"The working class, its role and
its mission today.
The tasks and concrete experiences of the Communist Party in the working class
and the trade union."
Brussels, 16-18 May 2008
www.icsbrussels.org , ics@icsbrussels.org
The role of the party of the working class in present conditions
Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
It goes without saying that the role of the party of the working class is to represent the interests of the working class and to work to ensure that these interests are realised.
In the present situation, most communist parties are striving to represent the interests of the working class under capitalism, since it is there that we find ourselves, and they engage in the struggle to secure for the working class better conditions of existence within the capitalist system. Capitalism, however, has ceased to be a sustainable economic system. It has become putrid and in its putrid state delivers nothing but poverty, hunger, war and ecological disaster to every corner of the world. The result of this is that today more than ever before the most important and essential function of the party of the working class is to lead it in its historic mission to overthrow capitalism – forcefully overcoming the desperate resistance of the capitalist class which believes its own mission is to stay in power for all eternity regardless of the horrendous cost that preserving capitalism means to the masses of workers everywhere.
The importance of theory
"Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement" (Lenin). The Party must be the repository and generator where necessary of the most advanced revolutionary theory.
As human beings live in the world and in society, they develop their own, and also adopt from others, ideas as to how to deal with the challenges of everyday life, many of these ideas being implemented in such a routine manner that they become "second nature", implemented unconsciously. Expressed linguistically these ideas are "theories" and to the extent that these ideas or theories, when put into practice, lead to the expected results, these ideas or theories are correct. If not, they are either incorrect, insufficient or inapplicable to the conditions to which they have been applied. In such a case a problem arises that appears insoluble and for which a new theory must be developed, applied and tested in practice in order that the problem may be resolved. For this reason, it is true that there is nothing so practical as a good theory.
In class societies, for as long as they are able reasonably well to deploy the resources available to satisfy most of the basic needs of most of the people as well as continue to develop and improve production and distribution in satisfaction of human needs, the ideology of class rule, to reconcile the exploited to their inferior status and precarious conditions of life, is broadly accepted. But because such societies are divided into classes, there are unavoidably ideas and theories of class struggle arising spontaneously in the ranks of the exploited, and becoming more widespread to the extent that class society fails to provide for the needs of the oppressed.
Over 150 years ago class society began its descent into oblivion. It ceased to be necessary for the progress of humanity, but instead became a fetter on this development. Methods of mass production developed by capitalism had brought within the reach of humanity the possibility of providing for everybody not only the bare necessities of existence but also a cultured and satisfying life, but continued private ownership of the means of production by the capitalist ruling class made it impossible to achieve this: on the contrary, the capitalist striving after maximum profit was giving rise to the pauperisation of millions, to war and to irreversible ecological damage to the planet, as is still the case. Humanity turned its attention to this new phenomenon, and it was Marx and Engels who happened to produce the necessary analysis of capitalist society which led to effective theory for the solution of the great problems caused by this degeneration of class society, which had reached its final form, capitalism, that in turn was on the point of reaching its last stage, namely, imperialism, the eve of proletarian revolution.
After the experience of the Paris Communse, Marx and Engels modified them to make it clear that there was no possibility of the working class laying hold of the ready-made state machinery of the bourgeoisie, e.g., through electoral victory, and using it for their own purposes but that it would be necessary to smash the bourgeois state and create new organs of power to carry out the requirements of the proletarian state. Subsequently the theories of Marx and Engels were further developed by Lenin in the light of the passing by capitalism to its imperialist stage, and Marxist-Leninist theory was put to the most comprehensive test of practice through the October Revolution and the building of socialism in the USSR, as well as subsequently in China, Korea, etc. The dramatic advances made in production, accompanied by massive improvements in the lives of the toiling millions in the socialist countries provided irrefutable proof of the validity of Marxist-Leninist theory.
