“Capitalism has to be destroyed”

“In the context of deepening economic crisis, environmental destruction, and an escalating series of wars waged by countries who possess the power to wipe out humanity several times over, capitalism has to be destroyed.”

Thomas Vincent, a representative from the Revolutionary Communist Group is explaining one of their core policies. On a day-to-day basis they work towards the ultimate goal of destroying capitalism and fundamentally changing our society. They are communists, in Britain, in 2011.

Over the past few years, a right-wing wave has swept over Europe. And not just within the hallowed halls of great power. Everywhere, extreme right-wing groups are crawling out from the fringes and edging in towards the mainstream.

Just look to the Netherlands, where charmer Geert Wilders and his somewhat ironically named Party for Freedom now make up the country’s third biggest party. Their policies include ethnic registration and introducing a ban on headscarves. Equally popular is Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France. Even good old social democratic Sweden can shock the outside world when the far-right-wing Sweden Democrats currently hold 20 seats in parliament.

This phenomenon will be all too familiar to people in the UK. Nick Griffin and his British National Party managed to secure over 500,000 votes in last year’s general election, proving that the far right is very much alive and kicking.

In light of this, it is easy to forget that another end of the political spectrum even exists, let alone that there are people who are dedicated enough to follow and fight for an ideology generally assumed to have collapsed with the Berlin Wall. Yet, in Britain alone, there are currently over 20 active groups and parties flying the colours of communism and radical socialism, and they fully believe that our society is in need of a full transformation, and fast. Though it has to be said that many of these groups are too small to be considered a real contender on the political scene, there were a number of them who stood for the past general election and managed, if nothing else, to drum up some support in what was generally considered a bad year for the left. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition got some 12,000 votes, while the Socialist Labour Party scraped just over 7,000. Also in the running was the Communist Party of Britain (not to be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain. Or the Communist Party of Britain Marxists-Leninist. Or the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxists-Leninist). In the end, they only managed to secure 947 votes, but General Secretary Robert Griffith has an explanation:
“The power of decades of state and big business anti-communist mass propaganda, combined with an unequal electoral system, make it much harder for us to win votes in parliamentary elections – although we find a lot of agreement for many of our policies on the doorstep and at hustings meetings.”

The fact of the matter is that communism as a mass movement has never really kicked off in the UK. Support peaked in the late 40s, with membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain reaching around 60,000. They even secured two parliamentary seats in the 1945 elections. However, compared to their counterparts in other European countries, this feat seems less impressive. The French Communist party had over 300,000 members at the time, while the Italians could boast some 1.7 million members. The prominence of the party continued to decline over the rest of the century, and it eventually split into several smaller factions.

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR in record time transformed communism from a genuine political threat to a harmless radical ideology on the fringes of the political spectrum. Pictures of ecstatic East Germans physically dismantling the Berlin Wall brick by brick, and finally pouring into the promised land of capitalism by the thousands were broadcast into every home. It seemed like the final blow; one last humiliation to a system everybody but those in charge of it knew was bound to fail. It was what prompted prominent political scholar Francis Fukuyama to announce the end of history. He argued that so far, history had been about different political systems fighting each other. Now that the one main contenter to the liberal democracy had been eliminated, one must infer that that is the one superior system.

And it does seem that the world has never looked back. There are now 82 liberal democracies in the world, built on the foundations of capitalism, and this number is only on the rise. When it comes to communist states, the story is a little different. At present, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Laos and Cuba are the only members of this very exclusive club. Even then, China’s slow but certain move away from the economic stylings of communism to reap the benefits of having cheap and plentiful labour on the international market demonstrate that it is increasingly becoming communist only in name.

It seems like the general consensus is that the system is dated and not fit for running a modern state. Griffiths, on the other hand, sees it from a different perspective.

“It took capitalism three hundred years to establish itself as the overwhelmingly predominant system in the world,” he argues. “The first efforts to build a modern alternative to it began less than one hundred years ago, in conditions of world war, enormous destruction and the hostility of wealthier capitalist powers armed to the teeth.”

Despite these conditions and their initially low levels of development, he says these states made “enormous economic, social and cultural advances for their own peoples while helping national liberation movements around the world.”

Vincent on the other hand disputes the very notion that capitalism is a superior system. Superior for who, he asks?

“It may be the ‘superior’ system for the bankers and their chums, but it’s not for the majority of us. The major capitalist countries exploit and oppress on an international scale. People can’t go on like this, and the achievements of socialist revolutions past and present demonstrate that another way is possible, not just in theory but in practice. Communism means working class and oppressed people organising to take control of their destiny.”

This message is echoed by the majority of the British far-left groups. The exact manifesto wording differs, and they propose different ways of reaching their aims, but the ultimate goal is the same nonetheless; a radical change in the very construction of our society. These groups might be small in numbers, but as far as power of ideas goes, they are real heavyweights.

Take the Communist Party, for instance. They back a planned economy, with increased levels of nationalization and state ownership of industry and production. Griffiths fully believes this can be achieved. even in today’s Britian, where the idea of capitalism seems to be firmly entrenched in the national consciousness.

