Theses prepared by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International for discussion in the British Section
The historic crisis of British imperialism, which has been maturing for many years, has two basic roots. First, the general crisis of the world capitalist system, which since 1966-7 has entered a new, more serious phase; this seriously limits the possibility for British capitalism to profit indirectly from international capitalist expansion. Second, the precipitate decline of British imperialism within the international capitalist framework; with the end of British hegemony first on a world scale, then in Europe, South Asia, the Mediterranean and finally in Africa, the British capitalist class has been reduced to a third-rate power, already outstripped by the U.S., Japanese and West German imperialists. After twenty years of slower growth than any of its rivals, the reserves on which British imperialism could feed to obscure and hide this decline have now disappeared. The decline has become clearly visible, influencing not only economic trends, political developments and tensions between the classes, but every single field of social life in Britain. The decline in the rate of profit of British capital, the relative decline of repatriated profits compared to the national income, the decline in the share of world exports, the decline of the pound as a world currency, the decline of British wages compared to those of half a dozen other imperialist countries, are the key indicators of this mortal crisis.
Traditional bourgeois society and traditional bourgeois rule in Britain (parliamentary democracy) were solidly founded on a British hegemony over the capitalist world which lasted nearly two centuries. A deep-rooted belief in the stability of the system, which could be ‘reformed’ but never seriously challenged; a general acceptance of the bourgeois-parliamentary ‘rules of the game’; the capacity of the bourgeoisie to avoid large-scale social explosions, through occasionally granting massive social reforms (the last time was in the period of the 1945-50 Labour government); the powerful combination of mass unionism and mass social-democracy; the absence of any mass tradition of revolution, Marxism or communism; a much deeper influence of social-patriotism and chauvinism within the working class; an acceptance by the bourgeoisie of the reformist social-democratic Labour Party as an alternative bourgeois government: all these and other specific features of British society had their objective roots in the specific position of British capital in the capitalist world market and the Empire and its effect on the interrelationship between the basic classes of British society. The at first gradual, and now precipitate, disappearance of all these material roots leads, of necessity, to a fundamental crisis of all aspects of British bourgeois society and traditional bourgeois political rule in the country.
The outbreak of civil war in Northern Ireland; the divisions this has created inside the ruling class; the temporary appearance of armed organs of dual power in the Catholic areas of Northern Irish cities: the use of the British army as a torturing police against the Northern Irish insurgents; the inevitable demoralization provoked by these developments inside the army; the seeds of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary developments which these experiences implant in the British working class and the British bourgeoisie: all these constitute a key aspect of the decline of British imperialism. The crisis in Ireland is the most striking manifestation of the crisis of British imperialism, and has in turn accentuated the latter. In the context of intensified economic problems and a turn to the E.E.C, British imperialism’s interests would be best served by a neo-colonialist relationship with the whole of Ireland — such as now exists in relation to the Twenty-six Counties. Its initial moves to achieve this end sparked the crisis in the North, which now poses an imminent crisis throughout the whole of Ireland. The crisis in the North is the sharpest and most intractable aspect of that crisis, but British imperialism's orientation to the E.E.C. also coincided with the end of an epoch for the bourgeoisie of the South. The attempt by the national bourgeoisie, through the Fianna Fail party, to create an independent economy in the Twenty-six Counties had failed by the mid-sixties; although some important developments had been consolidated, the basic relationship between the Irish and British economies remained, in essence, the same as that which had existed before the 1916-21 national struggle. The Southern economy was still based on the export and processing of agricultural goods for the British market, and the industrialization of the economy and urbanization of Southern society did not change this basic relationship. From the mid-sixties, the strategy of the Southern bourgeoisie was to get the best possible deal within this relationship —the attempt to change it was abandoned. Thus the need for sweeping changes in the South — economic, political, cultural and ideological — was to become entwined with the attempts of British imperialism to reform the North. The