Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev has died aged 84.
Sergei Khrushchev, during his father’s years at the head of CPSU was said to have participated in the Soviet missile and space programme, working on cruise missiles for submarines, military and research spacecraft, moon vehicles and the “Proton,” the world’s largest space booster. Continue reading “Sergei Khrushchev, born a Soviet citizen dies a US stooge”
In celebration this week of the 99th birthday of the Communist Party of China, we send our warmest comradely greetings to the cadres working hard to drive China forward to a moderately prosperous socialist society, the task entrusted to them through the programme of the party.
Socialist and anti-imperialist states have always been subjected to slanders and accusations by the imperialist press and academia. The endless clamour about ‘human rights abuses’ is a tired old technique for deceiving people. As Malcolm X once said: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Continue reading “Happy 99th Birthday To The Communist Party Of China!”
In February of 2020 a video titled ‘Everything You’ve Ever Seen About Cuba Is A Lie’ was posted to YouTube and made the rounds on various social media platforms. Across these platforms, it has been viewed -at the time of writing this article- around 703,625 times in total. The description of the video outlines its basic premise, in which there is no attempt whatsoever of hiding its obvious bias: Continue reading “Everything Turning Point USA Tells You About Cuba Is A Lie”
Joti Brar, leading British communist spoke on this weeks edition of Cross Talk with Peter Lavelle. The show is broadcast by RT and this week dealt with the rise of identity politics: Continue reading “Joti Brar, leading British communist on this weeks edition of Cross Talk”
The absurd lie that Stalin plucked a live chicken to an audience to demonstrate his supposed dictatorial power has been doing the rounds on many platforms of social media lately. It has taken the form of a poorly executed meme. This sloppy piece of propaganda has been resurrected and is supposed to teach us something about the ‘lockdown’.
Of course the story is a complete fabrication, even in the words of its author, but that hasn’t stopped it being passed off as truth.
For many sites, and publications would like to propel this story into the stratosphere for all the world to see. They would use it as an example of a megalomaniac, crazed tyrant intent on showing his power of control, the extent of his evil. Therefore, we take a moment to deal with this crazed, ludicrous rumour, scraped truly from the bottom of the barrel.
What is it that Stalin supposedly did?
The tale follows as thus:
“Stalin once ripped all the feathers off a live chicken as a lesson to his followers. He then set the chicken on the floor a short distance away. The chicken was bloodied and suffering immensely, yet, when Stalin began to toss bits of wheat toward the chicken it followed him around. He said to his followers “This is how you govern stupid people, they will follow you no matter how much pain you cause them, as long as you throw them a little worthless treat once in a while”.
Where does this story come from?
The tale can be traced back to the pen of anti-Stalin, revisionist scribbler Chingiz Aitmatov. Aitmatov is well remembered for his literary works, as well his role in helping Mikhail Gorbachev in the passing of ‘Perestroika’. Aitmatov was known for his particular “style” of writing that combined fact with fiction and in the preface to his most famous work wrote:
“As in previous works, here I also draw on legends and myths [Ed: unsubstantiated slander] handed down to us from former generations; together with these, for the first time in my writing career I also use fantasy to form part of the story. But, for me, neither is an end in itself, simply a method of expressing thoughts, a means of identifying and interpreting realities.”
The Truth
From such a literary “style” comes this tale of Stalin plucking a chicken alive is exactly an example of Aitmatov’s writing that blends very little fact with a heap of fiction, indeed in this case there is no fact to be found! The tale is part of the tradition of anti-Stalin slander that was brought in under Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, as part of the ‘de-Stalinization’ [asnti-communist] process. Apart from Aitmatov’s confession to passing off fantasy as fact, this fable has no further evidence or source for being true and if we are bearing into mind that this type of tale was typical of Aitmatov, and there are no other original sources for the tale other than Aitmatov, then we discover that the tale can be categorically ruled out as false, a cheap flight of fancy paid for by the Gorbachev era press. All other sources for this tale come from bourgeois and Christian newspapers, repeating with minor variations this ludicrous garbage. All in all, the tale reeks of falsity and is found from time to time, to be found bobbing along in the sewage of the revisionists and bourgeois press.
