Saklatvala Hall in Southall was packed on Saturday night as friends and comrades from across the UK gathered to celebrate the 93rd anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The British comrades were joined by representatives from the embassies of Peoples China and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea as well as friends from fraternal parties including the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The meeting was chaired by Ella Rule and the main address was given by CPGB-ML Chairman Harpal Brar. His excellent speech will be available for viewing on youtube shortly, in the meantime you can read a text version of the speech that deals with the falsification of history by the bourgeoisie in the latest issue of Lalkar. The meeting was the perfect preparation for the coming struggles, and an inspiration to the young Marxist Leninists.
Red Youth is the only socialist youth organisation in Britain which proudly upholds the history of the socialist countries and seeks to learn from their rich experience!
Celebrate the 93rd Anniversary of the October Revolution! 06 November 2010 (6:00pm onwards)
Saklatvala Hall, Dominion Road, Southall, UB2 5AA
Public meeting
Starting with a short film: Stalin Speech
Joseph Stalin addressing the military parade in Moscow on the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution, when the German fascists army was at the very gates of the city in 1941. Main speaker: Harpal Brar Chair, Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
Followed by solidarity messages from fraternal organisations
Cultural programme and food and drink
This Saturday is the 93rd anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Lets remember the sacrifices made for humanity, and how it was all made possible by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917! Anti-communist propaganda is reaching new heights in Europe, this leaflet from the CPGB-ML takes to pieces some of the lies peddled on the issue of Katyn, a monumental piece of Nazi propaganda eagerly taken up by todays boss class in films such as Katyn.
CPGB-ML Chairman Harpal Brar speaks at the Durham Union opposing the motion “the West has the duty to impose democracy”. Pointing out that this is the new formulation of the old colonial expression that the west, and Britain in particular, had a “duty to civilize the colonies”, he goes on to state that imperialism does not seek democracy, it seeks domination.
Speaking against the mover of the motion, one Dr Mendoza, who works for a bourgeois ‘think tank’, and is in other words an ideological flunkey of the bourgeoisie, he uses a few well known modern day examples of Britain and the US “exporting democracy” from 10,000 feet, namely, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, to illustrate the point.
These conflicts are about domination of the world’s resources, markets and labour, the source of all wealth, and not about “liberal interventionism” or humanitarianism.
The people of the world, left to themselves can solve their own problems in their own interests without imperialist intervention, and it is in the interests of British working people to make common cause with the anti-imperialist resistance if it ever wants to throw off its own chains and settle accounts with its own ruling class.
Now that Labour no longer occupies the government hot seat and has resumed the status of ‘honourable’ opposition, cost-free ‘left’ posturing is suddenly back in fashion.
The Daily Mail has helpfully recreated long-serving Brown toady Ed Miliband as the imaginary firebrand “Red Ed”, thereby throwing a lifeline to all those in the left swamp telling workers to hold fast to ‘the mass party of the working class’ and pray for better times.
Taking his phrases from Lenin and his inspiration from the Daily Mail, Robert Griffiths of the Labour-loving Communist Party of Britain (CPB) has dubbed Red Ed’s leadership victory “One step forward”, enthusing that this “represents a defeat for the arch-new Labourites” and enjoining the unions to “liberate” the new leader from the “death grip” of New Labour. How? Why, by steering their members back into social democracy, so that Labour may be “reclaimed”!
Really the boot is on the other foot. The unfinished task confronting militant workers anxious to resist the impending cuts is not rescuing virginal Ed from the fiendish clutches of ‘New’ Labour, but ‘liberating’ the unions and the wider working class from the ‘death grip’ of the Labour party – all brands.
The younger Miliband’s belated efforts to wipe his fingerprints off Labour’s many crimes, both against British workers and against the courageous people of Iraq, should fool nobody. And the ‘comfort zone’ from which the unions must be freed is not just some sordid ‘New Labour’ interlude, but the smothering embrace of social democracy represented by the whole history of the bourgeois Labour party.
