This speech was given by party chair Ella Rule to our party’s 20th anniversary celebration on 27 July 2024.
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Dear comrades and friends
I welcome all of you here today to enjoy our annual anti-imperialist barbecue. It was suspended during the pandemic but now at last we are able to restart what has been a venerable tradition of our party since it was formed 20 years ago.
Twenty years seems nothing to those of us who were there at the founding conference in 2004, but there are comrades here who weren’t even born at that time and yet have now become fully-fledged communists and a real credit to our party.
We have the barbecue at the end of July, not just because the weather tends to be better for barbecues at that time of year, but mainly because two very important dates in the calendar of the international working class occurred around that time.
The first of these was the victory of the Korean people against the combined forces of imperialism of the so-called UN Command, which drew in no fewer than 22 countries in the US war against Korea. The war, that cost 3-4 million Korean lives, ended on 27 July 1953, 61 years ago, with an armistice agreement. It was the first major defeat for US imperialism, which utterly failed in its mad anticommunist attempt to wipe out the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It demonstrated to the people of the world that imperialism is a paper tiger that ultimately, for all its wealth and for all its dastardly weaponry and million-plus brainwashed soldiery, cannot defeat the masses of the people fighting in a righteous cause to defend the sovereignty and independence of their country.
And then on 26 July 1953, Comrade Fidel Castro led an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago (Cuba), while his comrade Raúl Martínez Ararás led a simultaneous attack on the barracks in Bayamo. Although the attacks failed in their immediate objectives, nevertheless they signalled the start of the Cuban Revolution, which proclaimed its victory on 1 January 1959.
These wonderful events demonstrate the invincible strength of the people of the world and give us tremendous encouragement in the hard and bitter struggles that lie ahead to free the world of the stifling stranglehold of imperialism, which in its decline is ever more brazen and frenzied in its cruelty and destructiveness.
No doubt the representative here today from the Cuban embassy will be telling you more about their revolutions and their ongoing struggles against imperialism, in which they have the fullest support of all of us here.
It is a tribute to the struggles of the Korean and Cuban people that the embassies of China and Laos have also come here to lend their fraternal support on this important occasion, and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your participation and greatly look forward to hearing your contributions.
As it is also the 20th anniversary of the founding of our party, I would also like to say a few words on this subject to explain what our party is about and why we formed a new party when there were already no shortage of parties in Britain that claimed to be communist. To understand why we were different, the most important thing to notice is that we wanted to form a revolutionary communist party.
Proletarian revolution is our number one objective, to which all else is subordinated.
Our studies of the science of Marxism-Leninism have led us to the unavoidable conclusion that the capitalist system – for all the wonders that it has been able to bring forth in the past – has become a threat to the very future of humanity and must be overthrown. After its overthrow it must be replaced by a socialist system that places all major means of production in the ownership of the working class, replacing the bourgeois profiteering motivation for production with the socialist economic planning that seeks first and foremost to meet the needs of the producers, the needs of the working people.
Both the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism are endeavours that the ruling classes of today’s world, led by the imperialist countries, are determined to thwart at any cost, as these spell the end of their power and the end of their billionaire paradise.
However, the example of the successful revolutions that have taken place in the world – in Russia, in China, in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos, for example, have proved that hyper-powerful, hyper-vicious, hyper-aggressive imperialist powers can be defeated. And indeed they must be defeated.
As long as imperialism continues to rule the best part of the world, there will be the malnutrition of millions in the midst of plenty; there will be terrible wars causing misery and death to millions, flying in the face of humanity’s right to consider itself ‘civilised’; and the planet will be destroyed bit by bit as every profiteering capitalist and imperialist strongly resists all attempts to reverse global warming and the terrible damage it is doing as it worsens.
All these things drive the people of the world to revolution, as the lives of more and more people become unbearable and even unsustainable.
Marxist-Leninist science teaches us, and life confirms, that sooner or later the downtrodden people of the world rise up to fight against the injustices that are visited upon them. A revolutionary situation arises and fighting breaks out. But not every revolutionary situation and people’s uprising leads to a successful revolution. That is because if the people do not have a competent leadership, the reactionaries will direct them against the wrong enemy.
All too easily anger against the injustices inherent in the capitalist system is diverted into anger against some section of fellow workers – those of a different tribe, a different religion, a different colour, a different community. Any irrational prejudice that infects the masses will be exploited by the exploiting class to save its class rule. Moreover, the enraged masses, even if correctly identifying their exploiters as the enemy, will collectively not be clear as to how the situation is to be remedied after the exploiters are overthrown, and might end up inviting them back because they ‘know how to run things’.
For a revolution to succeed it must be led by a competent revolutionary party, closely linked to the masses and trusted by them.
It is our endeavour to build such a party.
And to be honest, it’s no easy task. In this country, revolution seems so far away, that to prepare for it might seem like preparing for the end of the world, or the return of the messiah. However, whereas those who have prepared for the end of the world have so far always been disappointed, and the messiah hasn’t returned either, we have seen many instances of successful revolution, so we can be confident that our efforts are not being wasted.
Marxist-Leninist science makes it clear that popular uprisings are inevitable. It also makes it clear that the capitalist world is suffering a grave economic crisis that has led to massive downward pressure on the working masses, as well as a growing threat of war, as well as of climate catastrophe. We do not know when a revolutionary situation will arise in this country, but we know that it will and that when it does we need to be ready.
We can’t build a party out of thin air once the revolutionary situation has arisen. We wouldn’t have the time to train the cadres, or for them to become hardened in struggle, let alone instil revolutionary discipline. And we certainly wouldn’t have time to build the necessary links with the masses and develop their trust in us so that they accept our leadership at that crucial juncture. All this is work that takes years and years, and starting in 2004 was, quite frankly, not a moment too soon.
