us that if Stalin had seen a draft of the first BRS it had just been looked at and returned with a diplomatic acceptance. It is clear that this was not the case and that Stalin and the Soviet Party had a serious input into the programme and that on the whole their amendments were accepted.
These articles are important for our understanding of our communist history and Vijay Singh should be congratulated for them — whatever we make of his opinion on the BRS.
Besides this indispensable reading there is in this volume the usual mix of interesting articles; from thoughts on Che Guevara’s economics to the Nandigram scandal in India to the Tukhachevsky Conspiracy in the Soviet Union.

In Karl Marx's Footsteps

Review

by Andy Brooks

Marx in London; Asa Briggs & John Callow, Lawrence & Wishart, London 2008,128pp £9.99.


WE OFTEN FORGET that the founders of scientific socialism spent the most creative parts of their lives in Britain and that the British communist movement can justly claim that its origins go back directly to the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
Twenty-five years ago Prof Asa Briggs helped to redress the balance by writing a guidebook that was designed to accompany the BBC programme Karl Marx in London that was first broadcast in the summer of 1982. Marxists and Londoners could, for the first time, visit Marx’s haunts and retrace the steps he took during the 30 years he spent with his family in the metropolis. In those days Marx’s fame ran throughout eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Asia and Latin America. Now the Soviet Union is no more but, if anything, interest in the life of Karl Marx and his co-worker, Frederick Engels has grown at home and abroad.
This long overdue second edition, revised with the able help of John Callow, the secretary of the Marx Memorial Library, will help a new generation to reach out and touch the life of the founder of scientific socialism. Marx in London is fully illustrated with photos, maps and prints along with transport details to places of interest while the text gives a potted history of Marx and London life in the late 19th century.
Sadly, but not surprisingly, there is no museum in London dedicated to the life and times of Marx and Engels. But their memory lives on in the streets and houses they knew so well. Some are remembered with the odd blue plaque – others would be passed unnoticed without the help of this excellent guidebook.
Marx lived in London from 1849 until his death in 1883 and you can travel back in time with this guide to those heady days so full of hope, revolution and struggle. But it wasn’t all bread and roses but a struggle for day-to-day existence because Marx’s early days in London were those of abject poverty.
Evicted from their lodgings in Chelsea, the Marx family decamped to the German Hotel in Soho which in those days was the home of many revolutionary exiles from Germany Austria, Italy and France. They stayed there in April and May 1850 but had to leave again when they were unable to pay the £5-a-week rent. They managed to find rooms in nearby Dean Street before moving to Kentish Town in 1856. Marx’s life is then traced through the landmarks of his life and those of his old friend Engels, who moved to London in 1870 until his own death in 1985.
Well-known sites include the British Museum Reading Room, where Marx worked on Capital, Covent Garden, where the meetings of the First International took place, Hampstead Heath, where Marx and his friends spent family Sundays and of course, his last resting place at Highgate Cemetery.
The book is published in association with the Marx Memorial Library and copies are available from the Library at a special price of £8.99 plus £2 postage.

Where does Santa come from?

by Daphne Liddle

FOR MOST of our readers Santa is the product of rampant capitalist propaganda and spin, invented to persuade workers, especially those with children, to spend more than they can afford on extravagant gifts and then spend most of the following year working harder than ever to pay off the debts.

Some may have noticed that this character is not quite the same as the old English Father Christmas. Santa definitely arrived from the United States at sometime in the middle of the last century, on his traditional sleigh pulled by reindeers and is entirely benevolent to children. He is based very loosely on Saint Nicholas, a Turkish saint who rescued orphan children.

Father Christmas is an altogether older, darker and more mysterious figure. He does not just bring gifts but also punishment for wrongdoers and he presides over a very chaotic time of year when the old certainties are, for 12 days, swept aside, for a festival of fun and anarchy.

Father Christmas was then also known as “The Lord of Misrule” or, in Scotland, “The Abbot of Unreason” and he brought a time when the lower classes defied the rules and regulations imposed by the upper classes and when masters had to wait on servants – and it was a time notorious for drunkenness and excess.

The Father Christmas figure is associated with ancient pagan nature religions that celebrated an annual cycle of crop growing and animal husbandry, where each year the cycle of light versus dark, summer versus winter, day versus night played out an endless dialectic that governed the working lives of the people.

Many of these religions had a god, like the Egyptian Osiris, who represented the corn they sowed. This god often took the form of a human god-king who achieved that office through a series of contests in physical and magic skills to marry the hereditary queen of the community.

He would be sacrificed annually or at regular intervals and buried. These gods always rose again from the dead as the corn rose after being buried in the fields – and a new god-king was chosen to replace the old.

The annual solstices were critical points, especially the winter solstice when the darkening and shortening of the days was suddenly reversed; when light had decisively won the battle over dark. It was a revolutionary point and a time of upheaval and chaos and rejoicing – when almost anything could happen.

Perhaps the oldest of the pagan gods that we know of associated with time of year is the ancient Greek god Chronos – often depicted as an old man with a white beard. To those who worshipped him he represented time itself. His followers recognised that time creates all things and eventually destroys all things – the dialectical principle of constant change. Chronos was said to eat his children. This can be interpreted as Victorian artists did, of a monstrous figure devouring real children, or it can be interpreted as an allegory that time eventually consumes everything.

The Roman god Saturn has been identified with the Greek Chronos and he presided over a 12-day festival in ancient Rome which included riotous feasting and drinking and, in households that observed the festival strictly, master waiting on slaves.

It was a time to remember the old agrarian village that had once been Rome, a time of primitive communism when “no man was master and no man slave” and “no one’s work was a burden” and when “no lines were drawn on the land” to mark out property boundaries.

Saturn was definitely a sun god and his triumph over darkness was a time of joy and freedom – and chaos. He was identified with Sol Invictus – the unconquered sun.

Saturnalia was a time of general relaxation, feasting, merry-making, and a cessation of formal rules. It included the making and giving of small presents (Saturnalia et Sigillaricia), including small dolls for children and candles for adults. During Saturnalia, business was postponed and even slaves feasted. There was drinking, gambling, and singing, and even public nudity. It was the “best of days,” according to the poet Catullus.

These nature gods, with their links to the annual agricultural cycle and their understanding of dialectics – and seasonal sacrifices – were later swept away; Zeus conquered his father Chronos as Jupiter did to Saturn. These gods, along with the Jewish Yahweh, declared themselves eternal, immortal and unchanging. They were the gods of people who owned property and upper class status and wanted to hang on to them for all time. These new gods hated uncertainty, chaos and anarchy.

Another Roman god strongly identified with Father Christmas was Mithras, who began in Persia as a god of the Zoroastrian religion. This was a dialectical nature religion – which is still practised today. It centres round an eternal flame, which of course is forever changing.

The Mithrasmas festival was celebrated on his birthday, 25th December (The Persian god Ishtar was also supposed to be born on 25th December). Mithras was popular among Roman soldiers. There are conflicting versions of his birth. Some say he sprang from a rock, others say from a tree. But another popular version says that Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25th in a cave, and his birth was attended by shepherds; he was considered a great travelling teacher and master and he had 12 companions or disciples.

Mithras’s followers were promised immortality; he performed miracles and as the “great bull of the Sun,” Mithras sacrificed himself for world peace.

He was supposedly buried in a tomb and after three days rose again and his resurrection was celebrated every year. Mithras was called “the Good Shepherd” and identified with both the lamb and the lion.

He was spoken of as the “Way, the Truth and the Light,” and the “Logos,” (word) “Redeemer,” “Saviour” and “Messiah”.

His worship moved from Asia Minor to Europe at a time when there were many wandering preachers who claimed to be “the Messiah” and to be able to perform miracles. It became strongest among Roman soldiers reaching a peak at around 200 to 250 AD. And it was a religion full of dark mysteries and initiation rites as practitioners rose through seven stages from outer to inner circles.

