THE PAST 14 years have seen a relentless onslaught against the wages, pensions and services of the working class and the oppressed. Food banks have multiplied, and the gig economy flourished. According to the TUC, workers are £11,000 a year worse off than when the Tories and the Liberal Democrats came into office. Monthly rents are 40% higher. Food bills jumped 20% in just one year during the inflation crisis.
To divert indignation at all this, successive governments have demonised migrants and asylum seekers, scapegoated the unemployed, undermined the living standards of disabled people and held up the mirage of Brexit, which all evidence now shows has made the country poorer. The Tories have empowered the unaccountable, racist and sexist police and further restricted the right to strike or protest.
Yet the capitalist class continues to accumulate its enormous hoard of wealth on the backs of the working class, while avoiding taxes on their ill-gotten gains. FTSE100 stock market prices have trebled since 2010, yielding on average 10.9% profit in the last year alone.
The Tories claimed all this was down to the last Labour government engaging in profligate spending on the NHS, welfare and to fund the few remaining public services. In fact, the harsh austerity they imposed was to pay off the government debt incurred to save the bankers in the City during the Great Recession.
As a result, health, education and welfare budgets have been slashed. Public service wages have shrunk by between one-quarter and one-third in real terms under the Tories. NHS waiting lists exceed 7.4m and there are 112,000 full time staff vacancies, including over 40,000 nurses, while the NHS spent £11bn on private profit-making providers in 2021–22.
In the decade from 2010 successive governments reduced central support to local authorities by 60% in real terms. As a result the largest city outside London, Birmingham, is bankrupt and a new wave of austerity is launched aimed at the enormous number of services provided at local level. This includes cultural and sporting facilities, particularly important for young people.
In his autumn statement Jeremy Hunt announced there was a ‘black hole’ in the public finances of anything between £35bn to £60bn, which must urgently be ‘filled’ either by spending cuts or tax rises. Of course, the Tories wanted tax cuts as well as spending cuts.
Labour’s shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has accepted this claim and promised not to increase either wealth taxes, income taxes or public borrowing. This can mean only one thing: more austerity and scarcely any money to restore the public services or raise the wages of workers in these sectors to compensate for the double-digit inflation which devastated incomes for three years.
Schools too are in a terrible state of disrepair, some literally falling down due to poor building materials. The promotion of academies has increased inequalities between working class and middle class postcodes. Universities also face huge cuts in staff and courses. Usually it’s the arts, social sciences and humanities that will close.
Rail fares have increased in real terms by 30% and bus routes cut at a time when all forms of public transport should have been increased to meet the threat of climate catastrophe. Hundreds of new oil and gas licences have been issued and even a new coal mine opened in flagrant violation of the UK’s obligation to ‘phase down’ fossil fuel production.
It is clear that on its present course. Labour’s acceptance of the Tories spending plans, set by the fiscal rules of the Bank of England and the Office of Budget Responsibility, will inevitably mean new austerity and cuts, not the major plan of spending we need on social welfare, health, education, the environment and infrastructure.
Yet the money to sustain and repair these services and to pay decent wages exists in the City of London, in the bank accounts of the super-rich, and in their offshore havens. Our trade unions and social movements have the power not just to claim back what we have lost, but to fight for everything we need for a minimally decent life. We have to use that power and make our unions, campaigns and political organisations fit to wield it.
Here we present our action programme to guide that struggle and, through collective action, to open up the fight for socialism. We offer it to union branches and campaigning organisations for discussion, debate and decision-making, because we know that the fight against the incoming government will be as hard, if not harder than the ones we have participated in over the past decade and a half.
Against the new cold war, for national liberation and socialism
Until the last decade, America, as the sole superpower, and Britain, as its closest ally, claimed to police a ‘new world order’ of peace and democracy. In fact, the next two decades, like the previous six, were ones of relentless wars and invasions: in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
But these years also saw the rise of new imperialist powers, China and Russia. This opened up a period of rivalry between these new powers and the older imperialists of North America and Western Europe, Australia and Japan. This is the ‘instability’ that Starmer and Sunak are talking about as justification for a massive increase in spending on ‘defence’. It is why Starmer says he will press the nuclear button and unleash Armageddon if need be.