But, you will say, surely the communist organisations that existed before we were formed were doing the necessary work? Regrettably they were not. We saw that in many important ways they were committed to lines that represented nothing other than betrayal of the masses.
They were all deeply committed to bourgeois electoral politics and, worse, to supporting the imperialist Labour party. In their practical activity they were engaged in reconciling the working class to capitalism by claiming that the best way to further their interests was to vote for the Labour party in bourgeois elections. To this day, the best part of their activities is devoted to ‘keeping the Tories out’.
It should be clear to the meanest intelligence that nowadays the Labour party mobilises to defeat even workers’ economic struggles to defend their wages and conditions, is a pro-war party that takes its orders from the imperialist ruling classes of the USA and Britain. By and large, the masses understand this better than the so-called communists do. For us, the struggle to break the hold of the imperialist Labour party over the working-class movement in Britain is an overwhelming priority. We get called sectarian for exposing people who purport to be friends of the working class, even though that friendship is demonstrably fake.
How can it be sectarian to oppose class collaboration?!
Our party was formed by people who all recognised very clearly that the Labour party is nothing but an enemy of the people. However, our struggles were not over. Very early on in our existence we lost a number of cadres because of our stand in favour of immigrants. The ruling class in this country, the bourgeoisie, is ceaselessly encouraging workers to blame immigrants for lack of jobs, lack of homes, lack of decent educational and health provision, etc. “They come here uninvited and get given our jobs, our council flats, overcrowd our classrooms, live off the welfare paid for from our taxes”.
But if there are too few jobs, that is not the fault of the immigrants, but of the capitalists who prefer to invest in low wage countries than in the UK. If there is a lack of homes, it is not because there aren’t enough building materials and builders to make all the homes that are needed – and, notoriously, London is crammed with unoccupied properties – it is because it doesn’t suit capitalism to build them, but it does suit capitalists to own empty properties as an investment.
From the ranks of the illegal immigrants there would be no shortage of people able and willing to assist in the building of homes – not just for themselves but for everybody else as well. It is only capitalism that prevents it being done. Plus it should never be forgotten that the overwhelming majority of immigrants coming here are driven away from their homelands by imperialist looting that has horribly impoverished them and/or by imperialist wars.
Immigrants are victims of our very own ruling class, and as such they are our class brothers and sisters and must be respected as such.
It is not immigrants who are starving the educational system and the NHS of funds. It is the greedy billionaires who are milking these services through privatisation. In fact, in the case of the NHS, it is largely immigrants who keep it going at all!
Obviously, if the working class targets immigrants as the cause of its misery rather than capitalism, they will never be able to conduct a successful uprising. Their anger and their sacrifices will be wasted hitting the wrong target. Therefore, there is no short cut to winning over the masses by pandering to their worst prejudices. Our job is to go out there and help them to see the truth. We had to wave a sad goodbye to those former comrades who refused to serve the masses by addressing their weaknesses.
We are often called sectarian by people who object to the fact that we make it our business to expose opportunism – the selling out of the long-term (revolutionary) interests of the proletarians in favour of focusing on gaining concessions from the capitalists. Believe it or not, we are quite willing to accept that many opportunists have the best of intentions, but these good intentions are undoubtedly paving the road to hell.
Lenin pointed out in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) that the fight against imperialism is a sham and a humbug if it is not inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism. He pointed out that “The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists … makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or a given nation against all others.”
These bribes are given for class collaboration, for abandoning the interests of the working class in general in order to receive the bribe. Nobody calls it a bribe, of course. It is a ‘palpable gain’ in the here and now, rather than some ‘theoretical’ future emancipation. In the Labour party-dominated trade union movement in this country, these sell-outs are held in the highest esteem and invited to address progressive audiences everywhere, the better to inculcate their class collaborationist message. We are the ‘sectarians’ who are rarely called to speak at such gatherings precisely because we expose opportunism.
For instance, in the Stop the War movement, we called for a campaign in the trade unions to persuade workers not to cooperate with war crimes, either by refusing to manufacture weaponry, or transport it, or disseminate propaganda glorifying imperialist war, etc. Such a proposal was unacceptable to the opportunists, denounced as divisive of ‘unity’, and led to our expulsion from the campaign.
People tell us that we can never become a mass party because of our bad manners! What they don’t realise, or don’t want to realise, is that to prepare for a successful revolution we need to win people to the side of the truth, even if for the time being they don’t want to hear it. We have gained absolutely nothing if we hide, or even abandon, our important political positions out of a desire to be popular. We might gain some sort of ‘influence’ with the masses, but it won’t be an influence that benefits them in any way.
The Sikhs have a saying that they use as a greeting: Sat Sri Akal – the truth always wins. Likewise, Hegel pointed out that Freedom is the appreciation of necessity (necessity being that which is true). As communists, it is our duty to hold fast to the truth, to the unavoidable necessity of proletarian revolution and socialism in the strictest meaning of the word. That is the only path to defeating the evil that besets this world. It is the only path forward to the emancipation of the working masses and to the dawn of a truly civilised world.
Let me finish by thanking everybody here who has come to support our party on this important occasion. Your support is greatly appreciated and an important encouragement to us to keep going even when things are tough. Today we are just a small party that has taken on a huge job. With your support, and in the case of our guests from socialist countries, with your example before us, we hope you will see the day when our efforts lead to fruition and we are able to lead the British working class to its emancipation and a bright future.