It does indicate that among the soldiers the attachment to dialectical nature religions remained strong in spite of Jupiter’s claims to eternal and unchanging immortality. They preferred a religion that gave hope of change in society and status.

Emperor Elagabalus (218–222AD) introduced the festival of Mithras, and it reached the height of its popularity under Aurelian, who promoted it as an empire-wide holiday.

But it was a religion that could not last – it was a strictly men-only religion and some argue that its elitist traditions deterred many. Sextus Julius Africanus popularised the idea that Christ was born on December 25th in his Chronographiai, reference book for Christians written in AD 221.

By the fourth century the Roman Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the main religion of the empire. He called a conference of Christian sects that was held at Nicaea where the final form of the New Testament was determined – with four gospels included and about a dozen other versions left out – many had been written long after the events they describe and their accuracy was disputed.

The Council of Nicaea was also a very political event; Constantine was a master of political spin who had broken with Rome’s traditional religions and philosophies but he did not want to endorse a religion that would challenge his authority on earth.

The celebration of Christmas as a Christian festival took off in Europe under the domination of the Frankish King Charlemagne. He fought many wars against pagan Teutonic tribes in what is now Germany and cut down their sacred tree groves.

But the sacred tree survived there in the form of the decorated Christmas tree, a tradition later brought to England by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert.

It also echoes the Anglo-Saxon winter solstice festival of “geol”, or Yule, with the well-known Yule log. Yule logs were lit to honour Thor, the god of thunder, with the belief that each spark from the fire represented a new pig or calf that would be born during the coming year. Feasting would continue until the log burned out, which could take as many as 12 days.

The prominence of Christmas Day increased gradually after Charlemagne was crowned on Christmas Day in 800. Around the 12th century, the remnants of the former Saturnalian traditions of the Romans were transferred to the 12 days of Christmas (26th December – 6th January).

Christmas during the Middle Ages was a public festival, incorporating ivy, holly, and other evergreens, as well as gift-giving.

Alas the midwinter festival we now “celebrate” every December has been well and truly taken over by the capitalist god Mammon.

But, as communists and subversives, we should encourage it to be remembered as a time when the social order can be turned on its head and slaves can become masters and enjoy themselves.

Nepal:revolution in the 21st century

At a recent packed meeting in London’s Conway Hall, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)’s international secretary Comrade, C P GAJUREL, gave a lengthy and detailed analysis of the current situation in Nepal of his party’s revolutionary strategy.
The meeting was organised by the British South Asian Solidarity Forum, which promotes education and discussion on the struggles of the working people of the South Asian subcontinent.
Gajurel’s talk was given against a background of growing instability in Nepal since the accession of an interim assembly and government, including the CPN(M), increasing mass pressure to declare a republic, and growing evidence of foreign interference. An account of his talk is given below:


“THERE IS NO socialist country providing support for revolutionary movements in the world today. There is an absence of a socialist camp in the world.

In Russia in 1917 a very strong working class existed (and in Europe as well) and the First World War exacerbated the crisis in Russia. Nepal lacks a strong working class and there is no war situation.

In the 1990s imperialism declared Marxism and communist revolutions over, and a relic of the 20th century, and claimed that only capitalism, not socialism could be sustained.

We are trying to have a revolution in the 21st Century. In Nepal we were fighting against a monarchy and a feudal system, but actually the monarchy has already been abolished.

Actually we are fighting US imperialism. The fight against the monarchy is almost finished. The king is no longer the head of state or the army and has no mass support, but he is backed by a reactionary class and by foreign reaction.

There is a need for solidarity with the ongoing revolution in Nepal and in the fight against imperialism. We aware of the weakness of the trade union and working class movement in the west, but we are seeking support from communists, Maoists, progressive and democratic forces, and liberal governments.”

Even if we achieve the Nepalese revolution, imperialism will not allow it to be sustained. In all respects your support is necessary.

During the people’s war of the last 10 or 11 years the army was effectively defeated and confined to its barracks, even though it was three times bigger than the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The people’s war had entered the stage of going over to the strategic offensive. It was at this point that negotiations began with the CPN(M) and other political parties for a settlement.

Eighty per cent of Nepal and most of the countryside was liberated and our own government set up, which collected taxes and provided security, and we were trying to capture Kathmandu.

We were at the gates of Kathmandu and 2,000 of the Nepal Army had been eliminated, and at that time negotiations began. The peace process began when the CPN(M) was in a victorious position. In Lenin’s words, “What you have won on the field of war will be legalised at the negotiating table.”

But the CPN(M) was not strong enough to seize power at the centre or mount a direct confrontation with the army. Success requires a general insurrection of the masses. Several efforts were made but they were not enough to win the war. Our strength was not enough.

During the war the enemies of the CPN(M) – the king and the Seven-Party Alliance (SPA) – united against the revolution and colluded with the king. The CPN(M) was declared a terrorist organisation and bounties were put on its leaders “alive or dead”.

Therefore it was necessary to divide this class. The CPN(M) adopted a strategy of dividing the opposing camp and unifying its own forces. We should thank King Gyanendra for arresting the leaders of the other parties and banning all parties and all political activities, driving them to the side of the Maoists.

The eight-point agreement between the CPN(M) and the SPA clearly mentions the organisation of a mass movement against the monarchy and for a republic.

The successful joint movement arose against the background of the people’s war and could not have been possible without it.

The Nepal Army could not use force against the mass movement because of the existence of the PLA.

After the surrender of the king the SPA made a secret deal with the king: they would call off the mass movement and the king would call on them to form a government. But the road map agreed with the CPN(M) called for an interim assembly and government to prepare an election for a new constituent assembly.

The US was opposed to this process as it contradicted the interests of US imperialism. When it was agreed that the CPN(M) would enter the interim parliament with 82 members, the US threatened to stop all assistance to Nepal.

When the CPN(M) entered the interim government the US threatened to ask its allies to impose economic sanctions on Nepal. But the United States’ policy met with total failure.”

Elections (to the constituent assembly) were scheduled for 15th June (2007), but all the parties attempted to use the elections to their advantage and against the continuation of revolutionary momentum and the CPN(M) achieving a majority.

So there was a conspiracy to sabotage the elections. The Election Commission decided it was unable to hold elections on that day due to inadequate laws and preparation, and the election was postponed, first for seven days and then for six months.

Meanwhile arms and money have flowed into the Terai* to promote ethnic violence.

The US prepared two ambushes against the CPN(M), using all the knowledge and experience of its successes and previous defeats of communist movements.

The first choice was for the CPN(M) to lose the elections, and if it didn’t accept this, they, and any mass movement supporting them, would be declared as “terrorists”.

The second strategy was that if the CPN(M) won the elections, the US had prepared contras – the Terais – and would claim that the elections were rigged by the CPN(M) and that these forces were fighting for “democracy”.

The CPN(M) saw these two traps ahead to be ambushed and killed, but the CPN(M) was also working out how to win the revolution.

An expanded CPN(M) central committee meeting was held in August representing 75 districts and the PLA leadership and a total of 2,174 delegates. The meeting unanimously adopted a declaration opting for a mass movement, and recognised serious mistakes on two issues.

The first was that a republic should be declared from the assembly – it should have been declared before the elections.
The second issue was the CPN(M)’s decision to demand elections based on proportional representation.

Thus the CPN(M) made a clear demand for a republic backed by a mass movement and decided to withdraw from the government and to refuse to participate in elections or to allow elections.

The Nepali Congress, the main party in the SPA, opposed these demands. After the mobilisation of a mass movement in the countryside the SPA retreated for two days for talks, then for five days.

