The nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula

Speech delivered by Keith Bennett at a public meeting held on 5 December 2006 at Marx Memorial Library, London organised by the Coordinating Committee of the Friends of Korea.

Comrades,

The purpose of my talk this evening is to attempt to provide information and to set out some of the factual background to the present nuclear crisis which played a prominent role in the international news headlines over the last couple of months - to try and put that into some kind of historical and overall political context.
In setting out the background to the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula, I want to say first of all that this represents three parts of unfinished business and one harbinger of possible future international development. The Korean issue represents the unfinished business of the national liberation movements against colonialism that played a huge part in the history of the 20th century; possibly the only part of the unfinished business of the World War Two struggle against fascism and Japanese militarism; and also the unfinished business of the Cold War. It also represents a harbinger of the possible future scenario for the development of international relations in the 21st century, namely a possible intensified rivalry or even clash between the United States and China in the future.

The Historical Context

In summary, Korea fell victim to imperialism like most parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the 19th century, with various imperialist powers contending to establish their domination over Korea - the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, for example, was largely fought over the Korean issue. At the beginning of the 20th century, Korea finally became a Japanese colony. The resistance to the colonisation of Korea by Japan was ongoing throughout history and the main form that it came to take was that of a guerrilla struggle under communist leadership led by Comrade Kim Il Sung. However as part of the post World War Two international settlement it was agreed that Korea would be divided, as was the case in Vietnam, except that this would be a temporary division pending the calling of democratic elections to form a united independent state. It was agreed that Korea would be temporarily divided into a Soviet zone in the north and an American occupied zone in the south. Those moves towards the reunification and independence of the whole country did not take place because as everybody knows the end of the Second World War was followed almost immediately by the onset of the Cold War by US and British imperialism, in particular, which froze the division of the Korean peninsula. In 1950 the Korean War broke out. The Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953 - a war of unparalleled barbarity by US imperialism and its satellites. Some 4 million Korean people were killed in the course of this conflict. Every city and town in the whole of Korea was destroyed by US aerial bombardment. The US used chemical and bacterial warfare, and also threatened to use nuclear weapons against Korea and against China in the course of the Korean War [I will say more on this aspect in a minute]. It was also, and this has recently been confirmed by the opening up of official US documents, official US policy to fire on and kill any columns of refugees the US forces saw coming their way.

US nuclear threats against the DPRK since 1950

Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, Korea, which was a victim of World War Two and not a perpetrator, remains the only country divided as a result of the outcome of that conflict. According to the Western media, the nuclear tests carried out by the DPRK a couple of months back are presented as being an unprovoked or inexplicable provocation carried out by an unstable or dangerous regime of some kind. That is what we have to cut through because for the DPRK and for the Korean people as a whole the nuclear issue is not something to be understood as today’s crisis. The nuclear issue is about a half-century and more of threat that the Korean people have had to live with every day.
In its September/October edition, an American academic publication, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, identified four occasions on which they say that the United States has verifiably threatened the DPRK with nuclear attack. This publication states the following four threats:

Threat number one: “One of the first instances of a U.S. threat of nuclear use came just five years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. With the United States mired in the Korean War, in November 1950 a reporter asked President Harry S. Truman whether U.N. forces might cross the Yalu River into Manchuria. Truman responded, ‘We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have’. Asked whether that included using atomic bombs, Truman responded: ‘That includes every weapon we have’. A few minutes after the press conference ended, the lead of the United Press wire story read, ‘President Truman said today that the United States has under consideration use of the atomic bomb in connection with the war in Korea.’ [7]”.

Threat number two this Bulletin goes on to say is: “Nearly three years later, Truman's successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, also wielded the threat of U.S. nuclear use. In May 1953, Eisenhower authorized an expanded Korean bombing campaign, prompting the North Koreans and Chinese to respond by increased ground action. As part of the heightened military activity, the Joint Chiefs presented six different scenarios for ending the war, ‘most envisioning the possible use of atomic weapons,’ according to an official Pentagon history. ‘After the NSC reached a seeming consensus on May 20 to employ atomic weapons both strategically and tactically - that is within and outside the Korean Peninsula - the administration communicated its resolve to the Chinese and North Koreans. . . . Both Eisenhower and [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles believed the message had the desired effect’ of ending the war, the history reads. [8]”

The third incident identified here, they go on to say is: “In what later became known as the ‘Tree-Trimming Incident,’ U.S. forces in Korea again threatened the use of nuclear weapons when they were placed on DEFCON 3 on August 19, 1976. The alert, which was ordered in response to a fatal skirmish between U.S. and North Korean border guards over U.S. attempts to trim a tree in the demilitarized zone, involved deployment of nuclear and other forces in operations that signalled preparations for an attack on North Korea. [9] The U.S. display of force included nuclear-capable B-52 bombers flying ‘from Guam ominously north up the Yellow Sea on a vector directly to . . . Pyongyang,’ noted Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub in his book, Hazardous Duty. [10]”
And the final threat listed in this article: “Most recently, during the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis, the United States nearly launched a conventional strike against the North's nuclear production facilities. Although nuclear threats were not reported to have been part of the effort, U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) did apparently study the nuclear option in 1995. And during 1997 congressional hearings, Gen. Eugene Habiger, commander of Stratcom, confirmed that indeed the United States had threatened the North with nuclear weapons during the crisis. Asked what ‘sort of deterrence’ he thought U.S. nuclear weapons played in preventing WMD from being used by rogue states, Habiger responded, ‘In my view, sir, it plays a very large role. . . .[The threat of U.S. nuclear use] was passed to the North Koreans back in 1995, when the North Koreans were not coming off their reactor approach they were taking.’ [11] Habiger subsequently explained that the message passed on to North Korea had been explicit. [12]”

Personally, I think that one can identify considerably more than these four occasions on which the US clearly threatened the use of nuclear weapons against north Korea, but those are four examples from an impeccable establishment US source. It is also worth noting that the Quadrennial Review adopted by the Pentagon in 2002 singled out the DPRK, along with six other countries as being explicitly countries which are in US military thinking possible targets for a US first strike.

The Geneva Accord 1994

As we have seen, during what some people call the recent years’ history of the nuclear threat to Korea, the Clinton administration in the US actively considered the use of nuclear weapons against Korea in the first half of the 1990s. Instead, as we know, former president Jimmy Carter put himself forward as a mediator and went to Pyongyang and at that time secured an agreement with President Kim Il Sung for a resolution of what was called the nuclear issue. Some people say President Carter somewhat wrong-footed the Clinton administration by going live on CNN from Pyongyang and announcing it before the White House had had a chance to shoot down the deal, and putting them in a politically difficult situation in terms of being able to get out of it. As a result of that visit a series of discussions concluded with an agreement signed between the US and the DPRK in October 1994 - known as the Geneva Accord. The basic premise of the Geneva Accord was that in exchange for the DPRK not going ahead with its threats to withdraw from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for permitting IAEA inspections and freezing the development of its own nuclear power facilities at Yongbyong, which used prior-enriched uranium, the US would first of all establish and lead an international consortium which would design, build and provide for the DPRK two light water reactors to meet its energy needs; in the interim period the US would supply fuel oil to the DPRK in order to make up for its energy shortfall; the US would progressively lift its sanctions which had been in place against north Korea since 1950; and the two countries would gradually move towards, firstly, the establishment of representative offices in their respective capitals, and finally to full normalisation of their diplomatic relations.
As a native American chief once noted, Americans never signed a treaty with another country which they did not immediately set out to try and break. Predictably enough the Geneva Accord was no exception. The US took no substantive measures to improve its overall relations with the DPRK: the delivery of the fuel which they were committed to provide was late and in short supply, and they totally dragged their heels on the building of the light water reactors so that several years after the starting date and just before what was supposed to be the completion date there was little more than two holes in the ground. Apart from the obvious reason that the US always does this, there were essentially two specific reasons why the US did this.

1. Particularly in regard to the delivery of fuel, the Clinton administration lacked a majority in the Congress and in the Senate and the Republicans were (a) opposed to this agreement in principle which they saw as appeasement, and (b) wanted to use it in their domestic political game against the Clinton administration.

2. More fundamentally, as several leading members of the Clinton administration have openly said, the US calculation at the time was that the DPRK regime was going to collapse within a few years, therefore they could afford to drag their feet because they would never be in a position where they were held to account for their broken promises. Imperialism has continually longed for the collapse of the DPRK, but this hoped for collapse has singularly failed to materialise, which gives the imperialist a kind of dilemma as to what they should do.

As a result in October 2000 Vice-Marshall Jo Myong-rok, the vice-chairman of the National Defence Commission of the DPRK which is chaired by Comrade Kim Jong Il, paid a visit to the US for discussions with President Clinton. That visit resulted in a joint communiqué agreed between the US and the DPRK on 12 October 2000. The joint communiqué is a very interesting document. It is well worth reading in full. In order to save time, I will just read an example to summarise the points:

“Building on the principles laid out in the June 11, 1993, US-DPRK Joint Statement and reaffirmed in the October 21, 1994, Agreed Framework, the two sides agreed to work to remove mistrust, build mutual confidence, and maintain an atmosphere in which they can deal constructively with issues of central concern. In this regard, the two sides reaffirmed that their relations should be based on the principles of respect for each other's sovereignty and non-interference in each other's internal affairs, and noted the value of regular diplomatic contacts, bilaterally and in broader fora.

