[illegible] ...of the working class, which has been able to cling stubbornly to its acquired conquests and prevent any such overhaul at the expense of the proletariat and other exploited strata of society, has been largely inhibited by the labour bureaucracy from replacing the decaying capitalist order with a new workers power, oriented towards the Socialist United States of Europe, which offers the only historically progressive way out of Britain's crisis. Thus a historical stalemate has emerged since the second half of the 1960s, in which neither the capitalist class nor the working class have been able to apply their basic solutions to the social and economic crisis. This has led to a protracted political crisis, taking more and more the form of a near-paralysis of government with regard to long-term strategic solutions. This is strikingly revealed by the terms of the latest Wilson 'plan for modernisation of industry', which is nearly literally the same as the one advanced by the same Wilson ... ten years ago! The gravity of the crisis of British capitalism is such that the traditional 'British' way of solving difficulties through pragmatic compromises and small, gradual shifts in the political balance of forces becomes less and less operative. This applies to the labour bureaucracy as well as to the capitalist class. The illusions of the official 'Labour Left' in the possibility of using the election victory of 1974, in a framework of increasing reliance of a crisis-ridden private industry upon state orders and state subsidies, for a considerable increase of the area of 'public ownership' and 'public planning' along the traditional parliamentary road have dismally collapsed, given the absolute priority for British capitalism to restore the rate of profit. Likewise, in order successfully to reconvert itself to the role of a major partner in a European imperialist superpower, on an equal footing with US and Japanese imperialism, British capitalism has not only to integrate itself in the EEC and modernise its industry accordingly. It has to radically overhaul the traditional patterns of its rule, which were established during the period of Britain's global hegemony. But such patterns cannot be mechanically remoulded. The social fabric resists change, and where tensions are great, it tears violently. The growing incongruence of the whole superstructure of British bourgeois society to the needs of the capitalist basis do not lead to an automatic adaptation of that superstructure. On the contrary, they lead to a succession of violent convulsions and conflagrations, where the outcome of the struggle between living social and political forces alone will decide whether big business's 'master plan' will be implemented or not. The clearest example of this is what happened in Ireland. The strategy of entry into the EEC required a new relationship with the Southern Irish bourgeoisie. To move towards this, the British Government had to move towards 'reforms' in the North. Sensing the changing mood, the oppressed Catholic masses got off their knees and unleashed a civil rights movement which developed to the threshold of a dual power situation in the Northern Catholic ghettoes, in reaction to the pogroms unleashed against the civil rights movement by the most militant sections of the Orange bloc. The moment British imperialism saw the beginnings of the arming of the Catholic minority, they sent in the troops in an attempt to disarm the Catholic workers. The resulting conflict drove the Catholic population firmly into the nationalist fold, in opposition to both Stormont and British imperialism. Every new turn by imperialism to try to defuse the situation has only got it further into the mire. The present stalemate in Britain cannot last for a further prolonged period. It threatens bourgeois society in Britain with near complete paralysis. Revolutionary marxists must be conscious of the fact that a decisive test of strength is progressively approaching in Britain. They must make the British working class, and especially its vanguard, conscious of the high stakes involved in this test of strength. Either the working class will free itself from the paralysing shackles of reformism, class collaboration and parliamentary illusions, and it will then boldly advance towards a socialist Britain oriented towards the Socialist United States of Europe, on the basis of the collective ownership of industry, banks and finance institutions, wholesale and large retail trade and transport corporations run under workers management, and reconverted on the basis of an overall socialist plan democratically worked out by the people of Britain for the purpose of satisfying priority needs of the toiling masses, guaranteed permanent full employment, high quality free health, education, public transport and housing service; radical reduction of the work week and radical increase in the standard of culture and quality of life for all the inhabitants. Or the capitalist class will succeed in decisively weakening the militancy of the working class through inflicting upon it a series of defeats which will isolate and repress the vanguard, fragment and split the class, and demoralise large sections of the proletariat, thereby enabling capital to significantly increase the rate of exploitation, shift the rate of profit and of internal capital accumulation suddenly upward, and modernise British industry and the British economy through a sharp reduction of real wages, social services and working class freedoms (in the first place trade union freedoms and the unrestricted right to strike), i.e. removing a large part of the social gains made by the masses since 1945, which will be accompanied by a qualitative strengthening of the repressive legislation and apparatus, and a reduction of traditionally enjoyed civil liberties. The precise form this 'rationalisation' of British bourgeois society would take is still far from predictable. It will depend on a whole series of changes in the relationship of forces, both between the classes nationally and internationally, and between the imperialist powers. It must be understood that such a qualitative change could even occur without the formal destruction of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, as it did for example in France in 1958 with the advent of the gaullist Fifth Republic. But it will in any case mean a grave defeat of the working class, a qualitative change in the conditions in which the class struggle evolves, compared to those of the 1945-75 period.
The combined impact of a synchronised international economic recession and the development of a pre-revolutionary crisis in Southern Europe, hitting an imperialist system already weakened by its defeat in Indochina, creates the most favourable international context for the class struggle in every country in Europe, including Britain, since 1917-23. It would however be mechanical and wrong to conclude from this general trend that in every country in Europe the working class now proceeds in a straight [line] upward in offensive struggles. On the contrary, the uneven development of the relationship of forces between the classes has been markedly accentuated since the beginning of the generalised economic recession of 1974-5 in the different capitalist countries of Europe. While the working class's militancy and objectively anti-capitalist struggles have been strengthened in several countries, they have been temporarily halted or even thrown back in various others, in the first place Western Germany. Britain itself represents a special case. But the balance-sheet since spring 1975 is clear. The capitalist class, with the main help of Wilson and the labour bureaucracy, has gone over to the offensive and has scored initial gains. The British working class finds itself confronted today with the urgent task of organising its forces to defend its standard of living and social, economic and political gains of the last decades which are threatened with erosion and suppression. Only through a successful defensive battle against all these attacks by the employing class, the Government and the bourgeois State, can the ground be laid for a working class counter-offensive, which would once again put the struggle for a socialist revolution and a socialist solution to Britain's crisis immediately on the agenda. Evidently, the further unfolding of the class struggle in Britain does not take place in an international vacuum. It will be strongly influenced by international developments, and in the first place by what happens in the rest of capitalist Europe. In that sense, and leaving aside the extreme unlikeliness of a quick economic world boom of such amplitude as to tide British capitalism over its main troubles in the coming one to two years, any qualitative advance of the revolution in Portugal, Spain and Italy, and even more so in France — not to speak of any conquest of power by the proletariat in any of these countries — would have a profound impact on the British working class, not only at the level of the broad vanguard, but even at the level of the broad masses. It would rapidly shift the relationship of class forces in favour of the working class. It would qualitatively speed up the broadening of the vanguard and the building of the revolutionary party. In the absence of such a qualitative advance in Southern Europe however, the uneven nature of the process of maturation of socialist revolution asserts itself more than ever in capitalist Europe. It means that the immediate impact of the pre-revolutionary situation in Portugal, Spain, Italy and France remains, for the time being, restricted to furthering the growth and the politicisation of a limited vanguard in Britain. It does not as yet provoke any significant shift in the overall relationship of class forces in that country. It is insufficient to neutralise or throw back the offensive unleashed by the British bourgeoisie against the accumulated strength and gains of the British working class. On the contrary, the short-term possibility of a broad international revolutionary explosion in Southern Europe — which the most lucid circles of international capital understand as well and fear as much as revolutionary marxists foresee and expect it — makes it all the more essential for British capitalism to try to inflict a grave defeat upon the British proletariat, before it can link up with a revolutionary upsurge in Portugal, Spain, Italy and especially France. For the same reason, a success of the British workers' resistance in struggles against the offensive unleashed by the bourgeoisie with the help of the Wilson Government could greatly alter the social and political perspectives for the whole of Western Europe. It would create in all probability a pre-revolutionary situation in Britain too. This would provide a bridge between the upsurge of the South European working class on the one hand, and the still more quiescent North European proletariat on the other hand. It would be a tremendous blow against any imperialist attempt to isolate and blockade the revolutionary upsurge in Southern Europe. The results of the coming test of strength between the classes in Britain are therefore not only vital for the future of the British working class. They will be of the greatest importance for the future of the class struggle in the whole of Western Europe too. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance for revolutionary marxists to adopt a correct principled and tactical approach towards the issues around which this test of strength will evolve.