Then the CPN(M) proposed a motion was declaring a republic. The CPN(M) said negotiations were no longer relevant and the motion should go to a vote.

The UML**, which was previously part of the government, was placed in a very difficult position. Supporting the motion would mean the motion would succeed, while opposing it would expose them as supporters of the king. The UML finally supported the motion along with the other left parties.

Thus the motion was approved by the interim assembly. But under the agreement with the SPA, the declaration of the republic could only be made by a newly elected government.

The CPN(M) is now demanding that the government put the proposal to declare a republic to parliament, but the Nepali Congress is in crisis and is unable to do so. If not, the CPN(M) would enjoy the most support in parliament, and the Nepali Congress would have to leave the government.

The CPN(M) is now demanding that the government itself puts the republic proposal to the assembly. But the Nepali Congress is in crisis and is unable to do this.

If they don’t it means the CPN(M) has majority support in the assembly, and the Nepali Congress should leave the government. The CPN(M) is now saying they will oust the Nepali Congress from the government via a mass movement, and a new government should be formed.

This would make the US very angry as it opposes any CPN(M) participation in the government. The CPN(M) knows that if it becomes the head of the government the US will not tolerate this. Thus the CPN(M) cannot fulfil the people’s aspirations, so it has asked the UML to take power.

Now the target is not the king; the target is now the Nepali Congress. Thus we are following the tactics of Mao: it is necessary to attack the enemy one by one, both in the military struggle and in the political struggle.

The monarchy is abolished, but feudalism and the feudal class still exist, and it is necessary to fight the parties representing the feudal class, which includes the Nepali Congress.

The UML consistently compromises with this feudal class. Both the Nepali Congress and the UML follow the US masters and the interests of imperialism and India. Now the CPN(M) is able to split the Nepali Congress and the UML through mass struggle, and now the two parties are fighting each other.

In the present situation the needs of the people cannot be implemented without a revolutionary constitution and government. Now the CPN(M) is building up a mass movement.

The definition of bourgeois democracy is the rule of the majority. US imperialism and Indian expansionism are opposed to this strategy and would not tolerate a revolutionary government. So the next stage will definitely be very difficult.

The US is not interested in Nepal’s resources or in economic control, but is afraid of the world-wide impact of the revolution in Nepal.

People are looking to the Nepali revolution, which supposedly cannot be successful without the support of a socialist camp, and cannot be successful in this world today because it would set a precedent for revolution for the oppressed, exploited and struggling people of the world.

There is also a growing Maoist movement in India and the Indian ruling class is very afraid of the success of the Nepali revolution and is ready to take any action.

So the situation is heading towards a climax. It is very difficult to predict what will happen in the next weeks or months. It is a life or death struggle we are working out in Nepal, and the situation is very serious, so at this point in time we think international support is very important.

We are preparing our people for the worst eventuality, including foreign intervention. But ultimately the masses will decide everything.

Previously Interpol issued arrest warrants in 120 countries against the CPN(M)’s leadership, and I was on the British visa blacklist. But now, as members of the Nepal government, the CPN(M) has been invited to Britain to attend a Department for International Development (DFID) conference on conflict management in south Asia.

Previously the Nepali government was supported by the US, Britain, India, and China, but now the situation has changed. Britain is now supporting the peace process. We think this is a divergence between British and US policy.

The CPN(M) has established relations with China, and the People’s Republic of China embassy in Kathmandu has issued a statement saying that China would not tolerate any interference in Nepal, including by India, after rigorous discussions between a representative of the CP China international department, Professor Wang, who met the CPN(M) leadership and visited the PLA’s camps.

In an interview Wang said that if the US or India attempted to intervene in various ways in Nepal, if a limit was exceeded, China would not tolerate this.

We are confident that we will eventually see the success of the revolution in Nepal, the first successful people’s revolution of the 21st century.

The CPN(M) will seek to develop relations with countries, for example in Latin America, who are resisting US imperialism, and wished to become a part of the anti-imperialist forces.

If it comes to power the CPN(M) will end the agreement for the its citizens to serve in the British Army. The CPN(M) would not allow any Nepali citizens to be used as mercenaries.

On the basis of national rights, the CPN(M) is in favour of establishing 11 regions in Nepal as part of a strong united Nepal in which the national minorities have been liberated.

Nepal is the richest country in the world in hydro-electric resources – “white gold” – and with the gifts of nature could develop tourism into a major industry. Nepal is rich in unique herbal and medicinal plants and is produces sufficient grain to export to India.

Nepal can also export workers to rich countries where the population is no longer growing. We believe that in a few years we can create a wealthy society.

Nepal was never a colony – it was never a British colony or under the rule of a foreign power.

It is not possible to copy revolutionary processes. There is a theory that developed countries should follow the example of the Russian revolution, while developing countries should follow the example of the Chinese revolution. But the CPN(M) believes that every revolutionary process must be unique.

Hinduism and casteism are very widespread in Nepal, but there are many different castes joining the revolution, and caste barriers are breaking down in the course of the struggle. Now inter-caste marriages are becoming accepted.

At present it is not appropriate to hold protests at the Nepali embassy, but if the parties don’t follow the agreements they have made and try to suppress the mass movement, then all forms of support would be needed along with pressure on the British government to take a favourable position.”

* The Terai region runs along the Indian border through the densely populated plains of southern Nepal.

** The UML (Communist Party of Nepal/United Marxist-Leninist, CPN/UML) is regarded as a “mainstream” communist party and is a member of the Seven-Party Alliance.

