The road to power

The Road To Power • 32 The road to power Despite the deepest and most sustained recession for half a century, the forces preparing to resolve the crisis of the present system by building a better one remain marginal. The recession has brought famine, chaos and war to the third world, and industrial decay, mass unemployment and falling living standards to the West. In all advanced capitalist countries economic decline has provoked offensives by employers and governments against the working class.

The unions and the traditional parties of the labour movement have met with a series of setbacks and a marked drop in influence. The old labour movement and the left are in retreat, demoralised and confused. Yet nowhere has a current emerged which can claim the allegiance of a substantial section of the working class for a strategy of revolution. The Revolutionary Communist Party was formed in May 1981 for urgent reasons: to build a revolutionary working class organisation in Britain. Since then it has grown steadily in size and influence. We now have a network of branches in every major city in Britain and, since April 1985, a weekly paper — the next step. The RCP has won a national reputation, particularly for its campaigning work on Ireland, racism, and the oppression of women, and also for its distinctive stance in the trade unions.

33 • The Road To Power In the wake of a number of major events — the Falklands War of 1982, the 1983 general election, the 1984-85 miners" strike, the British/American air-strike against Libya in April 1986 —the RCP has gained a wider recognition for its independent stand. We have also attracted considerable hostility from the traditional left. The party's programme, Preparing for Power, published in May 1983, contained our assessment of the economic and political crisis of capitalist society. It put forward our blueprint for a move from the defence of the immediate interests of the working class towards the replacement of capitalism with a system of planned production. The RCP's annual summer schools, also called Preparing for Power, have gained a broad audience for anti-capitalist debate in Britain.

The RCP has emerged as an organisation with the potential to change the shape of British politics - the first stage towards founding a new society. Here we outline how we intend quickly to realise that potential. 1. Crisis, war and the necessity of communism America's recasting of the world order after the last war provided the framework for sustained, if uneven, expansion. Then, throughout the West, state intervention in manufacturing, credit and welfare smoothed the way for growth. Even certain third world nations — the newly industrialising countries — were able to benefit from global capitalist expansion. Now, however, the world recession confirms that the methods used to stabilise the capitalist system over the past 30 years no longer work.

The West has been plagued by declining profitability, leading to cutbacks in investment and output, particularly in manufacturing industry. The more mature capitalist nations — Britain and Belgium in the old world, the USA in the new — have suffered badly compared with the more dynamic economies of Japan and West Germany. The newly industrialising countries have been plunged into debt and political instability, while more impoverished third world states have been pushed over the edge into mass starvation.

The Road To Power • 34 Falling profitability has compelled employers to cut wages and governments to reduce public expenditure. It has put the credit system under great strain, creating worldwide financial tension as Western firms go bankrupt and third world debtors default on loans. It has also unleashed intensified competition over trade, sources of raw materials and third world markets. Western leaders are forced into incessant diplomatic efforts to prevent economic rivalries from spilling over into political and ultimately military conflict. The most menacing consequence of falling profitability is the rush to rearmament, both conventional and nuclear. This is now common to all the Western powers.

Over more than 10 years of recession, each successive upswing has proved more superficial and each downturn more profound.

Each year between 1973 and 1985, inflation in Western Europe averaged 9.5 per cent, unemployment 6.5 per cent, and GDP growth only two per cent. Such a prolonged 'stagflation" is without precedent. In Britain the problem is specially acute: over the same period, inflation averaged 12 per cent, unemployment nearly eight per cent and growth little more than 1.5 per cent.' All forecasts now predict that there is worse to come. Various devices — consumer credit, re-stocking, rationalisation —have slowed the drift to slump, but none has restored profitability. Only foolish establishment politicians now see light at the end of the tunnel, or promise a return to past glories. Mass joblessness is the universal prospect for the foreseeable future. The recession reveals the re-emergence of fundamental, though long dormant, tendencies towards capitalist collapse. Marx described the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as *in every respect the most important law of modern political economy? Falling profitability is a result of increasing productivity under the social relations peculiar to capitalism. The drive to raise the exploitation of labour by improving productivity leads the capitalist class to replace workers, the sole source of profit, with machinery, which cannot by itself create new wealth. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall exposes how, under capitalism, the development of the

35 • The Road To Power productive forces is impeded by the social relations of production. It creates within the system a basic momentum in the direction of breakdown. A number of tendencies counteract the tendency towards capitalist collapse. The rising mass of profit that results from heightened exploitation can temporarily offset the fall in the rate of profit. But a rising absolute mass of profit cannot compensate for the inexorable decline in the rate of profit, as the proportion of capital expended on machinery and raw materials to produce this profit increases at the expense of capital invested in living labour.

The imposition of longer hours, lower wages, faster work rates — methods of upping the rate of exploitation while avoiding investment in machinery — can increase the rate of profit.

Cheapening the costs of machines, raw materials and energy can do the same. Trade, the export of capital, credit, the centralisation of capital through mergers and takeovers: all these can put off the day of reckoning. Yet there comes a point at which these counteracting tendencies are impotent. At this point accumulation halts and crisis intervenes. The events of the past decade are an eloquent vindication of the Marxist theory of crisis, and a telling answer to all those who have dismissed it as behind the times.

Capital's failure to develop the forces of production in a systematic manner and its inherent tendency towards crisis reveal that it is merely a passing phase in the evolution of mankind. Even in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the heyday of capitalism, the trends towards collapse were already evident. Marx showed that, when capital came up against its inbuilt barriers to expansion, it had no option but to modify its own laws by resorting to forms of organisation of a 'transitional' type—transitional to a different way of organising production. He identified the rise of joint-stock companies, the credit system and monopoly corporations as signals that capital could no longer raise productivity in the traditional manner. Capital could only continue to grow by overhauling structures of ownership and control in the direction of wider social involvement.

Marx considered the emergence of joint-stock companies as the ultimate development of capitalist production' which revealed the

The Road To Power • 36 'necessary transitional phase towards the reconversion of capital into the property of associated producers? Another significant indicator of the inability of private capital to advance under its own steam was the growth of state intervention in the economy.* Such measures revealed, not the transcendence of capitalist relations, but the fact that the system was reaching a dead end. They revealed that communism was not only possible: it was a necessity.

The emergence of powerful working class movements in the major capitalist countries made it possible for mankind to make the transition from capitalism to communism. Born out of and brutalised by capitalist society, the proletariat had little stake in the system. As a class, workers had everything to gain by ending wage slavery and establishing a society in which production was organised for need rather than for profit, and classes and oppression were no longer necessary.

In the period around the First World War Lenin developed Marx's analysis of capitalist decline. He saw the contemporary transformation of capitalism into imperialism as the opening of a transitional epoch. A more and more integrated world economy was characterised both by the advanced capitalist countries' export of capital, and by their quest to carve the planet up at each other's expense. Within the imperialist camp, free competition was replaced by monopolistic competition and state intervention. These mechanisms however could only postpone, not prevent, the tendency towards capitalist collapse.

For Lenin the imperialist epoch was a period of stagnation and decay, one overshadowed by the growing ineffectiveness of the tendencies counteracting the falling rate of profit. The capitalist class is obliged to use directly political means to regulate production and to discipline the working class. The fate of the system now depends on the success, or otherwise, of such tactics. For capitalism, self-destruction is not inevitable: rather, destruction will result from the conscious will of the working class. If the capitalists can manage to contain the revolt of the working class and restore profitable production at our expense, the system can stagger on and even undergo a revival. It is up to the working class either to overthrow the capitalist system or pay the price for the resolution of its crisis.

37 • The Road To Power The characteristic features of twentieth-century capitalism have been the turbulent alternation of periods of boom and slump and the coexistence of dramatic extremes of wealth and poverty. One of the central mechanisms that has enabled the system to survive is war. There have been wars among the imperialist powers, wars in the third world and continual bouts of warfare between the capitalists and the working class. Wars have regulated superpower rivalries and have redrawn the boundaries of Western influence in the third world. The mass devastation caused by the two world wars paved the way for a thoroughgoing restructuring of capitalist production, particularly in the countries most directly affected — Germany and Japan, France and Italy. It is worth noting that the past four decades of 'peace' have been the bloodiest ever. Apart from the two global conflagrations preceding it, more people have been killed in the 120 wars since the year 1946 than in any time in history.

Today's recession again puts a world war on the agenda. In its early stages, the Western powers have already begun to savage the third world. Britain has sent its task force to the south Atlantic, the French have sent troops to Chad, the USA has invaded Grenada and interfered extensively in Central America. The British/ American air-strike on Libya follows extensive meddling by the West in Lebanon and in the wider Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. Mounting economic skirmishes between imperialist states prefigure outright military conflicts. The capitalist system knows no other method of resolving differences. Washington, Paris, London, Bonn, Tokyo: all will stop at nothing to secure the profits on which their survival depends. In this sense the nuclear and hi-tech conventional weapons of modern capitalism present little that is novel. They have simply made genocide a more efficient business.

The capitalist class is also preparing to go to war against the working class. In every capitalist country the trade unions are under attack from the state and the employers. In every country workers are being forced to accept sacrifices to bail the system out. The longer the recession lasts, the greater will be the sacrifices demanded.

The Road To Power • 38 The working class has been here before. Last time, what began as wage cuts and redundancies wound up in Auschwitz and Dachau, the firebombing of Hamburg, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and the death of 30 million people. Early in the imperialist epoch, the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg posed the alternatives facing the world as socialism or barbarism. The same alternatives, even more starkly counterposed, face us again today.

2. The legacy of past defeats Despite more than 10 years of recession, Western capitalist societies have remained remarkably free from internal upheaval. Despite everything, there has been only a muted response from the working class. Trade union membership and militancy have everywhere declined and the unions have become more and more defensive in face of unemployment and aggressive management tactics. The failure of strike action to protect jobs, working conditions and living standards has strengthened conservative trends in the working class. The miners' strike was the biggest working class challenge to the employers' offensive anywhere in the capitalist world. However, its defeat exposed the inability of the labour movement to beat the bosses of the eighties with the tactics of an earlier era. In all Western countries, trade unions have gone through similar reversals, leading to a degree of exhaustion among their members. Likewise, the political parties that represent the working class have taken a more moderate, right-wing trajectory.

The labour movement has not really given the capitalists too much cause for concern. More serious threats have come from ethnic minorities (Britain and the USA), separatist movements (Spain, France), middle class urban guerrillas (West Germany, Italy, Japan, USA) and, in the peculiar case of Britain, from the internal colonial problem of Ireland. Indeed the relative quiescence of the working class has made a significant contribution to the West's success in containing resistance from other social forces.

The slow development of the recession, its uneven impact on the

39 • The Road To Power working class, the fact that it follows 30 years of steady expansion and stability: all this contributes to the absence of large-scale revolt.

Stretching from the early twenties to the late forties, the defeats of our movement have left a legacy decisive in its impact on the working class of the seventies and eighties. The contrast between the periods immediately following the two world wars this century illustrates a crucial shift in working class consciousness.

1918 and 1945 The First World War sparked a wave of revolutionary unrest across central Europe. In 1917 the Tsar was overthrown in Russia and the world's first proletarian dictatorship was established. In the following 18 months the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed and working class insurrections took place in Austria, Hungary and Germany. In 1920 industrial action swept France, while workers seized land and occupied factories in Italy. Even Britain and the USA were not immune from working class eruptions.

In the aftermath of the First World War enfeebled employers faced workers inspired by the Bolsheviks and organised into an international communist movement. The war had failed to settle the inter-imperialist disputes that had precipitated it. Britain had defeated Germany's challenge to its pre-eminence, but only at enormous cost. The USA was strong enough to bail Britain out, not so strong to take over its role as world leader.

