CPGB-ML and Red Youth comrades participated in some of the May Day celebrations which were held around the country during the May bank holiday. In Chesterfield comrades distributed copies of We Want Freedom and Who Stole our Future and spoke to many working people about the role played by the Labour Party in retarding our fight back against the savage programme of cuts and austerity which are being inflicted upon the workers by the Tory and LibDem millionaires.
In Manchester comrades made the same points to Labour Party supporters and those misguided comrades from the revisionist club. Opening the eyes of those in the labour movement to the stark reality of the role played by social democracy is much harder than explaining the same thing to the masses. Comrades from the RCG were on hand to help hammer home the message and a more revolutionary May Day atmosphere prevailed!
Henry Friedrich Carl Metelmann, was born on 25 December 1922, the son of a socialist railway worker in Hamburg, Germany. As a lively and active boy, he joined the scouts, and later his group was merged with the Hitler youth. With Hitler’s rise he was seduced by the fascist movement, and the experiences and privileges it bestowed
He fought with Von Paulus’ Nazi 6th army at Stalingrad. Through experience he came to reject fascism and capitalist imperialism. He settled in Britain, becoming a communist, a railway worker, groundsman, writer and peace activist. He died on 24 July 2011.
Henry Metelmann was keen to talk about his experiences, especially to the young, and equated the invasion of the Soviet Union by an oil-hungry Nazi Germany with the Anglo-American assault on oil-rich Iraq in 2003. He remained a member of the Communist party of Great Britain until its break-up in 1991.
He delivered a powerful lecture to the Stalin Society in London, in 2004, which sadly was not filmed, but shortly afterwards Harpal Brar, now chairman of the CPGB-ML, conducted this interview with Henry at his home in Godalming.
This interview remains as moving, compelling and relevant as the day it was conducted. For it helps us to understand German (Nazi) Imperialism. Not merely as something exceptional, uniquely evil, incomprehensible and never to be repeated; but as the standard behaviour of imperialism. That is of expansionist monopoly capitalism.
What conclusions does he draw from his long, full active and historically rich life? He tells us that there can be no peace, while capitalism still exists. We must overthrow it, or perish.
Cde Harpal Brar, Chairman of the CPGB-ML delivered this keynote speech at the party’s recent celebration of the Great Socialist October Revolution of 1917.
He explains the historical significance of the October Revolution, the achievements of Soviet Socialism, and its ongoing relevance to workers in Britain.
He gives a detailed explanation of modern imperialism, its wars and its global capitalist economic overproduction crisis. The analysis given by Marx and Lenin not only explains these, the major problems that humanity – and in particular the working and toiling masses – are facing, but shows us the way forward to their solution. Capitalism cannot be reformed, regulated, moderated or otherwise made to serve the interests of working people. It must be overthrown!
We must discard all those parties who pretend otherwise, particularly the social democratic Labour Party, and its revisionist and trotskite hangers-on who act as agents of imperialism (misguided or malicious) in the working class movement. In this as in so many regards, October shows us the way!
Our job, Harpal emphasizes, is to make this Marxist-Leninist analysis truly popular, well known and understood, and to inject the spontaneous protest and resistance movements with clear scientific analysis that can sustain them and help them to direct their blows.
The October revolution has shown that working people, when united and organized around a correct understanding and a disciplined party, guided by such an analysis, are really able to achieve unity of action, to become an army of millions and tens of millions, which no capitalist power can resist.
