US prison labour -- a return to slavery?

By Ray Jones

THE UNITED States holds 2.3 million people in Federal and local prisons – many of them black or Hispanic. This is half a million more than People’s China even though China’s population is five times the size of that of the United States.
The US holds 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners while only having five per cent of the world’s population. This not due to some terrible crime wave; in fact crime in the US has actually been going down while the number in prison has gone up.
Jail sentences have become longer, especially for possession of small amounts of drugs, and the “three strikes” rule means that for a minor offence – if it’s the third one – you can end up behind bars for life.
The laws themselves can have an anti working class, anti black, bias. For example, Federal law demands five years inside without parole for possession of five grammes of crack cocaine but to get five years for possession of cocaine powder you need to have 500 grammes. Why the difference? Well, crack is more common in black and Hispanic areas while cocaine powder is the preferred drug of the white middle class.
There is evidence to suggest that the drive behind this is economic, tainted with racism.
Prison labour in the US can be said to have its origins in slavery. After the Civil War when slaves were officially freed many were forced to enter the sharecropping system, where they orked somebody else’s land in return for a small share of the crop.
Those who in anyway breached their contracts or were convicted of minor crimes were arrested and then “hired-out” by the authorities to pick cotton, work in mines or build railroads. In the Deep South almost all those “hired-out” were of course black.
In 1885 Texas forced prisoners, mostly black, to haul granite to build the new state capital. The skilled stone cutters’ union protested at the use of prison labour and boycotted the building site and in reply the contractor brought in scab stone cutters all the way from Scotland to break the strike.
In Briceville, Tennessee, in 1891 coal mine owners insisted on banning union membership and miners were locked-out while convicts were brought in to scab. The response of the miners was to attack the stockade where the prisoners were held and set them free. The company then gave in and the miners were rehired and no more prison labour was used.
By the end of the 1900s most states had ended the use of contract prison labour; partly due to the public out cry at the brutality often involved and partly due to corruption, as firms bribed authorities to get the cheapest labour. But the infamous chain gangs of the South continued until the 1950s and were even resurrected in the 1990s in Alabama and Arizona to work on roads.
Federal Prison Industries Inc., trade name UNICOR, is a government-owned corporation that was formed in 1934 on the overt grounds that idleness in prisons was a problem and that prisoners would benefit from learning skills and labour discipline. UNICOR now has a sales total of about $2.4 billion and rising.
The number of private prisons run for profit has increased from five in 1998 to over a hundred today.
According to US law prison industries are restricted in what and when they can sell to the general public and indeed most of UNICOR’s sales go government agencies such as the military. All military helmets, bullet-proof vests – along with more mundane things such as shirts and pants – are made by prison labour and agencies are obliged to give prison manufacture priority.
But the prison industry is allowed to sell to the public under certain conditions – if they pay the “prevailing wage” for the work and if part of that wage goes as restitution to victims of crime.
Also there is a Federal minimum wage that currently stands at $7.25 per hour and most states have their own minimum which is usually a little higher (although in at least one case it is lower!). In those states which don’t set their own minimum, these are largely in the poorer South, the Federal rate is supposed to apply.
Prison work is, according to law, voluntary.
These regulations are designed to protect small and medium businesses and free labour from unfair competition and prisoners from sinking into virtual slavery. But more and more they are being circumvented in the drive for profit. Both unions and some small businesses have been fighting a running battle against the exploitation of prison labour but it is hard going.
One morning, for example, members of the Teamsters union (transport and general workers) turned up outside a notorious low-paying firm to leaflet the early shift in an attempt to organise the company. To their amazement the shift turned up in a prison van!
Providing services is not restricted by law so many call centres are now staffed by prisoners.
When radical lawyer Tony Serra ended up in a Federal prison for non payment of taxes he was put to work in the prison garden for 19 cents-per-hour and noted that other inmates were paid as little as five cents-per-hour for much harder work.
Inmates in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana have been de-boning chickens for four cents-per-hour for a private company.
Although many prisoners do volunteer to work to escape from mind-crushing boredom and in the hope of a little pocket money, there are often repercussions for those who refuse to. They can end up spending more time behind bars or even in solitary confinement so how far many can be said to freely volunteer is open to serious doubt.
Those who do “volunteer” are often short-changed and end up working for a pittance, especially in private prisons. Deductions from wages for victim compensation, travel, room and board (!) and other fees can reduce the final amount to just a few cents.
Work for prisoners is of course desirable, for their own sakes and for society’s. But it must be humane and done in a way which incorporates them into the organised working class – capitalism obviously is going to have serious problems in organising either of these imperatives.

Joint Statement on EU summit

Joint Statement of Communist and Workers Parties of the EU Countries

The EU Summit of Heads of States of February 11 signals a new severe attack against the working class and the peoples of Europe. The resolutions of the Summit, in accordance with the “EU 2020 Strategy” which promotes and deepens the Lisbon Strategy, intensify the anti-people policy of the European Union and the bourgeois governments by means of hard measures against the working class and the people. They seek to reinforce the profitability of the European monopolies both within the European Union and in the international imperialist competition.

The EU strategy for an exit from the crisis is based on the imposition of sweeping changes in social security systems, on the increase in retirement ages and on drastic cuts in salaries, pensions and social benefits as a whole. This attack bears the stamp of the liberal and social democratic forces which have supported the strategy of capital in cooperation with the European Union.

The deficit and public debt and the supervision of the economies of several member-states including Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and other countries are used for the ideological intimidation of the working people throughout Europe.

The transnational companies and the banks made immense profits through the exploitation of the workers and from state subsidies tax reliefs, both before and during the crisis. They now compete for the lion’s share of the new lending. Once again they place the burden on workers, the poor and small and medium family farmers and the self-employed by means of scaremongering and intimidation.

The spirit of resistance is intensified among the European workers who are not ready to bear the cost of crisis for which they are not liable in the least. In Greece, Portugal and other countries, workers, civil servants and small and medium farmers are holding public demonstrations and going on strike against the austerity measures taken. The Communist and Workers Parties signatories are playing a protagonist role in this movement, being in the front line of the class struggle.

The Communist and Workers’ Parties call on the working class and peoples in each country to organize their counterattack and to condemn the parties that support the EU anti-people offensive; to strengthen the ranks of the class oriented labour movement; to reject social partnership that promotes antipeople policies, and give a strong response to the anti-people assault, demanding instead: full and stable employment with full rights for all, substantial increase in salaries, the abolition of all anti-welfare and anti-labour laws, a reduction in retirement ages and exclusively free Education, Health and Welfare. Workers can live better without capitalists; it is they who produce the wealth and therefore they should enjoy it.
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The Parties

1. Workers' Party of Belgium
2. Communist Party of Britain
3. New Communist Party of Britain
4. Communist Party of Bulgaria
5. Party of the Bulgarian Communists
6. AKEL, Cyprus
7. Communist Party in Denmark
8. Communist Party of Estonia
9. Communist Party of Finland
10. Communist Party of Greece
11. Hungarian Communist Workers' Party
12. Communist Party of Ireland
13. Workers' Party of Ireland
14. Party of the Italian Communists, Italy
15. Socialist Party of Latvia
16. Socialist Party of Lithuania
17. Communist Party of Luxembourg
18. Communist Party of Malta
19. New Communist Party of the Netherlands
20. Communist Party of Poland
21. Communist Party of Romania
22. Communist Party of Slovakia
23. Communist Party of Peoples of Spain
24. Communist Party of Sweden

As Norway is an associated member of the EU,
Communist Party of Norway also endorses the statement.

Other Parties
Pole de Renaissance Communiste en France

Revolutionary leader Kim Jong Il

NEXT WEEK millions of Koreans will be celebrating the birthday of Kim Jong Il — the leader of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Korean communist movement that liberated the country from Japanese oppression during the Second World War and beat off the combined might of Anglo-American imperialism and their lackeys during the Korean war.
Communists in Britain and comrades throughout the world will be joining them in holding events demonstrating their solidarity with the Korean revolution and the Workers’ Party of Korea that has led the Korean people, under the leadership of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il to victory after victory in a struggle that began in the 1920s and continues to this day across the divided Korean peninsula.
The modern Korean communist movement was founded by Kim Il Sung and the young militants around him to fight the Japanese colonialists and build a revolutionary communist movement that would give the Korean workers and peasants a new life under socialism. Building a guerrilla army that took on the might of the Japanese Empire, Kim Il Sung mobilised the masses in a struggle that ended in victory in 1945 and the establishment of a people’s government in the north of the country.
The Workers’ Party of Korea, with Kim Il Sung at the helm, led the battle for land reform, education and socialist construction in the 1950s and 60s and then pushed forward on the engineering, technical and scientific fronts to build a modern socialist republic, where every individual worker is master of his or her own life. The DPRK stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the peoples of the Third World struggling to break the chains of colonialism and gave technical and economic aid to their new republics to defend their freedom and independence.
When Kim Il Sung passed away his successor, Kim Jong Il, told the Korean people and the world that they could “expect no change from him” and under his leadership, the Workers’ Party of Korea has won great victories in recent years. Natural disasters have been overcome. Imperialist diplomatic isolation was broken and the intrigues of US imperialism have been exposed. Democratic Korean scientists mastered the secrets of the atom to guarantee the DPRK’s defence and energy needs and now Korean rockets reach for the stars.
The tragedy of Korea is that it has been divided since the Second World War and that division is entirely due to the United States, which has propped up a servile regime in south Korea to maintain American imperialism’s military, strategic and economic dominance of north-east Asia.
A monstrous concrete wall divides Korea. Tens of thousands of American troops remain are stationed in the south, backed by a US nuclear armada that threatens the DPRK and its neighbours. The communist movement is outlawed in the south and contacts with the north are tightly controlled by the repressive regime.
The Democratic Korean government has worked tirelessly to end the partition of the country. It has called on the United States to normalise relations with the DPRK. A proposal for the re-unification of Korea based on the principle of “one country-two systems” — similar to the one that led to the peaceful return of Hong Kong and Macau to the People’s Republic of China — remains on the table.
Democratic Korea threatens no one, but the imperialist campaign to demonise and isolate the people’s government continues as a smokescreen to cover US plans to dominate the entire Pacific basin.
While we join the Korean people in their celebrations we must redouble our efforts to build solidarity with the DPRK and raise the demand for the withdrawal of all American troops from south Korea and an end to the partition of the country.

