Britain's Road to Socialism tabloid

y t i n U

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Communist Party l Free Autumn 2012

BRITAIN NEEDS SOCIALISM

‘Are there really only twelve millionaires in my Cabinet?’

Britain’s road to socialism and working class power Why we need socialism The fight for socialism and state power State monopoly capitalism is the enemy The labour movement must lead Capitalism is bankrupt An alternative economic strategy What you can do

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Britain needs socialism

A United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists ... but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe and of jointly protecting imperialist booty against America and Japan.

Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone'.

V.I. Lenin, On the Slogan 'For a United States of Europe' (1915)

'China's rapid growth over the last 20 years has reduced poverty and improved living standards on a scale and at a pace unequalled in history'.

World Bank, East Asia & Pacific Update: 10 years after the crisis (April 2007) World Bank, East Asia & Pacific Update: 10 years after the crisis (April 2007)

Distribution of personal wealth in Britain 2008/10* All households

total % of £billion total 10,330 100%

Wealthiest 10% Wealthiest 20% Poorer 50% Poorest 10%

4,500 6,400 1,047 8

44% 62% 10% 1%

(*excluding business ownership and up to £3,000 billion hidden assets) Source: Office for National Statistics, Wealth in Great Britain 2008/10 (July 2012)

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Why we need socialism

by Mary Davis The profit motive on which capitalism is based ensures that crises are endemic.

Accumulation, speculation and greed ensure that temporary stability is quickly followed by recession.

Social democratic attempts to reform the system have had some positive effects. They have demonstrated the benefits of public ownership, planning and the redistribution of wealth.

However, because capitalist economic and state power has remained dominant, the social democratic experiment has always ended in defeat, whether in Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Portugal, the Scandinavian countries, Australia or New Zealand.

On the other hand, if democratic rather than capitalist public ownership had been implemented, with greater workers’ control and less compensation for the former owners, the outcome might have been different and longer lasting.

Socialist public ownership would go further and end monopoly capitalist control of the economy altogether. In doing so, it would put an end to the exploitation of the working class.

Surplus labour would no longer be performed for capitalist profit, but used instead for the benefit of society as a whole.

Furthermore, the material basis for the oppression of women and black people would be removed. Since its inception, capitalism has extracted super profits from women and black people. Racism and sexism have also operated at an ideological level to sustain capitalist relations of production. Socialism would end this oppression economically and begin to eradicate it in every other area.

The huge inequalities of wealth in capitalist society continue to have a major impact on the political system and on people’s democratic capacity to control their own future ('popular sovereignty').

The economic, ideological and repressive apparatus of the state is constantly used to protect the interests of the ruling class.

The fact that the likes of Murdoch and Desmond control vast sections of the mass media exposes the shallowness of capitalism’s claim to democracy. Apart from the Morning Star, the working class and its labour movement have no voice at all.

Genuine democracy and popular sovereignty will only come about when the working class control state power.

But what happened in those countries which once offered an alternative to capitalism, notably the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of eastern Europe?

Capitalism’s hired politicians and

propagandists conveniently forget the enormous gains made in what was – in the case of Russia – a semi-feudal autocracy. The Soviet Union was transformed into a society which provided housing, education and work for all. Above all, socialist construction made it possible for the Red Army to ‘tear the guts out of the Nazi war machine’, as Churchill put it.

Although the war-shattered Soviet Union and eastern Europe were then left to reconstruct their societies without any Western help, the socialist countries went on to assist national liberation movements against imperialism around the world.

However, there were negative features as well as great achievements.

These included severe violations of Soviet democracy and the mass arrests and executions of the late 1930s, affecting millions of innocent people (many of them communists). By the 1970s, economic growth was falling behind the advanced capitalist countries.

The command-style economy and the failure to mobilise the Communist Party and the people led ultimately to stagnation and, beginning in 1989, the collapse of the socialist system.

But the capitalism that replaced socialism in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe has not solved their economic and social problems. Far from it – millions of workers have lost their jobs and almost all the social gains of the past 50 years have been wiped out.

