Red Youth is proud to stand with the socialist countries and is happy to reproduce below a solidarity message received from the Kim il Sung Socialist Youth League on the occasion of our 5th birthday! Red Youth maintains good international relations with a number of communist, socialist and revolutionary organisations.
Red Youth is still a very young organisation and we know that we have many weaknesses. But compared with the rump which try to pass themselves off in this country as communist youth, we can be very proud that in five years we’ve set a solid foundation and recruited the best revolutionary youth this country has produced. Since the youth riots of 2011 its become increasingly obvious to young socialists, that only the cpgb-ml and red youth offer a meaningful political experience, a vehicle for challenging capitalism.
Korean communists in imperialist prison camp holding aloft portraits of great revolutionaries Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin and Kim il Sung, from http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/protesting-chinese-and-north-korean-prisoners-display-news-photo/160757933
“Dear comrades,
The central committee of Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League sends the congratulatory greetings to Red Youth on the occasion of its 5th founding anniversary.
The Red Youth have achieved great successes in the work to hold the socialism-communism and to rally more young people behind its banner while defending their rights and interests.
We are very pleased about your achievements and also express our thanks that the Red Youth have supported the Korean people and youth who are in the struggle for thriving nation under the leadership of the dear leader comrade Kim Jong Un.
We believe that the bilateral relationship will be further strengthened and the greater successes in your work.
Red Youth joined DPAC at the Labour Party Conference in Birmingham today. An attempt by Tories to hold an anti Ed Miliband demo was scuppered by hammer and sickle flag waving members of Red Youth, a bizarre way for us to start our day!
Speeches from activists and local socialists correctly pointed out Labour hypocrisy, as delegates left the ICC Conference Centre many stopped to talk with a mere handful losing their tempers. To accusations of “you’ll let the Tories in” unemployed youth and those thrown off disability allowances merely declared it made no difference which gang of robbers were in government.
Heres the speech made by our 16 year old brother and comrade Austin.
The CPGB-ML encourages all it’s branches and groups to engage in study and to learn from the study each one of us undertakes in the spirit of the Red Youth motto each one, teach one! Across the country our members make presentations to modest sized meetings of Party comrades, Proletarian subscribers and friends to open up discussion about the history of our movement and the lessons for today. Unlike the Troto-revisionist parties, we have no “big-guns” on full time salaries who tour the country promoting their latest academic work on some obscure philosophical issue. Our comrades are all encouraged to be free-thinkers, enquring and studious and to work together to come to a Marxist understanding on important issues which have practical implications for our work today. Many comrades are enrolled on a cadre development programme which guides their study in the basics of Marxism-Leninism and gives them practical support in learning to make presentations and lead study circles.
The CPGB-ML has republished J. V. Stalin’s classic pamphlet Foundations of Leninism. The book is a reprint of the Foreign Languages Press edition which was distributed around the world by the Communist Party of China in hundreds of thousands of copies in many languages during the 1960’s and 70’s.
The need for the newly published edition arose from the demand for copies by our young cadre and the increasing rarity of the Chinese and Soviet editions which for many years were common place in second hand bookshops but which are now drying up. The new edition, replicates in every respect the Chinese paperback and will be sold at party events and online to the next generation of revolutionaries who are seeking out Marxist-Leninist answers to today’s pressing questions. Members of Red Youth will be able to purchase copies at a discounted price, and prior to their sale on eBay, orders may be placed via sales@cpgb-ml.org.
The following article is based on a speech delivered by a member of the Central Committee of the CPGB-ML to the memorial meeting, ‘Hugo Chávez and the Venezuelan Revolution’, organised by the party in London on 8 March 2013, we republish it now to mark the anniversary of the day of Comrade Chávez’s funeral.
Speaking of Mao’s contributions, the Chinese Communist Party has summed up: “Without him the Chinese people would, at the very least, have spent much more time groping in the dark.”
The same, also at the very least, can be said about the relationship between Hugo Chávez and the people of Venezuela.
Red Youth comrades can apply each year to enter onto a cadre development programme in Marxism-Leninism. This year Red Youth has just over twenty young comrades on the programme run by the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Comrade Aberrabii a student in the West Midlands has completed his first module which requires a written assignment, assessment and public presentation. He gave his presentation to a meeting in Birmingham this month which was well received. Red Youth will publish a select number throughout the course of the year and encourages comrades to work their way through our online education programme. We’re happy to publish his speech here.
