Neo-Corporatism

tHE GLOBAL COMMUNIST GROUP PROGRAMME

The Programme of the Global Communist Group

Given the global character of capitalism it is necessary for communists to build a world revolutionary party. Our objective is the creation of a new world party of communist revolution. To build such a party a communist programme is indispensable. The goal of the communist party is the revolutionary destruction of capitalism and its replacement with a world communist federal community.

As revolutionary communists we are not anarchists nor Leninists. Neither are we Leninists of the Stalinist or Trotskyist variety. We are just communists. We actively support the need for a communist programme and communist party.

1. Introduction

The communist programme is central to communist politics. The programme is an expression of the essence of communist struggle. It is the form by which theory and concrete practice gives expression to their integrated unity. Communism has an inherent programmatic character.

The communist programme consists of a set of aims together with an outline and elaboration of the means by which these aims can be achieved. All communist programmes, independently of any particular conjuncture in which they are lodged, have as their goal the establishment of communist relations. The programmatic means cannot be inconsistent with the ultimate aim of achieving communist relations of production. Strategic and tactical action can never compromise principled communist politics. Various principled tactics such as workplace committees, the united front, strikes and picketing, workers’ councils and workers’ militias are deployed under many different circumstances as a means to promote and develop mass mobilization on a principled revolutionary basis. The communist programme embodies the strategic goals of communism. It focuses on the practical tasks flowing from these fundamental principles based on the concrete historical conditions that obtain in capitalist society at any given time. It embodies the strategy and tactics to achieve the general goals and does not separate these questions off from programmatic aims.

2. The minimum-maximum programme

As revolutionary communists we are opposed to the concept of the minimum-maximum programme. Such programmes necessarily imply a stagiest conception of class struggle in which minimum and maximum demands stand at opposite poles. The minimum-maximum programme is characterised by the rigid separation of the minimum demands (economic or political reforms achievable within the framework of capitalism) and the maximum goal of socialism.

The concept of a minimum-maximum programme is an expression of a way of conceiving of struggle which mistakenly suggests that there obtain demands and corresponding struggles that are independent of the struggle for communism. By bifurcating demands into minimum and maximum ones this programme seeks to divorce the day-to-day struggle of the working class from the struggle for communism. Such an anti-communist conception of struggle reduces the communist goal to mere abstract rhetoric. All struggles necessarily form an integral part of the struggle for communism. Consequently demands cannot be bifurcated into minimum and maximum demands without misrepresenting the essential character of struggle and historical development. To bifurcate demands amounts to changing the character of these very demands and thereby eviscerate them of their reality and inherent revolutionary dynamic. The metamorphosis of the demands of the working class into minimum and maximum forms changes the context in which these demands exist. It is to opportunistically shift the struggle from a revolutionary to a reactionary context. Consequently the struggle over the programmatic character of the demands of the working class movement is a struggle over the political context in which the struggles of the working class are to take place. It is a struggle concerning the programmatic character of its struggles. The only demands supported by the communist programme are communist demands. Minimum and maximum demands, by contrast, are idealist ideological constructs designed to disarm the working class movement.

The subdivision of the reformist programmes into two elements, as enshrined in German Social Democracy’s “Erfurt Programme”, was the basis of the opportunist politics of the developing reformist wing of the Second International. Present day Social Democracy differs from its classical predecessor only in the ever increasing feebleness of its minimal reforms and in the ever decreasing use it has for holiday speechifying about socialism. This development is the concrete realization of the reactionary tendency inherent in such programmes.

In the epoch of classical liberal capitalism the working class, especially in Europe, fought for a series of economic and political rights as part of its struggle to organize and defend itself against the bourgeoisie.

These struggles constituted an integral part of the class struggle. The internal dialectic of these struggles meant that these struggles had the tendency to develop into a direct challenge to capital. This struggle means that the nature of capitalism and its state possessed the potential of changing from a theoretical to a political issue. Consequently the seizure of power by the working class was always a possibility. The class struggle, then, has dialectical tendencies of developing into a life and death struggle over class power. Although this revolutionary dialectic is implicit in these struggles it does not follow that these tendencies inevitably manifest themselves independently of concrete circumstances. Their manifestation is a complex function of the objective and subjective conditions obtaining at that given time and the character of the interrelationship obtaining between them.

At the time in question the objective conditions meant that the manifestation of the revolutionary tendencies in the form of outright class struggle would have been weak given that industrial capitalism had only newly emerged as a predominant mode of production. The objective conditions, then, would have militated against revolutionary tendencies manifesting themselves in a pronounced form. At the subjective level, given that the industrial working class was only beginning to find its feet the conditions for a confident revolutionary working class were limited. This would have proved another factor militating against the development of a revolutionary situation. Even theoretically speaking the working class was only in the process of developing a sophisticated revolutionary theory in the form of Marxism.