How we got in the State we are

by Daphne Liddle

AS LONG AS the state machine has existed there have been ideas about how it came into being and why it was necessary. The predominant ideas have always reflected the views of the ruling class and have been an attempt to justify why they need to control the behaviour of other classes, using force and punishment. They have always tried to convince us they are doing it for our own good.
In the slave societies of Greece and Rome the views of Socrates and Plato predominated. They claimed that humans are definitely not equal, that someare born with superior qualities and abilities and it is in everyone’sinterests if they are put in charge of society and allowed to run it withoutinterference from the rest of us.
The democracy they advocated was based on a small elite of the population –freeborn men from native (patrician) families only. Their society required absolute obedience and loyalty from the slave working classes and offered in return to keep the slaves fed, housed and clothed in the same way as domestic working animals.
Feudal states in Europe were based on the Christian Catholic concept of a pyramid of power with the king at the top who ruled over different grades of lords – dukes above earls above barons above knights – and all above commoners. This was supposed to reflect the heavens – “as in heaven, so onearth” – with God at the top ruling over various grades of angels, seraphim,saints and so on.
This society again required obedience and loyalty; serfs were not allowed to leave their home village but were required to keep their own family houses and grow their own food, make their own clothes. In return the feudal lords guaranteed their right to access to the land to farm and gave them protection from thieves, bandits and invading armies.
Early bourgeois societies had a quite different idea about the state. Their Protestant views backed personal freedom and choice but held everyone responsible for their own fortune: the rich were rich because they had worked hard and saved; the poor were poor because they were lazy and stupid and did not deserve charity. They saw life as a battle of each person against the rest to make as much money as possible to buy their own security and comfort and that of their children. They saw the state as necessary as a sort of referee between these contending individuals, or the human race was likely to wipe itself out in wars of greed and acquisition.
The new philosophers put forward ideas of a model state based on reason. Hobbes saw the state as a rational power to the problem that while men depended on each other and had to live together, they were by nature selfish and greedy and the state was needed to suppress these natural tendencies andprevent war. He described life as “nasty, brutish and short”.
Later, just before the French revolution, the philosopher Rousseau also advocated a state based on reason and saw the state as a social contract between each man and society. Each individual agreed to abide by rational social laws in order to receive the benefits that came with living with other people.
Both Rousseau and Hobbes were rationalists but accepted private property as a natural law of society. On the other hand the model societies advocated by Thomas More (16th century) and Gerard Winstanley (17th century English revolution era) both advocated collective ownership of the means of production. They had a more optimistic view of human nature and believed that greed and selfishness grew out of insecurity and fear of poverty. They believed that in a society where all property was held in common, and everyone had the means to make a living, human nature would graduallychange. They were both religious, in different ways, rather than rationalist.
Our understanding of the state is that it is an apparatus that arises within a society divided into different classes. Such classes have an economic basis in that members of different classes have different relations to the means of production. In other words the ruling class has effective control through private property or some other mechanism over the way in which any member of that society can gain a living; that the natural raw materials of the earth cannot be worked on to produce the necessities of life without ruling class consent. In such a position of power the ruling class is able to expropriate for itself all the wealth produced by labour,only allowing the workers to have as much of that wealth as is necessary to keep them fit enough to keep working, producing wealth, and producing a next generation of workers.
Within such a society the interests of the workers and rulers cannot be identical. In the distribution of the products of labour the loss of oneclass is the gain of the other. Their interests are diametrically opposed and cannot be reconciled except by force exerted by one class upon the other. And it is for this purpose that the state machinery came into being.The state machinery includes the armed forces, civil administration, judiciary, courts, police and so on.
“The state is therefore, by no means a power imposed upon society from without; just as little is it ‘the reality of the moral idea’, ‘the imageand reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather it is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is an admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms, which it is powerless to exorcise.
“But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economicinterests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power,arisen out of society but placing itself above it and increasinglyalienating itself from it, is the state.” (From The origin of the family, private property and the state by Frederick Engels).
“The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonisms objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the antagonisms are irreconcilable.” (From The State and Revolution by Lenin.)
Turning to the development of the state we now have in Britain and starting with the feudal state of the Middle Ages: it was an agrarian society and the chief means of production was the land. It was not held as private property but in fee or feu – hence the term feudal. In theory it all belonged to the Crown. The King delegated his great lords as dukes, viscounts, earls and so on to govern large estates on his behalf; they in turn delegated orsub-contracted to lesser lords – barons, knights and so on. Under them were the local squires and under them the commoners, villeins or serfs. There were different arrangements whereby serfs paid their dues to the lords above them. Some worked their own land (held in fee from the lord) and paid a portion of their crop to the lord. Others worked their own land on some days and also worked on the lords own fields – his demesne – on other days.
The feudal system already existed before the Norman Conquest in Anglo-Saxon society but in a bewildering variety of forms, with different duties and obligations including the remnants of slavery. The Norman regime standardised the relations between serfs and lords and among the different ranks of lords. Each lord owed taxes to the one above them. This could take the form of food produce, money or armed service. These lords were supposedto provide a certain number of trained and equipped fighters to keep orderi n their own patch and in time of war to be available to the lord above them, who in turn had to supply the king with armed men.
As the system developed sometimes this duty could be converted to a cash sum – a tax known as scutage – paid to the superior lord or king so he could hire mercenaries.
The local lords were supposed to dispense justice and keep the peace in their domain and provide welfare for the sick and elderly, widows and orphans. Many orphans and people with disabilities ended up being taken on as domestic servants in the manor house.
Alongside all of this was the church – almost a parallel state structureand supported by a 10 per cent tax – the tithe – on everyone’s income. The local priest would also have a glebe – a patch of land to grow food. In return the church was supposed to provide a variety of social services. For a significant donation the local lord could transfer his own duties to the sick and destitute to the local church or monastery. The church also provided what scant formal education there was to the sons of the rich and of course delivered religious services and teaching that informed the peasantry that humble obedience in this world would bring entrance to heaven in the next.
This began to break down when the Black Death plague hit Britain in the mid14th century. It wrought havoc throughout Europe, wiping out about one third of the population. This led to a labour shortage and local lords tempting the surviving peasants away from their home villages with wages, undermining the rules that tied the peasants to the village they were born in.
Then some lords, bereft of serfs to work the land, started keeping flocks of sheep to produce wool for sale. They thrived in Britain’s damp climate producing high quality wool that was saleable all around the then-knownworld.
Italian merchants were willing to pay so much for it that other lords were tempted to throw their peasants off their land and turn everything over to sheep and wool production. This was known as the enclosure movement and it happened on and off from 14th century. It still goes on today whenever publicly-owned land is transferred to private ownership through the privatisation of public utilities and facilities.
Thomas More, in his book Utopia, written mid 16th century, wrote, describing the contemporary situation in England: “Sheep … these placid creatures which used to require such little food, have now apparently developed a raging appetite, and turned into man-eaters. Fields, houses,towns, everything goes down their throats.
To put it more plainly, in those parts of the kingdom where the finest, and so the most expensive wool is produced, the nobles and gentlemen, not tomention several saintly abbots, have grown dissatisfied with the income that their predecessors got out of their estates.
“They’re no longer content to lead lazy, comfortable lives, which do no good to society – they must actively do it harm, by enclosing all the land they can for pasture, and leaving none for cultivation.”
The king decided to get in on the act by imposing a tax, known as the woolstaple, on wool exports, levied at ports which now bear the word staple or stable as part of their name (for example Barnstaple and Whitstable).
This pushed a lot of peasants off the land, forcing them to wander as beggars or seek work in the towns and creating a problem of disorder – and the beginnings of a working class that had no property rights and dependedentirely on wage labour for survival.
It coincided with the end of the Wars of the Roses and Henry VII curtailing the power of the great feudal lords. His son Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church and confiscated its vast landed estates in England and parcelled this land out to his friends and supporters. The pattern of feudal land tenure began to break down in favour of private landownership, with a new breed of enterprising landowners eager to break old traditions in order to extract maximum profits from their land.
At the same time the New World had been discovered with vast wealth to be seized and looted. Fortune favoured the bold and the wealthy of Italy, Spainand later France and England were clubbing together to finance bold explorers – the beginnings of capitalist companies.
The Stuart King, Charles I, tried to put a brake on the slide from feudal property relations to private entrepreneurship and ended clashing with Parliament, which then represented mostly the growing class of private landowners and their mercantile adventurer allies. The English revolution or civil war was a triumph of the power of these private landowners, allied with the mercantile adventurers and the small but growing urban workingclasses over feudalism. Large scale industrial capitalism did not then existbut the revolution created the conditions for it to happen.
But the revolution also created the beginnings of class awareness among the workers and farm labourers who had been dragged into the war to support the parliamentarians. The Putney debates of the ordinary soldiers of theParliamentary Army threw up ideas and concepts way ahead of their time and created the movement of the Levellers.
This was alarming to the new private-property-owning ruling class and after the death of Cromwell, they back-tracked and Charles II was invited to take the throne in a new kind of state – a constitutional monarchy. Charles IIwas happy to go along with the growing economic boom that arose from trade in slaves and sugar and not to challenge the power of Parliament.
His successor James II was not so wise; he tried to reassert the old powerof the monarchy and was thrown out for it in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1668. Mary Stuart and her husband William of Orange were brought from Holland to replace James II under a compromise agreement between the monarchy and Parliament that is the basis of our modern state.
At that time the state structure was fairly simple. Power resided in the army and Parliament. The armed forces, the judiciary and the church were answerable to the monarch and the monarch was subservient to the will of Parliament. Parliament was entirely controlled by landowners, those who owned no land had no vote and the big landowners controlled the elections –which were anything but secret – in their boroughs.
The very wealthy aristocratic families, represented by the Whig party, benefited from inheritance laws that differed from those in the rest of Europe. On the death of the owner the estate went in its entirety to the eldest son; younger sons had to set out to make their own way in the army, the church and the law – the higher echelons of which were dominated – and the armed forces still are – by the big landowning families.
It meant that by careful marriages to wealthy heiresses, the landowners could within a few generations accumulate huge estates. Virtually all of them were also making fortunes in the slave and sugar trade.
This gave them the huge economic power to invest in the beginnings of the industrial revolution – the creation of canals, coalmines and iron foundriesand later in factories and railways.
Meanwhile their European counterparts had a different system where, on the death of a landowner the estate was divided between all the sons; they saw their estates grow smaller with each generation. As their incomes dwindled in real terms, honour forbade them to seek paid work so they gravitated tothe royal courts to become idle, hard-up parasites on their respective monarchs – until the French revolution.
The British Navy played a big role in making the industrial revolution possible – it can be looked on as the armed wing of British entrepreneurship in the same way that MI6 is now the armed wing of the Confederation of British Industry. The navy protected British ships while attacking those of other countries, securing British mercantile acquisition of raw material andmarkets around the world for British manufactured goods.
Its need for cannons helped to foster the expanding iron and steel smelting industry. Later it helped Lancashire’s cotton industry by using militarymight to wipe out India’s Calcutta-based cotton industry. They even cut the hands off India’s spinners and weavers.