Comrade Aberrabii speaks to the meeting in Birmingham
What is imperialism? That is the first question that should be asked when debating or having a discussion about imperialism. If we look at the dictionary definition then imperialism is essentially the policy of extending a country’s power and influence through colonialism, use of military force, or other means.
So then, what is a definition of imperialism meaningful to Marxist Leninists? It is the highest stage of capitalism as Lenin said in his Imperialism: The highest stage of Capitalism, its most advanced and parasitic stage. It is not a policy of this or that government but rather something inevitable and imperialism has to come to life in order for capitalism to be fully developed, in other words imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism
There are various contradictions within the imperialist system that will contribute to its destruction. These contradictions are why imperialist nations are in terminal decline. Lenin clearly outlined three primary contradictions that contribute to this decline, as well as eventual collapse of capitalism and imperialism.
Tuesday’s policy announcements by the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition mark the entrance proper of both the question of youth and the question of labour into the election dog fight. In this tit-for-tat battle between the all-out reactionary welfare reforms of the Tories and the left-social democratic rhetoric of Labour, we may be fooled into believing that the object of contention is the future employability, prosperity and flourishing of young workers. A closer examination of both sets of benefit reforms, however, reveals only two strategies of ensuring the immediate term increased exploitation of young workers; strategies which differ only in their subtlety and intensity.
Here we will briefly outline a critique of the economic, social and political implications of both policies; implications which, we believe, have already been obfuscated by the rhetorical niceties of politicians and the press, and by inaccurate analyses of data provided by pilot schemes for the Tory policy.
The Conservative policy is best understood as an extension and consolidation of the principles of workfare. After six months of unsuccessful job-seeking, young people would be denied their standard JSA (dependent only on evidence that the jobseeker is, indeed, looking for work), and instead be offered a ‘youth allowance’ – paid at the same pitiful rate and dependent upon the claimant fulfilling 30 hours of community based work alongside 10 hours of job-seeking. Mr Cameron justifies this policy on the basis that it would provide badly needed work experience to young people and, ultimately, lead to a decline in youth unemployment. Speaking in Hove, East Sussex, Mr Cameron announced that:
“What these young people need is work experience and the order and discipline of turning up for work each day (…) That well-worn path – from the school gate, down to the jobcentre, and on to a life on benefits – has got to be rubbed away.”
It has apparently not occurred to the Prime Minister that there is a distinction between the individual difficulties a young person faces when applying for employment (in which a comparative lack of skills compared to other applicants may well prove an obstacle) and the overall underrepresentation of youth in the labour market. To claim that the latter is caused by a diminished skill set among young people would be to say that young people have gotten stupider, lazier and less competent in comparison to periods of low youth unemployment. Such a position is not only an outrageous insult, but is fundamentally disproved by even a cursory glance at school and college qualification rates over the last thirty years.
Contrary to this ridiculous position, we hold that the current rate of youth unemployment has nothing to do with an unprecedented slump in the qualities of young people, and everything to do with a structural crisis of capitalism which forces both private and public sector employers to seek efficiencies by avoiding recruitment, merging entry level jobs and, as far as possible, employing those who need less training and development opportunities than the majority of young people. This has created an all-out assault on the pay and conditions of those young people in work who, forced to compete for jobs and with no competition amongst potential employers, are compelled to pick up the scraps of the labour market in the form of precarious and low paid work – work which often returns them to the jobcentre with alarming speed.
The very best which we could say about any policy which refuses to address the conditions of the crisis, the want of jobs themselves and the appalling treatment of young workers, is that it simply will not work. The Tory policy, however, does not even merit this compliment; as opposed to being merely ineffective, the ‘youth allowance’ scheme threatens to take a bad situation for young workers and extend it into a recurring cycle of unemployment, poverty and exploitation
The crux of this policy’s failure lies both in the type of work which claimants will be forced into and the effect which a mass pool of unpaid labour will have on job creation. In the first instance, Mr Cameron proposes that claimants can ‘play their part’ by ‘making meals for older people, cleaning up litter and graffiti, or working for local charities’. Perhaps these workshy urchins will be expected to spend a weekend mucking out Mr Cameron’s stables!?
In effect, forced labour taken from the unemployed would be indistinguishable from the forced labour already extracted from those members of the working class unfortunate enough to be held within our prison system. The next step for Cameron is surely the establishment of an English equivalent of the Deutsche Arbeiterfront, were the current labour lieutenants of the bourgeoisie not already ably fulfilling this task!