Elsewhere, other countries have taken their own roads to socialism in very different circumstances.

The Cuban model seeks to involve the people from the bottom up. Despite its Third World origins, Cuba has built advanced firstworld health and education services and sent thousands of health care workers to other, poorer countries. Vietnam, like Cuba, has had to defend its national sovereignty against US imperialist aggression.

In People’s China, a country of 1.3 billion people (almost one-fifth of the world's population), great emphasis has been placed on economic and social development. A combination of Communist Party rule, state ownership and planning, market reform and foreign private capital has lifted more than 600 million people out of extreme poverty since 1981.

In Britain, our road to socialism will be different again.

Nobody can predict the future, but the capacity of the British working class throughout its 200-year history to re-group, reconstruct itself and fight back is legendary.

It will be strengthened by learning from its own mistakes and those of others.

Professor Mary Davis is an historian and former editor of Communist Review

Capitalism’s global failure People in extreme poverty: 1.4 billion (up 64m in 2010) People in chronic hunger: 925 million (up 110m from 1990) Children suffering chronic malnutrition: 170 million Children dying of hunger: 2.6 million a year (5 every minute) Children dying before age of 5: 9 million a year (17 a minute) Children with no school: 69 million Illiterate adults: 860 million (two-thirds of them women)

The fight for state power and socialism

by Gawain Little Revolutionary strategy must be based on an understanding that the state is a machine for the oppression of one class by another.

This is not an over-simplification or a onedimensional view. Indeed, Marxists have been at the forefront of analysing the complexities of the modern state and its various functions.

However, these complexities cannot be allowed to confuse the question and mask the essential nature of the state. It exists to defend the economic and social system and the ruling class in whose interests that system operates.

Whether it’s the workings of a legal and judicial system founded on the principle of private property, the use of the armed forces to enforce the extraction of super-profits abroad, or the role of the state broadcasting system in marginalising dissent and whitewashing the crimes of imperialism, the state acts to maintain and reproduce the current system of exploitation and oppression.

The election of a left government will not change this. A host of mechanisms within parliament and the political system, as well as outside them, help to maintain and even widen the gulf between the people and their elected representatives.

A left government in Britain would be surrounded not only by top state personnel who are hostile to socialism, but also by a state apparatus designed to protect and maintain capitalism – not to abolish it.

Even the most modest measures to shift the balance of power towards the working class are likely to come under sustained attack from within the state, the capitalist media and elsewhere.

For communists, there needs to be fundamental change not only in terms of who runs the state apparatus, but in the very structure, role and character of the state.

This means going beyond the parliamentary struggle. The working class must take state power from the capitalist class and use it to begin building socialism and defeating all attempts at counter-revolution.

This struggle is unlikely to comprise one single, decisive battle. Rather, it will be a revolutionary process, going through a number of distinct but inter-connected stages, proceeding from the contradictions within capitalism and within the state itself.

Serious opposition from within the state to a democratically-elected left government will help expose the nature of capitalist democracy.

It raises the need to build a socialist democracy instead, in which the mass of the

people can participate directly in the exercise of state power.

In such circumstances, new bodies of working class and popular power are likely to be necessary to monitor or take over state functions. The aim will be to restructure and then replace the administrative and political apparatus with one designed to dismantle capitalism and construct a system that serves the interests of society as a whole.

The essence of socialist revolution is that, working with its allies, the working class takes state power from the capitalist class. While mass extra-parliamentary activity and the election of a left government would represent an important first stage, it is the process that follows that will prove decisive.

The international balance of forces during the struggle for socialism also has to be taken fully into account. It is highly likely that a left government in Britain would face a huge propaganda offensive. There might well be attacks on sterling and on the British government’s ability to borrow in financial markets. The EU Commission, the European Central Bank, the European Court of Justice and the IMF will issue diktats and denunciations. There could be trade embargoes and other measures of destabilisation.

Nonetheless, it is important not to overestimate these dangers.