European communist & workers' parties statement

4th European Communist Meeting on Education
Brussels, February 5, 2010

There is only one historical truth, the one written by the peoples!

The 4th European Communist Meeting education was held in Brussels on February 5th. This year the meeting engaged with the distortion of the history of the Second World War in the process of education.

The meeting was organised by the Communist Party of Greece and took place in the building of the European Parliament.

25 representatives from European communist and workers parties participated in the meeting. During the meeting the participants presented facts from school and academic books about the falsification of the Second World War history; they unveiled the goals of this campaign and referred to their experiences from the action against the ideological manipulation of the youth.

The meeting issued the following joint statement:

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Joint Statement

We, the undersigned parties, condemn the fierce anticommunist campaign that is under way throughout Europe. Imperialist organisations such as the EU, NATO, as well as OSCE, the Council of Europe and almost all of the European bourgeois governments have launched and escalate an anticommunist campaign of lies and slander with the strategic goal being to contaminate workers and people’s consciousness with blatant anticommunism. Their objective is to erase the unprecedented contribution of socialism in the 20th century and assert the alleged permanence of the capitalist system. In conditions of capitalist crisis anticommunism is the spearhead for the promotion of the most severe offensive against workers. This offensive by the EU, the bourgeois class and the governments that support them (liberal and social-democrat) aims to ensure maximum profitability for capital. They promote anticommunism as regards all historical events distorting the socialist and even the national democratic revolutions, the class struggle and historical development. They aim especially at young people so they may not learn the historical truth and adopt the antisocialist propaganda.

The falsification of History –and especially the history of the USSR- has but one purpose: impeding European workers and peoples just to conceive the possibility and necessity to overthrow the unbearable capitalist system and replace it by socialism.

One of the central targets of this ideological and political attack is the distortion of World War II history. An attempt is made to identify openly socialism-communism with fascism without any historical basis when it is clear that Nazism and Fascism are based on an ideology of hatred and xenophobia, while communism and socialism are based on an ideology of solidarity and social justice. The two are distinct and opposite ideologies. Particular efforts are made to distort the causes of World War II declaring the 23rd of August as a day of anticommunist remembrance. The attempt to violate historical truth continues through the conscious depreciation of the indispensable role of the USSR in the great Anti-fascist Victory and in the post-war developments. The anti-socialist propaganda and the recent events on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Demolition of the Berlin Wall fall into line with the same reactionary direction of falsification of the historical truth.

The historical truth cannot be erased. The contribution of socialism to the defeat of fascism, to the people’s rights, to the confidence for the future and to people’s achievements in the socialist countries is indisputable. We must also underline the impact of these achievements in favour of the working class in the capitalist countries forcing the capitalists to make concessions towards the struggle of the peoples. Despite any weaknesses and problems, the achievements of socialism are today a pipe dream for the people when capitalism cannot and is not going to solve the problems that afflict people.

We will support with all our strength the struggle to defend and highlight the historical and scientific truth at schools, institutions and universities. We demand the eradication of anti-communism from the school-books and academic teaching. It is necessary that the young generations should be taught and learn the historical truth about World War II, the laws of nature and human society. In particular, they should learn Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Marxist theory of class structure, class struggle and of the analysis of capitalism as an economical system. The role of Communist and Workers’ Parties as well as of the Communist Youth Organizations in this issue is vital as regards the work in wide masses, in particular of young workers and students. To this effort may contribute not only the enlightening but also the scientific work of scientists, educators, academic and social personalities. The working class and the poor popular strata can fight for a society without exploitation, for socialism.

We strongly condemn the persecution and banning of Communist Parties and Communist Youth Organizations; we express our full solidarity with all the victims of anticommunist attacks and of the witch hunt. It becomes evident what the “democracy” of the EU, capital and the multinationals means. It has class content, is democracy for the few and exploitation and oppression for the many.


1. Workers' Party of Belgium
2. Communist Party of Britain
3. New Communist Party of Britain
4. Party of the Bulgarian Communists
5. Socialist Workers' Party of Croatia
6. AKEL-Cyprus
7. Communist Party of Bohemia Moravia
8. Communist Party in Denmark
9. Communist Party of Denmark
10. Communist Party of Estonia
11. German Communist Party (DKP)
12. Communist Party of Greece
13. The Workers' Party of Ireland
14. Socialist Party of Latvia
15. Socialist Party of Lithuania
16. Communist Party of Luxembourg
17. Communist Party of Malta
18. New Communist Party of the Netherlands
19. Communist Party of Poland
20. Portuguese Communist Party
21. Communist Party of Russian Federation
22. Communist Workers' Party of Russia - Revolutionary Party of Communists
23. Communist Party of Slovakia
24. Union of Communists of Ukraine
As guest: Pole de Renaissance Communiste en France

All For Sale

The anti-crisis programme of the Government of Russia

by Denis Mironov

THE RUSSIAN government has published its anti-crisis measures for 2010 on its official website but apart from a few news briefs the programme has largely been ignored by the mass media in Russia. In the cities the number of people who have access to online computers is only 22 per cent. Throughout the country as a whole no more than seven per cent are on the internet. At best this plan will be known only to one in five of the population.
It is even more difficult to understand the language of the governmental document. It is a vinaigrette of words; a porridge of general phrases and mysterious expressions that are possibly clear only for the initiated. Only the official statistics can be trusted.
For instance the programme states that “support of social stability and the guarantee of high-grade social protection of the population along with support of the revival of economy, the guarantee of stability of the positive tendencies become the basic priorities of actions of the government in the new year....” At this point the average Russian citizen will certainly yawn and read no further.
But the devil, as they say, is in the detail. If you study this document very attentively, you will suddenly realise that what may seem trifles really do concern us, the ordinary citizens.

General provisions

“The driving force for the steady growth of the Russian economy is named as investment and credit. Not industry nor manufacturing; not agriculture or even trade, but the banks and stock exchanges.
“The economy is still dominated by those factors that provoked its fast and rapid fall in the first place, notably a dependence on global commodities' export prices, low domestic demand [read – a poverty stricken population] and Russian industry's inability to satisfy it [in other words, nothing works], as well as a weak financial system and a lack of long-term loans. The initial stage of the government's anti-crisis policy, in late 2008 and 2009, did include a pro-modernisation component, but was largely aimed at cushioning the economy and the population from the consequences of the crisis, and at preventing irreparable damage to the country's industry and technology.
“This means that as things stand, further growth will be unstable because short-term internal economic risks have not been removed, slower than expected because it will depend on the revival of the global economy, and it will reproduce the economic model the government sought to abandon before the crisis.”

Three reasons why the overcoming the crisis “will be unstable and slower” are specified. Firstly, that the internal risks of the Russian economy in the short-term period have not been eliminated. Secondly, the position of Russia “depends” on the restoration of the world economy and finally that the “restoration” will only reproduce that model of the economy that we had before the crisis began. Therefore we “risk”; we "firmly depend”, and finally we go back to where we started from and where we didn’t want to be in the first place.
The document assures us that “in the Russian economy there is a potential for a fast return to a growth trajectory”. But then adds “The economic crisis has seriously affected Russia's starting position on this modernisation drive, with practically every sector of the economy experiencing some negative effects. Instead of laying down the foundations for innovative growth, the first stage of the Concept (2009-2012 – the long term economic plan for the Russian economy that runs until 2020) will to a considerable extent be spent on restoring the pre-crisis position.”
No, the statements do not match or add up!

Inflation

According to the government inflation will run at between 6.5 and 7.5 per cent throughout 2010. This is difficult to believe. Even according to official data, inflation had topped 15 per cent in 2009. How it will be halved this year is not explained apart from some crystal-ball gazing like: “The comparatively favourable conditions on the global market combined with the Russian government's effective anti-crisis measures will ensure the consolidation of these positive trends, and a positive dynamic in most macro-economic indicators in 2010” while suggesting that: “At the same time, positive economic changes were accompanied by a rapidly falling inflation rate, indicating that the growth is sustainable and not based on the appearance of new bubbles in the markets.”
“Bubbles”, dear readers, is an expression used in the official governmental document. We will remind them that inflation is an average increase in the prices of the goods over a set period of time. The fixed salaries for state employees and the armed forces, pensions and children’s grants are all based on these very average indicators. It’s not “bubbles” for us.

