Winter 2002 - (Volume 6 Issue 1)
A hard copy of Red Alert is available which includes a 'Communists in the capitalist press' section with numerous cuttings form the Western Mail, Evening Leader, South Wales Argus and the Pontypridd & Llantrisant Observer showing articles from the CP election campaign, letters on the CP's position to the fuel blockade and the Foot & Mouth crisis and notice of the Welsh Communists BRS launch events.
Welsh Communists Rising to the Challenge
Dominic MacAskill, Welsh Secretary, reviews the Communist Party’s work in 2001 and sets out the Welsh Committee’s priorities for 2002.
Before reviewing the Communist Party’s work in 2001 and setting out the priorities for 2002, I’d like to thank those members who have demonstrated their commitment through their activism and I’d like to encourage those who have not been so active to take inspiration from the work that has been done in pushing forward our agenda in Wales.
The Communist Party in Wales has been working:
· To oppose the domination of Europe by big business through its support for the newly launched Wales Trade Unions against the Single Currency.
· To develop our work in the trade union movement culminating in a successful Wales TUC which saw record Morning Star sales, a fringe meeting on the EURO, followed by a debate on the EURO on the conference floor for the first time, and an international Morning Star social.
· For a fair deal for education in Wales by supporting the Glanrafon Chater, this involved the Communist Party arranging meetings and distributing 3000 bilingual CP leaflets.
· To raise the profile of the Communist Party by the launch of our web site (www.welshcommunists.co.uk); this has been particularity successful with over eleven thousand hits since its launch in March 2001.
· To mobilise the CP’s national week of action in support of the Take Back the Track campaign which saw CP activities and meetings across Wales.
· To maintain our offices and staff our book shop ‘Rebecca Books’, this is a tremendous achievement for a party as small as ours - particular thanks goes out to our Cardiff volunteers who ensure the shop is open every Saturday.
· As Worker Beer Company volunteers and co-ordinators at festivals across Britain to raise money for the Cardiff Centre for Trade Union Studies.
· To develop our election work through contesting the General Election, standing candidates in Alun & Deeside and in Newport. Many thanks to the hard work of the candidates, their agents and all those who involved themselves in the campaign. This was the best organised and imaginative Communist campaign that I’ve been involved in, with good use of media friendly stunts and activities, which ensured that we received good coverage in the national and local press plus radio interviews and a contribution on the BBC TV’s Vote Campaign Live.
· To promote the latest edition of Britain’s Road to Socialism with meetings throughout Wales, including our first public meeting in Swansea for some time, and a successful day school in Cardiff .
· Successfully to raise £2500, the CP in Wales’ agreed contribution towards the All Britain £30,000 appeal. The money raised from our well supported annual weekend to the Fete de L’Humanite and the Red November dinner helped tip us over the threshold.
· To mobilise against racism by supporting the Cardiff Asylum Demonstration and helping to put on an event on, in the CCTUS, to mark the United Nations Day Against Racial Discrimination..
· To Stop the War by involving ourselves in launching local coalitions against the war and supporting the development of CND. The CP in Wales responded quickly to the war drive following the September 11th bombing and its clear analysis is helping to broaden the campaigns focus - to involve the organised labour movement.
· To promote the Morning Star with regular sales at trade union meetings and in particular covering the UNISON Health conference and the NUT conference which were held in Cardiff this year.
· Within campaigning organisations such as Cymru Cuba, CND and Wales Pensioners, not in a narrow sectarian way but in a way which will broaden and develop their work.
On top of all this work, branches have also been involved in their own local campaigns and working to develop the cadres of the future.
The Communist Party can be proud of the role it has played in the political life of Wales, it is clear from this review that we have been rising to the political challenges facing Wales and the rest of the World.
But all this work needs to be built upon and expanded in 2002, this can be done by bringing into activity those newly recruited to the CP and by finding ways of reactivating those who are currently inactive.
This year we have recruited well and we need to continue this good work on into 2002, branches are therefore encourage to complete the recarding process as early as possible so that officers can concentrate on this priority.
The CP at all levels will also need to assist in the work being done by Dave Morgan to relaunch the YCL in Wales.
The most pressing of priority for 2002 is to build on our work in the Stop the War campaign to ensure that it develops into a broad anti imperialism organisation which will help challenge the expansion of western big business interests across the world.
On a not unrelated theme the opposition to EMU needs to be expanded with particular emphasis on developing the work of Wales TASC.
Working to build Wales TASC will combine with the development of our work within trade unions and the need to build on our successful intervention at the 2001 Wales TUC.