Conclusion
Usually, debunking myths around Stalin can be a more serious affair. However, this tale is so laughable and so easily uncovered as a categorical lie that it merely requires a scratch and the obvious falsity is revealed. Here we have a tale from a revisionist writer adding to the canon of anti-Stalin propaganda no more, no less.
Denis Pushilin, The Leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) has signed a decree issued by the authorities in the region to use Donetsk’s former Soviet name: Stalino.
“I hereby decide to provide the name “the city of Stalino” with a status of Donetsk symbol. It is to be used in Republican and city events to commemorate important dates of Donetsk and WWII history.” — Denis Pushilin
The name Stalino will be used on May 9, the day of the victory in World War II, on June 22, the day of Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union and on September 8, which is the day of the liberation of the city from the Nazis.
Donetsk was named Stalin in March 1924, two months after the death of Soviet leader Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin). “The [local] Executive Committee believes the symbol characterizing our great leader, comrade Lenin will be ‘steel’ [or ‘stal’ in Russian] and decided that the city of Yuzovka should be renamed the city of Stalin, and the district and the factory — Stalinsky,” say documents of a plenary meeting of Yuzovka’s District Executive Committee on March 8, 1924, protocol №7. In 1929, its name was modified and became Stalino.
In 1961, Nikita Krushchev, as part of his ‘de-Stalinisation’ attempts to discredit and revise the reputation of former general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and the Bolsheviks, he gave the city a new name — Donetsk. The city was originally named Yuzovka in recognition of Welsh businessman John Hughes who in 1869 founded a steel plant and several coal mines in the region. The city today remains a center for coal mining and for the steel industry.
Why does this matter to the people of Sheffield? During the 1980s the city of Sheffield had a municipal council administration nicknamed People’s Republic of South Yorkshire or the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire. The council pursued a social policy radically different from that of Margaret Thatcher’s national government, following more closely along the lines of the Trotskyist Militant tendency dominated Liverpool City Council and the Greater London Council led by Ken Livingstone. Sheffield City Council constructed large council estates with large numbers of communal blocks of flats based on the streets in the sky philosophy, including the Park Hill complex, and the borough councils of South Yorkshire set up an extensive network of subsidised transport under the South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive.
The councils also took more confrontational steps against the Conservative Westminster government. Sheffield refused to set a budget in the rate-capping rebellion, while South Yorkshire declared itself a nuclear-free zone and a demilitarized zone. Even flying the red flag from the council buildings on May Day. During this period of government, the city signed a peace treaty with the city of Donetsk in the Ukrainian SSR and made Donetsk a twin city of Sheffield because of each city’s shared history in the Coal & Steel industry, And to send a message to the government in Westminster: Sheffield Stands with the USSR!
The National Union of Mineworkers moved to headquarters in Sheffield in 1983 in the run-up to the decisive 1984–85 miners’ strike and the area subsequently became one of the main centers of the strike.
Donetsk adopting its former soviet name, even if just for a few days a year shows just how important the legacy of the USSR, Lenin & Stalin is to worker’s liberation and self-determination. We support the DPR in its fight against Fascism, Nato, and Western Imperialism — Much like the Peoples Republic and city of Sheffield did in the 1980s. We are committed to real socialist politics in Britain!
RED SALUTE!
Below Red Youth reproduce a speech from Zeno Casella, coordinator of the Swiss Independent Union of Students and Apprentices, made on behalf of the Communist Party (Switzerland). In the speech, made at the Cambiare il mondo conference in Italy, he reveals the common issues in education across Europe, namely that it is becoming ever more narrow and limited for the working class, not to mention the degredation brought by privatisation.
See the communists’ latest resolution on education for more.
Dear camarades,
I would like to thank the comrades of Fronte Popolare on behalf of the Swiss Communist Party for their invitation to this important conference.
The bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx is not an opportunity to exhume a thought two centuries old, but to account for its validity and relevance. Scientific socialism as enunciated by Marx and Engels is not an old-fashioned and shabby intellectual tool, but a theory apt to guide a practice of social action. This is what binds us together here today: to grasp from the past the lessons and the method necessary to understand and act in the present.
My speech will therefore focus on a theme that is not very explored but extremely relevant for guiding some important struggles over the years. My role as coordinator of the Independent Union of Students and Apprentices (SISA) in Canton Ticino gives me the opportunity to find, in Marx’s texts, some valuable information on school and education in general.
1.
All the excerpts that I will quote are taken from the 1st book of Capital. The root of the educational problem is to be found for Marx in the division of labor typical of the capitalist mode of production:
“Manufacturing generates in every trade that seizes a class of so-called workers without skills, which was strictly excluded from the conduction as artisan type. (…) The relative devaluation of the labor force, which derives from the disappearance or the reduction of training expenses, immediately implies a higher valorisation of capital”
The devaluation of the workforce has extremely important consequences on the capabilities that a man must possess in order to perform his function in the productive apparatus. Marx writes:
“While simple cooperation leaves the individual working mode unchanged on the whole, manufacturing revolutionizes this way of working from top to bottom, and takes the individual workforce at its root. It cripples the worker and makes a monstrosity by favoring, as in a greenhouse, the ability to detail, by suppressing a whole world of impulses and productive dispositions.”
However, the very development of the productive forces creates a crucial contradiction in the formative needs of capital. With the words of Marx:
“For the big industry it becomes a matter of life or death to replace that monstrosity that is a miserable working population available, kept in reserve for the variable need for exploitation of capital, the absolute availability of man to vary the demands of labor; substituting the partial individual, the mere vehicle of a social function of detail, the totally developed individual, for whom different social functions are modes of activity that change one another”.
On the other hand, however, instructing the masses poses the problem of social control to the bourgeoisie: Marx reports in this regard the revealing words of Mr. Geddes, an English glassmaker:
“In my opinion, the greatest amount of education that has been used by the working class in recent years is harmful and dangerous, because it makes it too independent.”
Capital is therefore prey to a contradictory dilemma: is it necessary to instruct the masses to have available to the skilled labor force, or rather to keep them in ignorance so that they are more docile?
2.
The words of Mr. Geddes unfortunately correspond to those of the current ruling classes of the entire continent. After the massification of the studies of the second post-war period, dictated by the productive needs and by the more favorable relations of force to the workers’ movement, the neoliberal revolution began to dismantle the social progress achieved in the educational field. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the need to support a “social” confrontation with respect to the socialist bloc, public education has been severely attacked, from the school network to scholarships, while education itself becomes a commodity on the market .
The student union in Ticino did not fail to relaunch the fight against education cuts, especially as regards scholarships: on Wednesday itself, as part of a national day of mobilization, SISA organized protest actions in seven high schools of the canton. Now we continue to demand from Parliament the examination of our petition delivered last April, which calls for a policy to strengthen aid, in contrast to the cuts of recent years.
On the other hand, the new conditions of the global economy, constantly revolutionized by an impetuous and uncontrollable technological development, need a flexible and easily relocated labor from one sector to another.
What to do then? Assure complete training, at 360° on human knowledge, to every worker to ensure that he can be “reallocated” in the event of delocalization or automation of production functions?
Well, no: capital has succeeded in formulating and imposing new pedagogical paradigms that are strictly functional to its objectives: the famous “teaching by skills” allows to “equip” students (that are future workers) with a set of attitudes and skills practices through which they can be easily and quickly adapted to each new production task.
In this perspective, the so-called “knowledge” is no longer strictly necessary and should be omitted, as easily perishable in a context that is constantly changing and just as easily recoverable in a computerized society like ours.
At the end of the day, both to be a rider, an Amazon storekeeper or a McDonalds cashier, you need to be able to manage an electronic interface, to work in a group, to speak verbally in one or two languages, but you certainly do not need to know when America was discovered, what is the chemical composition of water, or what the basics of computer programming are.