Nevertheless, Marxist-Leninist theory is far from being universally accepted among the working-class masses, let alone grasped and understood. Even less has it been internalised to the point of being second nature. This is partly because it always takes time for new ideas to take hold, as people struggle to offload old ideology which has become "second nature", i.e., settled in for automatic and unconscious application. However, this is not the most important reason why the new ideology needed to guide the working class to its self-emancipation is not instantly grasped and implemented by the downtrodden masses. The bourgeoisie uses its dominant position in capitalist class society to suppress the new ideas and theories. It resorts to outright prohibition (such as what the government of the Czech Republic is currently doing in illegalising the KSCM (Czech Communist Youth) for demanding that the means of production be taken into public ownership; it mobilises petty-bourgeois academia and the mass media to ridicule and denigrate the new ideology; and it mobilises the labour aristocracy and sections of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia to permeate the working-class movement with distortions of Marxism most persuasively packaged to convince proletarian elements to confine their struggle against capitalism, however militant, within the boundaries of capitalism.
The bourgeoisie, therefore, in its struggle to hang on to its power, wages fierce class struggle to prevent the working class from embracing revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, its guide to successful overthrow of capitalism and building of socialism.
It follows that a prime duty of the party of the proletariat is to defeat the bourgeoisie at the ideological level in order to free the working class to strive for its self-emancipation.
There are petty-bourgeois elements, accustomed to thinking of the working class as intellectually inferior rather than as the ruling class in waiting, who think that so long as the party is versed in Marxism Leninism it is quite unnecessary to spread its ideology among the broad masses of the workers. The party is a part of the class, the brains of the revolutionary movement, and all one needs to do is to persuade the masses to follow it, for which purpose the best strategy is to tone down all mention of Marxism Leninism (which rather tends to put people off!!) but concentrate on being helpful during strikes, help with personal problems, etc., so that the grateful poor will follow the party out of gratitude. This is a profound error. To be able to lead the working-class masses through the hardships of the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism, it is necessary to have won their hearts and minds over to acceptance of the validity of our revolutionary programme, otherwise it will be easy for the bourgeoisie to bamboozle them. Furthermore, we need to be developing large numbers of working class people to the level of party members, which we cannot do if Marxism is for 'inside the party' only.
Therefore the revolutionary party of the working class has a duty:
To promote to the maximum the liberating revolutionary theory that will guide the working class to revolution – spreading this knowledge and understanding throughout the working-class movement at every opportunity;
To fight against all those who: (i) distort revolutionary theory to try to remove its revolutionary essence and (ii) belittle theory in order to encourage the working class to remain under the exclusive sway of bourgeois ideology.
The CPGB-ML endeavours to carry out these revolutionary tasks with regard to theory in the following ways, among others:
By conducting regular study classes for our members and contacts for the study of classic Marxist-Leninist texts
By organising weekend and day schools for theoretical discussion and debate on questions of vital importance for the working-class movement
By producing our newspaper, which endeavours to promote understanding of Marxism-Leninism, to apply it so as to understand important events taking place in the world today, and to counter the wrong ideas being peddled by agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement.
By producing and distributing leaflets on various questions of immediate interest to the working class for the same purposes
By intervening in mass organisations and mobilisations, such as meetings and demonstrations, to put forward revolutionary perspectives in relation to the demands being made, for example on such fronts as anti-war movements, National Health Service defence, defence of education provision, anti-privatisation campaigns, factory closures and redundancies..
The fight against opportunism and social-chauvinism
As has been mentioned above, it is a very important part of the work of a working-class party to counter wrong ideas that help the bourgeoisie to maintain itself in power. The wrong ideas most prevalent in the working-class movement are those of opportunism and social chauvinism, which act as chains binding the working class to the bourgeois system.
In the imperialist heartlands, where capitalism is most 'advanced' and one might, therefore, have expected the working-class movement to be likewise 'advanced', the distortion of revolutionary ideology for the purpose of diverting the masses from the path of revolution has been all the more effective to the extent that superprofits extracted by imperialism from the suffering and super-exploited masses of the oppressed countries, in addition to those extracted from the working class at home, has given 'our' bourgeoisie economic leeway to bribe upper layers of the working class, the labour aristocracy, in the imperialist countries and thus split the working class.
Imperialist looting also provides the bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries with vast funds on which it draws to hamper the efforts of the socialist countries rapidly to improve living conditions for their own workers. The arms race imposed by US imperialism on the Soviet Union after the end of the Second World War reduced the amount of the products of society that could be spared for the consumption of the working class and peasantry in the USSR, for instance. Other measures are economic sanctions, the funding of abundant numbers of spies, saboteurs and agents provocateurs, and, of course, outright war.