Nobody thrives long inside the Labour party who will not crawl behind imperialism when push comes to shove. A miracle landslide vote for ‘anti-war’ Diane Abbott would no more have been “one step forward” for workers than was the triumph of Ed over David. Suffice it to recall that it’s only a year and a half ago that she endorsed a Commons motion celebrating “the heroic efforts of the British armed forces in Iraq”, which were said to be conducting “important operations … to support the people and government of Iraq”.
Working-class people need to fight tooth and nail against the massive class attack now to be unleashed on their heads. We must never forget that it was the Labour party that prepared the ground for this onslaught in the first place. It was ‘New’ Labour that bolstered up the union-bashing laws enshrined by Thatcher, pushed through ‘anti-terror’ measures for use against workers in struggle and dragged the British working class into demoralising complicity with oppressive foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And it was ‘Old’ Labour that played the most crucial role in keeping workers off the revolutionary scent all through the post-war years, pretending that domestic advances in education and welfare provision could be won and sustained under benign capitalist rule whilst the army went on breaking heads in Greece and Malaya. With privatisation eating its way through the NHS and schooling, and the welfare state heading for the Big Society knackers’ yard, the gilt is rapidly peeling from the ‘golden age’ of Clem Attlee’s ‘real Labour’.
With world capitalism in the grip of an acute crisis of overproduction, our rulers can only hope to extricate themselves by driving living standards down into the ground and preparing for future wars to redivide the markets. To resist this class warfare initiated by our rulers, we need to take the fight back to capitalism, sweeping aside all those Labour apologists who would spread disunity in the ranks of resistance.
CPGB-ML and Red Youth members demonstrated in Birmingham on Sunday 3 October. We made the point that the ruling class is getting away with these attacks on the poor, and will continue to get away with such attacks so long as our labour movement is wedded to the imperialist Labour Party (new, old, Blairite, Brownite, Red Ed et al). Our statement on October 3 read as follows:
Labour is still blocking our resistance; break the link!
Brave words at the TUC
In a sign that the slumbering giant of organised labour might at last be stirring, the TUC has been instructed to coordinate union campaigns and industrial action against the impending cuts.
The motion which won an uneasy consensus at the 2010 TUC conference in Manchester was strong on pious aspirations but weak on specific commitments, however. After all, who could disagree that there should be “a broad solidarity alliance of unions and communities under threat”? The real question is what that should mean in practice.
Should the alliance really have as its main focus the organising of“a national demonstration, lobby of parliament and national days of protest against the government austerity measures”? Rather than signalling a serious response to the coming massive assault on the standard of life of millions of working people, who stand to lose jobs, homes, pensions, health care and more, such phrases suggest no more than a weary nod of assent to going through the motions of protest whilst waiting hopefully for better days.
The TUC set itself the goal of leading “a coordinated campaign across the labour movement with other working-class organisations and local communities for progressive means of ensuring the recovery and improving the public finances”.
Rather than tell workers the truth – that capitalism is entering an acute and prolonged crisis which will either see the proletariat standing up and taking the fight to the capitalists or eking out a miserable existence under ever-worsening conditions – the labour aristocrats of the TUC prefer to demobilise workers with the comforting lie that the “recovery” can be “ensured”, the “public finances” can be “improved”, the bankers can be tamed, the pumps can be primed and capitalism’s fatal crisis of overproduction can fade harmlessly back into the shadows.
It is on the basis of such delusions that TUC chief Brendan Barber is seeking to stifle the voices of those who have called for coordinated industrial action supplemented by civil disobedience. With not a shred of loyalty to the working class, this apologist for the imperialist Labour party went running off to the BBC to beat his breast, deploring talk of a “winter of discontent” and wailing that he had “certainly not called for civil disobedience – I don’t find the idea attractive and I think it is counterproductive”.
