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Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism
‘THE LABOUR PARTY is the mass party of the working class.’ This familiar claim is usually made as part of an argument that Marxists should abandon the attempt to build an independent revolutionary party and join the Labour Party.
At first sight it is a claim that seems to have a lot of truth in it. Certainly no other party is in a position to make such a claim and certainly a large proportion of the working class (frequently a majority) have regularly voted for it since 1945. It is also the case that the Labour Party was set up by, and has always retained a close relationship with, the trade unions – which undoubtedly are mass working-class organisations.
These are important facts which should not be lost sight of. They clearly distinguish the Labour Party not only from die Conservative Party – a direct representative of the ruling class – but also from the Social Democrats and the Liberals, neither of which have such an organisational connection with the working class. Because of this, when it comes to a choice between Labour and any of these other parties, as at a general election, Marxists will not abstain, but will support Labour.
Nevertheless these facts alone do not at all suffice as the basis for a Marxist analysis of the class character of the Labour Party. It is necessary also to consider the nature of the party’s programme, its leadership, and above all its actual practice, in order to make an overall assessment of its role in the class struggle. First the programme. The Labour Party does not have a specific document which constitutes its official programme. Its constitution, of course, contains the famous Clause Four commitment to the ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’, but this has never been taken seriously, even for inclusion in election manifestos. In general terms, however, and this applies to both its manifestos and the beliefs of the vast majority of its members at all levels, Labour’s programme is the reform of capitalism through parliament. For the right wing, the centre and even the ‘soft left’ of the party, this means a quite definite acceptance of the need to keep capitalism going while carrying through reforms.
Only sections of the ‘hard left’ even contemplate the idea of actually trying to abolish capitalism by means of systematic reforms, and they are ever willing to collaborate with and capitulate to the centre and the right.
The leadership of the party has lain always with the centre and right. When it has appeared to be captured by the left this has invariably proved illusory as the ‘left’ has moved rapidly rightwards. In terms of their social position, Labour’s leading figures have been at the very least upper middle class and in many cases closely integrated into the ruling class itself. The other dominant force in the party are the top trade union bureaucrats who supply the bulk of the funds and control the annual conference through the block vote system. They form a distinct and privileged layer standing above the working class.
The practice of the Labour Party needs to be considered in terms of its relationship to actual workers’ struggles in industry and in the workplace, and in terms of its behaviour in government. Where the former is concerned, its role is minimal. Most strikes it simply ignores, leaving them to the unions, and when a struggle is so important that it has to take some notice it either ‘supports’ from the sidelines, or equivocates, or tries to play a mediating role in order to get a settlement. In no way does the Labour Party attempt to offer organised political leadership to the industrial struggle. In government the Labour Party has repeatedly shown its preference for the priorities and requirements of capitalism over the needs of the working people it claims it represents. Again and again it has attacked strikes, raised unemployment, held down wages through incomes policies and cut spending on health and education.
Thus in neither programme, nor leadership, nor practice is the Labour Party the ‘party of the working class’. Rather it is a capitalist party operating within the working-class movement. Its role in the class struggle is to give just enough expression to working-class discontent to contain this discontent within the structures of capitalism. It is, together with the trade union bureaucracy, a principal prop and defender of the capitalist order. One further element of the original claim needs to be challenged, namely the idea that Labour is a mass party. In electoral terms it is, and also in its affiliated trade union membership, but this support is overwhelmingly passive. Its individual, real, membership is not above 300,000 and of these not more than about one in ten are active. The party cannot even sustain its own mass circulation newspaper.
The conclusion is inescapable. The ‘mass party of the British working class’ does not yet exist.
Could Labour be changed into a socialist party that really represents and fights for the interests of working-class people? History suggests otherwise.
For 80 years the Labour Party has been sustained by people on the left who were trying to change it. Overwhelmingly the experience has been not of them changing the Labour Party but of the Labour Party changing them.
Leader after leader, Ramsey MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Foot, Kinnock, have begun on the left and then progressed to the right, and they are only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath them are innumerable lesser figures who have been subject to the same process of gradual political corruption – ‘radical firebrands’ turned into ‘respectable moderates’ if not worse. Manny Shinwell, Stafford Cripps, John Strachey and Barbara Castle are fine examples from the past. Tariq Ali, Peter Hain, Ted Knight and Ken Livingstone are currently undergoing the treatment.
