joint statement of communist and workers' parties on the 60th anniversary of Nato

The 4th April 2009, is the 60th anniversary of the foundation of NATO, the imperialist organisation which is under the leadership of the USA.
NATO was created allegedly in order to confront the USSR, the first workers’ state in the world that withstood and confronted successfully the attack of the Nazi plague, giving a new impetus to the struggle for national and social liberation all over the world.
At the same time, the capitalist governments of the USA, Canada and Western Europe needed a military political mechanism to repress and intimidate the peoples. This need was served by the foundation of NATO.
Its goal was to confront and obstruct with the use of arms any type of progressive changes. For that reason, but also for ensuring the interests of imperialism, NATO supported the reactionary regimes and dictatorships in Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, while it played a leading role in the partition of Cyprus.
Its action was and still is based on anticommunism and all types of fabrications and provocations against the revolutionary communist movement and the peoples’ struggle for peace, social justice and socialism.
NATO’s history in its role as world “sheriff” of imperialism is linked to violations of international law. It is marked with the blood of victims of its direct or indirect interventions throughout the world.
Especially nowadays the character of NATO as a military mechanism, as a basic tool of imperialist action inside the member states as well as outside their borders for the establishment of the “new order” has been fully exposed.
The argument that NATO was an allegedly defensive treaty is a lie and empty propaganda aiming at concealing the real goals and role of this aggressive organisation. Following the summit in Rome in 1992 and in 1999 in Washington, NATO has adopted a new doctrine that provides the possibility of intervention throughout the world, in the name of new threats, under the pretext of combating terrorism, the protection of natural sources’ flow etc. During this period NATO moved on with its new structure which is based mainly on the aggressive “rapid deployment forces”.
The USA along with the EU organised the dissolution of Yugoslavia and in this way NATO triggered off the war in Bosnia, realized the dirty war against Serbia, with the 78 days of bombing in 1999 that levelled the country to the ground and led to the NATO and EU occupation of Kosovo and its “independence” from Serbia.
The wars of NATO in the Balkans and Afghanistan, the participation in the war in Iraq, the interventions in Pakistan and in South Asia demonstrate the brutal nature of imperialism. NATO was always the main supporter for Israel in its aggression against the Palestinian people and other Arab peoples. NATO, also, played, and still plays a role in the siege imposed on Gaza. Contrary to peoples’ will, NATO attempts to draw to its web Ukraine and Georgia. It encourages in every possible way their armament, supporting the most reactionary circles of these countries. The imposition of a “new order” have as an enemy the states and the peoples that react to the imperialist aggressiveness. Therefore, it escalates the armament and develops new threatening weapon systems, such as the so-called antimissile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.
NATO’s programme “Partnership for Peace” promotes its expansion with new country-members. It was implemented in all former socialist countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe that later became members of the NATO. Nowadays, pressure is being exerted to the government of the Republic of Cyprus to join this programme and be integrated in the Euro-Atlantic plans. The government and the people of Cyprus strongly resist because an approval would give an indulgence for the invasion of the Turkish army in Cyprus conducted with the approval of the USA and the NATO, as well as acceptance of the de facto occupation of part of the island by the Turkish troops that continues till nowadays.
Imperialism-USA-NATO-EU are closely related concepts. Despite their contradictions and their antagonisms, both the EU and USA turn against the peoples, since the EU in the Euro-treaty considers NATO as its main pillar and fully accepts its role. The EU army is linked with the NATO and France has returned to the latter’s military arm.
On the 60th anniversary of its establishment, NATO attempts to present itself as “innocent as a dove”, with an unprecedented propaganda of distortion of history, through the media manipulated by the system, the universities funded by research programmes of NATO etc.
NATO appears to be all-powerful, but it is not. The world economic crisis of capitalism strengthens the imperialist aggressiveness while at the same time it shows its limits. Imperialism cannot exist without controlling new markets, without broadening its influence, without capturing and oppressing other peoples, along with the peoples of its own states, for the expansion of monopolies’ activity.
There is a counterweight to NATO; it’s the anti-imperialist forces all over the world, the global anti-war, anti-imperialist, peace movement that in coordination with the workers’ movement and the other social movements of women, the youth, in defence of nature of natural resources and the movements of solidarity struggle against imperialism and demand from the collaborators of the “predatory alliance” the immediate dissolution of the NATO.
This is the “one-way road” for the peoples. We have to stop the imperialist aggressiveness, contribute to the defeat of imperialism that constitutes a prerequisite for a peaceful world.
Nowadays, the verbal condemnation of NATO’s crimes and threats is not enough. There needs to be a wide anti-war, anti-imperialist peace movement that will rally the workers, the youth and broad social and popular forces.
The peoples through their struggle can actually set obstacles to the criminal plans of the NATO and the other imperialist forces and win.
The Communist and Workers’ Parties call the peoples to intensify their struggle:
Against the military expenditure.
Prohibition of NATO programmes at the universities.
The immediate return of all troops and other missions that participate in imperialist operations outside our countries.
The emancipation of our countries from the imperialist wars, countries’ occupation and imperialist interventions.
The removal of all foreign military bases from our countries.
The disengagement of our countries from the NATO.
The dissolution of NATO.

LONG LIVE THE FRIENDSHIP OF THE PEOPLES

DOWN WITH THE NEW ORDER OF THE IMPERIALISTS

The parties

Algerian Party for Democracy and Socialism
Communist Party of Bangladesh
Communist Party of Belarus
Worker’s Party of Belgium
Workers' Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brazilian Communist Party
Communist Party of Brazil
Communist Party of Britain
New Communist Party of Britain
Party of the Bulgarian Communists
Communist Party of Canada
Socialist Workers' Party of Croatia
Communist Party of Cuba
Communist Party of Bohemia Moravia
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Estonia
Communist Party of Finland
German Communist Party (DKP)
Communist Party of Greece
Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
Communist Party of India
Communist Party of India [Marxist]
Communist Party of Ireland
Party of the Italian Communists
Jordanian Communist Party
Socialist Party of Latvia
Lebanese Communist Party
Socialist Party of Lithuania
Communist Party of Luxemburg
Communist Party of Malta
Party of the Communists, Mexico
New Communist Party of the Netherlands
Communist Party of Pakistan
Communist Party of Poland
Portuguese Communist Party
Romanian Communist Party
Communist Party of Russian Federation
Communist Party of Soviet Union
Communist Workers Party of Russia-Party of Communists of Russia (RKRP-RPC)
Union of Communist Parties –CPSU
New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Party of the Serbian Communists
Communist Party of Slovakia
South African Communist Party
Communist Party of Spain
Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
Communist Party of Sri-Lanka
Syrian Communist Party
Communist Party of Syria
Communist Party of Sweden
Communist Party of Turkey
Communist Party of Ukraine
Union of Communists of Ukraine
Communist Party of Uruguay

A Turbulent Life

Book Review

by Andy Brooks

A Turbulent Life by Jock Nicholson pbk, 111 pp, illus, £8.99, Praxis Press Glasgow 2009.

WHAT MAKES a communist tick? We think we know that from our own experience. We recall the struggles against the revisionist “euro-communists” in the 1970s and the struggle that led to the foundation of the New Communist Party. Some remember the fight to save the Morning Star by the Communist Campaign Group in the 1980s. Others will turn to the legion of academic works and turncoats’ memoirs that followed the downfall of the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). But what of the “loyalists” who remained faithful to the Gollan and McLennan leadership to the bitter end?
Jock Nicholson was one of those who comprised the vast majority of the old party’s membership whose class-consciousness was borne out of the tenements of Hamilton in Scotland and steeled by Spain and the communist party in the 1930s.
Nicholson was a militant trade unionist who worked with Willie Gallacher in Fife and played a leading role in the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) and the CPGB. Veteran readers may remember him when he was on the NUR Executive. Jock was certainly no friend of the NCP describing us as “a club of fanatics who were still living in the atmosphere of the Bolshevik insurrection”. But don’t let that deter you from reading this autobiography!
Nicholson’s book gives us an insight to the struggle starting with the back-breaking poverty of Scotland during the Great Slump and the struggle to make ends meet and ending with the liquidation of the old Party and the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union.
It’s packed with anecdotes about Willie Gallacher, the charismatic communist MP for West Fife from 1935 to 1950 ; life on the railways; the St Pancras rent strike in the 50s which Jock helped lead and lots more.
Being a communist is never easy and many fell by the wayside. Others, like Jock, stayed the distance. He describes Gallacher’s defeat in 1950 during the height of the Cold War and the political clashes with the right-wing on the NUR.
Though he says little about the internal struggles within the CPGB what he does say raises many questions. For instance he controversially says that the old Party elevated the industrial struggle above the electoral fight in the latter days of the Gollan leadership stating that “the factory proletariat had been elevated above the political thinker” particularly after Bert Ramelson took charge of the industrial department at King Street. It’s a pity that he didn’t write more but we must be grateful for what we have.
Working class memoirs are few and far between despite the renewed academic interest in local history in recent years. No-one wanted to know when Jock sent his manuscript out in 1992. It’s at last seen the light of day, with a foreword by Bob Crow, the General Secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union, thanks to the good offices of Praxis Press. Jock Nicholson certainly led a ‘turbulent life’ and his book is well worth the read. It can be ordered from your local library or bookshop or directly from: Unity Books, 72 Waterloo St, Glasgow G2, Scotland at £8.99 post free.