“The two sides agreed to work together to develop mutually beneficial economic cooperation and exchanges. To explore the possibilities for trade and commerce that will benefit the peoples of both countries and contribute to an environment conducive to greater economic cooperation throughout Northeast Asia, the two sides discussed an exchange of visits by economic and trade experts at an early date.”

This communiqué goes through a whole series of areas of concern to the US and the DPRK and sets out a constructive way of dealing with them. It concluded: “It was agreed that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will visit the DPRK in the near future to convey the views of US President William Clinton directly to Chairman Kim Jong-il of the DPRK National Defence Commission and to prepare for a possible visit by the President of the United States.”

A visit by Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, to Pyongyang took place very shortly afterwards at the end of October 2000, and again in the course of that visit a considerable consensus of views was reached between the two sides. At that time it was proposed that after further rounds of discussions between experts from the two sides, President Clinton would, at the close of his presidency, make a visit to Pyongyang. Towards the end of Madeleine Albright’s visit she gave a press conference in the Koryo Hotel [the transcript of the press conference is still available on the US state department web site which I looked at this afternoon]. This transcript bears careful reading. I will quote just a couple of examples of what Madeleine Albright had to say at that press conference:

“I explained to Chairman Kim America’s vision for relations between our countries free from past hostility, relations which contribute to peace and stability throughout the region, and which support the process of reconciliation between the North and the South. …
“Chairman Kim and I had serious, constructive, and in-depth discussions of proposals on diplomatic relations, missile restraint, and security issues”.

Towards the end of the press conference she was asked: “You told us that you had lengthy discussions with our Chairman Kim Jong Il. I’d like to know what are your impressions of the Chairman, and also what kind of discussions did you have?”

To which Secretary Albright replied: “I have to say that I was very gratified by the length of our discussions, by the fact that we took up all the subjects of importance to our side and presumably to his, and I found him a very practical and decisive listener and interlocutor.”

One can say that that point was the high point of any prospect for any positive relationship between the US and the DPRK and we were looking (which seems strange now in the present situation) for a possible visit by President Clinton and a full normalisation of US-DPRK relations. That visit did not take place because of the chaotic last days of the Clinton administration with the Appeals in the Supreme Court etc, and also because Clinton took a decision that he would prioritise trying to kick-start the Israel/Palestine talks rather than go to the DPRK. In an interview she gave to the Financial Times a few months ago, Madeleine Albright said that in retrospect she considered this to have been a mistaken decision by herself and President Clinton not to proceed with the Pyongyang visit.
The reason I have laid a considerable amount of stress on this is because we tend to lose sight of the process through which US-DPRK relations have been, and the willingness that the DPRK has shown to move towards a resolution of these problems for so long as they had a dialogue partner in the US that in some way can be defined as reasonable.
All this takes place against the background of the fact, as I have said, that the US in a period of three years murdered 4 million Koreans and then a period of the occupation of south Korea with constant nuclear threats against north Korea subsequently. So, it is not surprising that there is a huge and deep feeling of mistrust and hatred of the US in north Korea; therefore to build the momentum towards any kind of resolution of the issues that are faced is a complicated and a difficult process. It is one which is characterised by lack of trust, and that trust can only be very painstakingly built up. To reach the point that was reached in the last days of the Clinton presidency in US-DPRK relations was not easy. You have to understand the difficulties of reaching that point in order to put into perspective exactly how the DPRK side and the Korean people feel about the policies that were adopted towards them by the Bush administration. The Bush administration took office when there had been the best ever, not easily secured, prospect for normalisation of the US-DPRK relationship, which for the Korean people is important because it is the normalisation of that relationship that opens the way to the peaceful reunification of Korea and for the Korean people to be allowed to get on with what they want, which is to build up their own modern independent state on the basis of self determination.
The Bush administration comes in. And, although Colin Powell at first showed some indication of wanting to continue with the line of the Clinton administration, he on this as on other issues was largely isolated by the neo-cons - the Rumsfelds, Cheneys and so on. The first thing the Bush administration does is freeze and rip up every piece of the agreements that the US and DPRK had reached. It placed the whole process of the US-DPRK dialogue in the deep freezer. Then for about a year we get a situation where the only US policy towards the DPRK appears to be the uttering of puerile personal insults by Bush and others against Kim Jong Il and the Korean leadership, culminating in the now world famous, notorious “Axis of Evil” speech. The “Axis of Evil” speech was then followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In other words the US picked out three victims - Iraq, Iran and north Korea - and then began to tick them off with the Iraq war. It was against the background of having a carefully built up relationship reduced to nothing, of being insulted, of then being threatened, of seeing the US put its threats into practice in the case of Iraq, and of assessing this prospect, that the DPRK decided that it had no alternative but to resume developing its independent nuclear deterrent for self defence.

Six parties sign Joint Statement September 2005

Once the US-DPRK bilateral process had been completely sabotaged, the Chinese put forward a proposal to organise six-party talks which met in Beijing periodically. These talks proceeded very fitfully without making any particular progress until September 2005, when the fourth round of the six-party talks resulted in an agreement to which all six parties signed up on 19 September. Essentially this Joint Statement, which bears careful study, took us back to more or less what had been already agreed in the Geneva Accord of October 1994. In other words, eleven years had gone by and we were simply back to where we were. Besides outlining a way to deal with the nuclear issue, there are other clauses in it, for example, as follows, the significance of this I will come back to in a moment, “The Six Parties undertook to promote economic cooperation in the fields of energy, trade and investment, bilaterally and/or multilaterally”. On paper this Joint Statement dealt with more or less all the aspects of the nuclear issue. The problem with the Statement was, as we have seen, that there is a complete lack of trust between the DPRK and the US. Essentially this Joint Statement contains a set of aspirations on the part of all sides. In this situation of a lack of trust, there was verbal agreement of what the ultimate outcome should be, but there was no agreement on the order and sequence of events - who would move first.
In fact the US was very reluctant to sign the agreement at all - they hesitated for about two days after all the other parties had signed and it was only after some very heavy arm-twisting by the Chinese Foreign Ministry that the US agreed to sign at all. The person who signed the agreement for the US was the US chief negotiator in the six-party talks, Christopher Hill. Immediately after signing this agreement, Hill came under quite strong attack from neo-cons in Washington having allegedly given away too much to the DPRK. The day after the agreement was signed, the White House press spokesperson, Sean McCormack, made a statement in which he basically, talked down the agreement that the Americans had signed and really went back to the position the Americans had been pushing for before. He said the US would only do this when the DPRK completely, verifiably and irreversibly, etc. give up all its nuclear programmes. This was emphatically not what the Joint Statement said. The agreement may not have spelt out the sequence or the timing, but it emphatically did not say what McCormack said it said. It was in response to McCormack’s US press statement that the DPRK Foreign Ministry the next day issued its statement in which it reaffirmed its position that it would not unilaterally give up its independent nuclear deterrent. Here the western media always, 999 times out of 1000, presents it by saying ‘north Korea signed the deal and the next day it ripped it up’. This is not what happened. The agreement was signed and it was the Americans who ripped it up. And it was in response to that that the DPRK outlined its position.

US instigates new economic sanctions against the DPRK

However, as the Americans were not happy at signing the agreement, less than one month after that they manipulated the international banking system to force a hitherto rather obscure bank in Macao, called the Banco Delta Asia, to freeze all the accounts of DPRK businesses and foreign businesses doing business with the DPRK or banking there - one of them is British American Tobacco (of which Kenneth Clarke is a director - not anybody in the DPRK!). These accounts were frozen using the excuse of one of the hoary old DPRK scare stories that bubble away in the media for year after year. This one being about the DRPK’s supposed ‘manufacture of counterfeit currency’. The point about this US action has really nothing to do with the counterfeit issue. What has to be understood about this action is (a) the timing - coming less than a month after the hard won agreement that had essentially taken eleven years to get back to square one, and (b) it goes against the spirit, and I would argue also the letter, of the agreement, namely, the point that I previously quoted from the six-party agreement concerning the promotion of “economic cooperation in the fields of energy, trade and investment, bilaterally and/or multilaterally”.
Instead of doing that, the US instigated new sanctions on the DPRK’s international trade and finance and indeed on people doing international business with the DPRK. The US then proceeded to pressurise a whole series of other countries, banking institutions in east Asia and elsewhere to follow suit and to impose their own sanctions on the DPRK, using a threat to those countries and institutions that they will freeze them out of the US economy and the international banking system if they did not follow their diktat. As a result of this pressure, since those sanctions were brought in (October 2006) all the DPRK international business and foreign trade has either been frozen or has been seriously circumscribed. However since the US made the allegation, more than one year ago, they have declined to offer any proof whatsoever. They have declined to offer it bilaterally to the DPRK. After the US imposed these sanctions, the DPRK asked to have discussions with the US and sent its representatives to the US. The Americans in their typical way said: we won’t negotiate with you, we will give you a list of demands of what you should do. On that occasion the DPRK even said: allow us to open accounts with US banks in the US and then you can supervise the money that comes in and out and you can see whether it is honest or not. The US refused to negotiate, refused to present any evidence to the DPRK and, needless to say, refused the DPRK’s proposal. The US has never offered a scrap of proof either bilaterally or in the wider public domain. The US has however persistently offered contradictory accounts of the reasons for its actions against Banco Delta Asia and other institutions. On the one hand the US sometimes says it is a ‘policing matter’ or a ‘matter for the treasury’ with no bearing on other sections of the government or on the six-party talks. On the other hand they openly say that this is an excellent method of trying to bring about ‘regime change’ in the DPRK. The US sometimes says that the place to discuss this is at the six-party talks - the very same six-party talks that they say it has nothing to do with! At more or less the same time, the US says it can and cannot be discussed.
Certainly what the US has said is that these sanctions have been more effective than even they anticipated, and the US increasingly hopes to use these as a model for further sanctions. For example, there is a law going through the US Congress which will make illegal (and they seem to think that their law should be applied in every country of the world) for any bank any where in the world to have any financial dealings with the government of the Palestinian Authority for so long as the PA is led by Hamas. They are also attempting to bring in a similar law with regard to Iran. In the last couple of months they have put pressure on the Union Bank of Switzerland and a number of Swiss banks, as a result of which the Swiss banks have frozen their business dealings not only with Iran but also with Cuba on the grounds that the Swiss banking system is not safe from US pressure unless they take these measures. Since the sanctions on Banco Delta Asia were brought in, the DPRK has made it a pre-condition for its return to the six-party talks that these sanctions be lifted.
Finally, after the nuclear test there were private talks in Beijing between the US, the DPRK and China where it was agreed, although there is as yet no publicly announced date for their resumption, to resume the six-party talks soon within the context that this issue of the sanctions will be discussed and resolved within the first session.