Today Britain and America are not the only warmongers. Russian imperialism has laid waste to vast areas of Ukraine. In part this was provoked by the US, UK and European Union’s actions to lure that country into joining Nato and the EU. However, this is no excuse for Putin’s attempts to colonise Ukraine, which has the democratic right to defend its independence from Moscow with weapons from wherever it can get them. But no real independence awaits it, if it falls into the Western imperialists’ economic and military clutches. We must support Ukraine’s self-defence without supporting the pro-imperialist politics of its leaders.
Down with British imperialism’s support for Zionist genocide.
In the forefront of this election is another example of cruel national oppression and aggression—Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza and on the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The difference is that our rulers, the so-called democracies, support Israel, arm it with super-destructive weapons and protect it with vetoes against resolutions in the UN Security Council.
Their motive is that Israel acts as a guard dog for their strategic interests and the oil resources of the Middle East. That is why they supported Israel as an expansionist settler colony, displacing the indigenous population of Palestine. But the victims of this aggression refused to go quietly and have fought back. We must support their right to their homeland in the whole of what was, in 1922–48, a British colony.
The scale of the Israeli assault since November is now widely recognised as a genocide. Even Biden, Sunak and Starmer are calling for a ceasefire, despite for over six months slandering the mass movement for this as antisemitic, calling Israel’s atrocities justified ‘self-defence’. Now they are exposed, they try to pose as peacemakers and roll out once more a prospect of peace negotiations and the ‘two state solution’.
This would be just as fraudulent as the so-called Oslo peace process of the 1990s which ended up with the president of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat being bombarded in his Ramallah HQ by Israeli tanks. It also ended with 800,000 right wing settlers on the land designated for the state of Palestine.
The election of a Labour government gives us the opportunity and the duty to demand a change of pro-Zionist policy to measures which help the Palestinians recover from the brutal attacks of the last months and the 20-year siege of Gaza. We must call on all Labour candidates to publicly fight for a Labour government to demand:
We are against any imposed two-state solution. All the illegal settlements must be dismantled. Any genuine Palestinian state must be able control its own borders and to defend itself. It must not be a series of dismembered Bantustans. Likewise, the present Palestinian second class citizens of Israel must have full and equal rights. Palestinians in the refugee camps and beyond must have the right to return to their homeland.
But we also believe that, because of the disputed rights over land and housing, only a socialist Palestine, where the land, factories, schools and houses are socially owned, could reconcile both national communities on the basis of working class power and socialism.
For decent wages, work and social security – make the rich pay!
We say our right to a decent standard of living comes before the profits of the super-rich. Pay has been falling for over a decade. Strikes have been relatively successful in forcing the bosses to boost pay offers, but with inflation even the best deals are not guaranteed to hold their value.
Whenever inflation takes off unions should demand all pay rises are index-linked to the real increase in working class families’ cost of living, i.e. prices. We call this a sliding scale of wages. The TUC, the unions and local campaigns should set up their own price watch committees, made up of workers and their families, who can check the prices in the supermarkets, rents and utility bills every month and record price rises as they impact our household budgets. Unions should publish their findings and force the bosses to recognise them as the basis for pay claims and indexing wages.
In June 2022 the Tories announced that the number of job vacancies in Britain was higher than the number out of work. This was supposed to imply that there is plenty of work for everyone; you only have to ‘get on your bike’ and find a job. In fact this ‘vacancies paradox’ is a lie, on two accounts.
First there are skills shortages, meaning many skilled jobs cannot be filled until a new workforce has been trained or migrant workers are allowed to come and live here on equal pay and conditions.
Second, the unemployment figure—1.49 million, an in- crease of 103,000 over the last year—covers up the fact that 9.38 million people were economically inactive. This is not a ‘lifestyle choice’ as Suella Braverman implied, but mainly down to long-term illness brought on by health inequalities and people being hounded off Universal Credit. Including these workers, the unemployed rate was really 22%.