The Tory scheme promises employers a continual stream of free labour to undertake jobs which would otherwise be waged and available to young people. What employer in their right mind would pay for a job to be done when they can get it done for free indefinitely?
In light of this, we assert that the entire debate about the efficacy of pilot schemes for this policy is meaningless. If youth unemployment can be demonstrated to have gone down in areas where this policy has been implemented, this is entirely dependent on the fact that the policy was implemented in isolation. It may be that cleaning graffiti for free in one borough may make you an attractive applicant for a cleaning job in an adjacent council, but if all areas and all comparative employers are guaranteed free labour then such jobs will begin disappear. Any analysis which ignores this fact is doomed to be merely an exercise in rhetoric, rather than a concrete appraisal of young people’s future.
Against the Tories’ shambolic, back of a fag packet proposal, Labour have sensibly seized the opportunity to indulge in some populist ‘left’ posturing. Mr Miliband has promised a guaranteed six-month employment contract to every young person out of work, and guaranteed apprenticeships to all school leavers with relevant grades. With a political foresight with which he can rarely be credited, ‘Red Ed’ even had the sense to combine social-democratic nostalgia with a pretence of class war leadership – proclaiming that this miraculous policy would be funded by a tax on bankers’ bonuses and, thus, striking a blow at the bogeymen of the reformist anti-austerity movement.
While openly left in rhetoric, the Labour proposal constitutes a brutal attack on the employment rights of young workers. While it may be a distinction more theoretical than real in the present age, the initial justification of capitalism’s existence is that – in opposition to feudalism – the labourer’s relation to his employer is that of a free person entering into a contract. In this free contract, the worker has the right to demand certain conditions of his employer and, if these are not forthcoming, may freely refuse to enter into a given employment; losing only the wages that this employ would have secured him in future. Even this basic right of a worker is violated by Labour’s proposal. In an attempt to look ‘tough’ on those claiming benefits, Mr Miliband has followed the Tory example and promised to refuse benefits to any young people who turn down the job offered them. This position denies young workers the same basic rights held by everyone else and cannot conceivably be justified, even within the rules of the capitalist labour market.
We believe that the solution to youth unemployment is not to be found in the harassment of working class youth, but in the creation of a society which can offer young people meaningful work. We have no illusions that a one-off tax on one part of the capitalist class can pay for a wonder policy to solve the various difficulties facing young workers; capital is global and able to avoid national taxation with relative ease. We believe that only through creating a society where the working class controls what it produces and how it is distributed can we ensure long term, fulfilling and meaningful employment for all. We refuse to accept that young workers are to blame for youth unemployment, and we refuse to accept that we must beg employers for the ‘charity’ of hiring us. The only future which will work for us is socialism, and socialism is the only future we fight for.
If you’ve been a long-term reader of this blog, or if you’re new to Marxism and live in the north west of England, now is the perfect time to join Red Youth and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist – Leninist). Our comrades meet regularly in groups based in Crewe, St Helens, Wigan, Manchester & Liverpool and you’re very welcome to get along to meet them and see whats going on. We’ve got others in Blackburn, Preston and further north in Southport and we’re hoping to expand our activity and work in 2015 with new weekly and monthly meetings in these areas.
Now is a great time to get involved! If you’re interested, think about getting along to meet some of the group this coming Saturday in St. Helens town centre. Email owens.rhiannon@yahoo.com or northwest@cpgb-ml.org for more details.
Shin Dong-hyuk has recently come out admitting that statements he gave which were used in his biography ‘Escape from Camp 14’, which tells the story of him being born and raised in a North Korean prison camp until he escaped, were lies. While he still stands firm that his overall story is true, he has admitted that many parts of his story are false and need updating.
Who is Shin Dong-hyuk?
Shin Dong-hyuk is one of the most well-known ‘defectors’ from the DPRK and the leading witness in the current UN report on North Korea’s human rights. He has spent his years giving interviews that formed the basis of his biography, shaking hands with leaders such as George W. Bush and David Cameron, teaming up with the Bush Institute (a conservative think tank based around George W. Bush and his family), and being honoured and praised by the pro-imperialist NGO Amnesty International.
What is Shin’s story?
