Forward from mart ----- Original Message ----- From: New Worker Online Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2004 3:17 AM Subject: [New-Worker-News] Joe Parker 1917 - 2004
New-Worker-News http://groups.yahoo.com/group/New-Worker-News New Communist Party of Britain Homepage http://www.newworker.org Joe Parker 1917 - 2004 JOE PARKER, founder member and first chairperson of the New Communist Party, was one of the finest comrades you could hope to meet. He had a pleasant personality and was very witty but he was unshakeable in his commitment to the working class and in his belief that socialism was the way forward. Joe was born in 1917 and his life and many ways reflected the developments taking place in the Soviet Union. He started work in the engineering industry in 1932, which was the year that the Soviet Union completed its first five-year plan. The significance of that was perhaps summed up by one British capitalist, Gibson Jarvie, in October of that year: "Russia is forging ahead while approximately three million of our people despairingly seek work . Russia today is a country with a soul and an ideal. It is a country of amazing activity and perhaps most important of all the youngsters and workers in Russia have one thing that is too sadly lacking in capitalist countries today and that is hope." By the end of that first five-year plan, unemployment had been abolished in the Soviet Union. >From the age of 14 Joe had worked in the large factories of London serving his >fellow-workers as shop steward and playing a prominent role in the National Union of >Sheet-Metal Workers. When the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941 the official thinking in high circles over here was that the Soviet Union would do well if it lasted for six weeks and it would take a miracle to enable it to last out for two months. In fact the eastern front saw the largest and most significant battles taking place in the Second World War. By the time the second front had been launched on mainland Europe, the Nazi armies were already reeling back under the blows of the Red Army. Joe never lost the inspiration and confidence that arose from these examples of socialism in action against the squalor of mass unemployment and poverty and the desperation of fascism in crisis. Unfortunately all that tends to get drowned in the capitalist propaganda and anti-Stalin hysteria. As a result many youth of today, faced with horrendous problems such as housing difficulties and lack of apprenticeships, are prone to a lack of hope and positive perspective for the future. During the Second World War, Joe worked in a factory making sheet metal for aircraft. He was an active trade unionist and in 1940 he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). One of his colleagues, George Guy, who was also a CPGB member, recalled that Joe always strove to bring politics into his trade union work - on the executive of his union, at TUC and his own union conference and taking on the employers on the shop front. Though elected to the post of assistant secretary of the London District of the National Union of Sheet Metal Workers and Coppersmiths in 1965 this didn't stop Joe from remaining an active member of the CPGB and a vocal opponent of racism and fascism. But as the years went past Joe realised that the programme of the CPGB, the British Road to Socialism, was badly flawed. He saw that the CPGB's futile electoral challenges only served to demoralise and isolate communists within the labour movement. He realised that this revisionist and left social-democratic programme had to be defeated within the CPGB if the communist movement was to survive. When that was clearly not possible he took the principled decision, along with Sid French and others to make a clean break with revisionism and form the New Communist Party of Britain in 1977. Joe remained active the NCP long after his formal retirement though this was curtailed in 2002 by failing health. His life-long commitment to the communist cause was an inspiration to all who met him. Joe Parker always endeavoured to be positive in his approach to younger people and encouraged their efforts whilst at the same time seeking to develop their vision to the socialist horizon. Joe Parker was a valued comrade, a very modest man, and he will be greatly missed. Joe Parker will be cremated at West London Crematorium, Harrow Road NW10, at 11.30am on Tuesday 7 September. No flowers - mourners are urged to make appropriate donations. There will be a gathering after the service at the Paradise Public house, at the junction of Harrow Road and Ladbroke Grove, where a room has been set aside and further speeches or contributions can be made. ============================================== New Communist Party of Britain Homepage http://www.newworker.org London District http://www.londoncommunists.org Or write to us at PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ. A news service for the Working Class! 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