Pakistan -- Marching to Freedom

by Daphne Liddle

HUNDREDS of thousands of Pakistanis: workers, peasants, lawyers, trade unionists, communists, socialists and all manner of progressives have been marching in the last two months. And they have already achieved one big goal – the restoration of Iftikhar Chaudhry, the country’s Chief of Justice and the rule of law.
This may go a long way to achieving the full restoration and implementation of the country’s 1973 constitution – in line with the United Nations Human Rights Charter – which demands an end to bonded labour and wide-ranging land reforms that would give liberated bonded labourers their own land to support themselves.
The military feudal clique that has ruled Pakistan since 1947 – set in place by the departing British colonial regime – is now beginning to crumble and mass demands for civil rights are surging forward.
All existing and former heads of state in Pakistan have been drawn from that military feudal clique and the marchers want them all out, including existing Prime Minister Zardari (husband of assassinated Benazir Bhutto) and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif.
Sharif two weeks ago decided to lend his support to the ‘long march’ organised by lawyers and other civil rights activists demanding the full restoration of Iftikhar Chaudhry as Chief of Justice, along with all the other judges and lawyers who were summarily and illegally removed from office two years ago by the American-backed military dictator Pervez Musharraf.
At the time General Musharraf had been trying to regularise his position by preparing a presidential election in which he would be returned as a “democratically elected” leader. Traditionally Pakistani presidents are elected from within the parliament. To achieve his end he would have to breach all manner of constitutional laws and Chaudhry was not prepared to stand aside and let him get away with this, so Chaudhry had to go.
In the autumn of 2007 Musharraf engineered his “election” as president but it was a short lived victory. It provoked mass protests and he declared martial law. Popular outrage grew and he was forced to concede new parliamentary elections early in 2008 – and to allow former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto – candidate for the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) – to return from exile and begin election campaigning.
Nawaz Sharif, the former president kicked out by Musharraf, was living in forced exile in Saudi Arabia. But he slipped back into the country to join the campaign for free elections.
In the final days of 2007 Bhutto was assassinated while campaigning and the whole country was convinced that Musharraf’s intelligence thugs were either behind it or had deliberately allowed it to happen.
Popular anger rose to a crescendo; Sharif temporarily allied himself to the PPP in a joint effort aimed at getting rid of Musharraf. The delayed elections went ahead and Bhutto’s widowed husband, Ali Asif Zardari, won a landslide. Shortly after Musharraf was forced to stand down and the whole country celebrated.
But Zardari failed to fulfil the PPP promise to reinstate Chaudhry and the rule of law. He himself had old corruption charges hanging over him. All the leaders: Musharraf, Bhutto Sharif and Zardari were from the rich landowner class and all had “legal irregularities” and reason to fear the full implementation of the law. They had all failed to implement the 1973 constitution.
Furthermore they had all acted as willing tools of United States imperialism in the area, allowing Pakistan to be used as a base for Muslim fundamentalist terrorists undermining People’s Afghanistan in the 1980s and as a base to invade Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 2001. Musharraf also supplied Pakistani troops to back the US invasion of Somalia in the 1990s. Nevertheless Sharif continued to call for the restoration of Chaudhry; it was a very popular demand and he knew that Zardari’s rule was becoming less and less popular. The people would soon be looking for a new leader.
When Sharif declared his support for the lawyers’ civil rights long march and urged the protesters to occupy the area around the parliament building, Zardari had him put under house arrest. But he defied this to join the demonstrators.
Officials from his Muslim League (PML-N) party said that Sharif had been detained in his home town of Lahore. Hundreds of police surrounded his residence before dawn and detained him along with scores of his supporters.
Speaking to Al Jazeera before he was allowed by the police to head for the protest rally, Sharif said: “The police and the administration have sealed this house totally and there are a lot of very heavy police contingents standing outside my house.
“They say that I am under house arrest, but so far I haven’t been served any arrest warrant.” Sharif’s brother, Shahbaz, who is a senior member of the Muslim League, was also thought to have been placed under house arrest.
Scuffles broke out in Lahore shortly after Sharif’s detention was declared, with riot police firing tear gas at stone-throwing demonstrators.
Lawyers and opposition party supporters had planned to gather near Lahore’s main court complex before heading toward Islamabad to stage a mass sit-in front of parliament, in defiance of a government ban.
Sharif’s supporters denied he was a destabilising influence and insisted that all Zardari had to do was to reinstate Chaudhry and “he can enjoy uninterrupted government for four years,” he told Al Jazeera.
“We are not demanding an overthrow of the government, nor are we asking for mid-term elections. All we are asking is for Mr Zardari to fulfil the promises he made to restore the judges.”
Sharif was claiming to speak on behalf of the protesters, but he did not organise or lead the demonstration and most of the protesters wanted a lot more.
Ishtiaq Ahmad, a professor of international relations at Islamabad’s Qaid-e-Azam university, said that Zardari was resisting reinstating the judges for fear they might revoke his protection from corruption charges.
“The return of Benazir Bhutto and Zardari to Pakistan took place under a deal with Musharraf in 2007. As part of the deal all the corruption charges, through a special presidential ordinance called NRO [National Reconciliation Ordinance], were removed, against Zardari especially.
“The NRO remains, but the fear of the Zardari-led regime is, if they restore chief justice Chaudhry – given his assertive background – the NRO might be revoked and then obviously all those charges will come back to haunt Zardari and other party leaders.” Zardari relented and reinstated Chaudhry and the rest of the judges – and the mass sit-in in parliament square was averted.
It was greeted as a major step forward by the vast majority of people: trade unionists peasants, civil rights activists and many more. In London veteran civil rights activist Mukhtar Rana told the New Worker: “This has been a big demand of the people of Pakistan; it’s a return to the rule of law. The reinstatement of Chaudhry and all the judges and lawyers is a big achievement of the people of Pakistan.
“Lawyers in Britain and the US supported their cause.”
In Pakistan Baz Mohammed Kakar, a leader of the lawyers’ movement said: “This is a victory for the people of this country. Chaudhry is the first chief justice in the history of Pakistan who has proved himself to be a judge for the people, as a chief justice for the people.”
For now, calm has settled after the big demonstration. The army is supporting the chief justice and say they will obey him.
The People’s Party is opposing Nawaz Sharif for his record of bad government and violating constitution by declaring martial law.
Trade unions are growing in strength and confidence and many new civil rights and progressive groups are growing up.
Another giant protest long march has happened just a few weeks before, in the Sindh province, demanding the implementation of land reforms. It was mainly a march of the haris – landless peasants and recently liberated bonded labourers, demanding land to grow food to support themselves.
Article 38(a) of the Constitution of Pakistan says: “The State shall secure the well-being of the people... by preventing the concentration of wealth and means of production and distribution in the hands of a few to the detriment of general interest and by ensuring equitable adjustment of rights between employers and employees, and landlords and tenants.”
United Nations declarations specifically acknowledge this need. The Declaration on Social Progress, adopted by the General Assembly back in 1969, recognises the social function of property, including land, and calls for forms of land ownership that ensure equal rights to property for all..
Syed Mohammed Ali, writing in the Pakistani Daily Times, says: “Despite international conventions and our own constitutional imperatives, not much has been done to address the profound violations facing a multitude of small landless farmers across our country. A highly skewed distribution of land in our country continues to prevail, although there is growing evidence pointing to the need for security of land tenure to promote more investment in land to ensure higher yields.
“When agricultural land is owned in smaller parcels, production practices are also seen to become less extractive.
Nonetheless, landed politicians continue to deny the poorer rural workforce access to not only land, but also other productive resources, such as seeds, fertilisers and water.
“According to the International Labour Organisation’s World Labour Report, there are approximately 1.7 million bonded labourers in Pakistan, and a majority of them are in the agricultural sector.
“The introduction of canal-irrigated agriculture by the British and the migrations associated with the development of the so-called canal colonies’ created serious rural disparities in our part of the world, which enabled an increasingly incontestable dominance of the landed elite on sharecroppers/tenant farmers and landless agricultural labourers.
“Even after Partition, the lack of effective land reforms and the continuation of archaic laws meant to regulate the legal relationship between landowners and tenant farmers who occupy rural land in major agricultural areas in Punjab and Sindh have severely undermined the interests of the rural poor.”
Landlord and tenant farmer relations are guided by the Sindh Tenancy Act of 1950, which is said to be a result of the long struggle by the peasant organisations of the 1940s.
This Act articulated the rights, obligations and remedies available to the haris (tenant farmers/land-tillers) as well as to the Zamindars (landlords). The law recommended that borrowing and lending related be regulated strictly to avoid exploitation on either side. The law thus fixed a time limit of such lending or borrowing and further required written documents as proof for financial transactions. And a court was supposed to be formed to settle disputes between haris and the zamindars.
In practice, however, proper land records are not being maintained under the Sindh Tenancy Act. Despite trying to regulate loaning arrangement, landlords still apportion a large quantity of harvests, claiming these to be repayments of interest on loans given to their haris. The ease with which landlords circumvent the existing provisions of the law has impelled calls for a complete overhaul of this legislation.
There was even a Sindh High Court’s Hyderabad branch decision to amend the Sindh Tenancy Act according to needs of the peasants back in 2002. In 2007, the speaker of the Sindh Assembly finally formed a committee to amend the Sindh Tenancy Act. But, the prevalent political party lent its support to the landed politicians in order to remain in power, and once again not much was done to address the on-ground exploitation of the rural masses.
Furthermore the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1992 has never been properly implemented. Although the Asian Development Bank also provided a loan to the Sindh government aiming to end bonded labour, seven years after getting this loan, little groundwork has been done to achieve this objective.
In mid-February thousands of haris and their supporters set off on a two-week march to demand amendments to the Sindh Land and Tenancy Act, which will be tabled at the next Sindh Assembly session, according to deputy speaker Shehla Raza. The march was organised by South Asia Partnership, Pakistan (SAP-Pakistan), Sindh Haari Porhiat Council (SHPC) and Bhandar Hari Sangat (BHS).
On the last day of the march, the procession of the peasants from Sindh and the leadership of SAP-Pakistan, SHPC and BHS, were joined by thousands of peasants from Punjab, Balochistan and NWFP, as well as members of organisations working for the rights of peasants, workers and women.
The march was delayed as some groups were by police and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz workers.
Regardless, when the rally did start off, all one could see was a mass of people interspersed with thousands of flags, including those of the SHPC, Awami Party, and the historic Haider Bux Jatoi’s Sindh Haari Committee.
Various slogans reverberated through the air as the sea of people wove their way along main roads, by-lanes and footpaths. Several volunteers kept order, and many shopkeepers, residents and passers-by came up to the marchers with encouragement.
Many even joined the procession, or at least responded to slogans while flashing victory signs.
The rally, which had covered almost all of M A Jinnah Road, finally reached the Sindh Assembly around 6:30pm, where it was surrounded by massive trucks and hordes of police.
The leadership of the movement went into the Sindh Assembly building to speak with the ministers. After a while, Deputy Speaker Shehla Raza came out and addressed the rally. She said she was proud of the fact that the peasants and workers of the country were now aware of their rights and were also aware of how to get them.
She also promised that the amendments in the Sindh Land and Tenancy Act would be tabled at the next Sindh Assembly session.
“If these promises are not fulfilled, we will march again on 15th August and stage another sit-in here. That sit-in will be an absolute re-enactment of the peasants’ sit-in led by Haider Bux Jatoi more than 50 years ago. It had resulted in the passing of the Sindh Land and Tenancy Act,” SAP-Pakistan provincial coordinator Syed Zulfiqar Shah said in his speech.
He made the participants promise not to give up the fight, and to continue “till the rule of the workers and peasants was set up in the country”.
SHPC head Punhal Sario lambasted past and present rulers and systems of the government in the country for doing nothing substantial for the rights of peasants, workers and women, and for not ensuring the implementation of laws in letter and spirit.
Speakers at the sit-in took pride in the fact that not a single window was broken during the march. “Our peaceful struggle is our strength. It should, however, not be taken as a sign of weakness,” they said.
The long march started in Hyderabad on 15th February from the tomb of “Baba-e-Sindh” (father of Sindh) Haider Bux Jatoi and culminated on 26th February in Karachi with a sit-in in front of the Sindh Assembly building to demand the establishment of Haari courts, amendments in the Sindh Land and Tenancy Act and rights for landless peasants in the province.
In London Mukhtar Rana told the New Worker:
“Our movement has been supporting this. So many bonded labourers marching for their freedom! This is the task we have been fighting for years and years. It’s why I visited Karachi last year.
“But even when people got their freedom their was no work for them to support themselves.
“Now they are demanding land reforms so they can become landowners and have somewhere to grow their crops and support themselves.
“That’s the most important thing. Now things are going forward and we are playing an active role in supporting this struggle.”