Policies in the left wing programme aim to reduce vulnerability to outside pressure and sabotage. Taking strategic sectors and enterprises in the British economy into public ownership would bring them under democratic control. Taxing the wealthy and monopoly profits would reduce the need for government borrowing.

Britain should keep out of the euro-zone as public opinion is prepared for confrontations with EU neoliberal policies. Britain’s industrial base must be rebuilt and economic and political relations strengthened with nonimperialist, developing and socialist-orientated countries.

Ultimately, it will be for the working class and its popular anti-monopoly alliance to take the lead in building and defending socialism in Britain. There are many lessons we can learn from previous and existing socialist countries.

But socialism – and the higher stage of communism – will be an expression of the will of the British working class and popular movement.

As Britain’s Road to Socialism puts it: 'We share this Earth in common, we are interdependent, the individual good of the vast majority requires the collective good and cooperation and unity are better than conflict and division.

‘For the sake of humanity, the future is communism’.

Gawain Little is the Communist Party political education secretary and a member of the NUT executive

People with no safe water: 783 million People without adequate sanitation: 2.5 billion Western aid to developing countries: $134 billion Ratio of development aid to debt repayment: 1:25 Sum needed to meet UN Millenium Goals: $189 billion Military spending by US, France and Britain: $837 billion (2011) Cost of bank and financial bailout: $10,000 billion and rising Sources: UN Development Programme, UNESCO,WHO, UNICEF, SIPRI, Pax Christi, IM

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Britain’s road to socialism and working class power The labour movement must lead

by Robert Griffiths Which forces in society can be mobilised to resist the policies of state-monopoly capitalism and fight for progressive change and socialism?

Different groups of people have their own reasons for challenging aspects of today's economic and social system. But their common enemy is state-monopoly capitalism, which exploits workers here and abroad, oppresses large sections of society, strives to roll back democratic rights, blocks progress on every front, generates militarism and war, and now threatens the viability of our planet.

The working class has the most direct interest in overthrowing the system that rules and exploits workers, breeds inequality and insecurity, and which condemns many people to poverty at various stages of life At the core of the working class are those industrial workers who produce commodities directly for capitalist profit.

But public sector workers are exploited too, although their surplus value accrues to the capitalist class as a whole through the state. Self-employed and subcontracted labour also helps provide surplus value for the capitalist class.

Without the labour power supplied by working people in every sector, capitalism would immediately cease to function.

Yet the conditions of capitalist production, trade and administration create the potential for the working class to liberate itself. Through trade unions, in particular, workers can defend their common interests and develop their collective strength as a democratic, disciplined force.

It is very important that trade

Statemonopoly capitalism is the enemy

by John Foster In Britain, every sector of the economy is now dominated by a handful of giant monopoly enterprises.

Monopoly wealth and power controls political debate and corrupts politicians and political parties. It produces massive social inequality and a mass culture that promotes wealth-worship and selfishness.

The most powerful section of the British capitalist class is that organised in the banks and other financial institutions of the City of London.

The big finance monopoly capitalists use their influence to ensure that state power protects and promotes their interests.

The state is a complex of institutions which maintain the conditions in which capitalist exploitation can take place. These include the legal system, the police and intelligence services, the civil service, local government, public services, the monarchy, the Church of England, the BBC and the armed forces, as well as elected parliaments and governments.

Because its main institutions are not privately owned, the state can mistakenly be seen as ‘neutral’.

In reality, state institutions operate and defend capitalism, as they have been designed or modified to do. The power of the state is far more than the power of elected governments.

Moreover, the state and monopoly controlled mass media present capitalism as the most natural, essential and civilised type of society possible.

unionism embraces many more private sector, women, black, young, part-time, casual and immigrant workers, besides establishing itself more widely in small and hi-tech enterprises.

It is in the interest of all workers to prevent super-exploitation of one section of the working class, which is used to undermine terms and conditions for all.