“Public ownership of key sectors of the economy, and the planned use of our industrial, labour, energy and material resources is not only feasible – it is essential if we are to provide full employment, decent living standards and high quality public services for all, while also rescuing the planet’s eco-system from capitalist ruination,” says Griffiths.

The Revolutionary Communist Group take it a step further, explicitly calling for the destruction of capitalism as a system. Vincent explains that they don’t only see this as feasible, but indeed inevitable. “When people are pushed beyond a certain point, they are forced to organise and fight back, not because communists or anyone else persuade them to, but because they are left with no other choice. We have seen this in Britain before, in the unemployed workers movement in the 1920s and 1930s, in the miners strike of 1984/85, in the movement against Thatcher’s Poll Tax, and in many many other struggles. We are seeing it today on the streets of Greece and Spain.”

Fringe parties are known for their controversial and often polarizing policies; it’s why they’re on the fringes. Where the far right often preach discrimination and even outright racism, sexism and homophobia, the biggest criticism leveled against the far left is their continued support of regimes generally recognized to be brutal and oppressive.

In their manifesto, Britain’s Road to Socialism, Griffith’s Communist Party state that the Soviet Union made a tremendous impact on the struggle for freedom against imperialism across the world, “rendering invaluable aid to the national liberation and anti-apartheid movements.” They also praise the USSR for saving the whole of humanity from “unprecedented tyranny”, by playing a vital part in defeating fascism in the Second World War.
“Serious mistakes were made and crimes committed in the name of communism, when attempting to build the first socialist societies,” Griffiths admits. He argues that this stems from trying, in only 20 years, to achieve scientific base, industrialisation, universal health and education services, social peace – a process most capitalist countries spent over 100 years on.

“They did remarkably well under the circumstances. Soviet industrialisation made possible the defeat of four-fifths of Hitler’s forces by the Red Army, saving Europe from decades of Nazi barbarism.”
Both groups have forged connections to parties in the few current communist states. The Communist Party has fraternal relationships with Cuban, Vitenamese and Chinese communist parties. The RCG have pledged to “fight actively in defense of the Cuban revolution.

“Socialist Cuba was recently ranked first among ‘developing’ countries in the UN Human Development Index,” Vincent tells us, “and has been assessed by the World Wildlife Fund as the only society which both meets the needs of its population, and does so in a sustainable way.”

He argues that in Cuba, socialism has guaranteed rights to education, healthcare and housing, while operating under the most extensive economic blockade in history, which has caused shortages and raised the prices of many vital imports.

“There has always been a barrage of propaganda against socialist countries from the capitalist media, often making hypocritical claims about ‘human rights’ and portraying people in prison for criminal convictions as ‘civil society activists’. In reality the only political prisoners in Cuba are in the area occupied by the United States at Guantanamo Bay.”

Despite these somewhat extreme views, recent developments have pushed sections of the far left into the mainstream. The response to the public sector cuts implemented by the new government has been a noticeable spike in direct action from regular citizens. Of course, direct action is not a unique feature of the left, but several of these groups have gone out and publicly lent their support to the various anti-cuts movements. Recently, the Communist Party has called for their members to support the upcoming June 30th strike. Previously, the likes of the Socialist Workers Party had a strong presence at the massive March for the Alternative. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition councillors pledged this year to oppose all cuts to council jobs, services, pay and conditions, stating that “when faced with government cuts to council funding, councils should refuse to implement the cuts.”

And then there is of course the national student demo. The York Socialists, an umbrella group for different left-wing organizations at the university, were heavily involved in the fight against the fees increase.
“We were involved from the beginning in the York Students Against Cuts group, building for Demolition and the education marches in town and joining the sit-in,” says Secretary Raoul Lundberg. “It’s the institutional memory of socialist groups who’ve been contesting fees and commodification in higher education for decades.”
He believes that socialism is still more than relevant to the students of today: “I think its the combination of open critical discussion and activism working to build alliances to contest the structural bases of things, with a changed world as your horizon rather than personal or tribal political success, that makes our politics more meaningful and effective. That’s open to modern students and everyone else.”

Although they are experiencing more of a prominent role in the media at the moment, both Vincent and Griffiths believe there are still many misconceptions about what it means to be a communist in our day and age.

Vincent says that the biggest misconception is that communists have a blueprint for society, with a predetermined and thought-out paradise that they want to win people over to. “We’re not interested in a utopia, we’re interested in concrete improvements in the lives of real human beings.”

Griffiths, on the other hand, believes people have forgotten that communism at its core represents a world view and a view of humanity that is fundamentally more optimistic than what capitalism has to offer. Reactionary ideologies, in which he includes capitalism, tell us every day that human beings are greedy, selfish and utterly self-centred, and that these are the predominant characteristics of ‘human nature’.

“Almost everyone agrees with this pessimistic, defeatist view of human beings in general – but I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks it applies to themself! Capitalism excuses, praises, exaggerates, rewards or seeks to profit from almost every negative type of human attitude and behaviour.

“When true to itself, socialism and communism combat those negative traits and believe that a type of society is possible that would be based on everything that is best in humanity. ”