Greek lessons
Yet the same TUC motion also urged solidarity with the wave of proletarian resistance sweeping Europe, with Greece rightly heading the list. Greek workers have made great progress in the struggle to build “a broad solidarity alliance of unions and communities under threat”, but not by kowtowing to the labour aristocracy and their political representatives in PASOK.
What has made the communist-influenced popular front movement of PAME so potent has been the clear political break it has made both with the PASOK social democrats and with the union bureaucracies that carry bourgeois influence into the working class. The strikes and demonstrations led by PAME have mobilised trade unionists on a cross-union basis, where necessary bypassing bureaucratic obstruction.
Here in Britain, with unions like the RMT, PCS and FBU already making it plain that they do not intend to take the cuts lying down, and with such groupings as the National Shop Stewards’ Network, local anti-cuts alliances and militant trades councils preparing to make their own plans for demonstrating against the cutbacks in the absence of a timely and concrete lead from the TUC, it is clear that there are many who do not share Barber’s complacency and do understand the need and the opportunity for serious resistance to the attack upon their class.
In order not to fritter away this resurgent combative spirit amongst workers, it is essential that progress be made in the struggle to break the link with the Labour party and with the class-collaborationism Labour imposes upon the proletariat.
Again, we can learn from the Greeks. Instead of getting suckered into a phony debate about ‘fair, well-timed cuts’ versus ‘unfair, double-dip cuts’, or dreaming about how to ‘ensure the recovery’, advanced Greek workers are getting mobilised behind the line battled for by communists like Aleka Papariga, who has told workers not to be duped into confusing their welfare with the welfare of capitalism, pointing out that the “recovery of the economy” which capitalism hopes to achieve by loans or by cuts (in practice, both) only really means “recovery of the profit-making and the plutocracy”.
Fighting social democracy
Let us be in no doubt: if we do not put up serious resistance to cuts and privatisation now, British workers will be impoverished for generations to come. In order to fight, we need to be prepared to defy the law and act en masse, but our union leaderships are, in the main, more interested in protecting their ‘assets’ and their respectable career credentials than their members’ interests.
The fact is that British unions will not become fighting machines until they have broken with Labour. Instead, the unions will remain what they have become: a part of the system that oppresses workers, merely acting as a safety valve, while the leaderships work to limit the anger of their members, to divert it into safe channels and to encourage resignation to their fate.
We need to disaffiliate from Labour so we can launch a real, coordinated defence of public services, pay and pensions, which will of necessity include a mass campaign to defy the anti-union laws. If the present union leaderships won’t do this, we need a new leadership, or an alliance of reps from all the unions that can bypass the leadership until they get the message.
All through the prolonged post-war boom, it was the Labour party, in and out of power, which sought to reconcile workers to continued capitalist rule, pretending that the gains in social welfare won in the socialist countries through revolution could be secured in Britain through voting Labour at elections.
Whilst imperialism continued to loot the world’s resources and leech off the work of the world’s poor, crumbs from the superexploitation table both kept the labour aristocracy on side and paid a significant part of the rent on the welfare state. With the post-boom demolition of Britain’s industrial base (Thatcher/Blair) and present descent into acute crisis, the real state of affairs stands revealed. Under capitalism, the best the working class can ever hope for is to stand still for a few years; only under socialism will we have jobs, housing, health and education security.
It was the Labour party that strove to keep the working class docile during the boom. It was the Labour party that later picked up the assault on the workers’ movement where the Tories left off. Now ousted from government, but still spreading posthumous confusion, the Labour party is still holding us back from fighting these cuts.
The oppressed people of the world are striking out against imperialism. Blow after blow, they inflict defeat after defeat. Bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, the vast resources of US and British imperialism are being squandered fighting a losing battle against the peoples of the earth and the tide of history.
Anti-imperialist struggles are being heroically waged in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, where the people have suffered at the sharp end of imperialism’s vicious assault on human dignity. But in their fight against imperialism, the oppressed peoples of the world are not alone; they are joined by many thousands of progressive and peace-loving people in the centres of imperialism, who understand that every blow against imperialism is a blow against their own ruling classes.