The rise of British capitalism, funded by the great Whig landowners, produced enough wealth to keep them happy by and large and also the new class of bourgeois capitalists this process was spawning, so there was little strain on the coalition of landowners and bourgeoisie.
But there were a few areas of conflict. There was some antagonism between the big Whig landowners and the smaller landowners, the squirarchy, who did not have the resources to join in this bonanza – and the self-employed craftsmen and artisans such as weavers and spinners who found themselves put out of work with the rise of manufacturing industry. The squirarchy tended to support the Tory party – later the Conservatives – and generally opposed the rapid economic and social changes.
The Whigs were also bringing industrial innovations to agriculture, employing methods promoted by the chief minister "Turnip Townsend". Farm workers were now paid wage labourers – and very low paid at that. They lived in tied cottages and could be hired and fired at will and lose their homes as well as their jobs. The new farming methods called for wholesale enclosures – taking access to common land away from farm labourers and their little plots that they used to raise a bit of food and graze a few animals. The loss of this little bit of side income had a devastating effect on their diet and health.
They went from a wide and varied diet to living on just tea and potatoes. Those who indulged in illegal smuggling or poaching – on the land that had been stolen from them – stood more chance of survival than those who tried to scrape by on their less-than-subsistence diet.
Each enclosure required an Act of Parliament and as Parliament was entirely controlled by landowners it churned them out in a kind of mass production. This was early privatisation and direct theft of public property – but was made legal by the ruling class state. The idea that MPs should be impartial and not gain any personal advantage from the laws they passed had not dawned; they believed that only those who had a direct economic interest were qualified to know what it was all about.
And they claimed to be progressive rationalists who were rescuing the land from old fashioned, unproductive methods and using science to produce so much more wealth from the land. (The same argument is used today by giant transnational companies seizing land in the Third World). The workers who were in the way could bugger off to the towns and get jobs in the new factories.
The landowners and the new industrialists did clash over the Corn Laws. The process of industrialisation led to a large increase in the population, which in turn increased the demand for food – especially corn for bread – and corn prices rose in the late 18th century. The extra demand created by the Napoleonic Wars also increased prices. This led to a rise in rents that the big landowners charged to the tenant farmers. At the end of the war there was a sudden deflation of the economy and prices fell sharply. New methods of factory production led to an all round lowering of prices, especially in rural areas where self-employed spinners were being put out of business and whose income and spending power were reduced.
When corn prices fell many tenant farmers could not keep up with their rents; the landowners could not extract money that was not there. But corn prices in Britain were still above those in Europe and the landowners feared that imports would further reduce corn prices.
So the landowner-dominated Parliament, under the premiership of Tory leader Lord Liverpool, in 1815 introduced the Corn Laws, which forbade the import of foreign corn as long as the price of corn in England was below 80 shillings (£4) a quarter.
This was very unpopular with merchants and traders who wanted the freest possible trading conditions; it was not popular with the new growing working classes because it kept the price of bread high and it was not popular with the manufacturing industrialists because they had to pay their workers higher wages and this added to production costs.
So there grew up a popular movement to abolish the Corn Laws led by Whig politicians Cobden and Bright. It coincided with agitation among the new industrial bourgeoisie for them to have a voice in Parliament, along with the new ideas of equality, liberty and brotherhood that started with the French Revolution and were influencing liberal entrepreneurs throughout Europe.
Parliamentary democracy at the time was about as low as it can get. Constituencies had been mapped out centuries before and populations had shifted leaving some constituencies with about six people eligible to vote while huge new towns like Manchester and Birmingham had virtually no representation at all. Many constituencies were "rotten boroughs" – completely under the control of the local big landowner who could hand out a safe seat in Parliament to any of his friends.
In the late 1820s this threatened to unite the workers and manufacturers in agitation for electoral reform and the abolition of the Corn Laws. The big landowners reluctantly conceded – intimidated by the example of the French revolution and calls for similar revolution in Britain. This led to the 1832 Reform Act, which tidied away the rotten boroughs and broadened the electoral base to let in the better-off bourgeoisie – but the working class was still excluded. It was followed throughout the next century by other reform acts that gradually brought the right to vote to all adults over 18 by 1969. Thus total control of Parliament was wrested from the landowners.
The Corn Laws were eventually repealed in the 1840s by Tory/Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel – Britain’s first prime minister from a manufacturing-industrial family. He was strongly influenced by the devastating effects of the potato famine in Ireland and the need to bring down the price of bread for the starving. It was too late to prevent the deaths of millions of Irish people who starved while the English owners of Irish estates were still exporting food from Ireland to England to benefit from the high corn prices.
The bourgeois presence in Parliament began to grow but at the same times other parts of the state came into being, diminishing the relative importance of Parliament, and the bourgeoisie were in the forefront of creating and dominating these new parts of the state.
These included the growing civil service, which went from a handful of very rich young men being dished out sinecure jobs by the King to a small army of clerks and administrators to tackle the newly-introduced income tax, customs and excise and other state affairs.
The civilian police force was introduced by Sir Robert Peel – after trials in Dublin and London. This was seen as desperately needed in the new big towns and industrial conurbations to keep law and order at all times. It replaced a system of lone night-watchmen who had little power except to raise an alarm and the county militias – para-military forces under the control of local aristocratic landowners. Needless to say some of those landowners resented their power being usurped by a civilian police force.
The growth of new giant industrial towns brought public health problems: overcrowding, lack of access to clean water and sewage disposal problems – leading to epidemics of diseases like typhoid and cholera. The ruling classes recognised what was needed: piped clean water, sewerage systems and street lighting. But the bourgeois ideologues among them at first trusted to market forces to supply the obvious needs.
But while the great and powerful entrepreneurs had been willing to spend fortunes on creating canals, coalmines and factories that would bring them direct profit, no one was willing to spend the necessary sums to provide clean water, sewerage and lighting that would not bring a direct profit.
So the ruling classes gradually conceded that these things must be provided by the state from taxation – and at a local level. The old boroughs and parishes had to be incorporated to allow them to levy local taxes on residents (rates) to provide these essentials. An Enabling Act of 1835 allowed new towns the right to vote to become corporations. Once again there was resistance from local landed aristocracy that their powers as traditional lords of the manor were being eroded.
When campaigners, including Richard Cobden, for incorporation met for a debate in a large public hall in Manchester they were surprised at the end of the meeting they were presented with tickets for a "court leet" dinner from the local Lord Oswald Moseley (ancestor the 1930s fascist leader), who was reminding them that he was still in charge.
"Well what in the world does this mean?" asked Cobden. "Is it that in this great town of Manchester we are still living under the feudal system? Does his mandate down here for us to come into this dingy hole to elect a government for Manchester, and then go and get a ticket for soup at his expense? Why now I will put an end to this thing."
A Tory propaganda counter offensive said: "Working men beware! We must have no Middle-Class Government. No Whig Corporation – No New Police – No Turtle-fed Aldermen – No Cotton Lord-Mayors – No Civic Banquets – No Golden Mace – Collars and Orders – No Wine Cellars stored out of a New Borough Rate … The Whigs are not our Friends, their Reform tends to establish a Shopocracy to rule over and grind down the Poor."
In many areas the big landowners still had a predominant influence over local government – but now it was by tradition and not by automatic right; the power of the "Shopocracy" was growing.
One part of the state the landowners did keep for themselves was the army and they did this through structural changes to the army to keep the sons of the bourgeoisie out of leading position. Up to then anyone with enough money could by themselves a commission to be an officer in the army and it was mostly the younger sons of aristocrats and of local squires who did so. Officers would be expected to supply their own horses and uniforms.
They needed little in the way of military skills – just a natural ability to "lead men". The study of military skills was somewhat frowned upon as the study of killing. Only officers in the Royal Artillery needed some mathematics to work out where their canon balls were likely to land – if they did not want to hit their own side in battle, so the Royal Artillery Military Academy in Woolwich pre-dated Sandhurst.
In Europe there were many more military academies but these were largely a way of providing board and lodging for the sons of destitute aristocrats.
But as industrialists grew wealthier, some of them wanted to by commissions for their sons and from 1830 the percentage of officers from the landed gentry began to decline in favour of the middle classes.
This prompted the Cardwell reforms, which introduced the military college, which in theory was democratic. It stopped the sale of commissions and made it compulsory for all aspiring officers to attend the college – the main one being Sandhurst – to learn military skills and leadership. But effectively it kept the rising middle classes out because the criteria for acceptance in the college were less about skill and intelligence and more about "the right sort of attitude". This meant feudalistic paternalism towards the troops and any taint of commercialism or enterprise was frowned on. The Royal Navy underwent similar changes.
But the industrialists were compensated by the growing demands for guns, other weapons and uniforms for the professional army that ruled an empire around the globe – and secured markets and raw materials for the industrialists. By the end of the 19th century Frederick Engels wrote that where once it might have been possible to obtain socialism through Parliament that was now impossible because of the power and strength of the military industrial complex outside of Parliament.
As more and more working people won the vote, so its value as a means of changing society declined. Marx described Parliament as nothing more than "a talking shop".
Marx also foresaw, in his Grundrisse that there is still a fundamental conflict of interest between landowners and industrialists in that rents paid for workers’ housing, for factory land, for shops – indeed for access to land for any economic activity – all add to the costs of industrial products and so reduce profits. He predicted a day when the industrialists would want to nationalise all land to eliminate these costs. It has not happened in Britain – yet – because both parts of the landowner/capitalist coalition are still doing very nicely and because the landowners are still very strong within the state machine.
Lenin pointed to a clash between the British Parliament and the landowner-dominated army in 1914 over the Curragh Mutiny in Ireland. Prime Minister Lloyd George had just successfully steered a Home Rule Bill for Ireland through Parliament when the Ulster Loyalists in the north of Ireland rebelled under Sir Edward Carson. He led an Ulster Volunteer Force of 200,000 men in an armed rebellion to keep Ireland as part of Britain.
The Government in Westminster ordered the army stationed at the Curragh in Kildare to put down the rebellion but the officers – but they sympathised with Carson and mutinied; they refused to leave their barracks. Parliament had no power to compel them to obey and it was Parliament that was forced to back down. The result was the division of Ireland into the Free State in the south and the British-occupied Six Counties in the north – a source of conflict ever since.
Lenin was disgusted and wrote: "The Liberal government was completely overwhelmed by this rebellion of the landlords, who stood at the head of the army. The Liberals are accustomed to console themselves with constitutional illusions and phrases about law, and closed their eyes to the real relation of forces, to the class struggle."
Later in the 1920s Lloyd George tried to curb the power of the landowners when he introduced swingeing death duties on Britain’s huge landed estates. He hoped this would gradually reduce the size and power of these estates as they were handed from one generation to another. It worked up to a point – and the landed gentry howled about being persecuted. But many of them soon found ways around it by turning their vast estates into companies and making themselves technically employees of the companies.
In recent years they have regained everything they lost under Lloyd George and more under the European Union Common Agricultural Policy, which pays huge subsidies and grants to big landowners.
Currently the landowners prefer to remain in the background of the political arena but their wealth and power remain formidable. Many town centres are still owned by the old landed aristocrats who make fortunes from the rents of high street shops, offices and factories without lifting a finger.
There is no comprehensive land register in England and Wales, though there is in Scotland. This makes it difficult to asses the real power and wealth of the landowners. They are still in a mutually lucrative coalition with Britain’s bourgeoisie.
The main changes to Britain’s state machine are now coming from international bodies, like the European Union, Nato, the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These influences are dominated by the class of global industrialists and finance companies, who are happy to tolerate the anachronism of the feudal elements remaining in the British state so long as they are ready to trot out the British army to support global capitalism’s adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Solidarity with the Bolivian people

