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Post by dodger on Sept 2, 2013 15:59:22 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/regbook.htmlIn commemoration of his life, Reg Birch: engineer, trade unionist, communist by Will Podmore has now been published.
Steeped in the industrial battleground of the Park Royal, the largest concentration of engineering workers in the country — for half a century Reg Birch led the struggles of the industrial working class and founded Britain's first genuine Communist Party.
The following is taken from the Introduction to the book:
This political life of Reg Birch, engineer, trade unionist and communist, written to mark the occasion of the 90th anniversary of his birth and the 10th anniversary of his death, is much more than the story of one individual, however great. The facts about when he lived, where he lived and how he lived, make this a story about the British industrial working class during its highest level of organisation so far. We see this through the thought and actions of man who was in the thick of the working class struggle as a fighter and leader, and who was able to see and analyse it clearly in all its progressiveness and backwardness.
This account of Reg's political life and unique record of his speeches and articles does more than describe the ebb and flow of the ongoing war between those who create value by their work, and those who create nothing themselves but live by exploiting the work of others. It is also a story of British communism in its context of radically changing Britain and the world, illustrating its roots and the soil it grew in, and its development in the 20th century.
As described in the book, Reg discouraged biographers. Nevertheless, an account of his life and thought is needed. He made a huge contribution that impacts still. This political life is written not to survey the past, but in our need to look forwards and consider where we are going. For the 21st-century reader, Reg's story provokes reflection about the tactics and strategy of struggle, about working class morality, about the place of communism in a modern Britain, and about the very future of our nation.
The book can be ordered now by printing out and completing this form and sending it with the required payment to the address shown on the form.
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This review is from: Reg Birch: Engineer, Trade Unionist, Communist (Paperback) Amazon
This book is one of the very best ever written on British trade unionism. It contains a previously unpublished speech by Birch himself called the Special Nature of British Trade Unions which links their origin and growth organically to the organised workplace and the struggles for skill and democracy. A verbatim account of Birch's appearance before a House of Commons Select Committee on trade and industry will have the most cynical reader howling with laughter. Birch's notorious impish humour led him to debunk and demystify the most complex social and economic circumstances and those who he saw as the enemy of workers.
Covering 70 years of Birch's incessant involvement in some of the most important struggles of the century at home and abroad, the book reveals the emergence of critical ideas Birch helped to develop - the fallacy of the middle class, the fallacy of race and the 'left' 'right' divide, the fallacy of the labour aristocracy theory and above all the fallacy that parliamentary machinations would gradually whittle capitalism away.
The books account of engineering struggles is of major importance as its analysis of the reasons for the decline of British industry.
From his daily experience of struggle, spent for most of his working life at the workbench in Park Royal, Birch developed some of the theories and leadership skills of struggle in general and these are set down in an illuminating appendix.
It is hard to think of any other trade union leader of Birch's stature in the twentieth century, his sharp, cultured intellect and fierce organisational powers were unique in combination and the author should be congratulated for bringing them to our attention.
The book successfully captures the life and thought of a man who is little known today, though once known throughout the union movement, but who clearly helped to define our times. Trade unionists and social historians will find this a major and highly enjoyable read.
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Post by dodger on Sept 2, 2013 19:28:17 GMT
www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-reg-birch-1423153.html Obituary: Reg Birch ---(The Independent)
Reginald Birch, trade unionist and political activist: born London 7 June 1914; divisional organiser, AEU 1960-66; member, Executive Council AUEW 1966-79; Chairman, Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-
Leninist) 1968-94; member, TUC General Council 1975-79; member, Energy Commission 1977-79; died 1 June 1994.
Reg Birch was a pint-sized revolutionary but never a 'red under the bed'. He was a trouble-making, extreme left-wing intellectual trade-union leader and proud of it, rising to fame but no glory in the Sixties and Seventies when industrial unrest was fashionable. He was a former Communist who became the first and last Maoist member of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. In a world where genuine characters are a fast-dwindling breed, the former engineering union national officer Birch will be remembered with affection and a smile from everyone who encountered him.
Birch was an extraordinary, slightly built little man, with a wounding sense of humour and an outstanding ability to talk in riddles, particularly when sober. Only he seemed to know what he was talking about, but this minor detail did not deter the avid listener. Whenever trade-union leaders gather, stories about Birch abound, and now that he has gone those yarns will no doubt be stretched beyond credulity. Fortunately for the raconteur, however, the truth about Birch is so interesting that fiction and embellishment are superfluous.