In the West the capitalist class survived the post-war upsurge. Yet the class struggle raged for the best part of two decades, against a background of slump and continuing rivalries among the big powers. Britain and America, the stronger capitalist countries, rode out the storm without having to resort to systematic terror against the working class - though violent state repression proved necessary in both countries. Among weaker capitalist countries, however, the capitalist class had to resort to ever more desperate and barbaric methods. These culminated in the rise of fascism and military dictatorship in eastern and southern Europe and Japan, the wiping out of working class organisations, the murder of militants and the slide into war once again.

For the capitalists, the Second World War was the cathartic

The Road To Power • 40 preface to a period of unprecedented stability in both domestic and foreign affairs. The influence of anti-fascism ensured that the British and American working class gave its full support to the war effort, both in industry and on the battlefields. Once victory was won, all the parties of the working class in the West celebrated it as their own, going on to play a full part in the arduous reconstruction that followed. These developments marked the nadir of the labour movement.

In 1918, workers had realised that their participation in war had been a mistake. In 1945, after even worse butchery, the labour movement failed even to recognise that it had been defeated The USA came out on top. The war paved the way for 30 years in which the class struggle remained at low ebb, and in which relations among the major powers were for the most part cordial. Over the body of a defeated and largely silent working class, the post-war boom took off. The only significant threat to the new order came from national liberation struggles in the third world. The USA could do nothing to stop the revolution in China in 1949, but partly frustrated a parallel explosion in Korea. It crushed resistance in Latin America, but failed to hold on to Cuba. After the rout of the French in Vietnam in 1954, the USA took over responsibility for Western interests in south-east Asia, a responsibility which drove it to kill millions before it was forced out in 1975. As for western Europe, it followed in the USA's footsteps. The French fought a major colonial war in Algeria before they withdrew in 1960, leaving more than one million dead. The British fought insurgents in Malaya, Aden, Cyprus and Kenya. After prolonged guerrilla struggles, the Portuguese were finally expelled from Africa in 1975.

The fact that the imperialist powers were fairly secure at home gave them considerable scope to impose the terms on which decolonisation took place. Only when the imperialist powers were defeated outright —in Vietnam, Algeria, Angola and Mozambique — were there serious domestic repercussions. Why were workers in the metropolitan countries unable to shape post-war history? How can we explain the bitter twist from 1918 to 1945? To answer these questions we need to examine the two major political influences on

41 • The Road To Power the working class movement in the twentieth century — social democracy and Stalinism. The first betrayers: social democracy Social democracy was the first mass international working class movement. It emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century as the culmination of three decades of trade union and political organisation in Western Europe. It was strongest in the countries where capitalist development had given rise to a fairly stable working class — Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, and Holland.

It reached its heyday in the years of imperialist expansion leading up to the First World War. The social democratic parties were strongly influenced by Marx, and their programmes expressed a commitment to the overthrow of capitalism. Yet, as time passed, the scope of their day-to-day activities narrowed to protecting the interests of the trade unions and winning piecemeal legislative improvements in factory conditions and welfare reforms through parliament.

The intercession of the state in conflicts between employers and workers had a formative influence on social democracy. In the years around the turn of the century, governments in the more stable capitalist economies began to establish a legal framework within which the trade unions could operate. They sponsored collective bargaining between management and unions, encouraged arbitration and conciliation in industrial disputes, and promoted welfare reforms. Bismarck's regime in Germany pioneered this approach, but Britain and the USA soon became adept in it.

State intervention encouraged the emergence of a distinct layer at the head of the labour movement, one which had a material interest in mediating class antagonisms. The steady growth of workers' organisations gave rise to a substantial number of officials employed in full-time administrative jobs in the labour movement.

The labour bureaucracy, a section of the working class movement which looked to the state rather than to the rank and file to safeguard its position, became an influential social force.

Given that the labour bureaucrats' first ally, the capitalist state, depended on investment abroad and the super-exploitation of its

The Road To Power • 42 overseas colonies, the leaders of the labour movement inevitably adopted an imperialist outlook on questions of foreign policy. They duly helped to popularise this chauvinist outlook in the working class movement. While the labour bureaucracy grew ever closer to the capitalist state, it still had to take heed of the anti-capitalist aspirations of the mass of the working class. For most workers, life meant ceaseless toil in poor conditions, poverty-line wages, insecure employment and swift reprisals for stepping out of line. For workers, therefore, the purpose of joining unions and socialist parties was the replacement as rapidly as possible of the capitalist system with a more favourable regime. The sizable revolutionary wing of international social democracy reflected the strength of anticapitalist sentiment. The left was led by personalities of enormous stature: by Luxemburg and Liebknecht in Germany, Pannekoek and Gorter in the Low Countries, and Lenin and Trotsky in Russia. Up to 1914 social democracy contained the tensions between right and left, between bureaucracy and rank and file. However, the outbreak of war forcefully revealed how far the bureaucracy had come to identify with the establishment. The capitulation of the socialist parties to the military initiatives of their ruling classes resulted in the disintegration of social democracy and the slaughter of millions. The bureaucracy's success in delivering working class support for the war reflected the widespread influence of its chauvinist perspective. The revolutionary wing of social democracy had underestimated the grip of chauvinism on the movement and had been reluctant to force its differences with the right to a split. For the left, 1914 was a profound setback. It was everywhere reduced to a persecuted minority in the early years of the war. While opportunist sections of the left — particularly in Britain and Germany — opted to oppose the war on pacifist grounds, Lenin and the Bolsheviks upheld the proletarian internationalist line: they insisted that each section of the international working class movement should work for the defeat of its own ruling class. At the same time the left began to recognise that the betrayal of social democracy made new

43 • The Road To Power organisations, and a new international essential for the working class. As the war continued, carnage in the trenches and the militarisation of life at home spread disillusionment throughout the labour movement. The prominent role of representatives of the socialist parties and the trade unions in war cabinets and special committees to promote the war effort discredited the labour bureaucracy in the eyes of many workers.

The Russian Revolution in October 1917 provided the stimulus for leading sections of the working class to break from the old organisations and form communist parties, united, from 1919 onwards, in the Communist International.

The leaders of social democracy were now called upon to defend their beleaguered capitalist sponsors against a mounting working class challenge. In Austria and Germany, where national defeat destabilised the old regimes, social democracy played a decisive role in channelling working class unrest into appeals for constitutional reform. The labour bureaucrats did not shrink from helping the state to crush the revolutionary movement. For this the ruling classes were grateful. They rewarded the bureaucrats for their services by extending trade union recognition and ratifying the status of social democratic parties.

The openly reactionary role of social democracy ensured that, throughout central Europe, the communist parties became the leading force in the labour movement. Only in Britain, where the ruling class was victorious in the war and the labour bureaucracy less compromised in the eyes of the working class, did the social democrats retain the allegiance of the most influential sections of the working class. The young communist movement proved too weak to overthrow the system. In the deteriorating economic conditions of the early twenties, the revolutionary upsurge subsided and the capitalist forces regained the initiative. In August 1920 the Red Army was defeated and the Russian Revolution isolated. In September the Italian factory occupations were smashed; by the early months of 1921 a workers' uprising in Germany had been crushed and the strike by British miners sold out. Mussolini's march on Rome in the

The Road To Power • 44 summer of 1922 marked the emergence of fascism as the final solution of a desperate ruling class. The era of defeats had begun, only to be confirmed by the abortive uprising by German workers in 1923. The impostors: Stalinism The early communist parties were characterised by political confusion and tactical ineptitude. Their leaders hailed mainly from the old social democratic left. Some were strongly influenced by syndicalist and anarchist ideas; most underestimated the durability of reformism and the need for coherent policies and strong organisation to overcome it.

The early communists combined revolutionary enthusiasm with a lack of experience of deploying different forms of organisation and tactics. This weakness was the focus of recurrent criticism made of the European parties by Bolshevik leaders at gatherings of the Communist International. The disastrous defeat of the German Communist Party in 1923 was the price it paid for its political immaturity. It revealed a general loss of drive and direction in the Comintern. More and more the working class movement was pushed on to the defensive.

The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the mid-twenties led to the political degeneration of the Comintern. It transformed the relationship between communism and social democracy. The communist parties had previously lacked the political experience to deal with reformism. Now the Stalinist leadership pushed them in an opportunist direction. The strategy of 'socialism in one country", formulated by Stalin to legitimise bureaucratic policies inside the Soviet Union, encouraged communists in China and Poland to subordinate their organisations to petit-bourgeois nationalist movements. In Britain the Comintern urged the Communist Party to put its faith in an alliance with the labour bureaucracy in the Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee.

The disastrous outcome of these manoeuvres led the Comintern to declare a sudden about-turn. In 1928 it instructed the communist parties to break off all links with the social democrats and go on allout war against them. In practice the so-called "Third Period" line

45 • The Road To Power was scarcely implemented. Everywhere, virulent rhetoric against the social democrats was combined with day-to-day adaptations to their reformist approach to trade union and national politics. As a consequence the revolutionary potential of the communist parties was destroyed and they became increasingly reformist in their outlook and activities. The Comintern's tactics discredited the communist parties and gave social democracy a new lease of life.

The communist parties' descent into reformism became complete in the Comintern's mid-thirties switch to the policies of the Popular Front. The Kremlin's strategy of forming alliances with peaceloving' imperialist powers against "aggressive' ones, and the European communists' urge to form alliances with middle class parties against fascism, meant that patriotism and class collaboration became the order of the day. Communists in Britain, France and the USA became as moderate as traditional reformist parties; indeed, in their enthusiasm to display their national character and to renounce any commitment to the distinctive interests of the working class, they often appeared more right-wing than the social democrats. Under the banner of anti-fascism the Stalinist communist parties abandoned the anti-capitalist struggle indefinitely. In the thirties the labour bureaucrats became the most ardent advocates of state efforts to overcome the Depression. Statesponsored rationalisation measures would reinforce the standing of the labour leaders and also provide some relief from mass unemployment and wage cuts. Reformist counter-crisis programmes based on state control of industry and state provision of services persuaded workers to take an active responsibility for the restructuring of capitalist relations. Socialism was redefined to mean nationalisation, government planning and the welfare state.® The social democrats wanted to save capitalism, but in the thirties its survival required more drastic solutions than they envisaged. In the more insecure capitalist countries — Germany, Italy - it required the destruction of working class organisations. In France social democracy lost its working class base and in Britain the world's most servile labour bureaucracy was fully integrated into the capitalist system. In the USA the corruption of the labour

The Road To Power • 46 bureaucracy and the repression of militants proved sufficient to enable the establishment to contain the working class.

In the thirties Leon Trotsky attempted to rally what remained of the revolutionary forces against the betrayals of social democracy and Stalinism. In his "Transitional Programme' of 1938, Trotsky emphasised that the hallmark of the imperialist epoch had become the contrast between the readiness of the objective conditions for revolution and the relative immaturity of the political leadership of the working class: *The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

Yet the feeble forces assembled around Trotsky proved unable to turn the tide. Most were destroyed in the Second World War and Trotsky himself was assassinated by a Stalinist agent. The movement survived only as isolated groupings incapable of developing a revolutionary strategy for the post-war world.

By the late forties Western imperialists were in a strong position to rebuild their system. From Japan through Europe to the USA, workers' organisations were cowed and in disarray. Social democracy and Stalinism had blackened the ideals of socialism and communism in the eyes of many workers. The consolidation of the stagnant bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union provided a negative example of the consequences of socialist revolution and the attempt to build a communist society. In the Cold War of the late forties and early fifties, the ruling classes of the West used this propaganda weapon to powerful effect.