Finally I’d like to urge everyone to:
Make every effort to attend branch meetings and other Party and Morning Star events and to contribute to the campaigns and activities; read the Morning Star and introduce it to friends, to buy shares and organise collections for the Fighting Fund; play an active part in your trade union and use the Needs of the Hour as the basis for trade union conference motions; and win new members and supporters for the Communist Party, its programme and policies.
Transcript of a speech by Glyn Davies, Wales TASC NE Wales Regional Organiser, to a public meeting in Bangor.
According to new Labour, ‘Governments can’t provide jobs’.
Blair and Brown reckon the ‘Market’ and Big Business know best and all governments can do is to bribe Trans National Corporations to invest in Britain.
That’s why new Labour are keeping most of the Tory anti-trade Union Laws, why they are privatising schools, pensions, air traffic control and resist support for the ‘Take back the Track’ re-nationalisation of the railways campaign. It is also why they want to take Britain into the Single European Currency.
Bankers and Big Business want the Euro because it makes it easier for them to invest abroad. It is part of the strategy of privatisation and public sector cuts to be policed by the European Commission and the European Central Bank.
Workers in Wales and the rest of Europe suffer as competition drives down wages and conditions and destroys jobs.
Unfortunately the Trade Union leadership don’t realise the enormity of the situation confronting manufacturing industry - or they feel unable to confront Big Business.
This was underlined by the TUC General Secretary John Monks at the 2000 TUC Congress when - without a vote or congress decision - he proclaimed Britain’s Trade Unions in favour of early entry into the European Single Currency. Thus in one sound bite he put the TUC on the same side as the Bosses but as opinion polls shoe 69% are against entry into the EMU.
A new survey published on February 2001 showed that support for the Euro in Britain was falling. Only 21% of those questioned were in favour of the Single European Currency while opposition stood at 63% with 16% undecided. The poll results came the day after Tony Blair admitted that referendum on the Euro would be held within two years of the next election.
It is clear from this survey that he more people know about the EU the less they want anything to do with it. It seems the EU is still unable to sell the idea of the Euro in its own member states.
Public institutions are being forced to spend millions of pounds in preparation for the Euro while schools, Local Councils, Pensioners and the NHS, are suffering from lack of funds.
This is in essence a fundamental democratic issue. While the momentum for creation of a super state has continued - opposition to this reactionary and undemocratic project has remained high in many parts of Europe and particularly in the UK.
From its Birth in the Treaty of Rome free market objectives have been central to the EU’s proponents and beneficiaries - Big Business. The battery of EU directives and EU rulings add up to a charter for undermining existing democratic national parliaments and wholesale privatisation of industry and public services. We must counter the illusion of a ‘Social Europe’ prevalent in sections of the Labour movement.
It is essential that a United Campaign against the Euro is built, based on Democratic and anti-monopoly arguments in which the labour movement plays the leading role. Such a labour movement intervention would also dispel the crude caricatures of opposition to the Euro stemming from xenophobia or national exclusivity.
Wales Trade Unions Against the Single Currency (WTASC) support all democratic and non-sectarian movements against the Euro especially the labour movement based Campaign Against Euro Federalism. We will campaign to generate greater labour movement involvement and to raise awareness of the dangers posed by potential membership of the EMU.
WTASC will promote and develop the links between anti-EU activists, working people and progressive forces both in EU member states and those threatened by the Euro.
Comfortable assumptions about the liberal democratic and progressive ethos of the EU and member states prevalent on the right of the labour movement, have to be challenged.
The Labour government in its preparation for monetary union has surrendered its power to limit the anti- working class effects of the capitalist crisis. In particular jurisdiction over interest rates and levels of government spending have been lost. The prime beneficiary of this surrender has been Big Business.
For BP, GEC, Marconi, British Aerospace and British banks and insurance companies, the British state remains indispensable. The British state fights often literally to ensure their access to markets and raw materials across the world. It provides these companies with the research contracts, trained labour without which they could not survive.
The challenge today is to win a mass understanding of the seriousness of the current threat. In the past, working people had to wage a long struggle to win universal suffrage and subordinate parliament to democratic control. In doing so they demonstrated their practical understanding of the importance of how government is organised. the great objective of the conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s was to reverse this process.
The pro-big business, anti-democratic trend has been continued by the Blair government, resulting in a dangerous fatalism by many of the workers of ever achieving a genuine political change.
Full economic and social democracy had to be achieved by the collective organisation of working people themselves. The democratic transformation of institutions reflected and confirmed this process. Democracy had to be judged in terms of its economic and social content.
Today the battle for democracy is at a crucial stage.