ام كلثوم تغني لفلسطي

A beautiful song for Palestine by the great Egyptian singer Om Kuthum recorded in 1967 during the Nasser era.

Joint Statement of communist and workers parties in Europe

The Czech presidency of the EU, in the middle of a capitalist economic crisis, takes the initiative to organize a number of anticommunist events in order to bring in the forefront the attempt to equate communism with Nazism, to rewrite history and manipulate the consciences mainly of the young generations, with a view to the future rather than the past.
The intention, expressed within the EU (in countries where CP have been already outlawed), for the communism and the class struggle to be characterized as a crime, not only targets against the communists nor does it concern solely the EU countries.

The anticommunist hysteria that burst out a few years ago with the so-called “Memorandum” for the “need of international condemning of the crimes by totalitarian communist regimes” in the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly and goes on till nowadays is targeting to the working class as well as to the other popular strata”.
They want to strike the avant-garde of the popular movement and its struggle against the anti-popular plans and the attempt to place the burden of the world crisis on the workers’ shoulders. They want to eliminate the dispute of the exploitative system and the prospect of a just society, expressed by the ideology and the struggles of the communists. They intent to strike the forces of resistance and popular counterattack based on an anticommunist hysteria, lies and persecutions. They have announced new offences against Socialist Cuba and the peoples that resist imperialism.

We condemn these actions undertaken by the presidency of the EU and we call the peoples of Europe to react dynamically and condemn them massively.

======================

The Parties


Workers' Party of Belgium
New Communist Party of Britain
Party of Bulgarian Communists
AKEL, Cyprus
Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Estonia
Communist Party of Finland
Communist Party of Greece
Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
Communist Party of Ireland
Workers' Party of Ireland
Party of the Italian Communists
Communist Party of Luxembourg
New Communist Party of the Netherlands (NCPN)
Communist Party of Norway
Communist Party of Poland
Portuguese Communist Party
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
Communist Workers Party of Russia-Party of Communists of Russia (RKRP-RPC)
Communist Party of Peoples of Spain
Communist Party of Sweden
Communist Party of Turkey

Solidarity with Sean Garland

Statement signed by over 50 Communist & Workers Parties at Athens Greece in solidarity with Sean Garland


We, the undersigned Communist and Workers parties attending the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of Greece, Athens on 18th/22nd February 2009, condemn the arrest of Comrade Sean Garland, former President of the Workers’ Party of Ireland and current member of the Central Executive committee. He was arrested outside the Party offices in Dublin on Friday 30th January 2009, at the request of the U.S. authorities who are seeking his extradition to the U.S. The request for the extradition was signed by Condoleezza Rice in the final days of the Bush Administration.
Comrade Garland was first arrested in October 2005 while attending the Party congress in Belfast. This was a blatant attempt by the U.S. authorities to take advantage of the unjust and controversial extradition treaty between the U.S. and British governments which would have afforded him little or no legal protection. After having been granted permission to return to Dublin for urgent medical attention, after much consideration Sean Garland decided not to return to Northern Ireland.
Sean Garland has lived openly and has conducted his political activities and engagements in public for the last 3 years. He made his address known to the Irish authorities. He is 75 years old and is in serious ill health, suffering from a number of medical conditions.
Sean Garland has consistently denied any wrongdoing. He has received strong support from a wide spectrum of political, trade union and public figures concerned at the manner in which he was treated. Sean Garland is being subjected to a relentless and vindictive campaign of persecution by the U.S government.
We condemn this blatant attack on a leading member of The Workers’ Party of Ireland who has pursued a struggle against imperialism for almost 60 years. We express our solidarity with the Workers’ Party of Ireland and with Comrade Sean Garland in the fight against extradition to the U.S.
We demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of these extradition proceedings on political, legal and humanitarian grounds and call on all communist, workers parties and progressive organisation to send messages of support to the Workers’ Party at wpi@indigo.ie
and the Campaign to Defend Sean Garland at: defendseangarland@gmail.com

Communist Party of Albania
Algerian Party for Democracy and Socialism (PADS)
Communist Party of Armenia
Workers Party of Belgium
Brazilian Communist Party
New Communist Party of Britain
Communist Party of Canada
Colombian Communist Party
Communist Party of Cuba
Socialist Workers Party of Croatia
Progressive Party of the Working People – AKEL Cyprus
Communist Party of Denmark
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Estonia
French Communist Party
Communist Party of Greece (KKE)
Communist Party of India (Marxist)
Communist Party of India
Tudeh Party of Iran
Communist Refoundation Party, Italy
Party of the Italian Communists
Workers Party of Korea
Socialist Party of Latvia
Communist Party of Malta
Party of the Communists Mexico
New Communist Party of the Netherlands
Communist Party of Pakistan
Palestinian Communist Party
Party of the People, Panama
Peruvian Communist Party
Communist Party of Poland
Communist Refoundation, Puerto Rico
Romanian Communist Party
New Communist Party of Serbia
Party of the Communists of Serbia
Communist Party of Spain
Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
Party of the Communists, Catalonia
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Workers Party of Russia (RKRP)
Party of the Communists of Russia (RPC)
Syrian Communist Party
Communist Party of Sweden
Communist Party of South Africa
Communist Party of Turkey
Union of Communists of Ukraine
Communist Party of Venezuela
World Peace Council
World Federation of Trade Unions
Communist Party of Portugal

To confirm:-

Communist Party of Ireland

Communist Party of Britain

Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Joint Statement on Palestine

The Communist and workers’ parties and liberation organizations listed below, having convened on the eve of the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) in Athens, wish to express their strong condemnation of the barbaric ground, naval and aerial aggression launched by Israel against Gaza which began in late December 2008. This brutal assault on Gaza lasted some 22 days and resulted in the death of over 1,350 citizens, wounded thousands of innocent civilians including women, children and the elderly, and left a massive trail of destruction of homes, properties and infrastructure, depriving the residents of Gaza of the most basic services.