*Never had it so good' After the Second World War the ruling classes in the advanced capitalist countries adopted a policy of close collaboration with the labour bureaucracy. In Germany the Allies set about restructuring the unions and the social democracy just as much as every other aspect of German society. In Britain trade union leaders became cabinet ministers, members of the boards of nationalised industries and were given knighthoods. They joined with establishment

47 • The Road To Power politicians in pursuing government by consensus, and, at every level of society, consciously tried to suppress polarisation along class lines. Given the quiescence of the working class after the late forties, social democracy had little role to play. Conservative governments became the norm. Meanwhile, as it grew more remote from the working class, social democracy became increasingly reliant on middle class voters. The establishment saw the working class only in industry; and then only through the prism of the trade union bureaucracy. From national to workplace level trade union officials were integrated into structures for bargaining over wages and conditions and resolving conflict.® The working class was effectively excluded from politics: its only form of activity was trade union militancy. The ieft, in both social democratic and Stalinist parties, survived either by reducing its ambitions to the level of the workplace, or by moving away from the working class and taking up the concerns of the liberal middle classes. The major effect of the post-war division of labour between the old labour movement parties and the unions was to depoliticise the working class movement even further.

Between the late forties and the early seventies two generations of workers became used to steadily rising living standards and virtually full employment. Thus when politicians reassured people that the recession was only a temporary downturn, they were in general believed. The remarkable scale and duration of the post-war boom transformed working class attitudes to the capitalist system.

Up to the thirties, workers' universal experience was of insecure employment, constant hardship and grinding poverty. By the sixties, most work was less arduous, cleaner and safer, jobs were fairly easy to get and wages allowed workers to buy cars, houses and holidays abroad. Though exploitation intensified as productivity increased, capitalism lost some of its harsher features and workers gained confidence in the system. Before the war, many were ready to believe that the only way to get a decent life was by getting rid of the

The Road To Power • 48 capitalist system. Twenty years after 1945, almost everybody believed that capitalism was there to stay. The vast majority were concerned to make the best of an imperfect system; the notion that it should be overthrown was consigned to the lunatic fringes of society. In post-war Britain Marxism, to all intents and purposes, was dead. In the pre-war years it had been liquidated as a force in the labour movement. It had survived the era of defeats only in grossly distorted forms, as a preoccupation of eccentric academics and as a set of sterile dogmas among isolated radical groupings. It was not surprising that, when the system headed into a new slump and the employers launched a political offensive on the labour movement, workers were ill-prepared to respond.

3. The rise of the Revolutionary Communist Party Founded in May 1981, the RCP's pre-history evolved out of the impact of the recession on the British left. The burst of strikes which lasted from the late sixties until the return of a Labour government in 1974 was the immediate response of the working class to the employers' attempts to overcome their problems by holding down wages and denying trade union rights. It enabled the left partially to overcome the isolation it had suffered as a consequence of the postwar boom. The left from boom to crisis In the fifties and sixties the left was dominated by a clique of radical Labour MPs around individuals like Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot and the weekly paper Tribune. The Labour left had little contact with the working class, though it expressed a strong nostalgia for the earlier traditions of the labour movement. It generally respected the authority of the union leaders over matters of immediate concern to the working class. It also went along with the Labour leadership's open endorsement of capitalist economic policies, as outlined, for example, in the influential policy document

49 • The Road To Power Industry and society in 1957.

Dropping domestic issues, the left concentrated on international and humanitarian ones. The setting up of the Movement for Colonial Freedom in 1954 provided a forum for a paternalistic approach to the third world; that of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958, an arena for revulsion against the Bomb.

True to form, the Labour left never questioned the right of British imperialism to exploit the third world, nor its right to use conventional weapons against the peoples of Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, or Aden. In the sixties the activities of the traditional left were complemented by those of the 'new left. The new left was younger and more radical, but its concerns remained largely ethical — the horror of nuclear arms and the Vietnam war — and its social base middle class. Meanwhile, though many workers were active in the workplace, few showed much interest in wider political involvement.

The onset of the recession and the anti-working class attempts of successive governments to improve the flagging competitiveness of British industry triggered an avalanche of trade union militancy.

For the first time in decades the labour bureaucrats came under pressure. The establishment looked to them to deliver labour movement acquiescence to austerity — but workers looked to them to protect living standards.?

The crisis of the labour bureaucracy led to a modest revival of the left. At the same time a new generation of more radical trade unionists won high office in some influential unions — Jack Jones in the transport workers, Hugh Scanlon in the engineers' and Lawrence Daly in the miners'. In the wave of strikes and mass demonstrations against the Tory incomes policies and labour legislation laws of the early seventies, a number of left groups flourished on the fringes of the Labour Party, though most of their recruits hailed from the student milieu. The Labour left itself grew in size and confidence and linked up with radical elements in the trade union leadership — a development unique in the post-war period. Even the moribund Communist Party revived to connect up

The Road To Power • 50 the Labour left with a burgeoning layer of militant lower-echelon trade union officials. It was in these conditions that the 1973 conference of the Labour Party adopted the "left alternative economic strategy", a radical counter-crisis programme rooted in the reformist schemes of the thirties. While Harold Wilson offered the establishment the austerity of the social contract, Tony Benn promised workers *a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families. Even though it remained securely confined within the framework of Labourism, the left began to articulate a muted anti-capitalist sentiment for the first time since before the war.

Outside the Labour Party a number of far-left groups, mostly originating from the fragments of the Trotskyist movement, expanded rapidly. Identifying with trade union struggles, they managed to broaden their base with some working class members though these did not stay long. The far left expressed a revolutionary temper, but failed to recognise that, behind the flying pickets, occupations and demonstrations of the era lurked a Labourism which went no further than the measures required for the immediate defence of living standards.

Workers experienced the consequences of Labourism after the election of Harold Wilson's Labour government in 1974. While Wilson and, after April 1976, Callaghan persuaded workers to take responsibility for the crisis and accept pay restraint in return for welfare reforms, they cut both pay and welfare. The result was the sharpest fall in living standards for a generation.

To achieve its objectives, the Labour government extended the status and privileges of the labour bureaucracy. By building up the institutions of class collaboration Labour persuaded the union leaders to endorse austerity policies. Labour passed a series of laws safeguarding the status of union officials and gave them hundreds of top-level quangos in which to be consulted by politicians, civil servants and industrialists. At the same time as unemployment doubled and troops were used against striking fire service, council

51 • The Road To Power and hospital workers, the prestige of the TUC reached new heights.

Lower down the hierarchy, full time shop stewards and convenors walked tall, as trade union membership rose to an all-time peak in 1979 and closed shop arrangements multiplied everywhere.

Workers soon became disillusioned with the Labour government.

The strikes of the 1978-79 "winter of discontent reflected the widespread sense of betrayal. However, workers' bitterness after four years of Labour government amounted only to a rejection of the consequences of the government's policies, rather than a rejection of Labourism itself. The social contract led to a convergence between the traditional Labour left and the far left outside the party. Wilson and Callaghan upheld the kernel of the left's alternative economic strategy — cooperation between capital and labour in a scheme of national economic recovery. They dispensed with both its more unrealistic aspects and those who, like Tony Benn and Eric Heffer, proclaimed these enough to provide the government with a useful left-wing cover in its early days. The Labour left was too weak to take on the party leadership directly and, once its counter-crisis programme had been implemented, could not escape blame for what subsequently transpired.

Alternative economic strategy, Labour left and far left were all casualties of the Labour government. As trade union militancy plummeted, the Benns and the Heffers became isolated as rank and file resentment at anti-union policies grew. So it was that, when the winter of 1978 came, the Labour left was nowhere to be seen. Only when Labour lost office in the following year did the party's radicals come into their own. The trauma of the general election defeat paralysed the party leadership and the right wing. In the eyes of many trade union leaders Callaghan and Healey were responsible for Labour's defeat.

For the left this was an opportunity to increase its influence. So long as the union leaders busied themselves in attacking the party leadership over the electoral debacle, the left could make some headway. Hence although the left was as isolated as ever from the working class movement, intra-party wrangling gave it space

The Road To Power • 52 to expand its influence. For the far left the pattern was similar. It had been disoriented by the social contract, as the anti-Wilson trade union revolt it had anticipated had failed to materialise. To many militants the social contract seemed the most plausible political solution on offer -and the groups of the far left had failed either to criticise it effectively or put forward a convincing alternative. They had simply dismissed it with glib phrases about a 'con-trick' and had called for more of the same sort of industrial action that workers had already experienced as ineffective. By the end of the seventies the far left was back where it had started. It had rapidly lost the membership and influence it had gained in the early part of the decade. Its rank and file trade union groups had disintegrated. Under the cover of various campaigns (against the National Front, against Cruise missiles), it retreated from trade union activity and returned to its traditional base among students and the middle classes. In the early eighties its campaigns to democratise the Labour Party and elect Benn as deputy leader showed that whatever basis there had been for work independent of social democracy had vanished for good.

The origins of our party The RCP tradition emerged out of the left in the mid-seventies.

Inside the International Socialists, forerunners of today's Socialist Workers' Party and the most influential of the far-left groups of the time, a current calling itself the Revolutionary Opposition developed a basic understanding of the inadequacies of radical left politics. It focused both on the left's overestimation of trade union militancy and its underestimation of the need to overcome the influence of Labourism and the wider ideological legacy of past defeats. The Opposition was duly expelled from the International Socialists and out of it, in 1974, was formed the Revolutionary Communist Group. The founding statement of the RCG, Our tasks and methods, published in 1975, set itself three interrelated goals - developing a programme, forging a vanguard section within the working class,

53 • The Road To Power and establishing a revolutionary organisation. '° This embryonic revolutionary left set about an indispensible task of self-instruction in Marxist theory and conducted a conscious struggle against the rest of the left as it strived to create the basis for a workers' party. At the end of 1976 the pressures of isolation pushed the leadership of the RCG in an opportunist direction back into the radical left swamp. A resolute section of the RCG resisted the influence of the conservative mood of the late seventies and formed the Revolutionary Communist Tendency."

The RCT continued the process of theoretical development and cadre training vital to the establishment of a revolutionary party.

The RCT was the result of a political struggle within the British left, but it did not reflect any significant trend in the working class. It remained small and marginal, unable to exert any significant influence on the course of British politics. The launch of the RCP in 1981 marked the beginning of a turn from a process of largely internal consolidation towards an attempt to intervene more directly in the class struggle.

The RCP tradition emerged through a political struggle around two themes. The first was the necessity for the working class, as the class that aspired to rule society, to assert its interests independently from other social forces. The whole purpose of forming a working class party was to give the clearest possible expression and leadership to the independent interests of the working class. The second theme was the central importance of promoting an antiimperialist outlook in the working class. Given the historic influence of chauvinism over the British labour movement it was vital to cultivate a spirit of hostility to all manifestations of nationalism, racism and militarism in British society. For the RCP, internationalism was not a question of expressing moral indignation over events in distant countries, but a matter of urgent political significance for the class struggle at home.

The RCP's insistence on these two themes marked its supporters off from the rest of the British left from an early stage. It meant that we questioned assumptions that the left had long taken for granted,

The Road To Power • 54 emphasised issues which it downgraded or ignored entirely, and refused to support other positions or initiatives which it regarded as mandatory. Let's look at some of these controversies more closely.

Working class independence • class collaboration and narrow anti-fascism One of the most basic disagreements between the RCP and the left concerns our different appraisals of the history of the working class movement. The left has long celebrated the Second World War as a victory over fascism, and has regarded the Popular Front alliances of the thirties as a model for its contemporary campaigns.