The most that was achievable was for revolutionary communists to develop their ideas and politics by propaganda and participation in the struggle. In this way they could have struggled to increase and deepen the influence of communism within the working class thereby building up a communist current within the working class movement. In this way a small but decisive communist nucleus in the form of a propaganda cadre group could have been established.

Clearly, then, given the objective and subjective conditions as they existed in nineteenth century capitalism it was no surprise that a reformist ideology and politics engulfed the working class. However it would have been still possible for a small but significant communist movement to exercise a significant influence on the working class.

In this very process reformism assumed the leadership of the working class. For this leadership individual elements of the minimum programme were made ends in themselves. This position stood in sharp contrast to that of revolutionary communism for which these demands are the forms by which the needs of the working class are met in the actual struggle for communism. In the course of the emergence of the imperialist epoch the reformism strengthened considerably. The minimum-maximum programme was the programmatic basis for its enforcement of the rigid separation of the struggle for reforms from the revolutionary perspective for the overthrow of capitalism. The minimum-maximum programme, then, provided the ideological and political basis for Social Democracy’s reformism investing it with a legitimacy. This rendered the task of combating reformist politics more difficult. The minimum-maximum programme provided the reformists with a programmatic base that helped ensure it a position of influence within capitalism. To this end it attempted to limit the struggles of the working class by transforming parliamentary electoral tactics into a central strategy for obtaining reforms under capitalism.

The significance of this negative development is one that tends to be neglected. It was one that was to exercise an enormously significant impact on the historical development of the working class. It was to modify the revolutionary character of the working class to such an extent that the prospects for the emergence of a strong communist working class was seriously impaired. As a result of this negative development the working class was infected, in an institutionalized way, with bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology and politics that was to render the development of a revolutionary culture and politics within the working class a much more daunting task. The inculcation of this reactionary reformist feature in the working class movement constituted one of the more serious defeats inflicted on it. It has exercised a significantly enduring effect on the character of the working class movement.

Stalinism was to use a variation of the minimum-maximum programme to mislead the working class: the programme of stages based on the theory of socialism in one country. This theory together with its programme was fashioned by the conservative bureaucracy of the USSR in the 1920s during the period of its political counter-revolution against the working class. According to the programme of stages, the existence of the Soviet Union meant that it is possible for revolutions to pass through a democratic stage prior to a transition towards socialism.

The theory argues that this democratic stage (variously called advanced democracy, people’s democracy, anti-imperialist democracy) is rigidly separated from a socialist stage. Capitalism must be preserved during the democratic stage and socialism can then gradually and peacefully evolve according to the unique laws operating in each country. The programme was a cynical policy by the bureaucracy to limit the struggles against capitalism. This variation of the minimum-maximum programme, even in its most “left” form, argues that the implementation of the democratic stage cannot be left to the bourgeoisie but must be realised by Stalinism.

This “democratic stage” forms part of the counter revolutionary process. This process provides the opportunity for the capitalist class to reorganize and equip itself against the workers (Chile, Portugal, Iran). Alternatively it entails the emergence of a Stalinist regime that sustains itself, and ultimately world capitalism, by liquidating capitalism in a form meant to contain the scale and quality of the revolutionary process by the political expropriation of the working class—as in Eastern Europe, China, Indo-China, and Cuba. The Stalinist or Social Democratic versions of the minimum-maximum programme are a means for obstructing not only the fight for communism, but even an effective fight to win or defend reforms. This is because capitalism can provide neither permanent systematic social reforms nor lasting and fully-fledged bourgeois democracy.

To confine the struggle to minimum demands is to suppress the demand for communism that lies concealed within all demands. To suppress this implicit aspect of the minimum demands is to, in effect, fail to fight for the minimum demands. The only real way to fight for and defend any individual demands is by conducting a struggle that entails fighting for all demands –the communist programme. In effect there is no essential difference between what are called minimum and maximum demands within the programmatic context of communism. To fight for what are called minimum demands is to fight for what are called maximum demands. This is the dialectical character of the communist programme. To fight for any legitimate demand is to fight for communist demands. This is because to fight for minimum demands entails particular methods of organizing and struggling to achieve these demands. But this particular form of struggle is one that implicitly entails the struggle for communist demands.