The new curricula, drawn up on the guidelines of centers of global capitalism such as the OECD or the EU, are therefore increasingly focused on the “skills” to be developed during schooling and put aside the teaching contents, which however constitute the main knowledge that the popular classes can take in their lives (as they are almost never intended to do higher studies).
The struggle for an emancipatory education thus also passes through the resistance to these new pedagogical trends: SISA has had to face the introduction of a new Study Plan focused precisely on teaching for skills. A pedagogical revolution challenged by a few, including some deserving magisterial associations of social democratic tendency but with some Marxist reminiscences or the Communist Party itself. In this regard, our deputy Massimiliano Ay sent a question to the cantonal government, which pointed out the various critical aspects of this approach to teaching (whose disastrous consequences have already been observed in the United States, where it is a reality from beginning of the 2000s). We are still waiting for an answer.
3.
In conclusion, I would like to draw your attention to some reflections developed by Marx in his work and to draw some “features” for a socialist education.
From the Marxian observation of the contradictory development of modern industry, an extremely interesting perspective for the student movement and more generally the scholastic movement was born. Marx writes:
“From the factory system was born the germ of education of the future, which will connect for all children over a certain age, productive work with education and gymnastics, not only as a method to increase social production, but also as the only method to produce men of full and harmonious development. ”
The author of the Capital states here what in the Communist Party Manifesto is defined as “the unification of education and material production”. A polytechnic education that reconnects education to productive work, to train fully developed men.
This perspective is however far from the forms of exploitation of young people such as those introduced in recent years: neither the Italian school-work alternation (often without any educational value) nor the Swiss apprenticeship (in which cultural education is completely left out, and in which the poor wages often do not correspond in the least to the production made).
We must fight against these forms of juvenile exploitation, against the deformities they have assumed, but without repudiating the educational value of productive labor, which must be combined with theoretical formation for a complete education of man. This is the perspective to be recovered and on which to work to found a popular, emancipatory, democratic school, in the wake of the socialist experience of the last century.
Imperialism’s failure to subdue Syria’s legitimate government led by President Bashar al-Assad has greatly hindered the ruling class’s drive to war against Russia and China.
Such a drive to war entails bringing down defiant governments on the periphery of the two superpowers one by one. However the imperialists’ loss of the Syrian theatre quickly became a fatal setback to their grand strategy, leading them to acts of desperation.
The assassination of General Soleimani is a significant example of such an act of desperation. So desperate that the imperialist ruling class is willing to engage in acts of blatant and illegal aggression against Iran. It is by no means illogical or hyperbolic to suggest that the US is now in a state of de facto war with the country.
The loss of Soleimani is a tragic setback for the anti-imperialist united front, for it was Soleimani’s guidance that helped Syria and Iraq fight off the jihadist mercenaries of Isis and al-Nusra; it was Soleimani’s guidance that helped keep militant anti-imperialism alive and vibrant in Lebanon; it was Soleimani’s guidance that helped the Iraqi resistance do what they could to defend their country from the Nato occupiers.
Soleimani was a true veteran of the anti-imperialist fightback and an Iranian patriot of the highest order. The scale of the mourning across the region shows how much he was loved and valued by the people there. The best and only true way to honour his legacy is to bring the fight to our common oppressor here on the streets of Britain.
It is our humanitarian duty to hinder and harass our imperialist ruling class’s efforts in waging war upon any and all governments that defy imperialist rule. Former FBI agent Ali Soufan remembered Soleimani as being “responsible for the creation of an arc of influence – which Iran terms its ‘Axis of Resistance’ – extending from the Gulf of Oman through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea”.
US president Donald Trump did not just kill an Iranian general, he martyred a widely-loved man in the middle east; a symbol of anti-imperialist resistance. On hearing the news, Iranian demonstrators held up his portrait with the words “Suleimani may have, with his death, already have achieved the greatest revenge of all.” Let his fine example inspire us to strengthen and temper ourselves to wage a real war against terrorism and imperialism.
