Editor’s note: Our party was a motive force in launching the Workers Party of Britain in December 2019, and communists were at the heart of its most vibrant campaigns. However, developments since that time have led our comrades to consider that the WPB has failed in its stated aim of becoming a truly broad movement within which communists could work openly, transforming itself into a left-social-democratic vehicle for bourgeois parliamentarism and anticommunism. We have therefore withdrawn our members’ efforts from the Workers party project. Our stance towards the Labour party in particular and social democracy in general remains unchanged.
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Since the lockdown was announced, the Workers Party of Britain (WPB) has led the way in using social media and online meetings to speak to more than half a million people.
Regular Tuesday evening meetings organised by the party have discussed topics such as the collapse of project Corbyn, socialism and war, the failings of the corporate media, the anti-imperialist perspective on Palestine, and also on the national question in Scotland and a commemoration on the anniversary of the execution of Irish liberation leader James Connolly.
On 9 May – Victory Day – a hugely inspiring commemoration was organised that was addressed by both George Galloway and Joti Brar, paying tribute to the wartime alliance and the heroic deeds of the Soviet people, the Red Army, the partisans and the leadership of the Soviet communist party, the CPSU(B).
These meetings have been broadcast live across social media, educating and recruiting many thousands, helping to build the WPB and schooling a whole influx of those who formerly would have received their ‘socialism’ exclusively from the Labour party.
For many thousands, these meetings will have been the most farsighted, radical, revolutionary and informative political meetings they have ever attended.
Election of Sir Starmer
With the anointing of Keir Starmer as Labour leader in April, a relatively small (compared to the overall size of the Labour party) but significant section of working-class people separated themselves from the party.
That process is ongoing, as each leaked report or fresh attack by Starmer upon the supposed ‘left wing’ of the party, which prepares that party in the eyes of the ruling class to assume power once more, has the effect of sending disillusioned workers to the ranks of the Workers party – workers whose political and ideological ties to social democracy are in many cases trifling.
These people are, in the main, working-class folk mobilised in the furore that surrounded the Corbyn hysteria. Without the formation of the WPB, these thousands would, in most cases, have left politics altogether, though tiny handfuls might have found their way to other pseudo-radical groups on the fringes of social democracy: the revisionists around the Morning Star, the Trotskyites and so on.
The foundation of the WPB has, therefore, been fully justified, and an unalloyed success for Britain’s communists, progressive workers, radicals and revolutionaries. Instead of seeing these large numbers of socialist-minded workers cast to the wind or, worse still, ending up with our political enemies, they are with us.
The job of communists now is to give a Marxist understanding to these new friends, to make their organisational break a complete political break with the politics of social democracy, and to win them to the cause of thoroughly exposing the Labour party, opposing its pernicious influence in the trade union movement and elsewhere, and assisting in the class struggle of the British workers, building up once again a groundswell of support amongst the British working class for socialism and Marxism.
Media work
Throughout the entire period, George Galloway and Dr Ranjeet Brar have given weekly updates on the coronavirus pandemic on Moats (the Mother of All Talk Shows on RT’s Sputnik radio channel). There they have charted the abject failures of the British government to control the Covid-19 outbreak and adequately organise the response.
George Galloway’s show regularly has more than half a million viewers each week, and is aiming at a regular viewership of one million by Christmas. Short clips from the show on social media reach many thousands more. This is the huge step forward in the creation of an independent working-class media in Britain.
This work, alongside regular political agitation, has been supplemented by two political education classes each week. One for broad inner-party discussion amongst Workers party members, who have recently been discussing the party’s 10-point programme, and one for communists, who continue collectively to study the classics of Marxism-Leninism alongside their private study programmes.
The prestige of the CPGB-ML has grown immeasurably from this work, and our comrades have spoken on LBC radio, appeared on Press TV news, on RT’s CrossTalk, on Al-Mayadeen TV’s Kalima Horra, on Chinese radio and on French, Turkish and Chinese television stations. As a result of this exposure and our leading role in the WPB, our party is acquiring many new supporters.
Crisis is the future
The global financial crisis, accentuated by the corona pandemic, is ensuring that a turbulent period lies ahead. Whilst the revisionists work with their Trotskyite friends and other ‘left’ opportunists to develop new ‘broad fronts’ through which to tie workers to the Labour chariot, our party is forging ahead with helping to build the Workers party, seeking to build an alternative to the dead-end of Labour party reformism.
The priorities for communists must be to exacerbate the split inside Labour, without which there can be no freedom for British workers to engage in class struggle against the employers and government, to consolidate the foundations of the new party, and to undertake broad political educative work to win the largest possible number of class-conscious workers to Marxism-Leninism.
