Welcome to Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! This newspaper arms its readers with the knowledge and inspiration they need to confront the struggles of today. Make no mistake: the ruling class is on the offensive. The imperialist powers are driving a renewed onslaught on the working class internationally as they seek to shore up a crisis-ridden system through sanctions, threats and brute force. Revolutionary organisation is our best and only defence.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the increasingly savage attempts by the United States to bend socialist Cuba to its will: President Trump’s threats to ‘take’ Cuba; the devastating fuel shortages created by the US chokehold on Venezuela; the indictment of the 95-year-old communist veteran leader Raúl Castro. Yet as we show (p1) the Cuban people steadfastly refuse to submit to imperialist bullying, taking to the streets in their tens of thousands to defend the gains of the socialist revolution.
Cuba has for decades existed as a beacon of inspiration for those resisting imperialism around the world: it shows what is possible when the working class takes power. Defending Cuba is a litmus test for socialists everywhere – and one that, shamefully, the majority of the left in Britain fails, with the charge led by the Socialist Workers’ Party (p2), whose sneering dismissal of the gains of the revolution and encouragement to Cuban workers to bring down ‘the state capitalist bureaucracy’ parrot the propaganda of the bourgeois press – their position weakens support for socialism among the working class in Britain. Through the pages of FRFI, we reiterate our unconditional support for the Cuban Communist Party and the Cuban working class whose interests it represents.
Part of imperialism’s drive to expand its control of the Earth’s resources and destroy any force that threatens its control is the widening onslaught in West Asia. The barbaric imperialist and Zionist onslaught continues against the Palestinian liberation struggle in Gaza and the West Bank (p16), against the resistance forces of Lebanon and against Iran (p7). This is mirrored in the repression meted out within the imperialist countries against any expression of solidarity with the Palestinian national liberation struggle. In Britain, resisting state repression (p8) is part and parcel of campaigning in solidarity with Palestine.
Defending democratic rights on the streets and through the courts has wider ramifications for the working class as the British state expands its powers to control protests and repress the working class in preparation for the class struggles that lie ahead. To defend the right to defend Palestine, to oppose the Terrorism Act 2000 as an instrument of class repression, to support the internationally recognised right of an oppressed people to take up arms against their oppressor are basic positions that any principled socialist movement must adopt. It is these which our comrade Sarah of the SOAS 2 stands for (see p9) and it is why she must be defended as she goes to trial on 22 June.
At the same time, the deepening crisis is exposing the rifts between the major imperialist powers, as the US, Britain and the EU jockey to defend their own interests. In all these countries, nationalism and chauvinism are being intensified as a way of consolidating working-class support for the wars that lie ahead (p4, p11). A key element of this is the anti-immigrant and anti-Islam rhetoric that provides the pretext for the racist Labour government to ramp up immigration controls, targeting the most oppressed layers of the international working class.
Racism is the inevitable product of the imperialist carve-up and plunder of the rest of the world. Building a movement against racism in Britain, as we argue on p4, must take as its starting point the fight against the British state – to focus only on the threat posed by the far right, as the SWP, Stand up to Racism and the Together Alliance do, is to divert the working class from its real enemy and ultimately fail to fight racism in any form.
We have to challenge and expose the leadership of the left in Britain, as it seeks to divert the working class into the dead end of electoralism, touting MPs from the reactionary Labour Party or the Green Party (p6) and thereby reconciling the oppressed with their oppressors. What we urgently need to build instead is an anti-imperialist, class conscious movement on the streets of Britain. Such a movement must stand uncompromisingly with socialist Cuba and with national liberation movements around the world; it must consistently challenge the British state and all its racist and oppressive apparatus; it must oppose Britain’s immigration laws and fight for the interests of the most oppressed sections of the working class.
FRFI is fighting to build that movement.
Join us.