All this enables the imperialist powers to fabricate false evidence to the effect that the capitalist economic system is superior to the socialist one!
In these conditions, the labour aristocracy, provided with petty-bourgeois living standards and opportunities, do become purveyors of opportunism, of class collaborationism, in the working-class movement. Their own comfortable living conditions convince them that a decent life is available to all within capitalism if only people are prepared to work as hard as they do!
The Second World War produced what in Britain is called the Keynesian Consensus, whereby both the major bourgeois parties – Conservative and Labour – agreed that something had to be done, and done quickly, to better the living conditions of the working class. This Keynesian Consensus was the product of very special circumstances:
The earth-shattering victories of the Red Army in the Second World War, the defeat of fascism Germany, the establishment of a block of People's Democracies in eastern and central Europe – all of these soon to be followd by the victory of the Chinese revolution;
The reconstruction, following the wholesale destruction and the devastation of the Second World War, with the resultant labour shortages and conditions of relative full employment;
The working class being in a state of ferment, having endured mass unemployment in the inter-war period and the horrors of the Second World War, were no longer prepared to go back to the old conditions.
In these circumstances the bourgeoisie could hardly fail to respond to the militant demands of the working class.
The side effect of the bourgeoisie treating the working class thus was to isolate the Communist Party in Britain, particularly in view of the fact that the CPGB came up with a political programme which capitulated wholesale to the aims of counter-revolutionary social democracy. In this programme, the CPGB put forward the view that, through the election of a majority in parliament, composed of Labour and Communist members, the working class could come to power. The effect of such a line could only have been, and was, to demoralise and disarm the communist movement.
However, by the second half of the 1970's, as a result of the crisis of capitalism, the Keynesian Consensus broke down. In the circumstances, the bourgeois governments could no longer carry on in the old way. The workers could no longer be treated with kid gloves. James Callaghan, the last Labour prime minister before the advent of the Thatcher government, had already given notice to that effect. His Party lost the General Election in 1979 and was replaced by a Conservative government headed by Margaret Thatcher.
Mrs Thatcher's Conservative government of the 1980's brought the days of plenty firmly to a close. Strikes ceased to be as often successful. Laws were passed making striking difficult, and outlawing tactics such as mass picketing, and solidarity strikes, that helped lead to a successful outcome. Stringent penalties were applied to those who broke the law, in particular the sequestration of the funds of the unions involved. The Thatcher government made a point of breaking the backbone of the strike movement by standing up to its strongest component, the miners organised in the National Union of Mineworkers. In this Thatcherite attack, which resulted in the defeat of the year-long miners' strike, the government had the full support of the Labour Party, of the leadership of the largest trade unions, and of all the repressive powers of the bourgeois state, including the judiciary. Union leaders refused to bring out their members in support of the miners. Had they done so, there is no question of Mrs Thatcher having been able to defeat the miners, or even of the strike to save British Coal having needed to last more than a few days in order to secure victory.
Although the Conservatives were defeated in the General Election of 1997, a Labour govt has been in office since. Far from reversing the Thatcherite attacks on the working class, the Labour government has intensified attacks on the working class at home and waged relentless wars against oppressed peoples abroad. There is no longer any distinction between the Conservatives and the Labour Party – other than the Labour Party being even more conservative than the Tories. The Labour Party has given up on even the pretence of socialism by removing commitment to public ownership from its constitution.
One might have thought that in the light of these developments the influence of the Labour Party within the working class movement would have evaporated overnight, but no. Such is the vicelike grip of social democracy on the unions that they have been able to prevent so far the working class breaking its links with the Labour Party. In this they have the full support of the Troto/revisionist fraternity who assert that the Labour Party is the party of the working class, claiming that the Labour Party was fundamentally the "party of the working class" (because of its connections with the unions), that the leadership had temporarily been usurped by right-wingers but that this was remediable, the important thing being to continue to support Labour while struggling within the Party to oust the usurpers. The sheer overwhelming number of organisations and individuals within the working-class movement isolated those of us who opposed this line within the trade union movement. We will never accept, however, that a time will come when we have to howl with the wolves in order to gain "influence", for this would be to forsake our revolutionary duty to expose opportunism.