Even determined Marxists with revolutionary origins (such as the Militant Tendency) are not immune to the process. Years and years of trying to change the Labour Party and they become acclimatised to its reformist routine, embroiled in its structures and end up compromising their politics on the tough (but crucial) issues such as the Falklands War and Northern Ireland or on the question of a parliamentary road to socialism.
However, it is not just past experience that testifies against the possibility of changing the Labour Party, it is also any realistic assessment of the nature of the Labour Party today. First there is the fact that there is still very little that the party rank and file can do to control the behaviour of Labour MPs and nothing it can do to control the actions of a Labour government. Consequently any amount of left-wing resolutions on nationalising the commanding heights of the economy or unilateral disarmament can be won at Labour conferences without the least guarantee that anything will be done about them.
Secondly there is the role of the trade union leaders. Their position in the Labour Party is crucial because they supply the bulk of party funds and they dominate the conference and all the elections through the block vote system. The power of these trade union bosses will always be used against any real socialist transformation of the Labour Party, because the trade union bureaucracy is itself undemocratic and privileged in relation to the trade union rank and file. Thus in order to thoroughly democratise and radicalise the Labour Party it would first be necessary to thoroughly democratise and radicalise the trade unions.
Thirdly the whole structure and organisation of the Labour Party reflects the fact that it is essentially an electoral machine, designed to elect Labour MPs rather than advance the interests of the working class in struggle. The basic units of the party are wards and constituency parties, not workplace branches. The bulk of the membership are passive card-holders except at election times. The transformation of the Labour Party into a fighting socialist party would involve reshaping it and rebuilding it from top to bottom.
The only circumstances in which such a total overhaul of die Labour Party might even be seriously attempted is in the context of mass radicalisation of the working class, which in turn can occur only in the midst of mass revolutionary struggles.
The mass of workers will come to socialism not through reading papers and listening to speeches but through their experience of great class-wide battles. Such revolutionary situations in which the majority of the working class become activated do not, by their nature, last long (perhaps eighteen months at most). At any rate not long enough for the laborious process of purging and remaking the Labour Party. Consequently unless at least the foundations of a revolutionary workers’ party have been laid in advance of these decisive battles, the right wing and reformist leadership will still be able to use that power and influence to secure the defeat of the working class and the return to capitalist ‘normality’.
One argument remains – the negative one that not to be in the Labour Party is to be isolated from the labour movement. But this is to confuse the Labour Party and the labour movement. The basic organisations of the working class are not the Labour Party but the trade unions. So long as socialists make it a point of principle to be active in their workplaces and their unions they can both be part of the labour movement and build an independent revolutionary party. In the long run this is a far more realistic project than pursuing the pipedream of changing the Labour Party!
Marxism has always had to compete with rival theories. Its main rivals, apart from straightforward capitalist ideology, have been social democratic reformism and Stalinism. But there has usually been another alternative standing, apparently, to the left of Marxism, namely anarchism.
Anarchism clearly is not an important political force in Britain today, but at various times in the history of the revolutionary movement (most notably in the Spanish Civil War) it has exercised some considerable influence. Even now it has definite attractions for the young and rebellious.
First let us be clear that Marxists cannot afford simply to scorn anarchism in the way capitalist ‘common sense’ does. This is because the ultimate goal of anarchism – a society of real freedom and equality in which there is no longer a state or any form of oppression of people by people – is one that Marxists share. Supporters of the present order dismiss such an aim as absurd. Marxists do not. Our disagreements with anarchism are not over the ultimate aim but over how to achieve it; that is, how society is to be changed.
The starting point of this disagreement is a different view of the root cause of exploitation and oppression. To the anarchist the root cause is power: power in and of itself, power in all its forms – state power, the power of political parties and unions and every other kind of authority and leadership.
Anarchists believe that it is the existence of this power and authority which creates class divisions and all other kinds of inequality and oppression. Their ‘strategy’ therefore is to denounce and renounce, on principle, all manifestations of power and authority, and above all every kind of state power. To these they counter-pose the absolute freedom of the individual and the purely spontaneous rebellion of the masses.
Anarchism is thus essentially a moral stance. It lacks any historical analysis of how the things it opposes came about or of why it should be possible to get rid of them now, rather than any time in the past. It simply condemns ‘evil’ and fights for ‘good’.