In essence the campaign for Scottish and Welsh parliaments since the 1930s was democratic in the full sense that it had a manifest economic and social content it asserted the right of the people of Wales to possess its own national institution that could take action on unemployment and dereliction.
The Welsh Assembly must also be seen in a democratic sense. this would enable people living in Wales to decide for the first time their priorities in terms of a new balance of class forces and a progressive and democratic content for Welsh national culture and identity.
However the centralisation of power in the hands of the Blair clique, their efforts to dictate personnel and policies to the Labour Party in Wales, contradict the democratic essence of devolution. This has undermined support for the Welsh Assembly as a body capable of winning real improvements for the Welsh people.
These new bodies have also come into being at a time when other aspects of our democracy have been put into reverse. The Trade Union movement remains legally restricted.
WTASC is campaigning to open up a New Democratic Offensive. Today we need to fight for democracy as fundamental as that waged by the British labour movement at the beginning of the 20th century.
The starting point is to win the understanding of the people to how each part of the struggle is linked. If each separate aspect of the democratic struggle is treated in isolation, it will be impossible to give it a progressive, class content.
Every aspect of life in Britain is dependant on defending, against the EU, the democratic sovereign power of the British people.
The ability of nations and regions to defend the interests of their people, and give a real content to their democracy, will be determined by whether or not Britain is part of the EU. Hence popular support within the labour movement needs to be built for Britain's fundamental democratic right for a no vote for the single currency and to secede form the EU.
No less important will be the defence of the democratic rights of the individual in terms of ethnicity, gender and disability and the right to collective organisation.
The capacity of the working people to use any democratic gains will depend on the revival of organisation as opposed to passive membership of the Trade Unions amongst working people.
This will be no less the case for the traditional vehicle of the working class the Labour Party.
Wales Trade Unions Against the Single Currency was launched in the beginning of 2001, the main union sponsoring the organisation at the time was Cymru/Wales UNISON. Since its launch the organistion has developed recruiting members from across the trade union movement in Wales and holding a successful fringe meeting at the 2001 Wales TUC in Cardiff.
The organisation now has has four regional organisers:
Nikki Hardman (UNISON) - North West region Glyn Davies (UCATT) - North East region Ken Thomas (RMT) - South West region Chris Leaman (GMB) - South East region
The organisation’s convenor is Dominic MacAskill.
Join and help build the Wales TASC campaign.
Wales TASC c/o CCTUS, 131 Crwys Rd, Cathays, Cardiff, CF24 4NH. Tel: 07779140118
This is a regular feature in Red Alert giving advice on M-L classes and reading; in order to help you fulfil your duty as a Communist to: ‘improve...political knowledge and....understanding of Marxism-Leninism’ (Rule 15c)
In this issue we take a look at Dialectical Materialism - below is an extract from COMMUNISM - AN OUTLINE DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
Before a person can know themselves they must know their environment, the things which affect them physically and influence their way of thinking. The early Socialist thinkers were materialists; they regarded humans as a product of nature, ruled by the laws of nature and as dependant on them for their existence as all other forms of life. Their philosophy, their way of thinking about questions was therefore materialist.
Marx was a materialist. He had studied under the foremost philosophers of his time and was keenly interested in philosophy. He knew that Socialism must have an understanding of a person’s relationship to nature and to other people, and the practical reasons for mankind’s activities and ideas. Marx developed the philosophy know as Dialectical Materialism as the key to understanding mankind’s relationship to nature and of mankind’s social and political relations with each other.
In spite of its name, Dialectical Materialism is not so difficult to understand as anyone unfamiliar with it might think. It is a most profound philosophy - here we can only indicate its main outlines. “Dialectics” comes from the Greek word for a method of discussing and examining questions, which , by repeated questions and answers brought out every aspect of the thing discussed and its relationship to other things.
As applied by Marxism, the dialectical method of examining things, in order to determine the correct action to take about them, is based on the following principles - which Marxists consider to apply throughout nature (including human society):-
1 Actual events are always seen in a particular setting and their character is different if the setting is different.
2 Everything is constantly changing - developing or declining (for instance, a flower buds, opens and begins to fade)
3 The changes go gradually for a time and then there is a “revolutionary break” which gives the thing a new character and new development. (The fading flower becomes a seed pod, to continue the previous analogy)
4 The development of things is due to the conflict of opposing tendencies; the “revolutionary break” is the victory of the progressive tendency over the old conservative tendency.
Dialectical Materialism views society as the result of a long evolutionary process in which contending forces have played a part in opposition to each other and in which opposing forces continue to play a part in determining future developments.
