THE YEAR 1996 saw the launch of RCPB(ML)'s most important programme, the programme to Improve the Content, Extend the Readership of Workers' Weekly. This is a continuation of the work undertaken in 1994 to strengthen RCPB(ML) consistent with the present period of the retreat of revolution. We usher in the New Year with a further project of developing the technical base within this programme of improving the content and extending the readership of the Party's newspaper.

The great importance of this project lies in the further strengthening of Workers' Weekly as the scaffolding around which RCPB(ML) can be further built. Besides the technical base, a key part of this work is the waging of class struggle against the anti-social offensive of the bourgeoisie and against its social props which are creating illusions about capitalism and ideologically disarming the working class. This class struggle involves the fight for democratic renewal, in which the fight for a modern constitution resting sovereignty in the hands of the people is the most important.

Workers' Weekly, the Organ of the Central Committee of RCPB(ML), is the scaffolding around which the Party is built. RCPB(ML) mobilises the advanced elements of the working class to study, sell and write for the paper, as it does with youth and students, women and others.

Workers' Weekly has played and continues to play the crucial role in the building of RCPB(ML). When the present work was initiated at the Coventry International Seminar in New Year, 1994, the newspaper played a crucial role in focusing on the themes of the Seminar – Retreat of Revolution and the Tasks of the Communist and Workers' Movement. It also played the crucial role in mobilising public opinion for the draft of RCPB(ML)'s general line which was to be released in March of that year. Similarly, in 1995, when RCPB(ML) had launched its Draft Programme for the Working Class, it became clear that this work could not be accomplished without Workers' Weekly playing its role. It was at this time that the question of the regularising and further strengthening of Workers' Weekly was also put on the agenda.

Most crucially, the role of Workers' Weekly in building RCPB(ML) was again reasserted in 1996 ensuring that it strengthens itself in the course of waging the class struggle. RCPB(ML) focused on developing Workers' Weekly on the basis of modern techniques as an integral part of the task, Improve the Content, Extend the Readership! The work of strengthening Workers' Weekly was directly linked with the organising work of RCPB(ML), the work of waging the class struggle against the class enemy.

The organising work of RCPB(ML) involves organising workers who study, sell and write for Workers' Weekly. It also involves organising the youth and students to do the same thing. RCPB(ML) also pays attention to organising women and others for the same purpose.

Besides placing organising in the primary position, organising workers, youth and students, and women, and further professionalising the entire work including that of Workers' Weekly using modern techniques, the Party is also carrying on its theoretical work as an integral part of this organising. Most importantly, it wages an unwavering and resolute ideological struggle against all liquidationist pressure and carries forward the banner of creating the subjective conditions for revolution.

We are extremely happy to announce to our readers that Workers' Weekly is coming out in new format this year. This is an important achievement of the year 1996. All the members and sympathisers of RCPB(ML), all advanced workers, women, youth and students must take up the work set for 1997. They must especially join the project of strengthening Workers' Weekly on the basis of modern techniques.

Improve the Content, Extend the Readership! All Out for Waging the Class Struggle in 1997!

This issue of Workers' Weekly, the first of 1997, is a special issue.

Our lead article outlines the fighting programme of RCPB(ML) for 1997. It underlines the integral and indispensable role of Workers' Weekly in this programme, and gives a call to join in the work.

In future issue, Workers' Weekly will elaborate on its policy and how workers, youth and students, women and others can join in.

The mass edition of the newspaper will be printed in A3 format. From now on it will appear on the first Saturday of each month, beginning on March 1. The standard edition will remain in A4 format. Subscription rates will be published in the next edition of Workers' Weekly.

The Coming Election

The Coming Election 1997 is election year. Within a few weeks, the Prime Minister, at his own discretion and without the need to consult anyone, least of all the people, will announce the date of the general election.

In the election the people will be exhorted basically to choose which of the two major parties will form the government. Is this genuine democracy, does this provide the people with a genuine alternative? Far from it.

The people at this time want to govern themselves and exercise control over their own lives. This is their right. But the archaic and profoundly absolutist character of the British parliamentary system acts as a block to the exercise of this right. The working class and people are kept away from the seat of political power, while it is occupied by Her Majesty's Government and Her Majesty's Opposition. The continuation of this system ensures that the powerful economic interests rule the roost, and that things are ordered for their benefit and not that of the people.