The British anti-war and anti-imperialist movement must stand in solidarity not only with those fighting imperialism at the front line, but with our fellow activists and internationalists in the imperialist centres. The murders aboard the Mavi Marmara serve as a profoundly stark warning to us all about what happens when imperialism is challenged.
In the United States on 24 September, FBI agents began an assault on leaders and activists from the growing anti-imperialist movement that has arisen there in recent years. Comrades involved with a variety of political groups, particularly those connected with Palestine and Colombia solidarity, had their houses raided and their possessions taken. Especially targeted were members of the communist Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
The warrants that were issued attempted to brand those arrested as ‘sympathisers and supporters’ of ‘terrorist’ groups, ie, those that put up resistance to imperialist hegemony. Members of groups such as the Colombia Action Network or Students for a Democratic Society have had all manner of personal items seized, from computers and laptops, to photographs and passports.
Clearly, the US government wants to intimidate people away from joining anti-imperialist activity, and to find any legal technicality they can that will help them brand communists and anti-imperialists as criminals. This is especially important for the US ruling class at a time when the economic crisis is causing it to make tremendous attacks on its own working class, attacks which cannot but radicalise large sections of the population as they find their jobs, houses and social security taken away.
The CPGB-ML stands in whole-hearted solidarity with these comrades. We will do everything in our power to bring the issue to the attention of the British anti-war and anti-imperialist movements. As imperialism slides deeper into crisis, we can expect that the regularity and ferocity of these infringements upon civil liberties will increase.
We take the opportunity to send our comrades in the USA our heartiest congratulations at arousing the fury of the state forces, and we promise to redouble our own efforts here in Britain. As Marx rightly stated many years ago, “No nation that oppresses another can itself be free.” Our futures are bound together. Long live proletarian internationalism!
Comrades in the USA, in particular those brothers and sisters organised in and around Freedom Road Socialist Organisation have come under attack from state forces. FBI agents have raided and interviewed a number of activists. Keep up with the story and send them your support by visiting the websites of Fight Back News, Freedom Road Socialist Organisation and Workers World. Of course this kind of state intimidation is nothing new in the USA. It does us good to remember that we live in a dictatorship, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. This class of exploiters will act in an utterly ruthless way to protect its interests. The following is the story of Fred Hampton, a socialist and activist in the Black Panther Party in the USA who was murdered at the age of just 21 by the police and FBI. This article is taken from Proletarian issue 26:
Fred Hampton, 1948-1969
On 30 August 2008, Fred Hampton would have turned 60 years old. Instead, thanks to his political beliefs and activism, he was shot and killed by the Chicago Police Department in conjunction with the FBI, aged just 21.
Hampton joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) in late 1967 following a history of political involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
What made Hampton move away from the established and comparatively respectable NAACP, to the highly controversial and demonised BPP? For Hampton, it was a recognition of the need not simply to campaign against racism, but actually to fight for something: socialism.
The BPP understood that racism was merely a symptom of a far greater illness in the USA, namely, capitalism.
As Hampton said in 1969, “When I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.”
This political awareness, and rejection of non-violence, made the BPP ‘public enemy number one’ for the FBI. The infamous Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Programme) pumped millions of dollars into undermining and decimating the BPP leadership.
Arrests and intimidation played their part in removing the more experienced cadres from BPP activity, but they also brought Hampton to prominence in Chicago. The FBI’s Racial Matters Squad opened a file on Hampton in 1967, which, during the last two years of his life, expanded into 12 volumes, some 4,000 pages! Clearly, his leadership qualities and political abilities were not only acknowledged by his peers.
Hampton was a gifted organiser, and was almost successful in reforming Chicago’s biggest street gangs and recruiting them into the BPP. That he did not ultimately succeed in this endeavour was due entirely to the machinations of the FBI, who used paid informants to spread dissension between the gangs and the party.
He did, however, provide crucial leadership to Puerto Rican revolutionaries, enabling them to turn the Young Lords from a street gang into a revolutionary organisation sympathetic to Marxism Leninism.