Unions can also seek to represent the wider and more fundamental interests of workers in society. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) and various socialist organisations established the Labour Party at the beginning of the 20th century, not only to represent working class interests in parliament but to strive for a socialist society.

More politically advanced workers founded the Communist Party in 1920 to fight not only for reform, but for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

These organisations, together with the cooperative movement and other bodies built by the working class, comprise the labour movement. Only this movement has the organisational capacity to overcome state-monopoly capitalism, although it must also win allies to develop itself and further tilt the balance of forces in its favour.

However, the predominant politics and ideology of the mass party of the organised working class, the Labour Party, have been those of social democracy. It has sought to manage and reform capitalism, rather than abolish.

Furthermore, Labour's reformist outlook neglects socialist education and sees political campaigning almost entirely in terms of elections.

The ‘New Labour’ faction broke from social democracy altogether after 2001.

It openly represents the interests of monopoly capital and British imperialism.

It champions neoliberal policies and imperialist ‘globalisation’.

Whether the affiliated trade unions and the socialist and social-democratic trends will be sufficiently strong, resolute and united to take back control of the Labour Party from ‘New Labour’ can

only be assessed in the course of a determined struggle to do so.

The working class and peoples of Britain need a mass political party, based on the labour movement, that can win general elections, form a government and implement substantial reforms in their interests.

But this requires the unions themselves to fight both inside and outside the Labour Party for policies that will challenge state-monopoly capitalism.

This would provide the most favourable conditions in which to resolve the crisis of working class electoral representation, with the labour movement either reclaiming the Labour Party or reestablishing its own mass party of labour.

Other forces, whether in left-wing parties or in the Green and Welsh and Scottish national movements also have an important role to play in shifting the political balance of forces to the left.

So, too, do movements fighting oppressions based on gender, race, age and sexual orientation. The selforganisation of women, black people, youth, students and the unemployed must be supported and their needs and aspirations championed by the labour movement.

The peace, anti-war and international solidarity movements uphold a proud record of anti-imperialism in one of the world’s oldest imperialist countries.

Rooted in the working class, but active in all the major movements that bring people into activity against oppression, is Britain’s Communist Party.

Its Marxist-Leninist outlook, creativity, discipline and role as part of the international communist movement enable it exercise influence way beyond its small membership.

History and experience show that a powerful, influential Communist Party is essential if a mass movement for revolutionary change is to succeed.

They equate it with ‘free enterprise’ and the ‘free market’ – ignoring the triumph of monopoly.

They claim that capitalism brings democracy – although democratic rights have never been granted freely by capitalist ruling classes. The history of capitalism has been one of huge struggles to abolish the slave trade, win freedoms of speech and assembly, secure the right to vote, liberate the colonies, achieve trade union rights and so on.

The biggest threat to democratic rights today is capitalism itself.

More precisely it is the way in which the economic power of the monopoly capitalists has fused with the political power of the state, producing ‘state-monopoly capitalism’.

Through a whole series of mechanisms, the monopolists ensure that the state represents their common class interests. These mechanisms include appointments to state and private sector bodies, public-private contracts, selective state intervention in the economy, state subsidies, sponsorship of politicians and political parties, mass media patronage etc.

Many of the people in command of the top monopolies and the state apparatus are drawn from a narrow, wealthy and privileged band of the population in Britain.

How can state-monopoly capitalism be challenged and replaced?

The first step is to understand the role of the capitalist state in Britain today.

Labour governments have never done this.

They have simply assumed that elected governments can improve the lot of working people by using parliamentary means to reform capitalism’s abuses.

The communist approach is quite different.

It argues that socialist change can only be permanently secured by dismantling the capitalist state apparatus and replacing it through the collective power of the working class.

In the meantime, however, more limited

advances can be secured in face of capitalist state power – but on two conditions.

The first is that an elected left-wing government must actively draw on the extraparliamentary force of a mobilised working class to carry forward its democratic mandate.

Only this can begin to counter the concentrated power of capitalist state institutions.

The other condition is that the contradictions within the capitalist state are exploited.

