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Post by dodger on Jul 18, 2013 9:32:37 GMT
Party Invitation
Posted on July 17, 2013 Marxman,
imarxman.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/party-invitation/Disengagement with politics is becoming widespread. Elections for parliament often command little more than a 50% turnout, often less. As for council elections, many wards command fewer votes than half that at best.
This phenomenon can also be seen in the catastrophic, for them, decline in the membership of the main parliamentary parties. In the 1950s the membership of the Conservative and Labour Parties were approximately 2,800,000 and 1,100,000 respectively.
Today the Tories have around 170,000 and Labour 190,000 members with a rapidly rising average age of membership, about 75 in the Conservative Party, reflecting their inability to attract younger members.
However, this does not mean any serious counter ideology is attracting interest. There are periodic outbursts, such as a TUC day of action with large demonstrations, the Occupy movement had its media moment while camped outside St Paul’s and the recent self-styled People’s Assembly filled a hall.
These events are usually followed by a period of optimism with promises that this time things will be different, there will be action, the resistance begins here, and so on. Then, the enthusiasm wanes and the energy dissipates and capitalism continues its ruination of Britain unhindered.
On Saturday, 13th July, Durham hosted the Miners’ Gala, to be followed a week later by the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival at the other end of the country, two set piece events attended by large numbers of trade unionists. The Gala brought 120,000 through the streets of Durham last year. Surely an encouraging turnout in troubled times.
The radical Left, in its various guises, peddle their variations on a theme of Labour leadership sell-out and the plea for more militant union action. General strike anyone? There seems no appreciation that Miliband is actually fulfilling the role of Labour Party leader.
An old nostrum has it, quite accurately, that Labour draws more from Methodism than Marx. In other words, social and political change is a moral argument; capitalism should be reformed/abolished (delete as appropriate) because it is wrong.
If Labour paid more heed to Marx rather than Wesley there would be realisation that the starting point for change is present reality. Capitalism is not intrinsically evil; indeed it was a revolutionary force that transformed society.
However, the present reality is that capitalism long since passed its dynamic stage and entered the period of decay. Imperialism, both in terms of actual colonisation or, more recently, the movement of capital to low wage countries or cheap migrant labour to higher waged economies, has been the way capitalism has preserved itself.
None of this, though, prevents its absolute decline continuing and the desperate search for profit leads finance capitalism, the dominant economic form, to speculation and sub-prime lending. The consequence is international crisis and the further destruction of manufacturing capitalism, ironically its only source of generating new value.
At best, Labour might try to mitigate the worst effects capitalism’s decline, applying the moral principle that the weakest in society should be protected. The Tories may take a different view, that the weakest would benefit from a less indebted economy, which is really also the Labour Party’s position, whatever the contrary rhetoric.
Capitalism cannot be voted out and countering it is not a negative act. In fact it requires the positive engagement of the overwhelming majority of people, the working class, in formulating what is to be done (to coin a phrase) and then doing it.
This will entail a number of short-term measures such as withdrawal from the EU and defeating the divisive move for Scottish “independence”. The aim being to preserve Britain’s sovereignty and the unity of its working class to act on its own behalf in meeting the pressing need to confront and transcend capitalism itself.
Twenty years after the last pit in Durham closed a new miners’ banner was paraded at the Gala for the Chopwell lodge. This is the latest of several incarnations of the banner and it is adorned with three finely wrought portraits illustrating, unintentionally, the ideological confusion at the heart of the labour movement.
Marx and Lenin are on the banner, but the largest and central picture is of Keir Hardy. Like Chartism before it, the moral force is being promoted and while the working class continues to put its, be it waning, faith in Labour, then Marx and Lenin remain no more than symbols of a vague aspiration.
As celebrations of proud working class history the Durham Gala and Tolpuddle Festival are enjoyable social occasions and do forge links for present young people with the past. But they are exercises in nostalgic heritage that would not be out of place in Durham’s industrial open-air museum at Beamish.
Unless people, especially young people, realise that the need for change is an economic not a moral argument and requires their active involvement, then there will be no significant change, only continuing decline.
Disengagement and cynicism are no defence as increasingly moribund capitalism consumes social capital such as health, education and pensions. There is a need to build a party applying the lessons of Marx and Lenin to the present circumstances with an eye to the future.
