His name will endure through the ages

Theo Russell with Italian comrades

by New Worker correspondent

Communists and progressives gathered alongside representatives of the embassies of the socialist countries beside the grave of Karl Marx last Sunday to commemorate his death on 14th March 1883.
    The event was led by Communist Party of Britain (CPB) central committee member Alex Gordon, who said: "People have gathered at this spo for many years to mark Karl Marx's death. Marx spent the longest period of his life in London. At his funeral his life-long friend and comrade Frederick Engels gave the oration, on 17th March 1883, saying “at quarter to three in the afternoon the greatest living thinker ceased to think”.
    To commemorate his passing the Marx Memorial Library has for many decades held an annual graveside oration at his burial place in Highgate Cemetery with leading members of the working class movement paying tribute to Marx's enduring legacy to today's class struggles.
    This year Fran Heathcote, national president of the Public and Commercial Services union, and CPB International Secretary Kevan Nelson, spoke about the current strike wave and the issues confronting trade unions in Britain.
    Representatives of communist parties and the socialist countries were called on to lay flowers on Marx's grave, including the Cuban Ambassador, Barbara Montalvo Alvarez, Guo Yuliang of the embassy of the People's Republic of China, and representatives of the Laotian and Vietnamese embassies.
    Flowers were also laid by members of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), the French Communist Party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Frente Communista (Italy), the Communist Party of Italy, the Communist Party of Spain, the Tudeh Party of Iran, the Iraqi Communist Party, and Theo Russell of the New Communist Party of Britain.
    Although only a handful of people attended Marx's burial in 1883, the words of Frederick Engels were to become reality: "His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work."

The same old tune...

In his inaugural address to the nation Paul Nowak, the new TUC General Secretary’s made much of the fact that he started stacking shelves in Asda at the age of 17, and had been a hotel porter and worked in a call centre, but failed to mention he has been a Congress House bureaucrat, since 2000, or for the great bulk of his working life.
    Apart from his less than inspiring comments on the proposed anti-union laws he made the standard complaints about workers being: “on course for two decades of lost pay – the longest squeeze on earnings in modern history”, deploring low pay and saying that “ministers, unions and employers should work together on a proper industrial strategy, delivering good green jobs, training and skills across the country”. So, as might be expected the TUC is on course for more class collaboration instead of actually rousing the working class to action.
    He repeated the tired old slogan that the TUC should be concerned with securing: “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage” but we should heed Engels’s 1881 demand that it should be replaced by a very different motto: “Possession of the Means of Work, Raw Material, Factories, Machinery, By the Working People Themselves”.
    On another recent occasion Nowak said that that unions including the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) were unlikely secure the 19 per cent they are demanding but meekly said that: “I would hope that there would be a compromise reachable — in order to get to a compromise you need to sit down and negotiate and that’s what the government is point blank refusing to do.” Such inspiring leadership is what we have come to expect from the TUC.