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Communists in Stroud Green
Did anybody see the Communist Party of Great Britain demonstration outside our beloved new Sainsbury’s on Saturday? Protesting against the cuts, they told me. I haven’t seen that many red flags (2) for years. Warmed the cockles of my heart, it did. I didn’t establish which of the various factions they belonged to, as the party with that name dissolved in 1991, but their literature is distinctly anti-Trotskyite.
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The actual name of our organisation is the COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN (MARXIST-LENINIST), and details of our work in North London, past and present, is available by e-mailing our Secretary (me as it happens) at northlondon@cpgb-ml.org
And - small point - I prefer TrotskyIST to Trotskyite. The first is about political theory. The second is merely abusive. A bit like anarchism v anarchy, perhaps.
This unity thing is a fair point -- but unity around WHAT? The Communist Party of Britain and the New Communist Party (Britain's two other established CPs) both call for voting Labour, rather than standing their own candidates. We, by contrast, remind people that Labour (despite its trade union links) is every bit as pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist and the Tories or Lib Dems. Which party led us into the Korean War? Which party initiated the military occupation of north-eastern Ireland? And which party failed to repeal all but one of Thatcher's 13 anti-trade union laws while launching a package of public sector cuts that would have put the previous Tory regime to shame? T'was dear old Labour. The position of our organisation, the CPGB-ML, is so different as to preclude any kind of principled unity here. We see elections as a mere tactic to allow public debate in a way that can't happen at other times. Socialism won't come through parliament but through what Karl Marx called "the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions." Meanwhile, however, we DO undertake joint work with other groups who oppose Labour; demand that the trade unions break their link with that party and defy the anti-TU laws; call for victory to the Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian resistance; and embrace a revolutionary -- rather than reformist -- view of the future.
Andy certainly has a point,though, hasn't he? The tendency of the left, Communist and non-Communist, to split into almost invisible groupuscules has had a calamitous effect in many countries, since WW2. Perhaps the proliferation of IS's, IMG's, SLL's (all Trotskyist - I imagine it's Stalin getting in the way of unity on that front, for Steve) in my youth made little difference to events in the 60's, but the complete disintegration of the Left in a place like Italy has enabled the monstrous Berlusconi to go on and on. Reformistically speaking, anything rather than that, as far as I am concerned.
Communists siding with neo-mediaevalist fundamentalists always amuses me; less a political position than a supervillain team-up.
I note with interest from the <a href="http://cpgbml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=389">website</a> that the party also supports Cuba (which doesn't even support its own revolution anymore, and is enacting cuts that would give George Osborne a stiffy), Robert Mugabe, and the North Korean regime. Nice friends there.
1. Our support for "neo-mediaevalist fundamentalists." No, we are not Muslims (fundamentalist or otherwise) but, yes, we do recognise that the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are at the cutting edge of the fight against US and British imperialism (and, in the latter case, US-sponsored Israeli apartheid and aggression). Oppressed peoples around the world and the British working class share a common enemy -- imperialism.
2. Our support for J V Stalin. Guilty as charged, although we call ourselves Marxist-Leninists rather than Stalinists. Stalin was a great Marxist-Leninist and he embodied everything that was best about the groundbreaking task of building a society free of the exploitation of man by man. I don't quite get the bit about our chairman, Harpal Brar, having compromised his anti-imperialist credentials by being linked to the Stalin Society (of which, by the way, I and many other members of our Party are also members). Stalin was the very embodiment of anti-imperialism, in word and deed -- consistently upholding the socialist alternative, inspiring the peoples of the colonies to struggle for their freedom and (perhaps most importantly of all) playing the leading role in the defeat of Nazi German imperialism.
3. "Europe's other great moustachioed twentieth century dickhead". I thought we were engaging in serious political debate here. All I can say is that, as a compound adjective, 'twentieth century' should be hyphenated -- 'twentieth-century'. ADGS' English is clearly as poor as his approach to political analysis.
One more question - Was Orwell, in his description of communism, correct when he insinuated in Animal Farm that under Communist rule, 'All are equal but some are more equal than others'.