Unemployment: policy of restraint

The document says that: “In 2010 the forecast number of unemployed people registered with employment agencies will be maintained at the 2009 level (2.2 million)”.
That is certainly the number of people who have registered at the employment offices. But according to official returns at the end of 2009 a further 5.8 million people (7.6 per cent) had no employment and were actively seeking work. According to methodology of the International Labour Organisation they are classified as unemployed. Altogether eight million – an army! How many more millions are part-time or temporary workers; people seeking full-time work in Russia? What will happen if the “social boat” in which all of us float starts to rock? Who will look after them? The internal troops?

How will the economy revive? Well the government paper says that “One of the key goals is stabilising the banking sector and ensuring that companies have access to commercial loans on reasonable terms. To this end, the following policies will be pursued: – consistent cooperation with large and leading companies in key economic sectors aimed at restructuring their debt as obligations under development programmes, developing new products and completing major projects of national importance….”

It’s not clear how this “restructuring is going to take place. No matter. This is more important…

“Government support will only be provided to companies which have detailed business development programmes agreed with partner banks. The programmes should contain measures to ensure financial strength in the short term as well as long-term strategies to boost and maintain competitiveness.”

You see, there can be no economic recovery without the banks!

The paper recognises the most difficult economic and social situation that exists in so-called "mono-towns" or “one-company towns” in Russia where the vast majority work for one employer. There are 400 such cities in Russia. But they won’t all get assistance.
“The government has approved a list of one-company towns to be included in these rehabilitation programmes” but it doesn’t say how many are on this list or who the lucky beggars will be. However the Ministry of Regional Development says approximately 200 will be allocated 10 billion roubles in the form of grants. It is not a lot for such a huge country!

It then adds “the programmes will not concentrate on supporting jobs in ineffective companies, but rather will focus on reorganising these major employers, creating alternative jobs, and diversifying the local economy. This will be done though SME support programmes in one-company towns: industrial estates will be built and business incubators set up”. But how can this be possible if, as it also says, “the social and economic situation has worsened practically in all directions”?

Well it’s all down to “modernisation”. The document talks about “creating the necessary economic conditions to shift economic policy away from anti-crisis concerns towards addressing the modernisation challenge. Such conditions include macro-economic stability and seeing an improvement in those economic institutions that guarantee the expansion of economic activity (the application of laws, minimising bureaucratic obstacles, and a tax system that stimulates growth)” – the Russian government's implementation of measures aimed at speeding up the process of economic modernisation. This means encouraging innovation and investment in the economy, developing infrastructure (transport, energy and telecommunications), the additional stimulation of domestic demand for Russian-made products, improving the situation in depressed areas and the creation of new regional "growth hubs".
This is clearly just verbal gymnastics…but let’s be serious. Let’s look at what really concerns the Russian citizen.
The anti-crisis programme has highlighted the major factors that have contributed to the recession in Russia as the “weak financial system” and absence in the economy of “long money”, that is to say long-term investments and credits.
It states “The long-term stability of the banking system and the Bank of Russia's policy of reducing inflation will allow long-term loans to be issued. However, they alone cannot supply sufficient funds to facilitate economic modernisation. Therefore, it will be necessary to turn to the financial markets.”
And this how…

“The most important sources of long-term loans, the pensions and insurance systems, will be utilised. The state policy for the long-term development of life insurance will be drawn up. The wider use of savings as a source of long-term loans through increased bank deposit periods will be considered.
“It is envisaged that foreign investors should have a role in creating long-term investment resources. This will be accomplished by attracting and supporting long-term foreign investment through setting up joint investment funds involving foreign investors in strategic sectors that require modernisation, including agriculture, the pharmaceutical industry, affordable housing and infrastructure.
“The government will reduce the share of state property in the economy in order to attract domestic and strategic foreign investment. This will be done through privatisation by means of open public proceedings on the basis of tenders and auctions, including the floating of privatised companies' shares in IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) and SPOs (Secondary Public Offerings).”
So now the government is defining where it sees the financial sources that need to be tapped to fund the recovery – pensions, insurance, personal savings and more privatisations… Now we see where the Russian Government plans to get the money!
And this is how:

“One distinct challenge for modernisation will be the restructuring of the state sector: stepping up privatisation and reforming budget-funded organisations.
“Efforts to restructure the state sector, develop and implement programmes for improving corporate governance of joint-stock companies of mainly state ownership and state corporations will be accelerated, as will the privatisation and restructuring of state-sector enterprises.
“Lowering costs and increasing efficiency in the budget will become key aspects of making budget spending more effective. A programme will be adopted and put into effect to cut out ineffective expenses and surplus functions, optimise the network of budget funded organisations, and to reorganise most budget-funded organisations along new lines involving tenders for social services.”
This new economic policy is simply a new stage of privatisation. On 16th September 2009 deputy-premier Igor Shuvalov presented the report to the Russian parliament on the practical realisation of anti-crisis measures.
“We are entering a stage when it is necessary to begin new structural privatisations,” he declared. “We need to transform a considerable quantity of the state unitary enterprises into joint-stock enterprises … it is necessary to structure this practice in a new fashion, and we will continue this work.”
In Russia state unitary enterprises are commercial organisations that use state land but have no legal right of ownership of the state property they use in their business.
There we have it. The directors of State enterprises do not want to be simple “operative managers” of public property. They wish to become its proprietors – for ever!


The author is a writer and journalist and a member of Communist Party of Russia.

The Economic Crisis and the Question of Peace

By Eric Trevett


AT TIMES of profound capitalist crises there is an increasing struggle for markets and spheres of influence and in the last century this resulted in two world wars. The rivalry between the imperialist powers was especially strong.
War is a terrible thing but it is also very profitable to the arms manufacturers and it will have been noted that in the 1930s crisis impending war brought the mass unemployment in the major countries to a temporary halt.
Whether we are coming out of recession or not the crisis remains a serious one for the working class. Again the lesson of history teaches us that coming out of a recession does not mean a return to relative prosperity. The Wall Street collapse in 1929 was followed by a decade of depression, and in spite of the New Deal that the Roosevelt administration organised there was a further slump in 1938.
It was only when the United States economy went on a war footing that the high unemployment was resolved through conscription to the armed forces.
This is why the US so-called war against terrorism is so dangerous. We are in the midst of a war in Afghanistan and we have a puppet government in Iraq under the tutelage of the US armed occupation.
Now it is Iran’s turn to be under pressure from the imperialist powers. The US, looking for regime change here, has not ruled out the use of military force. And the Yemen is also under threat with the US and Britain closing their consulates there.
In Europe as a whole the antagonisms between France, Germany, Italy, Britain and Spain and so on have increased as the struggle for markets intensifies. It may well be that membership of the European Union will enable these countries to avoid another catastrophic world war. But the prospects for doing this are threatened by the aims of sections of the British and American ruling classes and there may well be a full scale war in the Middle East.
A major aim of such as war would be to bring the oil under the US and British imperialists’ control – under the control of their private monopolies.
If such a policy is envisaged, the imperialist powers, particularly Britain and the US, would prefer the war to be non-nuclear. This is why they are so keen on condemning Iran for its nuclear power programme. The tactic of scaring people into believing Iran has weapons of mass destruction is again being pursued and the danger is that strategy of lying and deception could possible lead to open war with Iran and other countries becoming acceptable to the people here.
The anti-Muslim campaigns in the press and media may also be designed to disguise the real threat that imperialism is contemplating very dangerous steps in response to its political and economic crisis.
People in Britain are generally honest and are rather gullible, thinking their leaders never lie. It is quite clear they were lied to over Iraq and its so-called weapons of mass destruction, which “could strike at random within 45 minutes”.
The imperialists have never had any regard for the sanctity of their promises and lying come naturally to them, as the native American people found out in the 19th century in the US, and more recently the Iraqi people found out – and the peoples of the world found out.
The peace movement has to face the fact that this is the scenario that is being constructed at the present time. The peace movement has responded positively and consistently against the so-called war on terrorism, which has allowed Iraq to be largely destroyed, with hundreds of thousands killed and wounded – but a “good deal” signed over the oil issue. This deal is not at all good for the people of Iraq, nor indeed for the people of Britain and the US but only for sections of the ruling class in these countries.
In Britain the working class living standards are going to be attacked and it is necessary to step up the campaign against the replacement of Trident. We should make efforts to contact the armed forces at every level. When we call for the main point, the withdrawal of all British troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, the peace movement proves itself to be the best friend of the armed forces. We need to point this out to them.
And we need to point out clearly that the service and sacrifice of those troops in Afghanistan and Iraq makes them into the agents of imperialism.

