Greetings to all the comrades and delegates from across Britain attending the 51st Congress of the Young Communist League this weekend at Ruskin House.
The tasks confronting Britain and the world’s communist movement as we meet are as critical as the offensive that is being waged against our class, humanity and the planet. Working people face a concerted assault on our wages and living standards by the ruling class and their government, in conjunction with rank profiteering by the monopolies, banks and energy suppliers.
This is being backed by an all-out assault to shackle and defang the trade union movement – as well as a general attack on hard-won civil liberties and the right to protest.
War is spreading across the planet, from the war in Ukraine to the tragic conflicts unfolding across the Middle-East and Africa. Refugees flee in their millions. The conditions for ‘another Ukraine’ in Taiwan are the latest ugly development in a strategy to create a new cold war against China by the USA, Britain and NATO. The risk of nuclear annihilation is at its highest at any point in living memory.
Britain’s youth are confronted with a grim future: a miserable and precarious existence with the absence of freedom or choice; an increasingly authoritarian state; the relentless scourge of war and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. All the while, the planet burns at an increasing rate, threatening to end the human story on a poisoned world.
But this fate isn’t inevitable. There is always hope in the struggle. Working people are the authors of our own history. Together we can conjure up a will and a force that can save the world and remake it anew.
We know some shiny badges and snappy slogans, grandiose proclamations and fine speeches are not enough to change our world. The billionaires, the monopolists, their subservient politicians, their police and their generals won’t heed your moral exhortations on social media or feel the bite of your witty satire.
For today’s youth, socialism and communism cannot be an online persona or an exercise in pseudo-intellectual one-up-manship. These are days that call for serious action with the utmost urgency and necessity. In 2023, to be a communist is to answer that call to action – for your class, for humanity and for the planet.
This call cannot be answered in words or private personal commitment alone, however sincere. This call to action is not just about having the ‘right’ opinions: it is a duty to be active in you community, campus or workplace, to be part of the Communist Party and the YCL, to help build the broad labour and progressive movement. If you believe that socialism is urgent and necessary for humanity, if you consider yourself a communist, then this duty is on your shoulders.
At all times we must come from and maintain our organic link with the working class. It is our anchor in stormy seas, without which we would be lost. The mass movement required to overcome the power of capitalism and put Britain on the socialist path won’t be constructed by an endless compromise or a mild-mannered politics that is palatable to the ruling class. Nor will it be won by the adventurist actions of small cliques— those purest of the pure, isolated hermits, who are completely alien working people.
This ruling-class offensive, which has in its crosshairs our people and our planet, has to be met with a working-class response more determined, more coordinated and more effective than our generation has ever known. Britain’s Communists are clear on the immediate priorities for our movement.
The wave industrial militancy and the battles of the last year must be supported and broadened in our unions. The fight against stagnant wages offers the labour movement today the chance to restate its relevance to a new generation and build on rising trade union membership and class consciousness across Britain. As part of this strategy, we must redouble our efforts to win the labour movement to a class understanding of the cost of profits crisis. We must galvanise resistance and the strike surge into a movement for trade union freedom to defeat the state’s anti-strike laws and win the repeal of all anti-union legislation.
In addition to the battles for wages themselves, the fight for other real measures to help working people battle spiralling costs for food, energy and essentials remain paramount – and trade unions must place themselves at the centre of this struggle.
Tenants’ unions, which have seen an encouraging resurgence in recent years, must be supported and expanded, uniting tenants against landlordism and in community struggles.
The student movement, for so many decades a source of radical politics and strength, must be rebuilt from the ground up with a class conscious and socialist outlook. The left and the labour movement must articulate an alternative economic strategy more directly, convincingly and forcefully in all spheres.
We cannot allow the prospect of a right-wing Starmer Labour government to placate social democratic elements in the labour movement to undermine rising militancy. We must continue to attack the right wing character of the current Labour leadership.
Internationally, we must redouble our efforts in the struggle for peace, international solidarity and disengagement from NATO efforts to protract the war in Ukraine and to combat the growing new cold war against China. We must rebuild a class conscious, anti-imperialist and genuinely mass peace movement that can bring millions into protest against the bellicose ambitions of the capitalist class.
As well as fighting for the immediate interests of our class, in the moment of the present, we must also represent and look to the future. All of these developments and all of these struggles decisively demonstrate the essential need for a stronger and more vigorous Communist Party and YCL. History tells us that a strong communist movement is essential if we are to free our class from the endless wheel of reformism, break with the capitalist system and win working-class state power.
Strengthening, rebuilding and reinvigorating Britain’s Communist Party and YCL on every front are therefore among our chief tasks and will be of the greatest service to Britain’s working class and labour movement.
These then are the tasks that fall to the comrades meeting for our congress this weekend.This is a difficult mission to be sure, but these are tasks which we will meet with a determination and a will to win that is greater still.
Good luck to the comrades and delegates of the 51st congress of the Young Communist League of Britain. Let us move forward together comrades, to blaze the next chapter – for peace, democracy and socialism in our lifetimes.
Long live the Communist Party and the Young Communist League!
Johnnie Hunter is the General Secretary of the Young Communist League