If 12,000,000 people really had been killed during the period in question, the current demographics of what used to be the Soviet Union would logically look a lot different from the way they actually shape up. The Soviet archives are now open to inspection, and allegations of this kind can be shown to utter tosh. Incidentally, Michael, did you know that -- per capita -- there are more people in prison in the present-day U$A than were ever held in the Soviet Union?
I draw your attention to an excellent pamphlet entitled 'Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union' (available via the Stalin Society website).
It entertains me, provides a community for me, presents an ideal I like but ultimately has absolutely no chance whatsoever of getting into any position of political power in the UK.
However, seeing as Arsenal are in the business of entertainment they achieve most their goals. No disrespect intended but it does make me wonder why you'd be in a communist faction. In reality its just a social club that never achieves any of its goals.
Answer to your 'serious' question. Yes, in the USSR among other places. While the capitalist world was suffering the Great Depression, the Soviets had actually eliminated unemployment (by 1936, as I recall). Then, despite losing 27m of its citizens in the epic fight to save us all from Nazi fascism, the Soviet Union rebuilt its society so quickly as to become the second most powerful industrial country a mere 10 years later.
As to your quote from the (now acknowledged) British intelligence agent George Orwell, "some are more equal than others", that strikes me as being a pretty good description of life in the capitalist 'democracies'. It was a 19th-century satirist by the name of Anatole France who one described the French republic as having the most egalitarian social system in the world. "Here," he said, "the rich and the poor have an equal right to sleep under bridges, steal bread and beg in the streets." Democracy, like many other things, is a question of economics -- and, therefore, of class. In terms of the class struggle, we Communists know which side we're on.
This attitude to me embodies all that is wrong with the left and why people in general don’t trust left-leaning political parties because it does smack of 'All are equal but some are more equal than others'. If you are against oppression it shouldn't matter who the prepetrator is.
And saying Stalin was a great anything sounds sadly the same as saying Hitler wasn’t all wrong, except for the Jews of course.
And it had never occurred to me that the Left had its own Holocaust deniers.
As for the fight against imperialism - the least attention paid to the rhetoric of al Qaeda and associated bodies would show that they are themselves thoroughly imperialistic, with ambitions for at the very least a restoration of the Caliphate's original domain, and in many cases dreams of a global islamic state. They, like Stalin, are imperialists too - just ones of another, nastier flavour. Supporting them is simple contrarianism.
I also notice that you don't even gesture at a defence of your party's position re: North Korea and Mugabe.
Now we move onto Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF, whose only 'crime' is to have liberated their country by force of arms from settler-colonial and apartheid bondage and to have expropriated the rich, white farmers who continued to dominate some of the agricultural sector, against the expressed wishes of the Zimbabwean masses.
There's also, I suppose, your view on Islamic 'fundamentalists' which needs to be addressed. First of all, you can't be an imperialist unless you're a capitalist, and the people we're talking about have been stripped of everything (by having been bled dry and, indeed, bombed and shot at by Western governments -- acting on behalf of the monopoly bourgeoisie). Even if some of them wanted to be, these people are not capitalists; they've got no capital. Millions have died in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine but that's never headline news on the BBC. After all, they're not white and they don't speak English, so who cares?
Secondly, while Communists -- by definition -- are not religious, we don't engage in theological or broader philosophical disputes with people whose homelands have been invaded and occupied. We express solidarity with them in every way we can as they fight back. This is our internationalist duty and, as both you and I have said elsewhere, their enemy is, indeed, our enemy.
As for Mugabe, how exactly does having his thugs beating up and terrorising the (poor, black) masses who wish to vote for the opposition (understandable, given Zanu-PF has in fact beggared the country) count as furthering the expression of their wishes?
"you can't be an imperialist unless you're a capitalist" is a very good way of excusing yourself and your chums from guilt, but it's also nonsense. It doesn't even work as circular logic given the majority of historical empires - the Caliphate the fundamentalists wish to revive included - were pre-capitalist.