The defensive nature of the working class struggles at the present stage would in itself not be surprising. After all, each economic crisis of overproduction is objectively an aggression against the working class, an attempt by capital to lower real wages through the pressure of mass unemployment, in order to increase profitability. That, together with the massive elimination of inefficient capitalist firms (devalorisation of capital) is one of the main objective functions of a crisis of overproduction, in order to make possible a temporary increase in the rate of profit, and thereby a new stepped-up rhythm of capital accumulation. However, given the concrete context of political and social relations in Britain since World War II, the working class was completely unprepared for this rapid shift in the economic and social situation. The capitalist offensive came as a big shock to it, which led initially to profound disorientation and disarray, even in the vanguard. To understand this, one has to take into account: 1. The myth of permanent full employment as a priority goal of all British governments since World War II corresponded to a material reality for nearly three decades. The whole organised labour movement was deeply committed to the axiom that a Labour Government would be perfectly capable of realising such a permanent full employment within the framework of the so-called 'mixed economy'. Even during the last election campaign, solemn pledges were unanimously advanced in that sense by the Labour Party, underscored by left-sounding phrases in Labour's election manifesto (if necessary, extension of public ownership in order to ensure full employment). 2. The fact that, immediately prior to the present capitalist offensive, the working class scored important victories against the bourgeoisie: defeating In Place of Strife, the 1972 miners' strike; freeing the Pentonville Five; bringing down the Heath Government and its plans to restrict trade union freedoms; increasing the workers' real wages in the first phase of the second Wilson Government, in spite of the unfolding economic crisis. 3. The nature of the political debate inside the organised labour movement prior to and immediately after the formation of the second Wilson Government, which created the impression of an administration 'to the left' of the first Wilson Cabinet, having drawn at least some lessons from the ignominious balance-sheet of the previous Labour Government and intent upon implementing a 'left' policy (extension of the nationalised sector; experiments with 'industrial democracy'; consolidation and expansion of the social services; etc.). It was the brutal betrayal of all these expectations and hopes of the working class (which were to a great extent the results of illusions both in the nature of British society today and in British social democracy) by the second Wilson Government starting in spring 1975 (the EEC referendum), which has essentially provoked the disarray which enabled the capitalist offensive to score initial points. Britain's membership in the Common Market is maintained. An incomes policy is implemented through the Healey measures. The standard of living of the workers is cut by at least 5 per cent in six months, with new attacks to come on wages, employment and the social services. Worst of all: no serious central resistance is organised against these attacks either by the trade unions or by the 'official' lefts. The capitulation of the 'official' lefts before Wilson added a big blow to the workers' morale.
Thus, in a very short time, the basic tide of the class struggle in Britain has been sharply reversed. Under the Heath Government and in the beginning of the second Wilson Government, the dynamic was one of a potential generalisation of mass struggles of a clearly offensive thrust — even if the starting point could be defensive, as was the case with the struggle against the Heath anti-union legislation. Revolutionary marxists worked with the perspective of broadening these struggles towards a general strike and the emergence of an incipient dual power situation. Today the working class is thrown back on the defensive to the point where the fundamental thrust towards a general strike is objectively no longer on the agenda in the very short run. The relative weakness of the vanguard, combined with the strength of the reformist illusions of the toiling masses, the treachery of the Wilson bureaucracy and the capitulation of the 'official' Labour left, created a situation in which delay in the generalisation of the workers' struggles permitted the bourgeoisie to pass to a generalised offensive, which the class was not ideologically and politically ready to meet head-on. Of course, one cannot say that a qualitative change in the class relation of forces has already occurred. In that sense, it is true that one of the key causes of the initial setbacks of the British workers — especially the de facto acceptance of the Healey-Wilson wage reduction by the unions — resides in the bureaucracy's utilisation of the continuing ideological and political weakness of the working class, its readiness to accept bourgeois ideological arguments ('high wages are pricing you out of your jobs'), its reluctance to 'provoke' a return of a Tory government ('give Wilson a chance. He might just lick unemployment'), rather than any real strengthening of the British bourgeoisie. However, to this ideological and political weakness must be added an objective factor: the eroding effect of the initial rise in unemployment over several years, and of the Sisyphus-type permanent militant struggles conducted in increasingly unfavourable circumstances by key sectors of the working class, in its traditional bastions. The strategy of the revolutionary marxists for a general strike, which alone was capable of meeting the general challenge decaying British capitalism was presenting increasingly to all British workers, implied, negatively, that fragmented strategies, however militant, would be less and less capable of achieving results and sustaining morale. This truth has caught up with the working class. It should be added that, if the roots of the initial setbacks are to a certain extent ideological and political, its consequences are objective, economic and material. Any prolonged period of mass unemployment, of dismantling of sectors of industry which were traditional militant strongholds (certain car plants, docks, printshops, etc.), steady decline of real wages without significant and successful mass resistance, could only increase the disarray ideologically, and weaken the class socially and organisationally. In reverse, a spread of successful massive defensive struggles could rapidly overturn the present trend and put again on the agenda the possibility of generalised struggles, even a general strike with action committees potential.