Keir Hardy can keep his place on the banner, but not in the deliberations of the working class today.
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A sober look at where workers are at now. Below is highlighted a Communist call to action.
www.workers.org.uk/features/feat_0113/congress.html
Out of the European Union, enemy to our survival
The European Union represents the dictatorship of finance capital, foreign domination, and the bleeding away of our capacity to take responsibility for ourselves. If we do not leave the EU, it will destroy our economy as surely as it has that of Greece. Destroy the economy of a nation and you undermine, possibly fatally, the ability of a country to be a country.
The EU is aided by quislings in our class who would rather supplicate in Brussels than struggle in Britain.
The British working class must declare our intention to leave the EU. We must wage this fight within our organisations, especially our trade unions. British withdrawal from the EU would fatally wound the project and shift the balance of force away from those who would break up Britain and launch war. Referendum Now!
No to the breakup of Britain, defend our national sovereignty
There are those in Scotland who wish to become an EU region with all the prestige of, for example, Estonia. Even a gerrymandered referendum confined to Scotland must return a “No” vote. Unless it does, the clock is turned back far more than 300 years. It would not only dismember our country (creating a new country called England and Wales) but would create an ideological back door to Britain through which the EU would be invited.
Devolution, and now the threat of separation, are both products of only one thing: de-industrialisation. When the working class in Scottish industry was numerous and active it often led the British working class. The SNP was laughed out of town as the “tartan tories”. The destruction of industry drags a class down, and no clearer example is extant than that of Scotland.
The future of all of us is at stake. We must demand that any referendum on the dismemberment of Britain be held throughout Britain. We must fight to establish a policy within our trade unions against break up.
Rebuild workplace trade union organisation
Too few British workers are union members. The percentage of public and other service sectors of the economy in unions is dangerously low. It is even lower in industry, in manufacture, in the private sector. Even more dangerous, it is still declining.
Most of the unions which existed only 40 years ago have now gone, a partial reflection of the destruction of the industries in which they organised. At the present rate of decline, trade unionism could be eradicated within this generation of members. The employing class has always aimed at this.
Unions exist as working members in real workplaces or they become something else entirely – something entirely negative. Workers need to involve themselves, prune back the weedy overgrowth and nourish the shoots.
Fight for pay, vital class battleground
A serious product of the decay of trade unions is the neglect of pay. Pay is our battleground. It reflects the state of struggle because it is concerned with the proportion of our labour power that we control.
In order to control the spiral of wage rises it could not control, capitalism took a bold step. It made credit easily available to workers. With Thatcher came the explosion of credit, and with that (and the destruction of industry, which led to mass unemployment) came a move away from the fight for pay. The collapse of the credit bubble has contributed directly to the slump and depression of the past five years, and now to the present depression.
But this depression is not the product of workers’ profligacy; it is the product of workers’ cowardice. We think now that we get what we want materially through credit, not by joining a union and putting in a pay claim. In borrowing rather than fighting we assist in our own ideological corruption.
For progress to be made in Britain’s economy, this thinking must go. We should spend only what we earn and if we don’t earn enough we’ll have to fight the employers for more. The fight for pay is central to our survival as a class, and should be put back on the agenda of our trade unions.
Regenerate industry, key to an independent future
Should our country be attacked in war now we would be defeated, because we do not make enough things here. The Soviet Union won the Second World War because Soviet workers made everything there. Their country was materially, as well as politically, independent.
We are encouraged to adopt a corrosively superior attitude: we need manufactured goods, but we are told they should be made abroad. All that dirt! We are encouraged to want energy without digging coal. We’d rather get our electricity from nice clean sources like wind and sea power, but these sources will not keep the lights on.
Science lies at the heart of progress. The two concepts are synonymous. Science must be at the centre of planning a new future for Britain in which all our resources, human and material, are used to meet the needs of our people, and not to make profit for capital. The regeneration of industry in Britain is essential to the future of our nation. Our grandparents, and theirs, knew this. We must now reassert it at the centre of class thinking.
Build the Party
The task of the Party is singular: to change the ideology of the British working class in order that they make revolution here. Until and unless we achieve this we cannot claim success. And when we do achieve it the work of our class will have only just begun. It is vital that we build the Party to assist the class in this historic role.
