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On Saturday 3 October 2009, from 6pm until late, we will be holding a public meeting in London to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution. This will be an excellent opportunity to meet with comrades from the People’s Republic of China, hear some fantastic speakers (full line-up to be confirmed within the next few days) and celebrate one of the most important, world-changing events in modern history. There will also be delicious food and drink, so bring family and friends and let’s make it a celebration to remember!
The meeting will take place at Saklatvala Hall, Dominion Road, Southall, Middlesex UB2 5AA. Trains go every 10 minutes or so from Paddington to Southall and take around 15 minutes. From Southall station, the hall is around 5 minutes’ walk, the route for which you can see in this map.
For more information, please email info@handsoffchina.org or call Keith on 07973 824742.
Further details and publicity material to follow shortly.
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On Sunday 6 September 2009, the CPGB-ML will be holding a one-day school concentrating on the tactical and organisational questions raised in Lenin’s pamphlets ‘What is to be Done’ and ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’.
Location: Saklatvala Hall, Dominion Road, Southall, UB2 5AA
Times: 10.30am-5.30pm
Contact: carlos@cpgb-ml.org
Map: Google Maps
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Via The Guardian.
If this were Burma or Iran the assault on democracy would be a global cause celebre. Instead, Obama is sitting on his hands
If Honduras were in another part of the world – or if it were, say, Iran or Burma – the global reaction to its current plight would be very different. Right now, in the heart of what the United States traditionally regarded as its backyard, thousands of pro-democracy activists are risking their lives to reverse the coup that ousted the country’s elected president. Six weeks after the left-leaning Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped at dawn from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa and expelled over the border, strikes are closing schools and grounding flights as farmers and trade unionists march in defiance of masked soldiers and military roadblocks.
The coup-makers have reached for the classic South American takeover textbook. Demonstrators have been shot, more than a thousand people are reported arrested, television and radio stations have been closed down and trade unionists and political activists murdered. But although official international condemnation has been almost universal, including by the US government, barely a finger has been lifted outside Latin America to restore the elected Honduran leadership.
Of course, Latin America has long been plagued by military coups – routinely backed by the US – against elected governments. And Honduras, the original banana republic, has been afflicted more than most. But all that was supposed to have changed after the end of the cold war: henceforth, democracy would reign. And as Barack Obama declared, there was to be a “new chapter” for the Americas of “equal partnership”, with no return to the “dark past”.
But as the coup regime of Roberto Micheletti digs in without a hint of serious sanction from the country’s powerful northern sponsor, there is every sign of a historical replay. In a grotesquely unequal country of seven million people, famously owned and controlled by 15 families, in which more than two-thirds live below the poverty line, the oligarch rancher Zelaya was an unlikely champion of social advance.
But as he put it: “I thought I would bring about changes from within the neoliberal scheme, but the rich didn’t give an inch.” Even the modest reforms Zelaya did carry out, such as a 60% increase in the minimum wage and a halt to privatisation, brought howls of rage from the ruling elite, who were even more alarmed by his links with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Cuba, and his determination to respond to the demands of grassroots movements to wrest political power from the oligarchs and reform the constitution.
Zelaya’s attempt to hold a non-binding public consultation on a further vote for a constitutional convention was the trigger for the June coup. The move was portrayed by the coup’s apologists as an attempt to extend Zelaya’s term in office, which could not have happened whatever the result. But, as in the case of the Chilean coup of 1973, a supreme court decision to brand any constitutional referendum unlawful has been used by US and Latin American conservatives to give an entirely spurious veneer of legality to Zelaya’s overthrow.
Behind these manoeuvres, the links between Honduras and US military, state and corporate interests are among the closest in the hemisphere. Honduras was the base for the US Contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s; it hosts the largest US military base in the region; and it is almost completely dependent economically on the US, both in terms of trade and investment.
Whatever prior traffic there may have been between the Honduran plotters and US officialdom, it’s clear that the Obama administration could pull the plug on the coup regime tomorrow by suspending military aid and imposing sanctions. But so far, despite public condemnations, the president has yet to withdraw the US ambassador, let alone block the coup leaders’ visas or freeze their accounts, as Zelaya has requested.
Meanwhile, an even more ambivalent line is being followed by Hillary Clinton. Instead of calling for the restoration of the elected president, the secretary of state – one of whose longstanding associates, Lanny Davis, is now working as a lobbyist for the coup leaders – promoted a compromising mediation and condemned Zelaya as “reckless” for trying to return to Honduras across the Nicaraguan border. A clue as to why that might be was given by the state department’s Phillip Crowley, who explained that the coup should be a “lesson” to Zelaya for regarding revolutionary Venezuela as a model for the region.
Obama this week attacked critics who say the US “hasn’t intervened enough in Honduras” as hypocrites because they were the same people who call for the “Yankees to get out of Latin America”. But of course the unanimous call from across the continent isn’t for more intervention in Honduras – but for the US government to end effective support for the coup-makers and respond to the request of the country’s elected leader to halt military and economic aid.
