Lead story

Baltimore burning

by our American Affairs correspondent

BALTIMORE is ablaze as rage and anger over the death of a young black man in police custody erupted on the streets of the American city. The mayor, who condemned the rioters as “thugs” has ordered a week-long curfew and thousands of heavily armed troops are on the streets to enforce it.

Police used tear gas, rubber bullets and smoke bombs against protesters who torched over 100 cars and set 19 buildings ablaze during the fighting that followed the funeral of Freddie Grey on Monday.

Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, called in the National Guard in an attempt to quell protests demanding justice for Grey who died on 19th April after suffering unexplained injuries to his spinal cord in police detention and spending a week in a coma. He was arrested for “catching the eye” of a police officer and running away. Six police officers have now been suspended.

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Baltimore burning

Anger rises as Brixton people fight for their homes

by New Worker correspondent

POLICE used tear gas to stem an invasion of the huge police station in Brixton last Saturday as protesters tried to storm it in a massive demonstration of local anger at the “gentrification” of Brixton that is forcing working class people out of the area.

About two hours before, thousands of people, mainly local residents, had gathered in Windrush Square in Brixton, south London, last Saturday in protest at rising housing costs that are forcing working class people out of the area and breaking up long-established and unique communities.

They are especially angry at the local authority, Labour-controlled Lambeth, for demolishing council estates and closing down housing co-operatives in order to luxury accommodation that local people cannot afford.

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Anger rises as Brixton people fight for their homes

Editorial

Communists and the General Election

WHAT is the proper role of communists in next week’s General Election? The New Communist Party stands no candidates in elections because history has shown that true socialism cannot be attained through elections, which are part of the bourgeois state machinery.

Nowadays running for election does not even give communist candidates the opportunity to build general working class awareness, confidence and unity.

Some have argued that just gaining a respectable number of votes shows there is popular support for communism and it is growing. Not so. Usually it results in a derisory number of votes that makes support for communism appear lower than it is — because even voters who have communist sympathies will, and should, vote Labour because the first priority is to prevent another Tory or Tory-dominated coalition government.

But even when they stand candidates who claim to be communist or strong left wing, they pitch their campaign within bourgeois capitalist parameters. And in doing so they abandon their communist principles one by one to comply with bourgeois concepts of what is respectable in politics. They cannot tell the workers the truth, that even if you vote for them they will be powerless to make any significant changes for the better from within a bourgeois parliament.

In other words they effectively turn into social democrats — a path that would lead them ultimately to the same policies now being peddled by the Labour leadership if they ever had any electoral success.

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Communists and the General Election