The parties also express their grave concern for the resulting humanitarian tragedy, and outrage at the intentional targeting of schools and civil institutions, including the UNRWA school in Jabalia Camp.

The Israeli attack on Gaza is in reality an aggression against the entire Palestinian people.

Based on the above, the signatories wish to declare the following:

(1) We salute the heroic steadfastness of the Palestinian masses of Gaza, and stress the fundamental right of the Palestinian people to resist the occupation, a right recognized by the U.N. and international law. We demand the immediate lifting of the siege of Gaza, the re-opening of borders, and the rapid reconstruction of all that was damaged or destroyed by this wanton aggression;

(2) We reaffirm our support for and solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle to regain their legitimate and inalienable national rights, including the right to self-determination and the establishment of an independent and sovereign state with Al-Quds (East Jerusalem) as its capital, as well as the right of return for all Palestinian refugees in accordance with U.N. Resolution 194;

(3) We strongly condemn the perpetuated construction of the racist wall as well as of the colonial settlements in the occupied West Bank which are in flagrant conflict with all the relevant UN decisions.

We demand the immediate remove of the wall and of the settlements as well as the immediate release from custody of all the freedom prisoners in the Israeli detention.

(4) We call on the U.N. Security council and other international organizations to conduct a comprehensive and thorough investigation of the grave human rights violations and war crimes committed by the Israeli army during this assault on Gaza, including its use of internationally prohibited weapons against the civilian population. The parties also call for the formation of special legal commissions to file “war crimes” charges against the Israeli authorities before the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and/or national juridical structures;

(5) We urge all sections of Palestinian national movement to work seriously and in a responsible manner toward ending the internal split and re-establishing Palestinian national unity. In this regard, the parties confirm the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) is the legitimate and the internationally recognized unified address of Palestinian people, and call for reactivating the role and status of the PLO with an open door to all those Palestinian national forces desiring to join it;

(6) We declare our intention to help build the international campaign to support Gaza and demand emergency assistance from the international community for its reconstruction.

Finally, the signatories commit to the following action measures on behalf of their organizations and members:

(1) to step up their solidarity actions with the Palestinian people internationally and within their respective countries;

(2) to pressure their respective governments to cancel the military and some political accords with the State of Israel;

(3) to organize and send, at the earliest opportunity, a joint party delegation to the occupied Palestinian territories to express our common solidarity with the national struggle of the Palestinian people;

(4) to convene an international symposium in solidarity with the Palestinian people, to be held in Damascus before the end of 2009;

(5) to organize a joint caravan of material aid to Gaza; and

(6) to hold an International Day of Action in Solidarity with the Palestinian people, with particular focus on the demand to break the siege of Gaza.

The signatories extend an invitation to other Communist and Workers’ parties and organizations to endorse this statement, and urge the Working Group of the International Meetings of Communist and Worker’s Parties (IMCWP) to work out the details of implementation of the above programme of action, in consultation with the Palestinian and Arab member-parties.

List of Parties and Organizations Co-signing this Statement – February 17th 2009

Communist Party of Albania
PADS, Algeria
Communist Party of Belarus
Workers’ Party of Belgium
Party of Bulgarian Communists
Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB)
Communist Party of Britain
New Communist Party of Britain
Communist Party of Canada
Colombian Communist Party
Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (Czech Republic)
Communist Party of Egypt
Socialist Worker’s Party of Croatia
Communist Party of Cuba
AKEL, Cyprus
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Denmark
French Communist Party
Communist Party of Macedonia
German Communist Party
Communist Party of Greece
Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
Communist Party of India
Communist Party of India (Marxist)
Tudeh Party of Iran
Communist Party of Israel
Party of the Communist Refoundation, Italy
Party of the Italian Communists
Jordanian Communist Party
Socialist Party of Latvia
Lebanese Communist Party
Communist Party of Luxembourg
Communist Party of Malta
Party of Communists, Mexico
Political Movement –“People’s Resistance”, Moldova
New Communist Party of the Netherlands
Communist Party of Norway
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Palestinian Communist Party
Palestinian People’s Party
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Peruvian Communist Party
Communist Party of Poland
Portuguese Communist Party
Socialist Alliance Party, Romania
Romanian Communist Party
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Worker’s Party of Russia – Party of the Communist of Russia
New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Communist Party of Slovakia
South African Communist Party
Communist Party of Spain
Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
Party of the Communists, Catalonia
Communist Party of Sri-Lanka
Syrian Communist Party
Communist Party of Syria
Baath Party, Syria
Communist Party of Tajikistan
Communist Party of Turkey
Labour Party (Turkey)
South African Communist Party
Communist Party of Sweden
Union of the Communists of Ukraine
Communist Party of Venezuela
Polisario Front
World Federation of Trade Unions

Forward with the Greek communists!

by our European Affairs Correspondent

GREEK communists gathered in Athens last week to chart the way forward at the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). During the five days of sessions delegates reviewed the work of the KKE, the international communist movement and launch the counter-attack against the ruling class offensive against working people at this time of world slump.
Congress unanimously re-elected Aleka Papariga as the General Secretary of the 77-strong central committee and agreed to set up a people’s anti-imperialist front and a programme of action in solidarity with Cuba and Palestine.
The Congress was attended by 435 delegates and 400 guests from around the country as well as over 90 delegates from communist and workers’ parties and progressive movements from 72 countries.

fraternal

These included fraternal delegations from the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Democratic Korea and Vietnam, communist parties in government from Cyprus, Syria and South Africa and fraternal delegates from parties across the world including the New Communist Party.
Opening Congress Aleka Papariga stressed that “Socialism is timely and historically necessary”, speaking of the party’s counterattack on all fronts at a time when big financial, social and political problems all over the globe, in the region and Greece are being examined.
Comrade Papariga reviewed the international and domestic situation, the global financial crisis and its causes, political developments, and prospects in light of the KKE’s ideological and political positions, while she also placed the KKE on “full alert” for the forthcoming European Parliament elections and the prospect of general elections.
“We all know that demands rise due to the fact that the crisis has begun becoming evident in Greece. It will break out, be sharp and last long,” she declared.
“We only have one choice, which is to rise to the occasion so that the labour movement can counterattack and build the social alliance to progress.
Aleka Papariga said that both the conservative New Democracy (ND) government and main opposition social democratic PASOK party, albeit with different phraseology and slogans, were essentially saying the same thing, that the maximum cooperation among the social partners, all the “productive forces”, must be ensured so that the crisis will pass as smoothly as possible.
At the same time, however, their choices and proposals had two basic interlinking characteristics: Measures to safeguard profits and “aspirin” measures to alleviate extreme poverty, she added.
She dismissed the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) for exceeding “all boundaries of opportunism and anti-communism” during the recent protests and riots and said the far-right Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) had “shown its aversion to the mass popular action and struggles, rendering itself an apologist of police violence”.
In his greetings to Congress NCP leader Andy Brooks said that “the Greek communists’ heroic struggle for liberation and against reactionary terror over the decades is an inspiration to communists in Europe and throughout the world. The theses of the Central Committee of the KKE will consequently provide the basis for discussion and advance that will go far beyond the ranks of the Greek communist movement.
The Communist Party of Greece’s tireless work to restore international communist co-operation has played a crucial role in rallying our world movement following the counter-revolutions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989”.