For the RCP, by contrast, the Popular Front marked the abandonment of working class independence which paved the way for the catastrophe of the Second World War. By treating fascism as an alien evil rather than as a product of capitalist society in crisis, the Popular Front separated resistance against fascism from the struggle against capitalism. Instead of mobilising the working class to get rid of all forms of capitalist domination, it meant unity with middle class and pro-capitalist parties to preserve the existing forms of exploitation and oppression against an even more repressive system. The Popular Front restricted the working class to defending one method of capitalist rule, parliament, against another — fascism.

Among the Allies, it had made working class militants more zealous even than the capitalists in their desire to prosecute the national war effort. Class collaboration under the banner of patriotic antifascism was responsible for finally extinguishing the revolutionary spirit kindled in the international working class movement after the First World War. The rise of the National Front in Britain in the seventies provoked renewed discussion of fascism, and of how to fight it. The British left revived the Popular Front approach. It depicted the NF as an evil menace to established society and launched an all-class alliance — the Anti-Nazi League — to fight it. By labelling the NF as 'Nazi and associating it with Hitler's Germany, the left sought to revive left-

55 • The Road To Power wing patriotism to fight a right-wing variety. The wider problem of British racism, and the support that racism enjoyed among all the main political parties, was passed over in a campaign to destroy a tiny and marginal far-right grouping.

One of the first revolutionary communist pamphlets, Under a national flag. was a polemic against the narrow anti-fascist approach." It pointed out the consequences of Popular Front colitico ation and hationalism. If emp of sed that the problem ass racism could not be reduced to the NF, and that its influence could only be combated through challenging chauvinism throughout British society, particularly in the labour movement. While the entire British left acclaimed the Anti-Nazi League as its most imaginative departure for years, the RCT emphasised the need for workers' direct action against racist attacks and for a campaign against state controls on immigration.

• nationalisation: a balance sheet Another clash between the RCP and the left arose out of diverging perspectives on nationalisation. In the thirties, as we have seen, the Labour leadership redefined socialism to mean state ownership of key industries and services. After the war it nationalised coal, civil aviation, gas and electricity, the railways and the canals, and iron and steel. It also set up the National Health Service and broadened social security arrangements. These measures of state intervention were warmly welcomed by the left. "The first session of the Labour government's parliament*, announced a jubilant Tribune in 1946, 'did more revolutionary things to this country than the first three years after the 1917 Revolution did for Russia.'" Since then the left has always looked back wistfully to the Attlee government, and upheld its nationalisation measures as a blow for socialism which should be defended and, at the earliest opportunity, extended.

Yet in reality there was nothing socialist about Attlee's regime. It merely introduced such measures of state intervention as were necessary to speed up post-war reconstruction, rationalise chronically inefficient industries (coal, steel) and overhaul outdated services (rail, hospitals). Similar policies were pursued by post-war governments of every complexion in other capitalist countries.

The Road To Power • 56 Workers in nationalised industries soon discovered that state administrators proved no different in practice from capitalist employers. They shed labour to cut costs (notably in coal and steel), maintained poor working conditions (especially in public services) and held down wages across the board. Workers who relied on publicly-provided health care or housing met chronic delays, poor service and shoddy facilities. Moreover Attlee proved more than willing to turn out the troops on workers taking strike action.

The left's sentimental attachment to past nationalisation has had negative consequences for the class struggle in the present. In every conflict in the public sector the unions loyalty to state ownership acts as a serious obstacle to defending workers' interests. For example, in the 1984-85 pits strike, the left in practice followed the National Union of Mineworkers in advocating the Plan for Coal, a scheme drawn up between government and union 10 years previously, as the basis for a settlement. Yet the Plan for Coal called not only for higher output from Britain's mines, but it committed the NUM to the measures to raise productivity, the redundancies and the pit closures necessary to make British mining profitable.'

For the RCP, it was vital to challenge the class collaboration and loyalty to state ownership codified in the Plan for Coal. No other course would enable the miners to succeed in defending jobs.

Nevertheless, the rest of the left regarded the Plan for Coal as irrelevant to the strike and allowed its influence to go unchallenged.

In the public services it is a similar story. Here the left uncritically endorses the union leaders limited schemes of resistance to government plans to put services out to private tender. But, in their determination to keep hospital and local services in the public sector, union negotiators have been prepared to accept job losses, pay cuts and drastically worse conditions. Keeping the private firms out safeguards the position of union officials to a degree, but that of their members not at all.

For the left, it is axiomatic to defend nationalisation and to oppose privatisation. For the RCP, the question is: does state ownership benefit the working class? We have argued that the labour movement should leave it to the capitalists to decide how they want to run their industries and services. Our only concern is

57 • The Road To Power that, in both public or private sectors, workers' interests are safeguarded. For the left it has long been an issue of principle to oppose the sale of council houses. But the only principle for the working class is to get the best available housing at the lowest possible cost — private mortgages included.

Middle class left wingers who work as salaried professionals in the state sector may identify strongly with public housing, hospitals and transport. But working class people who work for the low paying councils, health authorities and bus and rail networks, or who have to rely on the cut-price services they provide, have no such prejudices. • bureaucracy and rank and file For the RCP, the influence of the labour bureaucracy has long been critical in undermining the political independence of the working class. Since its rise in the early years of this century, the bureaucracy's ranks have been swelled by officials at all levels of the unions, from national officers, to regional and local organisers, and, after the Second World War, by full time workplace shop stewards and convenors. State-encouraged recognition of trade unions and legal support for the closed shop have boosted membership and ensured a substantial income for the major unions. The system by which employers check off union dues directly from wages and pay them directly to union head offices has helped to boost the financial security of the unions, as well as strengthening the links between the employers and the union leaders. Government subsidies for union education have, with the high salaries and expense accounts enjoyed by top-level negotiators, made the labour bureaucracy a breed apart from the rank and file. The fact that such a state-sponsored elite exercises political control over the official labour movement has always been a matter of central concern for the RCP. The labour bureaucracy fosters class collaboration and subservience to the capitalist state throughout the working class movement. Because of this we have continually emphasised the importance of workers ending the influence of this parasitic layer and taking control over their own organisations. We have focused in particular on the need for workers to abandon the

The Road To Power • 58 institutionalised closed shop and assert their own authority over union membership in the workplace. We have also campaigned for a return to the system of workplace collection of union dues. This would do much to restore the crucial connection between union representatives and ordinary union members and would make officials more accountable to the rank and file.

We have also recommended that control over strike action should be taken out of the hands of the officials. The form of working class control will differ in different circumstances, but it will generally involve mass meetings, rank and file strike committees and delegates who are immediately accountable to the strikers.

These demands are anathema to the British left which has long operated in the shadow of the labour bureaucracy. The left always reduces the problem of the bureaucracy to the activities of a few corrupt or politically spineless individuals. Its response to betrayals of particular trade union or Labour Party leaders is always to call for their replacement with more radical individuals of a higher personal calibre. The left never asks why the same cycle keeps on repeating itself. In the seventies, when tensions between rank and file militants and trade union functionaries were running high, the left would often make stinging criticisms of certain leaders and even establish radical grass roots organisations in the unions. But now that rank and file resistance has declined, the left has become more circumspect and has moved much closer to the bureaucracy. Hence it has reacted to RCP demands to strengthen rank and file independence with the same hostility as the bureaucrats themselves, equating these criticisms from a working class perspective with establishment attacks on the unions. In practice the left is drawn into backing the bureaucrats' defensive manoeuvres to protect their own position to the detriment of the rank and file. This difference in outlook came to a head in the miners' strike.

In the miners' strike the demand for rank and file control took the form of the campaign for a national ballot in the early weeks of the dispute. The union leadership refused to sanction this, the NUM's traditional way of embarking on strike action, because it feared it might lose the vote. For the RCP, a campaign around a national

59 • The Road To Power ballot was the only way both to challenge the collaborationist strategy of the union leadership and to win majority backing for an all-out national stoppage. Yet for the rest of the British left this approach was heresy. Following its established deference to the bureaucracy, the left put more faith in Arthur Scargill, a radical bureaucrat, than it did in the working class.

The result was a divided and ineffectual strike, one which ended up with militants blaming their defeat on fellow miners who returned to work, rather than on the disastrous strategy of the union leadership. The fact that the left endorsed every detail of the bureaucrats" strategy meant that demoralisation about the very future of the working class was bound to follow. If the strategy and tactics of the bureaucracy had been directly challenged from the beginning, as the RCP proposed, at least some clarification of the need for an independent rank and file approach would have occurred. At best, the miners could have been united around a programme which could have forced substantial concessions from the coal board and the government.

• building an alternative to Labour Ever since the formation of the Labour Party at the turn of the century, the British left has walked in its shadow. The Communist Party was founded in 1920 to destroy Labour's grip over the working class movement, but soon lost sight of this objective and drifted into the endless series of tactical manoeuvres towards the Labour Party that have become the central focus of left-wing debate in Britain ever since. Once the left in practice gave up trying to build an independent working class party by displacing the Labour Party, then the field was set for arid disputes about alliance, entry, or critical support. In the late seventies left-wing groups could be found supporting all of these positions. The Communist Party favoured a long-term strategic partnership with Labour, and Militant and other Trotskyist remnants had burrowed deep into its constituency organisations. The Workers' Revolutionary Party and the Socialist Workers' Party and others had abandoned entrism but still favoured critical support for Labour at election time. In 1978, as discussion of the impending general election opened, we published

The Road To Power • 60 Who needs the Labour Party?, a pamphlet which recommended workers to abstain from voting Labour.

We argued that the urgent task was to build a working class alternative to Labour. Calling for a vote for Labour — no matter what qualifications were added - could only confirm workers" loyalty to a party that played a decisive role in destroying the independence of the working class.

"Any support for the Labour Party, no matter how 'critical", undermines the development of a class conscious current in the labour movement that could challenge the reformist leadership of the working class. Asking advanced workers to support Labour critically is asking them to do what they are already doing. What they require is an independent programme that can challenge the Labour Party. This programme can only be developed in total opposition, both political and organisational, to this party."s We campaigned for abstention at the polls, but our proposals had a wider purpose. Who needs the Labour Party? concluded by declaring that we would intervene in the elections around issues which highlight the interests of the working class as a whole and which further the development of class independence. It particularly specified the questions of Ireland and racism. The political independence of the working class was the central objective which the RCP carried forward through a direct electoral challenge to the Labour Party in subsequent by-elections and local council elections.

The publication of Preparing for Power provided a clearly defined platform for RCP candidates in the 1983 general election. ' It also provided RCP branches with the opportunity to challenge local Labour candidates to come out in favour of a basic set of working class policies. The left has criticised the RCP both for standing aloof from the contest of 1979 and for running candidates in subsequent elections. In fact our position has been as consistent as that of the left. It has unswervingly supported the Labour Party, while we have proclaimed the need to build an alternative working class party, not in the future but in the present. Our changing electoral tactics reflect our growing capacity to offer an organisational as well as a political expression to the independent interests of the working class.

61 • The Road To Power Proletarian internationalism Our tasks and methods had argued that 'winning the mass of workers to a position of proletarian internationalism is an essential part of winning the class to a revolutionary position, especially in Britain where nationalism and chauvinism are deeply rooted in the labour movement."' The promotion of an anti-imperialist outlook in the working class movement has remained a central focus throughout the history of the RCP. • Ireland Ever since the current conflict erupted in Northern Ireland in 1968 and the troops invaded in 1969, the left has bowed to the strength of anti-Irish prejudice in British society and kept a low profile on all matters relating to the Irish War. It has generally taken an interest in Ireland only in response to two broad categories of events. First, the left has responded to particularly lurid instances of British repression — the Loyalist/RUC pogroms in 1969, internment in 1971, Bloody Sunday in 1972, episodic revelations of torture and terror in the late seventies, the use of plastic bullets, and the hungerstrikes of 1981. In these instances the left has generally appealed for British standards of justice and fair play to be observed, and has called for the government to introduce reforms in its methods of administering its oldest colony. A long series of campaigns — the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign, the Anti- Internment League, the Troops Out Movement, the International Tribunal on Britain's Presence in Ireland, the H-Block/ Armagh Committee - have restricted their horizons to mobilising all concerned people to plead for less barbarous forms of imperial rule.