DPRK Nuclear Test October 2006

We have seen the long history of US hostility, and nuclear threats, to the DPRK and the eleven years of attempting to normalise the DPRK-US relations which the US has consistently sabotaged. This brought us finally to some prospect of a resolution of the situation with the Joint Statement last September which the US immediately sabotaged, just as they have sabotaged everything else in the past. Then, to bring us up to date, we come to the missile tests in the summer carried out by the DPRK and finally the nuclear test. Two days after the nuclear test the spokesman of the Foreign Ministry of the DPRK made a statement which was reported on KCNA (Korean Central News Agency) in which he said: “Although the DPRK conducted the nuclear test due to the U.S., it still remains unchanged in its will to denuclearize the peninsula through dialogue and negotiations.

“The denuclearization of the entire peninsula was President Kim Il Sung's last instruction and an ultimate goal of the DPRK.
“The DPRK clarified more than once that it would feel no need to possess even a single nuke when it is no longer exposed to the U.S. threat after it has dropped its hostile policy toward the DPRK and confidence has been built between the two countries” (11 October 2006).

Hence the nuclear test carried out by the DPRK is a huge setback for the US, and in particular for the foreign policy of the Bush administration. It arises from more than 50 years of nuclear threats by the US against the DPRK; it could have been avoided if Bush had carried on from where Clinton had left off; it could have been avoided if the US had not sabotaged last year’s agreement; and it could still be solved if the US lifts its sanctions and returns to the negotiating table in good faith. This is the point that has been reached now and we are waiting to see what will happen. Bush in his “Axis of Evil” speech and elsewhere says that states like Iran, Iraq and north Korea must be prevented from developing nuclear programmes. As he said in his “Axis of Evil” speech: “We will not allow the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most dangerous weapons”. As a result of Bush’s policy: Iraq, no longer has a nuclear programme and is destroyed and in chaos and the Iraqi resistance is entrapping the US army; Iran, a few days before the DPRK carried out a nuclear test, refused the UN Security Council demand to suspend its own uranium enrichment programme and Iran described the DPRK nuclear test as “a reaction to America’s threats and humiliations”. Finally the DPRK itself has clearly demonstrated that it is a nuclear power.
In completing my speech tonight, it is interesting to refer back to the article from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, quoted from earlier, which ends with the words of a former defence minister of India, who concluded that after the 1991 Gulf War: “Never negotiate with the United States unless you have a nuclear weapon”.

REFERENCES given in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
7. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 821-822.
8. Richard M. Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look 1953-1956, vol. III of the History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2001), p. 2. The same message was conveyed to Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov on June 3. The armistice was signed on June 27, 1953.
9. Richard A. Mobley, ‘Revisiting the Korean Tree-Trimming Incident’, Joint Forces Quarterly, Summer 2003, p. 110, 111. Mobley states that the August 1976 DEFCON 3 was "the first time it was changed in response to activity in North Korea."
10. John K. Singlaub, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century (New York: Summit Books, 1991), as cited in Richard A. Mobley, ‘Revisiting the Korean Tree-Trimming Incident’, pp. 111, 113-114.
11. U.S. Air Force Gen. Eugene E. Habiger, Stratcom commander, statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Authorization for Appropriations Hearing for Fiscal 1998 and Future Years Defense Programs, Senate Hearing 105-37, 105th Congress, March 13, 1997, p. 654.
12. Habiger, conversation with Hans M. Kristensen, August 12, 2004.

What happens when the oil runs out?

Global warming and the energy crisis is now an issue of very serious concern around the world. Even many imperialists are worried enough to search round for answers – as long as those answers leave their profits intact!
Science journalist ALFRED BROWNE has studied the question intensively and has produced a number of thought provoking, and perhaps controversial, articles from a left perspective. He returns to the subject in this first part of a two part series.


THERE is no denying it; the 20th century brought great improvements in the standards of life of the ordinary people of Britain. They did not come without struggle, battles between bosses and workers, strikes and strike breaking, with the gains by the workers less than those of the bosses, the rich growing proportionately ever richer; nevertheless those improvements took place.

Go back that century, to Edwardian times when it was still the boast that the British empire was the greatest the world had known, drawing in tribute from near a quarter of the globe. Writing of living conditions in York, by no means a poor town, the economist Seebohm Rowntree reported the diet of a quarter of the population and 40 per cent of children fell below the nutritional standards necessary for mere physical health.

To feed properly the four children of the then normal family, he reported, a manual worker must never spend a penny on bus or rail fare, go to a concert, buy a book, sweets or toys for those children, must not smoke or drink, subscribe to a trade union or club, church or chapel, above all, must never lose a day’s work.

A labourer, even with regular employment, could only hope to feed two children. True poverty came three times for the typical member of the working class, in childhood, until brothers or sisters began to earn, after marriage, while children were too young to work, and in old age.
How different today when motor cars are parked along the kerbsides of working class streets, even those surviving from Edwardian slums, when electricity and the gadgets it powers free housewives from domestic toils, boosting family earnings to finance exotic holidays beyond the imaginings of even the better off Edwardians. It is enough to make one delude oneself into thinking the world may have been made for the comfort and well-being of humanity. Or is that a delusion?

After all Christians and Hebrews can point to chapter one of Genesis to show that is so and followers of other religions have similar authorities. Even secular, scientific atheists seem, nowadays, to accept such a basis for the good life, even if they replace God by human technology.

In fact, there is no mystery about from where come all these good things of the Western World. They come from previously untapped sources of energy, oil and natural gas, finite in amount but now being used with unthinking profligacy. That delusion of the previous paragraph is likely soon to turn to disillusion.

For all civilisation’s wealth comes from the energy available to it. In the earliest of civilisations, when agriculture replaced the hunter-gatherer way of life, that was still the muscle power of its members, or, rather, those members who produced the goods needed for the sustenance of all. But not all were producers.

Some administered – the chieftains, politicians, call them what you will - others preached the word of God, to be, jointly, the self-appointed guardians of the bodies and souls of the producers, joining in, of course, to consume the products of the workers. It is a system which has lasted long. Then, as now, extra energy was required to keep up production, to yield, in Marxist terms, surplus value. That came from slaves, humans taken captive in the wars to which mankind, by its nature, greedy and quarrelsome, is addicted.

Then came the enslavement of more powerful animals, horses, cattle, even elephants. Now muscle power has been replaced by that oil and gas, but all depended and still depends on our planet’s single source of energy, sunlight.

What our planet does is to provide the materials in which solar energy is fixed, the fixation being done by the primary form of life, plants. Fundamental among those materials are water (H2O) and that much deplored so-called pollutant of today, carbon dioxide (CO2 ). Not only do plants produce the essential ingredients for animal life, carbohydrates for energy, proteins for body-building, they also produce the oxygen we need to make use of that food.

The basic process, photosynthesis, the making of life material from light, is shown in the equation, CO2 + 2H2O + E (energy) = CH2O + O2 + H2O. Electrons are stripped from the basic components to provide the chemical energy locked in carbohydrate (CH2O). In practice things, and the carbohydrate, are more complex. The basic medium of animal energy, glucose, is a larger molecule (C6H12O6), as are the sugars, sucrose and fructose. However, animals do not live by energy foods alone.

Nor do plants. As every gardener knows plants have to be supplied with other natural elements than carbon dioxide and water from our planet’s soil and not just the N, P, K, nitrogen or ammonia, phosphate and potassium, of National Growmore fertiliser. Iron, magnesium, manganese, copper, chlorine must all be available in substantial amounts with further trace elements. With that raw material plants provide all living creatures with amino acids, proteins, enzymes and the nucleic acids, DNA and RNA. They also make their own chlorophyll, the green substance on which photosynthesis and all life depends.

Animals exist by virtue of the energy they obtain by eating plants, or other animals which feed on plants. The human is an animal with the mark of all animals, a hole in the head and another in the bottom connected by the digestive tract which converts the eaten matter into a form usable by the animal body.