Socialism and Darwinism

by Daphne Liddle

THE WORLD has recently been commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, a timid naturalist who rocked the scientific establishment because he could not deny to himself or the world the plain evidence of his scientific observations: evidence of how species evolve from one thing to another.
In 1831, as a new theology graduate, he undertook a five-year voyage on the ship The Beagle as a naturalist, studying plant and animal specimens from all the places this ship visited. In the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific he noted that the different islands had very similar but different species of many animals. He noted that the finches in one island had short strong beaks – ideal for cracking seeds, while those on another had longer, thinner beaks, ideal for rooting out insects. Natural selection had produced 13 different species.
He could not help but conclude that they had a common ancestor but, isolated by the ocean and prevented from breeding together, they had evolved to adapt to the best food resources on each island and so became separate sub-species.
The implication was that all species of plants and animals have descended from common ancestors, originally primitive, single-cell organisms, and have diversified to thrive under different and constantly changing environmental conditions.
This was in direct confrontation to the words of the Bible, which proclaims in the book of Genesis that all living things were created by God exactly as they appear today, and that since this creation there have never been any changes.
Darwin knew the uproar his findings would cause and delayed publishing for around 20 years, until 1859; he did not publish his famous The Origins of the Species, when he discovered another scientist, Alfred Russell Wallace, was about to publish a very similar study.
One of the first to congratulate him was Karl Marx, who sent him a copy of Das Kapital, which Darwin reportedly never got around to reading. Marx pointed out that Darwin’s god-free account of the evolution of life in all its diversity was consistent with his own account of the evolution of human society – that the general theory of nature was converging with the general theory of society.
But Marx and Engels did not agree with all Darwin’s subsequent assertions. In particular they contradicted his idea that evolution is a gradual process, asserting instead that is was a dialectical process with long slow build-ups to sudden, rapid changes.
Darwin was convinced that before long fossils would provide evidence of long, slow periods of change from one species to others; that there would be evidence of giraffes with medium length necks and so on.
The intermediate stages of evolution are gradually coming to light but they are a lot rarer because, in evolutionary terms, the changes happened dialectically and rapidly (thousands of years nevertheless). And where the changes were prompted by sudden changes in the environment, they occurred within a few generations.
The fossil record shows six major mass extinctions took place at the beginning and end of the Cambrian period (600 million and 500 million years ago respectively), and the ends of the Devonian (345 million years ago), the Permian (225 million), the Triassic (180 million) and the Cretaceous (63 million).
In circumstances where there is rapid change of the environment many species are wiped out completely. In some species just a few will survive that have some genetic variation that makes them better adapted to cope with the new environment. The survivors have only each other to breed with and so the crucial genetic variations – and other variations that may be neutral to survival – rapidly become a defining characteristic of the species and quickly become so exaggerated that a new species is formed.
The Russian Marxist Plekhanov commented: “Modern evolutionists introduce a considerable admixture of conservatism into their teaching. They want to prove that there are no leaps either in nature or in history. Dialectics, on the other hand, knows full well that in nature and also in human thought and history leaps are inevitable. But it does not overlook the undeniable fact that the same uninterrupted process is at work in all phases of change. It only endeavours to make clear to itself the series of conditions under which gradual change must necessarily lead to a leap.”
Change can also come through geographical isolation where a small population has become separated from the main population at its periphery. This form of speciation, called triallopac, allows a rapid evolution to take place. As soon as an ancestral species is separated, the inter-breeding stops. Any genetic changes build up separately. However, in the smaller population, genetic variations can spread very quickly in comparison to the ancestral group.
This can be brought about by natural selection responding to changing climatic and geographical factors. As the two populations diverge, they eventually reach a point where two species are formed. Quantitative changes have given rise to a qualitative transformation. If they ever meet in the future, then so genetically divergent are they, that they are unable to breed successfully.
As Engels commented: “The organic process of development, both of the individual and of species, by differentiation, is the most striking test of rational dialectics.” And, “The further physiology develops, the more important for it becomes these incessant, infinitely small changes, and hence the more important for it also the consideration of differences within identity, and the old abstract standpoint of formal identity, that an organic being is to be treated as something simply identical with itself, as something constant, becomes out of date.” Engels then concludes: “If there the individuals which become adapted survive and develop into a new species by continually increasing adaption, while the other more stable individuals die away and finally die out, and with them the imperfect intermediate stages, then this can and does proceed without any Malthusianism, and if the latter should occur at all it makes no change to the process, at most it can accelerate it.”
Right from the first publication of The Origins of the Species, capitalist theoreticians have tried to use it to justify the brutal and highly competitive society they have created.
The followers of Thomas Malthus argued, in 1789, that in the “Battle of Life” there will always be losers; there will always be people who are poor and starving. To try to correct this by giving charity or welfare to the poor will only encourage them to breed more. “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.” (Thomas Robert Malthus, The Principle of Population.) Ultimately, he argues, this will lead to far more people dying in poverty and starvation. He was obsessed by the dangers of population growth.
This fitted in with Darwin’s idea that natural selection operates through the survival of only the fittest and, though nature was cruel, the species would not be able to progress if those with “inferior” genes were artificially helped to survive and pass on their “weaknesses” to future generations.
Since then many right-wing thinkers have tried to use this to justify the class system, arguing that the rich and powerful have risen to the top of society because they are genetically superior – not just because they are more greedy and aggressive. In modern times they have argued that greed and aggressiveness are positive and progressive traits.
The eugenicists, including the Nazis, have argued that it is necessary to intervene artificially to prevent “inferior” specimens from breeding, either by forcibly sterilising them or simply murdering them. This policy was exposed when the Nazis took it to its logical conclusion in the gas chambers and the Holocaust. But even after that some governments in Scandinavia, the United States, Switzerland and Australia still continued until just a few decades ago in forcibly sterilising young people who were deemed “inferior”. These included people with learning difficulties, Gypsies, Australian Aborigines and other minority ethnic groups.
But if Darwin demonstrated anything it is that, in an uncertain and ever changing environment, any species needs the widest possible gene pool to stand the best chance of survival. The eugenicists, by trying to narrow the gene pool, make the human race less likely to survive. Our strength lies in our diversity; each different individual brings their own strength to the collective while the collective gives support to each individual. Darwin had read Malthus and Adam Smith, the founder of capitalist economics theory, who argued that competition in the market place led to competent and efficient producers of commodities at a low price prospering while inefficient producers selling at high prices would go out of business – and in this way the best methods of production would prevail over the inferior.
Engels commented: “Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the Animal Kingdom.”
But Darwin spoke of “fitness” in relation only to a given environment, not to an absolute scale of perfection. In fact, neither of the two terms with which Darwin’s name is chiefly associated, “evolution” and “survival of the fittest,” occurs in early editions of The Origins of the Species, where his key ideas are expressed by the words “mutability” and “natural selection”.
On the 18th June 1862, Marx wrote to Engels: “Darwin, whom I have looked up again, amuses me when he says he is applying the ‘Malthusian’ theory also to plants and animals, as if with Mr Malthus the whole point were not that he does not apply the theory to plants and animals but only to human beings — and with geometrical progression — as opposed to plants and animals.” Engels also pointed out: “Darwin’s mistake lies precisely in lumping together in ‘natural selection’ or the ‘survival of the fittest’, two absolutely separate things:
“1. Selection by the pressure of over-population, where perhaps the strongest survive in the first place, but where the weakest in many respects can also do so.
“2. Selection by greater capacity of adaption to altered circumstances, where the survivors are better suited to these circumstances, but where this adaption as a whole can mean regress just as well as progress (for adaption to parasitic life is always regress).
“The main thing: that each advance in organic evolution is at the same time a regression, fixing one-sided evolution and excluding evolution along many other directions. This, however, is a basic law.”
The Malthusians compare humans to flies, frogs and other species that produce hundreds of offspring, most of which will die before reaching adulthood, so that, by chance, a few will survive to keep the species going.
But the human race is very different. We produce mostly one offspring at a time which reaches maturity slowly. We are born very vulnerable with our brains still developing. Our behaviour as adults is governed less by innate instinct than by what we have learned as we grow up. Our experiences as children fit us to cope with the environment we find ourselves in. This makes us adaptable to cope with virtually any environment.
But our long, highly dependent childhood means we need a collective, collaborative society to live in. A frog or a fly only needs to survive long enough to mate, deposit eggs and its genes are successfully passed on to the next generation. Humans need not only to mate but also to sustain a pregnancy, survive childbirth and to rear their offspring. They cannot do this alone without the help and support of a wider family or society. And the only creature we know of that lives a significant time after it has ceased to be able to reproduce itself is the human female, a clear indication that babies with living grandmothers stand a better chance of survival than those without. It also indicates that human survival depends on the wider family support – not just that of the narrow one-man-and-one-woman nuclear family that is a product of bourgeois society.
And in turn our well developed brains, used collectively, have enabled the human race to adapt and change our environment (not always for the better). The ability to build shelters, make clothes and use fire means that humans can live in far colder climates than our primate ancestors. We can pipe water and transport food over long distances; we can sow and harvest food plants and husband animals; we can produce and exchange useful tools and artefacts; we can make and use medicines and so on.
History has shown that Malthus was wrong to say that human population growth leads to poorer conditions and increased poverty and starvation.
The population of Europe has risen steadily from the tenth to the 20th century and living standards have also risen. When the population was temporarily reduced it had nothing to do with food shortages. The 30 Years War reduced the population of Germany by a half but the causes were political – nothing to do with too many people or not enough food. The dramatic fall in the population of Ireland during the potato famine was not caused by excess population or insufficient food – the English owners of most of Ireland’s best land were shipping good wheat to England from Ireland throughout – but by the politics of capitalism. Following sound free market principles, the “Liberal” government in London refused to introduce any measure which might interfere with free trade or prices, and cancelled the supply of cheap maize to the Irish, therefore condemning millions to death by starvation.
The Malthusian principles of the English government were defended by Charles Grenville, secretary to the Privy Council thus: “…The state of Ireland is to the last degree deplorable, and enough to induce despair: such general disorganisation and demoralisation, a people with rare exceptions besotted with obstinacy and indolence, reckless and savage — all from high to low intent on doing as little and getting as much as they can, unwilling to rouse and exert themselves, looking to this country for succour, and snarling at the succour which they get; the masses brutal, deceitful and idle, the whole state of things contradictory and paradoxical.
“While menaced with the continuance of famine next year, they will not cultivate the ground, and it lies unsown and untilled. There is no doubt that the people never were so well off on the whole as they have been this year of famine. Nobody will pay rent, and the savings banks are overflowing. With the money they get from our relief funds they buy arms instead of food, and then shoot the officers who are sent over to regulate the distribution of relief. While they crowd to the overseers with demands for employment, the landowners cannot produce hands, and sturdy beggars calling themselves destitute are apprehended with large sums in their pockets.” (28th November, 1846).
This obscene lie was used to justify the greed of the English landowners, who had stolen the land from the Irish and driven them to the infertile margins to die of hunger. The same lie is now being used to condemn the Palestinians.
In the 1980s the leading capitalist thinkers, after espousing Keynesianism for a few decades, reverted to absolute adherence to the “free market” as the most progressive force in society. And along with it they revived Malthusianism, blaming the poor for their poverty and justifying their own greed and oppression of the working class. They presented again a picture of human beings locked in selfish strife, the Battle for Life with each against all and all against each.
John Forbes Nash, a mathematician, who later was committed to an asylum, devised “Game Theory”, full of complicated formulae that were complete rubbish and Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, trying to use Darwinism to justify capitalist greed. Dawkins has great problems with human altruism; he cannot understand why people help each other in ways that do not directly benefit each other. In the end he leaves it as a temporary aberration, people doing favours for others only in the hope of getting something back in return.
The political and economic policies of western governments were based on the crazy ideas of Nash – the assumption that everyone would cheat everyone else if they could get away with it. Altruism, idealism and selflessness were looked on with great suspicion; politicians who claimed to be working for the good of anyone but themselves were completely distrusted. Greed and the accumulation of wealth were seen as the only sane goals. And we can see how this has inevitably led to the current economic crisis.
But altruism is innate in humans; we could not survive without it. Our slow growing, intelligent children would never survive their infancy without the existence of society to protect them and their vulnerable mothers. And society would not survive without the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the elderly. We are all interdependent. If there ever were any totally selfish groups of humans as Dawkins described, they perished long ago.
The communist way of living is far closer to our inherited characteristics than capitalism is.