contradictions in the South are more heterogeneous and less explosive than those in the North, but are being exacerbated by the Northern crisis. Once these contradictions produce mass struggles in the South, they will bring broader social forces into the conflict, changing the whole balance of forces in the triangular crisis of the three states (Britain, the Six Counties and the Free State). The British ruling class has failed to date in its various attempts to defuse the struggle of the minority in the Six-County statelet; there is no sign that it can demobilize the struggle unless it inflicts a decisive defeat upon them. This is extremely difficult for the ruling class whilst it has not yet settled accounts with the British working class’s current militancy. The continuing struggle of the minority creates problems for the ruling class in dealing with the British workers, in that it creates crises of policy, ties up resources and contains the potential of the two struggles being linked. The historic relationship between Ireland and Britain; the existence of 1½ million Irish workers in Britain, who remain part of the Irish working class but are simultaneously integrated into the British working class; the fact that each struggle limits the ability of the bourgeoisie to defeat the other; and many other features, ensure that the destinies of the Irish and British revolutions are closely linked. However, the objective interest of the Irish and British working class in smashing British imperialism is not reflected at the level of consciousness. This is a product of the political backwardness, reformism and chauvinism of the British working class and its organizations, which has prevented them from understanding the common interest they have with the Irish national struggle, and the necessity for them to support that struggle. It is, therefore, a necessary part of the class struggle to fight this backward consciousness of the British working class, and to seek to build a solidarity movement in support of the Irish struggle which does not retreat on key questions, such as solidarity with the armed struggle in Ireland against British imperialism. For the IMG, therefore, a strategic aim, which would consolidate the links between the struggle in Ireland and the struggle of the British working class, would be the building of a mass movement in solidarity with the Irish struggle, which would support that struggle at whatever level it had reached. Such a movement, representing a break with the entire tradition of the British working class in relation to the Irish and other colonial struggles, would indicate a profound shift in the relationship of forces between reformism and revolutionary politics in the working-class movement, and is inseparable from a more generalized upsurge of the class struggle in Britain, the deepening of the crisis of the imperialist intervention in Ireland, and the numerical and political strengthening of the revolutionary vanguard in Britain. The building of such a solidarity movement is the centralizing focus of all our work on the Irish question in Britain, and a continuous aspect of our campaigns, regardless of ups and downs and changes in the political conjuncture. In the present period, the trends towards a troops withdrawal movement represent the most favourable possibilities in the situation, and our intervention must be deepened to accelerate and consolidate these trends. The development of a broad movement demanding the withdrawal of the troops, and linking this to the demand for the right of Ireland to self-determination, would not only render immediate aid to the Irish struggle, but would greatly enhance the possibilities of breaking down the political backwardness of the working class on the Irish question, and would create much greater possibilities of building a solidarity movement.
The onslaught of repression against Irish militants in Britain poses two tasks: 1. to defend the victims of repression (e.g. the Belfast Ten, the Coventry Seven); 2. to work within the anti-repression movement to direct it towards a political offensive on the question of the British Army. We should at all times link this repression with that in Ireland itself, and with the repression in general against working-class and revolutionary militants in Britain and Europe. The fact that the North of Ireland is being used as a laboratory for repressive techniques, which will be utilized by the NATO powers for internal ‘security’, shows concretely why the question of the British Army in Ireland centralizes the most important aspects of the immediate struggles against repression, and links them to the need for solidarity with the Irish struggle. Finally, the IMG must, in all its activities on Ireland and by direct assistance, help to build the Fourth International in Ireland, the Revolutionary Marxist Group.
Revolutionary Marxists, more than any other section of British society, must be conscious of all these changes and draw all the conclusions which flow from them, even though the mass of their class has not yet reached that understanding. The crisis of British imperialism implies a crisis of British parliamentarism and working-class reformism: that is the key conclusion we must draw.
