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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Lest we forget…

The problem with bourgeois democracy is that the bourgeoisie can never live up to the standards they claim to uphold. They preach about the superiority of the capitalist system, which they call freedom. But it’s freedom only for the exploiters to continue to rob and plunder working people across the globe to ensure that a tiny handful of parasites can live the lives of Roman emperors on the backs of the millions upon millions of working people.

They claim they stand for intellectual freedom but it is the freedom of the straitjacket and the dungeon. They preach this freedom with their missiles and drones, their special forces and their economic blockades against all those who dare to stand up for themselves.

They say Westminster is the “mother of all parliaments”. They call the American Congress the "heart and soul” of democracy. They say we have free speech and the “rule of law” but they lie, cheat and steal to climb to the top.

The law only counts when it’s in their favour and the votes only count when it serves their interests. Bourgeois democracy is democracy only for the exploiters. It’s dictatorship for the exploited. Bourgeois elections exist only to ensure that the smallest number of people can manipulate the maximum number of votes.

Remembrance Day was borne out of the grief felt throughout Europe for the millions who fell in the senseless slaughter of the First World War and the millions more who died, throughout the world, in the struggle against fascism in the Second World War.

Then, millions paused to remember the fallen and pledge, if only for a moment, to strive for a world without war. Now it’s just a ceremony – a pageant, a parade led by the great and the good who lay their wreaths at the Cenotaph one day and the next glibly tell us to stock up and prepare for conscription and war with Russia.

Then, all they had to do was bang the drum and wave the flag. But the old lies don’t work these days. The masses have broken the bourgeois consensus that confines the political arena to endless debates on law and order, immigration and the European Union.

In Britain millions have stood up in support of the Palestinian Arabs in their just struggle against Zionism and imperialism. In Europe workers and students are on the street demanding an end to austerity. And throughout the world people are demanding change and a better life – one that capitalism cannot provide and only socialism can deliver. War and peace, imperialism or socialism are, once again, back on the agenda...