Statement Issued: 22nd April, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul Saba
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The Party Committee of the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, which upholds the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao, with profound indignation and deep class hatred, denounces the British fascist state for its repeated political persecution of our worker comrade, Ekins Brome, a member of our Party Committee. Comrade Brome was arrested on February 13th, 1976 together with Comrade Najeeb Norman, another member of our Committee, when both these comrades went to Brixton Prison to visit two of our other leading comrades who were then in unjust detention from February 1st, 1976 – Comrade Ara Balakrishnan, the Secretary of the Institute and Comrade Wee Hock Seng. A surprise attack was made on Comrades Brome and Najeeb by some prison wardens who pounced on them and violently assaulted them inside the Brixton Prison compound. Both their spectacles were smashed and their faces were covered with bloody bruises. The fascist prison wardens bared their anti-communist fangs further by tearing off a badge of Chairman Mao from Comrade Najeeb’s coat! These fascist hoodlums revealed only too clearly that they were acting on the direct instructions of the panic stricken British fascist state when they turned truth upside down and hastily charged our comrades with assaulting them! From then on we witnessed yet again the mockery of the British legal system – the rubber stamp of the dictatorship of the fascist bourgeoisie of Britain. Our comrades, as soldiers of Chairman Mao and servants of the working and oppressed people, militantly resisted at every step and resolutely denounced the fascist courts and the moribund criminals who sat in “judgement” of them. They vigorously shouted the slogans: “Long live Chairman Mao!”, “Long live the Communist Party of China!”, “Death to the British fascist state!”, “Victory to World Revolution!”
Comrades Brome and Najeeb were remanded four times. They were shifted from one prison to another. They were physically assaulted in court and harassed in the prison. The fascist bourgeoisie had hoped to intimidate and “wear out” our comrades. But in vain. Each time they appeared in court our comrades shone with greater proletarian heroism. Their communist spirit of self-sacrifice drove the enemy to frenzy while inspiring the comrades of the Institute to fearlessly escalate further our’ work in building the revolutionary mass movement to expose and denounce the crimes of the British fascist state. On March 29th, the comrades were finally sentenced in a secret trial. Members of the Institute were prevented from entering the court. We were told that Comrade Brome was sentenced to 6 months and Comrade Najeeb to 3 months. It was only when we were allowed to visit Comrade Brome in Wandsworth Prison on April 17th that we were enraged to learn that he had actually been sentenced to 12 months in jail! This is yet another vicious crime that the British fascist state has committed against the communists of the Workers’ Institute and the working people of Britain.
Comrade Ekins Brome’s case merits the special attention of all progressive people who are involved in the working-class movement in Britain today. A more self-sacrificing example of a WORKER who so resolutely upholds his communist principles in sharp class struggles over a protracted period of time has never been seen in British history. Comrade Brome who hails from Barbados in the West Indies was recruited in his hometown in the early sixties to work in the London Transport Underground. Inspired by the people’s war raging in Asia, and Africa, in particular the heroic struggles of the Vietnamese people, awakened by the earth-shaking Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution led by Chairman Mao, Comrade Brome took to revolutionary politics. The antics of the revisionist scum around the “Communist Party of Great Britain” and the trotskyite miscreants of various hues disgusted him. He could see that the main activity of these agents of the bourgeoisie within the working-class movement is to confine the workers to the frustrating road of purely “economic struggles” and the bankrupt trade union system. Guided by Lenin’s great teaching that “trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie” Comrade Brome began to mobilise his fellow railway workers with the proletarian revolutionary line of Chairman Mao. His attempts however met with sustained harassment and vicious victimisation from the British fascist state, particularly from March 1970. In the summer of 1971 he was expelled from his job for the “crime of disseminating Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, the invincible ideology of the working class among his fellow workers. It was during this period that Comrade Brome saw from his actual practice that the trade unions are the defensive weapons of the fascist bourgeoisie. His union, the National Union of Railwaymen, led by a knighted scab and using the well-known motto “Workers of the world unite” as a cover, proved to be a total farce. Far from uniting with him and fighting to reinstate him and defending his right to politically organise at his work place – the union openly connived with his expulsion!