In contrast Marxism does not regard the state (or ‘power’ in general) as the fundamental problem. Rather it explains the emergence of the state as the product of the division of society into antagonistic classes. This in turn is explained as the consequence of a certain stage in the development of the forces of production. The central task therefore is the abolition of class divisions. This can be achieved only through the victory of the working class over the capitalist class. For this the working class requires organisation and leadership (trade unions, the revolutionary party, workers’ councils, and so on), and the use of power – from the mass picket up to and including the creation of its own workers’ state to combat counter-revolution.
It is this last point which arouses the particular ire of the anarchist. Here they echo the bourgeois arguments: that revolutionary power leads inevitably to tyranny; that Leninism leads inevitably to Stalinism. However, anarchism has failed to come up with any serious alternative way of dealing with the resistance of the capitalists and their efforts to restore the old order.
So far we have been discussing ‘pure’ anarchism which has its social base in the radical petty bourgeoisie – which feels alienated from both the power of big capital and the power of the working class. In so far as anarchism has attempted to gain a base in the working class, it has had to abandon some of its individualist principles and accept the need for collective organisation. Thus it has tended to merge with syndicalism, a form of revolutionary trade unionism which rejects participation in ‘bourgeois’ politics and the role of the revolutionary party.
It is as anarcho-syndicalism that anarchism has come closest to Marxism, and in the wake of the Russian Revolution many anarcho-syndicalists were drawn to the Communist International. But anarchism’s lack of theory, its abstention from politics, leaves the field to the reformists. Its failure to think through the realities of workers’ power disqualify anarchism as a practical guide to the achievement of the revolutionary transformation of society and the emancipation of the working class.
The relationship between the trade union struggle and the struggle for socialism is not a new question. It has been around since the beginnings of trade union and socialist movements in the early part of the nineteenth century. It is therefore useful to look back to what Marx himself said about it, especially as it was one of the great weaknesses of the socialists before Marx that they tended to ignore the trade unions.
‘When it is a question’, wrote Marx in 1846, ‘of making a precise study of strikes, unions and other forms in which workers carry out before our eyes their organisation as a class, some are seized with real fear and others display a transcendental disdain.’
The reason for this ‘fear’ and ‘disdain’ was that most early socialists came from the middle class and looked to this class to achieve socialism, either through moral persuasion of the ruling class or through secret conspiracies on the model of the French Revolution of 1789. Marx, however, rejected both moral persuasion and secret conspiracies in favour of class struggle by the workers themselves. Consequently he immediately recognised the crucial importance of trade unions and strikes as the basic way in which workers organised to defend themselves against the employers and built their unity for the future overthrow of capitalism.
But Marx also pointed out the limitations of the trade union struggle. The starting point of trade unionism was the attempt to improve the terms on which workers sold their labour power to the bosses, not to overthrow the boss-worker relationship altogether.
What was needed therefore was not only trade union organisation but also political organisation: the creation of a workers’ political party which would continually raise within the broader workers’ movement the key questions of political power and the ownership of the means of production.
Since Marx’s day these debates have continued. During the early years of the 20th century the workers’ movement internationally was divided into Social Democrats (like the British Labour Party) and syndicalists (like the American Wobblies). The Social Democrats looked to parliament (a later version of moral persuasion) to achieve socialism, and recognised strike action only for limited economic purposes. The syndicalists, reacting against the parliamentarianism of the Social Democrats, rejected the whole idea of political parties in favour of militant trade unionism.
Both strategies proved inadequate, particularly in the sharpened conditions of the First World War, and it was left to Lenin and the Bolsheviks to develop the Marxist position of building a revolutionary political party within all the daily struggles of the working class.
These different approaches reappeared in relation to the British miners’ strike of 1984–5. Labour Party leaders, despite depending on the unions for votes and money, regard political struggle as something to wage through parliament. They therefore reacted to the strike with embarrassment in case it cost them votes. Various middle-class socialists also turned up their noses at the trade union struggle because it was ‘only’ about economic issues. But there were hundreds of thousands of workers who supported the strike and even saw that it could politically weaken the Tories – but did not see it as part of an overall struggle against capitalism. The Marxist tradition is closest to the last of these in that we were 100 per cent in support of the strike and would do everything we could to help it win. But we also recognised that, while a victory for the miners would also strengthen the struggle for socialism as a whole by defeating the Tories, however great this victory, trade union action alone would not be enough. So within the strike and in the course of solidarity work around it we were simultaneously working to draw workers to revolutionary socialist ideas and to the building of a revolutionary party.