Review

EXHIBITION: REVOLUTION ON PAPER- MEXICAN PRINTS 1910-1960. BRITISH MUSEUM, ROOM 90


By Edwin Bentley

THE MEXICAN revolution, which started in 1910 and which was to last in one form or another for some 20 years, started as a local rebellion among peasant farmers and grew to embrace a wide range of progressive causes. This revolution most certainly was not a unified, planned, single-minded action by a highly organised political party. Rather, it was a series of frequently chaotic popular struggles against an economic model that had handed Mexican industry, agriculture and railways over to foreign investors. It was a revolt of women against the stifling conservatism of a totally male-dominated society. It was an uprising to overthrow the power of vastly wealthy landowners who blocked all attempts at land reform. The revolution also dealt heavy blows to the Catholic Church, which had acted as an obstacle to progress and had identified itself with the powers of reaction. It was a time to rediscover a national identity that went back centuries before the Spanish conquest, a time to celebrate and elevate the position of indigenous peoples.

Mexican society flung its windows open to all the exciting new ideas that were blowing around the world in the early 20th century, and adapted them to form a distinctive national character. This identity was to last until the 1990s and the re-introduction of unrestricted market capitalism and the economic anarchy that is so optimistically labelled “de-regulation” and “free trade”. Mexico’s identity centred around national sovereignty in all things, state control of major industries and public services, an often aggressive secularism, equal rights for men and women, and at least a basic social welfare provision.
The Mexican revolution did not lead to socialism, but it did create a nation that supported progressive causes throughout the world. Apart from the USSR, Mexico was the only country to give unqualified support and recognition to the Spanish Republic, welcomed at least 20,000 Republican refugees, and never had diplomatic relations with the Franco regime. In fact, relations with Spain were only re-established in 1977.

However it is certain that the revolution was stalled and prevented from going further by the liberal bourgeoisie that had benefited most from the overthrow of the old order. The Communist Party, founded in 1919, was illegal for much of the period. The new ruling class was made up of lawyers and professionals who were certainly social progressives, but had a real fear of the masses seizing power. They had no hesitation in using force to put down trade union militancy.
It is perhaps not surprising that they were happy to grant asylum to Leon Trotsky at the same time as clamping down on Marxist-Leninists. David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of the artists featured prominently in this exhibition, was even arrested and expelled from Mexico for his alleged involvement in one of the many plots to assassinate Trotsky, who was certainly not welcomed with open arms by Mexican revolutionaries! As the years and decades progressed, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party sank into a mire of corruption and patronage and became a self-serving elite.

It was in the field of art that the Mexican revolution made perhaps its greatest impact on the imagination of the world. Vast murals, monumental buildings, paintings, ceramics, and textiles, and an enthusiastic promotion of completely free artistic expression in all fields made Mexico the centre of innovation. The indigenous culture of Aztecs, Olmecs, and Mayans was fused with European styles to create a dynamic resurgence of national identity.

Printmaking was just one aspect of the cultural awakening of Mexico, but it was an art form immediately accessible to the masses it celebrated. What we see in this exhibition is an affirmation of the dynamism of the downtrodden sections of society once they stop regarding themselves as defenceless victims. This art is empowering and glorifies the dignity of every human being. The enemies of humanity are not invincible; they are paper tigers, parasites that shrivel away when they can no longer leech from the people they oppress.

In this exhibition there are some striking images of the great Emiliano Zapata, who lead the movement for agrarian reform and became a symbol of the revolution. A symbol, certainly, but one appropriated and glorified by the Mexican state to help the people forget that so many of Zapata’s demands had in fact not been delivered.

Readers of the New Worker will find particularly interesting the prints that openly promote class awareness and the struggle against fascism. Many of these are from the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) – People’s Graphic Art Workshop – formed in 1937 by Luis Arenal, Leopoldo Méndez and Pablo O’Higgins as a movement inspired by the triumphs of socialism in the USSR. TGP members had access to printing equipment at the workshop and anyone was free to come along and try out their skills. The collective produced prints for posters, flyers and portfolios which were produced on cheap paper. Their prints often supported the campaigns of workers and trade unions in Mexico. For example, Pablo O’Higgins and Alberto Beltrán collectively made a poster advertising the first Latin American Petrol Workers’ conference, which is on display here. Other printmakers here address subjects such as corruption, the link between capitalism and fascism, and labour conditions. There is one particularly striking and shocking print of a building worker falling to his death from rickety scaffolding


The TGP was particularly committed to the fight against international fascism. Angel Bracho’s striking red and black poster, Victoria! (1945), which celebrates the Red Army’s victory over the Nazis in 1945, is a key example of the TGP’s anti-fascist stance. There are posters calling people to lectures on the fascist threat, and one attacking Japanese militarism with a violent caricature of Emperor Hirohito. A further print that really remains in my mind is of the great Marshal Timoshenko, who organised the Soviet defences to resist the Nazi invasion. Here, Timoshenko is presented as a true hero of the working class throughout the world.

This exhibition helps us all to celebrate our international struggle, as well as providing a powerful lesson in how vested interests can control, manipulate, and eventually suffocate true revolutionary advances. The Mexican revolution promised so much. We must rightly acknowledge its achievements, while also learning from its eventual failure.

Admission to this exhibition is free. It is on until 5th April 2010, after which it will be touring the country

Happy New Year!!

All the best for 2010

the next issue of the New Worker will be out on Friday 8th January 2010

Christmas: It's all very well for the rich!

CHRISTMAS comes but once a year, we are endlessly told by our rulers to encourage us to make the most of a welcome break from a year of work, for those of us who still have a job, and to make the most of it for those struggling to survive on our miserable benefits regime in the midst of the worst slump since 1929.
The great and the good will make their annual obeisance to the birth of the Jesus, whom they all claim to uphold but whose teachings they ignore for the other 364 days of the year while encouraging the masses to celebrate the “Prince of Peace” in an orgy of eating, drinking and consumer spending.
For a week or so we can put our feet up to live a life that the rich enjoy every day of their parasitical lives. We will be told to think about those needier than ourselves and many of us, will indeed, give generously to beggars or charities. But what we should be thinking about is those much wealthier than ourselves and the rotten capitalist system they uphold and how they’ve got the money to spend every day of the year like Christmas, living off the backs of workers forced to make do with the miserable crumbs left at the rich man’s table.
For some the “needy” now include the worthless banks, whose executive bonuses are at long last are facing a modest increase in income tax. For others “goodwill to all men” is reduced to respect for our “betters” and certainly for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan struggling against imperialist occupation. Meanwhile over in Copenhagen, the masters of imperialism can wring their hands at the plight of global warming while trying to avoid any serious contribution to reversing climate change and attempt to pin the blame for it on the struggling nations of the Third World.
But all’s not well for the bourgeoisie. Their end- of-decade prophesies are full of gloom and doom. Gone are the days of the neo-cons who said that communism was finished and that this was going to be the “New American Century”. Gone are the gurus of capitalism who preached the greatest virtue was the possession of the largest amount of money, argued that socialism was finished and that capitalism was the only game in town. They still defend capitalism but cannot point to a single capitalist country where it does work and turn to neo-Keynesianism and talk about “quantitative easing” as they scrabble around trying to head off financial collapse.
Capitalism, of course, does work for those at the top. That, in the final analysis, is all it is, a system designed to perpetuate the rule of the landowners, industrialists and capitalists. And so it will continue until we end the system altogether.
The entire wealth of the world comes from workers in factories and peasants tilling the land. Yet outside the remaining socialist countries working people only receive a miserable fraction of the wealth they produce through their labour. At the same time the ruling elite live the lives of Roman emperors through the capitalist system that guarantees them ease, health and everything money can buy – all off the backs of the workers. Socialism will end this rotten system once and for all. The sooner the better!

What's wrong with Christmas?