Second, the left has responded to incidents of republican resistance, especially when they have involved bombings in Britain.

Aldershot in 1972, Guildford, Woolwich and Birmingham in 1974, a series of attacks in London in 1981, the Regents Park and Hyde Park bombings in 1982, the Harrods bomb at Christmas 1983 and the Brighton Grand Hotel bomb in October 1984 — all these have been condemned by the left. Its condemnations have taken different forms, from the outspoken chauvinist diatribes of Labour Party and trade union leaders, through attempts to apply Trotsky's polemics

The Road To Power • 62 against 'individual terrorism' to the republican movement, to criticisms of the IRA's selection of non-military targets. In practice, however, the consequence has always been the same: to deny the right of the Irish people to fight for national freedom against British domination. From the start the RCP has insisted on the basic demands "Troops out now' and 'Self-determination for the Irish people' When constitutional measures, such as the recent Anglo-Irish agreement, have been introduced by the British government, we have added the slogan 'No British solutions' to our basic demands.

Our aim has been to mobilise working class resistance to the British state's occupation of Ireland. Given the strength of the view that the British state has a civilising mission around the world and can play a progressive role in Ireland, as at home, it is vital to deny Westminster any right to interfere in the future of Ireland.

Hence we have been obliged both to criticise the opportunist approach of left-wing initiatives, and to conduct anti-imperialist solidarity work through our own campaigning organisation, the Irish Freedom Movement. Founded in 1982, this has since expanded to become the leading Irish solidarity campaign in Britain with a nationwide network of activists.'

The sharpest clash of views between the RCP and the traditional left on the Irish issue has surrounded the question of the IRA's armed struggle. We give our unconditional support to the struggle for Irish freedom, no matter what form that struggle takes. We support it irrespective of whether the republican movement adopts electoral or military tactics. Our insistence on this arises from our recognition of the strength of chauvinist hostility to the Irish struggle in Britain, not least in the working class movement. Any criticism of IRA tactics, or concessions to establishment propaganda about terrorism, can only reinforce the influence of nationalism and undermine anti-imperialist solidarity.

Over the past 15 years the failure of the British left to challenge popular prejudices on the Irish issue has given the establishment considerable room to manoeuvre in dealing with resistance in Ireland. This was particularly apparent during the 1981 hungerstrike when the government faced considerable international

63 • The Road To Power pressure, but faced little challenge to its ruthless line at home. The left's capitulation to the pressures of chauvinism has not merely left the Irish people isolated from their potentially most powerful ally. It has also given the British state a useful propaganda weapon against the working class. By raising the bogey of IRA terrorism, the ruling class can pull British society together and divert attention away from political problems at home.

• immigration controls and racist attacks Racism became a major social force in Britain in the seventies. The recession meant that immigrants who had been brought into Britain in substantial numbers from west Africa, the Caribbean and the Asian subcontinent in the fifties and sixties were now surplus to requirements. Immigration laws ratified the inferior status of black people, justifying their exclusion from the country and a system of restrictive internal controls. The authorities recognised that the existence of a significant black population excluded from full participation in British society constituted a potential source of instability. Racist propaganda, which characterised all young blacks as 'muggers", legitimised mounting police repression. As prejudice against blacks grew into a systematic force, discrimination, harassment and physical attacks became commonplace.1 The left recognised racism as a problem, but had no conception of organising working class resistance against it. It preferred either to focus on extreme manifestations of racism, such as the National Front, or to ignore the issue entirely. Left-wing anti-racists looked to the state to act against discrimination and against racist violence.

As a result, most anti-racist activists were, by the late seventies, incorporated into a network of community relations councils, local authority race advisory committees and police monitoring quangos, all set up by the state to contain conflict generated by the growing intensity of racial oppression.

When young blacks revolted against the police in a number of inner-city areas in 1981 and in sporadic riots in subsequent years, the left generally kept silent in the face of the media barrage about black 'criminality' and turned a blind eye to government measures to contain black resistance. Some left-wing MPs echoed

The Road To Power • 64 establishment prejudices and endorsed state repression.

The RCP has challenged the left's surrender to the pressures of racism in two main ways. First, we have attacked the state's right to divide and regulate the working class through immigration laws. We have emphasised the way these regulations help to popularise the notion that blacks, rather than the capitalist system, are to blame for high unemployment and bad housing. By appealing for working class opposition to all immigration controls we have highlighted the need for workers to unite against state-sponsored racism, rather than pleading for the ruling class institution that enforces racism to take action against it. The left has always equivocated about calling for the total rejection of Britain's own pass laws. Instead it has tried to reconcile the irreconcilable through the call for 'non-racist' immigration controls. By contrast, the RCP has always held that rejecting the right of the British state to regulate immigration is the only way the working class can begin to take an independent stand in defence of the rights of black people.

The second focus of RCP anti-racist work has been organising physical defence, by working class people, of blacks subjected to racist attacks. In 1979 we founded Workers Against Racism in East London to deal with the mounting racist attacks in that area, and we went on to set up similar groups around the country after the 1981 riots. The object of Workers Against Racism is to mobilise working class communities to take action to stop the menace of racial violence. This approach has met with some success in London, Bradford and elsewhere. However the campaign aims to do much more than simply isolate and intimidate hardline racists. Its most important objective is to build a working class culture of militant hostility to racism and chauvinism.

The Workers Against Racism approach is poles apart from the police monitoring and accountability committees on which most left-wing anti-racists now sit. These look to the authorities and to the police to deal with racist attacks — by the eviction of racist families, the surveillance and prosecution of known racists, and the banning of racist marches and meetings. For Workers Against Racism, this approach is not only ineffective, but actually

65 • The Road To Power strengthens the authority of the state to do what will always be its first priority: interfering against black people and genuine antiracists. The police have no interest in clamping down on people who carry a little further the sort of racist activity the police carry out in uniform. They have, however, every interest in gaining intelligence on the black community and in winning wider assent to their right to interfere in the affairs of the working class. Workers Against Racism takes a different approach. By putting the initiative in the hands of working class people — black and white — it creates a basis for class unity against the racists and against the racist state.

• the war drive in perspective Nato's December 1979 decision to base US Cruise missiles in Europe provoked an upsurge of protest throughout Western Europe. It also provoked sharp disagreement between the RCP and the rest of the British left.

For the left the key problem was the threat of nuclear war between the USA and the Soviet Union. In Britain the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament drew special attention to the dangers of continuing in a subservient relationship to the USA: the siting of US Cruise missiles here, CND argued, turned Britain into a sort of a fixed US aircraft carrier in the front line of any East-West conflagration in Europe. The call for the British government to renounce unilaterally its nuclear weapons and to refuse to accept US Cruise missiles, galvanised the British left in the early eighties.

For the RCP, the key problem lay elsewhere — in the fact that the recession made it imperative for all the Western powers to tighten their grip on overseas raw materials, markets and investments. The immediate threat to Western interests came from anti-imperialist movements in the Middle East, Central America and southern Africa. The longer-term danger of war came from disputes among the imperialists themselves. In the early eighties these were largely confined to squabbles over trade, but required increasingly frenzied diplomatic efforts to contain them.

The declining economic power of the USA, for 40 years the enforcer of the world imperialist order, is the major factor in destabilising international relations. All the Western powers are

The Road To Power • 66 preparing for war in the third world — and, if necessary, for war with one another. Thus, though East- West conflict remains a source of instability, it takes second place to the tensions in the imperialist camp. Indeed the USA has deliberately magnified East-West friction as a means of holding together the Western alliance, keeping it under its control and promoting anti-communist prejudice.

Given mounting Western intervention in the third world and spiralling inter-imperialist rivalries, the RCP argued that the fight against war had to have a clear anti-imperialist direction. We criticised CND's narrow focus on nuclear weapons. It made no sense trying to persuade the imperialist powers to drop one sort of weapons in favour of another — the issue was to get rid of the imperialist powers. Moreover, the whole obsession with East-West nuclear weapons distracted attention from the West's increasing use of conventional weapons in the third world. Finally, the portrayal of Britain as oppressed by the USA fuelled a narrow anti- Americanism in which Britain, a declining but nevertheless rapacious imperialist power, was exonerated from its actions in Ireland and elsewhere. The RCP's analysis has been fully vindicated by events. Whereas there has been no use of nuclear weapons since 1945 and no serious threat of war with the Soviet Union, the Western powers have been on the rampage in other areas over the past five years.

The USA has invaded Lebanon and has given its support to wiping out the Syrian air force. With British backing it launched a murderous air-strike on Libya. It has built up a massive rapid deployment force for use anywhere in the Middle East, approved South Africa's incursions into Angola, Mozambique and even further afield, sponsored state and guerrilla terror in Central America, and overpowered Grenada. Britain has attacked Argentina, given extensive support to adventures in the Middle East as well as carrying on its own squalid war in Ireland.

At summit meetings, 'international terrorism' — a mediamanufactured scare designed to unite the West against third world insurgency — is the only area of common agreement. While the left has tried to build an anti-nuclear, anti-American campaign, the RCP has set about forging an anti-imperialist movement. During

67 • The Road To Power the Falklands War we took the lead in mobilising support for Argentina against Britain. The left bowed to the wave of British jingoism, calling either for economic rather than military sanctions, or for the condemnation of both sides. But for genuine antiimperialists there could be no wavering.20 Britain was determined to show a country still dominated by imperialism that it would tolerate no challenge to its authority.

Whatever their reservations about Britain's actions, the major imperialist powers, notably the USA, endorsed Whitehall's efforts to put Argentina in its place. Calling for the defeat of the task force was not a popular move, but it placed the RCP firmly in the tradition of proletarian internationalism. It showed the working class that the only way to fight against war was to fight the enemy at home. The same issues came to the fore once again over Libya. The left's response revealed how far its hatred of America had led it to paint British imperialism in sympathetic colours. The left's main complaint was that complicity in the air-strike had confirmed Thatcher as Reagan's poodle, making a more independent British military policy more essential than ever. Left wingers called for US bases in Britain to be closed down; it never occurred to them to demand that Britain should cease operations in Cyprus, Oman and other parts of the Middle East.

Goaded on by the British establishment, left-wing disarmers have so much made the adequate defence of Britain their own cause that they now applaud conventional weapons. These are in fact the main area of military spending today, as well as the fastest growing one.

The left's patriotic and elaborate schemes for non-nuclear, alternative defence today include conscription. But the 'defence' of an imperialist power means the sinking of the Belgrano and the bombing of Tripoli. If we are to prevent a global conflagration in the future, it is vital that we build an anti-imperialist movement in the present — one that opposes every aspect of British militarism, from Fortress Falklands to the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

The Road To Power • 68 4. The vanguard party The organisational form of the RCP is determined by the requirements of building an anti-capitalist workers' party in Britain in the eighties. Any attempt to build a revolutionary party must take account of the fact that workers have not responded to the effects of the recession as a class. The narrow range of responses so far —from defensive trade unionism to the open acceptance of establishment solutions to the crisis — reflects the longstanding depoliticisation of the working class. Let's look more closely at the impact of the recession on the labour movement.

Fragmentation Over the past 10 years the capitalist class has moved away from the methods of industrial collaboration and consensus politics that prevailed in the post-war period. Employers have more and more rejected the mediating services of trade union officials, choosing instead to take on the working class directly. The series of antiunion laws passed by the Tory governments in the early eighties has both stirred up public animosity against the unions and allowed employers to use the courts to clamp down on industrial action.