Not completely, though, what comes out still retains some energy, nutritional value. Humankind also differs from other animals in that we lack the insulating materials, fur, feathers, fat, to survive easily in the normal ambient temperature, something which led to the discovery of fire, fuelled at first, of course, also by plant material but also by that product of animal digestion, animal dung, as it still is in some parts of the human world. It is that inability of animals, as consumers, to keep up with plants as producers, the inefficiency of animal intestines and other mechanisms of decay to extract all energy from plant remains and the remains of other animals used as food that has resulted, over millions of years in the presence of fossil fuel, oil, gas and coal with its locked in solar energy of the past on which our civilisation now primarily depends.
Modern industrial civilisation started with coal and the steam engine and we may think coal came first but much of the world knew of oil before it knew of coal. It seeps from the ground in the Middle East and other places as liquid or appears in a solid form as asphalt, used in the early civilisations there for lighting and building.

Around Baku, on the Caspian Sea, it seeped in particularly large amounts, with its associated gas, and was often set ablaze by lightning strikes. In 1272 Marco Polo, on his way to China, was astonished when he passed through Baku to find people coming from large distances to collect oil to burn in lamps to light their homes, when lamplight was a luxury unknown to the then primitive people of Western Europe. On arrival in China he found it being used there.
Slowly awareness of this strange substance seeping from the ground seeped into the minds of Westerners looking for a good thing to exploit. In 1828 a Christian missionary brought news from China of the drilling techniques there, using hollow bamboo canes and reaching down, so it is claimed, to 3000 feet. In America a group of businessmen backed a self-styled colonel, former railway conductor, Edwin Drake, to drill for oil at a seepage site in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania.
When his drill had gone down 69 feet without finding anything they decided to order him to stop. By the time their letter arrived on August 29, 1859, all had changed, oil had been struck the day before and the first oil rush to fortune had begun. Fortunes were made, but not by Drake, who died penniless in 1880. That oilfield soon ran dry but operations shifted to Texas and soon the US and Russia were oil suppliers to the world, helped, by the invention of the internal combustion engine.

That Baku oil field had been exploited by two Norwegian brothers named Nobel who used the dynamite invented by their brother, Alfred, of Nobel Prize fame, to blast a way for a pipeline through the Caucasus Mountains. Middle Eastern finds, first, a strike at Kirkuk in Iraq in 1927 so large that a river of oil ran from it and by an even larger strike, in Saudi Arabia in 1948 in what proved to be the world’s largest oil field, have transformed things.

How did the oil arrive? It had been a long journey. The formation of all present oilfields appears to have begun over a lengthy period of around 150 million years starting around 250 million years ago with their development going on ever since. It begins in hot, humid areas of intense plant life: rain forest, mangrove swamps and continental shelves, in what then were the tropics. The process depends on the nature of rocks. They start as cooled molten material from within the Earth’s surface, mostly solid like granite and basalt, impermeable by liquids. Erosion by water and wind reforms some into sedimentary rocks, such as sandstone, permeable by liquids and gases. Layers of different rocks become forcibly distorted and broken by pressure and tilt, reaching down into the Earth. Buried plants are first transformed by microbial action into a more liquid substance called kerogen.

Under the force of gravity it starts to migrate deeper into the Earth’s crust through permeable rocks. As it does so it meets increasing pressure and temperature, a rise of lo Centigrade for each 70 ft of depth, and water, carrying bacteria and other reactants. As a result it reforms into an immense variety of different hydrocarbons, containing, by mass, 82 to 87 per cent carbon and 12 to 15 per cent hydrogen, an indication of the relative proportions of energy contributed by the two elements. Eventually the crude may become trapped in one permeable rock between two impermeable rocks, so becoming an oil field to be tapped for human use.

The process reached its peak somewhat over 100 million years ago as recent ideas in geology, continental shift and plate tectonics, explain. That oil forming period was when there was one supercontinent, with the tropics moving around it and the climate was hotter and more humid because of the lack of land with permanent ice at the poles. Also the atmosphere was much richer in carbon dioxide, by the entire vast amount to be released as modern civilisation consumes the oil and gas on which it depends.

Towards the end of the oil forming period a shallow sea, the Tethys, breaking into the remaining supercontinent, Gondwana, swept up vast amounts of organic matter depositing them around the current Persian Gulf. In a mere 30 million years it had formed roughly half the oil ever produced, the present Middle Eastern oilfields.

How much survives for our civilisation’s use and how long will it last? In its first century, up to around 1960, the oil industry produced 200 billion barrels, around an eighth of what is thought to be the original total available. It then settled down to producing a similar amount every decade. Even if production were to be stabilised at the levels of the end of the 20th century, helped by increased fuel efficiency, shortages should begin to force a production decline by 2035. That makes little if any allowance for any increased consumer demand by the populations of China, India and other developing countries.

The Middle East has the most easily exploited reserves. Saudi Arabia, the US and Russia each had roughly similar original endowments with a rather larger one spread through the other Middle Eastern countries of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait. The United States had already used up over half its original endowment by 1999. Increasingly it seems future supplies will depend on Russian reserves.

There is that other easily exploited hydrocarbon resource, natural gas. The formation of crude oil goes on down to depths of 16,000 feet. Below 16,000 ft the temperature and pressure are too high for normal oil to form and existing oil can be turned into gas, principally methane. Natural gas is found dissolved in crude oil, associated gas, or on its own, unassociated. Vast quantities, put at 14 per cent of total world supplies, were lost in the early days of oil drilling, as associated gas was flared off. Again the main supplies are in the Middle East and Russia. The US had already used up half of all it possessed by the end of the twentieth century.

The largest gas fields are in Siberia. Urengoy, by far the world’s largest, is connected by a 5,470 km pipeline, five feet in diameter, crossing the Ural Mountains and 700 rivers and streams, taking supplies to Eastern Europe and then on to Western Europe which looks likely to become dependent on it. Reserves should suffice for some decades to come though extra calls on it as oil gets used up could mean it will last little if any longer.

So, because of that profligacy with which modern civilised humanity is expending it, the energy resource on which our civilisation depends will come to an end within the lifetime of many now living. What happens then? In an earlier article I suggested the universe renews itself by transformation between matter and energy. That means it must be cyclical in nature. Life is part of that process of transformation. Is it also cyclical?

Can it be that the human function, distinguishing humankind from all other living creatures, is to bring one cycle to its end? Instead of the world being for our comfort and well-being, as so many assume, are we to be the agents of its extinction—though that may be just the start of another, similar cycle? Humanity, greedy and quarrelsome, is addicted to war.

The 20th century saw humanity in an almost continual state of warfare somewhere or another and the 21st has followed suit, on the excuse in Iraq that it was necessary to prevent the development of weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons do exist, in quantities which would bring about true mass destruction of our present world, in just two countries: America, the symbol of that profligacy with which we are destroying the energy source of our civilisation, and Russia where its greatest reserves still remain.

The political prospects of an H-bomb war terrified millions in the 20th century but did not materialise. The fear may now be less but the economics of the present century makes the prospect of threat becoming reality even more likely.

Some will say this is just a hypothesis, that I have not dealt with the proposals for other means of energising our civilisation, have ignored the problem solving power of human technology. In a further article I will discuss these matters and possible political means of escaping the fate which, I suggest, now looms before us.

Review: Revolutionary Democracy

Review

by Ray Jones

Revolutionary Democracy, vol XII, no 2, September 2006. £3 plus 50p P&P from NCP Lit, PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ. Cheques to New Worker.

AS USUAL Revolutionary Democracy has a broad selection of interesting articles.
Rajesh Tyagi argues forcibly for the essential role of the armed peasantry and workers in the Nepalese revolution in the context of making a sophisticated analysis of the present political situation in Nepal.
Yuri Yemelianov’s review of Yuri Zhukov’s book A Different Stalin is an interesting look into five important years of the Stalin period.
In his article on The Shanghai Political Economy Text Book, Rafael Martinez presents a critique of Chinese political economy in some depth which is well worth reading – although it’s not easy going.
Grover Furr’s brief note makes a telling point about communism and anti-Semitism.
There are often fascinating historical documents in this journal and this issue includes the record of discussions between Stalin and members of the Communist Party of India in February 1951. Stalin gives his advice on the stages of the prospective Indian revolution and the handling of its contradictions. While doing so he also gives a neat definition of terrorism.