But imperialism, even in its period of death agony, does not know situations without any way out. However deep the present crisis, British capital is capable of solving at least its main difficulties. The solution which it has embarked upon over the last decade, and which the election of a Conservative government in 1970 brought a step nearer to realization, runs as follows: to integrate British capital with Western European capital into a new imperialist ‘super-power’, capable of competing with Japan and the U.S.A. on equal terms; to conquer a dominant position for British capital inside the Common Market; to utilize entry into the Common Market for seriously stepping up the rate of economic growth, even overtaking the declining growth rates of most of the continental capitalist powers; with that in mind, to qualitatively increase the rate of profit of British capital. Furthermore, the decline of British imperialism, the growth of the power of rival imperialisms and the overall backwardness of British industry, combined with the general decline of those industries which were the backbone of Britain’s former position as the ‘workshop of the world’, necessitate an all-out attack on the standards of living, working conditions and social reforms conquered by the working class since the beginning of this century. Such a decisive change in the relationship of forces, such a qualitative increase in the rate of profit, requires an all-out attack on the organized working class, with the inflicting of a decisive defeat on the trade unions in a large-scale confrontation. Entry into the Common Market was also intended to facilitate the carrying out of such a decisive change in the relationship of forces (through the advantages to be gained by closer political and economic collaboration; through intensifying the use of market forces to rationalize industry; through diverting the anger of the working class over the steep rise in the cost of living, etc.); but over the last period it has shown little sign of achieving this aim. On the contrary, the worsening balance of payments reveals the urgent need of the British bourgeoisie to deal with ‘its own’ working class before it can hope to make real gains out of the Common Market. The main obstacle in the path of the realization of these goals remains, however, the tremendous organized strength and self-confidence of the British working class. It is the only working class in the world not to have suffered any serious defeat for over forty years (since 1926-31). This organized strength expresses itself both in the increased total strength of the trade unions and in the continuing rise of the number of shop-stewards in the factories. The sharp increase in strikes over the last five years is both the expression of the organized strength and growing radicalization of the class, as well as its answer to the growing capitalist offensive necessary for an implementation of a bourgeois solution of the crisis. For these reasons, a head-on collision between Capital and Labour seems unavoidable in the period before us. This does not mean that British capitalism has lost its overall margin of manoeuvre, or that it prefers a collision course rather than an attempt to arrive at some sort of compromise with the trade-union bureaucracy. From the bourgeoisie’s point of view, there is no contradiction between a policy of ‘integration’ of the trade unions in the bourgeois state and a policy of breaking the influence of the ‘militants’ inside the factories — although, of course, these demand different tactical responses from the revolutionaries and the vanguard. On the contrary, the bourgeoisie would prefer that the backbone of militants in the factories was broken by the Labour Party bureaucracy (that was the objective function of the Wilson government). But the fate of In Place of Strife indicated that, given the relationship of forces within the working-class movement, this ‘ideal’ variant was unrealizable. In these circumstances, and despite the temporary attempts to arrive at an understanding with the ‘moderate wing’ of the trade-union movement, the depth of the crisis and the power and militancy of the working class makes a decisive test of strength between the classes inevitable. Only after a defeat of the more militant sectors of the working class could a change in bourgeois tactics again occur. The central objective of the bourgeoisie in the coming test of strength will be qualitatively to strengthen the state (as in 1958 in France). Methods such as fascism or the installation of military dictatorship would, in the present relationship of forces, meet with a massive response from the working class. And even the qualitative strengthening of the bourgeois state (the only other means the ruling class has in Britain of strengthening its hand over the working class) could only be achieved if a humiliating and crushing defeat was inflicted on the working class.
The objective pre-conditions for a victorious socialist revolution in Britain are ripening fast. Seldom in European history have there been more favourable relations between the classes for such a victorious revolution: decay, potential division and confusion in the ruling class and its allies; an insignificant role played by intermediate layers and forces.
What stands in the way of a successful solution of the British crisis through a socialist revolution is the weakness of the subjective factor necessary for such a revolution, i.e. the class-consciousness of the working class and its leadership. Specifically, given the spectacular rise of the shop stewards movement and the no less spectacular decline of the control of the Parliamentary Labour Party over the working class as a whole, the nature of the crisis of the subjective factor and the cause of the revolutionary vanguard's weakness can be summarized by two factors: (a) the fragmentation of the working-class struggles and the more militant shop stewards, confined to single firms and industrial branches — a fragmentation which, at best, is only overcome periodically, and on a local level; (b) the deep-rooted influence of reformism, electoralism and parliamentarism (combined with social-chauvinism) inside broad layers of the working class. In other words, a lack of understanding of the nature of parliament, the existing state apparatus and all the ‘values’ which prop them up as tools of the class struggle of Capital against Labour.
British social democracy shows in an extremely advanced form the general tendency of European social democracy, and more latterly Stalinism, towards the depoliticization of the working class. By confining its operation and perspectives within the framework of the bourgeois state, with its necessary distinctions between the ‘political’ and the ‘private/non-political’ spheres, these parties reduce politics to parliamentary and electoral activities in which the mass of the class cannot and will not be involved on a continuous basis. Inasmuch as late capitalism tends to increase the tendency, inherent in class struggles even at an earlier stage, to transform daily economic struggles into conflicts with the bourgeois class as a whole supported by its state and government, syndicalism and reformism feed on each other and both tend to weaken the capacity of the working class to give a united class answer to the challenge of the social crisis. The building of the revolutionary party in Britain will essentially involve the removal of these key obstacles on the road to a victorious socialist revolution. Conscious efforts by revolutionaries are an essential precondition for this removal. But they are powerfully helped by the growing contradiction between the militancy and radicalization of successive layers of the working class and the oppressed in general on one hand, and the relative backwardness of their ideology on the other hand. It is by conscious intervention in struggles through the development of initiatives and forms of action and organization, and by fighting for goals and slogans corresponding to the needs of the masses and understood by growing sectors of the vanguard —combined with revolutionary propaganda, but not essentially by propaganda alone — that this contradiction can be overcome; that the grip of primitive syndicalism and reformism on successive layers of militant workers can be loosened and the building of the revolutionary party take a qualitative leap forward.
