Another contribution of one of our newer members, explaining why they joined. This time from a comrade from the South East.
On the 26th of July, 2014, at the annual anti-imperialist barbecue, I joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
I inhabit a conservative town in a reactionary corner of south-eastern England, and know of no other communists nearby. I might easily have grown to maturity as another reactionary – why then did I come to the CPGB-ML?
I first encountered Marxism at the age of eleven years, shortly after entering secondary school, when, quite by chance, I encountered Friedrich Engels’ profound work The Principles of Communism on the internet. Gripped by that work, I have educated myself ever since that day on the workings and relations of society and have become firmly convinced that Marxism-Leninism is the only correct and scientific expression of the accumulated experience and class interests of the exploited working class, the proletariat. I have, therefore, long recognised the practical need for a sincere Communist Party armed with the advanced theory of Marxism-Leninism. However, there is in Great Britain today a plethora of different groups and ‘parties’ calling themselves communist, and therefore there was a large amount of material to sift through. While researching communist organisations in this country, I encountered, to name but a few, the Communist Party of Britain, the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and the odious Socialist Workers’ Party. What I found greatly disturbed me, for it seemed that all the parties and organisations I came across, particularly the Communist Party of Britain which advocates the absurd and revisionist notion of a parliamentary road to Socialism, were completely divorced from the real nature of society in this country, and thus could not know the genuine interests and tasks of the working class and its movement.
I was greatly relieved and inspired when I discovered that there was one organisation, one party, which cut through the thick layers of pseudo-socialist and revisionist rubbish, which was unrelenting in its fight against opportunism, and which was clearly and obviously acquainted with the objective reality of modern Britain and the true interests of the working class – this was, of course, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
Over time, I studied the material of this Party, reading Lalkar, Proletarian, the books of Comrade Chairman Harpal Brar et al, etc. and became convinced that the theory and general line of the CPGB-ML were correct. However, one question remained: an advanced theory is all well and good, but as Stalin said, revolutionary theory “becomes sterile if not accompanied by revolutionary practice.” Indeed, all Marxist-Leninists, unlike the revisionists, Trotskyites, social democrats and the like, know that correct theory comes and can only come from practice, from accumulated historical experience and practice as it is now. So then, was this Party an active one?
Clearly, the communists are up against the odds in their work of attempting to build a genuinely revolutionary Marxist organisation in the United Kingdom. The super-profits plundered from the oppressed countries through merciless imperialist exploitation make it possible for the ruling class of this country to bribe significant sections of the working class, to bind them materially to capitalism. This phenomena of the embourgeoisification of workers was first observed by Marx and Engels in England towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the theory and practice regarding it was formulated and systematised by Comrade Lenin in such works as Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, in which he noted that it was basically this embourgeoisified section of the working class which provided the social and economic basis of opportunism and revisionism. Indeed, since Lenin’s day, as imperialism has become ever more decadent and moribund, this labour aristocracy, as it was called, has only grown, its influence has only increased and become more pervasive, and it is aided in its deception of the working class and its movement by decades of relentless and shameless social democracy and Khrushchevite revisionism. We see, then, that to build a sincerely and thoroughly anti-revisionist, anti-imperialist, revolutionary Communist Party in the conditions which exist in the United Kingdom is no easy task, and the Communists attempting it are faced with an enormous task.
With the above taken into account, the CPGB-ML is indeed incredibly active in its work. Day by day the party is growing in number, and having attended party meetings and talked to party comrades myself I can testify for the fact that it is the only communist party in the country which is really attracting active support from real British workers and a not insignificant number of young people. Increasingly, sincere Comrades from other organisations, realising that their own groupings have been castrated and robbed of their revolutionary heart by social democracy, Trotskyism and revisionism and opportunism of various kinds, are defecting to the CPGB-ML, which is the only party consciously striving to create and develop conscious links with the masses, which it does by selling its newspapers and journals, attending protests and demonstrations, issuing leaflets, conducting workers’ educational programmes, and, simply but effectively, talking to the masses, actually learning from them, as well as through various other activities.
Surely, the party can only intensify its work and spread its influence, and surely as the crisis of capitalism develops, as the British working class its jolted from hardship to hardship by its despotic imperialist rulers, the Marxist movement can only develop, grow, and spread, so that we may reasonably speak of having active cells and cadre in all corners of the country, ready to make their contributions with all their zeal and effort to the cause of the proletarian revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat and communism.
So then, we may say, backed by the experience of the struggle of the proletariat and the truth of Marxism-Leninism, that this Party is the only thoroughly and consistently anti-imperialist, anti-revisionist and politically active communist organisation existing in Great Britain, it is the party of British socialism, and it is for all these reasons that I have joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
Long Live the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)!
Death to Capitalist-Imperialism!