Appeal for Solidarity With The People, The Government, The Communist And Progressive Forces of Bolivia

The political process in Bolivia faces a critical moment.

The reactionary forces, the oligarchy, the US government and some European forces promote a large scale campaign aiming to reverse the progressive processes in this Latin American country.
The goal of all these forces is to block the changes promoted by the Constitutional Assembly for a democratic Constitution for the benefit of the popular demands.
The retrograde forces, defeated on October 2003 and during the elections in 2005 try again to reorganize their ranks, to stop any change and to undermine President Evo Morales.
In order to achieve their goals they use any means, including armed groups.
The consequent progressive forces of the country, the social movements and organizations, after great and heroical battles, alongside with the Moviemento al Socialismo [MAS] under the presidency of Evo Morales, were the winners with big majority in the elections.
Now these forces try to valorize this victory in order important demands of the working people to be adopted and further promoted.
We, the signatories of this appeal, sharply denounce the support provided by the US government as well as its direct involvement in the subversive actions in Bolivia.
We also denounce the scandalous tolerance showed by other imperialist states and international organizations towards such inadmissible actions.
There is an urgent task the reactionary forces to be unequivocally condemned, isolated and defeated both on national and international level.
We stand on the side of the people of Bolivia and fully support the great mobilizations against the plans for a coup d'etat.
We support the alliance between the people and the government of Bolivia against the machinations of the oligarchy.
We express our full solidarity to the Bolivian people, to the government of the President Evo Morales, to the Communist Party of Bolivia, to MAS-IRSP and to all other progressive and anti-imperialist forces and movements in their great battle in defense of the progressive gains, in the struggle for deeper changes.
We call on for the development by all means of a large solidarity movement with the anti-imperialist forces and the people of Bolivia.