Furthermore, the defeat of the Tory party in February and October 1974 has had extremely serious consequences for the bourgeoisie. It was replaced as the dominant party of the ruling class in Scotland by the SNP finance capital clique. It lost around half of its traditional and indispensable working class vote. As a consequence of the scope of the defeat, the trusted Heath team was replaced by a Thatcher-Joseph leadership whose election every significant section of the bourgeoisie has opposed. This has led to a situation where the Tory party's function as the dominant bourgeois party is at least questioned in bourgeois circles, while simultaneously electoral reform seems unrealisable in the near future. The likelihood of a 'bourgeois coalition cabinet' (Tories-Liberals-SNP) remains uncertain and unstable at the very least, if not thoroughly unrealistic. The bonapartist candidature of Enoch Powell is without any significant chance of success in the short run. The idea of a 'national coalition' is laden with the risk of an outright 'take-over' of the Labour Party by the left, with all the subsequent risk involved in such an eventuality for the bourgeoisie. Under conditions where the need of the bourgeoisie for a strong party of the ruling class capable of taking on a confrontation with the working class cannot at present be realised, there is no alternative for the British bourgeoisie but to try to implement in the immediate future its plans through a Labour Government. This applies even though a Labour Government is not, as in 1964, part of an attempted long term strategic project of the ruling class. While constantly bullying and blackmailing this Government, thereby helping the 'left' bureaucrats to justify in the eyes of the workers their 'lesser evil' policies ('A Tory cabinet would create more unemployment, lower wages and more cuts in the social services than Wilson; so we have to cling to Wilson as the only possible alternative to the Tories'), British capitalism hopes to have the working class sufficiently divided and fragmented as the result of the blows which Wilson is inflicting upon it, and the militancy of its vanguard sufficiently eroded, to prepare the field for a further and more decisive onslaught, possibly after a crushing electoral defeat of Labour, once the preliminary weakening of the organised labour movement has sufficiently changed the relationship of forces to make such an onslaught practicable and liable to succeed. This plan is sufficiently realistic to consider as completely irresponsible the cynical calculation of the 'Bennites' who, reflecting their bureaucratic interests, refuse to break in any way with the trade union bureaucracy, and contemplate schemes such as beginning a challenge to the Wilson leadership only after it has led the Labour Party to a disastrous electoral defeat. While reflecting not bureaucratic interests but political confusion, likewise irresponsible is the attempt of those forces on the extreme left which minimise the present setbacks and their potential cumulative results, minimise likewise the qualitatively increased crisis of British capitalism, and deny the need to prepare for a decisive test of strength at short or medium-term distance, satisfying themselves with a 'business as usual' combination of fragmentary and syndicalist militancy and mundane revolutionary anti-reformist propaganda. All these forces strongly under-estimate the gravity of the situation and of the challenge it presents to the whole British working class movement. Thus the combined crisis of British capitalism and of the superstructure of bourgeois society in Britain transforms itself into a potential crisis of the traditional working class movement and of the British Labour Party. The whole future destiny of British capitalism, its possibility of pushing its anti-working class offensive through to a decisive [victory,] to decisively push up the rate of profit and of internal capital accumulation, depends upon the degree to which it will be able to use the Labour Party leadership and bureaucracy to achieve the initial goals of its offensive. The whole possibility of maintaining its conquests of the last thirty years, and transforming them into an unassailable platform from which to launch the struggle for socialism in the short term depends, for the working class, on the way in which it will be able to organise a powerful and massive defence against the bourgeois onslaught, in which it will reach a new level of consciousness, a larger and better co-ordinated mass vanguard, i.e. an ample recomposition of the organised labour movement, both inside and outside of the Labour Party.
The fact that the British Labour Party — or, more correctly, the organised mass labour movement — has today become the arena of the decisive political battle which will decide upon the future of Britain is no more accidental than is the emergence of the Wilson Government as the main initial tool of the British bourgeoisie's anti-working class offensive. This is the result at one and the same time of the tremendous strength of the British proletariat (more than 90 per cent of the British active population is now composed of wage and salary earners), of the powerful increase in its level of organisation (more than 11 million unionised workers, more than 300,000 shop stewards), of the deep-rooted feeling of self-confidence of the class after 25 years of full employment and innumerable struggles won in the 1960s and the early 1970s, of the growing awareness of the class of the decay and weakness of the bourgeois class enemy — all factors which make it clear that it is not the strength of the capitalist class but the treacherous role of the labour bureaucracy and the powerful hold of social democratic, reformist, electoralist, parliamentary, 'syndicalist' illusions over the decisive layers of the working class which allows the continuation of bourgeois rule in Britain. This leads to the highly contradictory function of the organised labour movement (essentially trade unions and Labour Party) in late bourgeois British society. With growing crisis of British capitalism, the contradictions of that function reach a point of explosion. On the one hand, the reformist nature of the labour bureaucracy has again and again saved British capitalism from being overthrown by impetuous mass struggles. This was the case after World War I ('Triple Alliance') and in 1925-26. It was the case in 1945-50. It was again the case in the early 1970s. The present offensive of the bourgeoisie is further reinforced by racist, sexist and chauvinist sentiments which capitalism and imperialism have created in the working class. Given the present relationship of forces between the classes, social democracy is indeed the main prop for the survival of decayed British capitalism, the main obstacle on the road to victorious socialist revolution in Britain. It is necessary to constantly remind the vanguard of the British working class, and whatever broader layers of the working class we can reach, of this elementary truth. On the other hand, however, the social democratic labour bureaucracy has only been able to play this treacherous role by permitting the working class to maintain and extend a network of mass organisations in which the class can constantly exchange, enrich and expand its collective experience of struggle, and make them into motors of still more far-reaching struggles. This network has created a qualitatively higher extent of 'nuclei of proletarian democracy within bourgeois democracy' than in any other capitalist country in the world. The way in which the working class identifies itself with this network has in its turn created a powerful potential for mobilisation of the class, including mobilisations in direct action not only on 'syndicalist' issues but also on directly political ones, mobilisations which can occur without the working class breaking politically from the Labour Party. The political mass strikes against In Place of Strife, the degree to which the working class went beyond the line of the Labour leadership in the struggle to free the Pentonville Five; the AUEW strike against the NIRC; the refusal of the miners and Ford workers to call off their strikes in February and October 1974 to fit in with the electoral strategy of the Labour bureaucracy — all these facts indicate the degree to which the ability of the Labour bureaucracy to prevent mass struggles involving large sections of the working class has been eroded, even while these same workers' affiliation to and electoral support for the Labour Party remains as yet essentially unchallenged. So, paradoxically, the very same instrument which is the precondition of the continuous social democratic betrayal of the instinctive socialist aspirations of the British working class becomes more and more the main obstacle to the successful implementation of new betrayals. To put it more concretely: only a largely passive working class, unwilling and unable to react to Wilson's policies, can permit the co-existence of the organised mass labour movement in its present relatively democratic structure, with the betrayal of the labour bureaucracy. Any significant mass reaction of the working class against Wilson's policies will translate itself into a tremendously explosive crisis of social democracy as an organisation, at every level.