The next economic slowdown will mean closures and job cuts. Bosses will use the threat of unemployment to hold down wages.
That’s why we say: work or full pay, full-time permanent jobs for all who want them. To any employer proposing job cuts, we demand the work available is shared equally among the workers available. Cut the hours, not the jobs. For a four-day working week with no loss of pay or increase in workload or work-rate.
To any boss who complains this would bankrupt them, like Royal Mail did, we say open your accounts to workers’ inspection and let’s see where the money went. If they are truly bankrupt, they should be nationalised under workers’ control and without compensation. In other words, when- ever the capitalists try to wriggle out of their commitments, we must make inroads into their private property by empowering the workers.
We call on a Labour government to invest in a programme of public works. Our environment must be upgraded with renewable energy, insulation and cleaner transport. We need more hospitals, more schools, more green spaces. It makes sense to create these by creating well-paid, secure jobs.
Every worker deserves full employment rights, including the right to join a recognised union. A Labour government must implement the original New Deal for Workers in full in its first 100 days. No consultation with employers: jail them if they break the law. Abolish zero-hours contracts and all forms of super-exploited labour. Raise the minimum wage to £20 an hour. We support the struggles of unions who are fighting for the rights of precarious workers, including the smaller independent unions like UVW and IWGB.
Abolish Universal Credit and replace it with benefits set at the minimum wage and indexed to inflation. It should be paid from day one and on day one. We say raise the state pension to a level people can live on, and lower the age to 55, so people can retire in good health and free up jobs for younger people. We support the campaign of disabled people for an end to sanctions and testing, restoring allowances to their 2009 levels.
Who will pay? Corporation tax is now historically low at 19%. Under Thatcher, it was 40%. If this level were restored it would begin to protect living standards, instead of lowering them as Reeves and Starmer are planning to do. The unions must demand they break from the Tory chains they have willingly tied their hands with.
Kick the profiteers out of health and education
To fill the tens of thousands of NHS vacancies, we need to restore nurses’ bursaries and raise all NHS workers’ wages to cover the collapse in real-terms pay. To cut the waiting lists and relieve the vast numbers of women forced into unpaid caring responsibilities we need a major programme of expanding health and social care under workers’ and community control.
Bring all contracts in-house and expropriate the big drug companies. Private healthcare must be nationalised and brought into the NHS. Then we can expand the NHS and social care so future generations can rely on them.
Funding cuts, competition from academies and falling student numbers have led to a rash of school closures. Instead of shutting schools and sacking teachers, we should reduce class sizes to 20 for primary schools and 25 for secondaries.
Housing, energy, transport and local democracy
The housing shortage has left millions stuck in private tenancies facing rocketing rents that often ab- sorb more than half of their take home pay. We need an emergency programme to build a million council homes a year with council ‘direct labour’ under workers’ and community control. Requisition land banks, empty properties and second homes to house the homeless.
Labour councillors need to be put on the spot: are they with the capitalists or with their communities? If they defy Starmer and Reeves’ orders to cut budgets, they must be supported by mass mobilisations by unions and users.
Climate action: socialisation of energy, land, housing and transport
In 2023 the world’s temperature for the first time climbed 1.5C above its pre-industrial levels, making it the hottest in 125,000 years. While this created droughts across the Horn of Africa, floods over one-third of Pakistan and hurricanes in Haiti, Britain is not immune to the effects of climate change.
Intense periods of rainfall and devastating floods have become part of Britain’s meteorological landscape. A month’s rain falling in 24 hours is not uncommon.
One in six people live in houses at risk of flooding, not only damaging their homes and possessions but condemning them to months of misery. For farmers the impact is far worse, with unseasonal rains and droughts destroying crops and forcing up food prices.
The incompetent and greedy privatised water companies have failed for decades to invest in new infrastructure, preferring to dish out bumper dividends to shareholders. As a result, water supplies contain record levels of chemical waste and ‘forever’ fertilisers. Now human waste pollutes our rivers, lakes and beaches.