We contribute via our interventions to raising the political level and consciousness of the class, by underlining the political nature of the class struggle at present intensified in the country. We simultaneously combat the danger of a new deviation into reformist, electoralist channels of the growing political awareness and militancy in the advanced sectors of the working class which expressed itself graphically in the miners’ strike and the struggle to ‘Free the Five’, with the use of political mass actions outside the ‘traditional’ realm of parliamentary politics, unprecedented in the postwar history of the British working class. While we do not exclude in advance a general confrontation breaking out around some other issue than the direct posing of the existence of the Tory government — for example, the wages freeze, severe and outrageous acts of repression, open political provocations, etc.—and in such circumstances would support and push forward all calls for a general strike and other decisive methods on these issues, nevertheless by adopting a line of preparing for a general strike to bring down the Tory government we consciously and deliberately attempt to give a central focus to all existing struggles. In this way we contribute in practice, be it within the limit of our own modest forces and influence, to overcoming the objective fragmentation of workers’ struggles—and of the struggles of other oppressed sectors of society — which is such an important obstacle on the road to victory in the decisive test of strength between capital and labour in Britain. In the event of a decisive clash becoming posed round a general strike to bring down the Tory government, we warn the workers that if they continue to answer the capitalist onslaught (the I.R. Act, wage freeze and similar measures) in a fragmented and split way, they risk defeat. We prepare the necessary conditions for overcoming these internal splits and fragmentations of the class, through the extension and growing unification of the struggles actually being conducted. We avoid the danger of a growing isolation of the militant sectors from the broader mass of workers, more likely to be influenced and weakened both materially and ideologically by the bourgeois offensive.
In a situation of growing class confrontation, approaching a head-on collision between the classes and potentially growing over into a pre-revolutionary situation, the existing nucleus of the revolutionary party, the IMG, can only go through a qualitatively new phase of growth towards the building of a revolutionary mass party, if it fulfills two basic conditions simultaneously: 1. projects before the advanced layers of the working class, the radicalized youth and women as well as the anti-imperialist militants, a general line, a ‘central strategic project’, which corresponds both to the objective needs and logic of the unfolding class confrontation — incorporating and expressing the basic socialist solution to the social crisis shaking Britain — and to the instinctive thrust of the masses in preparing for this confrontation. 2. concentrates its day-to-day activities on those fields and in those forms where the best vanguard elements already active in various current struggles can be won over to our general line, through the experience of participating in or observing our intervention and our initiatives, which they regard as answering some of their problems.
Both conditions form a dialectically intertwined totality. The first without the second implies the danger of sectarian propagandism (or an opportunist combination of propagandism plus tail-ending current struggles). The second without the first —the attempt to develop an action programme with no central thrust — implies the danger of pragmatism, subjectivism and impressionism: jumping from one ‘field of intervention’ to another following the conjunctural ups and downs of the situation, without a central guideline or project or without taking into consideration the general needs of the class struggle. In the present circumstances the ‘central strategic project’ can only be: support, extend, unify and generalize all current struggles towards the preparation of a general strike: to bring down the Tory government and create a situation of dual power in Britain. This general line dovetails both with our analysis of the dynamics of the class struggle, which is in the direction of a generalized confrontation, in which we obviously want to create the best conditions for the victory of our class; and with our analysis of the main subjective obstacles on the road of a victorious socialist revolution, inasmuch as a unification, generalization and politicization of the current struggles helps to overcome the obstacle of syndicalism, and the thrust towards fighting for the creation of organs of dual power tends to overcome the obstacle of electoralism and reformism. By projecting as our central thrust the perspective of some other issue in a given conjuncture, the IMG would have two interlinked tasks. Firstly, in its agitation to push forward by every possible means the movement towards a general strike on the key issue around which the class forces were becoming polarized; simultaneously, in its propaganda to emphasize that while the movement towards a general strike on the issue under dispute had to be supported completely, nevertheless it was necessary to go further to take up the issues of the government, of dual power, etc. Thus while we do not exclude in advance the use in agitation of slogans for a general strike on issues other than the Tory government, and do not mechanically counterpose the slogan of a general strike to bring down the government to movements, thrown up by the objective development of the struggle, towards general strikes on other issues, we nevertheless regard such questions as conjunctural slogans within the general tendency towards a clash between the working class and the centralization of bourgeois strategy via the Tory government. In the event of a general clash breaking out around some issue other than the existence of the Tory government, and in the period leading up to the outbreak of such a struggle, the question of the Tory government should assume a direct rôle in the agitation of the organization.