Iran vows retaliation for the murder, and it is our vital duty in response to support Iran in its defensive war against imperialism, no matter how loud our bourgeois imperialist media beats the drums of war.
Though we oppose war, we stand by Iran’s right to defend itself by any means necessary. It is our duty to organise in our communities with those who are serious about taking grassroots anti-war action, especially now that the Labour party will return to the clutches of Blairism.
Join us at this public meeting on Friday to discuss the building of a serious anti-war movement in Britain.
Friday 10 January, 7.00pm
Saklatvala Hall, 22 Dominion Road, Southall, London UB2 5AA
Red Youth and the CPGB-ML strongly condemn the coup that took place yesterday, 10 November, in Bolivia, where army chiefs forced the elected President Evo Morales to resign, with a warrant for his arrest being issued a few hours afterwards. The apparent leader of the coup is a prominent representative of wealthy Santa Cruz capitalists, bible thumper Luis Fernando Camacho, and its organisers have during the past few days been sending fascist gangs around the country to terrorise members of the government and of the party of government, the Movimiento al Socialismo and their families, while the army and police have sided with the perpetrators of the coup as they did in 1975 in Chile when the popular elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown under the direction of US imperialism.
We send greetings to President Evo Morales of Bolivia and wish to express our Party’s support for him as President of his country and for his right to occupy that position, earned through tireless and intelligent labour to improve the living conditions of the Bolivian masses over the last 13 years. In our Party’s view he remains the legitimate elected President of his country notwithstanding his forced resignation, and certainly has every right to stand to be re-elected in the re-run of the presidential elections which he has called at the request of the treacherous US-controlled Organisation of American States which without producing a shred of evidence questioned the validity of the results of the 20 October presidential election won by President Morales by a wide margin. However, it is now clear he will be prevented from standing, if indeed the elections are held at all.
With the backing of his Party, the Movimiento al Socialismo, Evo Morales has been exceptionally successful in achieving his aims, as even his enemies are forced to acknowledge. This, for instance, is what the Washington Post has written:
“… 13 years after his Movement for Socialism won at the ballot box, it’s indisputable that Bolivians , are healthier, wealthier, better educated, living longer and more equal than at any time in this South American nation’s history.…
“Using cash from the natural gas industry wrung from foreign investors — most of whom nevertheless remained profitable and have stayed in Bolivia — Morales’s government lifted up neighborhoods such as Huancané, an enclave of more than 3,000 working-class indigenous people transformed by government investment.
“With new stone roads, the neighborhood is now accessible by minibus, connecting residents to the world’s highest mass transit system — the aerial cable cars.”
Until Morales came to power vast amounts of Bolivia’s wealth was channelled towards imperialist multinationals by well-rewarded local magnates. Under Morales’ leadership the Bolivian people were able to put a stop to this daylight robbery so that a far greater proportion of the country’s wealth could be directed towards benefiting the masses of the people. Social spending by the government has reduced extreme poverty by more than half. Roads, schools and hospitals have been built throughout the country and welfare funds are distributed to help the most vulnerable. Per capita income has increased three-fold, and social inequality has diminished dramatically. At the same time the economy has grown at twice the rate of the Latin American average.
It is no wonder then that the Morales government is highly popular with the people of Bolivia, especially the indigenous population who had previously never had the opportunities they have now to lift themselves out of poverty and backwardness.
Of course, the Morales government has never been popular with the imperialists at whose expense the Bolivian people have been thriving. US imperialism has tirelessly throughout Morales’s tenure of office sought to mobilise disaffected sections of Bolivian society – the compradors and their hangers-on who have of course lost out under the new dispensation – to try to bring about regime change, so far with no success.