At the same time the Tories have continued to quite literally pour fuel on the fire of environmental destruction. They have signed off Britain’s first new coal mine in 30 years and dished out hundreds of new oil and gas exploration licences in the North Sea. Labour has promised not to revoke them.
As for the promises to fund preventative measures, it is worth trying to ‘follow the money’. Defra, the government’s environment department, handed back £310 million last year, unspent, despite projects, like flood de- fences, being years behind schedule.
Labour are no better. Rachel Reeves insisted on cutting their £28 billion a year spending programme down to less than one-quarter of that amount just to reassure the financial markets. Imagine what she would do if there was a serious crash.
The party has no plans to nationalise the fossil fuel energy companies, will only invest in projects the capitalists find profitable and will insulate Britain at a snail’s pace. The renamed Green Prosperity Plan certainly puts capitalism’s prosperity way before the planet’s sustainability.
Starmer put huge pressure on London Mayor Sadiq Khan to water down his Ulez policy, which has massively reduced air pollution in the capital, just to shore up votes for Labour. He failed that time, but if he is in charge of making the decisions, his instinct will surely be to ditch environmental policies again.
To stop the backsliding and to reverse climate change, we need to fight for the following demands:
Fight social oppression
In times of economic crisis, the people hit hardest are those who already face institutional discrimination, casual abuse and the constant threat of violence: women, Black, Asian and other ethnic minorities, the LGBT+ community, disabled and youth.
Women
Millions of women bear the double burden of exploitative work and unpaid domestic labour. They are discriminated against at work, receiving on average 15.4% less pay than their male counterparts.
Racism
Black people, Asians, migrants and ethnic minorities are subjected daily to verbal abuse, threats and often violence. Fascist thugs like Tommy Robinson whip up racist fears on the streets, given the nod by Tory and right-wing politicians, like Nigel Farage.
LGBT+ Liberation
Despite the important advances won by successive generations, the right to free expression of sexuality and gender remains subject to constant repression. Today trans people are in the firing line of a reactionary war by the Tory right, media and fascists. Tory promises to implement a new ‘Section 28’ outlawing discussion of trans issues in the classroom, and the notorious Cass review are the twin thrusts of the political and medical offensive increasing the oppression of trans people. This attack, inextricably linked to social attitudes towards women and lesbian, gay and bisexual people threatens to open the way for a wider assault on LGBT+ rights.
Youth are the future
Youth are three times more likely to be jobless than adults. The minimum wage for 16–17 year olds is just over half the adult rate at an unsustainable £6.40 an hour. Unemployment among 18-24 year olds is 11.2%; among 16-18 year olds it’s a shocking 26.3%, that is at three to nine times higher than for adults. The Tories’ attempt to resurrect National Service their underscored their eternal role as cannon fodder for the rich. Yet young people have been to the fore in the fight against racism, sexism and climate change. They must be in the front ranks of the fight against a new wave of austerity and for a huge improvement in education and training.
Internationalism not imperialism
Britain is the fifth richest country in the world, yet com- prises only 1% of its population. It achieves this by exploiting poorer countries. In the City of London trillions of dollars of investments and transactions every day seal the fate of millions of people in the Global South at the click of a mouse. City banks, financial institutions and insurance firms hold whole swathes of Africa, Asia and Latin America in debt bondage. Through the IMF and World Bank, structural adjustment programmes (massive cuts) are imposed when poorer countries cannot service their debts, Then it imprisons and deports those who seek a better life here.
Trade unions, bureaucracy and rank and file
one of this can be achieved unless we revolutionise our movement. The unions are weighed down by bureaucratic procedures and timid leadership. To transform
this situation we need to start in the workplace. We need to bring millions of unorganised workers into the unions, with shop stewards in every workplace able to confront management and call action.