The most fundamental of these is that the modern state no longer represents the capitalist class as a whole, but only the dominant monopoly section.

Super-profit is now increasingly extracted directly through the financial sector.

Investment banks use the savings of working people in retail banks to control and manipulate the productive economy and divert resources into international speculation.

The City of London, where much of the capital is now controlled by US interests, is the world centre for financial gambling, money laundering and tax fraud.

The destructive consequences affect not only working people but also the great mass of small and medium firms.

The interests of the super-rich drive a system that is parasitic, undermines the productive economy and is dangerously dependent on an external imperialist power.

Hence the crucial importance of uniting a much wider alliance around the labour movement, one which can expose the antidemocratic character of state-monopoly capitalism, politically isolate the ruling class and advance an alternative programme for economic regeneration and democratic transformation.

Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party

John Foster is the Communist Party international secretary

Capitalism is bankrupt

by Liz Payne

‘When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why so many people are poor, they call me a communist’.

Archbishop Dom Helder Camara (1909-1999), Recife, Brazil

Capitalism is economically, socially, politically and morally bankrupt. It no longer makes a progressive contribution to human development.

Capitalism’s driving force – that the private owners of industry and commerce must maximise their profits – prevents us from using the Earth’s resources to solve humanity’s fundamental problems.

Billions of people live in poverty, without access to education, medical services and sanitation. While people go hungry and even starve, food mountains are destroyed.

Big business fails to cut carbon emissions, while depleting finite resources and refusing to invest in safe, renewable energy.

Despite every attempt to regulate capitalism, economic crises recur. The drive to maximise market share and profit drives up production – while holding down the ability of workers and their families to buy the products.

Periodically, the result is a glut of unsold products, cuts in investment and production, rising unemployment, still less purchasing power – and a downward spiral into recession and slump. Only when labour is cheaper and production becomes more profitable do the owners of capital invest and expand again.

These cyclical crises are made worse by structural crises, notably in the financial or energy sectors.

The huge creation of commercial, government and household credit delayed the economic downturn for a few years. But, as a result, it tipped the capitalist world into deep recession from 2007.

So far, the governments of the USA, Britain and the European Union have spent or pledged almost £20,000 billion (£20 trillion) of public funds bailing out the financial markets and institutions.

Invested elsewhere, these sums could guarantee food, clean drinking water, education, health care and renewable energy supplies for all the world’s people.

Capitalism generates crises, inequality and poverty because it is based on the exploitation of workers.

Employers purchase labour power as a comodity, because workers create more value than they and their dependants need to consume. Collectively, they add more value to their products than the value of their wages.

This ‘surplus value’ is the source of capitalist profit in the economy as a whole.

Profits will be maximised by driving down real wages, exploiting new sources of cheaper labour and by suppressing trade unionism and employment rights.

More than a century ago, a small number of companies grew to monopolise each major sector of the economy in the advanced capitalist countries. The search for fresh raw materials, cheaper labour and new markets led monopoly capitalists to establish operations outside their own country. Capitalism entered its ‘imperialist’ stage’.

The struggle for ‘spheres of influence’ between monopolies and their respective states led directly to the First World War (1914-18) and laid the basis for the Second World War (1939-45).

The German and Italian monopoly capitalists had turned to fascism to suppress communism and socialism at home and fight for expansion abroad. During the clash between the main imperialist powers, the Soviet Union successfully defended itself and helped the countries of eastern Europe to abolish all forms of capitalism.

Counter-revolution in the socialist countries from 1989 has given monopoly capital and imperialism new opportunities to dominate the world.

Today, transnational corporations (TNCs) account for large proportions of world production, international trade and investment. The vast majority of the top 200 TNCs are based in the US, Britain, Germany, France and Japan.

The struggle for influence and control between rival imperialisms continues. At the same time, they cooperate in the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation to impose their common interests on other peoples and states.

