Margaret Thatcher funeral protests in London and across country pass peacefully

Ding Dong the wicked witch is dead

Together

1979

Revolutionary tale of an enemy within

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Bert Ramelson's life was the stuff of legend. It needs neither embroidery nor embellishment.

He achieved the distinction of being personally denounced in the Commons by ministers in three different governments because he was such an effective national industrial organiser for the Communist Party.

Sinister figures in the business world, linked to intelligence and armed forces chiefs, feared the communist and broad left trade union apparatus that he did so much to help build and guide from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s.

Yet Ramelson had lived an extraordinary life even before that period. Born Baruch Rachmilevitch into a Yiddish-speaking community in Cherkassy, Ukraine, he was heavily influenced by the Bolsheviks in his own family, not least his big sister Rosa - later a "red professor" in economics and a prisoner in Stalin's labour camps.

While the Reds fought anti-semitism, the White Guards murdered some of his relatives in one of old Russia's frequent pogroms and his parents left for Canada. There Ramelson gained a law degree before spending the mid-1930s on a kibbutz in Palestine.

A Histadrut strike against the employment of Arab workers finished off his zionist sympathies. He returned home before travelling via London to enrol in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigade in Spain, where he finally joined the illegal Canadian Communist Party.

Ramelson caught shrapnel and a bullet fighting Franco's fascists. While admiring the courage of many anarchist fighters, he also saw anarchist units withdrawing from the front line in order to support the Barcelona uprising against the Republican government. He witnessed the good-quality munitions supplied by the Soviet Union, later degraded by anti-Soviet propagandists who were not there.

Ramelson never forgot the lessons he learned in Spain - the need to make a concrete analysis of a concrete situation and to build broad unity in pursuit of immediate priorities.

He returned to Britain after two years, married his first wife Marian, who later wrote a ground-breaking class-based history of the struggle for women's rights, and set up home in Yorkshire.

During the second world war, which he believed became a people's anti-fascist war when the Churchill-Attlee coalition was formed, Ramelson served as a tank driver until his capture near Tobruk.

He was transported to Italy but escaped, met up with communist partisans, rejoined the British armed forces and ended up in India. There he played a leading role in the Forces Parliament which was soon closed down when it advocated Indian independence.

Back in Yorkshire after demobilisation, the Ramelsons fought against the right wing in the Usdaw union. Bert rose through the Communist Party ranks to become its district secretary. Together with Jock Kane, Frank Watters and Young Communist League and CP member Arthur Scargill he helped organise the historic turn to the left in the Yorkshire Area NUM.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson informed MPs from his MI5 reports that Ramelson had taken over from Peter Kerrigan as CP national industrial organiser by the beginning of 1966. Almost immediately, Ramelson was at the heart of the National Union of Seamen's strike that Wilson said was orchestrated by a "tightly knit group of politically motivated men."

Contrary to the impression given by his loud, rasping and accented voice, Ramelson was a persuader rather than an instructor. He respected the independence and democracy of trades unions.

The Communist strategy of mobilising rank-and-file workers to exert pressure on their leaders and make them more accountable was central to the advances made by the broad left and the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions in the late 1960s and early '70s.

Biographers Roger Seifert and Tom Sibley rightly highlight the leading role played by Ramelson in helping to win the national miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974, spring the dockers' leaders from Pentonville jail and render the Industrial Relations Act inoperable. These battles vindicated his insistence on the transformative effects of intelligent struggle.

The authors also face head-on the charge from sections of the far left that he and the Communist Party betrayed Des Warren, who was framed and jailed for his part in picketing during the 1972 building workers' strike. Tactical differences did not prevent Ramelson and the party from doing everything possible to win Warren's freedom, as the latter had acknowledged before his capture by the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Those of us who met Warren saw for themselves the baleful impact of prison on every aspect of his health, and it is to Ramelson's credit that he and the party did not retaliate against the bitter words ascribed to Warren at the time.

Following Labour's return to office in 1974 Ramelson worked tirelessly to help turn the labour movement back towards free collective bargaining and the wages struggle after left-wing union leaders Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon had signed the "social contract."

Ramelson argued from the outset - notably in Social Contract or Social Con-Trick, one of the biggest-selling political pamphlets in decades - that the unions were disarming themselves industrially and ideologically in pursuit of an illusory compromise with monopoly capital.

In one sense it was a pyrrhic victory, because the damage done by the Social Contract to left and labour movement unity had already sown the seeds of Thatcher's victory in 1979.

Ramelson handed the industrial organiser's baton to Mick Costello in 1977, focusing on international work and membership of the editorial board of the World Marxist Review in Prague.

It was a bold move. Following the Prague Spring, Ramelson had been summoned to the Soviet embassy in London on August 21 1968, when CP general secretary John Gollan was on holiday. When the Soviet ambassador sought to justify Warsaw Pact military intervention against the popular Czech communist government of Alexander Dubcek he met a blistering riposte from Ramelson.

This was not Hungary in 1956. There was no danger of fascist revanchism and he didn't believe a word about right-wing military plots by Dubcek's allies.