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Capitalism only survives because we permit it. The working class can do whatever it wants — it only has to decide to take responsibility and act for itself. |
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Post by dodger on Sept 23, 2013 19:00:37 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/where/principles.htmlPrinciples for progress
Any worker reflecting on events today will see unbridled US aggression, record job losses in Britain's manufacturing base, chaos in our schools and hospitals, the further undermining of our sovereignty by unceasing European Union integration. This Party considers these problems in the light of these key principles:
The world is riven by class — not race, gender, age or disability. There is only one human race, and any ideas that promote divisions between us do the work of capitalism.
There are only two classes in Britain — those who work and those who exploit those who work.
All political parties except this one, the Communist Party, are for the preservation of capitalism.
The European Union, the brainchild of Mosley, Mussolini, Hitler, is the huddling together of failed capitalists and would-be capitalists. It has nothing to do with socialism or reform.
The 'free movement of labour' — emigration / immigration — is the slave trade of the 21st century. The survival of the world depends on workers reclaiming where they are born and live, not following some illusionary road to a better place.
War and terrorism are created by the capitalist class. They are used to kill workers. They are used to propagate ideas of reaction and medievalism.
Capitalism only survives because we permit it. The working class can do whatever it wants — it only has to decide to take responsibility and act for itself.
Workers are thinking beings, they are not stupid or misled. They have permitted Britain to decline, and they must take responsibility for rebuilding it.
Progress can be achieved, but not in isolation or without organisation.
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Post by dodger on Dec 1, 2013 4:21:30 GMT
 The great Marxist
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Send orders to CPBML PUBLICATIONS, 78
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Post by dodger on Dec 29, 2013 1:33:21 GMT
Political statement from the Communist Party, 15th Congress, London, November 2009
CHANGE BRITAIN,
EMBRACE YOUR PARTY
WORKERS, MARCH 2010 ISSUE
Introduction
Our 15th Congress is timely with events in Britain and around the world unfolding extremely rapidly. The British government and the capitalist class internationally want us to believe that the working class cannot change anything, everything is beyond our control. We think differently.
First focus on Britain because it is our place: we can change it but nobody else can. Exactly the same applies to every other country: only its people can change it. Also focus on the present because that is where we are: we can change the present and therefore we can affect the future, but only people living in the future will be able to change it. No one can change the past; everyone can learn from it. We need to see Britain in perspectives of time and space.
What have we learnt?
We can start with an appraisal of what we said before, the tasks we set ourselves. Were we on the right lines?
At our 13th Congress, we issued a challenge to our class. Capitalism is in terminal decline, what are you going to do? Go down with the ship or construct something from the wreckage and strike out for a future? We predicted this financial collapse. We indicted the EU before the workers of Europe as a monument to their own timidity and backwardness. We confronted the denial of responsibility which was all around us within the class.
At our 14th Congress we said the sheer speed of decay is breathtaking. Capitalism is a spent force. We also said the class will find solutions when it looks for them. People cannot survive without their material needs being satisfied, so production of goods will take place, which means a class of producers will exist whether capitalists like it or not. If they stamp out production in one place it will burst out somewhere else. Internationally the working class, the producers of goods, cannot be exterminated.
To the matter at hand: Britain. We have a deep and decisive crisis of capital maturing for over a hundred years since the triumph of finance capital over industrial. There has been a gradual replacement of the industrial foundations of our economy with credit, promises and speculation which deliver a faster buck but are not load-bearing. This edifice will stand for a while but then cracks start to appear. Every government proclamation, initiative or policy is basically wallpaper to cover the cracks, which are everywhere. So it’s been a long time coming. Which is not to say “the end is nigh”, but the tremors are powerful and close together.
Actually, the struggle between finance and industrial capital goes back to the dawn of capitalism. The world’s first stock exchange was in Amsterdam in 1602. Twenty years later, Tulip Mania was the first speculative bubble. Over the next 15 years, tulips became so popular that a futures market was created for traders to buy contracts to buy tulips before the bulbs had even been planted. Bulb prices soared without ever changing hands and within a year the market collapsed and the trade in tulips ground to a halt.