On a visit to Shanghai in 1979, the year Birch retired, a Chinese building worker asked me: 'Do you know Reg Birch of the engineering union in England? We are told he is your next Prime Minister after your revolution.' Had this anecdote been told by anyone else I simply would not have believed it.
Birch was one of the most enigmatic trade-union leaders of his generation and because of his extreme left views he was never going to be hailed as one of the greatest union chiefs to grace the British labour movement. He embarrassed the Left of the labour movement as well as the Left of his own union, making even the Marxist engineering union president Hugh Scanlon - a former media bogeyman - appear right- wing.
Birch was a key figure in many of the main industrial disputes 20 years ago but never sought the headlines himself as he was not the union's President. Scanlon was paid to take the flak and the few interviews Birch gave were deliberately incomprehensible as well as, one suspects, deliberately incoherent. For example, after crisis talks with British Leyland management he said live on television that he had concluded satisfactory talks with the 'curator of the British Museum'. When I had the audacity to point out that his statement conflicted with the facts and that he was being unnecessarily offensive he replied: 'I am never rude unintentionally.'
For a revolutionary he was remarkably quiet and shy but admitted that he looked forward to the revolutiion, which he said would be 'ugly, protracted and bloody'. He disliked democracy which involved the use of ballot-boxes, saying it made workers 'lazy'.
Employers said they liked him and appeared to enjoy his company. The former British Leyland industrial relations chief Sir Pat Lowry said Birch was one of the most unusual but effective trade- union leaders he had encountered. He figured in key disputes in the car industry, particularly the long Ford strike in 1971, airport maintenance strikes and Fleet Street strikes which shut the press on a regular basis. Newspaper shutdowns kept him amused because he could meet the journalists knowing they could not write a word. His attempts, backed by the hard Left of his union, to win the union's presidency always failed miserably, but he loved the thrill of the chase. Because of his pro- Chinese sympathies he was expelled from the Communist Party but he sorted out that problem by starting his own party called the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). At its inception, in 1968, he addressed around 75 members and at his party's peak in the Seventies observers reckoned he could hold his annual general meeting in a telephone kiosk at Clapham Common.
The son of a builder, Reginald Birch was one of five children and was raised in Kilburn, north-west London. His father, 'who worked for posh artists', died when he was 14. His father had persuaded him to study English literature and it was this background which gave him the poetic turn of phrase and the mastery of the grand riposte. He attended a local elementary school, St Augustine's, leaving to become an apprentice toolmaker in 1929. By 1938, influenced by events in Manchuria and Spain, he became a Communist and conducted many collections for the victims of the Fascist regime in Spain.
During his working life as a toolmaker with a variety of north London firms he became active in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (now AEEU) and worked feverishly for every noble cause. His powers of oratory ensured that he became a natural leader, however small in stature. Like many militants of that era he found himself regularly out of work and blacklisted by employers. He was even jailed at the Old Bailey for organising a strike during the war and, after yet another dismissal, thousands of factory workers demonstrated for his reinstatement. In 1956 he joined the Communist Party's national executive and four years later his activism guaranteed his election to the union's powerful post of north London division organiser. He was elected to the AEU's national executive in 1966.
His first of many unsuccessful assaults on the presidency of his union was against the Catholic moderate Sir William Carron and he gradually drifted away from his Communist allegiance on the grounds that the party was little more than a 'bunch of social democrats'. He never disguised his affection for the Chinese brand of socialism and made frequent visits to Peking and Tirana, the Albanian capital, where he spent many a happy holiday en route to China.
Falling out with the Communists back home was not a career- enhancing move and he was expelled around 1966. This proved a fatal blow to his union aspirations. When Carron retired, the Communist old guard snubbed him and chose Hugh Scanlon, who had quit the Communist Party years earlier over the Hungarian invasion. The Communists, however, utilised Birch's talents to the full and could always be sure of his turning unofficial wildcat action into official action.
In 1975 he was elected to the TUC's ruling body, the General Council, an event which excited the media because of his political leanings. Birch's reaction: 'Oh Jesus, what an effing bore.' He soon handed a colleague a postage stamp and said: 'On the back of that I have written the names of all the TUC general secretaries who impress me.'
In his spare time he enjoyed classical music, swimming and growing herbs and ran a small bookshop, specialising in Chinese books and left-wing ideology. He said of himself: 'I have been called a Trotskyite, a Leninist and every bleeding name you can think of, mate, but I am just a bloody worker.'
No obituary of Reg Birch would be complete without a true story which has now passed into trade- union folklore.