There were, however, and continue to be, some gradual breaks made with Labour. 13 years after Labour helped to defeat the miners' strike, Arthur Scargill managed to make an organisational breach from that party and took the initiative of founding the Socialist Labour Party. However, he was unable to make a political break with the pernicious ideology of social democracy. His aim was merely to resurrect the old Labour Party, which he saw as socialist, little realising that Labour had always been a party of imperialism; that old Labour was a product of very, very special conditions which had disappeared from the late 1970's onwards; that under the new conditions, the Labour Party could not continue as of old. Under the new conditions, the bourgeoisie had no need for the old Labour Party. Consequently, the Labour Party had no option but to transform itself into New Labour.
Scargill's failure to realise all this, his inability to make an ideological break with social democracy, finally led him into a witch hunt against Marxist-Leninists within the SLP through arbitrary and illegal expulsions leading to these comrades forming our Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
Since that time the SLP has become largely irrelevant. We are the only communist party in Britain which puts forward the programme of the working class breaking the link with social democracy, and we are beginning to have some effect. Now even the Communist Party of Britain is considering whether some other electoral vehicle could be set up.
All the same, one can appreciate the extent to which, fertilised by a few drops of imperialist superprofits, a most luxuriant growth of opportunism is still suffocating our British working class movement, to the extent that a one-off one-day strike in opposition to the decimation of workers' pension schemes passes as the absolute height of militancy.
As if by osmosis, the concentrate of opportunism attracts to itself and contaminates most of idealistic youth from the moment they begin to try to militate for the benefit of the working class. Again there is an overwhelming temptation to try to build the influence of the revolutionary line by compromising with opportunism, but it is a temptation that must be strongly resisted.
There is a veritable Augean stable of opportunist filth to be cleared out, and it should be obvious to all that only a properly steeled Communist Party, which is thoroughly firm in principle and prepared to keep its head when all about it are losing theirs, can successfully undertake such a Herculean task.
Social chauvinism
In times of war opportunism easily transforms itself into social chauvinism - the vilest form of opportunism. It does not merely keep away the working class from the path of its own emancipation but actually mobilises it on the side of the bourgeoisie for suppressing workers of other countries, and on the side of the imperialist bourgeoisie for suppressing whole nations. The opportunists of the Second International led the masses of workers in both the contending imperialist camps to slaughter each other in the First World War.
Social chauvinism is still a very powerful weapon in the bourgeois armoury, and is embraced by all its political representatives from the fascists, through the conservatives and liberals, to the opportunists in the working-class movement. It is currently being used to mobilise public opinion against the Arabs and Iranians in the Middle East who want to control their own countries' resources, against the Palestinians striving to regain their own country, against the Zimbabweans taking back their own land from the white settlers who stole it, against the Koreans who are holding out heroically against the constant threats and economic and diplomatic aggression of US imperialism, etc., and against Chinese and Cuban socialism.
A by-product of social chauvinism in an imperialist country is racism that divides the working class even internally, making revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism virtually impossible.
It is obvious therefore that the party of the working class has an absolute duty to struggle hard to eradicate all traces of social chauvinism in the minds of the working class as a necessary means of preparing the working class for the struggle for socialism.
It is obvious moreover that the party of the working class must train the whole class to understand its great affinity with the working class of other countries, and with the oppressed nations fighting against imperialism. Notwithstanding the fact that they don't look as much like us as do members of 'our' ruling class, and even though we may not understand the language they speak or think much of some of their customs, they are on our side, they are our class brothers and sisters, and we are all fighting the same enemy. We must teach the working class to identify with their class brothers and sisters, we must celebrate their victories and mobilise to prevent their defeat. For this purpose, for instance, we are working in the Stop the War movement in Britain to popularise the slogans Victory to the Iraqi Resistance, Victory to the Afghan Resistance and Hands Off Iran, Victory to the Intifada, in the teeth of strenuous opposition from the leadership made up of cadres from the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party and the revisionist Communist Party of Britain, whose objection to the predatory wars being conducted in the Middle East are based more on them being a 'mistake' from a bourgeois point of view than on the fact that they are predatory and unjust.
