[LAF] {Disarmed} Fw: [national-cmp] Demo at TUC

Tue Sep 16 09:03:35 UTC 2008

I have been asked to forward the information below re a demo at the TUC   Congress House   on 28th Oct 

 it seem a bit confusing presumably because of copy and pasteing ( I hope the final version will be in paragraphs)  its supposed I think to be the draft of a leaflet,  to be handed out 

It seems to me to be worth going to  if possible.  I will  see if there is some more information  I can get hol;d of 

Meanwhile if you agree its a worthwhile demo please circulate
Thanks

Ed

Ed McArthur   07981  900  563

www.eventsandissues.bravehost.com

--- On Mon, 9/15/08, Terry Liddle <tliddle at freeuk.com> wrote:

From: Terry Liddle <tliddle at freeuk.com>
Subject: Fw: [national-cmp] Demo at TUC
To: "EDMUND MCARTHUR" <antines at yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Monday, September 15, 2008, 8:29 PM

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: GERALD DOWNING 
To: national-cmp at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 7:49 AM
Subject: Re: [national-cmp] Demo at TUC

Hi Terry,
Yes the Demo should start at 6pm at TUC's Congress Centre, Congress House, 23-28 Great Russell Street, London WC1 on 28 Octobre. Below is the text of the draft TT leaflet.
Gerry
No to Stalinist Lies about the Spanish Socialist Revolution!
Delores Ibárruri was a Counter
 revolutionary Murderer!
Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom showed a huge audience of youth and workers the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War. But today Philosophy Football wants to ‘celebrate’ Delores Ibárruri’s vacuous and demagogic speech defending Stalinism’s appalling record on the Popular Front of seventy years ago (1 Nov. 1938). Here she defended the Stalinist two stage theory of revolution where it was proposed that the main task was to defend bourgeois democracy and the working class had to wait for socialism until ‘democracy’ was restored. When they would not they had to be shot to maintain the Popular Front. It all came down to appeasing Hitler – less than ten months after the speech Molotov signed his pact with Ribbentrop. And today a broad array of radical artists and trade union ‘left’ bureaucrats are seeking to burnish their leftism by association with a supposedly revolutionary or at least a very radical leftist
 individual. 
Who was Delores Ibárruri?
Dolores Ibárruri was a revolutionary fighter politically corrupted by the counter-revolutionary politics of Stalinism to betray her class. She described the fighting in the streets of Barcelona in May 1937 as a ‘fascist anarchotrotskyist putsch’. This word had the advantage that it labelled all revolutionary opponents of the bourgeoisie in Spain as agents of Franco. She was the public face of Stalinism whose NKVD agents hunted down and executed thousands of revolutionary fighters from the United Marxist Workers Party (POUM), National Confederation of Workers (CNT) and the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) on the basis that if you did not support bourgeois parliamentarianism you were a fascist. By armed insurrection the Spanish workers had seized the factories, collectivised the land and set up their own popular committees which ruled the local areas; this was actual workers’ rule which only lacked a workers’ state or a revolutionary junta to
 organise it in the parts of Spain where they had thwarted Franco’s coup. There are no words for this other than the socialist revolution. The tasks that Ibárruri’s Stalinists set themselves were firstly, to prevent this revolution from seizing state power, secondly, to reverse its gains in order to cement an alliance with Britain and France, and thirdly, when this failed, to neutralise the threat from Hitler by signing a pact with him in which they naively placed their full confidence.
Kidnapping and Execution of the POUM Leader Andres Nin
The Stalinist General Alexander Orlov used his NKVD agents to deal with left-wing opponents of the Communists in Republican held areas. This included the arrest and execution of leaders of the POUM, CNT and FAI. He was responsible for fabricating the evidence which led to the arrest and purge of the leaders of the POUM, many of whom vanished. The evidence also suggests he directed the kidnapping and execution of the POUM leader Andrés Nin on 20 June 1937. In a report to his superiors in Moscow, dated August 1937, Orlov outlined his plan for the capture and liquidation of the Austrian Socialist Kurt Landau. His deputy, Stanislav Vaupshasov, managed the construction of a crematorium for the untraceable disposal of enemies. Erwin Wolf, Trotsky's former secretary, and Mark Rein, son of a Menshevik leader, disappeared in Spain, the victims of Orlov's terror. The Soviet Union were the main suppliers of military aid to the Republican Army. This included 1,000
 aircraft, 900 tanks, 1,500 artillery pieces, 300 armoured cars, 15,000 machine-guns, 30,000 automatic firearms, 30,000 mortars, 500,000 riles and 30,000 tons of ammunition. The USSR took Spain’s gold reserves; the world's fourth largest, in payment for its ‘assistance’ (from  Issue 84 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Autumn 1999 Copyright © International Socialism).

The Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov declared in autumn 1939: “During the last few months such concepts as 'aggression' and 'aggressor' have acquired a new concrete content, have taken on another meaning...Now...it is Germany that is striving for a quick end to the war, for peace, while England and France, who only yesterday were campaigning against aggression, are for continuation of the war and against concluding a peace. Roles, as you see, change...The ideology of Hitlerism, like any other ideological system, can be accepted or rejected - that is a matter of one's political views. But everyone can see that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force...Thus it is not only senseless, it is criminal to wage such a war as a war for 'the destruction of Hitlerism,' under the false flag of a struggle for democracy.”
Why the Truth Matters           ...
Surely it does not matter today who did what in Spain so long ago? The International Brigaders were brave fighters even if they did not understand anything about socialist revolution and believed everything they were told by Stalin’s professional liars. But it is only on the basis of the truth that we can even begin to fight anew for the socialist revolution and communist future. In truth neither the POUM nor the CNT/FAI leaders provided any revolutionary alternative to Stalinism, and ultimately betrayed the revolution themselves. They had entered the anti-working class Popular Front Catalan Generalidad government and refused to support the Barcelona working class in the terrible May Days of 1937 when the revolution was bloodily suppressed by the Stalinists and right Socialists. However they had the overwhelming bulk of the best revolutionists in their ranks, the left Socialists followers of Largo Caballero had many also but the right Socialist of
 Indalecio Prieto and Ibárruri’s Stalinists had none and stood to the right of all the working class forces in Spain at the time. The bourgeoisie themselves had almost no support in these revolutionary times. And Ibárruri’s rehabilitation is supported by leading trade union bureaucrats; ‘TUC Deputy General Secretary Frances O'Grady...the TUC and Unison’ and supported by the Stalinist-led International Brigades. Why do they want to sanitise the bloody counterrevolutionary history of Stalinism in Spain? 
Of course it is to defend their own record in dealing with the British working class and to insist that there is no alternative to this class collaboration. So the history of the most class conscious, revolutionary socialist era in the history of the world working class, the revolutionary offensive of the Spanish workers from 1936-39, must be falsified and denigrated and its champions, from the best to the very inadequate ones, libelled as fascists to deny all workers the aspiration of a socialist future. They will not succeed!  They are allowing Gordon Brown to destroy the welfare state, they acquiesce in the foul anti-immigrant campaigns of the governments which is assisting the rise of the fascists of the BNP and they are clearly announcing that when revolutionary struggles break out in Britain they will seek to compromise these to defeat in order to defend capitalism and maintain their privileges within the system, just as they betray all serious
 struggles for even partial gains by the working class today. They know the truth of Spain but they do not want the working class to know it lest they seek an alternative revolutionary socialist leadership. We will fight to let the working class know the truth.
All serious revolutionary socialists and anarchists should cooperate in fighting these falsifications and in fighting the betrayals of the trade union bureaucrats and Labour leaders, both right and left. We should unite to defeat these bureaucratic misleaders of the workers movement and their apologists in the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party who have collapsed so ignominiously to them in the Executive of the PCS, Unite and elsewhere. We can win the National Shop Stewards Network to become a real workers’ fighting organisation, we can defend the immigrant workers and raise demands that no trade union members collaborate in victimisation and deportation of immigrant workers and begin the construction of revolutionary socialist leadership for the working class.

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