Birmingham Council cuts

Birmingham Council in economic crisis 

Birmingham City Council is in a deep economic crisis and is seeking to heap this onto the backs of workers whilst cutting services provided for public health, including those which keep our streets clean and free of disease.

Birmingham City Council was once the single biggest local authority in Europe, but a workforce of 20,000 has been slashed in half and the plans which are being implemented by Labour Councillors seek to reduce this number to 7,000 by 2018. They blame it on the Tories but they ALL play the same game, its called capitalism, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

And the Birmingham anti-cuts movement does very little about it. Headed by Labourites and Trots they’re too busy infiltrating Momentum or sitting on various committees of one form or another. They particularly love talking to one another at the Trades Council. And the Communist Party of Britain doesn’t have time to organise public opinion or workers against the cuts, they have a grand election campaign to run for Mayor of the West Midlands. Despite its small size, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) in Birmingham is the only political organisation which can be seen three or four times a week in various parts of the town undertaking political work amongst the working class. If you want to get involved email birmingham@cpgb-ml.org

Bin men under attack – again

Refuse workers are vital to society; they do a job most people don’t want to do. Just because they work with rubbish they shouldn’t be treated like rubbish. In meetings held in March with Council refuse workers it was announced that Bin men are expected to take a £3,000 per annum pay cut and work an increase from four to five working days a week. Crews on wagons are to be reduced, as is the ratio of leading hands which risks putting the public at risk from fatal collisions on busy streets. This news has not gone down well with all the yards in Birmingham, and the more class conscious workers will be calling on workers to strike at the mass meeting in April.

Bin men and others who turn out on strike will need to come out determined to win. The bin men must be urged to find creative ways to ensure lorries do not leave depots, that tyres are bereft of air, that wagons have ignitions but no keys, that entrances and exits are barricades and scabs run a gauntlet from the Agency office to the depot. The public can help! Any wagon that makes it out must be prevented from completing its work and pressure must be piled upon the Council from the rate payers, who can take their rubbish and heap it upon the steps of the Council House for Labour Party leader Clancy and his gang to clean up, better still take the rubbish to the neighbourhood offices of the local Labour Party.

The movement against cuts

Too many people in this country are waiting for all the cuts to magically come to an end and a return to things as they were but capitalism is in systemic crisis no recovery is possible.

Whether it’s in relation to the privatisation of the NHS, an end to foreign wars of aggression or the seven year long freeze on public sector pay it’s time for British workers to draw a few simple conclusions from all too apparent observations:

Labour or Tory – it’s the same old story

Capitalism means crisis, racism and war

Its class against class – fight for socialism!

Basics of Political Economy – A talk by Harpal Brar, Birmingham 1996

Red Youth reproduce on Proletarian Radio this short but informative talk given by comrade Harpal Brar at a meeting of British workers and communists in 1996 on the topic of political economy. We do so to aid the study of political economy which is ongoing around the country in red youth and CPGB-ML study groups at the moment.

The crises of 1997 and 2001 brought untold misery to millions of people who suffer in the ‘real’ capitalist economy – the economy of factory closures, foreclosed mortgages and pension fund losses. There is no doubt that the present crisis is the most acute and destructive in the history of capitalism.

One need but consider the fate of young working-class couples who have just scrambled onto the bottom rung of the housing ladder, only to have their feet kicked out from under them by negative equity. Or consider those workers who have seen their final salary pensions melt before their eyes, after the two previous outbreaks of market turmoil convinced the bourgeoisie that this was yet another aspect of ‘welfare capitalism’ that needed ditching in the battle to protect their profits.

If capitalism cannot resurrect demand through building the debt mountain higher, it must instead try to tackle the other end of the overproduction crisis: it must trash the very productive forces it has brought into being in the first place, thus revealing itself as the real enemy of all social progress.

However, making people homeless, stealing their jobs, robbing their pensions and imposing below-inflation wage deals, whilst perhaps saving the bourgeois hide for a while, can in the long run only stoke up yet worse crises of overproduction, as effective demand is further undermined by the further impoverishment of the masses.

Whether the lords of high finance can postpone for a few more years the decisive crash of the world financial system is beyond scientific prediction. What is clear however is that every ‘smart’ move capitalism makes to save itself from its own insoluble contradictions only succeeds in further tightening the noose of history around its throat.

Even in the midst of the miseries such crises inflict, let the proletariat rejoice in this knowledge and organise to overthrow this decadent, parasitic system once and for all!

Successful pickets of RBS and NatWest

Comrades from Red Youth helped to organise CPGB-ML pickets in London and Birmingham yesterday in protest of attempts by NatWest bank to shut the account of broadcaster Russia Today. Such a move is not only a serious infringement on the limited press freedoms which exist in bourgeois society, it is also part and parcel of the propaganda war being waged against Russia in preparation of further armed conflict.

The wars that have been waged around the world by British and US imperialism are not justifable wars – they are wars for domination, for profit, and for oil. The growing popularity of RT poses a threat to the continued campaign to paint Russia as a threat to peace. The BBC and the corporate media are constantly attempting to prepare British people for a military confrontation with Russia, which would be catastrophic for British workers. We must not allow such blatant bias and propaganda to go unchallenged, and we must fight the interference of NatWest in the affairs of Russia Today which operates legally and fairly in the UK.

Stalin and the USSR – myth and reality

“We have faced almost a century of all-out ideological war from the bourgeois camp and their petty-bourgeois agents. they are determined to neuter the revolutionary potential of the working-class, to erase the achievements of the people struggling and working for the benefit of the majority, and to obfuscate the path to socialism.”

Britain’s Road to Revisionism

Below we publish a letter from a young comrade who had the opportunity to witness revisionism in action, as Rob Griffiths of the Communist Party of Britain was invited to speak at his school.

While it is disappointing that such a rank opportunist and arch revisionist was given the opportunity to speak, it is not surprising given that the decaying husk of the CPB simultaneously presents itself as the revolutionary party of the working class while also being devoid of any revolutionary content, effectively serving the ruling class.

Bob Griffiths misleading the youth of Britain about what communism means