One of the most widespread myths about Marxism is that it is first and foremost a doctrine of nationalisation and state ownership. This is a myth that is constantly and deliberately encouraged by the ruling class in order to discredit Marxism. Knowing that people generally resent and fear the state bureaucracy, the ruling class puts it about that Marxists want to expand the power of this bureaucracy till it controls everything – like in Eastern Europe.
Unfortunately it is a myth that is also believed and encouraged by many who call themselves Marxists. This is particularly the case with those who call countries like Russia and Poland ‘socialist’ simply on the grounds that their economies are nationalised – despite the fact that they have not a shred of workers’ democracy. It also applies to those who talk of a Labour government introducing socialism by nationalising the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, or the ‘top 200 monopolies’ as they sometimes put it.
In fact the central idea of Marxism is not nationalisation but class struggle – the struggle of the working class for self-emancipation – leading to the abolition of class divisions and the withering away of the state. Of course Marxists support nationalisation, but as a means through which the working class can take collective control, not as an end in itself. Our aim, therefore, is nationalisation not by the existing capitalist state but by a workers’ state and with full workers’ control.
Without workers’ power and workers’ control nationalisation is not socialism but state capitalism – a further extension of the concentration of capital into larger and larger units. As Engels put it, ‘The more the state proceeds to the taking over of productive forces the more does it actually become the national capitalist ... The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.’
Clear proof of this is the behaviour of British Steel, British Rail and the National Coal Board. Far from being islands of socialism in the capitalist sea, they ruthlessly exploit their workforce for the sake of profit just like other capitalist industries. Indeed, in recent years they have been at the centre of the ruling-class assault on jobs, wages and union organisation.
Some people suggest this is because the nationalised industries are only a minority of British industry, most of which remains in private hands. But in Russia, where the state owns almost all the means of production, workers are still exploited and oppressed, and production still serves the accumulation of capital rather than human needs. It is only in conjunction with workers’ power that nationalisation signifies a break with capitalism.
Does it follow from this that Marxists should be indifferent to the current Tory drive towards ‘privatisation’? Not at all. In the first place privatisation goes hand-in-hand with an attack on jobs and working conditions and must be resisted as such. In the second place it generally involves an attack on the quality of service provided by the industry concerned, which must also be resisted.
Institutions like the National Health Service and state education make a real difference to the standard of living of working people. Their defence is a matter of central concern to Marxists. Equally the demand for nationalisation of a company that goes bankrupt can be an important weapon in the struggle to save the jobs of the workforce. (Certainly it’s far better than setting up a workers’ co-op.)
However, in all these cases what we are talking about is reforms within capitalism, not measures that overthrow it, or even initiate its overthrow. Marxists are the most determined fighters for reforms because it is through fighting for reforms that workers build their consciousness, confidence and fighting spirit. But that is no reason to confuse these reforms with socialism, the basis of which is, and can only be, the establishment of workers’ power.
The standard right-wing view of revolution sees it as a conspiracy engineered by malicious revolutionaries with the mass of people playing only the role of passive bystanders. Clearly this is a stupid caricature. But sometimes, especially when the majority of workers are passive, would-be revolutionaries and others on the left can adopt a kind of mirror image of this reactionary view. They see revolutionaries as heroic individuals acting on behalf of the working class to liberate them from above.
Carried to its extreme, this sort of thinking leads to terrorism and the kind of actions undertaken by the Italian Red Brigades. It has a long history stretching back to the nineteenth century French revolutionary Blanqui, who devoted his life to planning insurrections to be carried through by a special selected elite.
The Marxist view is very different. As Trotsky put it, ‘the most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historic events ... a revolution is first of all the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.’
This principle is confirmed by all the experience of workers’ revolutions in the past century and a half. From the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and more recently the May events in France 1968 and the Solidarity movement in Poland, every major confrontation between workers and the existing order has begun spontaneously – not at the summons or behest of a revolutionary organisation.
This in no way invalidates the role of revolutionary leadership. Revolutions may begin spontaneously but they do not end that way. Either in the course of the revolutionary upheaval a revolutionary party is able to win the leadership of the masses, then organise and centralise them for the seizure of power (as was the case in Russia) or the revolution will eventually be stifled and defeated. Nevertheless, the role of the party is to guide the revolution to victory, not to manufacture it. The role of revolutionaries is to lead the masses, not to substitute for them.
All of this may seem obvious in the abstract when we are talking about a full-scale revolution – no one is going to argue that the Socialist Workers Party can overthrow the Tory government by mounting a surprise attack on Downing Street. But it also applies to the thousands of partial economic and political struggles that occur in non-revolutionary and pre-revolutionary situations.