During Ford pay talks the employers offered only one concession: improved death benefits but no improvement on wages. After a while Birch started tapping slowly on the table and began moaning quietly. A concerned Ford executive said: 'Mr Birch, whatever is the matter? Are you all right?' Birch ignored him and continued wailing, this time more loudly, Birch suddenly shouted: 'Is anybody there? Is anybody there?' By now the Ford boss was becoming exasperated and said: 'Really, Mr Birch, have you taken leave of your senses?' Birch replied: 'I am in touch with my dead members on the other side. They want to know if your kind offer is retrospective.'
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Post by dodger on Sept 3, 2013 17:46:20 GMT
Reg Birch – a life remembered
There are many books written about the history of the trade unions and the working class covering the period up to and during the Second World War, but there are very few that deal with the ongoing struggle that many of us took part in and who remember the part that Reg Birch took – a leading part.
The sub-title says it all – engineer, trade unionist, communist. He was all three in one.
Leaving school at the age of 15 in 1929, he became an apprentice toolmaker and joined the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU). Ten years later he became a shop steward.
He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1939 but parted company with it in 1968. By that time the CPGB had drifted away from its revolutionary principles, downgraded the importance of the industrial struggle and had adopted The British Road to Socialism (BRS) as its programme. Reg, like many other militant comrades, had long opposed the BRS as a left-social democratic programme and the style of work that followed, which in his words divided the CPGB into “thinkers” and “doers”, of full-time officers and passive dues payers.
Reg had great faith in the industrial working class, in its ability to defeat the capitalist employers in struggle, given the right leadership. He served the union as a branch officer, branch president, shop stewards’ convenor, and member of its London District Committee. Then he became its district organiser, executive councilman, and secretary of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions.
Much of his time was spent in conflict with employers in the aircraft industry, in which the unions were militant and well organised in those days and this is covered at length in the book.
In 1968 Reg decided that it was necessary to form an “honest” communist party, a Marxist-Leninist party. And so the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) was formed, with himself as chairman, a post he held until he retired in 1985.
Some communists in engineering joined its ranks. Others, who later helped found the New Communist Party of Britain in 1977, felt that Reg’s move was premature.
But, under Reg’s leadership, the London North district committee of the AEU was not only concerned with national problems. It also had an international outlook and went on record in opposition to the repression of the Palestinian people.
It opposed the United States aggression against Vietnam – in fact Reg was in Hanoi during the bombing of Vietnam in December 1972. He had made many friends in his travels: Chou En-Lai in China and Enver Hoxha, leader of the Party of Labour of Albania amongst them.
Whilst the book of 308 pages is the story of Reg Birch, there is also included a chapter devoted to his wife Dorothy, a fighter in her own right and a great support to Reg. It is packed with anecdotes and stories about industrial struggle including a hilarious account of the AUEW’s presentation to the Trade and Industry Sub-Committee of the House of Commons in 1975.
Reg Birch was an outstanding union leader who fought for the class all his life which is why he is remembered with affection by many who knew him but did not necessarily agree with everything he said. His controversial decision to form the CPB (ML) in 1968 and the political line it subsequently developed can be studied in this text which includes some key Birch speeches and CPB(ML) pamphlets.
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Post by dodger on Sept 7, 2013 9:41:38 GMT
A barbaric system which has outlasted its time: Capitalism Must Go
First Published: The Worker, No. 9, May 8, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul Saba
www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.secondwave/birch-77.htm
“Our Party does not subscribe to the view that world war necessarily brings revolution. I would prefer to put it the other way: revolution prevents world war”, Reg Birch, Chairman of the Communist of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) said at the May Day meeting held at Conway Hall, London. Greeting workers all over the world; spoke of the international situation and the situation in Britain in respect to the great Issues of war and revolution.
“Just now there is great clamour about the threat of World War III. In history’s time it is overdue: it has been longer than a quarter of a century since the last. That does not make it inevitable and, unlike some, our Party does not subscribe to the view that world war necessarily brings revolution, I would prefer to put it the other way: revolution prevents world war. If you get revolution out of war, that is a bonus; but you have to be alive to conduct it.”
“It was true that in the First World War by 1917 the great Bolshevik Party had triumphed and the Russian workers had seized power having turned an imperialist war into the capture of power for the working class and having contributed to the establishment throughout the world of communist parties. In the Second World War, a world saved by the Red Army’s blood and the loss of so many young, the fat old men seized power in the Soviet Union and the revisionists came into their own. Soviet imperialism was born. And many of those communist parties founded after the Bolshevik revolution fell by the way side.”
“We do not need any warnings about that. Nor do we share the view that, in some automatic way, out of chaos comes progress. We say instead: progress will create chaos for the capitalists. That is our business. We must put them in disarray.”