Hampton’s goal of politicising the street gangs and engaging them in community work ran contrary to the interests of the US authorities, and the FBI’s Chicago BPP infiltrator William O’Neal personally instigated an armed clash between the party and the Blackstone Rangers gang.
Reducing the influence of the Panthers was high on the agenda of the FBI, and its boss, J Edgar Hoover, himself took a personal interest in ensuring that Cointelpro destroyed “what the [BPP] stands for”.
This meant taking action against the Panthers’ Serve the People programmes, such as free breakfasts for school children. Additionally, BPP literature and newspapers were targeted, in an attempt to stop the party’s political message being transmitted. Racist cartoons were printed and ascribed to the BPP in an attempt to alienate their white supporters.
Indeed, the message of the BPP, along with Hampton’s charisma and ability to spread the idea of socialism and communism within the black community, was what singled the party out for special repression from the US government.
Tacit support was given to cultural nationalist groups who preached black chauvinism and separatism, as this only served further to divide America’s workers, and black activists in particular. “Racism is a by-product of capitalism,” he said.
To Hampton, education was key, and programmes were only effective to the extent that they were understood by the people. He cited examples such as Papa Doc’s Haiti, and African states where colonialism was replaced by neo-colonialism, stressing that for the proletariat it matters not what colour the exploiter’s skin is.
As Hampton explained, people joining the BPP from a background of poverty might not understand the ultimate goal of “a communistic state”. Without political education, those who joined the party because they “wanted something”, would find themselves wanting more. This would lead the revolutionary movement to capitalism, and “before you know it, you’ve got Negro imperialists”.
Hampton was not scared to use the terms socialism and communism, as he explained to those who were benefiting from the BPP free health clinics and food for kids programmes: “they’re endorsing it, they’re participating in it, and they’re supporting socialism”. “They [the police] can call it communism, and think that that’s gonna scare somebody, but it ain’t gonna scare nobody.”
To those who believed the McCarthy era propaganda against socialism, Hampton said, “socialism is the people! If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself!”
Just a few days before his murder, the BPP published an article by Hampton about a speaking tour he and other comrades had made to Canada, in which he expressed his particular support for the Korean revolutionary leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung:
“Every campus that we spoke on we were heckled by the same pigs. They tried to start fights at two of the campuses but they were unsuccessful. The pigs even got up and took a very strong position against Kim Il Sung. We knew very well, when they took that anti-position, that Eldridge [Cleaver] and the leadership of our party were definitely on the right line in following the teachings of the great leader of north Korea, Kim Il Sung.” (‘Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton on Canada’, Black Panther: Black Community News, 29 November 1969)
Hampton was a dedicated revolutionary who studied theory, and carried this through into everyday action. Throughout 1969 he maintained a demanding speaking schedule; he organised weekly rallies in support of BPP members in jail or on trial.
He worked with volunteers and party members in organising a free ‘People’s Clinic’ in Chicago’s West Side, whilst organising and teaching political education classes at the BPP ‘Liberation School’. And all this was on top of helping out at the Breakfast for Children Programme each morning from 6.00am.
Following the established party model, Hampton also instigated a Community Control of the Police project, in order to remind the police that they were public servants, and not above the law.
In November 1969, Hampton was appointed to the BPP Central Committee as ‘Chief of Staff’ and also gave a lecture to UCLA law students in California. This was all reported by FBI infiltrator O’Neal whose bosses were clearly unhappy.
The Chicago chapter of the BPP was becoming one of the strongest in the country, and, despite all attempts to derail it, its Serve the People programme was by far one of the most successful.
O’Neal’s FBI handler, Special Agent Mitchell, decided drastic action was necessary to eliminate the threat that Hampton posed. A detailed floor plan of Hampton’s apartment was drawn up, and an illegal weapons raid was planned.