It was another milestone in Ramelson's journey of disenchantment with the Soviet Union. Towards the end of his life he came to believe that the Soviet party had abandoned its socialist objectives as early as the mid-1920s. His participation in the British party's 1956 investigation into Soviet anti-semitism had also shaken his faith more than he let on, compelling him to question his support for assimilation.

Yet his commitment to the essential work of a communist party in Britain remained undimmed. He urged workers to join it and trade unionists already inside to be active in their local party branch. At the same time, he emphasised the need for the Communist Party to work for broad left unity across the labour movement, especially in order to exert influence within and upon the Labour Party, for instance in favour of the Alternative Economic Strategy.

The authors recount Ramelson's own vigorous participation in major inner-party debates, not least around its programme The British Road to Socialism. The purges carried out by the revisionist party leadership in the 1980s led him to ponder whether "democratic centralism" could ever be implemented without a seemingly inevitable degeneration into bureaucratic centralism.

This may have been one of the reasons why, after opposing the liquidation of one section of the CP in 1991, he did not join the re-established Communist Party of Britain. Yet he agreed with much of its political outlook and remained a solid supporter of the Morning Star until his death in 1994.

Seifert and Sibley's tale of this titanic figure is a pleasure in more than one way - it also marks the welcome return of publishers Lawrence & Wishart to the service of the labour movement.

Its only notable shortcoming is that more use could have been made of CP archives to elaborate Ramelson's views while a member of the party's executive and political committees.

They have delivered a worthy biography of a magnificent life, recounting Ramelson's tale with precision, depth and insight.

Every thinking communist, socialist and militant trade unionist in Britain will benefit from reading it.

In the seventies Margaret Thatcher makes her mark as Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher and stops free school milk

Hugo Chavez a Symbol of hope

In an enormous, varied and colourful life, Hugo Chavez was a product of poverty in Venezuela, which like many young people in Latin America led him into the armed forces and a growing sense of anger at the social injustice of a resource-rich but unequal country, bringing him into politics.

Despite the failure of a 1992 coup attempt and his subsequent imprisonment he became phenomenally popular, was elected president, re-elected three times, brought in a new constitution, improved the lives of the very poorest in his country, and forged a very special place on the world stage for Venezuela.

There are two things that stand out.

The Alba pact between Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador and other countries in the region was a polar opposite of the US free-market economics that has traditionally been imposed on the poorest people in Latin America.

This process allowed Venezuelan oil to support poor neighbouring economies and in return, among other things, Cuban medical help brought health care for the first time to millions.

The only condition of this process was that each country had to reduce inequality and conquer poverty - a far cry from the economics of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank's imposition of structural adjustment programmes across the continent.

But beyond economics Chavez understood, as few other American leaders have, the bitter history of oppression of indigenous cultures and languages throughout Latin America.

It was no accident that the one gift he gave to US President Barack Obama was a copy of Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano.

Chavez articulated the pain of the cultural oppression by the Spanish conquistadors and the landowners and multinational corporations. This change in the cultural politics of the whole continent will survive.

Chavez became a huge figure on the world stage because he was the polar opposite of everything that, in particular, the two Bush administrations wanted for Latin America.

He forged alliances to try to bring about a different narrative in world politics, something that is not easy to do. He was often unfairly criticised as being some kind of dictator.

It is a strange dictator that tolerates a mass media that is in permanent opposition, a wealthy elite who regularly condemn him, and an independent judicial system.

RIP Hugo.

Thousands of coffee workers stage walkout

Colombian coffee growers have launched an open-ended strike demanding better prices for their product and policies that benefit the people.
Thousands of workers, as well as farmers from small and medium-sized plantations, have joined swelling industrial unrest in the Latin American country.
In the western Tolima province activists clashed with police on Monday when officers tried to prevent a demonstration going ahead.
Protesters insisted that they would camp out in provincial capital Ibague until at least tomorrow to press their demands.
Telesur journalist Milton Henao said peasant demonstrators had been marching peacefully when police attacked them.
He stressed that the farmers remained unintimidated.
Growers have been hit hard by falling global prices in coffee beans, pointing to a 55 per cent drop in the price of arabica beans since a 30-year high in 2011.
Farmers are now paid around £190 for a load, or 125 kilos, of beans, but production costs them more than £230 per load.
The growers are calling for an increase to their £20-a-load government subsidy.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos branded the strike "inconvenient and unnecessary" and he was backed up by National Coffee Growers Federation president Luis Genaro Munoz.
Mr Munoz supported the setting up of a new government commission for the industry and rejected the use of roadblocks to press demands.
But Tolima leader Danilo Lopez said that the federation needed to be democratised to serve small and medium farmers.
He said the protests were the "awakening of the Colombian people against capitalist exploitation" and claimed the fight was a political one against bosses and the anti-popular policies of the government.
Mr Lopez added: "What we want is a minimum support price of 800,000 pesos (£290) per load for coffee and to curb the cost of inputs.
"We continue to negotiate other aspects of agrarian and peasant security."
Elsewhere negotiations to end a strike at one of the world's largest open-cast mines in northern Colombia kicked off today.
Directors from Cerrejon coal and representatives of union Sintracarbon agreed a draft agreement to end the 19-day strike.
Workers are calling for health and safety improvements and wage rises.
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