Cuba -- 50 Years of Revolution

by Andy Brooks

THE OLD ERA ended in Cuba in 1958. The revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro and his guerrilla army swept away the hated Batista regime ending decades of corruption and American domination. Today the Cubans are celebrating the 50th anniversary of people’s power – and not just on the island of socialism.
A new biopic about Che Guevara hit the screens in January to critical acclaim in Britain and throughout the world. And we will get a further taste of the Cuban experience in a festival organised by Cuba50 that will run throughout the year. Events, large or small, will take place across the country featuring some of Cuba’s brightest talents in a dazzling celebration of the island’s rich artistic, musical and cultural heritage.
In London it began last month with an exhibition of vintage and contemporary photos from the archive of the Magnum photo agency including classic portraits of Fidel and Che as well as images taken during those heady days in Havana in 1958 when the Batista regime was overthrown.
The small collection on display, some 40 images, is naturally mainly of interest to snappers and specialist collectors, but it is well worth the trek from Barbican station just to see how the eye of the Magnum photographers capture the moment on the streets. Buildings and monuments remind us of the past but only the camera can capture the moment of reality. Passion and banality is equally frozen in time – the past preserved in black and white for all eyes to contemplate.
This is just the start. Cuba 50 is supported by the Cuban Ministry of Culture, Cuban Embassy, Cuba Solidarity Campaign and a number of unions, tourist and business interests. Further details can be obtained on their website http://www.cuba50.org or writing to:
Cuba 50 c/o Unite218 Green LanesLondon N4 2HB
The Magnum exhibition is open Wednesday to Friday from 11.30am - 4pm and it carries on till the end of the month. Ring the bell to gain admission at:
Magnum Print RoomMagnum Studios,63 Gee StreetLondon, EC1V 3RS

Capitalism does not have the answers!

by Eric Trevett

“Not since the First World War has our banking system been so close to collapse,”
Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England.

“We who have looked to the self-interest of the lending institutes to protect shareholders’ equity, myself especially, are in a state of shock and disbelief,”
Alan Greenspan, former Chair of the United States Federal Reserve.

THE ECONOMIC and political crisis of capitalism once again proves the validity of the Marxist critique of capitalism. Those in the labour movement who contended that capitalism had found a way of becoming crisis-free and that boom-and-bust was a thing of the past have been proved wrong.
The present crisis may well prove to be the most profound in the history of the capitalist system. The capitalist media try to find a scapegoat to blame for this crisis. They point to greedy bankers and even Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been held responsible. But the real reason for the crisis is endemic to the capitalist system itself.
The crisis affects every capitalist country in the world, irrespective of whether they have capitalist or social democratic governments. The proof of this is the fast rising unemployment throughout the system with notable concerns going to the wall, giving rise to a further concentration of power to a shrinking elite.
Some people are amazed when told that the crisis results from too much production, too many goods, which the purchasing power of the market is unable to absorb. There simply is not enough purchasing power in the population.
Further proof of this is to be found in the sharp competition between enterprises resulting in sharp cuts in the price of commodities. At one time the rising price of oil up to about $150 a barrel was an exception to the general malaise. But that was caused by speculators and the price of a barrel has now sunk to under $40 a barrel, with the Middle East oil producers discussing cutting production in an effort to maintain prices and profits.
The letters of regret we had from gas and electricity companies that they were having to raise their prices substantially due to a sharp rise of fuel have not been followed by letters rejoicing that they are now able to cut the price of their products substantially.
The argument that the freeing of market forces would lead to a balancing out of supply and demand has also been exposed by the present crisis. Indeed the banks and motor corporations have turned to public funds to avoid bankruptcy. That means that taxation from the working classes is to be allocated to big business ventures.
The working class is to be even more philanthropic than those Robert Tressell wrote about in the book, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
In the Unites States especially this development of bailing out the motor car industry is viewed with horror because it seems to smack of socialist legislation. Of course it’s no such thing and it undermines the argument against social ownership.
Capitalism needs a constantly expanding economy to realise maximum profits and to help establish political stability. Now there is contraction in the economy tens of thousands of workers are losing their jobs and half a million families are more than three months in arrears with their mortgage repayments.
Many of the recently made unemployed are from high salaries jobs and enjoyed big bonuses and lavish expense accounts. They thought they had secure jobs but the harsh realities of capitalism have ended that belief. They are workers and as such should be encouraged to participate in the struggles of the working class generally and its organisations. the answer, of course, is socialism
The answer to capitalism in crisis is, of course, socialism. To achieve that that capitalist state machine has to be replaced by a working class state machine. In the communist movement we put the issue more sharply: that the dictatorship of the capitalist class must be ended and the dictatorship of the proletariat established in its place.
Communists do not believe the state to be neutral; the capitalist state serves the interests of the capitalist class and the working class state serves the interests of the working class – and other sections of the population by putting an end to the exploitation of one person by another and landlordism.
Before socialism can be established there is much to be done in the field of organisational and ideological work. The working class has suffered some setbacks in the recent past. The defeat of the miners and the decimation of the engineering industry has weakened the trade union movement and undermined class consciousness.
But now there is growing anxiety among working people with growing discontent with the capitalist policies of the three major political parties.
There is not enough righteous anger over the domestic policies of privatisation and against the foreign policies, including the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and the obstacles that British and US imperialism have put up against effective solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The labour movement should take advantage of the opportunities arising from the capitalist crisis to rally the working class with a renewed commitment to achieve a socialist society.
Fascists are also active in Britain, aiming to take advantage of the situation to introduce a much more dictatorial system to defend capitalism. In Germany the most reactionary sections of the capitalist class used the fascists to maintain their power, with the persecution of trade union and labour activists and any progressive elements – and of course the Jewish communities.
An important part of the work of the labour movement is to actively oppose the fascists whenever and wherever they make their play. The struggle against racism is necessary in the struggle for working class unity around a revolutionary perspective.
To further strengthen the socialist movement we should fight to restore Clause Four to the Labour Party constitution, with the additional amendment that the transfer of power from the capitalist state to the workers’ state is an essential prerequisite to build a socialist society.
Today the governments of capitalist countries are desperately trying to find ways to resolve the crisis. One method being discussed is printing more money. We should remember that this was tried in Germany in the 1920s and it led to massive devaluation of the mark, so that is not the way forward.
From the working class point of view we should not be satisfied to find a way out of the crisis for a system that is obsolete. Our aim should be socialism.
History has proved that socialism cannot be attained by spontaneous struggle alone. It is necessary to build a party dedicated to leading, uniting and helping the working class to ensure its freedom to exploitation and social poverty.
The New Communist Party has obviously got a role to play in achieving this and on that basis we appeal for support in building our party and increasing the circulation of its paper, the New Worker.