“If we listen to much that is said about the 1st, 2nd and 3rd worlds, we are invited to believe that the 3rd world, some homogeneous unit of progressive, liberation-seeking peoples, will join the 2nd world, capitalists and imperialists but not so much so, and cooperating together face the 1st world of super powers, Soviet imperialism and US imperialism.” “Is that likely’? Can we believe that capitalism will ever join anybody on the path of progress!”
“We do not need anyone telling us that the Common Market is good for us. You try telling that to people in the streets around here. Or that NATO with its neo-Nazis and Yankee generals is an effective barrier against the imperialist powers. We do not need people telling us beware of the enemy at the gate, arm and be ready, stand shoulder to shoulder with the bourgeois army against the Soviet. Of course we have to defend. But remembering Franco and Spain we cannot forget the Fifth Column inside our country either. We do not require war mongers to frighten us. We have a war to fight here and that is what we must do.”
Reg Birch asked if there was, in fact, some homogeneous mass called the third world, all on a single path of progress struggling for liberation and socialism. “Is it so? Are they all of such a development?’ I wish it were so.”
“When we consider the question of world war we have to remember those wars made by the so-called 1st and 2nd worlds on the so-called 3rd world. We can only say we have not had war since the Second World War if we conveniently forget Malaya, if we conveniently forget Korea and Vietnam, all ingredients of potential world war. Especially if we forget the war waged by British imperialism in Ireland. But we cannot forget any of those things: A propos Ireland our Party remembers its brave demo in 1969 with the demand “British Troops out of Ireland” and the running arguments we had all the way from the Park to Trafalgar Square!”
“In Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East, wherever Marxism is not in command, there is much confusion. And the EEC?
“Nowhere can we see a homogeneous unit joined together, free in purpose and striding forward –except in Albania and in China. That is the world we are talking about.”
“And what about here? We communists have no need to be the Theoreticians, great, clever people. We are not required to be the mentors of the working class – only of it. They alone will resolve the question of their own freedom. They alone are the revolutionary force. The task of our party, which is of the working class and in it, is to accelerate that movement. We are proud as a Party of what has been achieved already. We are sad only about our inadequacies, our lack of impact that is so necessary today.”
“We have yet to smash social democracy. And soon they will seek to put us in a great quandary
“Mr. Callaghan says there will be an election in ’78, Shall we have Callaghan? Shall we have Thatcher? What kind of a choice is that? The very idea of putting crosses on bits of paper is an insult to our literacy. “
“Let us talk of what we know our place of work. We know the battles that have gone on where we have been and where we have watched others – agonising battles. The bulk of the struggles you have witnessed recently in economic terms have been Vicar of Bray battles, chopping and changing as they went along. Let us consider also one of the best battles that Workers have ever joined together in, based on a principle, the Trico women’s battle for equal pay. Black and White together, only asking: Are you with us or against us?”
Straight, simple, classic thinking, indomitable, unbeatable.
“Ford stewards say they will not have the social contract again, But then they apologise for their temerity by saying that it was necessary for phases one and two. If it was necessary then, why should we not have another ten? Indeed why should we not carry the arguments is in a pickle. We know that the social democrats in the time of the Labour Government do a better job of conning the working class than the Tories do. So why don’t we all go to work for a year for now and make capitalism under a Labour Government really profitable again!”
“There is no substitute in this land for the trade union machinery that exists, so laboriously constructed with such great sacrifice within the trade union movement. In that area of struggle where such primitive weapons are required there is not a better one. We do not want parallelism. We want our membership to seize that which has been made by them and run it. Instead of being told what to do, run it for ourselves.”
“The Scottish TUC yaps that it wants the social contract. Now the Welsh TUC. Soon with devolution we will no doubt have the Cornish TUC and the London one all over again. Healey tells us that we must’ not lose the fruits of our sacrifice. The fruits of his sacrifice would be nothing but a bad taste in our mouths. ’We must have some flexibility’ he says ’and we must take care of differentials’. Well, if you fall for it, then you deserve it. You have got to see in your own place of work that it does not happen.”
“We want no social contract. We are not even asking for a return to ’free collective bargaining’. It is too costly. We simply say: we’ve had enough of the lot of you. What we require now is revolution. We don’t need a social contract; we do need socialism.”
“We can see now the strength of our working class even in its frustration. It is a disciplined army. It has to be. It is a workers’ army. It is not allowed the privilege of saying I’m in favour of gradualism. I’m in favour of propping up capitalism. We cannot say I’ll contract out of the social contract: it’s all right for you. We cannot wish the factory down the road to have bad conditions but we’ll go on strike over ours. There cannot be rat shops anywhere.”