However, as a capitalist economy, that of Bolivia is not exempt from the ravages of the world economic crisis, and it is a fact that demand has been falling for Bolivia’s main exports, especially gas, resulting in price reductions on the world market and reduced government income. Imperialism has seized upon those aggrieved by the necessary consequences of this to renew its efforts at regime change. Although the compradors and the aggrieved together are only a minority of the population, they are, with the covert backing of imperialist NGOs, able to threaten the country’s normal functioning with violent demonstrations, involving the destruction of government property and acts of extreme violence against government supporters, including the burning of their homes.
In response to this, millions of Bolivian people have come out on the streets to demonstrate their support for their government and for their President, which needless to say receives little attention from the imperialist media who prefer to focus on the mayhem caused by the counter-revolutionary forces.
There is no doubt that were imperialism able to re-impose on Bolivia a government servile to imperialist interests the Bolivian people will stand to lose all or most of what they have gained in the last 13 years. For this reason we say: Hands of Bolivia! Respect the result of the October 20 election. No interference in the re-run election. Let the Bolivian masses be their own election monitors! Bolivian wealth for the Bolivian people!
Venezuela condemned the coup in the strongest possible terms:
The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela categorically repudiates and denounces before the international community grotesque coup d’etat perpetrated in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, against their constitutional president, Evo Morales Ayma, his government and the vast majority of the humble, noble and hardworking Bolivian people.
Throughout three weeks since the electoral day of last Sunday, October 20, a sophisticated operation carried out by radical racist sectors of the political opposition, private media, the US embassy and the Organization of American States (OAS), has sought to cast Bolivian society back into times of dictatorships and neoliberal policies, to privatize the natural resources of the Bolivian people and submit it to the designs of the White House and transnational corporations.
The international community must not remain impassive in the face of this outrage against democracy and the institutions of a country, whose government for almost fourteen years has guaranteed social peace, driven by remarkable economic growth, which is the result of the rescue of national sovereignty over natural resources, which has made it possible to guarantee the cohesion and social inclusion of its population, historically discriminated and fractured.
President Nicolás Maduro, the Bolivarian Government and the Venezuelan People, accompany the sister people of Bolivia in the current struggles for the defence of their sovereignty, their democracy and their right to live in peace, demanding that the coup sectors depose their violent behaviour and the forced seizure of institutions, respect the physical integrity and life of the public servants who are being harassed, including President Evo Morales and his government team, as well as citizens who demonstrate in support of the constitutional government.
Venezuela will always accompany the people of Bolivia, land of heroic resistance of Tupac Katari; favourite daughter of El Libertador Simón Bolívar, created and founded by Marshal of Ayacucho, Antonio José de Sucre; free and independent homeland of Our America.
Red Youth adds our signature to the following statement in support of the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela and President Nicolás Maduro:
On Monday 5 August US President Trump signed an executive order placing an embargo on the government of Venezuela, in effect placing an embargo on the whole of Venezuela. After the failed attempted coup of Juan Guaidó earlier this year, which was backed by the US, Venezuela now joins the likes of Cuba, Iran, Korea, and Syria as a recipient of the most extreme and damaging economic warfare.
Despite the abject failure of the coup, thanks to the steadfast determination of the Venezuelan people and their military to resist US imperialism, the US regime is still desperate to find some alleviation from the global crisis of capitalism, whether through economic or military methods.
Although temporarily set back by the disruptive nature of the Trump administration, US imperialists have nevertheless ploughed on with their machinations across the globe, provoking Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, supporting the beginnings of a colour revolution in Hong Kong, scrapping the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty, and of course the ongoing assault on Venezuela.
John Bolton, the US’s national security advisor and one of the key war hawks of the Trump administration, also took the opportunity to threaten Russia and China when speaking in Lima, telling them that supporting Venezuela “could affect repayment of their debt after Maduro falls.”
Unable to learn a lesson from their bloody nose in Syria, where US-backed terrorists have been largely defeated by the Syrian Arab Army and their allies (including Russia and Iran), the US is continuing to support the farcical claim that Juan Guaidó is the president of Venezuela, the flimsiest of pretences under which to turn the economic screws and threaten military action.