For a fighting movement
We need to bring all disputes and strikes under the control of the workers involved. Mass meetings of workers should elect strike committees, accountable to and replaceable by the members. Strikers should be in control of all negotiations and full reports of discussions given to mass meetings, where members can mandate their representatives to follow their democratic will. Only strikers, not officials, should be allowed to suspend or end strikes.
Every serious dispute runs into the anti-union laws, used time and again to thwart the democratic wishes of trade unionists to take effective strike action—by long laborious balloting procedures or court injunctions.
Bureaucracy and Rank & File
At every stage of the struggle workers come up against conservative or timid union officials. True, some are prepared to support action and listen to activists, but even they reserve the right to dictate the length and duration of strikes.
We saw this on ample display during the strike wave of 2022–23. Sector after sector were herded back to work on the basis of shoddy deals not worth the paper they were written on. One or two-day strikes, often rotated round the workforce, did not escalate into the all-out action that could have won. Instead they were used as ‘bargaining chips’ to end the conflict as soon as possible.
The problem is that union officialdom is a bureaucratic caste, bound together by privileges and loyalty to each other. At the top, 30 union general secretaries earn over £150,000 a year, below which is an army of officials, mostly unelected, who control strike negotiations (and sell-outs).
Councils of action
Even militant, well organised strikes need the support of other workers in solidarity committees to strengthen picket lines, raise funds, refuse to handle scab goods and take solidarity strike action. They should aim to coordinate our resistance and take initiatives, drawing in representatives from local workplaces and neighbourhoods, able to launch demonstrations, direct action and wildcat strikes.
At the high point of struggle these organisations can develop into real councils of action, with recallable delegates from every workplace and neighbourhood, authorised to implement their decisions. These can go beyond trade disputes with individual employers towards a class struggle of the whole working class against the capitalists and their system.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks recognised the importance of such councils of action (called soviets in Russian) in 1917, not just as centres of struggle but with the potential to organise society as a whole. Their expertise built up by fighting for, then implementing workers’ control, in defending their actions with arms against the bosses and could be used democratically to decide what is produced and how it is to be shared out equally.
That is why in every struggle communists seek to broaden the movement, with joint strike committees and combines, solidarity groups and local action committees, to maximise our impact and draw ever wider sections into conflict. The direct democracy of such councils would be far more representative than the cleanest parliament, because it would be the democracy of the oppressed fighting for their freedom.
Their democracy – and ours
In ‘democratic Britain democracy itself is severely limited. Every five years workers have the opportunity to vote in MPs. Naturally this is preferable to an unelected dictatorship, allowing workers to put up their own candidates, but it is still fixed in the bosses’ favour.
MPs can make all sorts of promises at election time. Then they can break them. There is no way of holding them to account or immediately replacing them with people who better represent the will of their electorate. The first past the post system discriminates against small parties.
Even then, parliamentary elections do not give rise to a government that has full power, even on paper. Ministers do not have to be elected. The unelected Lord Cameron is currently Foreign Secretary. Then there is the Privy Council, a semi-secret body appointed by the King, and the House of Lords, which can delay and amend legislation.
Finally there is the Monarchy itself, which is more than just an extravagant bauble—it is a powerful component of the capitalist state. The King has the right to refuse to let parliament’s laws take effect, suspend parliament or sack prime ministers. We demand Labour reinstates its pledge to abolish the House of Lords and goes further down the democratic road:
Abolish the Monarchy and the House of Lords. Introduce proportional representation and annual elections with votes for all residents over 16, regardless of nationality. Even in the most democratic class society, real power does not rest in parliament. Unelected judges, secret services army and police chiefs, all represent the ‘power behind the speakers’ chair’. They defend capitalism by anti-working class court rulings, by spying on workers’ organisations, by smashing picket lines and breaking strikes. This is why we demand:
The capitalists claim democracy guarantees free speech. But this ‘right’ is constantly under attack—just ask anyone speaking up for Palestine. In practice free speech exists mainly for those who can afford it: the newspaper barons, the giant social media gatekeepers and the owners of the TV stations. Their lies and gagging measures go unanswered because working people have no real access to the mass media and no control over social media. We fight for:
Socialists stand at the head of the fight to defend and extend democratic rights. But democratic rights within the capitalist system are not enough. Even the most democratic capitalist constitution would leave the real source of power and wealth, the real cause of economic crises and poverty— private property and the profit system—intact. And the peaceful use of the democratic system by the working class will never be enough to transform society while the real core of state power—armed force—remains in the hands of the capitalists
The workers’ government
Every major battle between the workers and the bosses is a political struggle. The Tories always seize on this fact. They taunt trade unionists with being ‘politically motivated’ and our leaders always rush to reassure the Tories. For them, a strike should remain a dispute between one section of workers and their employers. Politics is what 600-odd people get up to in parliament.