As can be seen from the press cuttings the Communist Party didn't let the fascists in Newport take part in the democratic process without challenging their right to express their poisonous views. The Welsh committee, at a later meeting, commended Carol Virgo on her spirit in the face of Police political bias.
Cuttings from Morning Star, Western Mail and South Wales Argus reporting on the incident
Pembrokeshire Communist and Artist Royston Hobson recieves critical acclaim for his latest exhibition
Cuttings from Western Mail, County Echo and Western Telegraph reviewing the exhibition
Communists Play key role in Anti War Campaign
Photo of October London Demo picturing Communist banners and hammer & sickle flags
The Communist Party in Wales, and in Britain as a whole, has played a key role in the Anti War campaign and assisting in the creation of the biggest anti war movement since Vietnam.
The Communist Party has taken a leading role in the National Stop the War Coalition with Andrew Murray taking on the role of the Chairperson of the campaign. Andrew Murray is also the author of the excellent Communist Party pamphlet Stop the War, this pamphlet clearly sets out the Communist Party’s anti imperialist analysis and is a must for all comrades and friends to read.
More locally comrades have been involved in the work of CND Cymru and in setting up local Coalitions against the War, in particular good work is being done in Pontypridd and Newport which ensured that buses of activists from these areas went to the two national demonstrations. Comrades have also been involved in work to include the trade union movement in the anti war movement with one particular success when the Cymru Wales region of UNISON came out in support of CND Cymru and against the War.
The Welsh committee, meeting in January, will be discussing how to build on this work.
Celebrating 60 years in the Communist Party
Photo of Dominic MacAskill making the presentation to Hilda Price
At this years Red November Dinner, the Welsh Committee of the Communist Party took the opportunity to celebrate Hilda Price’s 60th year as a communist.
Welsh secretary, Dominic MacAskill spoke of Hilda as being an inspirational Party member who, along with her husband Iorwerth ‘Badger’ Price, had been a source of strength and continuity for the Communist Party in Wales during some difficult years.
Always an activist, Hilda first started her communist agitation in her trade union, the AEU, during the war years and is still active in the pensioner movement to the present day.
To mark this occasion Dominic presented Hilda with a framed copy of a soviet poster which was first issued in 1941, the year that Hilda joined the Communist Party.
The Communist Party had taken over a Cardiff Greek restaurant for the night to celebrate the Bolshevik revolution, with around 50 members and friends enjoying the fine food and drink whilst digesting the tales of Ken Gill (Chairperson of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and former President of the TUC) and Robert Griffiths (General Secretary, Communist Party).
The event is becoming a very successful fixture in the Welsh communist calendar and next years event is already being planned. It was also a successful nights fund raising, with around £300 being raised for the CPB National Appeal.
Recruitment success in 2001
The Communist Party in Wales grew by over 10% in 2001, the membership is now at its highest since the re-establishment of the Communist Party in 1988. The Gwent branch is the fastest growing branch in Wales, reflecting that where we are active we recruit. Keep up the good work!
Communist Education Survey
In order to properly address the education and skill needs of individuals and branches, Nikki Hardman has developed an education survey which needs to be completed by members and returned as soon as possible. The survey is being distributed with this issue of Red Alert.
New Marxism-Leninism courses have been developed by the Party centrally and are available for branches to use, contact the Welsh secretary for course details and possible tutors.
Branch Handbook
The CP has now produced a branch handbook which gives valuable information on Branch organisation, political education, campaigning work, conducting meetings, using the media, running elections, recruitment and much more.
The handbooks have been distributed to branch secretaries and additional copies can be requested from the welsh secretary.
Branches encouraged to use Party website
The website is only as useful as the information on it. Individuals and branches are encouraged to pass on information about activities, meetings and events for inclusion in the Latest Events section.
A new discussion page is also being launched for those who find it difficult to get out and about.
46th National Congress of the Communist Party of Britain
The next bi-annual congress will take place on the 1—3 June 2002 in London.
Branches will need to make plans for special pre-congress discussion meetings to consider amendments to main resolutions, branch resolutions and election of delegates ..etc; further details will be circulated to branch secretaries.
Plans for Summer school at Tolpuddle
A summer day school is being planned for the Saturday of the Tolpuddle commemorative weekend.
The venue will be a circle of tents in the TUC camping site in Tolpuddle, refreshments and entertainment will be available from the Workers Beer Company tent. Further information will be circulated nearer the time.
Communist E-mail list
A Communist e-mail list is being put together to allow quick communication of events, activities, meetings…etc; if you would like to receive such information then pass on your e-mail address to the Welsh secretary c/o CCTUS, 131 Crwys Rd, Cathays, Cardiff, CF24 4NH