Toussaint L'Ouverture

by Caroline Colebrook

TOUSSAINT L’Ouverture was born as a slave in the 18th century on theCaribbean island St Dominique, also known as Hispaniola, who led the people in a long and complex struggle for emancipation from slavery and from colonial rule.
Their struggles took place against a background of contending colonial powers: France, Britain, Spain and the newly independent United States. Vast fortunes were being made from the production of sugar, coffee and other commodities in the slave plantations of the Caribbean.
Toussaint was a self-educated man who challenged the idealists and intellectuals of the French revolution to extend the principles of Liberté, egalité and fraternité to the black slaves of France’s colonies. He was also a military genius who took on and defeated the armies of the colonial powers, including Napoleon.
Napoleon did not forgive him and tricked him with a false peace treaty to come to France, where he was seized and thrown into prison where he died of starvation and neglect. But his legacy lived on. He had proved to the world that black people are just as capable as white people of being great intellectuals, military leaders and political tacticians.
Today the island of Hispaniola is divided into the Dominican Republic and Haiti – the first autonomous black state in the western hemisphere.
He was born Toussaint Bréda at some time around 1743 on All Saints Day(either 20th May or 1st November) hence the name Toussaint; the name Bréda came from his owner. He later acquired the name L’Ouverture, meaning one who finds an opening.
Toussaint’s father, Gaou-Guinou, was born a free man in Africa. He isbelieved to have been from the Arrada people of the Dahomey coast but was brought by slave traders to St Dominique and sold to the Count de Bréda.
De Bréda was relatively humane and happy to encourage Toussaint to learn to read and write. He became a coachman of the count and was already a notedhorse rider and herbalist before his subsequent military and political career. A free black priest, Pierre Baptiste, taught him to read.
Toussaint married a woman named Suzan Simone and they had a son, named Placide.
Though it was not widely known during his lifetime, Toussaint was in fact afree man by the time of the great slave uprising he would eventually help lead. He was freed from slavery at about the age of 33, and colonial records show that he leased a field of about 15 hectares with 13 slaves to grow coffee.
As a young man he engrossed himself in the works of the French philosophers whose ideas helped to spark the French Revolution. But he also read a great deal about military tactics and became an admirer of Julius Caesar in this respect.
In 1789 the French Revolution rocked France and its colonies. The sugar plantations of St Dominique, though far away, would never be the same. Spurred on by such Enlightenment thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the early revolutionaries considered seriously the question of slavery. Those revolutionaries were not willing to end slavery but they did apply the Rights of Man, as proclaimed by Thomas Paine, to all Frenchmen, including free blacks and mulattoes (those of mixed race). Plantation owners in the colonies were furious and fought the measure. Finally the revolutionaries gave in and retracted the measure in 1791.
The news of this betrayal triggered mass slave revolts in St Dominique,under the leadership of Georges Biassou. Toussaint joined their ranks as a medic. But first he took pains to see that his former master’s family were able to leave St Dominique safely. Toussaint’s knowledge of strategic and tactical planning and leadership abilities quickly brought him to prominence. He became an aide to Biassou after the Night of Fire.
Le Cap fell to French republican forces, who were reinforced by thousands of blacks in April 1793. Black forces had joined the French against the royalists on the promise of freedom. Indeed, in August Commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax abolished slavery in the colony.
Two black leaders, Jean-François and Biassou, had little confidence in the French Republic and preferred to commit their allegiance to a king. So they accepted commissions from Spain. The Spanish deployed forces in coordination with these indigenous blacks to take the north of St Dominique.
Toussaint, who had taken up the Spanish banner in February 1793, came to command his own forces independently of Biassou’s army. By the year’s end,Toussaint had cut a swath through the north, had swung south to Gonaïves,and effectively controlled north-central St Dominique. It was at this time he acquired the nickname L’Ouverture (opening) because he exploited openings in the defences of the opposition.
Some historians believe that Spain and Britain had reached an informal arrangement to divide the French colony between them – Britain to take the south and Spain the north. British forces landed at Jérémie and Môle St Nicholas (the Môle). They besieged Port-au-Prince (or Port Républicain, as it was known under the Republic) and took it in June 1794.
The Spanish had launched a two-pronged offensive from the east. French forces checked Spanish progress toward Port-au-Prince in the south, but theSpanish pushed rapidly through the north, most of which they occupied by1794. Spain and Britain were poised to seize St Dominique, but severalfactors foiled their grand design.
One factor was illness. The British in particular fell victim to tropical disease, which thinned their ranks far more quickly than combat against theFrench. Southern forces led by Rigaud and northern forces led by another mulatto commander, Villatte, also forestalled a complete victory by the foreign forces. These uncertain conditions positioned Toussaint’s centrallylocated forces as the key to victory or defeat.
On 6th May 1794, Toussaint made a crucial decision, influenced by events inFrance. The Republic was now in the hands of the Jacobins, led by Maximilian Robespierre, who did honour the principles of Liberté, egalité and fraternité; they abolished slavery on 4th February 1794.
The Spanish had promised emancipation but they showed no signs of keeping their word in the territories that they controlled, and the British had reinstated slavery in the areas they occupied. Toussaint’s priority was emancipation so he had no choice but to cast his lot with the French.
In several raids against his former allies, Toussaint took the Artibonite region and retired briefly to Mirebalais. Toussaintproved to be a brilliant general, winning seven battles in seven days. As Rigaud’s forces achieved more limited success in the south, the tide clearlyswung in favour of the French Republicans.
A major turning point at this point was the 22nd July 1794 peace agreement between France and Spain. The agreement was not finalised until the signing of the Treaty of Basel the following year. The accord directed Spain to cedeits holdings on Hispaniola to France. The move effectively denied supplies,funding, and avenues of retreat to combatants under the Spanish aegis.
The armies of Jean-François and Biassou disbanded, and many flocked to the standard of Toussaint, the remaining black commander of stature.
In March 1796, Toussaint rescued the French commander, General Etienne-Maynard Laveaux, from a mulatto-led effort to depose him as the primary colonial authority. To express his gratitude, Laveaux appointed Toussaint lieutenant governor of St Dominique.
Toussaint used this position to increase his power within his homeland. He distrusted the intentions of all foreign parties – as well as those of the mulattoes – regarding the future of slavery; he believed that only black leadership could assure the continuation of an autonomous St Dominique. Heset out to consolidate his political and military positions, and he undercutthe positions of the French and the rebel mulattoes.
A new group of French commissioners appointed Toussaint Général de Division (commander in chief of all French forces on the island). From this positionof strength, he resolved to move quickly and decisively to establish an autonomous state under black rule. He expelled Sonthonax, the leading French commissioner and concluded an agreement to end hostilities with Britain.
Toussaint tried to secure allegiance of the mulatto leader André Rigaud andthus to incorporate the majority of mulattoes into his national project, but his plan was thwarted by the French, who saw in Rigaud their last opportunity to retain dominion over the colony.
There followed a clash, sometimes referred to as the War of the Castes, between Toussaint’s predominantly black forces and Rigaud’s mulatto army.The contending colonial powers were engaged in intrigue and manipulation on both sides of the conflict. Toussaint, in correspondence with United States president John Adams, pledged that in exchange for support he would deny theFrench the use of St Dominique as a base for operations in North America.Adams, the leader of an independent, but still insecure, United States, found the arrangement desirable and dispatched arms and ships that greatly aided black forces. Later President Thomas Jefferson reversed the friendly American policy.
Rigaud’s army and ambitions were crushed and he fled the island in late1800. Toussaint secured the port of Santo Domingo in May 1800, Toussaint held sway over the whole of Hispaniola. This position gave him anopportunity to concentrate on restoring domestic order and productivity.
He realised that the survival of the island depended on an export-orientedeconomy. He therefore re-introduced the plantation system, employing paid labourers rather than slaves to produce the sugar, coffee, and other commodities needed to support economic progress.
A constitution, approved in 1801 by the then still surviving ColonialAssembly, granted Toussaint, as Governor-general-for-life, all effective power as well as the privilege of choosing his successor.
But this period of autonomous black rule was brief. Toussaint had always distrusted France and his de facto independence and autonomy rankled withthe French leaders and concerned the governments of slave-holding nations, such as Britain and the United States.
When Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in France, he began to work withcolonists to return France’s Caribbean territories to their earlier profitability as plantation colonies. Moreover, Bonaparte regarded St Dominique as essential to potential French exploitation of the Louisiana Territory. Taking advantage of a temporary halt in the wars in Europe,Bonaparte dispatched to St Dominique forces led by his brother-in-law,General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc.
Leclerc denied that he was trying to reinstate slavery. He landed inJanuary 1802 with between 16,000 and 20,000 troops aided by white colonists and some mulattos – about the same size as Toussaint’s army – at severalpoints on the north coast.
Over the following months, Toussaint’s troops fought against the French but two of his officers, Dessalines and Christophe, defected to join Leclerc. On7th May 1802, Toussaint signed a treaty with the French in Cap-Haïtien, on condition that there was no return to slavery, and retired to his farm in Ennery.
But Leclerc sent troops to seize Toussaint and his family, shipping them to France on board a warship. They arrived in France on 2nd July. On 25th August 25, 1802, Toussaint was imprisoned in the castle Fort-de-Joux in Doubs. He died of pneumonia while imprisoned.
But the struggle did not end there. The betrayal of Toussaint and Bonaparte’s restoration of slavery in Martinique undermined the collaboration of leaders such as Dessalines, Christophe, and Pétion.Convinced that the same fate lay in store for St Dominique, these commanders and others once again battled Leclerc and his disease-riddled army. Leclerc himself died of yellow fever in November 1802, about two months after he hadrequested reinforcements to quash the renewed resistance.
Leclerc’s replacement, General Donatien Rochambeau, waged a bloody campaign against the insurgents, but events beyond the shores of St Dominique doomedthe campaign to failure.
Dessalines led a successful campaign against Rochambeau in what proved tobe a very bloody war of attrition.
By 1803 war had resumed between France and Britain, and Bonaparte once again concentrated his energies on the struggle in Europe. In April of thatyear, Bonaparte signed a treaty that allowed the purchase of Louisiana bythe United States and ended French ambitions in the western hemisphere.
Rochambeau’s reinforcements and supplies never arrived in sufficient numbers. The general fled to Jamaica in November 1803, where he surrenderedto British authorities rather than face the retribution of the rebel leadership. The era of French colonial rule in Haiti had ended.
The success of Dessalines had an impact throughout the slave-owningCaribbean islands and in the southern states of the US. Believing themselvesto be kind and paternal and the slaves to be child-like and grateful, white slave owners suddenly became aware of the tinderbox that they were sittingon. Although slave owners would publicly declare that slaves were, in fact, happy being slaves, in reality they knew otherwise.
All throughout the southern United States, white slave owners began to build “slave shelters” to hide in, should the slaves revolt. Many of them regularly occupied these shelters whenever they feared a slave revolt. Guns became bedside companions and fear became the rule of the day.
The successful Haitian revolution had an impact around the world. In Britain the poet Wordsworth – at that time a political progressive – wrote a poem about L’Ouverture. Many songs and stories have been written in hishonour and a Hollywood film is currently in production.
The history of Haiti since then has been mixed, with imperialist powers using economic pressure to recolonise it. This had led to serious povertyand hardship for most of the population. But the people continue to resist US imperialist interference and the imposition of puppet rulers.