Undaunted by the loss of his job, Comrade Brome, who has a wife and two sons, stepped up his revolutionary work. Theoretically he grasped that proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat are the only solution to the plight of the working people. For this the leadership of a genuine Marxist-Leninist party which completely breaks in theory and practice with the revisionist muck of the past in the imperialist heartlands and upholds in a living way the proletarian revolutionary line and authority of Chairman Mao is decisive. With this orientation he participated actively in building a proletarian party in Britain – the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) which has now degenerated into a social-fascist party. It was in this arduous process of party-building in the oldest working-class country in the world that Comrade Brome, along with his close comrade-in-arms, Comrade Balakrishnan, began to grasp in practice and theory the nature of state and revolution in Britain and the deviousness of the revisionists who wave the banner of Chairman Mao to attack Chairman Mao’s forces. They found through protracted and complex class struggles with the class enemies inside and outside “CPE(ML)” that the leadership of this party has been usurped by a fascist agent Carol Reakes, who together with her mentor, the renegade Hardial Bains, leader of the so-called Communist Party of Canada (ML), is trying to develop with the aid of the two superpowers and their hangers on in Britain, an oppositional faction within the international communist movement with the vain hope of overthrowing the revolutionary authority of the great, glorious and correct Communist Party of China and beloved Chairman Mao over world revolution.
Guided by Chairman Mao’s teaching: “The correctness or incorrectness of the ideological and political line decides everything” Comrades Balakrishnan and Brome began to sec further the ugly features of Hardial Bains and Carol Reakes. The latter’s revisionist lines and programmes are designed to give a new lease of life to the dying imperialist and social imperialist bourgeoisie. More specifically it was found:
a) By separating imperialist politics from imperialist economics and refusing to grasp that the present imperialist economic crises is the final death-throes of the imperialist system. Hardial Bains and his cronies in “CPE(ML)” have taken a “protracted” stance and merrily participate in bourgeois elections and clamour for bourgeois respectability, Under the direction of these revisionists Comrade Brome himself had to participate in the February 1974 parliamentary elections – an exercise which he found can only give breath to the dying moribund bourgeoisie and demoralize the revolutionary ranks.
b) Hardial Bains and his cronies in “CPE(ML)” cover up the fascist nature of the state by talking endlessly of “growing” fascism mainly in the ideological and cultural front, by running after any ruse put up by the fascist state, e. g., the National Front, or by highlighting one-sidedly the racism practised by the fascist police. Relying on the sensibleness of the fascist bourgeoisie they uphold the authority of the fascist court and the jury system, instead of denouncing them as tools of the dictatorship of the fascist bourgeoisie. Comrade Brome found from his own experience that this is something that the fascist state welcomes. In May 1973 and June 1974 he was brutally assaulted and arrested on trumped-up charges while politically organizing the working people of Brixton. The second case is of particular importance because he was attacked while postering for a meeting to discuss the political significance of the callous murder by the British fascist state of the English anti-fascist student, Kevin Gately. But on both occasions he was explicitly instructed by Carol Reakes not to denounce the court but to “reason” in court with the help of “legal aid” from the fascist state. Both times the politics of his case was never disseminated by the so-called Communist Party. For his second case, Comrade Brome was sentenced to 15 months in jail. The conspiracy of silence by the bourgeois mass media[1] on this mockery of justice was matched by the total ban in the “party press”. Such is the “legal aid” that the agent Carol Reakes renders the British fascist state!
c) Under the cover of “concrete conditions” in the imperialist heartlands, Hardial Bains and Carol Reakes reject the key documents of the Communist Party of China, such as the Party’s Ninth and Tenth National Congress Reports and its rich, and scientific analysis of the stage in the world and the situation in Western Europe and North America. The insistent demands by Comrades Balakrishnan and Brome for these documents to be studied within “CPE (M-L)” were dismissed outright! Hardial Bains and his cronies in “CPE(ML)” ignore the historic import of the unprecedented struggles waged by the Third World countries led by Socialist China for a new international economic order and thus do not grasp that this can only be established by a new international political order. They are “so wise” that while conveniently overlooking the concrete fact that the international dictatorship of the bourgeoisie exists in the form of NATO, led by the superpower United States, they cudgel their brains to concoct how revolution will be won in the imperialist heartlands. Thus while waving the banner of Chairman Mao, they negate the international significance of the earth-shaking Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China which is guided by Chairman Mao’s theory of continued revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The main purpose of this political revolution is to carry forward the invincible banner of the Great October Socialist Revolution and win victory of world revolution whether there is war or not by capturing the base of international capital, the imperialist and social-imperialist heartlands and establishing the INTERNATIONAL DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT with the People’s Liberation Army of China as the main pillar under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao, so as to build THE NEW WORLD of socialism and communism. It is for the sole purpose of helping to realise this historic mission of the proletariat that the international united front against the two superpowers has been so painstakingly built by Socialist China. Without this correct and optimistic perspective which is of immediate significance and resorting to one-sided propaganda on the danger of war, Hardial Bains and Carol Reakes, along with a number other quacks, spread doom and gloom within the progressive and Marxist-Leninist ranks in Western Europe and North America.