“We will not even get involved in the argument about whether getting rid of the social contract means the weakest going to the wall. As if everybody does not know that nothing succeeds like success and lower paid wages are based on higher. For everyone to run as fast as he can is the only way for us all.”
“In this land our function, our job is to remember the heritage which out of class relationships and struggle is ours as Marxists. All Marx ever wrote was learned from class conflict. It was we the working class in this world, and first in Britain, who were the inspirers of all that theory and all that reason. We have the job to say: there is no easy road, there is not a gradual road, there is not a civilised road – not when you are dealing with barbarians. Capitalism is barbaric. It has outlasted its time. It must go. That is the task of our Party. It is your job too, all of you, wherever you are, to struggle for the emancipation of the working class in this land.”
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Post by dodger on Oct 5, 2013 22:13:17 GMT
Britain’s Wealth Is Its PeopleFirst Published: The Worker, No. 24, December 20, 1976. Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul Saba www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.secondwave/birch-76.htmBritain has not lost the capacity to labour and produce wealth, Reg Birch, Chairman of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) said in London on December 3rd. Speaking to an audience at the Bellman Bookshop Reg Birch ridiculed the notion that Britain was bankrupt and sustained by other countries.
The capitalists certainly do not believe that Britain is finished. West German and US capital prefer this country to any other for investment. It was rubbish to believe that the British working class was weak and not very skilled and not able to compete, if that was to be the game.
The myth that Britain is not self-supporting is part of an ideological indoctrination that has gone on for a long period of time, “What is needed is to revitalise the basic industries, industries which capitalism always neglects.
All the resources are present in Britain, more than any nation in the whole world. The most valuable resource is people. The people can achieve anything. The first task is to take care of people.
The full speech reads:
If we are to talk of what we have to do, we need to know what is and what could be – Britain today and Britain tomorrow. If we take the people of Britain, either class, capitalists or workers, they don’t know where they are or where they’ll be tomorrow. Tomorrow belongs to the people. But it can only do so if the people understand the present state of society and, understanding it, change it. This change for the working people of Britain can only mean the liquidation of the opposing class.
The battle between the classes is permanent but certain features of it are new. Britain is supposedly suffering from a malaise, a sickness. According to capitalism it has lost its capacity to produce wealth; it is not self-supporting; it runs back and forth with a begging bowl. In this highly industrialised society it supposedly takes one worker to labour and support another which is not all that different from an agricultural society of the past. We have to dispel the notion that Britain is being sustained by ’friendly’ capitalist countries.
This is a confidence trick upon the mind.
The decline is visible to all. “When I go abroad on trade union business, as if I were an “ambassador for British capitalism”, I am given a booklet to counter talk about the “English sickness” by showing that West German and US capitalists prefer Britain as an investment opportunity. Having complained for decades about the damage of strikes to Britain’s economy, the Government now juggles with statistics and arrives at the conclusion that there are not so many strikes after all. They only feel they’ve overdone it a bit.
Within the limits we have, let us analyse the present in order not to be Ignorant about tomorrow. A study of 620 companies in Britain shows that pre-tax profits, after deducting wages and costs, runs into £197,000 for building firms, £300,000 for electrical engineering firms and 1180,000 for engineering firms. In spite of the Government’s running backwards and forwards “seeking aid”, there was the skill produce those profits in Industry. We are told Britain has to export: because it is not self-sufficient and has to import food. But food exports from Britain are to exceed 1231m. What is the sense of this? It simply means that keen-witted traders find things to export either way to make profits, particularly with the opportunities provided by currency instability within the EEC.
How can there be these contradictions, that there are profits and yet massive loans, great unemployment and rapidly descending living standards? Profits and yet all manner of cuts, especially in those precious areas of health and education, so that the end product can only be illiteracy and malnutrition. That is what is in store for us unless we seek to change.
This is no sudden situation. Since the last great depression in 1931 there has been no development of basic industry. The basic industries are always neglected in capitalism, after an initial upsurge. Only the war halted this process in Britain for a time, and even then the engineering industry was using old machinery. Then the switch to other sources of quicker profits. But once you do that you bring about the destruction of a people. It is not whether capitalism is to do without a water industry, a coal industry or the railways, but whether the very foundation of our industrial society is to be swept away.
It was a canard that the burgeoning motor industry could replace what was being destroyed. The growth of the GNP in West Germany was held up as some kind of an ideal but it was simply that having its industrial base destroyed and starting anew with US and UK money there was an inevitable reversal in economic roles. The whole import and export of motor cars with their interchangeable parts also being imported and exported so that there is no such thing as a national car, is absurd. They are bulky things to export, but then if you let Latin Americans assemble them, you are in danger of turning more peasants into a proletariat.