Here the principle can be harder to grasp. Take the case of a small local strike which socialists in the area have been actively supporting, visiting the picket line, collecting money and so on. After a few weeks the strike runs into difficulties and the picket line dwindles. Here there can be a strong temptation for socialist supporters to substitute themselves for the workers on the picket line rather than arguing for a strategy that can re-involve them.
Another example is Ireland. British rule in Northern Ireland has been and remains brutal and oppressive and socialists have a duty to say so loud and clear. But the fact is that for the last ten years there has been no mass campaign in Britain on the Irish question. Some very small revolutionary groups see this as the fault of somewhat larger revolutionary groups. In reality, neither the SWP nor any other left organisation could create such a campaign by sheer willpower in the total absence of a mood of solidarity in at least a section of the working class (above all Irish workers in Britain).
Finally there is the case of a battle such as that of the printers at ‘Fortress Wapping’, where workers fought for their jobs against pre-planned mass strike-breaking, organised by the employer and heavily defended by the forces of the state – the police. From the outset it was obvious to revolutionary socialists that the first step towards winning this vital dispute was a series of militant mass pickets. At the same time it was no less obvious that the trade union leaders were not prepared to organise such pickets, indeed actively opposed them.
In such a situation the substitutionist temptation is there again. Perhaps what the printers aren’t doing we should do for them? Perhaps if every Socialist Worker supporter could be assembled at Wapping every Saturday night that would do the trick? Actually this is neither practical nor desirable, as it would not solve the basic problem in the dispute. The task would remain of mobilising the mass of print workers – and not just those directly involved – and then other trade unionists in their support.
Does this mean revolutionary socialists do nothing? No, it means continuing to support the pickets, and outlining to the workers involved an alternative strategy to that of the union leaders.
Revolutionary leadership is an art which involves the concrete assessment of every concrete situation – there are no universally valid rules. But in general we can say this: it is not a matter of revolutionaries leading themselves, but of drawing into action workers who are not yet revolutionaries. This means neither tail-ending the working class nor being so far ahead of it as to be out of sight.
The list of injustices in our society is endless; poverty, racism, the Bomb, homelessness, cuts in health and education, the plight of old age pensioners, the treatment of the disabled, police brutality, the oppression of women and gays, repression in Ireland, attacks on the unions, unemployment. One of the crucial differences between liberals or reformists, on the one hand, and Marxists on the other, is that the former tend to regard each issue as an isolated problem capable of being solved on its own, whereas the latter view all of them as having a common root in the economic structure of capitalism.
For the liberals the way to tackle these issues is largely a matter of changing attitudes; of the enlightened – themselves – persuading the unenlightened; of influencing me powerful directly, or else of mobilising public opinion which in turn will influence the powerful.
For Marxists it is first of all a matter of mobilising the power of the oppressed themselves to win concessions from the system through struggle and, in the process, developing and harnessing that power to overthrow the system completely.
To illustrate and evaluate these different approaches, let’s take two examples. First, the treatment of old age pensioners.
Everyone knows the majority of old age pensioners (those from the working class) are treated miserably. After a lifetime working for the system they are ‘rewarded’ with a pittance barely enough for survival. The old make up the largest single group within the 15 million people in Britain who are on the poverty line. Almost everyone would like to see pensioners treated better. Most politicians feel obliged to pay lip service to the pensioners. In an opinion poll, I would guess, 90 per cent at least would favour higher pensions. No one, as far as I know, actually opposes or attacks the pensioners. And yet, despite this immense support, their desperate situation remains unchanged. Why?
First because our society subordinates everything to the accumulation of capital, and from the point of view of capital, pensioners are useless, indeed, worse than useless. Consequently, in the queue for ‘rewards’ pensioners will always come light years behind the Royal Family, the armed forces, the police, Lord Mayor’s banquets and innumerable other vicious or useless obscenities, all of which do contribute – in their way – to maintaining the rule of capital.
Second, because as old age pensioners they lack the collective bargaining power to force an improvement in their lot. This latter condition will remain until organised workers use their industrial strength to fight not only for themselves, but for pensioners too. The first condition will remain until production for profit is replaced by production for need.
Another example is the oppression of women. Sexist attitudes are, of course, still widespread and deeply rooted. Nonetheless in terms of ‘attitudes’ the past 15 years have seen an extraordinary transformation. At the level of ideas, the women’s movement has been an amazing success. There have been two major pieces of legislation, the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act, in force for eight years. Yet the actual conditions of most women have worsened rather man improved. The earnings gap between men and women has widened and child care and housework remain overwhelmingly the responsibility of women.