Despite the initial setbacks on the national political arena and in certain sectors, the level of direct social and political struggles still qualitatively exceeds that seen in any similar period of the post-war Labour governments. Furthermore, a clear radicalisation is taking place amongst the constituency and individual membership organisations of the Labour Party — with, in sharp contrast to 1964-70, not a decline but an initial increase in membership of the CLPs occurring and a more pronounced rise in the LPYS; the experience of right-wing MPs being removed as candidates by CLPs; the impact of the Clay Cross struggle; the defeat of Healey and other rightists for the Executive of the party; the stunning electoral victory of Benn; two-thirds of the CLPs voting for the resolutions of the 'Militant' group on the economy, probably a majority of the CLPs opposing the Healey measures; etc. The result of these developments is that, whilst as yet the largest number of workers who have broken with reformism are outside the Labour Party, a recomposition of trade union and Labour Party is taking place as well as the growth of extreme left currents within the Labour Party and left social democratic and centrist developments within the Labour Party. Given the circumstances of clear crisis at all levels of the Labour Party, we must avoid all 'infantile left' perspectives that this party, including the whole of its bureaucracy, will simply abandon its hold over large sections of the masses and forces to its left, by remaining monolithically right-wing in the face of a new working class upsurge. While the Labour left is deeply marked by the traditions of reformism, and its bureaucratic layers by their very social nature will not initiate struggles but only follow in the wake of an upsurge, nevertheless it is a labour bureaucracy and not part of the ruling class itself. Its role is to defend the historic interests of the capitalist class within the framework of its own base inside the working class — the base from which it derives its positions and from which it is able to extract its privileges from the ruling class. Large numbers of rank-and-file militants who have not broken completely with reformism or social democracy have already passed into opposition to Wilson-Healey. Reflecting this, Tribunite forces have been forced to take a position of verbal opposition to the Government's policies. The rest of the Labour bureaucracy abstained from any fight against Wilson out of sheer opportunist calculations. They want to cling to the trade union bureaucracy, which will not fight Wilson as long as it is not forced to fight by an unfolding mass struggle. Once the mass struggle starts, however, the whole logic gets reversed. In that case, the union bureaucrats are faced with the prospect of either losing their positions or in order to save their skins having to go along partially with the masses, as they did in the fight against In Place of Strife. And then the Labour left will be under increasing pressure to challenge Wilson's policies from top to bottom, not for 'ideological' reasons but simply to keep the Labour Party together and able to maintain its grip on the working class. But such a crisis at the base as at the top of the Labour Party means a qualitatively increased crisis for British capitalism at the very moment when Wilson's policies are the only realistic solution for British capitalism's ills. If today the crisis of capitalism has transferred itself into the crisis of British social democracy, the temporary outcome of the crisis of social democracy in the sense of the break of a significant section of the unions and the Labour Party with Wilson's policies would mean a decisive aggravation of the crisis of British capitalism.
Under these circumstances, the totality of elements acting in the situation (the organisational flexibility of the Labour Party, which allows openly oppositional activity without a need to make a political or organisational rupture with the party; the emergence of left currents at the base of that party and even amongst the bureaucracy, the smallness of the size of the vanguard which has broken from the party) means that, while a challenge to the Labour Party at all levels, including electorally, will be necessary for the final historic defeat of social democracy, the break of the British working class with social democracy is very unlikely to take the form, in the near future, of the setting up of a rival party or of a significant challenge to the Labour Party by the revolutionary left on the electoral field. This break will much more likely take the triple form of a turn away from parliamentary and electoral politics without an organised break with the Labour Party as such (e.g. increasing attempts to solve political questions through extra-parliamentary actions, increasing counter-position of the organisations of the labour movement to the parliamentary institutions, including the Parliamentary Labour Party), of united actions of a broader and broader vanguard, both within and outside the Labour Party; and of a deeper and deeper penetration of revolutionary socialist and communist ideology among the rank-and-file trade unionists and Labour Party members. Only in the case of a huge vertical split of the Labour Party, and the appearance of a mass centrist party of the dimensions of the German USPD, could this basic crisis be organisationally overcome. In the immediate future such an alternative solution is not on the cards. What this means is to fully understand the dialectics of the uneven development of working class consciousness, reflecting in the vanguard, combined with the historical peculiarities of the British working class and the British organised labour movement. Both the opportunist and the sectarian counter-positions to this analysis are unrealistic and misleading for revolutionists. They lead to a dead-end from a tactical point of view. The opportunists believe that, because the workers by and large do not stop voting Labour or being formal members of the Labour Party, it is impossible for them to bypass social democratic illusions or leaders in action altogether. From this they draw the conclusion that no significant actions can be initiated by the vanguard anyway, all political solutions having to be advanced in exclusively electoral and parliamentary terms, through the official leadership channels of the Labour Party. The sectarians, on the contrary, believe that as long as the workers are ideologically social democratic, they will be unable to challenge capitalism and its labour lieutenants efficiently in action. Therefore, denunciations of the left Labour bureaucrats in one form or another become the main duty for revolutionists, which implies a retreat into sterile propagandism. The correct revolutionary marxist position is that the contradictions of bourgeois society and of social democracy have reached the point where millions of British workers can challenge objectively, through their class actions, both the capitalist economy, the reformist misleaders and the bourgeois state, before they break totally with social democracy, both on the ideological and organisational level. Indeed, such a total break will only occur after the experience of many such mass actions has been assimilated, thanks to the correct intervention of the revolutionary marxist organisation itself — which has of course to be combined with consistent propaganda against reformism and social democracy.