The meaning of 1917

COMMUNISTS and progressives all over the world commemorated the 89th anniversary of the Russian Revolution last week in meetings and ceremonies to mark the turning point in the history of the working class. In the socialist countries of Asia, on the island of Cuba, in eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics communists pause from their work to recall the achievements of the Soviet Union that was born from the torch lit on 7th November 1917.
Though the Soviet Union is no more, the roar of the guns that triggered the popular uprising that swept the Bolsheviks to power echoes across the planet today. In People’s China, Democratic Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba the masses are taking their own roads to socialism, while throughout the Third World progressive forces have taken a socialist perspective to achieve liberation, independence and social justice.
In the imperialist world we remember the sacrifice of Soviet youth who smashed the Nazi legions in the Second World War and saved the world, and in the Third World comrades and friends rallied to pay tribute to the immense Soviet contribution to the national liberation movement in breaking the chains of colonial slavery.
At the same time we must look to the challenge of today and the promise of tomorrow. Communists are united with the progressive movements of Latin America that have brought about sweeping changes for the benefit of working people and indigenous populations across their continent. In Britain and the United States communists are marching side-by-side with the millions in the anti-war movements mobilised against the war in Iraq.
When the counter-revolutionaries who had wormed their way to the top of the Soviet leadership destroyed the USSR, the imperialists rejoiced and told us that communism was finished. They said Marx and Engels were wrong. Their paid scribes claimed that “history was dead” and that from now on and forever more the entire planet would be governed by the exploiters. Their intellectual lackeys told us to expect a new era of common prosperity funded by a “peace dividend” with the end of the Cold War and a “new world order” that would solve the problems of the planet.
What we got was imperialist wars for resources and land and an anti-working class offensive aimed at stripping working people of the gains won through struggle during the last century.
Though the pundits who fill the media with bourgeois lies every day ignore 1917, they cannot ignore the spectre of communism. Lenin and Stalin are reviled by these errand boys of imperialism as much now as when they were alive. While these champions of exploitation and oppression bang the drum of “human rights” to accompany a barrage of lies against all the remaining socialist countries they say nothing about the real oppression and squalor that exists in the world – all entirely due to the merciless exploitation of workers and peasants by the economic system created by the capitalists, industrialists and landowners to ensure that they continue to live out their parasitical lives of ease and pleasure.
The lesson of the Great October Russian Revolution is that working people can take destiny into their own hands and end the era of exploitation. The Soviet peoples under the leadership of the Bolsheviks proved that you can build socialism in one state and create a social system far superior to the decadent, corrupt and oppressive capitalist world. Above all it showed that when the chains of exploitation are broken and the energy of working people is released you can reach for the stars.

SUEZ: When Nasser stood up against imperialism!

by Andy Brooks

ON 29th October 1956, Israeli troops stormed into the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula and advanced towards the Suez Canal. The Israelis claimed it was aimed at curbing Egyptian support for Palestinian guerrillas based in Gaza.
In fact it was part of a secret deal hatched in London and Paris to topple Egypt’s Free Officer Revolution led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and return the recently nationalised Suez Canal to Franco-British imperialism.
The next day, Britain and France offered to temporarily occupy the Canal Zone to protect the international waterway, demanding a 10 mile buffer-zone on either side and entirely on Egyptian territory, to separate the warring forces. When this unacceptable ultimatum was rejected by Nasser the RAF began bombing Egyptian air-fields and Anglo-French paratroopers descended on the Canal. The second Arab-Israeli war had begun.
The old colonialists dreamt of restoring their power in the Middle East. The Egyptians dreamed of building a new modern Arab republic in the heart of the Arab world. While the Arab dream remains unfulfilled to this day the colonial pretensions of British and French imperialism were shattered in October 1956.
The 1952 Egyptian Revolution, led by progressive army officers, ended a corrupt and venal monarchy that had long been in the pocket of imperialism. The Free Officers immediately introduced land reforms, public education and a rudimentary welfare state.
But above all they were determined to fulfill the centuries-old dream of all the people of Egypt – the construction of a dam that would conserve the waters of the Nile for agriculture and use its power to generate electricity for the people of the great river.
British engineers had already built one dam across the Nile at Aswan in 1899 but it had become woefully inadequate and almost overflowed in 1946. Plans for a new High Dam at Aswan began in 1952 and the Nasser government had been led to expect funding to come from loans from the United States and Britain. But in 1956 Britain and the United States both cancelled their offer.
British imperialism, like the French, was angered at the Egyptian government’s embrace of Arab nationalism which had inspired democratic movements that challenged the Arab kings and princes under British protection in Jordan, Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Cairo was the base for the Algerian national liberation movement fighting to kick the French out while the Americans had been stung by Egypt’s decision to import arms from socialist Czechoslovakia and establish diplomatic relations with People’s China.
This left Nasser with only two choices. Give in to imperialism or find the money elsewhere. He did – by nationalising the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company.
No one had asked the Egyptian people whether they wanted the canal in the first place though 120,000 Egyptian workers, mainly forced labourers, had perished during its construction. Egypt’s feudal rulers originally held shares in the French company but Ismail Pasha was forced to sell all of Egypt’s stakeholding to Britain in 1875 to meet external debts. The canal then came under total Anglo-French control.
Opened in 1869, the charges levied on shipping made a handsome profit for its owners but the Egyptians got little back in return. The Suez Canal Company had effectively robbed the Egyptian people of £35 million a year, Nasser said in his fateful address on 26th July 1956 in Alexandria. This money, just like the canal, belonged to the people.
Anglo-French imperialism immediately tried to bring the Canal to a standstill. All British and French pilots were ordered out but the Egyptian and Greek pilots stayed at their posts. Then Britain and France tried to build up an international lobby to challenge the nationalisation while secretly plotting with Israel and moving troops to the region in preparation for the invasion.
On 31st October Anglo-French warplanes began to bomb Egypt. Nasser ordered the sinking of all 40 ships present in the Canal to block it to all Powers.
Significantly the Eisenhower administration in Washington had not been consulted nor had it given its blessing to the Anglo-French invasion. American imperialism had no interest in maintaining the old European colonial empires and indeed they were actively working to dismantle them to open the Third World to US competition.
Their major Arab ally was the feudal king of Saudi Arabia who was threatening an oil embargo on Britain and France if the war continued and the United States still hoped to win Nasser over to their plan to extend Nato into the Middle East.
At the United Nations on 2nd November the American delegation voted in favour of a General Assembly resolution, moved there to sidestep a British or French veto, calling for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of the invading troops In Britain Labour opposition leader Hugh Gaitskell had initially backed the efforts of Tory premier, Sir Anthony Eden, to regain control of the Canal. But a growing peace campaign and pressure from union leaders and the rank-and-file soon changed his mind. On Sunday 4th November Trafalgar Square was packed with demonstrators chanting:‘One, two, three, four! We won’t fight in Eden’s war’ and Gaitskell forcefully attacked Eden’s aggression.
Britain and France ignored the UN ceasefire vote and on 5th November Anglo-French paras were dropped along the Canal. Egyptian forces, already fighting the Israelis, were deployed to defend the waterway. The French and British commandos faced fierce resistance in the streets of the Canal ports. The Egyptian masses rallied to defend their revolution and drive the invaders out. Pro-Nasser demonstrations swept the streets of the Arab world, still largely controlled by Anglo-French imperialism.
Oil pipelines were sabotaged and French and British property attacked by angry crowds. In Cyprus, the key British base for the invasion, General Grivas’ EOKA guerrillas – also fighting British colonialism – attacked the RAF bases and throughout the non-aligned world the tripartite aggression was denounced.
The Soviet Union moved quickly the day the paras landed. Failing to receive a positive response from President Eisenhower to a proposal for joint action to repulse the aggressors, the Soviet Union then demanded an immediate halt to all military operations. The Soviet government stated that the USSR was “determined to use force to shatter the aggression and to restore peace in the Middle East”. It obliquely threatened to launch missile attacks on Paris and London while Krushchov warned that he would send Soviet volunteers to join the fighting Egyptians.
The next day, 6th November, the British Cabinet met in crisis session. Seven ministers in Eden’s government threatened to resign. Eden visibly shaken, told a news conference he was going on hunger strike. When Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister, received the news, he interrupted a meeting in the Indian parliament to read it out, and said that an empty stomach was better than an empty head.
On 7th November Britain, France and Israel agreed to a ceasefire. By the end of the year all British and French troops had left and Israel evacuated Sinai and the Gaza Strip the following year with the end of the Egyptian blockade of the Israeli Red Sea port of Eilat and the establishment of UN buffer troops in the Gaza Strip and along the Egyptian-Israeli frontier. Eden retired soon after, a broken man, while Nasser became a hero to all the Arabs. And the Aswan High Dam was built with Soviet assistance in the 1960s.
In a speech in 1960 President Nasser said: “The true significance of Suez for the liberation movement in Asia and Africa was that it signified an end to the era when the imperialists could mobilise their armies and navies to deal lethal blows to liberation movements. The Suez war proved that the victim of aggression had its own armies and that freedom had supporters all over the world”.

