Honing and updating
Vernon Price reports on last weekend’s membership aggregate and the three debates over programme
January 23 saw the first online aggregate of 2021, attended by members and supporters of the Communist Party of Great Britain and Labour Party Marxists. In December we commenced a review of the CPGB’s
Draft programme,
1 and this month we considered updates to sections covering freedom of speech, Europe and crime.
I must stress that these are not fundamental changes - the programme is not based on struggles against this or that policy of the current government. It addresses the period of the transition from capitalism to communism, and is intentionally confined to main principles and strategy. However, these changes are to section three, which contains immediate demands, and it is appropriate that we make changes according to either experience or big political developments.
Weekly Worker
Paul Demarty insists that unrestricted free speech is central to the communist project
This article is a version of an opening I delivered at the Communist Party members’ aggregate on January 23, motivating a new section of the CPGB’s
Draft programme on freedom of speech and related liberties.
The rather short text - which, as amended, is reproduced below - could, in principle, be a lot shorter. The first demand is for “unrestricted freedom of speech” - a formulation identical in substance to that of the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks - and the rest is essentially commentary. The further demands concern specific
Letters
Most readers of the
Weekly Worker agree that capitalism must be overthrown, that this should happen as a result of the actions of the working class majority taking power, and that all Marxists should unite in one party with a programme along the lines suggested by the CPGB.
However, the CPGB stubbornly persists in urging all Marxists/socialists to join the Labour Party and fight within it to win members to Marxism. It frowns upon the setting up of any other party of the working class, which it always derides as being a “Labour Party mark two” and therefore doomed to fail.
Goodbye Donald Trump
The January 6 failed coup is a symptom of decay. Even with a near $2 trillion rescue package the Biden administration is unlikely to revive the American dream, says Jack Conrad
There can be no better way of beginning this valedictory article on Donald J Trump than by quoting Marx quoting Hegel. Here are the seemingly casual opening lines of
The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):
Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
Ever since his unexpected election victory over Hillary Clinton in November 2016, Trump was busily agitating, manoeuvring, campaigning to ensure that, by fair means or foul, he would remain US president - not only till 2024, but 2028 and perhaps beyond (he talked of “negotiating” a third term, even though since the time of George Washington there has been an unofficial two-term time lim