A correct understanding of that general line implies combating a whole series of deviations which many who claim to be Trotskyists have repeatedly been guilty of in Britain.
1. We do not tie the general strike perspective to that of the re-election of a Labour government. First, because we do not exclude in advance the more favourable variant, namely, that the strike would have an extra-parliamentary outcome (dual power), and we do not contribute to strengthening the social-democratic tradition of looking only to elections for ‘political solutions’, at the very moment when this tradition is being seriously weakened. Second, because we cannot exclude that the general strike could actually take place when a Labour government was in power; this would be a real possibility if a Labour government was returned within the next few years.
2. We do not counterpose the general strike perspective to the existing struggles (a mistake made implicitly by those in the labour movement, like the SLL, who stress the futility of anything less than a general strike, instead of the potential of existing struggles); on the contrary, we present the general strike as the necessary culminating point of all the current struggles (which we vigorously support and strive to extend), necessary because recent experience indicates very clearly the difficulties confronting isolated sectors of the working class.
3. We do not counterpose the preparation of a general strike ‘from below’ to the preparation of a general strike ‘from above’ (i.e. through motions presented to the TUC). We consider that all discussions, resolutions and actions which tend to put that perspective before broader and broader layers of the workers are useful, and we therefore periodically agitate at normal trade-union meetings in favour of the recall of the TUC to prepare a general strike, without making such agitation in our press and in our interventions into the main, permanent axis of our campaign.
4. We do not limit the general strike propaganda to factory workers alone; for the deep-rooted, overall social crisis shaking British capitalism makes a growing participation by university, polytechnic and school students, women, intellectuals, technicians, etc. in such a general strike (as in France, in May ’68) not only probable, but highly desirable. Simultaneously, we understand the priority of rooting the organization in the vanguard of the militant sectors of the working class and we understand that its credibility among other layers will depend upon its ability to combine the presentation of over-all solutions for the social crisis (and itself as a force with a following amongst the advanced sectors of the working class) with concrete proposals for the most adequate forms and goals of struggle for these layers.
5. We do not conduct the popularization of the general strike line in an ultimatist or hectic way (a headline in every issue of the paper), nor in a haphazard and impressionistic fashion. We understand it as a continuous political campaign which recurs regularly in our press and our interventions, tied to various current struggles and analyses, but which takes an agitational form only under circumstances where this becomes both necessary and credible (i.e. in relation to existing struggles, debates within the organized labour movement, etc.).
6. Finally, we consciously combat any tendency towards an economist adaptation to the strong syndicalist traditions of much of the vanguard of the working class in Britain. We do not crudely subordinate the struggle of students, women, blacks, etc., to the general strike perspective, but, through fighting for our action programme throughout the labour movement, seek to involve all those who are conscious of their oppression under capitalism in working for the general strike, as a social confrontation which will put in question every aspect of life under capitalism.
Preparation of the appearance of organs of dual power immediately before or during the general strike — or whatever other form the generalized confrontation between the two classes pending in Britain will take — is our main strategic goal in the coming period, the one which differentiates us most sharply from all other currents on the left, currents which either effectively work towards the reabsorption of mass struggles within the framework of parliamentary democracy (the Labour left, CP, RSL, and, partially, the SLL), or fundamentally avoid the question of state power tied to the question of dual power (IS).