The parties

PADS, Algeria
Communist Party of Argentina
Democratic Progressive Tribune - Bahrain
Communist Party of Bangladesh
Communist Party of Belarus
Workers’ Party of Belgium
Communist Party of Bolivia
Communist Party of Brazil
Communist Party of Britain
New Communist Party of Britain
Party of the Bulgarian Communists
Communist Party of Canada
Communist Party of Chile
AKEL, Cyprus
Communist Party of Bohemia & Moravia
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Egypt
Communist Party of Estonia
Communist Party of Finland
German Communist Party
Communist Party of Greece
Communist Party of India
Tudeh Party of Iran
Communist Party of Ireland
The Workers Party of Ireland
Communist Party of Israel
Party of the Italian Communists
Jordanian Communist Party
Socialist Party of Latvia
Lebanese Communist Party
Socialist Party of Lithuania
Communist Party of Luxembourg
Communist Party of Macedonia
Party of Communists, Mexico
Popular Socialist Party of Mexico
New Communist Party of Netherlands
Communist Party of Norway
Peruvian Communist Party
Philippine Communist Party (PKP-1930)
Communist Party of Poland
Portuguese Communist Party
Socialist Alliance Party, Romania
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
Communist Party of Peoples of Spain
Communist Party of Sri Lanka
Sudanese Communist Party
Communist Party of Sweden
Communist Party of Turkey (TKP)
Communist Party of Uruguay
Communist Party, USA
Communist Party of Venezuela
New Communist Party of Yugoslavia

A layman's view of global warming and climate change

by Eric Trevett

IT IS CLEAR that something fundamental is happening to the climate of our planet: glacial fields are melting at both the Arctic and Antarctic; there are unprecedented periods of drought in Australia, tornados of great intensity and huge floods in Louisiana and Mexico on a scale never witnessed before and the permafrost of Siberia is thawing out.
Not long ago people like George Bush and the former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, denied there was any climate change at all. They have since had to abandon that point of view. A more sophisticated argument being put forward by some is that the climate change is a natural development. Climate changes like these have occurred before, like the one that caused the demise of the dinosaurs.
It follows there is nothing to be done to counter this natural process. Fortunately that defeatist view that justifies passivity and inaction fails to take into account the ability of human beings to influence and to some extent change their environment, while at the same time embracing and harmonising with the forces of nature.
Scientific analysis is that the prime reason or the climatic changes has been and still is the continuing build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Much of it comes from industry: power generation, motor cars, lorries and aircraft, which use fossil fuels. There was a comparatively small amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere before the industrial revolution but over the past 200 years there has been a massive build up of it and it has induced a process of global warming, which in turn promotes climate change.
If allowed to continue unabated the future will indeed be bleak and it is not an exaggeration to say that the survival of the human species itself could be problematic.
Having identified the problem and achieved broad acceptance, a top priority should be given to cutting the emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
There is still much to do to actively achieve this. Britain’s record is not very good in that struggle to date. According to the Independent emissions have increased by three per cent over the past 10 years.
Former Prime Minister Blair spoke a lot about facing up to the dangers of global warming but it will take more than good speeches and changing a few electric light bulbs to resolve the problem.
In a way the shortage pf oil and the escalating price of fuel, together with the tax, insurance and maintenance are forcing increasing numbers to make their journey to work by train, even though train fares are exorbitant, for many it is still cheaper than going by car. We should be actively demanding the renationalisation of the railways to reduce fares as a basic part of creating an integrated transport system.
In regard to the harmful emissions from aircraft, it would not be too much of an inconvenience if all internal flights were stopped and with the development of rail links to major cities in Europe a number of international flights could be cancelled or replaced.
We should also add our voice to oppose the building of additional runways at Heathrow, Gatwick and so on. Of course to have a fully integrated transport system it would be necessary to nationalise the air travel industry, and while we are at it the road haulage concerns as well.
Of course under capitalism there is no chance of achieving an integrated transport system; yet this is basic for the effective tackling of climate change.
As a result of the climate changes it is clear that crises from flooding in some areas and drought in others and the encroachment of the sea over areas of land, it would be difficult to produce sufficient food to ensure an adequate supply. Therefore the temptation to divert land currently producing food crops in favour of crops for fuel production should be opposed.
It goes with out saying that the efforts to build up our defences against rising tides should combine with fresh efforts being made to desalinate water at an economic price for irrigation purposes and, if possible, for drinking water as well. On the nuclear issue, there should be more effort to explore the possibilities of using nuclear fusion, which eliminates the problem of radioactive waste.
The human species is facing a crisis different from and greater than it has ever faced before. Unfortunately big business will combine to put its thirst for profit above its concern for people’s wellbeing. People like George Bush fight for the vested interests of the likes of the oil industry. They stand in the way and in opposition to what is literally a struggle for survival. It is instructive to remember the rearguard action the tobacco companies put up in denying there was any link between smoking and bad health.
The fight for a healthy environment makes the struggle for socialism more important than ever before. Like the systems of slavery and feudalism that preceded it, capitalism is now standing in the way of the economic and cultural development of humanity.
This crisis cannot be resolved by market forces – nor by government at a local level. It must be addressed at central government and international levels.
I would welcome a debate from readers in the letters page of the New Worker.

Climate change: urgent action needed

by Renee Sams

MOST of the energy we use today is provided by fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas, which have provided cheap and abundant power needed for the development of today’s industrial society. The choices that will be made in the very near future will have enormous consequences for the future.
At the time of the industrial revolution it was thought that those fuels were so plentiful they would last forever. It was not realised until the last century with its ever increasing need for power, that one day those resources would come to an end.
The first warning came in 1949 when M King Hubbert, a widely acclaimed geophysicist, startled the world with his assessment that the fossil fuel era would be very short-lived and that fossil fuels would not be able to meet world demand in the relatively near future.
In 1956 he predicted that US oil production would peak in 1970 and then decline. This prediction became known as Hubbert’s Peak.
But the world did not heed the warning, and since then world energy use has risen by almost 71 per cent. And while the developing nations now need their share of the dwindling resources, it is predicted that oil use will continue to grow exponentially as they become more industrialised.
With such an easily available cheap and profitable fuel there has been no incentive to research and develop alternative cleaner, renewable sources of mass energy and it is only now that some progress is being made in the use of alternative forms of renewable energy sources.
Currently, hydroelectric energy is the largest resource of renewable energy but progress is being made in tapping energy from solar, wind and water, to nuclear, biomass, geothermal and even new forms of fossil fuel.
As realisation sinks in that the end of the era of plentiful oil is approaching, the Bush administration has recently adopted a policy to produce a major amount of ethanol from corn as a substitute for fossil fuel to reduce the US reliance on imported oil.
An increasing use of biofuels seems like a good option for both governments and industry but far from reducing global emissions, increasing use of land to produce suitable crops is likely to accelerate climate change.

abandon

At the G8 meeting last June, President Bush stood out as the major obstacle to progress on climate. He forced the final communiqué to abandon any firm commitment to emission reduction.
In the US Bush’s new policy has already had some dire effects. It has driven the price of corn up sharply, more than doubling in the past 12 months and this has meant that the problem of hunger in the least developed countries of the world like sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia has increased.
Already it is clear that the sustainability of biofuel is very doubtful, with the continually increasing energy demands that will undoubtedly lead eventually to prime agricultural land being used to feed vehicles instead of people. Even in countries like Mexico and South Africa that have some level of economic development but where corn is a still a staple, a catastrophic rise of 400 per cent in the price of corn brought the people out on the streets their thousands in protest.
Brazil is one of the major producers of biofuel, using the waste from sugar production to make ethanol. About 30 per cent of the automotive fuel in Brazil now uses ethanol and the industry has recently announced that it intends to invest $9 billion to increase production.
It has been pointed out by environmental activists that this will require the clearing of a major area of the Amazon rain forest, which has already been massively reduced in size by the logging companies over the years.
The ethanol boom is raising commodity prices and large landowners have been burning more forest to clear land for ethanol production and obtain a higher profit than they can on cattle ranching.
And there is growing evidence that the rainforests play an important role in regulating the climate in the northern hemisphere.
In Africa a number of countries including Benin, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal, led by Ghana have been testing the production of biofuel from jatropha, a weed that animals won’t eat and farmers use as hedges for their fields.
It is a perennial weed that grows well in poor soil and arid conditions without fertilizer or irrigation, and its roots lying close to the surface stabilise the soil and this has made it useful for planting on earthen dams and dikes. Mali is an extremely poor, landlocked country and the government hopes to be able to power all the country’s 12,000 villages with affordable, renewable energy derived from jatropha. They have said that they will not be producing jatropha for export until the needs of their own people for energy have been met. It is an experiment that will need to be strictly controlled if they are to carry out this ambitious project.