Even the UN Human Rights office, which is no friend of Venezuela, has released a statement expressing deep concern that the sanctions could exacerbate the crisis Venezuela is already experiencing due to sanctions and sabotage, leading to life-threatening shortages of food and medicine.
The US is determined to make Venezuelans suffer. Their crime? Using their natural resources to better the lives of their people, building homes and schools, redistributing land, expanding healthcare, reducing extreme poverty, ensuring jobs are available, and reducing dependency on imports for food and other necessities.
Venezuela is a clear example of the threat posed to the ruling class by simply trying to provide for the working class rather than the ultra-wealthy.
It is the billionaires who have companies spanning the globe, who sail on multi-million pound yachts to their multi-million pound houses on multi-million pound private islands, who demand that the Venezuelan working class (and the American, and the British, and the rest of the world) live in poverty and squalor, and, if needs be, are shot and bombed to remind them of their place in the world.
The global economic crisis, however, draws them into more and more precarious positions. Needing to constantly increase their profits to remain on top they rampage across the world: looting, extorting, polluting, and killing. However, they now find resistance to their global hegemony not seen since the destruction of the Soviet Union, and are as such are seriously flirting with war against China and Russia.
Venezuela will not be an easy stepping stone on the path to WWIII though. Her people are loyal, armed, organised, and educated through years of struggle, and she is supported by many nations, large and small, across the world.
The undersigned call upon all progressive people and organisations to stand in solidarity with the Venezuelan people and their government, led by President Maduro and the PSUV, against imperialist aggression, and to demand an end to the embargo and the sanctions!
Venezuela’s defeat will be our defeat, Venezuela’s victory will be our victory! Venceremos!
We invite organisations and individuals who support a free and independent Venezuela to sign this statement of solidarity by emailing info@cpgb-ml.org.
We invite organisations and individuals who support a free and independent Venezuela to sign this statement of solidarity by emailing info@cpgb-ml.org.
Signed:
Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
Indian Workers Association (GB)
Red Youth
Stalin Society
Ethera Api UK – Hendry G Wickramaratne (secretary)
Below we reproduce a statement from the government of Venezuela regarding the blockade:
The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela denounces to the international community a new and serious aggression by the Trump administration through arbitrary actions of economic terrorism against the people of Venezuela. Washington has issued another Executive Order that seeks to formalize the criminal economic, financial and commercial blockade already under way, which has caused severe injuries within Venezuelan society in recent years, and whose sole objective is to asphyxiate the Venezuelan people and to force an unconstitutional change of government in the country, in open violation of the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations.
This decision by the ruling elite in the United States intends to grant legal form to the blockade of all the assets and properties of the Venezuelan State, thus constituting the most grotesque and brazen looting of which there is a record in the contemporary history of international relations. As if the illegal robbery of Citgo and the Venezuelan diplomatic headquarters were not enough, the White House and its allies seek new opportunities and resources to usurp and loot what belongs to the more than 30 million Venezuelans.
The international community must take into consideration that it takes much more than a supremacist tycoon who is in the midst of an election campaign, or an out- dated warmongering hawk, obsessed and desperate not to lose his job, to undo the libertarian work initiated by the Liberator Simón Bolívar and resumed in the 21st century by Commander Hugo Chávez.
With its renewed interventionist actions, it is clearly evident that the United States government and its allies are committed to the failure of political dialogue in Venezuela. They fear its results and benefits. In this sense, the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela will not allow this biased escalation of aggressions to affect the processes of political dialogue in the country, and confirms its unwavering will to reach national agreements in different dimensions, to further strengthen our democracy and guarantee the people’s right to live in peace.
Before the imperialist attack, President Nicolás Maduro ratifies his call to unity of all Venezuelans, to confront economic and political terrorism in this new phase. The national civic military unity is essential to firmly and patriotically walk the road that irrevocably upholds the independent character of Venezuela, overcoming together any obstacle that stands in the way of defending the country and its sacred national sovereignty.
Caracas, August 6 2019.
Read more: Red Youth solidarity with Venezuela