The Battle of Cable Street

The Battle of Cable Street and the failure of fascism in Britain

by Daphne Liddle

ON THE 4th October 1936 thousands of working class people in London’s East End, led by the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Independent Labour Party rose early from their beds to occupy four key places along the route of a planned march by Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascist Blackshirts in order to block its path. Throughout the day they stood firm in spite of mounted police baton charges, numerous arrests.
By noon Gardiner’s Corner was impassable due to the number of anti-fascist demonstrators. Police tried to clear a route through Leman Street – but this was blocked by a tram, deliberately abandoned by its driver.
Police tried to reroute the march through Cable Street. Anti-fascist demonstrators, the vast majority local residents, blocked Cable Street with barricades in three different places. Police fought their way through one barricade, only to be confronted by the second. Eventually the police gave up and ordered Mosley to abandon his march. They escorted him to the Embankment where his followers dispersed.
This was a humiliating defeat for Mosley and eventually led to a cutting off of vital funds from his main financial sponsor, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
The Battle of Cable Street marked a significant turning point and the end of any prospects of fascism becoming a truly mass movement in Britain as it had done in some other European countries.
Mosley’s BUF was not the first fascist movement in Britain. That was the Imperial Fascist League, founded by Arnold Leese, a former army camel vetinary who had served in India and the Middle East. This tiny group modelled itself on Mussolini’s fascist movement but, unlike Mussolini at that time, Leese was virulently anti-Semitic. He claimed this sprang from his vetinary objections to kosher animal slaughter practices.
He was further influences by the notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion – the same work that influenced the young Hitler.
Mosley began his political career by being elected Conservative MP for Harrow in 1918 at the age of 23. He soon found party discipline irksome and left the party to become first an Independent Conservative and then simply an Independent. In April 1924 he joined the Labour Party, five months after it had formed a minority government supported by the Liberals.
By 1925 Mosley was proposing a new economic policy based on the theories of John Maynard Keynes, whom he had consulted in drawing up his version of social credit policy. Mosley proposed the nationalisation of the banking system and a system of social credits to the unemployed to stimulate demand.
When Labour lost the October 1924 general election to the Tories, as a backbench MP he accused the Government of wishing to be fascist but not having the courage.
In May 1930 he resigned from Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government after it failed to adopt his economic policies and took with him a number of other Labour (or rather Independent Labour) members, including John Strachey, Dr Robert Forgan, W J Brown, Oliver Baldwin and his first wife, Cynthia Mosley, to form the New Party.
The New Party tried to make a populist appeal to the unemployed as an alternative to the young Communist Party of Great Britain. But it failed to attract a mass following. Then Mosley visited Mussolini in Italy and was very impressed; he decided to form a Union of Fascists based on the New Party’s youth movement. He drafted a new programme, the Greater Britain and aimed to win fascist power in Britain.
One obstacle to making fascism popular in Britain is that it is a particularly nationalistic cult and in the 1930s was already identified firmly with Italian and German nationalism. So Mosley tried to prove that fascism also had British roots and tried to construct a British tradition of fascism. For this he seized upon the Ulster Volunteer Force, an organisation led by Sir Edward Carson in the north of Ireland in the earlier part of the 20th century implacably opposed to home rule for Ireland.
In 1914 Prime Minister Lloyd George had passed a Home Rule Bill through Parliament, giving Ireland its freedom. But Carson staged a rebellion in Ulster. The army was ordered to deal with this rebellion but the officers mutinied – the British aristocrat class fully supported Carson – and Parliament was forced to back down. Lenin at the time pointed out that this was an indicator of the true nature of class power in Britain.
Mosley gave the job to one of his lieutenants, W E D Allen, former Tory MP for Belfast West to mould the legacy of Carson and the paramilitary UVF to fit a fascist perspective. Ever since, the fascist extreme right-wing in Britain has had strong links with Protestant paramilitaries in the occupied six counties of Ireland.
For Mosley himself this led to a strangely two-faced position as he had in the past backed a united Ireland and had links with the Blueshirt Irish nationalists. One of the advantages of fascism as an “ideology” is that it does not have to adhere to rationalism or consistency – “faith”, strong emotions and “leadership qualities” are given priority.
Mosley’s vision of a fascist Britain included an Enabling Act to free the Government from parliamentary control while it introduced the new economic policy. Parliament would no longer have the right to dismiss a Government through a vote of censure. Parliament would be elected on an occupational franchise rather than on geographical constituencies and its role would be purely advisory; the Commons would advise on political and economic matters while the Lords would advise on moral and religious matters.
Once every five years there would be a referendum and the population would be allowed to endorse the Government. If the people voted against it, the monarch would summon new ministers who, in his opinion, would be likely to win support in a fresh vote.
Parallel to this would be an apparently self-governing industrial structure, a “corporate state” comprising employers, tame trade unions and consumer groups. Each corporation – governing a whole sector of the economy – would determine its own policies on wages, prices and conditions.
His promises of full employment did attract some working class support in those areas worst hit: the depressed textile industries of Lancashire, Leeds and London’s East End. But even in these places the fascists never gained a majority and were tainted by the anti-Semitic reputation of international fascism.
Mosley was not originally anti-Semitic but did not discourage it among his members when they attacked Jews. He was a great opportunist, seeking financial support from European fascists who were very anti-Semitic. When Jews and communists united to fight back, Mosley’s movement became very anti-Semitic.
Arnold Leese, resentful that Mosley had stolen so many of his potential followers, was scornful of Mosley’s insincere anti-Semitism and labelled him a “Kosher fascist”.
Mosley sought but did not find support from Britain’s industrialists but did not admit this in public. Historian Robert Benewick wrote: “Among those rumoured to have contributed generously were Sir William Morris, Lord Inchcape, Sir Henry Deterling, Watney’s Brewery and the Imperial Tobacco Company. These rumours were, for the most part, without foundation.” Some had backed the New Party before Mosley turned it fascist.
Mosley did get some support from a section of the British aristocracy, particularly the friends and relations of his second wife, Diana Mitford and from the Cliveden Set, who toyed with the idea of supporting Hitler. Left-wing journalist Clive Cockburn, editor of The Week, certainly regarded the Cliveden Set as a pro-Nazi conspiratorial group. They did manage to spread some confusion among the German and British governments. Diana Mitford/Mosley and her sister Unity possibly gave Hitler a false impression that the British aristocracy would support him.
The BUF did gain some support in the London area, including a handful of intellectuals such as William Joyce, Raven Thompson and A K Chesterton, plus an assortment of disenchanted petty bourgeoisie and workers. But it never gained enough support from any class to say that it in anyway represented the outlook of that class.
The opportunism of the BUF, in allowing itself to be seen as anything that a potential recruit mighty want it to be, in order to maximise membership, lead to confusion and divisions and eventually more members were leaving than joining. Some who joined were obvious cranks and eccentrics, and their presence discouraged others.
Mosley did have one powerful supporter in the shape of newspaper baron Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, the Sunday Dispatch and the London Evening News. Rothermere used his papers to promote fascism, which he seemed to interpret as a sort of armed Conservatism. He did not share the fascists’ anti-Semitism nor their stated opposition to international finance capital.
Rothermere backed off from supporting Mosley as Hitler’s fascism became more notorious, especially after the “Night of the Long Knives”. Rothermere was also disconcerted by the violence associated with Mosley’s mass rallies in Olympia in the early 1930s.
This violence attracted a diversity of recruits who saw in fascism the embodiment of their own frustrated causes but who did not help the movement except in terms of recruitment statistics. Benewick wrote: “In 1933 and 1934, particularly during Lord Rothermere’s boost the BUF had taken hold like wildfire and had drawn to itself every unstable person and adventurer of either sex that the town.”
The BUF did provoke a great deal of opposition, which was mobilised by the CPGB – at the same time that volunteers were being recruited for the International Brigade to fight in the anti-fascist war in Spain. These twin struggles against fascism at home and abroad helped to strengthen and shape the CPGB. Membership doubled between 1935 and 37.
Following the seventh Comintern conference of 1935, the CPGB aimed to build a broad Popular Front against fascism based on Dimitrov’s analysis of fascism and the best way to combat it.
The Labour Party’s attitude to fascism was to hope that it would disappear naturally if ignored. The leadership felt that strong opposition to fascism only drew attention to it and encouraged. So they did not support the Popular Front as a party. But many individual members did support it.
The first large open air fascist rally in London’s East End happened on 7th June 1936. The fascists claimed that 100,000 had attended but press estimates varied from 3,000 to 50,000. Among them were 500 uniformed Blackshirts. The rally provoked a hostile crowd of local residents which was attacked by police. It ended in a free-for-all of hand-to-hand fighting.
In mid-July the East London Trades Council organised an anti-fascist march and rally in Victoria Park, with Labour MP Herbert Morrison to speak along with Sylvia Pankhurst. Fascists attacked the march, throwing stones as well as bags of flour and soot.
The East End became engulfed in a frenzy of political activity, with meetings every night – for and against the fascists. The Home Office recorded police attendance at 536 meetings in August, 603 in September and 647 in October. Nearly 300 extra police a day were drafted into the area.
In Parliament Herbert Morrison described how the Jews in the area felt under this pressure: “I say, and I am sure the whole House will agree, that in this country we are not prepared to tolerate any form of Jew-baiting.
“We are not in the least disposed to look with an indulgent eye on any form of persecution. It is therefore necessary that public attention should be drawn to this danger.”
Subsequently Mosley wrote in protest to the Home Secretary, Sir John Simpson, claiming that Jews were now the only people in Britain immune from attack! He argued that it was illegal to incite others to violence but felt he had as much right to attack Jews on their conduct in Great Britain as the Labour Party had the right to attack capitalists.
This was the background to the Battle of Cable Street. The BUF planned to assemble in Royal Mint Street near Tower Bridge and then march in four columns to meetings in Shoreditch, Limehouse, Bow and Bethnal Green. Mosley planned to address all four meetings. Various Labour local authority and Jewish groups had tried to get the march banned in vain. The Labour leadership and its papers, the Daily Herald and News Chronicle advised all anti-fascists to stay away.
But the Communist Daily Worker called on people to come out, a previously planned rally in Trafalgar Square in support of Republican Spain was dropped, after pressure from Communist Party members living in the East End, and comrades were told to rally to defend the East End.
Benewick describes the scene: “On the morning of 4th October, the East End was transformed into an expectant Madrid. Red flags were draped from windows, and variations of the slogan ‘They shall not pass’ adorned walls throughout the district. Gangs of youths marched through the streets chanting ‘Mosley shall not pass’ and ‘Bar the road to fascism’.
“Members of the Jewish People’s Council distributed a handbill which ended, ‘This march must not take place’. Leaflets were distributed by the Communists calling for a demonstration at Aldgate. The Ex-Servicemen’s Movement Against Fascism distributed handbills calling on its supporters to parade. The national Unemployed Workers’ Movement boasted of a human barricade. The loudspeaker vans of the Communist Party and the Jewish ex-Servicemen’s Association echoed throughout the boroughs. Anti-fascist rallies were announced for 2pm at Cable Street and at 8pm at Shoreditch.”
Hundreds of thousands of people began to converge on the four places where the fascists had planned to meet.
Some 3,000 fascists assembled in Royal Mint Street at 2.30pm. Even at the starting point, police had to baton charge anti fascists to try to clear a way for the fascists.
Throughout the East End, anti-fascist crowds – mostly local residents – blocked the planned fascist routes at strategic points. The path from Leman Street to Commercial Street was blocked by an abandoned tram. When police tried to reroute the march through Cable Street, it was blocked by barricades at three points.
The anti-fascist crowds defied repeated mounted police baton charges. There were legends of one or two police officers trying to surrender to the crowd – much to their embarrassment. Eventually the police gave up and told Mosley he could not march that day.
There were subsequent fascist rallies and meetings but none so big again. On 3rd October 1937 Mosley – now banned from the East End – attempted a march through Bermondsey in south London which also met with implacable opposition from local anti-fascists.
The communists stepped up their work among the East End residents on all sorts of local issues but especially housing. They backed rent strikes against exorbitant rents rises and won many working class former Mosleyites away from fascism. Workers soon learned that in any dispute with landlords or bosses, the fascists would take sides against the workers and consequently their support declined dramatically.
Mussolini’s support for Mosley waned when he could not gain mastery of London’s streets. Mosley complained that this was due to Communist influence and underhand conspiracies – but that the local people really did support him. But in subsequent elections BUF support declined and Mussolini withdrew financial support from Mosley.
The BUF never recovered from Cable Street and the fascist movement was totally discredited during the Second World War when Mosley and a number of his followers were interned as potential fifth columnists.
After the war Mosley made several unsuccessful attempts to revive his movement under different names but his support was reduced to a small fringe of cranks and eccentrics. When racism reared its ugly head in Britain again in the 1970s neo-nazi parties like the National Front barely mentioned him.