Initially, the Chicago Police ‘Gang Intelligence Unit’ were to handle the raid under the misinformation that the BPP were responsible for the deaths of two of its officers. However, the GIU head Thomas Lyons correctly intervened, since there was no evidence at all to link either Hampton or the BPP to the aforementioned killings.
This did not stop Mitchell finding those who would cooperate, however. This time, it was the Special Prosecutions Unit, who assembled a 14-man team for the raid equipped with pistols, carbines and even a Thompson sub-machine gun.
At 4.30am on 4 December 1969, the raid took place. The apartment was used that night, not only by Hampton and his pregnant partner, but also by several BPP members who were ‘crashing’ there for the night, O’Neal having left at 1.30am.
The raid began with the front door to the apartment being kicked open, and the man nearest the door, Mark Clark, being shot point-blank in the chest with a .30 calibre M1 Carbine (a battlefield weapon used by US paratroops during the second world war).
Clark had been sleeping with a shotgun across his lap, and upon being shot his weapon discharged. The Panthers fired no other shots during the raid.
The same policeman who had shot Clark then proceeded to shoot the unarmed 18-year-old Brenda Davis, who was then shot by a second officer. The policemen unleashed automatic fire from the Thompson sub-machine gun through the walls into the bedrooms beyond, with 42 rounds converging on the spot where O’Neal had informed them would be the head of Hampton’s bed.
Amazingly, Hampton was hit just once in the left shoulder by this barrage, although it was a serious wound.
A second team of policemen entered through the rear of the apartment, again shooting as they entered. There then followed a lull in the firing, during which the following exchange took place between two officers, as testified to by surviving witnesses:
“That’s Fred Hampton …”
“Is he dead?… Bring him out.”
“He’s barely alive; he’ll make it.”
Two shots were then fired, followed by one of the officers announcing, “He’s good and dead now.”
Fred Hampton, aged 21, had been asleep when first hit, and, as he lay prone on the floor, was shot twice at point-blank range in the head. His body was then dragged into the doorway in a pool of blood.
The police opened fire on the remaining bedroom, hitting several Panthers repeatedly. The survivors were beaten, dragged into the street, and arrested on a charge of the attempted murder of the police officers who carried out the raid, and aggravated assault.
The survivors were assigned bail of $100,000 each, and yet five months later all charges against them were dropped.
The official investigation into the shootings was a farce, and it was left up to the survivors and the BPP to pursue a civil case against the SPU and FBI. Finally, in 1983, it was acknowledged that there “had in fact been an active governmental conspiracy to deny Hampton, Clark and the BPP plaintiffs their civil rights”.
Damages of $1.85m were awarded to the survivors and the families of the deceased. The organisers and perpetrators of the assassination of Fred Hampton served not one day for the offence, and, by the time it was acknowledged by the US justice system, the Cointelpro programme had served its purpose in destroying the BPP from the inside.
What set Fred Hampton apart from so many other would-be revolutionaries of the late 1960s was his dedication to both theory and practice. It was this that made him such a dangerous adversary of the US bourgeoisie.
Comrade Hampton was not manipulated by the racism he suffered and witnessed. He was not blinded by hate or prejudice, but rather he was motivated by the true spirit of proletarian internationalism: a love of the people.
In 1968, Hampton clarified the distinction between reaction and revolution with the following statement:
“You know, a lot of people have hang-ups with the party because the party talks about a class struggle. We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx and Lenin and Che Guevara and Mao Zedong and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practised anything about revolution always said that a revolution is a class struggle.
“It was one class – the oppressed, and that other class – the oppressor. And it’s got to be a universal fact. Those that don’t admit to that are those that don’t want to get involved in a revolution, because they know as long as they’re dealing with a race thing, they’ll never be involved in a revolution.”
The saying most often associated with Fred Hampton is: “You can kill a revolutionary, but you cannot kill a revolution. You can jail a liberation fighter, but you cannot jail liberation.”
Fred Hampton Jnr was born a few months after his father’s murder. He, too, is active in the African-American revolutionary movement and has spent almost nine years in jail on politically-related charges.
