The New Worker
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 11th October 2013
COMMUNIST and workers parties from all over Europe, including the New Communist Party of Britain, met in Brussels last week to set up a new liaison committee specifically aimed at co-ordinating workers’ opposition to the European Union. On the 1st October in a meeting room of the EU Parliament in Brussels the founding meeting was held of the “Initiative of communist and workers’ parties in order to study and elaborate European issues and to coordinate their activity”.
The proposal, which was an initiative of the Greek communist party (KKE), followed the annual European communist day conference sponsored by the KKE which was opened with a key-note address by the new Greek communist leader Dimitris Koutsoumpas. Thirty three parties took part in the general meeting and most stayed on to agree the founding statement of the Initiative and elect its secretariat.
KKE Politburo member G Marinos said the Initiative was “a significant step which serves particular needs... that would strengthen the struggle of the communist parties for the interests of the working class, the popular strata and the youth”.
“We are deeply aware of our responsibility. The problems are sharpening; the capitalist crisis of overproduction and capital over-accumulation, which is the other side of capitalist development, has led millions of working class and people’s families to unemployment and poverty. Labour’s exploitation by capital is being intensified, the future of the youth is being undermined,” he declared.
The first tasks of the new European communist group will be to co-ordinate strategy in the forthcoming European parliamentary elections and counter the European Left Party, a bloc of social-democratic and revisionist parties that supports the European Union.
“We will wage the battle of the EU parliamentary elections in a determined way with as our criteria the people’s needs, the people’s interests against the European Union and its strategy — against the bourgeois, liberal and social democratic parties which serve the interests of capital, against the forces of opportunism which support the EU and follow the line of capitalism’s management”, Marinos said.
NCP leader Andy Brooks supported the proposal while pointing out that the NCP’s opposition to the European elections in Britain is simply to boycott them. This initiative, he said, was an important step in building the common communist stand to lead the fight-back against the bourgeois offensive against the working class all over Europe and strengthen the anti-war and peace movements throughout the EU.
Thirty European communist and workers parties, including those from countries outside the EU like Belarus, Norway, Russia and Turkey, signed up to the Initiative, whose first steps include preparing an intervention at the EU summit in December; campaigning for the release of the remaining Miami Five Cuban political prisoners held in America; preparing for the EU parliamentary elections in 2014 and campaigning against the banning of communist parties and their symbols by some of the regimes in eastern Europe.