Speech by Andy Brooks, general secretary of the New Communist Party of
Britain to the 12th National Congress of the NCPB on the 27th of
November 1999.

Comrade Chair, Comrades, Honoured Guests and Friends,

Comrades,

We are here at the brightest spot in our Party calendar -- the
Congress which will chart the Party's policies into the next century.
We have a draft resolution which reflects the experience and thinking
of the Central Committee, we have a large number of resolutions and
amendments which reflect the discussion that has gone on throughout
the Party in the run-up to Congress. We will leave this hall tomorrow
with a document which reflects the collective will of the entire
Party.

This is our 12th Congress and the 22nd year of our existence. We have
a record to be proud of. By our words and deeds we have kept the
communist ideal alive through thick and thin. We fight for union
rights, for the unity of the working-class movement.

We fight for peace, not the imperialist peace of the grave, but peace
and justice, because without justice there cannot be peace. -- in
Ireland divided by British imperialism we call for the end of
partition and the re-unification of the country. In the Middle East we
call for justice for the Palestinians -- which means the restoration
of their legitimate right to return to their homes and their
legitimate right to have their own independent Arab state. We fought
to stop the war in the Balkans. We fight for an end to the bombing of
Iraq and an end to the cruel blockade which has claimed a million
innocent Iraqi lives. We will continue to fight to make peace the
issue throughout the labour movement.

We understand the necessity as well as the inevitability of change. We
fight for revolutionary change. We fight to build the vanguard party.

Now it is a simple fact that the entire wealth of the world is
ultimately generated from those who work the fields and those who work
in the factories and at the point of production. They also constitute
the vast majority of the people of this planet. It is an equally
simple fact, though one still to be grasped by millions of the
oppressed, that the vast majority of people who work receive only a
pitiful fraction of the fruits of their labour. The exploiters take
the rest to guarantee their worthless lives of ease and splendour.

The communist movement is open to all classes and strata of society
and our Party is no exception. But we must always focus our work on
the working class, and the industrial working class of the country.
Though we are small in numbers, the working class base of our
membership -- and that of the readers of the New Worker -- has always
been our strength.

We have to be the Party of the class. We have to be the vanguard of
that class. And we have to be clear exactly what that means.
Revisionists and Trotskyites, in Britain and throughout the world,
think that all it means is leading and preaching to the masses. Look
where it's got them.

The masses, the workers, the toilers, the strivers, are often wiser
than ourselves. We come from the working class. We must learn from the
working class. And we have learnt. At our Eighth Congress in 1991 we
decided to drop our boycott of the European elections. At the European
elections this year the vast majority of people boycotted them --
despite the barrage of propaganda designed to whip up interest in this
charade. At this Congress we are wisely proposing to return to our old
position -- and not one branch has opposed it.

Some who pose as communists and revolutionaries believe that the
vanguard leads and makes the revolution -- they talk a lot about
policies, they fight to capture positions within the labour movement
-- some of them even operate as secret societies as we well know.

Well, what our Party knows is that is it not Parties that make
revolutions but people -- the millions, who once they grasp the power
they truly possess can bring the whole corrupt, exploitative system
down once and for all. But this cannot be done without a revolutionary
party, a vanguard in the true sense, a party of militants, a party
which leads by example, a party of comrades who lead by example. A
Party which openly argues for revolutionary change.

Over a hundred years ago Marx and Engels spelt this out in the
Communist Manifesto.

1> "...  TWO things result from this fact:

  1. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be
itself a power.

  2. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the
whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and
meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Communism with a manifesto of
the party itself."

2> "In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a
whole?

 The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working
class parties.

 They have no interests separate and apart from those of the
proletariat as a whole.

 They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to
shape and mould the proletarian movement."

Marx and Engels made immense contributions to the theory of scientific
socialism based on years of study and research. But they were also
practical revolutionaries working tireless to build working-class
revolutionary organisations. Though they never expected to see
socialism in their own lifetimes they had no doubt that it would come.

This century has seen two world wars and great revolutionary upsurges
starting with the October revolution in 1917. After the second world
war the torch of socialism was taken up in eastern Europe, born from
the flames of resistance, and spread throughout Asia. The victories of
the Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese revolutions followed by those of
Cuba and Laos have ensured that a large proportion of the globe
remains under the control of working people today.

The British ruling class and the rest of the pack tell us that
socialism is dead. They tell us that the counter-revolutions in the
Soviet Union and eastern Europe in 1990 ended the spectre that is
haunting Europe -- as Marx and Engels said. But they are wrong.

The counter-revolutions were the product of treachery and revisionist
thinking. They too have taught us a bitter lesson one we should never
forget. And the lesson is this -- that the Party which seeks to lead
the class must serve the class. If it fails to serve the interests of
working people it ceases to be a communist party -- if it serves the
interests of the class enemy, which afterall is what class treachery
and revisionism is all about -- it ceases to be a communist party and
it rapidly ceases to have any influence within the class it claims to
lead.

Ten years after what the ruling class call "the fall of the Berlin
Wall" they've tried to drum up more anti-communist fervour with
gloating propaganda and pompous ceremonies revolving around three
has-been politicians, German ex-Chancellor Kohl who lost the German
elections, former President George Bush who was defeated by Clinton
and the traitor Mikhail Gorbachov who is hated in his own country.
Needless to say these events failed to attract much interest even in
Berlin.

In 1848 Marx and Engels said "A spectre is haunting Europe -- the
spectre of communism" and it is still there, and it's not just Europe
but the entire imperialist world. If they did not fear the communist
ideal they would simply ignore it and try to marginalise it -- in the
same way as they treat syndicalism or co-operativism. But they do fear
it -- even in the heart of Europe and the United States where the
revolutionary movement is at the moment weak.

That's why we are constantly fed with a diet of pseudo-documentaries
on television which denigrate the October revolution and the
leadership of Lenin and Stalin. This is why students are brought up to
equate Stalin with Adolf Hitler, and communism with nazism. This is
why the Dalai Lama, the exiled so-called "God-King" of Tibet is
wheeled out from time to time to tour Western capitals to preach his
own anti-communist and reactionary ideas -- ideas which have long been
rejected in Tibet and the rest of People's China. This is why the
schools and universities refuse to acknowledge the crimes of British
imperialism and world imperialism in the past.

Was it any surprise that the British government had to impose a
blanket censorship during the war against Yugoslavia? While the
capitalist media ran daily reports of supposed Yugoslav atrocities in
Kosovo barely a mention was made of the mass protests against the war
on television or the radio.

They lie to us in war. They lie to us in peace. They may not fear us
as a party -- a small party with a weekly paper -- but they certainly
fear what we represent.

But the hideous caricature of socialism that they present to the
masses is in fact a mirror of their own worthless bourgeois society --
their world which condemns millions upon millions to back-breaking
labour for breadline wages -- a capitalist world that allows millions
upon millions to die from hunger and disease by brutal blockade or
cynical neglect -- a world run to give a tiny group of parasites lives
comparable to that of Roman emperors.

What we represent is the highest aspirations of humanity. A world
without oppression and exploitation a society of equality and
opportunity, a culture of hope and progress, a future of endeavour and
happiness. Achieving it is a long and hard process -- a process of
struggle. But our efforts are helping to hasten the day which will
surely come when the torch of revolution is picked up by British
workers.

We will shortly enter a new century and the new millenium. Let's march
forward and face the future with confidence and determination.