Great Britain / Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)

Dear Comrades and Friends

On behalf of my party, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), I would like to thank the MLKP for doing us the honour of inviting us to be present on the auspicious occasion of the celebration of the 15th anniversary of the foundation of your party.
It is wonderful to see that, despite the reverses suffered by the working-class movement throughout the world as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, thanks to the betrayal by Khrushchevite revisionists, the Turkish working class remains determined not only to fight against imperialism, but even more to establish working class state power in Turkey. Besides that, Turkish workers who have been forced to leave their beloved country to find a living in other countries, such as this one, Germany, and mine, Great Britain, are now seeking to fortify the ranks of the anti-capitalist and communist forces in the countries in which they work, overcoming language barriers as well as local xenophobia incited by the bourgeois mass media, to make important contributions to the development of the working-class movement in those countries.
It is wonderful to see such a thriving proletarian movement that is able to stand and fight independently of the petty-bourgeois anti-imperialist movements of an oppressed country like Turkey, which generally operate under the signboard of religion. For while nobody would doubt the heroism and fighting spirit of many of these petty-bourgeois movements in the anti-imperialist struggle, the working class does not confine itself to the anti-imperialist movement but is the only class which in due course will need to carry through the anti-imperialist struggle to a struggle to overthrow the local exploiting classes and to establish socialism.
Dear Comrades, as a communist from an imperialist country, I want to wish the anti-imperialist Turkish masses well in the struggle to overthrow the imperialist grip on your country. I want you successfully to defeat my ruling class, cut it off from its source of nourishment in the form of the lifeblood of the oppressed countries, and weaken it for when it faces the showdown against the working class at home. For many decades now, the British ruling class has, like the ruling class in other imperialist countries, used a small part of the superprofits it extracts from oppressed countries such as yours to provide a petty-bourgeois standard of living to the upper echelons of the British working class - the ‘labour aristocracy'. The political leaders of this stratum, dominant in the working-class movement, have as a result lost sight of the need for socialism and instead preach and practise class collaboration. This stratum is represented in Britain by the Labour Party, the Party now in government, which is shamelessly occupying and waging a war of aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan in a bid to monopolise, as a junior partner of US imperialism, oil supplies and pipelines at the expense of rivals for those resources.
Currently, as a result of an enormous decline in Britain's industrial base, as production has moved abroad to places where workers are cheaper and less privileged, the labour aristocracy is beginning to lose its privileged position, but there is still a great deal of work to be done to counteract the damage that has been caused to the working-class movement by the nefarious influence of class collaborationism for more than a century. Because of the years of betrayal by this section, the working class of my country tends to be cynical and apathetic, a prey to xenophobic and anti-communist prejudices, where they need to be active, united and determined in order to be able to defeat capitalism and win their freedom to build a new life fit for human beings.
However, Britain today is home to millions of immigrants coming from countries like Turkey or India where the working-class movement has not been so polluted by class collaborationist tendencies. Hence their contribution to the working-class struggle in my country is potentially very great and of utmost importance. For this reason my Party especially welcomes the approaches made to us by the MKLP for collaboration in the struggles of the British working class, where there is much urgent work to be done.
It only remains for me to wish the MKLP great success in its work in the coming years.
For the defeat of imperialism and the march forward to communism!
Long live the fraternal solidarity between the workers of Britain and Turkey!