From this analysis flows a clear projection of perspectives, and a clear outline of political and organisational priorities for the British revolutionary marxists of the International Marxist Group, section of the Fourth International. The most burning immediate task is to overcome the feeling of disarray and disorientation today predominant in the working class, as a result of the first setbacks suffered at the hands of the Wilson Government. It is possible to overcome this feeling of disarray and disorientation, because the setbacks suffered till now are still marginal, and can still easily be reversed. The absolute precondition for this is a real fight against the effects of the Wilson-Healey austerity measures. The biggest danger is passivity and complacency, the idea that somehow 'things will work themselves out in the long run'. If this were to prevail the marginal setbacks could be turned into a major and stunning defeat. The initial Wilson-Healey measures are absolutely insufficient seriously to redress the rate of profit and rate of internal capital accumulation for British capitalism. They will have to be followed by much graver attacks upon the living standards of the working class. The fight against the Wilson-Healey measures is possible under the present circumstances, without any specifically political precondition being solved first: this should be absolutely clear, lest our own analysis becomes an additional obstacle on the road of organising a successful defence by the British workers of their decades-old conquests. Even without the prior overthrow of the Wilson leadership or Government; even without a reversal of the majority of the TUC or the Labour Party on the Wilson-Healey policies; even without a prior strengthening of the political vanguard, the fight is possible here and now. This should be the first theme on which revolutionary marxists should unceasingly insist in their daily agitation. To be sure, this fight will probably be, in the beginning, a dispersed and fragmentary one. A generalised and coordinated fight would be preferable. But to postpone immediately possible struggles in favour of future imaginable, be it ideal, ones, is to play right into the hands of the bourgeoisie and its labour lieutenants. The longer the passivity lasts, the more the weight of disorientation adds itself to that of unemployment in eroding the militancy of the class. Fight now, fight immediately to defend your standard of living, wherever you can: this is the first key task of the hour. That is the first message the IMG should bring today to the British working class. For these initial fights to be successful, they must be organised on the basis of the broadest possible unity of action of all the forces actually involved, and around the immediate defensive issues concretely raised. This has already started to happen in the case of the demo for the Shrewsbury prisoners, the Medical Committee Against Private Practice, the November demo against unemployment. This can be repeated on as many concrete issues as possible, which give rise to such possibilities: strikes for wage demands guaranteeing the defence of the workers' purchasing power; factory occupations against lay-offs and closures; actions for nationalisation without compensation and under workers control of factories threatened with closure; mass demos against unemployment; mass actions against cuts in the social services; mass actions against increases in rents and public service charges; mass actions against the depletion of health and education services, against inflation and high prices of essential goods etc. Real actions today, even on 'modest' issues, are preferable to ideal actions tomorrow on global issues; without the first, the risk is that the second will not occur for a very long time. Having understood this basic truth, which emerges from the analysis of the precise point we have reached in the class struggle in Britain today, British Trotskyists should appear in the coming months as the exemplary fighters for the unity of action of their class, in defence of its threatened standard of living and conquests, wherever and whenever they have the possibility of intervention.
The second important task is the development of an overall political perspective for the British working class — or at least its most militant sectors — which is credible enough in the eyes of the class to make possible the generalisation of the struggles which are initially fragmented, sectoralised and partial in character. Without such an overall political alternative perspective, there is a big danger not only that the first wave of fragmented struggles against the Wilson-Healey measures and policies will peter out, but that they will lead to a series of partial defeats, once they take the form of confrontations between limited sectors of the most militant workers and the Government. In order to understand this, one has to understand the roots of the present disarray and disorientation of the working class, which is neither social democratic ideology in general nor results of past defeats (which never took place), but precisely the lack of a coherent and credible alternative political perspective to that of the Wilson Government. When a society is hit by a social, economic and political crisis of the depth of the one which is hitting Britain now both the bourgeoisie and the working class instinctively feel that only overall political solutions are viable. No serious British working class militant can really believe that he/she is able to defeat inflation in their own plant, trade, town or industry in isolation, nor to solve the problem of unemployment in a plant-by-plant way. While these beliefs do not stand in the way of initiating a resolute defence of the standard of living of the working class, wherever it is savagely and cynically attacked, they stand in the way of a generalisation of these struggles into a transformed test of strength with the Government, as long as no credible alternative is offered to the working class. In addition, one has to take into consideration the specific forms and limitations of the working class struggles in the past period and their still limited effects upon average working class consciousness. After the initial period of bourgeois reform and struggle inside the Labour Party in 1945-55, the predominant form of mass working class struggles emerged as the ability of the working class to use the colossal strength of its trade union organisations to achieve significant gains in living standards and defence of jobs. To the degree that explicitly political struggles took place, these, while displaying elementary class consciousness, did not in most cases involve a clear break with social democratic aims and goals. Furthermore, even within the trade union struggles, not merely was the penetration of new forms of struggle into the movement limited, but the struggles were initiated on demands either of a traditional trade union character or of a confused reformist nature, predicated on the belief that the downturn of the economy was purely conjunctural and would be quickly followed by a new boom (expected profitability under new capitalist ownership of the UCS and the Fisher-Bendix and Briants factories, after the initial 'work-ins'). Finally, the extreme organisational flexibility of the Labour Party, allowing not merely individuals but whole areas and unions to carry on actively in contradiction with the line of the party without openly challenging the current overall activity of the national party leadership, meant that the working class was not driven into direct confrontation with the political bureaucracy of the Labour Party but largely ignored it in the struggle. Today, however, such a stance is no longer possible. The open initiative taken by Wilson in initiating the bourgeois attacks upon the working class standard of living and past conquests makes a head-on challenge with the officially established leadership of the Labour Party unavoidable as soon as even a limited test of strength is on the agenda, not to speak about a generalised struggle against these measures. This means that an alternative political perspective and leadership of the working class becomes a decisive contributing factor for the victory of such tests of strength and the possibility of a generalised counter-attack. We remain absolutely convinced that only a revolutionary marxist party can both carry through the struggle for socialism and most adequately defend even the immediate interests of the working class. But as yet such an understanding exists at best among a few thousand workers, compared with even the tens of thousands who, without as yet overcoming their allegiance to the Labour Party, are immediately willing to fight the Wilson-Healey measures, not to speak of the hundreds of thousands or even millions who have to be mobilised progressively in order decisively to defeat the attacks of the bourgeoisie. For the majority of the most militant workers who are already, and will be, engaged in these struggles, what is posed as yet is not the question of whether they should or should not politically break with the Labour Party, but what policy, programme and leadership should be fought for inside the Labour Party and the labour movement. While the organisational flexibility and political heterogeneity of the Labour Party means that the vast majority of these militants are not as yet forced into collision with this party as a whole nor questioning their membership of it, nevertheless they are forced at every step into conflict with the Wilson leadership of the Labour Party and its policies. It is this objective process which lies behind the increased involvement of the trade unions in the politics of the Labour Party; the growth of the CLPs and the LPYS; the impact of struggles like Clay Cross and Newham; the emergence of elements of the trade union bureaucracy like Scargill; the recomposition of left social democratic, centrist and revolutionary currents within the Labour Party. Despite their disparate starting points, these different developments are part of the same process which is driving towards an explosive crisis of the Labour Party and a clash with the Wilson leadership and its supporters at every level of the labour movement. The task of revolutionary marxists in Britain is not mechanically to counterpose the movement to this process, which in any case they are powerless to prevent, but to ensure both that even those workers who do not yet break with their illusions in the Labour Party adopt the most advanced demands and methods of struggle possible, and that the maximum number of workers understand the historical bankruptcy of the Labour Party and the need to form a revolutionary marxist leadership for the working class in society as a whole. There is no contradiction whatsoever between our projecting the need to fight immediately the Wilson-Healey measures, here and now, without 'waiting' for a political alternative to emerge inside the Labour Party, and the understanding of the fact that the emergence of such an alternative leadership is a necessary precondition for a generalised successful defence and counter-attack, reversing the limited gains scored by the bourgeoisie during the last six months, and bringing the whole level of working class struggle and consciousness onto a qualitatively higher level than today. On the contrary, we must consistently lay before the working class, and in particular in counterposition to the electoralist and manoeuvrist positions of the left bureaucrats, the fact that the policies of the Wilson Government and the Wilson leadership cannot be defeated by inter-bureaucratic manoeuvres or resolution-mongering within the Labour Party, but only by beginning to alter the relation of forces through the mass mobilisation and action of the working class. We must consistently demonstrate that every strike, every mass demonstration, every form of mass action by the working class is not merely the best way to defend the working class, but a bigger blow against the Wilson leadership than a hundred resolutions by the 'left' bureaucrats. We must consistently understand and point out that only the immediate successful organisation of the partial struggles will create the necessary heat in the unions and the Labour Party, which makes the emergence of a nationwide challenge to the political line and leadership of Wilson inside the Labour Party both possible and positive.