Racism and the unity of the working class
Racism is widespread in all imperialist countries and it infects the working class as well. It is encouraged by all the bourgeois political parties, including the Labour Party, because it enables them to blame "foreigners" living in the UK for the hardships suffered by the working class and its growing alienation. Since good jobs and all social benefits available to the workers are in short supply in relation to demand, there is intense competition among workers for them. The bourgeoisie shamelessly manipulates this inter-proletarian competition to turn workers against each other rather than against the bourgeoisie, against the capitalist system which keeps the working class poor.
These days overt racism is no longer acceptable. However, the bourgeoisie has now learnt to disguise racism as opposition merely to immigration (although, as it happens, it is for the most part only black immigrants or non-English speakers who are targeted). Again, the message that immigrants are a "problem" which must be "contained" comes at workers from every conceivable direction – from fascists, from conservatives, from liberals, from social-democracy. It is so strong that it has caused our party to lose a few industrial workers, otherwise good comrades, who came to us from the SLP, who accused the whole party of not understanding the working class simply because some of our members were denouncing all anti-immigration propaganda as inherently racist.
In a recent, very racist, series of television documentaries entitled 'Whites', many former steel workers living in a village outside Bradford (West Yorkshire) were interviewed. It was interesting to see that Bradford's white members of the working class appeared almost all to agree that there was no difference between the Labour Party and the Tories, with neither of them caring for the interests of the working class in any way whatsoever. The untutored working class is running well ahead of certain parties that like to claim to be communists as far as appreciation of reality is concerned. Spontaneously, however, while they reject the bourgeois political parties themselves, they proved to have absorbed the ideology promoted by all these parties and the bourgeois media that the problem is immigration – Bradford being a town heavily populated by people of South Asian origins. Immigrants were blamed for loss of the traditional way of life that these workers used to enjoy 'before the immigrants came'. It was, however, patently obvious from the programme that the traditional way of life of Bradford's steel workers was due to the closure of the steel mills, the loss of their traditional employment with the social life that used to accompany it, and had nothing whatever to do with immigrants.
In the circumstances, the only logical conclusion that could be drawn, given the false premises, was that the interests of the working class could only be served by reversing immigration. This conclusion was in fact reached by some of those interviewed who were prepared to vote for the overtly racist and anti-immigrant British National Party, the only Party willing to "so something about our problems". Most workers, however, would still feel it shameful to follow the British National Party and refuse to take that step, sensing correctly that it would be false but not knowing what they should do instead.
These workers are desperately in need of clarity on this question. Communists need to be out there among them explaining that it is capitalism not immigrants to blame for the problems they encounter, but that on the contrary the black working class are suffering too under capitalism and must be united with for the purpose of fighting back. This work can only be done by communists firm in principle and courageous enough to face physical intimidation, but it must be done as a matter of urgency.
Conclusion
It is a long time since Britain has had a Communist Party of substantial size prepared to carry out these manifold duties. The result is that, as we see in the case of the Bradford workers mentioned above, bourgeois ideology has been virtually unopposed in the working class. In order to succeed in bringing enlightenment, we cannot work entirely on our own, even if we clearly cannot compromise on principle. There are many sections of people who, while not communists, will agree with some part of our programme and we need to mobilise them to assist in these urgent tasks wherever possible. We need to work in the unions and in broad organisations consistently to put forward a correct line, even if it remains a minority view for some time to come. We need, if we can, to use bourgeois elections to spread the truths of Marxism Leninism as they apply to the issues raised during the elections, although we must beware the almost irresistible logic of the election process that the most important thing is to get more votes. This is not the most important thing. The most important thing is to spread the ideas of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, and to receive more votes is secondary to that. We want votes for revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, not votes for our pretty faces.
Such are the main tasks of the working class party in Britain today. However, these tasks will not remain always the same, other than the party's overall task of acting as the general staff of the revolutionary working class. Today the task is to prepare the working class ideologically for the seizure of power, tomorrow it will be to organise the actual seizure of power; and the day after it will be to organise the dictatorship of the proletariat for the most effective building of socialism.