The capitalists rule over us through their political representatives. They attack us by introducing laws, through pay limits, through dragging us into wars and through cutting social spending. Individual employers do not wait for political approval before slashing jobs, pay and conditions.
Workers will soon realise, if they don’t know already, that a Labour government is just the same. The party is just as committed to maintaining the capitalist system. In government, now as before, it will act on behalf of the bosses against the interests of the workers.
Even a government made up of left wingers, like Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott, would face immediate problems if they tried to implement even a fraction of the programme workers need. Higher spending on the health service and benefits, a shorter working week, the confiscation of the monopoly profits would all hit the capitalists where it hurts most, in their pockets. They wouldn’t take it lying down.
The question of power
Real power does not rest in the debating chambers of parliament. It rests with the unelected boards of the major monopolies, the international capitalists who forced Liz Truss from office and with the unelected judges, generals, police chiefs and the faceless senior civil servants who remain in place no matter who is elected.
Any government that tried to take away the capitalists’ wealth would soon find itself face to face with that state. The capitalists are not about to give up their privileges, their wealth and their power just because somebody asks them politely. The full force of the state would be unleashed against any such government.
But there is another source of power. It is composed of millions of people rather than the few thousands of exploiters. Without it nothing would function, from the factories to the supermarkets, from the railways to the schools. It has deep-going traditions of organisation, collective work and solidarity. It is a force that is capable of running the whole of society, because it is already central to making that society run.
That force is the working class. To rule it must be organised as a class, to recognise its own true interests, and to set about getting them.
In every major battle democratic councils of action will emerge in every town and locality. They begin as a means of co-ordinating our fight across the existing divisions of section and union. But they can rapidly develop into an alternative source of organised power, a challenge to the capitalists’ own organisations of political rule.
Alongside such organisations the working class would need to build a means of protecting them. From the defence of our picket lines through to defence of communities and demonstrations from the police or racists, the need for organised self-defence is posed. From workers’ defence squads can grow the armed power the working class needs to counter the armed power of the capitalist state and impose its own rule on society—the workers’ militia.
The workers government
It is organisations of this type, workers’ councils and a workers’ militia, that we fight to make an alternative centre of power in society. Based on such organisations, a workers’ government could be established, under complete democratic control by working people.
The possibility of establishing a workers’ government could only arise in periods of heightened class struggle. Councils of action and workers’ defence squads would exist alongside the capitalists’ government, its army and police force. Such a situation of dual power could not last for long: one or the other power would have to triumph.
That ls why workers who genuinely stand for socialism must take the revolutionary road to establish a workers’ government. It would have to base itself on the mass organisation and armed power of the working class to survive the bosses’ counter-attack.
Such a workers government would have to move to dis- arm the capitalist class by winning rank and file soldiers to the workers’ side and getting arms from them for the workers. lt would mean being ready to defeat the crack army and police units in open battle. In short it would mean insurrection and smashing the capitalist state that defends the bosses’ property.
No government that leaves the bosses’ armed power intact could govern in the interests of the workers. The exploiters’ state would have to be broken up, and the resistance of the millionaire minority to the rule of the majority would have to be suppressed by force.
A genuine workers’ government would rely on arming the mass of the working class. It would dissolve the British armed forces, the secret service, the police, the civil service mandarins and the capitalists’ parliament, and would pass power over directly to a national congress of workers’ councils.
