Neo-Stalinism

Dear Comrade Editor Your piece CPB Votes for Backlash, which asserts among other things “the party’s (the Communist Party of Britain) years-long habit of supporting anti-trans-rights arguments and campaigns” and this is a “shameful attack on trans rights”, really is a disgraceful smear and the opposite of the truth. The Communist Party and the socialist daily Morning Star (which is not “controlled” by the CPB) have consistently demanded for all oppressed sections and groups in society, whether on the basis of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, culture, immigration status, language...

In percentage terms, Scottish Labour romped home to victory in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election on 5 October 2023. Labour won the seat with nearly 60% of the vote (compared with 34% of the vote in the 2019 general election). The SNP’s share of the vote slumped from 44% in 2019 to 28%. The overall swing from SNP to Labour was just over 20%. If the result were repeated across Scotland in a general election – although it certainly will not be – Labour would win 42 seats and the SNP would hold on to just six seats. Even so, the result strengthens the more realistic prospect of Labour...

How to Tankie — The Anti-Imperialist’s Guide to the Modern World is a small handbook (“this might be considered a work of satire”) of the responses used by “tankies” against those of us who “think that a Russian tank where it isn’t invited is as bad as an American one where it also isn’t invited.” A “tankie”, it explains, “used to be someone who followed the official Communist Party line in all things, most particularly when the Kremlin sent in the tanks”. By extension, it describes those today who think of themselves as left-wing but back Putin over Ukraine, Xi Jinping over Hong Kong and the...

"Victory to Ukraine!" — flyer to be distributed at Stop the War's demonstration, 25 February 2023. Download here Text of flyer below. Vladimir Putin’s imperialist Russian state is renewing its offensive against Ukraine, ramping up its war right across the Donbas front, using tens of thousands of newly-mobilised conscripts. Putin has no intention of stopping his war any time soon. Stop the War (StW) campaigns for the Western states to stop sending arms to Ukraine and for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations. The StW call to end arms shipments to Ukraine, if carried through by the West...

This year I attended the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival in Dorset for the very first time. It was on the bucket list for a Canadian friend and as I’d never been before, I thought — why not? For those who’ve never heard of it, the festival is an annual event held to mark the repression suffered by pioneering British trade unionists in the nineteenth century. The sleepy village of Tolpuddle has a little museum and a few small businesses that trade off its legacy, for example The Martyrs’ Inn. This was the first year since 2019 that the festival could go ahead in person. The Tolpuddle festival is no...

The Young Communist League (YCL) turned out in some numbers for the TUC’s “cost of living” demo on 18 June, all dressed up in black with oh-so-”militant” red bandanas and flags. This kind of posing has become standard practice for the YCL, but their chants were new: “One solution, revolution!” and “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! Che Guevara! Stalin!” These slogans were obviously intended to (1) promote the YCL’s self-image as ever-so-left-wing r-r-evolutionaries; (2) annoy the hated “Trots”; (3) direct a metaphorical two fingers at the adult Communist Party of Britain, whose contingent on the demo was...

Steve Sweeney, international editor of the Morning Star, has written to us: “An article written by Jim Denham in the 15/6/2022 issue of Solidarity... states that I have ‘publicly backed the Russian invasion’. I would be grateful if you could point to where I have done so...” As Solidarity has said, this based itself on Sweeney being a platform speaker (in a personal capacity) at the “Victory Day” meeting held in May by George Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain (WPB), at the Venezuelan Embassy’s meeting hall. Sweeney didn’t say “I back the Russian invasion” at that meeting, so we withdraw...

Socialist Action, a small but occasionally influential British group, has Trotskyist origins – but its politics are now flatly Stalinist. It specialises in long-winded and theoretically pretentious praise for China’s economic system and policies. Periodically SA spews out something denying and / or justifying the Chinese state’s genocidal oppression of the Uyghur people. In August 2020, after they enthusiastically cited and republished the Stalinist-cum-conspiracy-theorist Max Blumenthal, we published this exposing their incoherence and dishonesty on the Uyghurs. I recommend reading it...

The Young Communist League (YCL), youth wing of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), has grown quite a bit in the last few years. It has attracted some attention on the left because of that, but also because of its increasingly disturbing political character. At the end of August a young woman who had resigned from the YCL posted this video on YouTube. In it she reports that the organisation has come to be dominated by a grouping called Redtek, with unpleasant consequences for the democracy of the organisation and for women members specifically. Redtek is a new mutation of the group Red...