Stop the Gaza Massacre!

ISRAELI forces are pounding the Palestinians as their deadly ground, sea and air assault on the Gaza Strip enters its second week. Over a thousand Arabs have been killed and thousands more wounded, mostly civilians like the 42 killed when a UN school was shelled by Israeli artillery on Tuesday.
Palestinian doctors say many families are in need of ambulances, but medical workers were struggling to reach casualties because they were being shot at by the Israelis. Iyad Nasr of the Red Cross in Gaza City said that the military operation has worsened the hardships created by the Israeli blockade over the last 18 months.
The United Nations says 13,000 people, over 2,000 families, have now been internally displaced because of the fighting, and that is just in the north of the Strip.
Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, says that there is no crisis and that aid is getting through, but Christopher Gunness, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman, said her denials were absurd. “The organisation for which I work – UNRWA– has approximately 9,000 to 10,000 workers on the ground. They are speaking with the ordinary civilians in Gaza... people are suffering,” he said. “A quarter of all those being killed now are civilians. So when I hear people say we’re doing our best to avoid civilian casualties that rings very hollow indeed.”
terror
Israel commandos backed by tanks and helicopter gunships are spreading terror across the towns and refugees camps in the enclave that shelters over a million and a half Palestinians but there’s no real plan to this invasion and their troops are acting in chaos and confusion. Hamas militiamen and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) commandos are putting up a fierce resistance in the streets and they say their fighters now control the agenda on the battlefield.
Palestinian partisans are trying to inflict as many casualties as they can on the Zionists while hoping to take some Israelis prisoner to use as bargaining chips when the guns eventually fall silent.
PFLP officer Abu Jamal said that the resistance movements are in a high state of unity and close communication and they are operating in full confidence of victory.
The resistance say they have taken two Israeli soldiers captive and Hamas fighters claim to have destroyed seven tanks and downed one helicopter gunship.
They put Israeli losses at 11 dead and 48 wounded in the fighting so far. Palestinian rockets are continuing to land deep into Israel hitting Israeli military bases and towns including Gedera, just 30 km south of Tel Aviv.
The resistance warn that others will be aimed at the Israeli nuclear research establishment in Dimona if the fighting continues.
The Israelis put their losses at six soldiers dead and 31 wounded including Colonel Avi Peled, the commander of the crack Golani Brigade who was seriously injured in fighting Monday night. They say nothing about prisoners but they admit that they have “lost contact” with one of their men.
The Americans blocked a Libyan-backed ceasefire proposal at the UN Security Council last weekend. But international efforts to stop the war are growing following the latest Israeli atrocities. Israel has agreed to halt the fighting for three hours a day to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and Hamas is now studying an Egyptian proposal for a ceasefire backed by the Americans and the European Union. deep concern
But most Arabs believe that the Israelis will carry on fighting until the new American president is sworn in later in the month and Barak Obama is saying nothing apart from expressing his “deep concern” until he enters the Oval Office on 20th January.
Once again the world sees the true face of Zionism in action against the heroic and long-suffering Palestinian masses. In Britain and throughout the world people are taking to the streets to demand an immediate end to the slaughter in Gaza and for the complete restoration of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs. Only then will the peace return to the Middle East.

Solidarity with the Palestinian people

We, communist and workers parties from all parts of the world, strongly condemn the repeated murderous air strikes by the Israeli air force on Gaza which resulted in the killing of over 340 Palestinians. By these brutal attacks and other crimes by the armed forces, the government of Israel try to achieve what was impossible by imposing the wall, the siege and blockade: to break the resistance of the Palestinian people.

The policy of genocide and state terrorism by the Israeli government, supported and endorsed by the powerful imperialist forces in the USA and EU and accepted by some Arab reactionary governments is a new provocation against the peoples and the worldwide solidarity movement. We call on the workers, women, youth and other sectors, all anti-imperialist and peace loving forces to mobilize against the criminal attacks and policy by the Israeli government, to demand immediate stop and sanctions against Israel. To develop immediate solidarity actions and humanitarian support for the Palestinian people.

Our parties express firm solidarity with the resistance against the aggressions, with the progressive, anti-imperialist and communist forces in Palestine and Israel, with all those fighting for the establishment of an independent State of Palestine within the borders of 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Free and independent Palestine!

Algerian Party for Democracy and Socialism
Workers' Party of Belgium
Communist Party of Britain
New Communist Party of Britain
Communist Party of Chile
Socialist Workers´ Party of Croatia
Communist Party in Denmark, KPiD
Communist Party of Finland
Unified Communist Party of Georgia
German Communist Party - DKP
Tudeh Party of Iran
Communist Party of Israel
Party of the Italian Communists
Communist Party of Malta
Party of the Communists, Mexico
Popular Socialist Party of Mexico
New Communist Party of the Netherlands
Philippine Communist Party (PKP-1930)
New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
Communist Party of Sweden
Syrian Communist Party
Communist Party of Turkey
Communist Party of Uruguay

Support Frederic Kanoute!

World Federation of Trade Unions


To: Spanish Football Federation
U.E.F.A.

The World Federation of Trade Union representing 65 million members from 95 countries all over the World expresses its full support to Sevilla striker Frederic Kanoute, who is facing a fine from the Spanish football federation for revealing a T-shirt expressing support for Palestine during a match.
Kanoute lifted his Sevilla shirt over his head after scoring in the match against Deportivo La Coruña on Wednesday to display a T-shirt on which the word "Palestine'' was printed in several languages.
He had the right to express his support to the Palestine people. A crime is being committed in Gaza with more than 700 people killed until now and the international community is doing nothing to stop it.
Frederic Kanoute deserves congratulations because he has humanity and he is showing solidarity. The WFTU demands from the Spanish Football Federation to immediately stop their actions against Frederic Kanoute and to respect the right of football players to express their opinion. We are on his side.

Send protest letters to: Spanish Football Federation E-mail: rfef@rfef.es Fax: +34 914 959 801
U.E.F.A. Email: info@uefa.com Fax: +41 (0) 848 01 2727 / F. Kanoute: oumar@kanoute.com

THE SECRETARIAT

Athens

9th January 2009

World Peace Council call on Gaza

WPC statement of urgency!

No to the Israeli invasion to Gaza -Stop the massacre of the Palestinian people!

The World Peace Council (WPC) expresses its vehement condemnation of the yesterday’s invasion of Israel into the Gaza strip in Palestine. The Israeli cruelty has no end. After the week long bombardment of innocent children, women and civilian population, the heavy armed war machinery of Israel is escalating further its aggression with a ground invasion. The hundreds of dead Palestinians, the thousands of injured by Israeli bombs are crimes against humanity and have to be put to court as such.

The Israeli regime would not be able to commit those brutal attacks without the full support of the US administration (outgoing and incoming one). The position expressed by the Czech EU- Presidency (about “defensive character of the invasion”) shows the criminal complicity of the European Union, which is far away from being more human or even less a counter pole of the USA.

The government of Israel is counting also on the internal differences and contradictions amongst the Palestinians and the Arab world. This is the moment of highest responsibility and unity against the troops of invasion and occupation. We call upon all the peace loving forces in the region to unite against the imperialist plans in the Middle East, against the “procurator” of Imperialism in the region, the reactionary and inhuman Israeli regime.

We express our deep respect and solidarity to the forces struggling for peace inside Israel and we salute their brave protests and demonstration in Tel Aviv and other cities.

The World Peace Council is calling upon the Security Council of the UN and its Human Rights Council in Geneva, to prove their minimum respect to the founding Charta of the UNO and the Universal declaration of Human Rights, by condemning clearly the Israeli aggression and imposing an end to the invasion and the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, which is the first cause for all the suffering of the Palestinian People since 60 years now.

In this moment the peoples of the world have to react with massive political protests and actions against the injustice and genocide of the Palestinian people. The WPC calls for increased solidarity and humanitarian aid of all means and will take respective initiatives in the coming days.