Obviously we are not content with posing the creation of organs of dual power. We want workers’ power, the creation of a workers’ state based on workers’ councils and workers’ democracy. But this remains a purely theoretical statement, liable in the best of cases to be understood only by individual members of the vanguard (or rather of the vanguard of the vanguard), until the working class has passed through the experience of dual power. The function of a period of dual power is to modify in a qualitative way both the possibility for the working class to break in practice with reformism and bourgeois parliamentary ideology, and the possibility to build a mass revolutionary party. It is impossible to predict today the precise way in which dual power organs will actually arise in Britain. They could arise out of strike committees (the classical Russian variant). They could arise out of factory and shop-steward committees (the tendency prevalent in Germany in 1922-3). They could arise out of local and regional bodies for ‘united action’ against the Tories and the employers, on a much broader basis (the tendency prevalent in Spain, in 1936). It is useless to speculate on these variants and consider this or that form as more likely than (or preferable to) another. What revolutionaries have to do today, is:
1. propagate tirelessly the coming together on a local regional basis (and as soon as possible on a national basis) of the real militants leading the struggles, across factory, sector, industry or political alignment separations — in other words, propagate the most diverse forms of unification in action of the vanguard around the key issues thrown up by the class struggle, concretely helping it to prepare for the general strike to bring down the Tory government, i.e. to fight for a global class answer to the social crisis and the bourgeois offensive;
2. acquire in this way the capacity to inter-relate and combine the various forms of such action committees which will, in circumstances of working-class upsurge, arise under different labels and different leadership (in some places, local meetings of shop stewards; in others, local trades councils; in others again, local united front committees of left groups; and in some cases the possibility exists of local Labour Party bodies playing a rôle);
3. use all these diverse forms of action committee, and every experience of unity in action of the vanguard, in order to prepare and educate the vanguard for the appearance of the qualitatively different Councils of Action which will emerge in a general strike situation.
In this framework, we must reject two deviations. 1. A sectarian deviation which seeks to establish Councils of Action on a programmatic basis. This deviation blurs all distinction between (i) action committees comprising vanguard elements of the class united for specific objectives, and (ii) the emergence of embryonic organs of dual power (Councils of Action), which by their very nature must be all-embracing representative bodies, reflecting all the political divisions and relations of forces inside the working class as they are at a given moment, and whose key importance lies in the way they can begin to raise an alternative authority to that of the bourgeois state, thus combining a capacity for class unity at a qualitatively new level with a capacity for big leaps forward in class consciousness. 2. An opportunist deviation which views these bodies as simply pressure groups to ‘force’ the trade-union bureaucracy and the Labour Party to fight. This view is based on the concept that because the working class still votes as a class outside the organizational framework of the Labour Party (except in ‘purely economic struggles’). On the contrary, the whole present situation is characterized by the fact that, although they still vote Labour in their overwhelming majority, the workers — especially the more militant ones — look less and less upon the Labour Party as a means to overthrow capitalism and solve the social crisis in Britain, and look less and less upon parliamentary elections as a means to solve their basic immediate problems. We must firmly base ourselves upon this contradiction, and see in the capacity of the class to create organs of dual power although it still votes for the Labour Party a more systematic expression of this contradiction, creating the means to solve it in a favourable sense from the revolutionary viewpoint.
It is in the framework of our central strategic goal, that we ensure that organs of dual power actually arise out of the general strike in which the decisive test of strength between Capital and Labour in Britain could culminate, that propaganda and wherever possible agitation for, and attempts at exemplary implementation of, workers’ control take on a special importance in the orientation of the IMG. Revolutionary Marxists reject any confusion between workers’ control and workers’ self-management. They likewise reject the gradualist notion that workers’ self-management under capitalism or workers’ participation alongside employers on management boards of capitalist firms can be in the interests of the working class. However, at times of heightened class struggle, workers’ control can include taking decisions about the productive process as a part of the struggle against the employers — e.g. the decisions on the allocation of electricity made by the strike committee at Brest. In pre-revolutionary situations, workers taking over and running the means of production (dual power at the level of the factory) can act as a focus, a spur and an aid to the development of the class struggle in a revolutionary direction and to the establishment of dual power at the level of the state. Workers’ control means to us the actual defiance of employers’ authority and capitalist decisions by the workers, before they have the power to overthrow capitalist relations of production and the bourgeois State. It marks a process of qualitative increase of class consciousness and class militancy, prior to an actual revolutionary situation. In its main expressions (attempts to abolish commercial and banking secrets; to veto speed-ups and changes in labour organization at plant level — i.e. actually not apply them; to veto lay-offs or reductions in the volume of employment in factories, localities, regions or branches of industry, while simultaneously refusing any responsibility for managing isolated plants), it creates both the objective and the subjective conditions favourable for the establishment of embryos of dual power, both in reality and, even more important, in the consciousness of the working class. Concrete experiences of this type, and especially their extension, will be a vital and necessary precondition for the emergence of actual organs of dual power on the occasion of a general strike or other form of decisive generalized mass mobilization of the working class and the oppressed. This method of approach to propaganda and, whenever possible, actual struggles for workers’ control exemplifies the more general method by which the IMG should approach the application of the transitional programme. What is involved here is the need to understand the absolute priority of starting from the class struggle, from the experiences accumulated by sectors of the class through their struggles, in order to raise the consciousness of the working class. For that reason, we do not believe that our intervention should consist essentially in ‘explaining’ (propagandizing) fundamental aspects