Neither in the present circumstances can there be any question of the adoption of a classical entryist tactic by the revolutionaries. The driving forces not merely of the class struggle but even of the crisis within the Labour Party itself come, in this period, from the direct struggles of the workers, carried out above all through the unions, but also in a sense through united front bodies, and not from developments within the Constituency Labour Parties. When we therefore call for the struggle for an alternative policy to the Wilson one in the Labour Party, and an alternative leadership to the Wilson leadership, as the second key task of the hour, we do not in any way create illusions among the British workers that 'left' social democrats are able to solve the crisis of British capitalism any more than Wilson is, while abstaining from overthrowing capitalism. On the contrary, it is in the course of this struggle that we are most able to show the bankruptcy of the left bureaucrats. At every stage we must explain that their programmes are completely incapable of solving the problems which confront the working class; that on those few issues where the bureaucrats are forced by the pressure of the masses to take up demands which correspond to the interests of the working class, these reformists are unwilling and incapable of waging a real fight for them; that the bureaucrats dread above all the sole means — the mass mobilisation of the working class — which can defeat Wilson. At every stage, we counterpose our own programme of action and methods of struggle to theirs. Such a policy, which involves a constant dialectic of united action, ideological and political struggle, outflanking of the left social democracy and attempts at every stage to force them to define their attitude to the mass struggle, does not 'create illusions' in the left social democrats, but is, on the contrary, the sole way to break in practice the illusions which even the militant sections of the workers already have in the 'lefts'. We say to these workers: 'The only way out for Britain is a socialist revolution, the take-over of all the wealth of the country by the working class which created it, the smashing of the bourgeois state machine and the establishment of workers power, based upon democratically elected workers councils. We are convinced that history will confirm this opinion of ours. We know you do not yet agree with this. But we also know that you become daily more angered and embittered against capitalism. You are beginning to understand that, contrary to everything you were told for thirty years, "welfare state capitalism" can neither guarantee full employment, nor high level social services, and your conquests and standard of living are being whittled away. We also know that you are understanding that Wilson, whom you elected to power to defend your living standards, is acting as the main tool for the attack upon your standard of living today. If you are willing to go into action on a generalised scale to beat the bourgeois offensive by removing Wilson and replacing him with an alternative leadership of the Labour Party, we shall fully support your struggle. But we advise you strongly not to repeat the past mistake of giving blind credit to any leaders — "left" or "right" — in the Labour Party. Fight to set up the necessary machinery to ensure that future betrayals will become much more difficult than the current and the past ones. Establish a system of strict control of the mass organisations of the working class over the Parliamentary Labour Party. Elect the party leader and the Cabinet yourselves, instead of having them elected by the PLP. Establish a system of rapid recall of any minister or MP who has betrayed his mandate and his electors. Extend party democracy. Lift the ban on the affiliation of communist and revolutionary organisations to the Labour Party. And above all: do not have confidence in any person or persons: concentrate on the programme. Make the election of any alternative leadership dependent upon the adoption of a concrete programme of action which we propose to you — which is that section of our transitional programme which is the answer to your current needs and which will bring us a decisive immediate step forward towards final removal of the employers' power and the employers' property in Britain, a decisive step forward towards a socialist Britain. For this common programme of action we pledge our full support as revolutionaries. We shall fight with all our strength to establish the broadest possible unity of action inside and outside the Labour Party for this common goal.'
The central points of such a programme in Britain today must be: — against the erosion of living standards by inflation: rejection of the Healey measures and all forms of incomes policy under capitalism; sliding scale of wages, pensions, unemployment pay, grants and state benefits based on a trade union controlled cost of living index; £40 minimum wage; an immediate freeze, policed by committees of housewives and trade unionists, of the price of all basic goods in working class living standards, total freeze of rents; immediate nationalisation of food, oil and all other industries supplying basic necessities of working-class life. — for the defence and extension of the social services: rejection of all social expenditure cuts; sliding scale of public expenditure; immediate injection of £1,000 million into the health service; immediate target of building 500,000 houses a year; abolition of all private medical practice and all grammar and private schools; nationalisation of the drugs, health supply and construction industries. — against unemployment: workers control to impose work-sharing with no loss of pay; immediate introduction of a 35 hour week with no loss of pay; an emergency programme of useful public works; nationalisation without compensation and under workers control of all firms creating redundancy. — against the scourge of racism and fascism: abolition of the Immigration, Pakistan and Aliens Acts; right of black and other oppressed minorities to form caucuses within the labour movement and to organise to defend their communities; rejection of the right of organisation of fascists and racists. — towards the liberation of women: free abortion and contraception on demand; equal pay for equal work; free 24 hour community controlled state nurseries, implementation in full of the demands of the Working Women's Charter. — against the imperialist oppression of Ireland: immediate withdrawal of all British troops; release of all Irish political prisoners; self determination for Ireland. — against the imperialist policy of wars and counter-revolution: withdrawal from the EEC and NATO; immediate withdrawal of all British forces from abroad; breaking of all links with the Spanish dictatorship, end to the tariff barrier with Portugal and for cooperatives and workers organisations to place massive orders with Portugal, handing over of all British owned firms to the Portuguese workers; solidarity with the Iberian revolution. — for the defence of democratic rights against the moves to the strong state: abolition of the crime of conspiracy; repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism and Incitement to Disaffection Acts; immediate release of Des Warren and all other political prisoners, defence of working class struggles through the organisation of mass and flying pickets, disbanding of the SAS and Special Patrol Group; ending of joint police-army exercises, full trade union and political rights in the armed forces. — for the development of a socialist plan for the reorganisation of the economy to ensure full employment and halt the decline in living standards: opening of the books of all capitalist firms, local government and economic departments of the state; immediate nationalisation of banks, insurance and finance institutions; abolition of capitalist defence expenditure — not a programme of armaments but a programme of public works; penal taxation of all incomes over £10,000 a year and on capital and inherited wealth, take-over of all external portfolios and ban on the export of capital; full workers control of industry; drawing up of a plan for the expansion of the economy on the basis of nationalised industry; nationalisation under workers control of all basic industry. — for workers democracy: democratic election of strike committees; all major decisions to be taken by mass meetings; annual election, with right of recall, of all union officials; no official to receive more than the average wages of a skilled worker, automatic re-submission to selection at elections of all MPs; election of party leader, Prime Minister and Cabinet by the Labour Party Conference; subordination of the Parliamentary Labour Party to the decisions of the Party Conference and the National Executive Committee; for the abolition of all bans and proscriptions in the trade unions and Labour Party. It is around the demands of this programme that the decisive blows to defeat the Wilson leadership of the labour movement will be forged.
