GREETINGS to all the comrades and delegates from across Britain attending the 51st congress of the Young Communist League this weekend at Ruskin House.

The tasks confronting Britain and the world’s communist movement as we meet are as critical as the offensive that is being waged against our class, humanity and the planet. 

Working people face a concerted assault on our wages and living standards by the ruling class and their Tory government, in conjunction with rank profiteering by the monopolies, banks and energy suppliers. 

This is being backed by an all-out effort to shackle and break the back of the trade union movement — as well as a general attack on hard-won civil liberties and the right to protest.

War is spreading across the planet, from the war in Ukraine to the tragic conflicts unfolding across the Middle East and Africa. Refugees flee in their millions.

Efforts by the United States to create another “Ukraine” in Taiwan are the sharp end of their campaign to create a new cold war against China by the United States, Britain and Nato.

The risk of nuclear annihilation is at its highest at any point in living memory.

All the while, the planet burns at an increasing rate, threatening to end the human story on a poisoned world.

Britain’s youth are confronted with a grim future. A miserable and precarious existence with the absence of freedom or choice. An increasingly authoritarian state. The relentless scourge of war and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. The inexorable onset of climate extinction.

But this fate isn’t inevitable. 

There is always hope in the struggle. Working people are the authors of history. Together we can conjure up a will and a force that can save the world and remake it anew.  

In days like these however, badges, slogans, proclamations and fine speeches are simply not enough.

The billionaires, the monopolies, their subservient politicians, their police and their generals won’t heed your moral exhortations on social media or feel the bite of your witty satire.

For today’s youth socialism and communism cannot be an online persona or an exercise in pseudo-intellectual oneupmanship. 

These are days that call for serious action with the utmost urgency and necessity.

In 2023, to be a communist is to answer that call to action — for your class, for humanity and for the planet.

This is a commitment that cannot be sterile. If manifested in words and private personal commitment alone, however strong, it ultimately means and contributes very little. 

If you believe that socialism is urgent and necessary for humanity, if you consider yourself a communist, then the duty is on you. The duty to be active in you community, campus or workplace, to be part of the Communist Party and the YCL, to help build the broad labour and progressive movement. 

At all times we must come from and maintain our organic link with the working class. It is our anchor in stormy seas, without which we would be lost. 

The mass movement required to overcome the power of capitalism and put Britain on the socialist path won’t be constructed by endless compromise or mild-mannered politics acceptable to the ruling class.

Nor will it be won by the adventurist actions of small cliques, purer than purer, and isolated from working people. 

This ruling class offensive, which has in its crosshairs our people and our planet, has to be met with a working-class response more determined, more co-ordinated and more effective than our generation has ever known.

Britain’s communists are clear on the immediate priorities for our movement.

The wave of industrial militancy and the battles of the last year must be supported and broadened in our unions. The fight against stagnant wages offers the labour movement today the chance to restate its relevance to a new generation and build on rising trade union membership and class consciousness across Britain.

As part of this strategy, we must redouble our efforts to win the labour movement to a class understanding of the cost-of-profits crisis. 

Through all of this, we must galvanise resistance and the strike surge into a movement for trade union freedom to defeat Tory anti-strike laws and win the repeal of all anti-union legislation.

In addition to the battles for wages themselves, the fight for other real measures to help working people battle spiralling costs for food, energy and essentials remain paramount — and trade unions must place themselves at the centre of this struggle.

Tenants’ unions, which have seen an encouraging resurgence in recent years, must be supported and expanded, uniting tenants against landlordism and in community struggles.

The student movement, for so many decades a source of radical politics and strength, must be rebuilt from the ground up with a class conscious and socialist outlook. 

The left and the labour movement must articulate an alternative economic strategy more directly, convincingly and forcefully in all spheres.

The current industrial battles and resistance to the Tory government can and must be the springboard for a fight to remove the Tories from power and win a progressive government that can roll back attacks on working people and the labour movement.

We cannot allow the prospect of a right-wing Starmer Labour government to placate social democratic elements in the labour movement to undermine rising militancy. We must continue to attack the right-wing character of the current Labour leadership.

Internationally, we must redouble our efforts in the struggle for peace, international solidarity and disengagement from Nato efforts to protract the war in Ukraine and to combat the growing new cold war against China. 

We must rebuild a class conscious, anti-imperialist and genuinely mass peace movement that can move millions, which we have seen as recently as the Iraq war.

But as communists, as well as fighting for the immediate interests of the class, in the moment of the present, we must also represent and look to the future.

All of these developments and all of these struggles decisively demonstrate the essential need for a stronger and more vigorous Communist Party and YCL. 

History tells us that a strong communist movement is essential if we are to free our class from the endless wheel of reformism, break the capitalist system and win working-class state power. 

Strengthening, rebuilding and reinvigorating Britain’s Communist Party and YCL on every front are therefore among our chief tasks and will be of the greatest service to Britain’s working-class and labour movement. 

These then are the tasks that fall to the comrades meeting for our congress this weekend and this is the importance of our congress. 

These are difficult tasks to be sure but these are tasks which we will meet with a determination and a will to win that is greater still. 

Good luck to the comrades and delegates of the 51st congress.

Let’s move forward together comrades, to blaze the next chapter — for peace, democracy and socialism in our lifetimes.

Long live the Communist Party and the Young Communist League!