LONDON — “Our campaign was about discussing a road forward with fellow workers, building support for union fights and presenting the communist program,” said Jonathan Silberman, the Communist League’s candidate in the Holborn and St. Pancras parliamentary by-election, at a celebration of the CL’s campaign here Oct. 8.
“The crisis facing working people and the imperialist rulers’ march toward more wars cannot be fundamentally affected by elections,” he said. “Whatever the differences among Labour, Conservative and Green, they are all loyal to the capitalist system, the source of this crisis.”
CL campaigners knocked on doors in the working-class Somers Town estate in the constituency and beyond. Silberman said, “We joined a union-organized protest in Liverpool against attacks on immigrant rights; protests by rail workers against driver-only operations that undermine jobs and safety; a picket line by cleaning and catering workers at a school in east London fighting against a wage cut and for union recognition; and actions against Jew-hatred.
“Rising Jew-hatred is a key question in U.K. and world politics today,” he said. “A massacre of Jews was prevented last week by the crew and passengers on a plane heading to Israel during an attempted hijacking. Antisemitism is growing on the left of bourgeois politics, in the Green and Labour parties and to a lesser extent on the right.”
Silberman pointed to the Labour government’s sanctions on Israel, and “the motion passed at the recent Green Party conference labeling Zionism as ‘racism’ and calling for an end to Israel’s existence.” The Greens rejected a motion that would have prevented Jewish party members from being punished “based on their affiliation with Jewish community institutions.”
“There is nothing new in the anti-Israel course of the Andrew Burnham government. It’s consistent with the British rulers’ course for over a century,” Silberman said. The CL produced a pamphlet containing his talk at the Contemporary Antisemitism conference in Haifa, Israel, “UK Policy in the Middle East: Defend British Interests, Not the Jews.”
Silberman described a trade union-sponsored discussion he participated in on the lessons of the 1936 working-class mobilization against an antisemitic march by fascists at Cable Street in London’s East End. “All the speakers assumed a framework of ‘fighting against the right,’ claiming Reform Party leader Nigel Farage is a ‘fascist.’”
“In 1936, a massive strike wave in France took place, showing the potential of the working class to take power,” Silberman said. But Stalinists and social democrats refused to organize workers to fight for their own interests, instead pointing them to a popular front with bourgeois parties. “The threat of fascism was real. But the choice was not between democratic capitalism or fascism, but between fascist counterrevolution or the seizure of power by the working class.
“The rulers will only start backing fascist movements when their rule is threatened by the working class. Today the challenge facing our class is recognizing our own capacities to change the course of history.”
This is why defense of the Cuban Revolution is key, Silberman said. “It showed that working people can take political power and transform social relations. In the face of Washington’s drive to overthrow the revolution — in which London is complicit — working people in Cuba and their government are mobilizing to hold onto political power.
“The CL is in the same trench as the Cuban workers,” he said. It organizes speakouts against Washington’s attacks and gets out the truth about Cuba, promoting books like Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Cuban revolutionary leader Víctor Dreke.