Oliver Cromwell: knocked them about a bit

by Andy Brooks

OLIVER CROMWELL, the leader of the English Revolution, died on 3rd September 1658. He led the parliamentary forces to victory in the English Civil War which began in 1642 and ended with the trial and execution of the king, Charles Stuart, in 1649. He presided over the establishment of the Republic of England, or Commonwealth as it was styled in English and in 1653 he became head of state, or Lord Protector. Cromwell’s death was marked by genuine mourning throughout the country. His state funeral was the biggest London had ever seen. Two years later the Stuart royalty were back.

Today Cromwell’s death passes largely unnoticed apart from the annual ceremony organised by the Cromwell Association near the parliamentary leader’s statue in Westminster. Gone, but not quite forgotten.

Marie Lloyd, the Victorian musical hall queen, sang about “the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit”. Elvis Costello wrote Oliver’s Army, a sardonic song about the modern British Army in 1979, and a radical punk rock band took the name of Cromwell’s New Model Army for their own. The name of Cromwell is preserved in the streets of London. Countless books, articles and novels have been written about his life as well as two feature films and a number of television documentaries and every year enthusiasts re-enact the major battles of the civil war.

And the resonance of the English Revolution is heard on the streets today. The Quakers we meet on the peace demonstrations were founded by George Fox, whose pacifist beliefs were borne out of the violence of the revolution. Robert Owen, the founder of the Co-operative Movement, and William Morris, the Victorian socialist and artist, were both influenced by the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers, the “True Levellers” whose attempt to establish co-operative farms in Surrey and other parts of the country were suppressed during the Commonwealth.

To the Irish, Cromwell is the tyrant who stamped the boot of England on Irish soil with a ferocity not seen again until the Easter Uprising of 1916. For romantic socialists Cromwell represents the well-to-do Puritan merchants and landowners who dominated the Army Council – the Grandees who crushed the Levellers and the rest of the democratic movement in the army.

an upstart?

Monarchists see Cromwell as an upstart general who made himself dictator through the might of his New Model Army. For some Protestants Cromwell is still a religious reformer who fought for freedom of conscience for all faiths apart from Catholicism. Many in the Jewish community still remember Cromwell as the leader who allowed Jews to live, worship and work in England for the first time since the pogroms of 1290. But for the bourgeoisie Oliver is best forgotten, even though their ascendancy began when their ancestors took up the gun in the 1640s.

The ruling class abhor revolutionary change today because it threatens their own domination so they naturally deny that their class ever came to power through it in the first place. For them the English republic is an aberration, a temporary blip in the steady advance of bourgeois progress which is the myth they teach us in school. If they elevate anything at all it is the “glorious revolution” of 1688 when the last of the Stuarts was deposed and replaced by a king of their own choosing. Though not as bloodless as they claimed – plenty was shed in Ireland – the establishment of a monarchy that was the gift of parliament was achieved without the involvement of the masses, which was precisely what was intended.

The problem was simply that the most advanced section of the bourgeoisie in the 17th century, the “Independent” faction led by Cromwell, was unable to maintain stability after the death of their most prominent leader. The real victors were those who styled themselves as English “Presbyterians” who fought the king not for a republic but for a “mixed monarchy” – an oligarchy still headed by a king who ruled through a parliament of the merchants, bankers and landowners and an established Church, like that in Scotland, that was free of the trappings of feudalism.

That’s what they thought they got when Charles II returned in 1660. When they realized their mistake William of Orange and his Dutch army were invited in to make sure it didn’t happen again.

But the torch of the English Revolution lit the fires that were to erupt a century later in the British colonies of North America and the flames quickly spread to France and ignited the French Revolution.

Cromwell was a reluctant republican who only embraced the views of the militant Levellers after the upsurge of renewed civil strife in 1648 due to Charles Stuart’s intrigues and double-dealing convinced him that there would never be peace as long as this “man of blood” lived.
Cromwell’s positive role, was recognised by Stalin who told the novelist H G Wells in 1934 that: “The Communists base themselves on rich historical experience which teaches that obsolete classes do not voluntarily abandon the stage of history. Recall the history of England in the 17th century. Did not many say that the old social system had decayed? But did it not, nevertheless, require a Cromwell to crush it by force?”

Though Cromwell abolished the established Church and guaranteed the right for all sects to pray as they saw fit, he was not a social reformer and thought the Leveller ideas absurd and dangerous. But basic bourgeois rights, particularly the absolute right to property and the end of feudal duties, were won during the English Revolution in a fight that involved masses of working people empowered for the first time in their lives.

In 1948 British communist leader Harry Pollitt said:

“When the growing capitalist class, the poor farmers and craftsmen, led by Oliver Cromwell, shattered the system of feudalism, and executed King Charles I in the process, reigning monarchs and ruling nobilities everywhere saw the pattern of future history unfolding. The name of Cromwell was reviled, then, as much as Stalin’s is today, by the ruling powers of the old and doomed order of society.
“The English Revolution is ‘great’, because it broke the barriers to man’s advance. It allowed the capitalist class to open the road leading to modern large-scale industry. It permitted science to serve the needs of the new, capitalist society. And, because of these developments, it provided the basis on which, for the first time, a new class, the working class, began to grow, to organise and itself to challenge the prevailing system of society.
“Capitalism, at first progressive, in so far as it led the way for technical advance, developed to the point limited by its own structure. It became, as feudalism was before it, a barrier to the further advance of man. It ceased to serve a useful purpose. It had built up enormous productive forces, but was incapable of providing the majority of the people with a decent standard of life.
“Throughout the world, the working class, with the Communist Party at its head, now goes forward to put an end to capitalism and to build socialism. The English Revolution set this train of historic events in motion. That is why our Party is proud to honour its memory.”