by Daphne Liddle

WHAT IS IT about the traditional commercial Christmas that really annoys us communists and atheists? We do not subscribe to the sentimental legends about the sweet little baby Jesus nor are we tree-worshipping druids. We know that capitalism survives by selling as many commodities as it can. So why do we feel so offended by the excess of sales pressure at this time of year? Why do we feel that some deep internal sensibility inside us is being exploited; expectations aroused and then disappointed and betrayed?
The Victorians, and especially Charles Dickens, must take a lot of the blame for creating the myth of a golden age of Christmas – a time of families coming together for a great merry feast in some vast warm indoors, where the cold and snow are shut out and where children are wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the sudden splendour of the decorations. It always snows exactly on Christmas Eve, like an extra decoration/plaything sent from above to transform dingy cities into a sparkling paradise and provide the materials for shaping snowmen and snowballs. There is carol-singing, holly and ivy everywhere and endless mountains of food and drink.
For most working class Victorians this was very far from reality. They would be lucky to get the whole day off work and lucky to have any kind of roast meat for dinner.
But it was during the Victorian era that Christmas cards and Christmas trees were introduced and the possibility of making profits out of selling stuff that people would not otherwise buy.
In northern latitudes there has always been some sort of festival in midwinter around the solstice – a celebration because days had stopped getting shorter and darker and had started to get longer and lighter. Warmer would have to wait for some time around March or April but that was a different festival.
And there is something innate in human beings that needs regular cultural feasts and festivals. Human beings – like bees, ants, starlings, herd animals, chimpanzees and many other species – cannot survive as solitary individuals. We may get the odd Ray Mears or Behr Grylls who can survive alone in the wilderness but hermits and anchorites do not found dynasties. Passing your genes on to the next generation requires living in a social context. Human children require a lot of bringing up and it takes a group/tribe/village environment to give them a reasonable chance of survival. So we are all descended from long generations of people who were part of society – who contributed and received from the collective.
And deep inside us all there is a need to take part in the traditions and rituals that bond society together. This is the essence of culture. We need to belong.
The sellers of trinkets, baubles, Barbie dolls, useless gizmos and gadgets know this and their advertising campaigns tap into this deep need inside us and then betray.
Their message is that if we do not spend every available penny on the rights cards, a big enough tree, enough lights to festoon the entire house and garden, we will not be a proper part of the group – and our children will be disappointed and feel left out.
We are pressured into buying mountains of food that cannot possibly eaten and dozens of “must-have” presents for distant relatives and friends to prove we have really thought of them, albeit fleetingly. The gift they really need and want is a proper slice of our time and attention but modern pressures of work make this the rarest and most precious commodity of all.
Wage slavery and debt slavery cut our cultural bonds with family and friends as working hours expand to take up all our time and our only bonds are with our employers and banks/credit card providers. And even at work our opportunities to make a cultural bond with fellow workers are taken away with the demise of tea breaks and lunch-hours.
And the excess spending of Christmas pushes us further into debt bondage every year, keeping our noses firmly fixed to the grindstone and our shoulders to the wheel more effectively than any Roman slave-master’s whip. We feel guilty about debt; put it down to our own foolishness and worry about it alone in the night. We don’t want to admit that the sales pressures have worked on us and we have spent more that a sensible person should.
We have so little time left for family social bonding that when we do get together with them at Christmas we hardly know them and we feel awkward and guilty for neglecting them. We feel alienated and alone – and increasingly cynical.
Thus ultimately the sales pressure of Christmas, instead of satisfying our need for belonging to the group/family/tribe actually isolates and alienates us from this and turns us into millions of lonely individuals. And we wonder why our society is becoming dysfunctional!
The advertisers particularly target children. They come into this world ready primed to absorb and bond with the culture of the society in which they find themselves. If their friends have a particular toy or brand of trainers their need to be part of the group – and the advertisers – tell them they must have the same and that urge is very strong. It can exert enormous pressure on parents, especially those feeling guilty because work pressures have not allowed them enough time to spend with their children.
Commercial pressures turn Christmas buying into a competition, pitting one household against another in the amount they can spend on their children at Christmas. Failing to satisfy your child’s demands is a crime against their youth and innocence. Parents are expected make sacrifices – of their money and their reason – to try to satisfy the insatiable. Thus people are in reality further alienated from each other by this competitiveness and parents are alienated from their children.
The satisfaction the presents bring to the children is shallow and fleeting. Too soon they become as cynical and disillusioned as their parents.
Women are under enormous pressure to provide a proper Christmas feast, even though they know a lot of it will end up in the bin.
The capitalist Christmas ends abruptly on Christmas Day with the declaration of the start of the January sales. And once the whole thing is over – with all its pressures, extra work and social disappointments – most working people heave a sigh of relief and hurry back to their workplace and the mind-numbing routine monotony.
Just occasionally at Christmas we catch a glimpse of the real thing. I remember a few years ago in Woolwich main shopping centre – a very run-down area with high unemployment and a high proportion of locals on benefits, by-passed by the worst commercialism – a drama group staged a bit of street theatre in fantastic costumes with music and dancing. It was not hot stuff to the adults but the children running about were too young to have seen anything like it before. They were genuinely entranced and captivated by it and gleefully joined in; because of this their parents were smiling too. It was quite unexpected and no money was involved. It was real.
When workers and their families get together a relax a little, when the joking and laughing break out, that is real; that is the sort of happiness that capitalism can never provide; it involves no money and no profits.
What would the ideal socialist mid-winter festival involve? That is hard to prescribe; it is the sort of thing that will happen spontaneously given the right conditions and circumstances.
But those conditions must include an end to huge commercial pressures; it must cost very little to stage. It must allow workers a lot more time to relax and unwind. It is impossible to find joy if you are exhausted. It must allow all generations to come together to give each other time and attention. And it must involve genuine fun – though that it a quality impossible to define or command. All we can do is to give it the right soil to grow in.

Imperialism and the slump of 2009

Andy Brooks, NCP General Secretary, moves the Main Resolution at the 16th Congress of the New Communist Party of Britain in London on 5th & 6th December 2009

Dear friends, comrades and honoured guests

We meet again at a time of intensifying struggle in Britain and across the globe. We meet while the British ruling class and the bourgeoisie throughout the capitalist world are struggling to recover from the greatest slump since 1929.
We have seen sweeping changes across the world over the past three years.
The Zimbabwean government refused to bow to imperialist demands to reverse the land reforms, held an election and formed a coalition government without imperialist interference.
The Nepalese people overthrew the hated monarchy in 2008. Russia defeated an imperialist attempt to build a Nato bridgehead in the Caucasus when it crushed the Georgian aggressors. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the second socialist country today to possess nuclear weapons, stood firm in the face of threats of the US imperialism and by so doing so forced the Americans to negotiate face to face to ease tension on the Korean peninsula.
The Iraqi and Afghan resistance forced the imperialists onto the defensive and have made the long-term occupation of their countries untenable.
Though the “new world order” and “globalisation” have been put on hold by the new Obama administration in the United States, the primary contradiction in the world today is still between American imperialism and the rest of the world it seeks to dominate.
Though the most reactionary and aggressive sections of the US ruling class suffered a setback in the 2008 presidential elections when their Republican candidate was defeated, the Obama administration has not abandoned US imperialism’s dream of world domination but has merely changed tack to take into account the changed economic climate and the growing resistance throughout the world to open US hegemony.
US imperialism, weakened by the slump that began with the near collapse of the banking system last year, is on the defensive but it is not in retreat.
US imperialism wants to hold on to what it’s got. US forces continue to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran is still under threat. Cuba still suffers from the US blockade and the Americans are working to prop up the remaining reactionary regimes in what they like to call their own “backyard” to halt the advance of popular democracy in Latin America. Israel continues to deny the legitimate rights of the Palestinian Arabs and Korea, Cyprus and Ireland remain partitioned.
We have taken part in the biggest anti-war movement this country has ever seen — a movement that mobilised millions throughout the Western world and led to the defeat of the most reactionary circles of the ruling class in Britain and the United States. Bush has gone and so has Blair and along with them has gone the dream of the “New World Order”, the “Project for a New American Century” and the “New Middle East”.
The neo-conservative economic model has been dumped and the bourgeoisie is once again turning to Keynesianism to stave off economic melt-down and head off mass social unrest in the imperialist heartlands.
We meet as working people rally to defend their jobs and livelihoods in the Royal Mail, the civil and national health service and local government. We meet in the run up to a general election next year with a resurgent Tory Party promising to resume its all out offensive against trade union rights should it return to power, while the neo-nazi BNP attempts to stoke up anti-Muslim and anti-ethnic minority hatred in its bid to politically legitimise a racist and fascist bloc within the ranks of the bourgeoisie.
All of this is reflected in the analysis of the draft main resolution which is the product of the intense discussion that has taken place in the Party Cells, Districts and the Central Committee over the past 11 months. Now this document comes to the highest authority of the Party, the Congress, for debate and to chart our course for the next three years.
We have always maintained that peace is the central issue in all our campaigns. In Britain the labour and peace movement must step up the fight to bring about the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all British troops from Afghanistan and indeed from every other part of the world.
At the same time the labour and peace movement must mobilise to stop this Labour government or whatever takes its place next year from spending more billions on the needless and useless replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons system and then develop the campaign to scrap all British nuclear weapons and close down all US bases on our soil.
In the past the ruling class has always closed ranks during times of economic crisis. But this slump has only sharpened the divisions between those who believe that the future for British capitalism lies in greater European integration, those who think British imperial interests are still best served through the alliance with the United States and those who believe that British imperialism can extract the maximum benefit by playing off one against the other by acting as a trans-Atlantic “bridge” between American imperialism and that of France and Germany. And the latter course was the traditional path of all Labour and Conservative governments from the late 1950s to 1997.
The Tories directly represent the ruling class while the right-wing leaders of social-democracy collaborate with whichever the section of the ruling class that they believe is the dominant one.
After the 1997 Labour victory Tony Blair put all his bets on the Americans siding with the most reactionary elements within the British ruling class in the belief that victory in Iraq would give British imperialism a significant slice of the spoils when the “new world order” was established. That dream died on the streets of Baghdad along with Blair’s hopes to see out a third term in office. His successor, Gordon Brown, would still like to straddle the Atlantic as the arbiter between US and Franco-German imperialism but that bridge was burnt in Iraq and this Labour Government is now increasingly looking towards the European Union for its salvation.
The bourgeoisie, as always, do not want the general election debate to go beyond the issues in which they themselves have differing opinions. Our task is to fight for working class based politics and argue the case for socialism. Everyone knows that Britain is an immensely wealthy country and that economic basis for socialism has existed here for over a 100 years. But we are no nearer to socialism than we were in the 1900s. The fact is that the class as a whole is still committed to social democratic reform. This is not because the class is collectively stupid but because they know, quite correctly, that the British ruling class could restore the entire public sector and the entire Welfare State and more by simply disgorging a fraction of the profits they make at home and abroad.
Our electoral policy is to vote Labour in all elections apart from the bogus European parliamentary polls which we boycott. This is not because we supported the venal reactionary policies of “New Labour” or have been taken in by Brown’s neo-Keynesian reforms.
It’s not because we think a Labour government can solve the problems of working people. We know that isn’t possible in a bourgeois “democracy”. Our policy, which has been discussed and elaborated from Congress to Congress since 1977, exists because it is based on the concrete conditions that exist in Britain today.
In our view a Labour government with the yet unbroken links with the Labour Party, the trade unions and the co-operative movement, offers the best option for the working class in the era of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.
Our strategy is for working class unity and our campaigns are focused on defeating the right-wing within the movement and strengthening the left and progressive forces within the Labour Party and the unions to create a democratic Labour Party that will carry out the demands of organised labour when in office.
Working people have made some gains since Labour returned to office in 1997, gains that would not have happened under the Tories, like the peace process in Ireland, devolution in Scotland and Wales and creation of the Greater London Authority.
Though the anti-union laws have not been repealed they are largely in abeyance and the Brown Government tacitly accepts the principle of consulting the unions, even if it rarely takes the advice it is given.
Let’s be clear about bourgeois democracy. We believe that the working class can never come to power through bourgeois elections but that doesn’t mean that we turn our back on working class demands for social justice and state welfare.
We believe that social democracy can never lead to people’s democracy but that doesn’t mean that we turn our back on social democratic movements that represent millions upon millions of working people in Britain in the unions and within the Labour Party.
We believe that the class collaborationist ideas of social democracy can and must be defeated within the working class. But it cannot be defeated by imitating it in the countless variations of the British Road to Socialism upheld by the revisionist, pseudo-communist and Trotskyist movements in Britain today.
The fact that these platforms do not work; that they are rejected time and time again by the same working class these programmes claim to advance, never deters these pseudo-revolutionaries who believe they can change the consciousness of the masses through rhetoric and wild promises.
Now we can all play that game and conjure up imaginary legions beyond the British working class to take us down the revolutionary road. We can all invent a class that is seething with anger and mobilised for revolutionary change that is just waiting for the correct party with the correct formula to lead them to victory. As communists we have to work with the working class that exists and not the phantom of romantic ultra-leftism.
Standing left candidates without mass support against Labour divides the movement and the class and ignores the obvious fact that the only realistic alternate governments are those of the Tories and the Liberal Democrats that have been and would be much worse than any Labour government.
Since the 1920s communists have been isolated from the mainstream of the labour movement largely due to hostility from the right- wing within the movement and partly due to the sectarian and revisionist policies of the old CPGB.
We have worked since our foundation in 1977 to end these artificial and anti-working class barriers and that is why we affiliated to the Labour Representation Committee in 2005 and focus much of our work in building that movement.
We will support social reform and our immediate programme outlined in this document charts our demands and details how it could be achieved by a left social-democratic government and how it all could be paid for through taxing the rich and scrapping Britain’s weapons of mass destruction.
But our major task is to build the revolutionary core within the class. The communist movement is based upon the revolutionary principles of Marxism- Leninism. Its purpose is to equip the working class so that it can establish working class state power and then build a socialist society.
Bourgeois democracy is a fraud. It is democracy for the exploiters and dictatorship in all but a formal sense for the exploited. Bourgeois elections, when they are held, are used so that the smallest number of people can manipulate the maximum number of votes.
We have continued to make political and organisational progress over the past three years. Our general position on the Labour Party, Ireland, peace and national liberation is known throughout the British labour movement and the international communist movement.
Our New Worker supporters’ groups continue to grow like the fund-raising which has sustained the New Worker and enabled us to go into colour production. Over the past three years we produced more pamphlets that in any over similar period since our establishment in 1977.
We stand for peace and socialism. Peace because only the oppressors and exploiters want war. Socialism because it is essential to eliminate exploitation, unemployment, poverty, economic crisis and war.
Socialism is the only solution to climate change, pollution and global warming. Let us work together to build the movement that will ensure that this century becomes the era of socialism.

