NOVANEWS
Comrade IrIs Cremer
With great sadness, the committee has to announce that, just two months after her diagnosis, our dear comrade Iris breathed her last breath on 2 April. She was a fighter to the end, and in the last days and weeks of her life she was still making sure that Proletarian could be produced and that Stalin Society meetings were. Her funeral on 17 April packed out the crematorium and gallery, and was followed by a wake at which family, friends and comrades celebrated her life even as they mourned her death. Iris’s contribution to the movement was tireless and her example will live on in the work we do in building the party. Her obituary can be read online at blog.cpgb-ml.org/iris-mary-jessie-cremer-1941-2014.
Some of the eulogies from the funeral have been printed in the latest issue of Lalkar, and the most recent Stalin Society meeting was dedicate to honouring Iris’s life and work. The meeting gave an insight into how the work that she and other leading comrades did over the last 45 years laid the foundations for the work of our party today. Video from the meeting will be on Proletarian TV soon.
Cormade Iris was responsible for many important organisational tasks, which we are now in the process of reassigning. Enclosed with this bulletin is a list of some of those jobs. Please have a look through these and consider whether there are any that you could take over, either wholly or partly – no contribution is too small to make a difference if we all work together to keep the party functioning and growing. (Contact Katt to offer your help: katt@cpgb-ml.org / 07825 815 038.)
As our party has grown, the practicality of leaving so many critical tasks to one or two people has become steadily less viable. We were already talking about the need to change how we operate in the light of this new reality, but Iris’s death means we must move from talking about change to implementing it. Iris’s contribution was tireless, but in her place we now need to train up a whole new generation of organisers, each doing their small part, rather than looking to find a single individual to fill her shoes.
