This speech was delivered at the CPGB-ML’s 20th anniversary celebration in July 2024.
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Comrades. What a pleasure it is for all of us to be gathered to celebrate this momentous occasion – 20 years of the Communist Party Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGB-ML).
It was a little under three years ago that I joined the party, and I don’t think I could have imagined at that time giving a speech on behalf of Red Youth, our youth wing.
Yet such is the energy and vigour in the party, the commitment to Marxist study that not only helps us understand the world around us and how we can go about changing it, but crucially, gives us the confidence to do so.
To have around us people who are not only like-minded, but committed, capable, revolutionary cadres; this is invaluable in a country such as our own where class-consciousness is so very low compared with the rest of the world. It is the revolutionary energy of our party, as reinforced by our political study, which I would like to touch on today.
I joined the party a few months after starting my first full-time job. I was eager to impress the employer and accepted long hours and little sleep in order to prove I could do the job. It took just a few months to realise that, despite the great amount of work I put into the role, with the job occupying my mind most moments of the day due to the strange hours I was working, I wasn’t really getting anything out of it. I didn’t feel fulfilled.
In Marxist terms, I had quickly became alienated from my labour. I didn’t feel a part of the service the company was providing. Further, the service was not doing anything good for the world; it was yet another cog in capitalist economy that didn’t really seem to produce anything meaningful.
The division of labour under capitalism that under socialism would produce great wealth for the working class by rationally divvying up work instead removes all pleasure one should get from work.
Without Marxism I could never have put all this into words. Certainly, without the encouragement of the party, the work it’s given me to use Marxism in practice and hone my skills not only on the streets, but actually learn new ones in aid of any work the party needs doing, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
The revolutionary energy of the party does not come from nowhere. It is the result of decades of arduous work and faithful study by the founding members of the party even before it was formed. This culture of work was astonishing to me when I first joined. I am still in awe of it, and I do my utmost to emulate it. Whenever I talk about party work I’ve been doing, a friend of mine often laughs: “Why would you do it if you’re not being paid for it?”
Why? Because it’s right. Because I couldn’t go forward, having studied Marx and Lenin, without doing something about the wretched world the bourgeoisie has created – especially not when we know for a concrete fact that we can change it – the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia did change it. No matter how hard the bourgeoisie try to make the workers of Britain and the world forget this fact, we will never let them. We will never forget the achievements of the Soviet Union.
It is this fact that lead me to the CPGB-ML. I didn’t really know much about the Soviet Union growing up. I accepted as fact, as many of us did, that Stalin was some sort of dictator-mastermind-manipulator-micromanager, with evil on par with Hitler. That the Soviet Union was an oppressive country full of miserable people, half of whom were in labour camps – all of whom personally placed there by Josef Stalin himself, of course.
Yet the more I learned in bourgeois history, the more contradictions I found. Turning to left-wing sources, penned by various anarchists, revisionists and Trotskyites alike, I left further confused. It was only the courageous stance taken in Proletarian and Lalkar that engaged me. Here was a confident stance in defence of the Soviet Union, and one that added up no less. I was instantly hooked, all of my ideas being challenged at once.
I’ve never looked back since. Even on my lowest days, studying a little Marx, or doing a little party work, brings everything back into perspective.
Here’s to many more years of the CPGB-ML.