Shin Dong-hyuk claimed that he was born into a North Korean prison and lived there until he escaped and fled the country. He talks about all kinds of horrors from members of his family being executed, starvation, and heavy work in a prison called Camp 14.
His new version of events changes his original story very drastically. In his new story he includes two prison camps, not just ‘Camp 14’ (the name of his book) but also ‘Camp 18’. The new version of his story also includes him escaping the camp twice before. While he had originally claimed that he was tortured when he was 13, the new version of his story now says it happened at the age of 20.
Finally, his father came out saying that Shin had never lived in a political prison camp and his testimony is false.
Even Shin’s own biographer, Blaine Harden, admitted that many parts of his story do not add up. In a statement on his website he said that: “On Friday, January 16, I learned that Shin Dong-hyuk, the North Korean prison camp survivor who is the subject of Escape from Camp 14, had told friends an account of his life that differed substantially from the book.”
But already in the introduction to his book he stated that:
“In writing this book, I have sometimes struggled to trust him. He misled me in our first interview about his role in the death of his mother, and he continued to do so in more than a dozen interviews. When he changed his story, I became worried about what else he might have made up.
Fact-checking is not possible in North Korea. Outsiders have not visited its political prison camps. Accounts of what goes on inside them cannot be independently verified. Although satellite images have greatly added to outside understanding of the camps, defectors remain the primary sources of information, and their motives and credibility are not spotless. In South Korea and elsewhere, they are often desperate to make a living, willing to confirm the preconceptions of human rights activists, anticommunist missionaries, and right-wing ideologues. Some camp survivors refuse to talk unless they are paid cash upfront. Others repeated juicy anecdotes they had heard but not personally witnessed.” (p. 10)
Many citizens of DPRK emigrate out of the country to find work and education abroad, from logging operations in Russia, textiles factories in Mongolia, to work in Japan and China, and even university placements in the UK. But ordinary people who emigrate out of the DPRK who don’t tell such incredible stories, usually don’t get best selling book deals, don’t become celebrities, and certainly don’t make money from prancing to a photo-shoot with reactionary heads of states and selling themselves out to every free market think tank that shamelessly hides behind the label of a human rights organisation.
Where have we seen this before? The Nayirah testimony.Imperialist countries such as the USA and Israel are not above killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people to secure their own greed, so it is a mistake to believe that they are above the most dirty lies.
One of the worst examples of this is the “Nayirah testimony” where in October 1990, a young girl who only gave her first name Nayirah, gave testimony that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers killing premature babies by stealing their incubators and letting the babies die on the floor, that Iraqi soldiers had tortured a friend of hers, and were making fun of George W Bush. Her speech was so powerful that it became a media poster to support an invasion of Iraq.
It was later revealed that her second name was al-Sabah, and that she was the daughter of the Kuwait ambassador to the USA (Kuwait being the country that Iraqi soldiers supposedly committed these crimes according to Nayirah), and both worked for an organisation called “Citizens for a free Kuwait” which was an operation established by the Kuwait government to sway public opinion in the USA towards a US invasion of Iraq. Then the cherry on this whole grizzly sundae is that the Citizens for a free Kuwait, was hiring the business of public relations corporation Hill and Knowlton, that worked to spreading her testimony all over USA television news networks.
By now everybody was doubting her testimony but it was to late. The Gulf War had already started and thousands were to perish in the upcoming months.
What can we learn from this?
As much as any story may appeal to your emotions, there are many terrible people out there who aren’t bothered by the consequences of lying for personal gain.
As imperialism is once again driving towards war on all fronts, the left should be wary of the propaganda intended to dehumanise its enemies. We must expose their lies and not give one inch to their sabre-rattling.
Seek truth from facts.
Always be prepared to be wrong.
Never abandon our solidarity with anti-imperialist comrades overseas.
Since its very first time in office 90 years ago (bombing Iraq, selling out the unions), the Labour party has consistently proved itself to be a loyal servant of the British imperialist ruling class (both in and out of office) and an entirely false ‘friend’ to the British working people.
If we want a dignified, secure and peaceful future for British workers, free from poverty, insecurity, discrimination, war and preventable diseases, we need to understand who are our friends and who are our enemies in the struggle against capitalism and for socialism.
Come along and join the discussion, and be part of building a future that’s fit for human beings.
Saturday 24 January 2015 (12.00-2.00pm)
Beechbank Community Centre, Wester Mavisbank Avenue, Airdrie, ML6 0HE