Today already tens of thousands of British workers can understand such language. Tomorrow millions will understand it. It prepares a qualitative leap forward in the class struggle, as well as a qualitative leap forward in the class consciousness of broad masses. It is the practical way in which millions will break in the coming months and years with some basic tenets of social democracy. To confine ourselves solely to the struggle against 'social democracy as a whole' means to lose a historic occasion for achieving that first decisive break, in favour of propaganda which will only convince at best a few thousands.
A third key task is to weld together the vanguard which is and has been slowly emerging during the last years around the transitional programme in its totality, i.e. in the first place around those concepts which cannot yet be included in the action programme proposed for the struggle against the Wilson-Healey policies: the idea of generalised workers control over the whole economy; of workers councils emerging out of strike committees and action committees in the next wave of mass struggle, of challenging the bourgeois state institutions and state machine at the level of the state. This task is, at the present stage, still a propaganda task, which has to be systematically pursued both in Red Weekly and in special pamphlets written for this purpose. It means a lively ideological debate with other currents of the left, both inside and outside the Labour Party, in which we base ourselves on the past experiences of the British class struggle, the experiences of past socialist revolutions in Europe, and especially the fresh experiences of Chile and Portugal, in order to hammer home a series of key lessons which show the inanity of all reformist and centrist concepts about the gradual and parliamentary road to socialism. In this context we do not take up the question of Portugal and other international struggles solely as separate issues of solidarity, but as an integral part of our global fight against reformism on every question. This struggle is absolutely essential. Revolutionary marxists do not believe that the working class can spontaneously break with social democratic ideology in its totality. The inevitable fate of social democratic mass currents is defeat and demoralisation, if left to themselves by revolutionary marxists. But while we believe that through this propaganda campaign and ideological debate we can make significant inroads in the vanguard in order to win individuals and groups to the IMG, and set in motion a process in which the IMG emerges as the potential pole of regroupment for winning over the most consistent militants in the extreme left to the programme and the organisation of the Fourth International, such a process is in no way opposed to a broader campaign of unity of action of the whole mass vanguard, to become the spearhead of the counter-offensive of the working class and to polarise a larger break with the social democratic leadership within that class. The present mass vanguard in Britain, willing to go beyond the classical limits of social democratic policies in action, is overwhelmingly proletarian in composition. It includes a large part of the militants who have been leading the mass struggles of the last seven years. It is in no way essentially limited to members of the extreme left organisations. On the contrary, in its great majority it is politically affiliated to the Labour Party through the unions, and in an increasing number individually active in the Constituency Labour Parties and LPYS. This turn towards the Labour Party reflects a potential process of politicisation and the search for a realistic political alternative to reformism, in the only organisational framework where this could have the greatest immediate impact and the greatest short-term efficiency. As a function of the weakness and sectarianism of most of the revolutionary left, this vanguard — still in quantitative terms in large part outside the Labour Party, and despite its willingness to go beyond the political framework of all current varieties of social democracy over various questions — has had its political attention at least partially focussed by the existence of a 'left trend' within the Labour bureaucracy (for all this left's shallow manoeuvres, opportunism and lack of opposition to the Wilson-Healey measures) in its search for a realistic political alternative. With the present confusion in the vanguard as a whole, despite the weakness and in the last analysis worthlessness of even partially focussing the attention of the vanguard on the 'alternative' posed by the left bureaucracy, the political weight of that sector of the vanguard organised and active around the base of the Labour Party, with such a focus, has increased in the past period in the activity of the vanguard as a whole. We have to understand this actual composition of the mass vanguard and conduct our fight for the transitional programme in the mass vanguard on the basis of that understanding — i.e. the attempt to create a powerful revolutionary current within the united left movement, which will challenge the Labour left at each turn of the struggle for leadership of concrete actions, and prepare the next decisive step in the break of the working class with social democracy, a step which will become possible as soon as a generalised mass struggle again shifts the consciousness of the working class to a higher level, provided the building of the revolutionary party, the strengthening of the IMG, gives the vanguard the necessary instrument to achieve that task successfully. The focus that revolutionary marxists must continually orient towards in this regard must be the emergence of a class struggle tendency in the labour movement, of all those forces in struggle but presently fragmented without clear common action against the central enemy, represented by the policies of the Wilson leadership and that leadership itself. Such a class struggle tendency must group together all those forces who, notwithstanding many differences on long-term strategies for socialism, are nevertheless prepared to fight against the betrayals of the Wilson Government and for the immediate needs of the working class. The forces for such a class struggle tendency are already emerging in the current struggles. The task is to politically clarify and render organisationally coherent these forces and the many others that will come into collision with the role of the Labour Government. Politically, we fight for such a class struggle tendency to be formed on the basis of the only platform which can provide a real solution to the crisis which confronts the masses: our programme of action. This means fighting continuously to turn this programme into a real element in the class struggle through every form of propaganda, popularisation of exemplary struggles, and above all through fighting for united front action and organisation of tendencies in the vanguard of the working class. While avoiding ultraleft errors which refuse to enter any united action unless it is established on our own programme, or which artificially separates vanguard forces from broader layers prepared to take real action in defence of the interests of the working class; while avoiding all manipulative errors which seek to gain acceptance for our demands on the basis of moves which do not correspond to the real relations of forces within the movement — nevertheless we see united action on less adequate bases merely as temporary compromises, imposed on us by unfavourable relations of forces and in which we seek to win the basis of united action to adequate demands of our action programme. Similarly, where forced through relations of forces to vote for the candidates of the Labour left against right-wing candidates, we maintain our programmatic independence, and the programme that we demand these leaders implement is our action programme and not their reformist schemes. The specific combination of the direct struggle of the masses with the crisis of the Labour Party characterising the present phase of the class struggle in Britain is breaking up old formulas, scenarios and shibboleths of the British extreme left. Those who thought in the heat of the 1968-73 upsurge, that the political domination of the Labour Party over the working class had disappeared, today find themselves confronted with the re-emergence of left Labourite currents, which present an apparent way forward for large sections of the working class, and which cannot be defeated on the basis of pure militancy, organisational sectarianism and lack of clear political perspectives which achieved temporary success in the period immediately following 1968. Those who for years have immersed themselves purely in the rhythms of activity dictated by the CLPs, today find themselves confronted with direct working class economic, social and political mobilisations which provide not