‘Globalisation’ is the drive by imperialism to force economies – especially those in former socialist countries and the Third World – to privatise their public sector, remove labour protection and hand over their markets and natural resources to Western monopoly capital.

The imperialist powers openly use political, economic and – where necessary and possible – military means to enforce their interests. The September 2001 attacks on the US provided the pretext for a bogus ‘war on terror’, allowing seizure of the oil, gas and strategic supply routes of the Greater Middle East.

The EU is developing its military capacity, while NATO has extended its military operations to the borders of Russia and into Afghanistan and the Middle East. People’s China has been ringed with military bases. Yet many millions of people around the world, including in Britain, are learning that capitalism breeds crisis, poverty, social injustice, insecurity, militarism and war.

Inspired by socialist Cuba and revolutionary Venezuela, Latin America has turned left. There and on other continents, mass communist and working class organisations are on the march again.

Our planet and its people cannot afford capitalism. Socialism remains the only alternative.

Liz Payne is the Communist Party women’s organiser

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For 2 an alternative economic and political strategy

by Anita Wright Strikes and demonstrations are a constant feature of capitalist society, but they often proceed in isolation from each other and fail to confront the capitalist system itself. So what is needed to overthrow this system of booms, busts and wars orchestrated by a minority of business barons who steal the wealth produced by the labour of others?

Two fundamental, interlocking elements are needed if state-monopoly capitalism is to be challenged successfully.

First, a coherent alternative economic and political strategy (AEPS) has to be developed that inspires and unites the organised working class and progressive movements.

Second, a popular, democratic antimonopoly alliance of forces has to be built to pursue such a strategy – an alliance that is sustainable and unstoppable.

Progress towards socialism will require the left and the labour movement to work to unite a mass movement, one in which the organised working class would win popular leadership.

Such an alliance must take account of the different conditions in Scotland and Wales. However, as the majority of the capitalist monopolies are owned and controlled at the British level and political power is predominantly exercised through the British state, it is essential to strengthen unity in the labour and progressive movements built up across the three nations of Britain.

That is why the Communist Party supports maximum devolution of

economic and financial powers to the Scottish and Welsh legislatures, so that they can exert popular sovereignty against monopoly capital – while opposing both reactionary separatism and reactionary unionism.

To be effective, the AEPS must have at its heart a left wing programme that promotes the interests of the working class and the majority of ordinary people.

The economic objective must be to protect and improve living standards for working people and their families based on full employment in a modern, productive, balanced and sustainable economy.

The People’s Charter, the Charter for Women, the Countryside Charter and the Charter for Youth all contain policies that set out the first steps in this process. In doing so, they lay the basis for more advanced policies to be developed by a future left-wing government committed to curbing the City of London’s financial domination of the economy.

The financial sector and key industries should be taken into democratic public ownership, imposing controls on the export of capital and ensuring that Britain can pursue its own foreign policy independent from the United States and the European Union.

Together with a more progressive taxation system, notably a Wealth Tax, this would make it possible to fund the massive investment needed in public services, manufacturing and housing, and to develop an integrated, publicly-owned transport system and new and safer forms of energy production.

In order to expand democratic rights and people’s participation in every form of

struggle, all anti-democratic, racist and anti-trade union laws should be repealed and the House of Lords abolished. Local government needs to be reinvigorated and progress made towards a federal republic in Britain, including a parliamentary chamber for England.

The media monopolies that promote racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism and the values of monopoly capitalism should be broken up in favour of wider ownership and participation.

The Morning Star, as the only daily paper of the labour movement and with an editorial policy based on Britain’s Road to Socialism, has an increasingly important role to play in the ‘battle of ideas’ to inform, mobilise and inspire the popular and revolutionary movement.

The election of a left government based on a Labour, socialist, communist and left majority, backed by a popular democratic anti-monopoly alliance and committed to the left wing programme, would mark the opening stage of Britain’s socialist revolution. But it will not be achieved without the working class fully engaging in the electoral struggle.

Winning elections in England, Scotland and Wales will be necessary to ensure that such a left wing programme has the democratic endorsement of the people.