The working class must fight for democratic renewal of the political process and institutions as an indispensable component of its class struggle. The situation must be ended whereby the Cabinet, armed with the royal prerogative, wields executive power. Parliament, the legislature, must be subordinate to the people and the executive power subordinate to the legislative power. The working class must fight for a modern constitution, the central point of which is that the people themselves are enshrined as the sovereign power.

A VERY IMPORTANT MEETING to commemorate Cornelius Cardew was organised by the Progressive Cultural Association (PCA) at Marx House in London on Saturday, December 21 last year. Cornelius Cardew was secretary of PCA and a member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). It is fifteen years since he was tragically killed by a hit-and-run driver in the early hours of December 13, 1981, at the age of 45.

Cornelius Cardew was an accomplished composer, and the meeting was used to highlight some of his most important achievements and to elaborate on the joint work of PCA and the Canadian Cultural Workers' Committee (CCWC). The meeting was attended by invited guests, notably those who are themselves composers and had worked very closely with Cornelius in the PCA-CCWC work. The PCA invited Hardial Bains, National Leader of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), to give the main paper, which was entitled The Question Is Really One of Word and Deed. Hardial Bains is closely associated with the joint work of PCA and the CCWC. Cornelius Cardew had been active in this collective work from 1978 until his untimely death.

The paper presented by Hardial Bains was very well received indeed. A lively period of discussion followed, focusing on some of the key questions raised. The formal meeting and discussion session was followed by a social in which the discussion continued for some hours.

The Question is Really One of Word and Deed

Speech delivered by Hardial Bains, National Leader of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), December 21, 1996, at the meeting held at Marx House, London: "In Commemoration of Cornelius Cardew, 1936-1981", organised by the Progressive Cultural Association

Price £1.50 (plus 50p p&p) ISBN 0 9530083 0 4

Workers' Weekly article on commemoration

The final text of the paper The Question Is Really One of Word and Deed as authorised by Hardial Bains has just been released by PCA as a 24-page pamphlet. It can be obtained by writing to the Progressive Cultural Association, c/o 170 Wandsworth Road, London SW8 2LA, by calling in at John Buckle Books at the same address or by using the submit form for E-mail enquiry

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PEOPLE ARE DEMONSTRATING this weekend to mark the 25th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday", when 14 Irish people, most of them teenagers, were killed by British troops on the streets of Derry. "Bloody Sunday" was not some isolated atrocity. The 25 years that have passed since, as with the centuries before, have produced more sacrifices, more atrocities, and many more killings, in both Ireland and Britain, and for all this there is no real sign of change in the British bourgeoisie's self-serving intent to keep Ireland and her people shackled to Britain, whatever further sacrifices this may mean for the peoples of the two countries.

How can this be? How is it that the British bourgeoisie is able to continue to perpetrate such outrages in the name of the British people? This situation is intolerable. This bourgeiosie that continues to subjugate Ireland is the salefsame bourgeoisie that denies us our rights here in Britain, that decimates the workforce and impoverishes the people of England, Scotland and Wales, that marginalises and ghettoises whole sections of the community, that is unleashing a devastating anti-social offensive aimed at taking society back to the middle ages, when people had to fend for themselves and the devil took the hindmost. If not prevented, it will furthermore turn us into cannon-fodder for a third terrible world war, whatever our nationality. The fact is that the British bourgeoisie will continue to further its imperialist interest in Ireland as elsewhere, just so long as the working class and people remain subordinate to its interests at home.

The key question therefore is for the working class here in Britain to assert its own interests as against those of the bourgeoisie. The victory of those interests will result not only in the ending of the outrages against the workers and people in this country but also would be the greatest contribution the workers here can give to ending the outrages such as Bloody Sunday and the denial of the right of the Irish people for self-determination. Without the struggle to achieve its own emancipation the support given to the Irish people's struggle for self-determination by the British working class can have no real substance, and the workers will remain, at worst, apologists for the crimes of the English bourgeoisie, running around tut-tutting in their wake. Proletarian internationalism for the working class is not a matter of standing on the sidelines, whether to denounce the actions of our rulers or to sympathise with those that suffer the effects of these actions. It can only be the natural extension of our revolutionary stand at home, here in Britain, with the working class taking up and elaborating its own agenda, the kernel of which must be the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of modern sovereign states of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Only such a solution will bring lasting peace and an end to the divisions of centuries.