From August 1st, 1974, inspired by Chairman Mao’s campaign to criticise and repudiate Lin Piao and Confucius, and following Chairman Mao’s teaching: “Going against the tide is Marxist-Leninist principle” Comrade Balakrishnan brought the line-struggles within “CPE(ML)” out into the open and despite intimidation, arrest and continuous harassment by the British fascist state began a sustained campaign to criticise and repudiate the Lin Piao anti-Party clique of the imperialist heartlands, Hardial Bains and Carol Reakes. A significant aspect of this campaign was the revolutionary mass movement to expose and denounce the British fascist state and its agents in “CPE (ML)” for their political persecution of Comrade Brome. Comrade Brome who was then in jail gave full and enthusiastic support to this campaign which was to lead to the birth of the Worker’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought in London on December 20th, 1974.
As soon as Comrade Brome was released from jail on April 22, 1975, he threw himself with, renewed vigour and without any thought of self to carry out the task of harnessing, together with our other comrades, the socialist new thing, the Workers’ Institute, in the midst of the working masses by adhering to the basic line of the Communist Party of China and taking class struggle as the key link in all our work. From his own experience he could see that the 3 part programme of the Institute[2] is the most correct in training soldiers of Chairman Mao in the imperialist heartlands, to defy death to defend Chairman Mao, to defy death to defend the Party and to defy death to defend the bright red bastion of world revolution, Socialist China. He worked tirelessly and on a daily basis to participate in the unprecedented work of building the first revolutionary stable base area in and around Brixton.[3]
This he sees as the only way to rebuild the revolutionary cadre, especially those from student and intellectual background. By integrating deeply with the working people of all nationalities, in particular the poorer workers, and patiently arming them with the proletarian revolutionary line of Chairman Mao one is better able to restrict bourgeois right and combat and prevent revisionism within the Party.
It is precisely because the comrades of the Workers’ Institute have made headway in this difficult work that the British fascist state has made frenzied and wild attacks against our comrades, in particular our leading comrades, since February 1st this year. Beloved Chairman Mao and our Party have said that “the world is being turned upside down” and that “nothing is hard in this world, if you dare to scale the heights”. Armed with these teachings and upholding the communist spirit of self-sacrifice of our worker comrade Ekins Brome, the members of the Workers’ Institute are further strengthened in their resolve to participate more actively in smashing the old world and in building THE NEW WORLD!
[1] Note: The bourgeois mass media gave wide-scale publicity to the cadres of “CPE(ML)” who upheld the authority of the fascist court in February this year while at the same time silence was maintained regarding the cadres of the Workers Institute who denounced the fascist courts.
[2] Note: The 3-part programme of the Workers’ Institute consists of:
a) conducting on a regular basis discussion groups on current affairs and study groups On the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Chairman Mao to train contingents of theoretical workers;
b) carrying out scientific social investigation and detailed mass work in working-class communities to build revolutionary stable base areas.
c) using Chairman Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line to participate actively in battles of annihilation at the ideological and political fronts against bourgeois reactionary lines and unfolding mass movements in doing so.
[3] Note: It is interesting to note in this regard that the discredited “CPE (ML)” began to disseminate a mischievous leaflet under the name of a “West Indian Defence Committee” in Brixton right where Comrade Brome works, immediately after his arrest. Vainly attempting to divide the working people in Brixton along racial and colour lines, such a “committee” is to defend the interests of the British fascist state!