breakthrough

In China they have made a breakthrough in the use of sustainable and renewable energy with revolutionary wind power technology. Last year they unveiled the world’s first magnetic levitation (maglev) generator which is expected to boost wind energy generating capacity by as much as 20 per cent over traditional wind turbines.
This would effectively cut the operational costs of wind farms by up to half, keeping the overall cost of wind power under 0.4 yuan ($ 5 cents). These new frictionless turbines are able to utilise winds with starting speeds as low as 1.5 metres per second, which is arousing interest in a dozen Chinese cities and more than 50 countries around the world.
A spokesman for the Guangzhou based Zhonke Hengyuan Energy Company said that the generator could be used on islands, in observatories, and television stations, and even provide roadside lighting by using the airflow from passing vehicles.
Beijing is going all out to achieve “Green Olympics”, Beijing Vice Mayor Liu Jingmin told a press conference “by not only improving the city’s ecology and environment, but also by adopting a ‘green’ environment-friendly approach to managing city affairs”. China is all set to spend US$200 billion over the next 15 years on environmental improvements.
President Bush, backed by the Exxon Mobil (trading as Esso in this country) is already prepared to continue the policy of preventing any meaningful action to bring down global emissions of greenhouse gases at the Bali Kyoto meeting.
Exxon is the largest oil company in the world with the biggest annual profits of any company last year of $36 billion.
This giant funds a variety of mainly extreme right-wing think tanks, which have lobbied against Kyoto from its inception.At a gathering of the 40 biggest corporations they all agreed that the only way forward for them is a market-based system of the buying and selling of carbon “credits” that will not reduce carbon emissions by one iota.
Join people all around the world to demand that world leaders take the urgent action we need to prevent the catastrophic destabilisation of global climate. The national demonstration in London will be one of many demonstrations on climate taking place around the world on 8th December.

International communist celebration in Minsk and Moscow

COMMUNISTS from all over the world celebrated the 90th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution last week in a series of events that started in Minsk and ended in a massive march through the streets of Moscow.
Eighty communist and workers’ parties including the New Communist Party of Britain, from over 60 countries attended the 9th international communist conference in Minsk, the capital of former Soviet republic of Belarus, to discuss the relevance of the Russian revolution in the 21st century. NCP leader Andy Brooks and Richard Bos from the Central Committee took part in the three-day event, which was supported by the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Democratic Korea and Vietnam.
Leaders of the Communist Party of Belarus said the conference was of great significance because Belarus was where the first congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party took place in March 1898. The congress established the Marxist party of the Russian proletariat, which played a decisive part in the success of the October Revolution. Now Minsk is the capital of Belarus, the only former Soviet republic which still has a progressive government committed to the welfare of the masses and the only former Soviet republic where the anniversary of the 1917 revolution is still a public holiday.
In the years that that followed the counter-revolution and break-up of the Soviet Union pro-imperialist revisionist and nationalist “reform” politicians formed a government committed to capitalist restoration that plunged the country into corruption, hyper-inflation and chaos. That was halted by the mass movement that defeated the reactionaries in the 1994 presidential elections and took Alexander Lukashenko, a Belarusian leader from Soviet days, to power.
Supported by the communists, the Lukashenko government has renovated the agricultural and manufacturing base which remains in public ownership. Belarus is now a “socially orientated market-economy” with free education and healthcare, virtually full employment, vibrant industries and collective farming that has made the country a major food exporter in Europe.
The conference began on 3rd November with the laying of flowers at Lenin’s monument and the monument to Victory in the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany followed by an official welcome from President Lukashenko. The communist forum reviewed the significance of the historic event in Russia in 1917, as well as current trends in social development, and exchanged points of view on the pressing issues internally and externally affecting one another’s countries. And on the last day the delegations visited four state-owned factories and farms to see the progress being made in Belarus with their own eyes.
On 5th November the international delegations departed by night-train to Moscow to take part in the celebrations organised by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). Life for working people in the Russian capital is far different to that of workers in Belarus. Though the Putin government has curbed the worst excesses of the worthless Yeltsin regime and it is safe to walk the streets of Moscow, at least in daylight, there are still plenty of beggars along streets full of shops packed with goods only the chosen few can afford.
Delegates visited the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square and joined CPRF supporters for an October celebration in the columned hall of Moscow’s historic House of Unions. There it was clear that achievements of Lenin and Stalin had not been forgotten by the applause whenever their names were mentioned by speakers, including CPRF First Secretary Gennady Zyuganov and Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya, the second woman in space and now a CPRF MP in the Russian parliament, the State Duma.
Finally on 7th November they joined tens of thousands of Russian communists for a march through Moscow in sub-zero temperatures that ended in a rally addressed by Gennady Zyuganov and other leaders. Russia is in the throes of a national election that Vladimir Putin’s “United Russia” bloc is predicted to win. The CPRF, which has 45 members in the State Duma, is fighting to retain and expand its share of the seats.
This was the biggest communist demonstration in Moscow since 1993 and indeed the biggest of any kind in the Russian capital in recent years. The police put the numbers at over 40,000 but many participants thought it was much, much bigger.
As the rally ended with the Internationale, comrades from all over the world could see that the communist movement is alive and well in eastern Europe – defending the gains of the working people of Belarus and marching on the streets demanding change in the heart of Putin’s Russia.

Communists march through Moscow on Revolution Day

On 7th November 2007 the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) held a march and rally to mark the 90th anniversary of the Great October Russian Revolution. Over 40,000 people took part in the demonstration, the biggest communist rally seen in Moscow since 1993. Delegations from 80 communist parties including the NCP took part in the demonstration

Review: Information Bulletin -- the Lisbon conference

Information Bulletin 2/2006/15,
£5.00 plus 50p P&P, NCP Lit PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ.

The second part of the report of the conference of communist and workers parties held in Lisbon in 2006. Part one is still available from the NCP at the same price.

by Ray Jones

YOU CAN ALWAYS finds things of interest in the Information Bulletin, there’s always something to learn.
Michael Perth from the Communist Party of Australia gives an insight in to Australia’s imperialist role. Not only its support of the United States’ imperialist adventures around the world but also Australia’s own role in the South Pacific.You might not know but the police commissioners in both the Soloman Islands and Fiji and many government administrators in these places are Australians. The Australian military and police are occupying Timor Leste, the world’s newest state, and Australia refuses to put them under UN control.
Badouin Deckers of the Workers’ Party of Belgium makes some good points about the relationship between China and the US. He claims that the Western powers and Japan hoped to gain control over China’s economy and to impose bourgeois parliamentarism — the 2002 report of the US Congress commission on economic relations says so explicitly.
But the 2005 report admitted the failure of the policy and says that in the long run the relationship will be negative for the US economy and security.
Deckers also quotes the independent research group Global Security saying that much of the US’s massive spending against “terrorism” is really aimed at China.
On Iraq Deckers also uses US sources against them. While the US has been busy blaming the resistance for the civilian deaths he points out that the Intelligence Agency of the US Defence Department has admitted in August 2006 that 70 per cent of the bomb attacks in July were against US-led forces and 20 per cent Iraqi puppet forces. The remaining 10 per cent against civilians have been denied by the Iraqi resistance.
There is much more good material in this Bulletin but there also does seem to be a worrying trend in a minority of contributions. The use of “Marxist” instead of “Marxist-Leninist” sometimes strikes a sour note for those of us who have come through the battle against revisionism in the old Communist Party of Great Britain.
We have learnt that the fight against revisionism does not end but must be a continuous process.