Palestine

STORIES OUR MOTHERS TOLD US

By Pauline Collins


THERE WAS an air of excitement as we arrived and drove into Beit Fourik. It was my third visit to our SE London Linked Village in the West Bank.
The old checkpoint had been demolished and had been replaced by two concrete pillars. I think a “sweetener” to the world while the land grabbing, collective punishments, deaths continue unabated.
The soldiers stopped our mini-van and Jamal told us to say that we were going to a “celebration”. We were let through. The old checkpoint has always been desperately commented about on previous visits: the constant closures, the impossibility and/or delays getting to the hospital, the pregnant women giving birth, the deaths. The new one still a checkpoint controlling the village, denying access in and out arbitrarily at a whim.
I did not recognise entering Beit Fourik A new tarmac road had replaced the old stony one. People were walking up and down it celebrating. We got out of the mini bus and entered the Municipal Building and met the community leaders. Fouad, our community representative, was there to meet us.
It took a while for us all to settle down together, we were taken into another Municipal Building newly refurbished since my last visit and eventually we all began talking about the village and the people within it.
We were introduced to Maheeda, the newly elected woman councillor for the Municipality, which was wonderful and I was proudly told about her appointment by Fouad, taken onto the roof of the building and in the village space music and dancing filled the night.
We were all taken to a Beit Fourik wedding, men’s night. The women were on the roofs of the houses cheering and laughing and the men in a giant circle dabka dancing. We were given Arabic coffee to drink. It was joyful and will live in our memories. The “celebration” sent a message to the lights in the hills from the Settler watch towers, the illegal settlements and the vicious settlers within them: “You will not defeat us, we will resist, we will overcome and gain our freedom; we will dance in spite of you all.”
A barbecue followed. Wonderful meats, salad and rice all cooked by the men and we smiled at the universatility of the “man at the barbecue” occasions. We met Safia who is going to come from Nablus/Beit Fourik on the Project visit to Britain from Palestine next spring.
There was some confusion as we were told to split into groups of “how many” two, three, fours to go to our families who were having us to stay. Laughter and doubts spread as we could not make head or tail of what was what and I was told “don’t worry, don’t worry” as I anxiously with Christina and Jane went with Yoher to Marina’s house. In the morning everyone said they had a wonderful time in their accommodation. The families they had stayed with had taken some of them to their extended families and they had revisited the women watching the wedding.
It was great seeing Marina and family again. Her family was well and she talked about how she wanted to start a health project looking at diet and exercise with the women of the village because they suffered from diabetes, heart problems, extreme stress. She said that the Red Crescent medical clinic had closed. There was no funding for Municipalities that had officials that were Hamas. There was a new mayor he had replaced the Hamas mayor. We wondered if this was why.
The next day we were taken up into the hills. Marina and Maheeda came with us. We could see the watch towers and settlements all around and were shown the hillside where the farmers’ land had not been farmed for years and their fig and olive trees were unattended because it was too dangerous. The settlers had harassed, injured and killed people who were olive harvesting.
We walked amongst the sublime rolling, rocky, milky, brown rich earth. The sun was shinning, small plots of land were being tilled with small ploughs and donkeys. We became aware slowly that the seemingly isolated landscape was filled with activity. The colours the farmers were wearing blended into the earth. New modern tractors, carts passed us intermittently and we were told that the agricultural “Park” scheme supported the village.
High in the hills there was a “sanctuary” where the villagers could pray, stay the night; a spiritual place and Jamal said that “he loved coming to Beit Fourik”. It is a magical place.
We were taken to meet a farmer and his sheep. He had built a shelter for them. I noticed with such pleasure how the sheep, who were all woolly and fluffy with brown faces all looked to him as we came to the opening it reminded me of a “father with his children”. A shepherd and his flock. We were taken to see the bee hives. Members of our group went amongst the sheep and looked closely at the bees in their hives.
We washed our faces and hands in the cool clear stream of water that flowed from the hillside.
It was curious how the occupation, the viciousness of the settlers, receded during this time. We were told how there is a severe water shortage, reminded of the danger of farming the land and land lost. We were overlooked all the time by the watch towers, no doubt photographing everything we did, and yet the beauty of place, of people, of nature was greater and for a little while together we were able to be free in our minds and enjoy.
We were taken to a family (I am so sorry I forgot to take their names down). Their son had been shot by the Israeli military. He had been a university student in Nablus and the family’s house had been demolished. This meeting symbolised to me the resilience, resistance of the Palestinian people confronting daily the horror of the illegal Israeli occupation.
The villagers of Beit Fourik had clubbed together and rebuilt the family house and we were sitting in a beautiful home, drinking Arabic coffee in a community that looked after each other; that were providing rights for themselves where they had had all rights taken from them even their son. The father talked about his son’s death quietly with dignity and his mother sat gently beside him. We were welcomed and introduced to the tragedy of their lives and for a moment we entered into it with them in solidarity.
We were told that the whole extended family was in effect under open house arrest. Collective punishment. That they could never leave their village, never travel; the Israeli authorities would be punishing them all for the rest of their lives. We said our goodbyes, got in our mini bus and drove back to Abu Dis.
Thank You Beit Fourik you are not alone or forgotten and we will tell your stories.