Brown’s plan is to save capitalism’s bacon. He would have us all embrace a bleak future which is the grim reality for so many already. Of course he doesn’t talk about capitalism. He talks about great powers, the EU and the USA, and globalisation, as if that were a thing. The EU is presented as an unstoppable force, a power above nations. Yet his is the only government that acts as though it were so. The British government is the first to instigate and rubber-stamp every EU policy and directive, many of which were written here. The first to punish our people for not loving the EU enough. The question asked in Westminster is not, "is this good for us as a nation?” but “is this what the EU wants?” And now this infantile pre-election jostling about who will be the next government. Who will be the next monkey to the EU organ grinder?
In its terminal state, Capitalism uses the EU as an illusion of vigour and rude health, an impression of power. But it is only as powerful as we allow ourselves to believe it is. Think of the Wizard of Oz. A mighty voice turned out to be that of a wizened little man, artificially amplified. To overcome the fear you had to pull back the curtain and see for yourself.
The stench of political corruption here is almost overwhelming now. The putrefaction of parliamentary democracy in decay is an assault on the senses. The arrogance of members of parliament – “It was all within the rules” – has backfired on them. Workers’ natural suspicion of politicians has turned to contempt.
Capital will emerge from this period more damaged and certainly more vicious. Look at the preparations here and elsewhere in the world for riot control, suppression of dissent. Was that show of strength in London in April 2009 to protect “The City” from anarchists, or was it a testing ground for new methods of urban containment? We should always be vigilant about the erosion of civil liberties. Coercion is never for our benefit.
But we have learnt that unemployment is capitalism’s favoured weapon of attack on workers. Unemployment, underemployment, agency working, short term working, outsourcing – all designed to weaken a community’s root. The party said unemployment is war on workers. It still is. The EU’s “free” movement of migrant labour with its associated rootlessness of workers intensifies the attack. If the clarity of the engineering construction workers on this point was truly shared and asserted by the working class as a whole, the forces of capital and labour would be dramatically realigned in Britain. Since last Congress the working class has found a voice to demand of agriculture, “Grow it in Britain”. Where is the voice which says of industry, “Jobs now. Make it in Britain”?
Capitalists cannot correct the fatal flaw in their system which makes it obsolete as a force for progress, but they can and do learn lessons. We have had crises of capital before. They end them with a war. Remember that the last Depression ended with (and was ended by) a World War. The last shots fired in that war were the two atom bombs. Will the first shots fired in the next one be nuclear?
So the drums are beating all over the world. Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Korea, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. The list goes on. Workers need to recover that understanding that wars are not accidental or a mistake. They are part of a plan. Here’s Major General Smedley Butler, the highest-ranking and most decorated United States Marine in 1935: “…I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union has dramatically increased the prospect of war as a weapon of first resort. A collapse 20 years ago but perhaps unravelling since 1956. It’s time to have some perspective on how that collapse has impacted on working class thinking. One thing is clear. We are involved in a very long-drawn out struggle between two classes in which socialism has been proved possible in one country (USSR) and in several countries simultaneously (USSR and others). Our role is to destroy capitalism in Britain.
The working class round the world looked on the Soviet Union with a mixture of admiration and disdain. “They did well for themselves but it’s not for us” or “We don’t want to be like them but we like their influence in the world.” We became reliant and dependent. We used them as a crutch. When the crutch was taken away we staggered about. We’d forgotten how to use our legs. That dependence on the Soviet working class has had consequences on how workers think. Over-reliance promotes a feeling of personal inadequacy and compounds that tendency within the class to refuse responsibility. Because the Soviet Union was a counterweight to unbridled capitalism, to an extent we took our eye off the enemy.
The impact was worldwide with workers tilting at windmills. Look where moves towards secularism have been reversed. The “western world” is now the enemy. In Africa and the Caribbean, dormant forms of medieval thinking are revived, witchcraft, demon possession and the like. In Britain too some workers see scientific advance or climate change as the enemy to be focussed upon. Throughout Europe, some trade unionists argue that nationalism is the enemy and seek to focus anywhere but at home where real change can be made.
Those trying to forge their own workers’ nationalism may be quite hard to recognise. What the enemy says may offer a clue. Consider Bush’s axis of evil. Consider the favourite targets of the moment: Iran, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Sudan, North Korea, chosen because they refuse to bend the knee. Try to see each country objectively and from a worker’s perspective.