We have to revitalise the basic industries. Railways, electricity, road transport are a subsidy to capitalism. We would revitalise them: agriculture, transport, engineering. They have been run down because of the profits skimmed elsewhere. We are in a situation where all those things we are best at are being run down because other things are more profitable. This means our people are being run down while capitalism will sojourn elsewhere. The EEC. The intention to invest in Europe is not like the Tsar running off with a tiara but a decamping with a bourgeois fort to sit in. With the breaking down of our society through devolution, let it be remembered that there is also a parliament in Brussels.
How could they done such things? How could they get away with it? Because of the acceptance of capitalism and the labour movement IS idea of gradualism not revolution. For the labour movement to take on this struggle now must lead to revolution and socialism –which denies its very origin, We have a farcical situation in which a wage freeze would be an improvement compared with the social contract! And what is it for – to survive today so that some one else can die tomorrow? The labour movement had a primitive function to maintain wages; milk for the kids. To do that now means a direct confrontation with capitalism, means not gradualism but revolution. The situation in Britain is very reminiscent of the Weimar Republic before Hitler.
It is rubbish to believe that the British working class is weak, not very skilled, unable to hold its own and in, need of being supported by ‘friendly’ capitalist countries, that we have to plead with the Japanese not to dump their goods here and put us out of business, All the wealth and skills are present here in the people – more than in any other ’nation in the world and that is no chauvinist boast. It’s obvious that revolution is inevitable or else counter-revolution under a care-taker social democracy. The only thing that holds us back is fear. If we, consider supposing we began to seize power tomorrow. How can we do that? With no arms. And all those other capitalist countries will descend on us. Such a dilemma of even worse dimensions faced the working class and the Bolshevik Party in Russia in 1917.We must not forget the great debt owed to the proletariat and peasants of Russia. Without their victory others would not have been able to do it, which is not to diminish what others have done but only to keep the chronology in mind. More than twenty countries waged war against a bankrupt Russia, and their war of intervention failed: the decline of capitalism’s world crisis. If the workers of the world could respond then do you think workers today would be any different if we began the first revolution in an industrialised country here in Britain? Do you think that the US or the USSR could attack us so easily? Would they dare turn their backs on their own workers?
The alternative is corporatism fascism counter-revolution. We cannot go back to a relatively democratic bourgeois rule with occasional crises. The idea that if we wait little things will get better is rubbish. Not only have they run down the economy with no knowledge of what they have done, they have no idea of how to keep the crisis from deepening. Capitalism is not a science. It is a disease.
The impact of a move to revolution in this land will devastate capitalist thinking in other countries. It has to because we are the worst off and each day it will get still worse. Can, we say that our kids will do it? Will you let your boy do it – when he will be bowlegged with rickets? We can do it because we have to do it. Remember “The British Working Class and Its Party”! Remember “Congress 1976”!
Don’t be hypnotised by leftists running up and down screaming “We want a Job”. Don’t be distracted by being urged to fight these cuts but not those. Don’t believe we can disguise ourselves as social democrats, or Scottish nationalists to creep under the door, to infiltrate the Labour Party and seize power so that we can then hand it over to the people. Only they can take it. If you are worried about armed might; remember that we make the arms. If you are afraid that a standing army will fall on us, remember that the bourgeoisie in two wars has not been able to depend on a standing army but had to turn to the people, to us.
Other points made by Reg Birch
Why at this time is there so much talk about workers’ participation? Does it not equate with the fact that when we raised the slogan about the right to work, they countered with retraining schemes and redundancy payments. When women fought for equal pay they were fobbed off with the Equal Pay Act in order to deny it. Workers’ participation is for the purpose of seeing to it that workers don’t have real control. The only real workers’ control is the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The trade unions are not revolutionary organisations. They have reached the end of their traditional role. The trade unions cannot do what they traditionally did defend the standard of living of the working class. To demand that they take up their traditional role is, itself the revolutionary act. To call for the very right to live; since others are determined that we shall die, is revolutionary.
We the people must do it. Just as once, in Russia, ten million said: you go to the war. Not us. So we have to say: you have to suffer cuts. Not Us. What is true now is that it cannot be done by degrees...
Our first exposure has to be ourselves. Because we have accepted that we are less able than we used to be, the people have not lost the capacity for labour nor has their intellectual level declined.