The World Turned Upside Down

COMMUNISTS and progressives will be rallying to mark the 92nd anniversary of the Russian Revolution this weekend in parades and ceremonies across the world. The Bolshevik revolution on 7th November 1917 swept away the rotting edifice of bourgeois rule in Russia and lit the torch of revolution that burns on throughout the world communist movement.
Back in 1891 the first workers’ uprising established the Paris Commune, which lasted for two months before being drowned in blood by the French ruling class. The Russian revolution mobilised the starving masses with its battle cry of “peace, bread and land” to build the first workers’ and peasants’ republic. The Bolsheviks’ first call was the peace decree calling for an immediate armistice, the annulment of secret treaties, self-determination and no annexations. That call ended the senseless slaughter with Germany and ultimately brought the First World War to a close.
The Bolsheviks established a revolutionary militia, the Red Army, which against all odds, beat back the forces of reaction during the civil war that followed to establish the world’s first socialist state: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin became a bastion for the international working class.
The Russian Revolution electrified the entire colonial world. For the first time in the history of humanity the masses had overthrown feudalism and capitalism and were beginning to build a workers’ and peasants’ state. The oppressed peoples of Africa, Asia and the Americas were inspired by the fledgling Soviet state that defeated the reactionary White Guards and beat off the combined might of the imperialist interventionist armies. Within decades the colonial chains of slavery would soon be broken with the help of the Soviets.
When the entire imperialist economy crashed in 1929 plunging millions upon millions into poverty and desperation, the Soviet Union was building a new life for working people, emancipating women, eliminating unemployment, eradicating illiteracy and providing free education and a health service that was second to none.
While reactionary ruling circles in Europe tried to turn the clock back by turning to nazism and fascism to crush the working class, Soviet citizens were enjoying a new life in the USSR. Working people were in command at all levels of government and the Soviet Union was the centre of modern scientific and artistic development. And when the Nazis plunged the world into another global conflict it was the Soviet youth who smashed Hitler’s legions and saved the world from barbarism.
When the counter-revolutionaries who had wormed their way to the top of the Soviet leadership destroyed the USSR and brought down the people’s democracies of eastern Europe, the imperialists rejoiced and told us that communism was finished. Now we’re plunged into another global slump that is entirely the creation of the world capitalist system.
The Soviet Union is no more but the spirit of the Great October Russian Revolution lives on in the world communist movement and the people’s democracies of Asia and the Caribbean. The lesson of 1917 is that working people can take destiny into their own hands and end the era of exploitation. The Soviet peoples under the leadership of the Bolsheviks proved that you can build socialism in one state and create a social system far superior to the decadent, corrupt and oppressive capitalist world. Above all it shows that there is no limit to human creativity when the chains of exploitation are broken and the energy of working people is released.
Capitalism cannot solve the problems of the world economy and indeed that is not its intention. It is merely a system that ensures that a tiny minority of landowners, industrialists, speculators and parasites can enjoy the life of Roman emperors by living off the backs of working people. Now great mass movements are again sweeping the continents. Working people are demanding social justice, democratic rights and an end to exploitation. It’s capitalism that’s finished — not us.

The Second World War

Mein Kampf

By Alfred Brown

I have long been confused about the origins and early events of the Second World War, not just because I am now 88. My confusion dates back seventy years to that September morning when, delivering Daily Workers, I learned an ultimatum by Neville Chamberlain to Hitler to cease his attack on Poland had expired and we were at war with Germany. Like many others I was already confused about our alliance with and guarantee to Poland. What did we have to help that country stave off German aggression? Nothing except words of condemnation.
Air raid sirens sounded but there was no raid. There followed an autumn, winter and spring of what was called the phoney war, as far as we and our allies, the French were concerned, as Hitler got on with putting right what he saw as another error of Versailles.
Then, in May 1940, came the German attack on the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force in the West, through Holland and Belgium, avoiding the French Maginot Line of fortresses in which both Western allies had put their trust. German superiority in weapons and generals such as Rommel and Guderian overran the French army within a week. The BEF, to the West, awaited the coming of those German forces but Hitler ordered a pause, inexplicable to his generals. The full-blooded assault was never resumed. No determined land effort against the BEF was ever made. Nothing more was heard of the prong of the German offensive which reached the Channel coast. Hitler went to Paris to receive the French surrender in the railway coach in which the Germans had surrendered in 1918, while still in occupation of French territory. The BEF retreated along that coast to Dunkirk from which the men were evacuated, some with rifles, some without, but leaving all heavy equipment behind. That was, however, an unexpected achievement, to raise public spirits, even a majority of MPs, to reject the surrender terms Hitler offered.
Many must have felt confused by all that and our prospects. Was our island to be invaded? Ancient rifles, relics of 1914-18 and even earlier were handed out to part time volunteers, first known as Local Defence Volunteers, then the Home Guard, ‘Dad’s Army’, still surviving as TV’s favourite comedy. Reports of barges being assembled for invasion came as the Luftwaffe launched bombing attacks on RAF fighter stations in South East England, the Battle of Britain. That was a war by communiqué, football report fashion, numbers of German planes downed in the air for us, of British destroyed on the ground for Germans. Reporting it for the national news agency, The Press Association, I heard that the head of Fighter Command was to tell Churchill destruction of airfields was forcing his planes out of Southern England. That would mean German planes in France would be nearer than the RAF to any fighting along our coast. Was invasion imminent? Instead the Germans switched to bombing London and I switched to describing that, confused as ever.
Now, however, some sense has come into all that, from reading a book which should have been required reading for all those wanting to look into the German dictator’s mind.
The book was Hitler’s Mein Kampf [My Struggle], written in 1924 during the nine months he spent in prison of the five years sentence given him on the failure of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, to seize power in Bavaria ,organised by his Nazi Party and the wartime general Ludendorff.
Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau on the Austro-Hungarian border with Germany, later moving to the capital, Vienna. It was there that he developed his third great hatred, to add to those of Jews and Marxists, of the Slavs, particularly Czechs, whom he saw as destroying the German nature of Austria. An English translation of the book, then a world best seller, was published in Britain in the 1930s, the title page of my copy having the inscription ‘109th Thousand’. How many of those thousands were read by those likely to benefit from understanding Hitler’s motivations at the time one has no idea but it has shone light on my confusions. Alongside those hatreds, Hitler reveals his likes, in particular one for Britain and the British, also the role he believed we British could play in his ambitions for Germany.
It all stemmed from his experiences in the World War One. He had moved from Vienna to Munich, was called back to Austria for military service but rejected as unfit. When war broke out, however, with Germany allied to Austria-Hungary, he volunteered to serve in a Bavarian regiment and was accepted. Except when he was hospitalized from wounds, in 1916, and gassed, at the end of the war, he was continually in the front-line as a headquarters runner, earning first an Iron Cross Second Class, for bravery in December 1914 and an Iron Class First Class, a rare distinction for a corporal, in August 1918. He ended the war, after his gassing, back in Munich, in a reserve battalion. He was horrified by what he found, the collapse of the public and political will, with Jews and Marxists, as he saw it, running everything.
The Army had not been defeated. It had been betrayed by the strikes and breakdown in ordinary life at home was what Hitler believed. The truth was that Germany was not large enough to sustain, economically, the effort the war demanded. It could not feed and provide services for both its civilian population and army. As Hitler claimed, the great opportunity for victory which came with the removal of Russia from the war was frustrated by a general strike at home.
Hence the need for what was to dominate Nazi propaganda, lebensraum, or living space. The settlement of World War One had made Germany smaller. Its Eastern border had been moved West to produce a Polish corridor leading to the new international port of Danzig, separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Its population had been mostly Poles but included Germans. It was the World War One outcome which led to World War Two. Yet Hitler rejects the idea of restoring Germany’s 1914 frontiers as politically foolish. “They were no protection in the past nor would they mean strength in the future. They would not give the German nation internal solidarity nor provide it with nourishment.” Yet the need for lebensraum was growing remorselessly “for,” he writes, “the population of Germany increases by nearly 900,000 annually.”
Even before the war Germany was too small a country for its people and for its rulers’ ambitions of ‘peaceful economic conquest of the world’. Its alternative means of growth were territorial acquisitions within Europe, to the East, and colonisation. The latter might have been possible in alliance with Russia but by the nineteenth century it was too late except by a hard struggle. Such a struggle would be better employed gaining territory nearer home.
“For such a policy there was only one possible ally in Europe – Great Britain. Great Britain was the only Power which could protect our rear, supposing we started a new Germanic expansion. No sacrifice would have been to great in order to gain England’s alliance.”
In fact Germany’s pre-war rulers failed to consider a regular scheme of defence or plans for acquiring lands in Europe, sacrificed chances of an alliance with England and neglected to seek support from Russia.
That was written while discussing the mistakes of Germany’s past rulers but he makes it clear that his policies for the future continued to depend on British support. The old Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy in WW1 had proved disastrous for Germany. Italy remained neutral and eventually joined the Anglo-French side.
What Hitler proposed in Mein Kampf was another Triple Alliance, of Britain, Germany and Italy, no doubt, in part, with thoughts of the growing power of France, reaching down though its African territories and the effect of that, then, on the traditional British policy of balance of power in Europe.
So there it is. During all those years of Hitler’s fight for and acquisition of power, of the growing dislike of him, his policies, his actions, among many Britishers, not just left wingers like myself, did the German dictator continue to harbour those thoughts of alliance with Britain. After all the British he met, at Berlin and Berchtesgarten, were by no means ordinary left-wingers. How many, even while Britain was supposedly discussing a possible alliance with France and Russia against German aggression, would be in agreement with Hitler’s plans to go East, if it brought him up against Stalin and his hated Reds. Some of us were even of the opinion that our own prime minister, Chamberlain, was somewhat submissive to him until that confusing Polish reaction.
So were Hitler wartime actions involving Britain tempered by not just a touch of pro- Britishness? I find my confusion lessened by the thought they could well have been.
What might have happened if Hitler had behaved differently or we had accepted his offer of terms of surrender? One can only speculate but I suspect things would have been very little changed. Hitler must have known that he had to go East for his territorial enlargement and attack the Soviet Union before 1942 when, his spies must have told him, the Red Army would have its new weapons which eventually won the war.