In contrast to the Leninist, Trotskyist and Stalinist programmes we do not draw distinctions between demands. The Trotskyist programme is a modification of the Stalinist minimum-maximum programme. The only distinction is that Trotskyism introduces what are called transitional demands. Consequently Trotskyists, in contrast to the Stalinists, set up three programmatic layers. Both programmes entail the bifurcation that consequently limits the class struggle. They both conceive struggle as divided into stages. In the case of Trotskyism there are three stages. The stage of minimum, transitional and socialist demands. The three stages are externally linked to each other. Trotskyism’s essential criticism of the Stalinist programme is really a derivative one of no essential political significance. It is really a criticism of the Stalinist programme from within the Stalinist programme. Unlike the programme of revolutionary communism both programmes lack a dialectical character.

Communists regularly, in the light of experience and changing conditions, refine and re-elaborate its programme. They produce sharply focused action programmes that address the key questions of the day in the context of the struggle for communism.

Our programme forms the only basis from which to build action programmes for particular countries, situations or sections in struggle. Such action programmes contain all of the key elements of the general programme itself sharply adjusted to a particular situation or country. An action programme is, in a sense, the communist programme modified or adjusted to particular concrete situations.

3. The crisis of proletarian leadership

Capitalism will not depart the scene automatically. It needs to be consciously overthrown by the working class. For this to happen, a revolutionary vanguard party must be forged. This vanguard requires theory, perspective and programme.

Capitalism’s inability to meet the basic needs of the masses makes it necessary to transform the defensive struggles of the workers into the struggle for state power. Yet, because of the political character of reformism, the existing leadership of the working class is unable to carry through such a fight. It is tied to the class interests of the bourgeoisie. The imperialist bourgeoisie seeks to sow divisions within the proletariat. In Europe, by 1914, the mass workers’ parties had become dominated by the politics of imperialist collaboration. This was true both of parties like the British Labour Party, which has been a reformist party from its foundation, and of the Social Democratic parties which maintained a formal adherence to Marxism. It culminated in the betrayal of the working class by the leaders of the Second (Socialist) International. In 1914 they became recruiting sergeants for the imperialist war. Then, as a wave of revolutions swept Europe (1917-23) they openly sided with bourgeois counter-revolution against the working masses. Social Democracy thus took on its fundamental shape. It became strategically wedded both to the capitalist economy and the capitalist state, albeit in the forms of both state capitalism and bourgeois democracy.

Stalinism’s historic roots lie in the left counter-revolution that took place within Russia. Stalinism is no less a servant of the bourgeoisie than is Social Democracy. Through its past political dictatorship of the Soviet Union, and the other degenerate workers’ states, it blocked the advance to communism. It blocked the internationalization of the revolution, spreading chauvinism and class collaboration. It also promoted the potential for capitalist restoration within the workers’ states. Towards the end of the Second World War revolutionary struggles developed (e.g. in Italy, the Balkans and France). However the combined forces of Social Democracy and Stalinism resolutely dissipated the revolutionary spontaneous will of the masses.

The Social Democratic parties and the Stalinist Parties, having performed their role as agents of democratic counter-revolution, were thrust to one side by the bourgeoisie who then installed, wherever possible, openly bourgeois parties at the helm of the booming economies of the 1950s and 1960s. The minimum-maximum programme is one of the devices used to establish and sustain the democratic counter revolution. The late 1960s initiated a new period of intense class struggle in the imperialist heartlands, invariably started from below by an increasingly confident and relatively well organised working class. Throughout Europe the Stalinist and Social Democratic leaders together with their trade unions successfully fought to contain these struggles, to keep them within the bounds of legality and official organisation. In France, Portugal and Spain, Stalinism and Social Democracy were given the chance to demonstrate yet again their counter-revolutionary loyalty to capitalism. With serious defeats in many countries of Western Europe by the mid 1970s, the European workers’ movement was again thrown back and pacified for the next period. By the onset of the second major recession, that of 1979-82, the existing leaderships had successfully demobilised working class resistance which led to the imposition on the proletariat of the imperialist countries of a decade of austerity, anti-union laws and attacks on democratic rights. In government they were only too happy to preside over and to initiate these attacks thereby abandoning its minimum programme. Thus in the 1980s the crisis of reformism in the imperialist heartlands took the form of the inability of the working class to resist the attacks of the Thatcherite-Reaganite economic liberals. With the onset of the globalisation of capital the monopolistic bourgeoisie abandoned Keynesian, social-liberal welfarism, with its “mixed economy” and state intervention in the economy, the Social Democratic and Stalinist Parties are thrown into ideological and political crisis. The bourgeoisie no longer requires reformism’s old minimum programme. The inherent nature of the trade unions, as agent of the bourgeoisie, obstructs and dissipates resistance to the attacks. Yet the working class has fought back against its enemies. Massive and bitter workers’ struggles have marked the 1980s, but not one of them has been able to gain a decisive victory. Indeed the defeat of the miners strike in Britain constituted a defeat for the British working class as a whole. Only a new movement and a new programme can solve the chronic crisis in the workers’ movement of the imperialist heartlands.