He is currently the Chairman of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee.
For a marxist analysis of many of todays social and economic problems, Red Youth is happy to promote and recommend to our readers the excellent material which is made available by our comrades in Italy organised around Rete dei Comunisti. Two websites provide articles in Italian and English and the latest articles on the Crisis in the Italian bourgeoisie can be found on the english pages:
“The communist network (RdC) is a political organization that has been established on September, 13th 1998 in Bologna. It works with “Contropiano”, the newspaper which is an online paper and also a quarterly magazine.(www.contropiano.org)
Rete dei Comunisti’s aim is to inform the Italian society and fight for a new better society all around the world . His newspaper writes about National and International issues, and it develops discussions on several strategic themes”
PYONGYANG, Sept. 23 (Xinhua) — Talks between delegations from the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) (Marxist-Leninist) were held in Pyongyang on Thursday, the official news agency KCNA reported.
Department Director Kim Yong Il and officials of the Central Committee of the WPK and the head of the delegation of the CPGB (ML), General Secretary Zane Carpenter, attended the talks, KCNA reported.
Both sides “informed each other of the activities of their parties” and “exchanged views on further developing the relations between the two parties and matters of mutual concern” in the talks, the report said.
The CPGB (ML) delegation arrived in Pyongyang on Sep. 22.
The KCNA had reported the news of the Fifth Conference of the CPGB (ML) held on June 12. At the meeting, the CPGB (ML) declared to make an active effort for the development of friendship and culture between the two countries’ people, especially the workers on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the opening of diplomatic relations between the DPRK and the UK (Dec. 12, 2000).
“Theresa May has said police retreating from the streets as more than 26 incidents of anti-social behaviour take place every minute is a “damning indictment” of Labour’s failure to get to grips with the issue.
Mrs May spoke out after the chief inspector of constabulary said one such incident was reported to police every 10 seconds…
Mrs May, who signalled the end of the anti-social behaviour order (Asbo) and more emphasis on community involvement earlier this year, told Sky News: “This report is a damning indictment of Labour’s failure to get to grips with anti-social behaviour…
“They spent record amounts of money but achieved nothing,” she said. “
Labours failure to tackle what we now know as anti-social behaviour is rooted in its 13 years of anti-working class policies; from the privatisation of essential services, its failure to expand access to education to the poorest through to the failure to support manufacturing and create good jobs with respectable terms and conditions. Its ruthless persecution of working class youth through ASBO’s widened the gap between disenfranchised youth and the rest of society, as our organisations statement of aims proclaims, Red Youth:
“oppose[s] the victimisation of young people. Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, introduced in 1998, are an essentially arbitrary punishment meted out overwhelmingly to young people. Their principal aim is to put the blame for the state of our communities onto young people.
We are asked to believe that the increasing crime rate, boarded up shops, crack houses, noise pollution and muggings in working-class areas are all the fault of young people with caps and hoodies, rather than being the result of unemployment, lack of investment, and so on. Similarly, stop-and-search powers are used disproportionately against the youth, especially black youth, who are several times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites. We demand, and will fight for, an immediate end to all legislation and police powers that target working-class youth.”
Mrs May knows full well that it was under the last Tory administration that our industries and communities were decimated. Like the Labour government that followed, they are so removed from the lives of ordinary people that they are quite prepared to let our communities go to rot. We must fight back, we must organise, and we must take Marxist understanding to the youth!
across the UK gathered to celebrate the 93rd anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The British comrades were joined by representatives from the embassies of Peoples China and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea as well as friends from fraternal parties including the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The meeting was chaired by Ella Rule and the main address was given by CPGB-ML Chairman Harpal Brar. His excellent speech will be available for viewing on youtube shortly, in the meantime you can
read a text version of the speech that deals with the falsification of history by the bourgeoisie in the latest issue of Lalkar. The meeting was the perfect preparation for the coming struggles, and an inspiration to the young Marxist Leninists.