We have to say in factory, office or school: there is nothing right about shutting hospitals, closing schools, accepting the social contract and a declining standard of living. We have a right to work, to no unemployment. This means no contraction wherever you are – in mine, office or school. Don’t get involved in taking 100,000 from here and putting them there. That is the sort of thing Robens, Beeching and the like did for capitalism. We do not run steel or the mines, but we work there and you are not shoving us out. We say the same thing in schools, hospitals or wherever we work.
We have only one way to survive. We have to work. This will lead to the seizure of power. We have allowed this unemployment to happen, to us because we were not convinced of our right. We will not bother with arguments about do we need a shipbuilding industry or do we need railways nor if we give up a school here will they build a vacuum cleaner factory there.
The only real investment is investment in people. Take Albania with its oil and mineral wealth. It is because Albania invested in its people that its industry and agriculture are thriving. The question is not can we afford to build a new steel mill? The people can do anything. Wealth and its preservation is the people. We insist on surviving. Then we can have a steel mill: a shipbuilding Industry or anything else. They cannot do it. Capitalist ’planning’ is that with working people, their only source of wealth they have 2.2 million unemployed!
You have to be brave ’and clever to be a worker’ – brave to go to work every day to you’re your family, clever to screw even a half decent wage out of the employer. Workers are afraid of what would be if they seek change. People naturally prefer the existing thing they know to the “x” quantity of change, they wonder if they will muck it up. There is that humility there. But they have to do it. There is no one else.
An important part of the answer to the working class’s reluctance to embark on revolution is the inadequacy of this party. It is our fault also that the long heritage of social democracy has not been changed. We cannot change it simply in our own minds. We have to change it in converse with our mates. Such, as change is not unknown. It has been done. Here it could be done very successfully indeed.
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Post by dodger on Oct 16, 2013 16:18:18 GMT
www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.secondwave/cpb-69.htmLabour Govt. – Workers’ Enemy!CPB(ML) Meeting at Brighton First Published: The Worker, November 1969.Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul Saba ON OCTOBER 2nd the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) in association with its Sussex branch held a meeting during the ’Labour’ Party conference. Many workers, students, friends and comrades attended in response to the general call set out in posters – “Don’t be fooled again by the “Labour” Party.” The main speaker, Reg Birch, Chairman during the Labour Party Conference because Labour “unfortunately still has in its number good workers. There are still there people who have slogged all their lives having been gulled that you shall achieve Socialism by the ballot box, that there is a neat way, a British way, a kind of English cricket way to do it. But come that joke of an election when the question shall be Box and Cox we shall say then waste not your time on those politicians and their false promises.” “There is no difference between a Labour Party and a Tory’ Party today – both accept that they must make the system work, and work against us. The Labour Party are architects and innovators for capitalism.”“It is what we will give to the nation as a working class that matters, not the phoney claims of the capitalist politicians.”Speaking of the Ford strike and other recent important industrial actions Birch continued “The British working class is the oldest and most advanced working class in the world ... No one call tell this most advanced working class how to fight for a penny but you know that win, lose or draw in that battle you have advanced nothing in terms of yourself as a class.”Our Party “Must show that it is no harder to take the thing to its proper political level than it is to fight for those economic gains.”It is our job to show that there is no primrose path to socialism Birch continued. If we and the working class fail “the workers will become disillusioned, they will turn away because of our cowardice, they will in the end come to find one day that because they didn’t get around to seizing power themselves that a new extension of capitalism will have come about – fascism.”“The working class will not have it any more. They will judge by those who do!”Ted Roycraft, trade union leader and member of the Secretariat CPBCML.) began by calling the Labour Party Conference “National Rubbish Week.” The conference was “surrounded with a great air of fantasy.”Their debates do not have any real effect on the decisions made by the Labour Government which are “based upon the requirements political and economic of monopoly capitalism.” In contrast “our meeting breathes an air of reality.”The real strength lies with the working class, not in the conferences and resolutions of the misleaders, whether Labour or the TUC. The “Labour” Party and revisionist “C”PGB spread the illusion that the existing institutions set up to serve the interests of capitalism can be made to serve the interests of the workers by means of a fiddle at the top, that a “machine that is set up to oppress can be made to serve the interests of the workers.”“All the rules laid down in this country politically and economically are laid down by the employers and we as a Party will not be bound by them . . . We are not going to play it according to their rules.” The so-called left-wingers in’ the Labour Party have carried out a “headlong retreat in the sole interests of monopoly capitalism.”We must be realists in terms of political objectives, Roycraft continued; we cannot vote employers out of existence, they are still there after strikes and elections. “We are for socialism. We don’t believe it can be attained by peaceful means. We face the threat of fascism in England and in the world. We have to counterpose to that not the palliatives of social democracy but a clear path of revolution. The only solution for the working class, the only way they can attain all their political and economic objectives is by the revolutionary overthrow of the rule class in Britain and replacing it by the dictatorship of the working class in this country.”Michael Klein Sussex Secretary, spoke of Labour’s broken promises on wages, rents, interest rates, prices, equal pay for women, and criticized them for the rising cost of living, record rates of unemployment, speed-up, and taxes on working people. He pointed out that “historically in the U.S., Germany, and now in England it is the Social Democratic parties and their Corporate State that have most effectively acted for the employers to disarm, and co-opt the trade unions, to attack the intermediate strata, to confuse demoralise and then smash the working class. For every development of organisation and strengthening of monopoly capitalism and its dictatorship, whether it be compulsory conciliation committees wage freeze or TUC self regulation, is done in the name of so-called “socialism” and “the national interest.”“To expect the capitalists to give up one of their two parties, their most effective one at that, is like expecting them to give up state power and the fruits of exploitation without a revolution. There is no lesser evil; it is time for a new start.”In the lively discussion that followed a many people agreed that a new start must be made to develop a workers’ party that will take state power and build up socialism and that that party is the Communist Party of Britain, Marxist-Leninist.