of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the State or of capitalism (although propaganda for the full programme is obviously an essential, and too often underestimated, element of the activity of a revolutionary organization); nor that it should be limited to supporting the immediate demands which the workers in struggle advance themselves (although, there again, such support is absolutely essential, except when these demands conflict basically with the interests of the working class as a whole) and hoping to win the most resolute militants for our organization simply by being more militant than others in our fight for these demands. Our intervention has to be based on a conscious application of the transitional programme in the sense that, starting from the given needs and consciousness of the masses, we try to bring broader and broader sectors of them to fight for such goals and in such forms as to significantly raise that level of consciousness. In that sense, there is a world of difference between a struggle against redundancy which limits itself to a protest demonstration (even under the slogan ‘Bring down the Tory government’) or, worse still, to a lobby of parliament, and a struggle against redundancy which — as exemplified by actual strikes led by Trotskyists in various European countries — brings the workers to prevent lay-offs in plants and regional branches of industry, and instals actual organs of workers’ control over the level of employment in these plants. We have, of course, not the slightest illusion that this could actually become stabilized or institutionalized on a wide scale, i.e. that the workers could ‘abolish’ unemployment without abolishing capitalism. But we are firmly convinced that experiences of that type qualitatively increase the self-confidence of the working class, qualitatively increase its capacity for self-organization, and thereby create more and more favourable conditions for the emergence of an actual dual power situation from a generalized mass upsurge.
For the time being, the basic trend of the working class, and especially its more militant sectors, is towards less and not more involvement inside the Labour Party. At the same time, electoral polarization, especially in a general election, will be stronger than ever, given the degree of sharpening of the class contradictions in Britain. A vote for Labour will be a class vote, not in the sense that it will be a vote for socialism (nobody apart from certain self-proclaimed ‘Trotskyists’ believes that a Wilson government could implement socialist policies, and one has at least to express the hope that those ‘Trotskyists’ who still shout ‘Labour to Power on a socialist platform’ do this tongue in cheek, in order to convince some mythical working class said really to believe that the Labour Party is about to introduce socialism, said to need a ‘new negative experience’ which will expose the ‘traitors’), but in the sense that it will be a vote against the capitalist class and what the mass of the working class see as its most faithful representative, the Tory Party. Under these circumstances, the IMG will have to call for a vote for Labour, but without creating any illusions in the nature of the incoming government or in the possibility of solving the crisis of British bourgeois society through parliamentary action. The correct slogan will have to be a shortened variant of a formula of the type: ‘Vote Labour, but rely only on your own struggles, which must be unified’.
For the same reasons, we should not propagate the idea that we are always automatically in favour of the party which commands the electoral support of the majority of the working class forming a government. Historically, there have been many occasions when such an attitude has been inadmissable for revolutionaries (‘Noske to power’ in 1919 was not proposed by a single communist, however ‘right-wing’ he might be). And equally today, we should not educate our members with any such ‘absolute rule’. As we said before, with regard to the formula for the general strike, the concrete combination of circumstances during which a generalized upsurge of the mass struggle actually occurs could very well orient the working class away from a parliamentary-electoralist solution. And a significant rift might occur between the remnants of electoral loyalty towards the Labour Party and the relation of forces in local ‘councils of action’ which, without consciously breaking with the Labour Party, might be dominated by militants already to the left of the Labour Party. Especially if a general strike occurs under a Labour government, such a combination of circumstances would be very possible. Even if the majority of the workers still showed loyalty to the Labour Party, and the slogan ‘All Power to the Councils of Action’ actually implied a government a majority of whose members would formally be members of the Labour Party, this would have an entirely different significance from saying that we were in favour of the Labour Party forming the government. But today, disputes around questions of this type are essentially of an educational nature, whose only purpose is to avoid the adoption of general formulas supposedly applicable to all and every situation. It is unnecessary to come out in advance with the ‘correct government slogan’ in our propaganda for the general strike, because the very success of that propaganda, together with all the other subjective changes which are occurring and will occur in the British working class (especially its more militant sector), could significantly modify the conditions upon which the correct formulation of such a slogan depends. Nevertheless, the reality of the working-class radicalization in Britain covers a great variety of local and regional situations. It is undoubtedly the case that in many localities it is both possible and necessary to involve local Labour Party Young Socialists and even local Labour Parties in different united front activities (in support of strikes, anti-imperialist struggles, student, school-student or womens’ liberation campaigns, etc.). The organization should be prepared to undertake this without sectarianism or inhibition, and should consider this a specific application of the general policy of building and extending autonomous united action bodies on a local scale — bodies which pave the way towards real ‘councils of action’ tomorrow and real dual power organs the day after tomorrow. If and when a shift in the situation occurred, e.g. a sudden massive influx of radical workers into the Labour Party or the sudden rise of a ‘new left’ in the constituency parties, we should be ready to re-examine the situation with the maximum flexibility. What we are basically interested in is to struggle together with the vanguard and convince it of the correctness of our policies for the working class as a whole. Whether this vanguard acts inside or outside the Labour Party cannot be the most important aspect of the situation, neither positively nor negatively. The basic fact is that it is not encompassed inside the Labour Party, does not orient towards the Labour Party, and is capable of acting independently from the Labour Party. That is the basic reason why any form of entryism is misplaced under the given circumstances. But this does not exclude at all attempts to involve local Labour parties in genuine unity of action, nor approaching them systematically with this purpose, wherever this is credible and necessary for the success of a given action or campaign.