A war to remember

SOMBRE CEREMONIES marked the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War across Europe last week. The war, which cost over 61 million lives, began with the Nazi German invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939 and ended on 2nd September 1945 when the Japanese Emperor Hirohito surrendered following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American atom bombs.
In Britain the focus was naturally on 3rd September, the day the British and French ultimatums to Germany expired, and the sacrifice of our people that followed in the struggle to defeat the Axis powers. Here, with the dubious exception of some neo-nazis and anti-semites, there is no doubt that Nazi Germany started the war in a bid for world domination.
But if you were to believe the ravings of some of the reactionary rulers in eastern Europe today you could be forgiven for thinking that it was the Soviet Union that had plunged the world into turmoil in 1939.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski says little or nothing about the pre-war Polish regime’s despicable collaboration with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. But he’s got plenty to say about the Soviet Union - blaming them for the outbreak of hostilities because they had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany and then absurdly claiming that Poland would have successfully repelled the Nazi legions if it hadn’t been for the Soviet intervention - which incidentally occurred after the Polish government had collapsed under the Nazi onslaught.
The leaders of the Baltic states elevate Nazi collaborators as heroes and bang on about demanding compensation for what they say was decades of Soviet occupation while the rest of the pack want communism equated with Nazism and outlawed.
All of this is done under the approving eye of the big-wigs in the European Union who choose to forget the people who made the greatest sacrifice in the struggle against Nazi Germany and who eventually forced the Wehrmacht on its knees begging for surrender in 1945.
War-time leader Winston Churchill said that the RAF’s battle with the Luftwaffe in 1940 was the “finest hour” in what would later be called the Battle of Britain. It certainly was, but the finest hour for the world communist movement was undoubtedly the battle for Europe.
The Soviet people, led by Joseph Stalin and the Bolsheviks, liberated half of Europe and smashed Nazi Germany while Josef Broz Tito’s guerrilla army and Enver Hoxha’s partisans drove the fascists out of the Balkans.
Communist-led resistance forces had the fascists on the run in Greece, France and Italy while others fought alongside the Red Army on the eastern front while in Asia Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh led the fight for freedom against the Empire of Japan.
If it wasn’t for the Soviet Union Germany and Japan would have won the Second World War. What that would have meant can easily be seen by their actions during the conflict - the extermination of millions of Jews and all others deemed unfit to live by the Nazis; concentration camps, mass slavery and dictatorial rule by an elite of industrialists, landowners, war-lords and degenerates of every kind.
This was the world ruled by Hitler and Hirohito - a world that would have set back civilisation hundreds of years had it succeeded.
The Soviet Union is now sadly no more but nothing can take away its achievements. The words of microbes like Kaczynski and his kind will soon be forgotten. The Soviet victory will be remembered by working people for ever.

new worker editorial 3rd september 2009

70th Anniversary of the Second World War

The Falsifiers of History Have the Aim of Covering Up Their Own Preparations for Fascism and War

by Chris Coleman
National Spokesperson of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)

September 3rd marks the 70th anniversary of the declaration of war by Britain and France against Nazi Germany, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939. On the occasion of this 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, the imperialists and their apologists – as did the leaders at Gdansk on 1st September – have lost no time in attempting once again to rewrite history. They have as an aim to cover up their plans for state arrangements at home which serve their dictatorial rule, and internationally their preparations for a new inter-imperialist war for the redivision of the world. The focus of their falsifications, as ever, is the role of Stalin and the Soviet Union in the lead up to the war, in particular the gross slander that Stalin “connived” with Hitler, carved up Poland and set off the war. The truth is the precise opposite.
The Second World War was a terrible catastrophe for the entire humanity. There is no doubt such a tragedy could have been avoided, or at the very least limited in its devastation. Facts, readily verifiable from the documents of the time, make clear the causes of the war. It was the ruling circles of Britain, France and the USA who re-financed and re-armed Germany to be the dominating force in Central and Eastern Europe and egged Hitler on to “Go East”, to realise his cherished dream of taking over territories such as the Ukraine and destroy the Soviet Union and Bolshevism. Faced with Hitlerite aggression, the Soviet Union called on Britain and France to sign a collective mutual assistance pact with military clauses. They refused, choosing instead to sign the Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, an act of betrayal which sealed the fate of Europe, ceding Czechoslovakia and its powerful armaments industry to Hitler, and giving him the green light to go east and attack the Soviet Union. The Polish government, imperialist itself, took the same stand, for which it was to pay so dearly. Appeasement was not a sign of weakness, as is claimed, but of connivance. The imperialist mentality was to fear communism more than fascism, to follow a short-sighted and self-serving policy which brought the most terrible devastation on the peoples of the world, including their own.
It is also fact, readily verifiable, that the Soviet Union, following the policies of Lenin and Stalin, was a factor for peace in the lead-up, the waging, and the aftermath of the Second World War. It was, after all, the October Revolution which brought the First World War to a close. It was the collective security proposals of the Soviet Union which could, if taken up by the imperialist powers, have prevented, or at least limited, the Second World War. Faced with the refusal of Britain and France to take up these proposals, the Soviet Union had no alternative but to sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany in order to give it time to prepare for the inevitable Nazi invasion of its territories. It was also forced to move its Red Army on 17th September 1939, into Ukrainian and Byelorussian territories seized by Poland in 1919-20, thus saving millions from the slaughter visited upon the rest of Poland, and moving its forward defensive line several hundred kilometres west. When the inevitable invasion came, in June 1941, the war took on an anti-fascist character. Millions upon millions were inspired on the world scale to participate in destroying the fascist menace. This was the main factor in the victory of the anti-fascist forces over Nazism. The policy of the Soviet Union was based on steadfast opposition to aggression, invasion, occupation and annexation, to the imperialist redivision of the world and inter-imperialist war. Despite all the waverings, the cynicism, the treachery, the obstruction of the governments of Britain, France and the USA and others, they stuck to their stand. They made huge sacrifices in order to do this, and with great proletarian generosity ensured that the war effort progressed and victory over fascism was ensured. It was not down to the failure or weakness of the policy of the Soviet Union that this victory over fascism in 1945 was not consolidated and the opportunity for peace and democracy cast aside, with the imperialist powers reverting to their old policies, which had brought such disaster to the world’s people, including their own, of “containment of communism” as their main aim, along with renewing their support for and practice of fascism worldwide.
Why the falsifications of this indisputable history? Everything points to the fact that the attack on communism today is not so much on what it is or has been, but on what it can do. In the 20th century communism solved the problems that faced humanity. It led and inspired people to make huge advances and win great victories. The crises later in the century were due to its abandonment, not its legacy. Now in the 21st century, despite the raised consciousness of the people, the result of the achievements of the 20th century, and the opportunity which that presents to take matters into their own hands, in the last 25 years of retreat of revolution the forces of reaction have been and are determined that the people will take no such initiatives, that they will leave the solution of the problems which face humanity in the hands of those who created them, in the hands of today’s so-called “benevolent despots”. Thus communism must be attacked. Its ideology and politics must be discredited. History itself must be falsified and rewritten.
The attack, the falsifications, come not merely in the form of lies, but as total disinformation which distorts the whole progress of humankind, the basis of change, motion and development, how a new society has been and is being created, and if not challenged deprive the people of any perspective, of an outlook on their lives.
As the late Hardial Bains pointed out in his important work Modern Communism,the attack is not just on communism but on all real change. History, he says, has been turned on its head, with the worst crimes of the Hitlerite fascists attributed to the communists in general, and to Stalin in particular. This disinformation is intended to disorient the workers, women and youth and provide them with no prospects whatsoever. It is also to divert the attention of the world’s peoples from the crimes being committed today by the imperialists and world reaction in the name of democracy.
The question must be put: How can one believe the stories of those who commit such dreadful and dastardly acts these very days? Guantánamo, Fallujah, Gaza, the bombing of villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan are facts of history too. How can the solution of the world’s problems be left in the hands of those who cause them, who are leading the peoples into such terrible catastrophes?
It is vital that the falsifications of history, such as of the causes and lessons of the Second World War, are exposed and combated. This is necessary not as something in itself, but as part of providing all the information, the perspective, the outlook – which only Modern Communism can do – to enable the working class and people to discuss and plan the way forward, what kind of new society is needed, how to take matters into their own hands, to bring about democratic renewal and bring into being a pro-social anti-war government, and solve themselves the problems facing society.