The employers' success in a series of set-piece confrontations with major unions — steelworkers, civil servants, hospital workers, railworkers, printers, miners - has disoriented the labour bureaucrats and created confusion among workers. In a climate of economic insecurity generated by industrial collapse and mass unemployment, the bosses have exposed the complacency of the post-war labour movement.

Abrasive management tactics have shocked trade union officials long used to the polite procedures of consultation and negotiation.

The labour bureaucrats' survival strategy is to make any number of sacrifices on their members' behalf, so long as they are reserved some role — no matter how menial - in the new order. This approach makes unions even more an adjunct of management and even less responsive to workers' demands. It also leads to conflict among unions as each one tries to do sweetheart deals with employers in particular sectors. But today's splits in the TUC are not merely bureaucratic squabbles: they reflect deeper political

69 • The Road To Power divisions in the working class itself.

Workers have polarised in their responses to the recession. Some have rallied to defend established organisations and practices against the bosses, reacting to attacks on jobs, wages and trade union rights with displays of militancy along traditional lines.

Though industrial action has sometimes been violent and prolonged, it has generally been conducted within the familiar postwar framework of trade union activity. And, despite considerable determination and resilience on behalf of the rank and file, strikes of this kind have nearly always been unsuccessful in achieving their objectives in the new climate created by the recession. Yet a militant minority of workers has remained faithful to the unions and to Labour. Indeed, the pressures of establishment attacks and growing isolation have strengthened many militants' loyalty to the official labour movement. On the other hand, a growing body of workers has responded to the employers in a way which discloses a basic scepticism about the traditional organisations of the labour movement. The ineffectiveness of the trade unions and the Labour Party in defending working class living standards has created widespread disillusionment. This is reflected in declining trade union membership rolls and strike figures, and in the electoral defeats of the Labour Party in 1979 and 1983. The continuing attachment of militants to the outdated institutions of Labourism appears to many as a desperate clinging on to a past made obsolete by the recession.

Through the mounting setbacks of the early eighties the Labour Party has failed to present itself as a credible political alternative for the working class. Its revival under Neil Kinnock's leadership is more the result of Tory unpopularity and the lack of credibility of the SDP/Liberal Alliance, than an indication of enthusiasm for Labour. The lack of working class confidence in Labour's programme remains profound. This is a particularly acute problem for the left — its roles in the miners' strike and the campaign against rate-capping in local government have left it divided, discredited and isolated. Loss of faith in the official labour movement has pushed many workers away from collective organisation towards individual

The Road To Power • 70 solutions to the problems thrown up by the recession. Workers in declining industries have preferred to go for voluntary redundancy and take their chance on the job market, rather than put their trust in campaigns of resistance run by discredited union officials.

Workers in the building trade, for example, now accept that unions cannot help protect jobs and conditions; hence many have given up their union cards and gone on the lump. A growing fatalism has led to a greater openness to company unionism, and a willingness to transfer electoral allegiances to the openly middle class Alliance parties. Many commentators have drawn attention to recent structural changes in the working class: the decline of manufacturing, the rise of services, the effects of new technology, long-term mass unemployment, the increase in part-time and temporary work. The division between the employed and the unemployed, and the fact that workers in jobs have managed to maintain their living standards over the past decade, are certainly significant developments. However these factors are of secondary importance.

The key issue is not the restructuring of the labour market, but the process of political fragmentation that is taking place.

The fact that collective organisations and methods no longer appear to offer a practicable way of defending jobs or living standards is the decisive factor in making workers susceptible to establishment propaganda. This allows the government and the courts and the media to interfere and influence the affairs of the labour movement. Thatcher's propaganda success on the issue of trade union democracy is a striking illustration of this trend.

The real problem for the working class is not the demise of the old labour movement. The trade union leaders have failed to defend workers" interests and have cynically manipulated militancy to protect their own positions. Over the past decade, even the more radical forms of Labourism have served to demoralise rather than inspire resistance. Workers' rejection of traditional militancy and Labour Party politics reflects an unconscious recognition of the irrelevance of Labourism. The problem is that this has taken place without a parallel process of ideological clarification. Hence the crisis in the labour movement emerges as a conflict between

71 • The Road To Power commitment and indifference to basic class organisations. It has not yet led to widespread questioning of the politics of Labourism.

Class unity To build a revolutionary party it is necessary to tackle the deepening rift within the working class by putting forward policies which can unite workers against the system. This is the objective of the RCP.

For the traditional left, the unity of the working class means unity on the terms of the labour bureaucracy. Hence it endorses the methods of trade union leaders and Labour politicians whose first concern is the survival of their own institutions. The left continues to support the labour bureaucrats, even when — as in the miners* strike and in local government — their policies deepen divisions in the working class and frustrate anti-capitalist initiative.

The RCP aims to expose the divisive consequences of bureaucratic unity and to put forward policies around which the most politically active workers can mobilise others. In the miners' strike, for example, we criticised the narrow Labourist strategy and the bureaucratic tactics of the NUM leadership. We called for a campaign around a national ballot to unite the miners behind an anti-capitalist approach. While NUM leaders and the left dismissed moderate miners in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere with contempt, the RCP emphasised that the success of the strike depended on putting forward a strategy that could win their support.

The lesson of the miners' defeat was that the unity of the miners could not be achieved on the basis of the old policies and methods.

The split in the miners union was not an isolated event. The consolidation of company union methods in the electricians' and engineering unions, the growth of scab unions among ambulancemen, nurses and teachers shows that the NUM split anticipated wider trends. The working class movement cannot be rebuilt by clinging on to the institutions of the past in the style of Arthur Scargill. A new working class leadership must relate both to those workers who keep faith in the old ways and those who have become cynical and demoralised. The individualistic responses of the more passive workers often reflect an instinctive understanding of

The Road To Power • 72 Labour's impotence. There is a strong tendency, reinforced by the left, for the more active workers to blame the setbacks they have experienced on the more passive workers. Militants condemn their mates for their lack of guts and for succumbing to television and the popular press. But right-wing influences have only gained strength because workers have already had enough of the old union and Labour leaders. The problem for activists to tackle is that the bureaucracy's failures have allowed backward sentiments to flourish. The blame lies not with Fleet Street, but with the old methods. The way forward lies, not through doggedly pursuing bankrupt strategies and castigating those workers who are reluctant to follow them, but through adopting a different approach. This means consistently putting forward policies which relate to militants' determination to fight; it means giving this determination a sharper anti-capitalist edge. In turn, that will enable activists to put forward tactics which can draw other workers into action.

The heightening class struggle inevitably gives rise to complicated and confused conflicts. Industrial action may take a narrowly sectional form or have a largely token character; it may be an illjudged reaction to management provocation. It may begin, like the dispute at Poundswick school in Manchester, as a legitimate defence of trade unionists at work, and then turn into a reactionary campaign to enforce tighter discipline in the classroom. Workers may take strike action to demand that their employers sack a racist worker, setting a dangerous precedent for the victimisation of militants, as happened, for example in Islington council in 1985.

Whatever the form taken by the class struggle, revolutionaries must unearth its anti-capitalist content and reformulate workers demands to draw this out.

Because anti-capitalist policies put the interests of the working class first, they provide a logical basis for unity. In today's recession, Labourist policies aimed at preserving the doomed institutions of a privileged section of the working class appear to many workers increasingly illogical. In the miners' strike the RCP held up the importance of defending all jobs irrespective of the local or national profitability of the industry. For its part, the NUM made much of its

73 • The Road To Power commitment to profitable and expanding pits and to preserving the archaic committees for negotiation and collaboration with the bosses. The apparently more extreme policies of the RCP provided a more coherent basis for uniting the moderate Notts miners with the more militant areas than did the Labourist policies of the NUM leadership. Why did the RCP's line in the miners' strike fail to win wider support? Our weakness was that at the beginning of the miners' strike we had no member employed in the pits. We lacked the resources to mount an intervention in the dispute on the scale required to have a decisive influence. In short, we were not in a close relationship with a vanguard section among the miners which could have won wider influence for anti-capitalist policies in the crucial early stages of the strike. Every major event in the class struggle reveals the urgency of creating a vanguard in the working class.

Since this is central to the RCP approach to building a revolutionary party, it requires further consideration.

Party stages The demise of the official labour movement is a temporary setback to the working class. It exposes the organisational and, above all, the political weakness of the working class and makes workers vulnerable to the employers' offensive. The result has been a series of setbacks in recent years, from which the left has generally drawn pessimistic conclusions. Left wingers argue that, given the present crisis of the labour movement, it is unrealistic to do more than dig in and cling together to preserve what is left of the old organisations.

In the view of the RCP this attitude is based on a confused analysis and leads to a suicidal perspective.

The left's defensive strategy confuses the crisis of the labour bureaucracy with the problems confronting rank and file workers.

The frailty of the official labour movement does create short-term difficulties, but it also has the positive effect of calling into question the relevance of Labourism. Indeed for the first time in more than 60 years workers have experienced directly the fruitlessness of the Labour approach. This experience can provide important lessons about the need for a major political reorientation.

The Road To Power • 74 The left's strategy is suicidal because it seeks to preserve institutions that have already failed. The unions and the Labour Party have been proved ineffective in defending the working class.

Confusing the collapse of the official labour movement with the problems facing trade union activists is dangerous. It means that working class interests take second place to those of the bureaucracy. Far from drawing pessimistic conclusions, the RCP looks upon the present period as one of tremendous potential. The decay of Labourism has led to a quest for new solutions and a willingness to consider an alternative form of working class politics unique in living memory. Today, for the first time since the Second World War, it is possible to win a real hearing for anti-capitalist ideas. It is with this positive assessment of the prospects for revolutionary communism that we set out to build a working class party.

Labour's descent and the search for new answers provide the preconditions for building a revolutionary movement. But they provide no guarantee of success. The traditions of the past weigh heavily on the modern working class: workers will not automatically flock towards a revolutionary organisation when they become disillusioned with Labourism. Moreover, the absence of a coherent anti-capitalist outlook in any section of the working class means that a revolutionary party must be built in stages.

In the vanguard party stage, we aim to deploy our limited resources to win over a core of the most politically motivated workers to a strategy of revolution. In the subsequent mass party stage, we will be able, through this leading section, to influence wider and wider layers of workers. The prolonged depoliticisation of the working class makes it impossible for a newly emerging revolutionary organisation to relate directly to the class struggle.

Given the balance of forces in the labour movement and the dead weight of tradition, even the most militant working class revolt comes under the influence of Labourism. Any attempt to build a revolutionary party without a systematic struggle against the existing outlook of the working class movement must inevitably fall prey to this influence. That, indeed, is the lesson of the past failures of the British left.

75 • The Road To Power The fate of would-be revolutionaries who attempt to rally millions with their demands is either to be rejected out of hand or to be interpreted as a radical variant of Labourism. In the former case anti-communist prejudices are confirmed and the aspiring revolutionaries are condemned to stand impotently at Speakers' Corner for decades. In the latter, Labourism —the central barrier to the creation of a revolutionary party — is reinforced rather than undermined. These left wingers are held spellbound by the party they started out trying to overthrow. All they do is provide a constant infusion of youth, energy and radicalism into a party that is otherwise dying on its feet.

For the RCP the road to mass influence lies through the most politically motivated section of the working class. Through a dialogue with the most active workers, we aim to create a coherent force able to respond to all issues from the point of view of the working class as a whole. It is essential to train a vanguard if the limitations of narrow militancy and sectionalism are to be overcome. A vanguard exists in a dynamic interaction between the party and the mass of the working class. Through its capacity to give a lead to other workers in struggle, it can mediate between the currently small and isolated forces of revolutionary communism and the mass of the working class.