merely the motor force of the class struggle, but also the dominant element of the crisis of the Labour Party itself. Under these circumstances, the revolutionary left in Britain is passing through a period of splits and regroupments. While the IMG fights to regroup all forces accepting the basic programme of the Fourth International and maintains the full right of tendency and faction for all those who accept this basis but disagree on immediate tasks and tactics, we give priority in the present phase to the attempt immediately to strengthen the British section of the FI by seeking fusion with all those currents which not only agree on the general programme but which are drawn towards a similar understanding of the immediate tasks ahead in Britain today, for the working class, the vanguard workers and the revolutionary marxists themselves. The strengthening of the revolutionary marxist organisation is, at the same time, an absolute precondition for a successful intervention in the above specified sense, an intervention which requires that an initial threshold of militants and of implantation in the working class should be passed. At the same time, the IMG strives for the greatest possible unity in action of all the organisations of the extreme left. Through fraternal debate, polemics and the demonstration of the correctness of its line in practice, it seeks to break them away from their original shibboleths and convince them of the need to regroup their forces with the IMG, to create a strengthened and united revolutionary organisation in Britain, under the banner of the Fourth International. Serious attention should also be paid to the growing crisis inside the British Communist Party. While the party continues to organise the majority of those left trade union militants who are outside the Labour Party, and while it wields not insignificant influence in the broad workers vanguard, its systematic tail-ending of the left bureaucracy (which results in the CP finding itself outflanked not only by the revolutionary left but even by left elements inside the Labour Party), together with the steady erosion of its press and youth organisation, has increased the feeling of lack of perspective inside its ranks. The crisis of reformism thus becomes, at least in part, a crisis of the neo-reformists of the British Communist Party. Combined with the effects of the deepening crisis of world Stalinism, this creates a favourable climate for the penetration of Trotskyist ideas among the periphery and even the membership of the CP, provided we adopt a correct attitude of allying irreconcilable firmness on all matters of principle with a systematic united front approach towards the Communist Party on all matters where the general interests of the British and international working class are at stake.
While at all times propaganda on the tasks of a revolutionary workers government retains its value in the pedagogic task of explaining to the working class the conditions necessary to overthrow the capitalist order, in the coming period of working class struggle, with increased need for generalised solutions, increased activity of the working class in relation to the political crisis of the Labour Party, and a clear potential for development towards pre-revolutionary outbreaks if the working class succeeds in defeating the Healey measures and the Wilson Government, it is clear that the IMG will be confronted with the increasing need to formulate clear and precise slogans in relation to central questions of political life and government. The fundamental axis which the IMG must pursue in that respect is the one outlined in the 'Theses on the Construction of Revolutionary Parties in Western Europe' (printed in International, Vol 2, No. 1) i.e. to work for the creation of organs of dual power. Such an axis acquires a particular significance in Britain today, not merely from the point of view of its relation to tumultuous working class struggles, but also in relation to the development of left social democratic and centrist currents. The entire line of left social democracy, and of their Stalinist supporters, is summed up in the orientation to 'A Labour government with left policies' — a government which carries through radical measures, but within and on the basis of the framework of the bourgeois democratic state. Such a framework will of course either succeed in sabotaging the implementation even of a left reformist programme, reducing such a government to a farce and creating profound demoralisation within the working class, or if the upsurge of the workers were to threaten to go beyond this framework, would lead to the overthrow of the government and the unleashing of massive repression by the ruling class. In counterposition to this line, the perspective which the IMG must advance is that of a government resting not on the institutions of the bourgeois democratic state, but based on and responsible to the mass organisations of the working class. In pursuing such a perspective, the IMG must utilise not merely propagandistic explanation, utilisation of international and historical examples, and partial experiences of workers democracy in mass workers struggles, but must attempt systematically to show the complete infringement and hemming in of proletarian democracy by the framework of the bourgeois democratic state. Every example of coalitionist manoeuvrings, of combining of votes of Labour forces with Tories, of violation of decisions of the workers organisations by the parliamentary clique, must be utilised to convince the widest possible sections of the workers that the bourgeois parliamentary system, far from being the highest, or even the sole, form of democracy is on the contrary an obstacle to, and incompatible with real workers democracy. It is necessary through campaigns for replacement and expulsion of notorious rightists, election of all officials, the responsibility of elected representatives to the workers organisations, for the subordination of the Parliamentary Labour Party to the conferences of the workers organisations, for the election of the government and party leader by the Party Conference, and above all through experiences of workers democracy emerging from mass struggles, to convince the working class of the qualitatively higher form of democracy represented by proletarian democracy and of the way in which not merely the institution of private property but the bourgeois democratic institutions are themselves a barrier to the development of such democracy. Within this general framework of advance it is particularly necessary, as a radicalisation of the working class taking it beyond its bankrupt leadership progresses, to advance slogans of government which increasingly counterpose all developments of proletarian democracy to purely parliamentarist conceptions of government. Such a line is of particular significance in conditions where both general theoretical considerations (the necessity of at least partial experiences of organs going beyond the bounds of the bourgeois state to bring not merely a vanguard but the masses to a realisation of the need for a workers state and workers power), international experience (Chile, Portugal), and considerations of the specific nature of the Labour Party (extreme political dominance with extreme organisational flexibility), make it clear that the working class will act beyond the framework of the Labour Party, as in 1926 even up to the creation of embryonic organs of dual power, before it makes a clear political rupture with that party — indeed it is clear that experiences of such a character are a clear precondition for bringing about a rupture of the masses with reformism and with their illusions in the bourgeois democratic parliamentary institutions. Under these circumstances the general formula advanced by the Transitional Programme, to demand of the reformist organisations and leaders of the workers parties that they break with the bourgeoisie, retains its full validity not merely on partial questions (to demonstrate their refusal to break with the social contract, the Healey measures, etc), but also to demonstrate their refusal to break with the bourgeois state and its democratic institutions. It is necessary to advance under suitable circumstances slogans clearly counterposing a governmental alternative based on the workers organisations to a parliamentary one, even where the composition of the government would be reformist leaders. In the event of a general strike or similar mass upsurge creating democratic organs of mass struggle it is necessary to advance formulas of the character of a government based on Councils of Action. In circumstances where a clear counterposition on central questions exists between the policy of the mass workers organisations and that of the parliamentary leadership, it is necessary to demand a Labour government responsible to the organisations of the working class and not to Parliament.