The second congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) took place on 3 July at the Saklatvala Hall in Southall. The congress was well attended with participants from around the country. The morning session was taken up with reports and discussion around those reports. The message to our members and all those outside of the party was unanimous: we have done well in our first year as a party; we will do even better next year!
Our party members have attended many demonstrations, rallies and meetings with leaflets and papers in hands. They have produced an excellent bi-monthly paper and kept the party’s website up to date. While the SLP that ejected many of our founding members lies cold on the mortuary slab, our party is vibrant and full of life.
Members have run national schools and regional study classes as well as encouraging individual study. We prize our self education as much as our general activity, understanding that, without theory, practice is meaningless. We have fought, and will continue to fight, against opportunism within the movement, be it Trotskyism, revisionism or social democracy.
Congress applauded loudly when the International Secretary informed it that the Workers’ Party of Korea had decided to enter into formal fraternal relations with us. The Korean party is one of the most consistent and principled parties in the world and we are proud and honoured to be recognised so publicly by them.
Party officers and the central committee were elected during the afternoon session and the congress went on to debate the various propositions that had been put forward for discussion. While some of these were of an organisational nature, we reproduce below three resolutions that state our party’s position on international issues of importance. All three propositions were passed unanimously.
In their speeches and reports, members also restated the party’s support for the Palestinian struggle, ZANU-PF, the Irish liberation struggle and the anti-imperialist resistance in both Iraq and Afghanistan among others.
The congress was an inspiration to all present and now we have only to turn our great words into great deeds.
Resolutions passed
Vietnam
This congress congratulates the people of Vietnam on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of their defeat of the armed might of US imperialism, forced by the courage, heroism and determination of the people of Vietnam to retreat on 30 April 1975 back to its lair, after it had waged a brutal and genocidal war to subjugate Vietnam lasting nearly 11 years.
We echo the words of General Vo Nguyen Giap that “Time will pass by, but the Vietnamese people’s victory in the war of resistance against the US will forever enter history as one of the most brilliant exploits, a shining symbol of the triumph of revolutionary heroism … Vietnam became the focal point of the fierce struggle between revolutionaries and reactionaries in the world, a place where there was a [battle] between progress and reaction, between justice and injustice in the struggle of humanity for peace, national independence, democracy and social progress.” (‘The anti-US war for national salvation – a great victory of ability and intelligence’, 2005)
The heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people was an inspiration to people all over the world yearning to free their countries from imperialist domination, and to working class and oppressed people everywhere who dream of a future where they will have overthrown capitalism and put an end to the miseries of poverty, hunger, alienation and war that are the capitalism’s unavoidable concomitants. This struggle showed that truly although imperialism appears mighty and invulnerable, in actual fact it is nothing but a paper tiger which will go up in flames when the masses of working people, led by a party with correct revolutionary principles and tactics, determine that they will be rid of it.
We wish the Vietnamese people and their government every success in overcoming every obstacle in the path of building socialism in their country. The perspicacity and tenacity that they devoted to winning the war will lead to certain success in building a bright and secure future for all.
DPRK
This congress congratulates the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for the steadfast stand that it is taking to safeguard the independence and wellbeing of the Korean people. In the 52 years since US imperialism and its allies were driven out of the northern part of Korea, the imperialists have not let up on their aggressive stance towards the DPRK. They have at all times maintained an incessant campaign of lying propaganda against the north, they have never ceased to conduct provocative military exercises, frequently making incursions into DPRK territory, and they have maintained an economic blockade to try to effect ‘regime change’ in the DPRK by so-called ‘peaceful’ means. Raising a hue and cry about ‘nuclear weapons proliferation’, they have tried, since the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the DPRK of its most reliable supplies of fuel, to prevent the DPRK from developing its own independent, nuclear energy production programme, with a view to stifling the DPRK economy by starving it of energy. This too is all part of imperialism’s campaign to bring about ‘regime change’ ‘peacefully’ in the DPRK, and to create the false illusion among the people of the world, who suffer desperately from the ill effects of imperialism and who will in due course be its gravediggers, that communism leads only to economic disaster.
This congress not only supports the DPRK’s striving to produce nuclear fuel if it should so wish but also its use of nuclear by-products to produce atomic weapons for its self defence. By its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, US imperialism has proved that it cares not one jot for the norms of international law, and that therefore it is only fear that will prevent it from invading whichever country it wishes to invade. In the hands of the DPRK, therefore, nuclear weapons are a safeguard for peace on the Korean peninsula. In any event, it ill behoves US imperialism, which maintains more than 1,000 nuclear warheads in South Korea, to try to tell the DPRK that it cannot have a single one.
This congress conveys to the government and people of the DPRK, and to the Workers’ Party of Korea, its support for their untiring efforts to reunite their country peacefully so that the Korean people may be able to build their own future free from outside interference – a demand overwhelmingly supported by all Korean people, be they from the north or the south or the diaspora. Korea is one.
Defeat of Fascism
This congress joins with the whole of progressive humanity in celebrating this year the 60th anniversary of the victory of the mighty socialist Soviet Union against Hitlerite fascism on May Day 1945.
As we remember the 27 million Soviet citizens who died to safeguard freedom, we urge working people to realise that Hitlerite fascism is not the product of some evil quirk in the German character, as has been generally put about by the imperialist rivals of German imperialism. It was merely a resort to naked terror that any bourgeois regime will resort to when it ceases to be able to control the exploited and oppressed masses by deception alone. The bourgeoisie of any country, including ours, will resort to these tactics when its rule is under threat from the masses who have had enough of poverty, starvation, disease and war. The German masses had fascism imposed on them because they were becoming too militant for German imperialism to handle. What prevented the German working class from overthrowing capitalism before the latter managed to impose fascism, however, was the treacherous and dirty role of social democracy, which divided the German working class, which refused to unite to safeguard democracy in a front with the communists, and which paved the way for the advent of fascism rather than see German imperialism overthrown.
The Soviet Union, under the leadership of comrade Stalin and the Communist Party, fought the Nazi beast almost single-handedly, with 90 percent of the Hitler army marauding on its soil for four years. It played by far the greatest role in the Nazis’ defeat, which was a tribute to its socialist economy – its programme of industrialisation and collectivisation – that provided it with the wherewithal to defeat the Nazi war machine against which the heavily armed bourgeoisies of various western European countries, such as France and Holland, were unable to hold out for longer than a few weeks – if that. Since its socialist economy was built in a period of a mere 10 years, transforming the Soviet Union from a backwater into a superpower in that short time, the Soviet Union’s defeat of such an industrially advanced country as Germany is proof that socialism, in unleashing to the full the productive powers of the masses of working people, sets free a truly extraordinary and mighty indefeasible force. We can infer that after capitalism’s final defeat, the energy of the liberated masses, devoting itself 100 percent to the exponential improvement of their wellbeing, will unimaginably transform social existence – banishing forever poverty, ignorance and war.
The Soviet Union was a bastion of peace and justice, and the world has been suffering in an unprecedented manner from the unbridled aggression of western imperialism ever since she collapsed. We pledge solidarity with the peoples of the countries comprising the former Soviet Union, lead by their Marxist-Leninist communist parties, in their revolutionary struggle to seize back the socialist motherland that has been snatched away from them.
Long live the Great October Socialist Revolution!