The reality is that Honduras is a weak vessel on the progressive wave that has swept Latin America over the past decade, challenging US domination and the Washington consensus, breaking the grip of entrenched elites and attacking social and racial inequality. While the imperial giant has been tied down with the war on terror, the continent has used that window of opportunity to assert its collective independence in an emerging multipolar world.
It’s scarcely surprising that the process is regarded as threatening by US interests, or that the US government has used the pretext of the lengthy “counter-insurgency” war in Colombia to convince the rightwing government of Alvaro Uribe to allow US armed forces to use seven military bases in the country – which goes well beyond anything the Bush administration attempted and is already heightening tensions with Ecuador and Venezuela.
That’s why the overthrow of democratic government in Honduras has a significance that goes far beyond its own borders. If the takeover is allowed to stand, not only will it embolden coup-minded military officers in neighbouring countries such as Guatemala, act as a warning to weaker progressive governments and strengthen oligarchies across the continent. It would also send an unmistakable signal that the radical social and political process that has been unleashed in Latin America – the most hopeful development in global politics in the past two decades – can be halted and reversed. Relying on Obama clearly isn’t an option: only Latin Americans can defend their own democracy.
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Obituary of Comrade Marie Shapiro from the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist Leninist)
Last December the working class of the world, but particularly of Great Britain and Australia, lost a comrade who had spent her life in their service. Though few would know her name, Marie Shapiro made an enormous contribution to the cause of communism.
Marie was born in London on December 11, 1913 of Polish parents who returned to their homeland the following year.
In fascist Poland Marie saw the suffering of her own people, but she also heard the stories of the great Soviet working class which was creating a new society under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Josef Stalin. At sixteen she secretly joined the Polish Young Communist League, demonstrating an unwavering bravery that would stand her in good stead all her life. Not long after she served nine months in a Polish prison for distributing leaflets proclaiming May Day.
Her parents obtained a British passport for her, and she was expelled from Poland as a British citizen. By that stage she was already a member of the Polish Communist Party.
Marie’s aptitude for foreign languages and the law saw her accepted at the Sorbonne, but without funds she was unable to remain in Paris, and journeyed to London. Her independent spirit was irrepressible. Determined to support herself rather than live off the charity of her English relatives, Marie become a seamstress. She joined the Tailor and Garment Workers’ Union and also the Communist Party of Great Britain, and actively recruited her fellow workers to both organisations.
Yet already she knew that communism, not economism, was the way forward. Trade Unions were, and are, great mass organisations and training grounds for the working class, but ultimately only a strong Marxist-Leninist party could lead beyond the day to day battles within capitalism to socialism, where the dictatorship of the proletariat could liberate the vast majority of people for the first time and pave the way for the classless society of communism.
In 1933, a year after her arrival in London, she met the man who would become her lifelong partner, comrade and best friend, Jack Shapiro. For both, Yiddish was their first language, and they mixed with the progressive element of the East London Jewish community, who were helping to awaken the English working class about the horrors of rising fascism in Germany and Italy.
In 1936 Franco attacked the Socialist Government in Spain. Both Marie and Jack were determined to join the International Brigades and fight in Spain. They took Spanish lessons before approaching the Party. To their bitter disappointment they were told that they could do much more for Spain if they stayed in England. Nine of their group went to Spain, but only four returned. Their sacrifice made Marie more determined never to waver from the struggle for communist internationalism for which her comrades gave their lives.
After World War Two, Jack and Marie made their first of ten trips to the fledgling People’s Republic of China, but it was in the bitter battle against the revisionism that eventually led to the collapse of socialism and the outlawing of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, that they became staunch supporters of and contributors to our Party. They recognized the leading international role played by Ted Hill, the founding chairman of the CPA (M-L), in repudiating revisionism.
Hill exposed the bankruptcy of the secret speech of Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, just three years after Stalin’s death. While using the name of Marxism-Leninism, Khrushchev rejected key Marxist-Leninist concepts such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, while espousing the path of peaceful transition to socialism, despite Lenin’s searing critiques of such wishful thinking in classics like The State and Revolution.
Both Jack and Marie deeply studied the Marxist-Leninist classics and applied them to British conditions, but revisionism had a near stranglehold on the British communist movement at thattime.
Jack became Vanguard’s decades long ‘British Correspondent’, but not a word of his was ever published without Marie’s sharp scrutiny. Many drafts were developed before the articles met Marie’s approval. It was in every way a partnership right to the end.
Jack and Marie remained active in many progressive campaigns. Marie was never idle, but it was not until the last years of her life when she was terribly ill that she gave her support to the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), that had risen above revisionism and begun to chart a way forward.
Jack and Marie lived in frugal comfort, ensuring a constant flow of finance to support our Party’s work, but able to provide support for their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
We send our condolences to Jack, to her daughters Doreen, Susan and Rosalind and to her seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren, and to the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) who has lost a comrade small in size, but mighty in communist stature.