Again we must ask why, and again the answer brings us back to the requirements of capitalism. For capital women remain a source of cheap labour that it will not, and cannot, afford to pass up. For capital the family structure, which oppresses women, remains an exceedingly convenient arrangement for the reproduction of labour power and maintenance of social control. Only the overthrow of capitalism will create the real conditions for women’s liberation.
Both these examples point to the same conclusion. Oppression takes many forms and each form of oppression generates its own struggle for reform. Marxists support these many struggles, but they don’t lose sight of the fact that the different oppressions have a common source in the capitalist mode of production. The many struggles are not isolated campaigns, but different aspects of a single war – the war of the working class to overthrow capitalism.
Capitalism is in a state of deep economic crisis and the capitalist class always reacts to economic crisis in the same way: it attacks the working class. This has been the fundamental reality behind government policy in Britain for the last ten years or more, whether the government has been Tory or Labour. It is going to continue to be the fundamental reality facing the working class for the foreseeable future, no matter who wins the next election or the election after that.
Because the capitalist crisis is world-wide, it is true for workers everywhere. High unemployment in the USA, food queues in the Eastern bloc, starvation in the ‘Third World’ – all are manifestations of the way the world’s ruling classes are making workers pay for the crisis.
Time and again the ruling class will return to the offensive striving to weaken union organisation, drive down wages, cut social services, slash jobs and undermine workers’ rights. All with the basic aim of reducing the share of the national income going to the working class and increasing the share going to profits.
In this way they will eventually provoke a massive and general confrontation between capital and labour. We cannot tell when this will happen but we can be sure that sooner or later it will. The question facing the working class and in particular its politically aware sections, in other words socialists, is how best to prepare for this confrontation so that the working class wins it.
Marxism provides an answer to this question. It is that we should build a revolutionary party.
This is neither easy nor fashionable. It means accepting (for the present) being a small minority within the class as a whole, and it involves much hard work and numerous difficulties. Nevertheless it is essential, for the simple reason that without revolutionary leadership the working class is bound to be defeated in a decisive conflict.
The enemy we face, the ruling class, is highly organised and centralised. This applies to each company, where you can be sure that all the managers of BL, ICI and the National Coal Board will follow a single coordinated strategy, and it applies to each capitalist state, whether East or West. Obviously the army and the police are highly disciplined and act according to a centralised plan.
To defeat such an opponent the working class must also be centralised. It must be able to link its action in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen with its action in Liverpool, Birmingham and London. It must be able to pursue the same strategy among miners, dockers, engineering workers, teachers and civil servants. Such coordination can only be supplied by an organisation which unites the workers leading the struggles in all these localities and workplaces.
At first glance the obvious candidates for this role are the trade unions and the Labour Party, with their already established mass memberships. However it is a task they are completely incapable of performing: they cannot coordinate the struggle effectively because at bottom they do not even want to wage it. Both the trade union leaders, whose main concern is to preserve their balancing role between workers and employers, and the parliamentarians, whose main concern is to win votes, fear an all-out struggle by the rank and file even more than they fear defeat by the ruling class. At the crucial moment they will inevitably betray.
This makes the building of a revolutionary party doubly urgent. Unless a credible alternative, with a substantial base in the working class, is built in advance of the general confrontation, the majority of workers will continue to follow their existing leaders – who will lead them to catastrophe as they did in the General Strike of 1926 or in Chile in 1973.
A revolutionary party differs from a reformist party not only in aims and ideas, but also in the nature of its membership, organisation and mode of operation. A reformist party is essentially an electoral machine. Its membership is usually large but passive. Its main jobs are fund-raising and canvassing. This requires neither political education, nor discipline, nor democracy, for no serious action by the party membership is even contemplated. It leads necessarily to the domination of the party by its MPs and its bureaucracy.
A revolutionary party, however, is a combat party. Its membership is smaller (in a non-revolutionary period) but active. Its job is to fight for its political analysis and strategy in all the struggles of the working class, and in so doing win the leadership of the class at rank-and-file level. This requires a high political level, unity in action and real democracy, for the party’s politics have to be carried in practice by the members.
Only a party built on these lines can lead the working class in an all-out conflict with the system. Only the working class, informed and strengthened through the leadership of such a party, can make a socialist revolution and create a socialist society.
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Last updated: 5 June 2015