23 IMCWP - IZMIR TURKEY 20-22 October 2023

STATEMENT OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF BRITAIN

The Communist Party of Britain welcomes this 23rd international meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in Izmir. We salute and thank our hosts, the Communist Party of Turkey. We pledge our solidarity with the TKP in its struggle for a secular, independent and socialist working people’s republic in Turkey. 

From our standpoint, as communists working in the world's oldest bourgeois democracy, we see a world in transition. 

The gross domestic production of the BRICS has now surpassed that of the G7. Time will tell whether the progress of an enlarged BRICS can be maintained and how its contradictions with the imperialist bloc will work out. While the economies of the major capitalist powers stagnate, there is growth in the BRICS economies as a debt-driven financial crisis threatens the post-Covid recovery of the major G7 powers. 

For communists working in the imperialist heartlands, solidarity with nations working to break free of imperialist domination is a foundation of our politics. This is why we work to achieve the greatest unity around concrete solidarity actions without losing sight of the historical truth that the class struggle persists so long as capitalist relations of production and private ownership exist.

We acknowledge the class character of many of the regimes who find the BRICS a useful instrument. These are contradictory processes and the outcome depends on the interplay of class forces at both the domestic level and globally. 

The appropriation of surplus value by a class of owners inevitably engenders class struggle and it is not possible to either legislate or imagine this out of existence or to imagine that conflict with imperialism renders class struggle redundant. 

The rapid increase in China’s economic and technological growth and rise in global influence poses a serious threat to US global hegemony and the dominance of the Western imperialist system since the 1990s. We count this as a decisive factor in complicating the drive by the main imperialist powers – including Britain – to decisively shape the global situation. 

Our party works constantly to explain how collective ownership, state direction of the economy, collective control and ownership of the banking system and direct investment in the productive economy are universal principles that can only be guaranteed in a system where public ownership predominates and the state is a reliable instrument of the working class constituted as the ruling class. 

We do so from our understanding, deepend by the tumultuous course of class struggle in our own country where a massive strike movement followed the political defeat of a left wing challenge within the Labour Party.

Our social democratic formation is unusual in that the trade unions exercise real if limited power within the party structures. A limited breakthrough - with the election of a firm internationalist, anti-imperialist and anti war Labour Party leader - unleashed a powerful counter attack by the ruling class, the capitalist state, domestic and foreign intelligence organisations including those of the US and Israel and what we describe as the personification of capital within the labour movement whose main instruments are a majority in the parliamentary Labour Party and decades old domination of the party apparatus.

We are under no illusions that a Corbyn led government would have survived an attack by the forces which when confronted with the prospect of a left-led Labour government, did everything to defeat it. 

Our approach is to rally workers in struggle, build the widest class and left wing unity, fight on every front to advance the struggles of the working class and draw lessons from every victory and especially every defeat.

The City of London,which has both domestic and global features, is where the global bourgeoisie does much of its business. Yet such is the depth of the capitalist crisis that wide sections of our working people are experiencing direct attacks on their living standards, wages, pensions, benefits and savings. 

This is exceptionally fertile ground for the work of our party and we count the growth of our party and especially the Young Communist League as a real advance.

We are realistic that our party’s modest resources are not yet decisive in the politics of our nation but we are confident that in the working class movement the values and ideology of our party command respect and support as does the our daily newspaper the Morning Star which is universally seen as both the newspaper of the labour movement and the left as well as the voice of the communists. 

Since the dissolution of socialist relations of production in the former USSR and Europe the global balance of power has not favoured the world's working class, the millions existing in pre-capitalist or unevenly developed capitalist relations of production and has thrown great burdens on the countries that aspire to build socialism. 

Communists operate in vastly different conditions, some clandestinely, some in bourgeois democracies, many in countries where the battle to fully establish socialist relations of production proceeds in conditions characterised by a substantial engagement with foreign capital and where there are constantly evolving contradictions between the need to fully appropriate the social product. and the obligations arising from integration in the global capitalist economy.

The position of women in the capitalist world is bleak. In terms of pay gaps, lack of opportunities in education, lack of health care and social needs provision, as well as rising levels of sex-based violence, women’s experiences are grim. Even in countries that have managed to overthrow the system which oppresses women and are trying to build a socialist, sustainable future,  historically embedded patriarchy still has to be tackled.

UN Women, the entity working for women’s equality and empowerment, in their Snapshot Report this year, estimates that, without substantial global funding, sex equality worldwide will not be achievable by 2030 and more than 340 million women and girls (8% of the world’s female population) will be living in extreme poverty. 

Countries which are pursuing a socialist path must do more to lead the way for women’s equality.  Listen to women, hear their concerns and bring them into decision making at every level so that patriarchal attitudes from a reactionary past can be ended and women valued for their contributions to a progressive future.

Comrades, the 22^nd meeting in Havana reaffirmed the importance of the unity of the Communist and Workers Movement to the struggle against the capitalism system of exploitation. Today, Communist unity is an absolute imperative at a time when world peace is under immediate threat from economic, military, and political tensions arising from the situation in Ukraine, notably the intervention of US led imperialist forces seeking to escalate, prolong and widen the conflict.

Long live our Communist unity for Peace and Socialism 

Long live the international unity of Communist and Workers Parties