There has been an attempt recently to suck us into a voyeuristic and judgemental stance vis-à-vis elections in other countries, usually featuring an alleged opposition movement presented as being on the side of the angels. So Georgia, Burma, Zimbabwe, and again Iran. How would we know? We are not there. Enough of telling other people how to improve their lot. Let them sort themselves out. Our internationalist line is very clear. Fight your own battles, in your own land. And leave us to do the same. The voice of opposition and dissent, whether real or imagined, is lauded to the skies so long as it’s far away from the imperialist heartlands.
How well do we know our class?
We have had to struggle in recent years for the right to call a spade a spade, with regard to our class. The inadequacies and shortcoming of British workers have been faced up to with honesty and are well documented.
Many British workers don’t recognise themselves as workers and some even deny they are British. This psychological defect has no basis in reality. Materially, because of where we are and our relationship to the means of production, we are British working class whether we like it or not. Yet despite apparent inactivity and lack of self-organisation the class asserts itself when it chooses. The fact that these manifestations are unexpected should cause us to reflect where we are as a Communist Party. Are we as embedded, “in and of”, as we once were? Have we moved with the class as it has changed?
How do we measure up to the requirement “advanced detachment”?
Are we advanced? Yes – a unique storehouse of wisdom distilled over generations, with fearless application of Marxism to British conditions. The issue of a “detachment” should not be confused with detached. Are we a unit, a brigade, a section of the class? Do our branch life, education and structures place sufficient emphasis on day-to-day practical collective work? In particular, how are we identifying and engaging with honest worried workers, who have moved beyond an individual response along the lines of “How am I going to get out of this mess?” Are we aware what a powerful impact we can have on people’s thinking when we communicate, not shouting or whispering, just talking?
Remember that knowledge is indestructible. People talk to each other and will talk – the truth will out irrespective of how much it is repressed, how many lies are told.
Britain is the inspiration for, and the natural home of, Communism. We have to think of Britain as a small component part of an eventual Communist world. Communism can only exist as a world system; the State cannot wither away in a single country surrounded by others armed to the teeth. Our own advance depends on the advance of workers everywhere.
What next? A call for action
A challenge for us in this coming period, when things will change rapidly and often for the worse, is how to ensure the light of Communism continues to burn in Britain.
Be optimistic. Keep things in perspective. We have survived 40 years. Big deal. The working class has survived for centuries. The tale of socialism in the twentieth century must be written. Our Party may be the sole survivors who remember it and can write it. It must be written from the perspective of a British worker.
Be honest with workers as ever, not deferential. Confront idleness, sloppy thinking, passing the buck and every slippery way of avoiding responsibility. Above all attack fatalism, the most reactionary mode of thought in a modern proletariat. Remember in the Second World War pubs had posters “there will be no pessimism in this house”.
We’ve got a system that doesn’t work. Workers know this. We come back time and time again to what does work. Industry, sovereignty, self-reliance, self-protection, it all comes down to control in the workplace and control of our resources. Workers who seek to control their lives recognise that nothing is insurmountable. Pollution is an industrial problem. We will come up with an industrial solution. It is capitalism, not carbon dioxide, which is destroying the planet. Control is not the same as communism but in the hands of a working class it’s a good start. And it’s not new. Britain introduced the world to the concept of industry, sovereignty, self-reliance. We have fertile soil in both meanings of the phrase.
For some time now we have recognised we have everything we need here to prevent Britain going backwards, notably we have skilled, educated workers, who see the euro for what it is, see the EU increasingly for what it is, see the G20 and the like for what they are, see the Labour Party for what it is. But who don’t as yet see with sufficient critical mass what a seismic event it would be for British workers to say we will have a future on our terms.
There is great potential both for progress and for destruction. The ruling class can’t rule in the old way. The working class wants to be ruled in the old way. This is impossible. The old way is gone.
Britain is under attack on many fronts. Resist where we can. Be dialectical about it. Guerrilla. High time we outgrew that nursery school approach to conflict, shouting at the wrong enemy. Fight where we are strong. Encourage defiance.
Renew this focus on Britain. Because Britain is under attack we have to defend it, protect it, and cherish it. Much of what is bad in the world started and was influenced by the British ruling class. Much of what is good in the world started or was influenced by the British working class. What is good for Britain will be good for the world.
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