The vanguard does not exist at present — it has to be created. It cannot be identified in any particular social, occupational, or geographical area, or among the followers of any existing party.

The recession has fragmented the working class, but has not yet restructured it in any systematic way. The vanguard will reflect the heterogeneity of the modern working class. It will be made up of workers with diverse occupational backgrounds and experiences — manual and white collar, male and female, black and white. This new layer of workers will be defined not sociologically, but politically: by its genuine commitment to the overthrow of capitalism. The form of organisation appropriate to building a vanguard in modern Britain is the propaganda party. The RCP is such a party.

What does this mean in practice? How is it different from other leftwing parties?

The Road To Power • 76 A campaigning party Despite the fragmentation of the working class movement and the general shift to the right, there are signs of an awakening political consciousness among a substantial minority. Inner-city riots, the miners' strike and general disgust with the Thatcher government have given rise to a wider questioning of the system and a deeper hostility to the British establishment and its repressive forces.

Thatcher has conducted a series of political campaigns that have challenged the narrow preoccupations of the labour movement: campaigns on law and order, international terrorism, sexual morality, educational standards, trade union democracy and on race. In the short term, these have strengthened reaction and have benefited the government by diverting the public's gaze from unemployment and attacks on workers rights.

But by putting ruling class propaganda forward in such a forceful manner, the government has made an equally forceful working class response that much more likely. When Thatcher bracketed the miners with Argentina, labelling them 'the enemy within' , she ended a long British tradition of keeping politics out of the workplace. The Tories' use of the Falklands Factor revealed the confidence of the British establishment in winning a political battle against a labour movement strongly imbued with chauvinist prejudices. But it is a high-risk strategy. Thatcher's very determination to politicise industrial conflict could yet unseat her.

When the IRA attempted to blow up the leadership of the Tory Party at the height of the miners' strike, there was little sympathy among the miners for the establishment's attempts to drum up an anti-Irish response. Similarly, Tory efforts to smear the miners with allegations that they received funds from Libya, while achieving some success in isolating the miners from wider support, rebounded against the government in the mining communities. Again, anger at Britain's involvement in the bombing of Libya indicated the strength of anti-militarist sentiment in Britain. The left channelled instinctive sympathy with the Libyan people in a narrowly anti- American direction, thus letting Thatcher off the hook. However, the scale of the initial popular fury showed the potential for developing an anti-imperialist response to Western military

77 • The Road To Power intervention in the third world.

Building a revolutionary movement depends on exploiting the present conjuncture in British politics. The RCP must connect with each outbreak of anti-capitalist indignation and re-orient it into coherent resistance against the capitalist system. This demands not only that we put forward a clear anti-capitalist line, but that we draw out the organisational consequences of our independent working class approach. For the RCP it is not enough to point the way forward for the struggle against capitalism in ideas alone. We have to provide practical organisation that shows the direction we want to give to the workers' movement. Our perspective begins from the need to fight for the interests of the working class in the present. Hence, while our party looks forward to building a new society, it starts out from the measures needed to defend workers' living standards and rights in the struggles of today.

For more than half a century the British left has worked within a framework established by bureaucrats. The left puts its resources into mobilising for the TUC's occasional demonstrations about unemployment or public spending cuts. It works within campaigns sponsored by the labour bureaucracy (CND, the Anti-Apartheid Movement). And it can be relied upon to support the Labour Party at election time. The left supports the miners and every other group of workers in struggle on the terms dictated by the union leadership.

It also skirts round issues which the Labour leadership would rather avoid: immigration control and racist attacks; abortion rights; Ireland and British imperialism in general.

We cannot accept such a narrow purview. To do so would consign us to the left's fate — that of being but a pressure group on the labour bureaucracy. At a time when the interests of the working class and the policies of the bureaucracy collide more violently than ever before, accepting the authority of the official labour movement means going against the urgent needs of the working class. The RCP has set out to build a new working class party. That requires propaganda and activity which shows what must be done in practice to advance working class interests. It also means setting out

The Road To Power • 78 to undermine and destroy the still preponderant influence of the labour bureaucracy. A direct challenge is needed to Labourism in all spheres of political life — in the workplace, in the unions, on the streets and at the polls. Only by presenting the politics of Labourism and the independent politics of the working class as a sharp choice between rival party organisations is it possible to win workers from the side of the bureaucracy to that of the revolutionary movement.

To draw out the organisational consequences of independent working class politics, the RCP has sponsored a number of campaigns — around Ireland, racism, women's rights and international issues. These campaigns have a number of objectives.

They offer solidarity with oppressed sections of society. They persuade the working class to identify with every threat to the British establishment. They aim, too, to neutralise ruling class propaganda on the question of democratic rights.

The British establishment is skilful at manipulating public prejudices against the oppressed. Through this technique it can win wide backing and turn potential threats to its system into a source of legitimacy and strength. The media depict Irish freedom fighters as terrorists and young blacks as criminals; in so doing, they justify measures of repression which affect the whole of society.

Establishment propaganda is also effective in fomenting divisions within the working class movement, to the extent that Irish people and blacks come to be regarded as enemies rather than allies. For the RCP, challenging these smears and redefining the terms of the discussion generated around them is a vital part of developing a working class response to oppression in capitalist society.

Pro-family propaganda helps push women into the roles of wife, mother, dutiful daughter and all-purpose carer. This not only compensates for welfare cuts, but also bolsters the family as a source of authority and discipline at a time when the stability of society is under threat. In every major industrial dispute the employers and the media play on family pressures to divide the working class and push strikers to return to work. Campaigning in support of women's rights and fighting to ensure women's untrammelled participation in social, economic and political life is vital if we are to deprive the ruling class of a powerful ideological weapon against the

79 • The Road To Power working class.21 The campaigns sponsored by the RCP aim to unite the working class in a political challenge to the capitalist state. The working class cannot be united, nor a vanguard forged, in the sphere of trade union struggles alone. Class objectives can only be achieved through fighting for an anti-capitalist perspective on other conflicts which are just as vital. The current strength of the British ruling class derives in no small part from its ability to dictate terms on these. The success of the RCP in building a revolutionary movement will depend much on our ability to do the same.

Theory and propaganda To create a vanguard we have to exert a decisive influence over the ideas that prevail in the working class movement. We need to promote a climate of theoretical discussion and debate conducive to the complete overhaul of the ideology of the labour movement. This means developing Marx's critique of political economy in relation to both national and international events. It demands a rigorous assessment of the balance of political forces in society, and in particular of the obstacles to revolutionary advance within the labour movement. Over the past decade we have made some important theoretical breakthroughs on the evolution of the crisis, imperialism, reformism and the Soviet Union. The results of this work are contained in our journals and books; but much more remains to be done. In the struggle to redirect the politics of the working class, the fight for theoretical supremacy, through open debate and polemic, will be central. Regular issues of Confrontation and more ambitious goals for our summer schools will be specially relevant. Our aim is to develop Marxist theory and to involve working class activists in argument about our analysis and the policies that flow from it.

As a propaganda party, we devote much of our resources to organising around the written word. Through propaganda, we test our revolutionary theory in the class struggle. The intention is to target the most politically active workers, explain our ideas convincingly, and motivate them to get involved in the revolutionary movement. To do this our propaganda must

The Road To Power • 80 assimilate the experience of the working class and challenge the existing outlook of even the most militant workers.

Our weekly paper, the next step, aims to present working class politics in a way that is attractive and accessible to workers who are looking for political answers. This requires that the editorial board of the next step, through the party and its journalists, stays in close touch with active workers and knows exactly what they are thinking. The purpose of our paper is to connect with workers experience and perception of political problems and win them round to our policies. Good journalism, graphics and photography are of great importance in ensuring that the paper seizes our readers imaginations and engages their interest.

Our paper is also designed to convince workers of the relevance of RCP politics. This means projecting a clear line, one with real immediacy to the class struggle. Our politics must be presented logically, in a way which does not assume agreement or simply assert the RCP position. To be convincing, ins must sharply challenge all the prejudices that act as a barrier to the development of workers' political awareness. Hence polemics against influential trends in the working class movement are of the utmost importance.

We aim to achieve the clearest counterposition of RCP politics to the prevailing forms of establishment ideology in the labour movement. We cannot lose sight of the fact that we are trying to communicate Marxist politics to a readership for whom Marxism is as yet an alien ideology.

The strategic objective of the RCP is to build a vanguard party.

But a strategy is not something that can be taken out on to the streets. The function of the RCP's activities is to provide a practical implementation of our strategy in the class struggle. The weekly paper has a vital part to play in promoting, animating and organising activities which give a clear shape to anticapitalist politics. This role of the paper - that of an organiser - has two aspects.

The first is to provide the most politically conscious workers with a clear propaganda lead. This means overcoming the influence of Labourist notions, and pointing a clear way forward through the immediate manifestations of the class struggle to the broader anti-

81 • The Road To Power capitalist aims of the working class. Second, we want to provide active workers with a means of overcoming their isolation, with policies that can unite wider groups of workers in the course of the immediate struggle. This is difficult, because our policies will appear unrealistic as long as no vanguard exists to fight for them.

But we are obliged to try to influence the class struggle now, even before a vanguard has been created. The only way we can advance is through the struggle to forge a vanguard itself.

Activity A revolutionary party requires more than good arguments to extend its influence. To make headway, we have to show that revolutionary politics can be effective and can produce results. This is why the RCP has always sought to ensure that, whenever possible, its policies acquire an organisational expression. Our political opponents regard our struggle for leadership of today's struggles as unrealistic or even sectarian. Yet Marxist politics cease to be Marxist politics unless they take a practical form.

The British left restricts itself to calling for support for struggles that are already taking place, and to exhorting the leadership of the labour movement to take more radical action. In effect this approach acknowledges that the left has nothing distinctive to contribute to the working class movement. For the RCP, activities are a way of demonstrating the practical edge of Marxism and of persuading workers that it is both possible and necessary to fight in a new way in the here and now.

In the early days of the RCP, most of our activity was organised directly around our propaganda — selling it, holding meetings to promote and discuss it. But if we are to extend our influence, we need to supplement this with more direct initiatives. In the past, the RCP engaged primarily in activities which were either artificial or reactive. Artificial activities were protests or pickets on issues which we identified as important, even though others did not. Activities around the Prevention of Terrorism Act or deportation cases were instances of this sort of work: they had an exemplary character they were individual examples of a broader kind of action which we considered appropriate but lacked the resources to deliver.

The Road To Power • 82 Artificial activities can create a certain public profile for us on a particular issue. The problem is that they generally fail to attract or involve people because they do not key into their immediate concerns. Hence, however correct the slogans on our placards, they are of limited value in building a vanguard party.

By contrast, reactive activities are those organised in response to issues or events which are of immediate general concern. Instances here are demonstrations against the invasion of the Falklands, Beirut, Grenada or Libya; against particular atrocities in the Trish War or a wave of racist murders. Because people are spontaneously interested in these forms of activity, it is easier to attract support for them. The problem is that these sort of activities often do not have much of a politicising effect on the people engaged in them.

Participating in an RCP protest over Libya may well not turn liberal outrage into consistent anti-imperialism.

It is important for the party to react to events, but it is often difficult to give reactive activities a clear revolutionary edge. Hence merely reactive activities, while they raise our profile and draw people towards our events, can only play a limited partybuilding role. The most important form of RCP activity must, therefore, be of an interventionist type. This means initiatives which connect with real concerns in the working class movement, and which actively redefine issues in a way that takes the struggle forward and promotes a wider anti-capitalist point of view. It is this sort of activity which will be crucial for the extension of our membership and influence in the working class.