Popular support and participation will be vital when countering attempts by monopoly capitalism and its supporters – within and outside the state apparatus – to challenge and sabotage a left government and its policies.

Anita Wright is a member of the Communist Party executive committee

n New from Manifesto Press housing sector, a new communications infrastructure and new green industries.

The book argues for an alternative economic strategy that breaks political dependence on the US, and diversifies economic relationships, fostering those with emerging BRICS economies and questioning anew our dependence on the European Union, whose ‘social model’ now seems a distant memory.

! g soon Comin blished pu To be ember o in N v 2 201

This book challenges the consensus that has confined political economy to the options that the banks and big business will accept. Based on the policy agenda that Britain’s trade union and labour movement have begun to shape it analyses what is wrong with the British economy, arguing that the country’s productive base is too small, that the economy has become too financialised and that power has become concentrated on a narrow economic fraction based in the City.

It insists on the importance of a strategy that can boost spending power among the British people, begin to narrow the widening inequalities in British society and raise the standard of living and build a new, democratised public realm that insulates people from dependence on volatile financial markets.

Edited by Jonathan White with contributors from Mark Baimbridge, Brian Burkitt, Mary Davis, John Foster Marjorie Mayo, Jonathan Michie, Seumas Milne, Andrew Murray, Roger Seifert, Prem Sikka, Jonathan White and Philip Whyman.

It sets out policies to establish democratic and social control of the City, arguing that regulation is not enough.

Granite and honey The story of Phil Piratin, Communist MP

by Kevin Marsh and Robert Griffiths

The book focuses on how immediate growth and longer-term re-industrialisation might be achieved, arguing that a sociallyowned banking sector can foster the creation of a new, sustainable, social

This pioneering new biography sets the story of Phil Piratin, elected Communist MP for Mile End in the post war general election that returned Labour to power on a reforming manifesto.

n www.manifestopress.org.uk

H

Daily paper of the left £1 daily from your newsagent www.morningstaronline.co.uk

What you can do Now is not the time to sit around and moan about how bad life has become.

Join with others to mount a political fight-back.

Few families beyond the rich have remained immune to unemployment, rising prices and cuts to living standards. The drive to break-up the NHS, education and national pay rates is an attempt to break the gains made by the working class, through struggle, over the last half a century.

Mass demonstrations throughout Britain over recent years illustrate the depth of feeling in every city, town and village. Each of us can contribute to such campaigning, although we are many times stronger when workmates and other activists are involved.

Critically the book tackles the problems that a progressive government would face and argues that an alternative economic strategy must be accompanied by measures to devolve political power and encourage the active participation of the people in exercising control over the actions of big business and finance in Britain.

Building an economy for the people an alternative economic and political strategy for 21st century Britain

Morning Star

The book reflects the commanding role that Piratin played in the 1936 Battle of Cable Street against the fascist Blackshirts and in parliament as the MP who exposed numerous colonial massacres (including the Batang Kali case in Malaya, which is currently before the High Court).

The book contains new material from the papers of Hugh Faulkener, who penetrated the British Union of Fscists and provided Piratin with vital information.

The book provides unequalled coverage of these and other significant episodes in 20th century and labour movement history.

Piratin also tabled a Private Members Bill in the Commons to provide for a universal system of employers’ insurance which subsequently contributed towards major legislative reforms.

Second in a new Manifesto Press series of Labour Lives

H Get involved with your local community, housing, Save The NHS and anti-cuts campaigns and take the message of resistance on to every estate and high street in Britain.

H If there is no local group to join, start one.

H Take part in your union struggle at work and in the community. If you are out of work, join a local unemployed group.

H If no union or group exists, start one.

H Your union branch should affiliate to the local Trades Council – take discussion out of the pub and club and into the community!

H Read the People’s Charter and raise the Six Points wherever you are active.

H If you want that alternative, go for Socialism.

H Start a local or workplace group to study the Communist Party programme, Britain’s Road to Socialism.

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