The Secretariat of the WPC

World Peace Council, WPC Statement of Urgency
Wednesday 7th January 2009
http://www.wpc-in.org/ , mailto:info@wpc-in.org
10 Othonos St. 10557 Athens Greece
Tel: +30-210- 3316326 Fax: +30-210-3224302

Chill the drills: save the world

by Renee Sams

THE MELTING of the Arctic ice is one of the clearest signals of global warming and scientists are now saying that there is nothing natural about the melting. They are confident that it is primarily due to pollution from the burning of fossil fuels.
Following the recent summers of record melting in the Arctic, the oil companies are eagerly awaiting permission to drill the first well in the National Wildlife Reserve while officials from the five Arctic nations hold urgent talks over the future of the Arctic.
The scramble for oil and other natural resources, which become more accessible as the ice is more rapidly thinning, intensified recently as Norway and Germany announced a new exploration partnership. And Russia has confirmed that its state-controlled oil companies would do business in the Arctic.

high stakes

The stakes are high not only for the environment and the climate but also for world energy supplies.
For many years the oil companies have maintained that there are still large reserves left. BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, published recently claims that there is still “enough ‘proven’ reserves to provide 40 years of consumption”.
Dr Colin Campbell, former chief geologist and vice-president of a list of major oil companies, including BP, Shell, Fina, Exxon and Chevron Texaco, admits that when he was the boss of an oil company he never told the truth: “It’s not part of the game,” he said.
But scientists are now warning that world oil supplies are set to run out even faster than expected and sooner than governments and oil companies are prepared to admit. Dr Campbell explains that the peak of regular oil – the cheap and easy to extract stuff – has already been passed in 2005.
There is still the more difficult to extract heavy oil, deep sea reserves, polar regions and liquid taken from gas, but the peak will come as early as 2011.
There are still natural gas fields in Alaska, Siberia and the Middle East that could provide fuel for about 20 years longer than the world’s oil reserves. But although it is cleaner than oil it is still a fossil fuel which emits CO2.
In recent years the considerable gap between demand and supply has narrowed and last year all but disappeared. If consumption begins to exceed supply by as little as 10 or even 15 per cent it could cripple the oi-dependent industrial countries. Yet BP still flatly denies this scenario.
None of them disagree that world oil demand is surging. The rapid development of India and China plus the West’s reliance on oil means that a lot more oil will have to come from somewhere.
The four countries with the biggest reported oil reserves are Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait but there are concerns about exactly how much they really have. In Kuwait last year a journalist found a document suggesting that the country’s real reserves were only half what was reported. Iran this year brought in oil rationing measures, the first major oil producing country to do so.
Over the past few years the biofuel industry has expanded enormously and the oil giants are leading the race to produce biofuel to replace the oil as it begins to run down.
Brazil, with an industry that only began in the 70s, has become the world’s second largest producer of biofuel crops and an agricultural superpower. The country was hard hit by the oil crisis and the then military government launched a subsidised drive to develop an alternative source of energy.
The authorities maintain that biofuel made from sugar cane, as opposed to corn, produces carbon monoxide emissions 90 per cent lower than petrol and that as sugar cane covers only five per cent of Brazil’s arable land and food prices are not affected.

rainforests

Now the Brazilian government has announced a ten-year plan to slash rainforest destruction by 70 per cent, after new figures showed that the destruction was rising again after a period of slow down.
But environment minister Carlos Minc made it clear that this reduction depends on Brazil receiving enough funds from foreign governments to fight the loggers, pay for the protection of the world’s largest tropical rainforest and combat global warming.
Prominent scientists have recently predicted and computer models show that the North Pole could become ice-free as early as 2030, much sooner than the pace predicted by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The big argument the five nations are having is not how to protect the Arctic environment but about which nation can claim which parts of the Arctic, particularly areas with potentially huge reserves of oil and gas, and the shipping routesLast year Russia planted a titanium flag at the North Pole, pointing out that the Unites States had not signed the international treaty governing land claims. By hosting the five-nation meeting, Denmark is trying to move on from these issues.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge lies between the Brooks Range Mountains and the shores of the Beaufort Sea and it contains the greatest diversity of animal life of any conservation area in the circumpolar region.
But even though the IPCC has found that drilling for oil and gas would cause severe damage to the fragile infrastructure of the tundra, the mega oil corporations continue to concoct schemes to open up the region for drilling.
President Bush, who became President with the backing of the oil giant Exxon, is a great supporter of opening up the Arctic for exploitation. And a recent poll showed that a big majority of the American people do not want their cars fuelled by gasoline from Middle East countries that “support terrorists”.

ethanol

Environmentalists are also calling for cutbacks in ethanol subsidies, tougher environmental regulation and a new appreciation of scientific data that may bring them into conflict with some of the policies that Obama, who supported ethanol subsidies in the Senate, is likely to put forward.
At the European Union negotiations taking place in Brussels to tackle the climate crisis, they agreed to have10 per cent of vehicle fuel sourced with renewable fuels by 2020, in spite of warnings by scientists.
Reports from the United Nations and the World Bank have warned that many biofuels produce more greenhouse emissions than petroleum-based fuel and displace farmlands from their role of providing food.
Claude Turmes, the European Parliament’s chief negotiator on the issue, said: “The 10 per cent agrifuels target has been seriously undermined”.
The United Nations Commission on Climate Change in Poznan was held from 1st to 12th December and halfway through the agenda the leading countries were still stalling over the plan they had promised.
As President-elect Barack Obama does not take office until 20th January, whether he will “chill the drills” in Alaska will not be known until he gets round to debating the issue.
The environmental lobby will continue to keep him under intense pressure to not only save the fragile structure of the Arctic but save the rest of us from the rising tides that would be the result faster melting of the ice.

Joint Statement on the EU Working Time Directive

Joint Statement on the EU Working Time Directive

The undersigned Communist and Workers’ Parties welcome the mobilizations of the workers and the youth across Europe against the EU Working Time Directive and the respective report (Cercas Report) that are discussed in the European Parliament. This directive does not only aims to annihilate elementary workers’ rights but also pursues to deliver a blow to the organized class-based trade union movement.

We extend our solidarity and support to the struggles of the class-based trade unions that oppose the extension of the working hours up to 65 per week, vehemently reject the distinction of the working time in “active” and “inactive” as well as the further flexibilization of the industrial relations.

==================

Workers’ Party of Belgium

Communist Party of Britain

New Communist Party of Britain

Communist Party in Denmark

Communist Party of Finland

Communist Party of Greece

Communist Party of Ireland

Socialist Party of Latvia

Communist Party of Luxembourg

Communist Party of Poland

Portuguese Communist Party

New Communist Party of Yugoslavia

Communist Party of Spain

Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain

Communist Party of Sweden

The wind of history

by our European Affairs Correspondent

RUSSIA’S communists must be ready to take power. That was the message of Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov at the 13th Congress of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) in Moscow last weekend.
“The wind of history is blowing in our sails again ... At this time of crisis the world of imperialism is starting to die. We are standing on the threshold of political and social shifts,” Zyuganov said in a two-hour speech opening the Congress attended by delegates and observers from all over the Russian Federation, as well as 88 fraternal delegations from communist and progressive movements.
New Communist Party of Britain leader Andy Brooks and Richard Bos from the Central Committee represented the Party at the Congress and took part in a number of solidarity events held during the Congress.
The CPRF was established in 1993 when the ban on communists was lifted in Russia. It is now the biggest communist movement in the country with some 160,000 members and four million active supporters. It is the second biggest parliamentary party with 57 seats in the 450-strong Duma. Zyuganov won over 13 million votes in last March’s presidential election, which the communists say was rigged by Putin’s United Russia party.
Zyuganov, 64, has led the party from its foundation and he was re-elected on Sunday along with 105 members of the Central Committee, 75 of whom are under 40.
But the CPRF general secretary said the average age of the membership was a cause for concern. Most of the activists are well over 50. People under 30 barely make up five to seven per cent of the Party. “Given the average age of its members, the party will find it hard to be active in the event of a near inevitable deterioration of the situation in the country,” he warned.
The CPRF is the direct Russian successor of the old CPSU – but not that of the CPSU’s discredited politicians who led the Soviet Union to disaster in its final years. Zyuganov dismissed claims in the Russian media that his party was drifting towards social-democracy. “We categorically reject all these allegations. We believe that they are prompted either by incompetence or by wishful thinking. Social democracy is not our path,” he declared.
The CPRF harks back to the great victories of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. Though Zyuganov referred to the “abuses of power” and “tragic mistakes” during the political struggles of the 1930s he added: “We have no right to forget that it was in the 1930s that the powerful production and scientific base was laid which ensured the defeat of fascism and still forms the foundation of the country’s economy.”
Zyuganov condemned the corrupt Putin government whose only successes rested on windfall oil profits that were now evaporating and whose sole objective was to cling on to power at all costs. “The ruling class is an alliance of the oligarchy, the new bourgeoisie and the top bureaucrats, who between them own the bulk of the means of production and wield real power”, he said. The working class has shrunk numerically because of the policy of deindustrial-isation and the peasantry in the devastated Russian countryside fares even worse and it has become depoliticised and déclassé.
The communist party has drawn up a programme to restore the rights of working people and prevent the collapse of the Russian economy, including the renationalisation of mining, energy and other strategic sectors. But this, Zyuganov said, would be impossible to implement in the framework of the current system dominated by bureaucrats and oligarchs.
“At one time we believed that we could come to power by taking part in elections at various levels. Now, given massive election rigging and the severe pressure of the authorities on society, this is an unlikely scenario” he said while stressing that the CPRF would “use everything – parliamentary and non-parliamentary forms and methods of struggle – to weaken the ruling group and to expose its essence in the eyes of our compatriots”.

• CPRF fact-sheet
• Political Report of the 13th Congress
• RIA Novosti report on the Congress