Our campaign against the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers is a good example. In March 1985, at the end of the pit strike, many miners —especially militants — were worried about the spread of scab unionism. They were worried, too, about the complacent response of the union leaders, whose conduct of the strike had already caused general unease. The campaign run by the miners' next step group against the UDM connected with these fears.

At the same time, however, it challenged the narrow 'defend the NUM' attitude that prevailed among militants, by redirecting the struggle against the UDM into a campaign against the class

83 • The Road To Power collaboration of the NUM bureaucracy.

This sort of interventionist activity aims to turn workers' distaste for scab unionism into a wider challenge to the policies of the labour bureaucracy. It is these, after all, which have allowed openly antiworking class organisations to gain ground in the first place. By bringing the party into a more direct relationship to the class struggle, interventionist activity can help accelerate the emergence of a working class vanguard.

Organisation The RCP has adopted that style of internal organisation which best enables us to achieve our political objectives. We begin from a recognition that there are different levels of political awareness in the working class. To arrange the dynamic interaction between party and class that is essential if both world-historic and immediate goals are to be met, we have adopted the organisational principles of democratic centralism.?2 The early development of the RCP was achieved largely through a process of consolidation among a small group of individuals.

Recruitment took place in a fairly random way, and much of our growth was based on intellectual conviction and personal commitment. The party achieved a relatively high degree of internal education, training and collectively imposed discipline. These methods allowed us to expand steadily and raise our overall political level. But they were one-sided; they carried with them the dangers of reinforcing our isolation from the class struggle, and of encouraging routinism. The party has subsequently embarked on a strategy of growth through a process of external intervention. This is not so much a substitute for the earlier approach as a development from it — an attempt to counteract its one-sidedness. A higher level of resources and overall political development now allows us to test our theory in the class struggle. Today we can reach out and fight for leadership in the working class movement. This forces each of our members and supporters to take responsibility for implementing our perspectives, and to take greater account of their practical consequences.

Democratic centralism is a mechanism for assimilating the

The Road To Power • 84 experience of the working class into the party. Democracy is vital to ensure the maximum openness of the party to active workers and to their perceptions of the class struggle. Without it, individual preconceptions will dominate, and our collective awareness of the destiny of the working class fall into disrepair. That is why discussion and debate are vital: they ensure that experiences are shared, that common lessons are learned and that personal initiatives are coordinated.

To be genuinely democratic, discussion must be highly informed, not only by the sort of knowledge to be gained from books —though that has an important place — but also by active involvement in the class struggle. Debate inside our organisation must reflect the dialogue between the party and the wider working class movement.

Democratic centralism is also a mechanism for transcending the limitations of individual experience. It is the responsibility of the party's centralised leadership to ensure that it is actively engaged in transforming individual into collective consciousness. The role of political leadership is to keep pushing the party forward to achieve the highest possible expression of working class interests. This demands setting up a chain of command, a division of labour and a professional apparatus. The object of this structure is to make sure that the party's intervention in the class struggle is under clear central direction and that arguments are carried through to their conclusion. A revolutionary party has no place for discussion for its own sake or for debates with no result. The party leadership is responsible for striking the right balance between central control and local initiative in the overall development of the party.

The structure of the RCP corresponds to the demands of democratic centralism. The highest decision-making body of the party is its national conference. This elects a political committee as the leadership of the party which, though accountable to it, is responsible for carrying out its perspectives between conferences.

All other party committees and national and local organisers are appointed by the political committee. All party members work under its discipline. Members are admitted to the party when, on the recommend-

85 • The Road To Power ation of a local branch, they are judged by the political leadership to have an adequate understanding of our programme —and to have shown a commitment to fighting for it in practice. Membership of the RCP is not a commitment in the abstract or the dedication of a particular amount of time or energy. It is the acceptance of personal responsibility for a role in the future of the working class movement. International The RCP aims to establish communism in Britain and throughout the world. It is axiomatic in the Marxist tradition that, given the development of an international division of labour under the capitalist system, communism can only be won on a worldwide basis. Hence the working class revolution must be an international one, and the revolutionary party in Britain must be part of a revolutionary international. The degeneration of the first four attempts to create such a body means that we must make a fresh start.23 An international, however, cannot be simply proclaimed or organised by committee. It must be forged in a political struggle to develop a programme for the international working class. Although the RCP is currently confined to Britain, we have devoted some resources to distributing our propaganda abroad and to following closely developments in the working class movement in other countries. Yet, while we are keenly building up contacts overseas, at present we have no formal links with any other organisation.

For the RCP, the first stage in building a revolutionary international must be to develop the internationalist aspect of our work in Britain. The next stage is the development of links with working class organisations in other countries and, where possible, joint activities on issues of common importance — such as, for example, racism in Europe.

The Road To Power • 86 5. Real freedom People sometimes ask us to detail our 'vision of the future. For the RCP, any attempt to do more than outline the form of a future society would be speculation. Since the future cannot be predicted, visions of it are inevitably based on the past. The utopian socialists of the 1830s harked back to rural idylls and, in the 1890s, William Morris indulged in fantasies about a return to medieval craft guilds.

Similar forms of radical escapism remain popular today. Our conception is of a future literally beyond our wildest dreams, in which social life will for the first time overcome the limits of scarcity and develop unhindered. What is our vehicle for reaching this state of affairs? A dictatorship exercised by the proletariat over all other classes. The first article in our party's constitution describes our aim as to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in Britain with the objective of realising communism throughout the world'. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a transitional phase between capitalism and communism, during which the working class will rule society. In this period the workers" regime must eradicate generalised want, and at the same time make sure that the working class stays in power — if necessary by physical suppression of attempts to restore capitalist rule.

The term dictatorship of the proletariat' strikes horror into the hearts of the employers and their apologists. By presenting it as an anti-democratic and coercive form of society, they have succeeded in pressing the official communist movement to eliminate the concept from their programmes. Yet the dictatorship of the proletariat will be the most democratic and liberated form of society in human history. For the first time the majority —the working class — will rule over the minority of capitalists and their allies. Compared with the various forms of capitalist tyranny, from parliamentary democracy through military dictatorship to fascism, the proletarian dictatorship will mark a tremendous leap forward. It will represent an advance towards real freedom for the whole of society, not merely for a privileged section. As in any class society, there will remain an element of coercion. But whereas in capitalist society the

87 • The Road To Power state's repressive forces contain the mass of society on behalf of the ruling elite, the proletarian dictatorship, acting on behalf of the masses, will coerce only representatives of the capitalist minority who try to win back their right to exploit and oppress us all.

What will be the advantages of communist society? The main one will be that it will break out mankind's productive potential from the ties that bind it down under capitalism. Communist society will be based on the conscious allocation of the labour-time of society, instead of the indirect and chaotic organisation of work that now takes place through the capitalist market. Planning will be made possible by the combination of workers' control and workers' management of the economy. Workers' control is achieved by the workers' state taking over industry and services from the capitalists.

Workers management is much more difficult, for it means the central regulation of economic affairs through the active involvement of the working class at local level.24 Communism will allow the development of the productive forces of society beyond the constraints imposed by capital. By abolishing the struggle for basic necessities — a struggle common to nearly everybody today — it will open whole new vistas for the expression of individuality. Under the proletarian dictatorship, social advance will end exploitation and class antagonism. Women will be freed from the burdens of family life imposed within capitalist society.

Personal fulfilment will for the first time come within the reach of millions. Unlike the capitalist state, a proletarian one will create the conditions for its own disappearance. Once economic development has met a certain level and the threat of capitalist restoration has been eliminated, the workers' state will become a purel administrative body. What guarantee is there against the degeneration of the proletarian state into a bureaucratic dictatorship along the lines of the Soviet Union? Making a revolution in an advanced capitalist country would give us a much better start than the Bolsheviks had in Russia. Ensuring that the revolution is international in its scope is essential to allow the new society to take advantage of the global division of labour already established under capitalism. Apart from

The Road To Power • 88 these objective factors, the only real guarantee is a subjective one— the vigilance of the working class.

It is up to every worker to accept responsibility for the fate of the revolution and to make sure it is not betrayed. Communists can offer no guarantees for the future, for it lies in the hands of the working class. But we already have, before our eyes, a guarantee that capitalism brings permanent mass unemployment, growing poverty and escalating military conflict.

Some point to the loss of personal freedom involved in joining the RCP and the struggle to build a communist society. But how is taking a share in getting rid of capitalist domination and in making a new society a loss of freedom? The rulers of the Western powers boast about the 'free world', but it is one in which millions are free only to starve, languish on the dole or serve as cannon-fodder in round after round of barbarism. The only freedom that means anything today is the liberation that can be achieved through overcoming petty individualism in the collective struggle of the working class to overthrow the tyranny of capital. That struggle opens the way to a society in which freedom can be a reality for everybody. Mike Freeman Notes 1 Barclays Review, May 1986 K Marx, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth, 1973, p748. For further discussion of the Marxist theory of crisis in RCP literature, see The recession: capitalist offensive and the working class -a Marxist analysis of the crisis and reformism in the labour movement, Revolutionary Communist Papers No 3, July 1978, and World in recession, Revolutionary Communist Papers No 7, July 1981.

3 K Marx, Capital Vol 3, London 1959, p437.

4 See Revisionism, imperialism and the state: the method of capital and the dogma of state monopoly capitalism, Revolutionary Communist Papers No 4, February 1979. See Prolonging the death agony: the rise, fall and reconstitution of social democracy, Revolutionary Communist Papers No 8, September 1981.

See Slump socialism: the depression, the war and the working class, RCP discussion pamphlet, 1983.

7 Trotsky, The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International: the Transitional Programme, London 1970, p4.

8 See M Freeman, Taking control: a handbook for trade unionists, London 1984.

89 • The Road To Power See The recession: capitalist offensive and the working class, op cit.

10 Our tasks and methods, Revolutionary Communist Reprints No I, August 11 See documents on the split within the Revolutionary Communist Group, Revolutionary Communist Papers No1, March 1977.

12 See F Richards, Under a national flag: fascism, racism and the labour movement.

London 1978. 13 Tribune, 8 November 1946.

14 On the RCP's intervention in the miners' strike, see F Richards, The miners' next step, London July 1984, and M Freeman, Our day will come: the miners" fight for jobs. London 1985.

15 M Freeman and K Marshall, Who needs the Labour Party? London 1978, p33.

16 Preparing for Power: the programme of the Revolutionary Communist Party, London 1983. 17 Our tasks and methods, op cit, pll.

18 See The Irish War: the Irish Freedom Movement handbook, London 1985.

19 See Workers Against Racism, The roots of racism, London 1985.

20 See M Freeman, Malvinas are Argentina's, London 1982.

21 See K Marshall, Moral panics and Victorian values: women and the family in Thatcher's Britain, London 1985.

22 The development of the RCP's approach to questions of organisation owes much to the traditions of the Bolshevik Party and in particular to VI Lenin's pamphlet What is to be done?, in Collected Works Vol 5 written in 1902. We have also been inspired by G Lukács' essay "Towards a methodology of the problem of organisation' which was first published in 1922 and is included in the collection History and class consciousness, London 1971.

23 See F Richards, The question of the international, Revolutionary Communist Reprints, August 1979. 24 See F Füredi, The Soviet Union demystified: a materialist analysis, London 1986

Join us on the road to power!

Become an RCP supporter! • If you accept the assessment of the state of the world and how it can be changed contained in Confrontation, then become an RCP supporter. • Supporters of the RCP are actively involved in campaigning for women's rights and Irish freedom, in fighting racism and in trade union struggles. Supporters meet every week in groups in every major city in England and Scotland to discuss politics and plan action.

For more detalls, phone 01-729 0414 or write to BM RCP, London

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