CPB calls on its supporters to ‘Vote Green in Gorton and Denton’

Reposted with thanks from CPGB-ML

On 17 February, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) penned a Morning Star editorial column entitled ‘Vote Green in Gorton and Denton’. It deserves our attention for what it reveals about the true nature of this organisation whose leaders continue to assert that they are the true inheritors of Britain’s revolutionary tradition and of the Leninist Third International.

To begin, let us examine the nature of the Green party, who are everywhere, by bourgeois and ‘socialist’ commentators alike, being held up as the ‘progressive’ option for working-class voters. But the Green party is not a party of the workers nor of the ‘left’. It is another party of capitalism. In Britain and throughout Europe, the Greens have always been a party of war.

It was a German ‘green’ minister and vice-chancellor, Joschka Fischer, who oversaw the Nato bombing (using depleted-uranium-tipped weapons) of Yugoslavia, the first ‘Gulf’ war against Iraq, and the sending of German troops to Afghanistan.

It was another ‘green’ German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, who has been further to the right than the führer himself in her support for aggressive nazism in Ukraine and all-out war against Russia. She cheered on the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline (an environmental and economic disaster) the shelling and missile attacks upon the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (a potential environmental catastrophe) and the decommissioning of Germany’s nuclear power stations (a huge economic own goal).

The only consistent strand running through ‘green’ policy for the last 30 years, in fact, has been a willingness to serve imperialism – no matter what the human or environmental cost.

The Green party of England and Wales claims to have ‘differences’ with the USA over its approach to Greenland, but has nevertheless expressed its desire for a strong European force (ie, for Nato) to continue the proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, allying with the illegitimate fascist junta of Volodymyr Zelensky, who continues to assert his intention of fighting “to the last drop of Ukraine blood”. (Is Zach Polanski the Left’s answer to Nigel Farage?, Channel 4 News, 2 September 2025)

Capitalism, war, imperialist brigandage, and all the economic mobilisation toward producing the mechanised merchandise of death – up to and including rattling the nuclear sabre. There is no such thing as ‘sustainable’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ monopoly capitalism. The entire Green party shakedown is a fraud.

Searching for the new face of capitalist rule

As the working class looks on in horror at the various revelations contained in the released Epstein files, including the sordid dealings and back-door manoeuvrings of Labour grandee Peter Mandelson, the Labour party’s stock has sunk so low that it is now as widely discredited as the Tory party it was brought in to replace just a year and a half ago.

For the bourgeoisie, with an accelerating financial crisis and an increasingly desperate drive to rebalance its books via a nice big war for plunder, it’s time for a new act with which to convince the masses to keep their faith pinned to bourgeois parliamentarism and the capitalist order. But that next act is proving increasingly hard to stitch together: SNP, Plaid … Reform, Green … The desperation is palpable.

Friedrich Engels noted, most profoundly, that “the vote” – universal suffrage – is itself nothing but an instrument of capitalist rule.

“Universal suffrage, he says, obviously taking account of the long experience of German social democracy [ie, 19th-century socialism], is ‘the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state.’

“The petty-bourgeois democrats, such as our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and also their twin brothers, all the social-chauvinists and opportunists of western Europe [and we must include ‘left’ Labour, Green, Corbyn, ‘Your party’ and the CPB in this category], expect just this ‘more’ from universal suffrage. They themselves share, and instil into the minds of the people, the false notion that universal suffrage ‘in the present-day state’ is really capable of revealing the will of the majority of the working people and of securing its realisation.

“Here, we can only indicate this false notion, only point out that Engels’ perfectly clear statement is distorted at every step in the propaganda and agitation of the ‘official’ (ie, opportunist) socialist parties. A detailed exposure of the utter falsity of this notion which Engels brushes aside here is given in our further account of the views of Marx and Engels on the ‘present-day’ state.

“Engels gives a general summary of his views in the most popular of his works in the following words:

“‘The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split.

“‘We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.” (VI Lenin, The State and Revolution, chapter 1, 1917, citing F Engels, The Origin of the Family, 1884)

We do not often come across this passage in the propaganda and agitational literature of the present-day social democrats. They are too busy covering up the naked sores of capitalism.

CPB eternally wedded to parliamentarism and social democracy

It is interesting to see that when the CPB quietly discards its own programme (a programme far older than its party, but which it has upheld since its April 1988 founding conference), it does so without any inner-party debate, and by calling for another vote for yet another right-wing social-democratic party of imperialism.

The CPB states its rationale thus: “Every election in Britain is now held in the shadow of twin imperatives – blocking the advance of Reform UK towards government and shifting the Labour government to a focus on working people’s interests and priorities.”

This statement reveals the deep tactical and strategic errors of the CPB, whose leading lights are now so confirmed and hidebound in their ‘thinking’ and practice that no new data, no new situation seems sufficient to force them to a rethink.