It is urgent for the IMG to work out a concrete transitional programme for Britain, i.e. a programme which offers the working class socialist solutions for all the basic manifestations of the global social crisis which British society is experiencing and which leads to a central conclusion: the necessity for the working class to struggle for power.
The programme should be formulated in such a way that it starts from the concrete problems posed to the working class by the social crisis (inflation; unemployment; decline of social services; massive reappearance of poverty; crisis of housing, the education system and the National Health Service; crisis of the patriarchal family; racism and xenophobia; erosion of the democratic freedoms of the working class, etc.). It must offer to these problems solutions for which the working class can be mobilized in the coming years and which, taken together, are incompatible with the functioning of the capitalist economy and the bourgeois state. Through the struggle for this programme, the working class can acquire the experience and consciousness needed to create organs of dual power, a necessary precondition for it to become able to tackle in practice the destruction of the bourgeois state and the suppression of capitalist relations of production. In the process of this same struggle, especially following the appearance of a revolutionary situation through the spread of organs of dual power, revolutionary Marxists can build the mass revolutionary party which will lead their class to a victorious socialist revolution.
Under the given circumstances in Britain, with an unfolding and deepening social crisis, with innumerable variants of local trade-union struggles, political struggles, anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles, struggles against the bourgeois family, student struggles and struggles for democratic demands, etc., intertwining and combining, there is a very real danger that the fragmentation and absence of a unifying central focus of the class struggle and the struggle of the oppressed in society will reflect itself in a revolutionary organization through a growing fragmentation of intervention and activity, each local branch or regional sector concentrating on the issues which happen in the opinion of comrades to be the most likely to lead to rapid recruitment, or even on the issues in which, for accidental reasons of age, profession, place of residence, etc., they happen to be most easily involved. Such a fragmentation would be disastrous for the capacity of the organization to appear as a real force in the vanguard, presenting key answers to the key questions posed for the class in the present situation. The struggle for a central, unifying perspective, a central political line which the organization will fight for in the working class, thereby becomes in itself a struggle to strengthen and centralize the British section, both politically and organizationally.
When so many struggles occur simultaneously in a country as they do in Britain today, the absence of a unifying and centralizing political line, axed around a key demand and a key political campaign, not only tends to increase centrifugal tendencies inside the organization, thus preventing it from objectively playing a unifying rôle within the vanguard, but could also strengthen a fundamentally wrong approach to party-building which sees the choice of priorities in function, not of the objective needs of the class struggle and its perspectives, but of purely subjective considerations of what this or that group of comrades considers to be the most ‘paying’ activity in terms of short-term recruitment, gaining a foothold in this or that sector of the mass movement or increasing the influence of the organization in this or that area. Since the process of the rising mass struggles is uneven in scope and tempo, in relation both to sectors and to regions, such a method of approach would inevitably increase differences amongst the comrades, since these subjective judgements on priorities would vary greatly according to the specific circumstances and experience within which they operated. For that reason, the adoption of a central political line by the organization greatly contributes to unifying the cadre and overcoming disputes about priorities in this or that field of work. Provided such a general line is applied with the necessary flexibility, many activities which might seem contradictory and mutually exclusive will appear as complementary and capable of being unified and focussed around a central campaign. In this sense, the adoption of the line of a general strike to overthrow the government will transform the IMG into a strong pole of attraction for a growing number of radicalized workers and youth, and will help it to continue the growth and development which the organization has experienced since the last World Congress.