Only then could the fight to establish socialism begin in earnest.
Party and International
To spearhead the fight for revolution, the working class needs a political party that represents its class interests. The working class today has no such party. lt is faced with a crisis of leadership. Resolving this crisis means building a new leadership to challenge the hold of the Labourites and the trade un- ion bureaucrats over the working class. There is only one way that this can be done: by building a new revolutionary party.
The seeds are there for the growth of revolutionary ideas among a minority of workers: the failure of the Corbyn left has discredited the notion that Labour can be transformed; new militants in the unions have cut their teeth against the bureaucracy in the strike wave; young people from Black Lives Matter and the Sarah Everard movements, from the ecology groups and Gaza encampments are taking up revolutionary slogans. These developments demonstrate the potential that exists for the building of a revolutionary alternative to Labour.
But the politics of the leaders of the social movements and the far left obstruct this potential. The former rest on the courage and tenacity of their activists but focus only on immediate demands and fail to draw the unions into real action. The latter may sound more radical but warn of ‘getting too advanced’ of the masses and often end up dividing, not uniting our forces. Revolutionaries have to go beyond fighting for reforms which are disconnected from the goal of socialism. We can and must build a bridge between the two through a system of transitional demands—policies which provide the answers to winning the struggles of today, and at the same time develop the forms of organisation which can mount a challenge to the capitalists’ state and their economic system.
The action committees which could co-ordinate solidarity strikes and defence of services, the defence squads that can see off Tommy Robinson’s gangs, are the embryonic types of organisation that can become the workers’ councils and workers’ militia of tomorrow. That is the method of a transitional pro- gramme, the essence of the revolutionary approach.
This is alien to nearly the whole of the far left today. The SWP scorns the idea of a programme, claiming you just need to cheer on the workers taking militant actions, only warning of the reformists’ inevitable betrayals when it’s too late. The RCP claims to have a revolutionary programme, but it consists of a few disconnected, almost entirely economic demands with the words ‘revolutionary communism’ tacked onto the end. There is no ‘bridge’ to connect the two. The real question is whether we go into battle with the class enemy with or without a plan of action. Revolutionary socialists don’t counterpose the battle plan to the battle itself. But like all sensible workers, we start with a clear plan even if it has to be altered and improved in the process.
Given the disunity and variety of organisations on the left, is it possible that a new revolutionary leadership could be built through uniting all socialists who recognise the need for an alternative? We stand for the maximum unity of the working class in struggle. But without overcoming the deep-seated political confusion and differences on the left, any ‘united party’ would collapse at its first major test in the class struggle.
The party we need has to be made up of workers. It can’t fight for a revolution unless it bases itself on the daily struggles of the working class. It has to be a combat party, not an electoral machine or a talking shop. It would use elections to spread the ideas of revolutionary socialism. Its MPs would use parliament as a platform to denounce capitalism and the sham democracy of parliament itself. But the party’s central task would be to root itself in and transform the unions. Alongside this it would aim to mobilise the most exploited and oppressed—the youth, the unemployed, unorganised workers, black people, women, LGBT+ people—in militant, working class oriented struggles.
A fighting party needs a centralised leadership and the confidence that in battle all its members are fighting for the same goal. Its leaders would not be permitted to do as they like. They would be under the control of the party as a whole. At the same time, once a democratic decision was taken, it would have to implement it with maximum unity in action. The principle of democratic centralism is only a political expression of that needed for solidarity. In a war you need leaders, a battle plan and combat discipline. The revolutionary party is an instrument of class war. Just as the bosses wage their class struggle across international borders, so must we. The revolutionary party has to be an internationalist party. Socialism is international or it is nothing. It cannot be built in one country alone. Workers Power exists to build a revolutionary party. We aim to rally the forces of the left around a genuinely revolutionary programme, so that from the discrediting of Labourism, a strong, united and revolutionary party can be built, a party which can stand at the head of the working class in its fight for freedom.