1. Labour is a party of imperialism. This fundamental fact continues to elude the brightest and the best of the CPB, who insist on regarding them as the “mass party of the working class” whose true nature is constantly “betrayed” by … well, every Labour leader, person of influence, office-holder and functionary that ever has any say in the running of British national affairs.
2. The CPB remains, therefore, a firm supporter of the British Labour party. Which means, by extension, of Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, Shabana Mahmood – and, indeed, of Peter Mandelson. Which means that the CPB remains a firm supporter of British imperialism, whether it wishes to acknowledge this or not.
3. The concept of “shifting the Labour government to a focus on working people’s interests and priorities” [genocide in Palestine? Genocide in Ukraine? Five percent GDP spending on Nato? Austerity and unemployment? More anti-immigrant racism? More imperialism and war!] is a shamefaced way of saying that the CPB remains committed to the entirely false and totally discredited notion (indeed, they have elevated this concept to a strategy) that they/we/British workers can and must ‘reclaim’ Labour for the working class.This is, of course, the result of the class-collaborationist Britain’s Road to Socialism programme. Every CPB congress and central committee statement continues to reaffirm and reinforce this fundamental error.
4. The CPB is thereby implying that somewhere deep down (due to the petty pecuniary interests of their own salaried and corrupted trade union bureaucrats, in their own pathetically inconsequential “organic” links to the labour aristocrats, no doubt), Labour is a party that serves the working class. It does not. But the CPB is so financially and politically bound up with the interests of the imperialist Labour party, it cannot ever break free. It has sold its soul (and the Morning Star) to ‘Labour’ imperialism.And the CPB must therefore be smashed. Broken. Organisationally dissolved. Discarded. Discredited. Outcast. For even when it issues its call to “vote Green”, this is a shamefaced call to retain faith in the Labour party! A protest vote whose sole ambition is to oust the ‘leadership faction’ and bring back the (entirely fictional) ‘real’, ‘old’ Labour!
5. The idea that “blocking Reform” by shifting back towards the Labour party [or another party of imperialism, to give a temporary knock to Labour today while saving the workers for social democracy tomorrow] is a concrete advance for the workers is the very formula the British left has used since 1924 to force disillusioned workers away from anti-capitalist conclusions and back into the Labour fold.How many times have we been exhorted to vote Labour to keep the Tories out? Or to keep the BNP out? To keep the fascists out? And now to keep Reform out? But in what way is the imperialist Labour party any different from these bogeymen? And in what way would a government of the LibDems, Greens, SNP, Plaid etc serve the interests of workers?They are all parties of capitalism. And in an imperialist country, that makes them all parties of British imperialism.

Our most urgent task is not to ‘reclaim Labour’ but to smash it in order to help bring into being a mass revolutionary working-class politics in Britain. This is the only path to socialism in our country.

CPB shows its true colours

The CPB continues: “Labour has done its best to hand the seat over to Reform. At Starmer’s bidding, the party blocked the candidate with the best chance of holding it for the party, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham …

“Instead, working-class voters are invited to back Angeliki Stogia, a corporate lobbyist and champion of the privatisation of public services. It is a choice that speaks volumes about Labour’s priorities and principles. As the Communist party has noted: ‘a Labour vote in this by-election is a vote for continuing outsourcing, privatisation and corruption’.

“It is through such undemocratic decisions that the door is opened to Reform.”

But Labour, to restate, is a party of imperialism. This Jekyll and Hyde ‘Starmer bad but Burnham good’; ‘Blair bad but Benn good’; Right Labour vs Left Labour, as if they were two separate parties is simply a fairytale for the feeble-minded.

The CPB can “pressure” Labour to become socialist and fulfil the CPB’s left-wing shopping list (the much cherished “left-wing programme” buried in its seldom-read BRS, the central party article of faith) until it is blue in the face. As the old Chinese adage says: The drooping flowers pine for love, but the heartless brook babbles on!

The CPB is so cross with Labour, its one true love, that in this by-election it has called for a protest vote. Until such time as Sir Keir Starmer should resign, when it will be back to the old refrain of ‘Vote Labour to keep Reform out!’

If Labour has been particularly genocidal, then on the eve of the next general election the headline will simply be “Keep Reform out!”, with an instruction to vote Labour contained in the small print lower down the page. As we saw in July 2024, when the Morning Star’s headline read: “Kick the Tories out!”

But the essential message was and remains: support Labour. Blame the party’s actual policies and actions on the ‘right’ of the party. Support imperialism while pretending to be ‘communist’. Dissimulate, spread despair, whine a little … and then get back into line!

The ‘Communist’ party of Britain concludes its article: “In Gorton and Denton, that must mean a vote for the Green party’s candidate Hannah Spencer. Her victory would constitute a major rebuff to Farage and the Reform party racists and send the most powerful message to the Labour government that it must move to the left if it is to survive [You hear? Back to Corbyn?! What a farce!]

“It may also galvanise the unions and left MPs [who?!] to start tuning words into deeds and acting to give the government the new leadership which is the prerequisite for winning back working-class support.”

Why, dear reader, would a ‘communist party’ want to ‘win back working-class support’ to the genocidal Labour party? The anti-worker party of Epstein-Mandelson-Streeting-Starmer-Lammy-Cooper-Mahmood monsters? This party that so loyally serves the paedophilic and humanity-devouring corporate capitalist elite?

Because it is a ‘communist’ party in name only. A party imperialist in content, ‘communist’ (loosely) in form. It is time to recognise this Trojan horse for what it is – an integral weapon of the enemy class.

The CPB is a Eurocommunist party of western social-chauvinism and social democracy – the fitting and willing product of the 1954 Rockefeller ‘Marxism-Leninism Project’ – a project designed to fill the working class’s leadership positions with “Marxists who are against Marx, against Lenin”, who are against “dialectical and historical materialism” and “actually-existing socialism”, “against class struggle” … and who always and everywhere will prefer the ‘evils’ of capitalism over the alleged ‘evils of communism, in practice’.

The CPB is a party, like the Labour party it serves, fit for imperialism.