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Post by dodger on Nov 25, 2013 14:36:09 GMT
Mel.
'Reg never vacuously 'called for strikes...'
Eh? Wrong again, William Podmore, You have penned a biography of Birch but are 'unaware' that during 1941 (while his compatriots had their backs to the wall and Stalin was busy aiding Hitler's war against Britain) Reg helped organise a strike at a company in Stonebridge. Sloppy, William. Very sloppy indeed!
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William Podmore:
I pointed out that rather than vacuously 'calling for strikes', Reg Birch defended the wages and conditions of organised engineering workers, against the employers who took advantage of war conditions to try to roll back the working class's gains.
I wrote in my biography of Reg: "The employers were ready to take advantage of events: they fought far harder against the working class than against Hitler. They had an ally in the person of Ernest Bevin, formerly General Secretary of the TGWU, then Minister of Labour in the coalition government. He was determined to put the workers firmly in their place. The government had already, on 18 July 1940, rushed through the Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order, Number 1305, which banned all strikes and lockouts, and imposed binding arbitration. In the spring of 1941, Bevin thought he had found his opportunity in Swift Scale, a factory in Park Royal [Stonebridge]. The factory, employing 130 workers, had seen continual strife between the employer and the workers, due to what the Ministry of Supply called the employer's deficient and bungling management. As G. J. Nash of the Ministry of Labour and National Service observed dryly, "In this particular instance, the management of the firm appears to have left something to be desired." Reg said later that they had concentrated on winding up one of the management negotiators, who had a double-barrelled name, by always referring to one half of it at a time.
In 1939, the toolroom workers had held a successful one-week strike to win the hourly wage rate prescribed by the District Committee. Next year, the employer dismissed the convenor, a Jamaican. The workers struck, demanding his reinstatement. On 17 April 1941, they resolved, "That we, the workforce of Swift Scale Company, declare our intention of taking a complete holiday until such time as we secure the reinstatement of our Convenor Bro. [Brother] Leslie." Signed E. W. Edwards (Chairman of Committee), E. O'Driscoll (Capstans), Reg Birch (Acting Steward), G. Whale, J. Higgins (Acting Steward), Cox, E. Day.
They refused to report the dispute under Order Number 1305 and refused to return to work to await the outcome of official procedure. The shop stewards in the area handed a message for Bevin: "Because of the chaotic state of production in other factories, together with the move against trade union organisation and democratic rights, we support and wholeheartedly endorse this action of resistance."
Bevin took the case to the Old Bailey, and the seven shop stewards, six men and one woman, were charged. In this celebrated trial, Reg defended himself. The guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion, however, and the government at first wanted a long prison sentence. But Bevin realised how much damage this would have done to the war effort. Sir Frederic Leggett of the Ministry of Labour wrote on 9 June 1941, "The Minister feels that ... there is good cause for leniency. ... the Minister would be glad if Counsel could be instructed to say that, while he had felt bound to enforce a law which was made in the general interests of the country and to make clear the seriousness of the offence in the circumstances in which the country was placed, he recognises that these workers were probably led astray by others and that they had no desire to impede the prosecution of the war."
This was a great victory for the working class. After this encounter, employers feared yet respected Reg."
I have already shown that Stalin never aided Hitler's war against Britain.
Perhaps you Mel should check your facts before making your accusations.
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Post by dodger on Dec 17, 2013 7:07:21 GMT
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