The working class of the degenerated workers’ states had repeatedly proved itself to be the most determined force in this opposition. More than once it had hurled itself against bureaucratic privilege and political oppression. In the post-war era this struggle had taken the workers to the brink of proletarian revolution. This has been demonstrated by the creation of soviets (Hungary 1956) and proto-soviet bodies (the inter-factory committees in Poland 1980 and China 1989). But the absence of a revolutionary party, programme and strategy means that the workers have been defeated in every major revolutionary crisis. Its spontaneous struggles have led merely to situations that have served both to leave the power of reformism intact and, in certain instances, to positively strengthen the forces for capitalist restoration. In Hungary and Poland in 1956 misplaced hopes in a section of the state bureaucracy led the working class to ultimate defeat. Syndicalism and trade unionism, as with Solidarnosc in Poland, led the struggle away from the goal of state power and diverted it into a utopian struggle for independent trade unions co-existing with bureaucratic rule. Even the left wing of Solidarnosc peddled the illusion that self-managed enterprises, rather than workers’ management of the centralised planning mechanisms, could overcome the crisis of the command economy. In Eastern Europe and China, the workers aspire to parliamentary democracy. The bloody slaughter of the forces of China’s “Democracy Movement” by the tyrants of the Chinese Communist Party served only to strengthen the bourgeois democratic current within the opposition movement. These hopes in “democracy”, emptied of a working class content, are fostered by imperialism to ease the passage of the masses of these countries into the camp of capitalist exploitation. Without revolutionary leadership and a revolutionary programme the break-up of Stalinism in its heartlands will benefit both a ruling minority inside these states as well as finance capital.

Without revolutionary leadership the potential for revolution, embodied in the events of Hungary 1956 and China 1989, cannot be realised. Without such leadership the ruling Stalinist parties served as either the handmaidens of capitalist restoration or the harbingers of military bureaucratic retribution.

4. Stalinism and Neo-Colonialism

The counter-revolutionary character of Stalinism has been expressed in its violent opposition to the perspective and programme of communist revolution in the neo-colonies and wherever bourgeois democratic questions assume a revolutionary importance.

Social Democracy has been less enduring in the neo-colonies. In these countries the reformism and the trade unions have been less firmly established because of the under-developed nature of capitalism. From Indonesia through Chile to South Africa today, Stalinism has clung to the perspective of a democratic stage, which excludes the fight for working class power, but embraces all kinds of bourgeois, petty bourgeois, clerical and military allies. This popular frontist strategy which ushered in democratic counter-revolution after 1945 has resulted since then in bloody and decisive defeats in key revolutionary situations.

In Indonesia the PKI, one of the largest Stalinist parties in the capitalist world, entered the left nationalist government of Sukarno in 1965. It claimed to be at the head of a “people’s state”. Unarmed and unwarned by their leaders, the masses of the PKI were then slaughtered by the military. This disaster bears direct comparison with events in China in 1927 and Germany in 1933. In Chile, Stalinism and the Social Democratic Socialist Party led the workers and poor peasants to disaster. Allende’s government, installed in 1970, was a popular front whose programme was limited to reforms. Allende renounced from the outset the arming of the workers and guaranteed the reactionary high command a monopoly of armed force. Nevertheless, spontaneous working class militancy led to the creation of cordones, industrial proto-soviets, and even armed militias. It led to demands for expropriations which Allende stood firmly against. Economic crisis and sabotage created the climate for a coup d’état by Pinochet in September 1973, which left tens of thousands dead, tortured or imprisoned and hundreds of thousands forced to flee the country. In Iran, the Stalinist Tudeh Party participated in the mass overthrow of the Shah, only to support the imposition of Khomeini’s Islamic Republic. In the name of revolutionary loyalty the Tudeh assisted Islamic reaction in the slaughter of masses of workers, leftists and Kurdish rebels. In return Khomeini unleashed his repressive apparatus against the Tudeh itself. As the leading force within the ANC, the South African Communist Party squandered a revolutionary opportunity with its policy of using the township revolts to seek negotiations with the “enlightened” wing of South African imperialism. Tied in with that it has beat a retreat from all forms of revolutionary activity in the interests of the “global stability” that was sought by the Kremlin. Today it has been installed in power as imperialism compliant government

Stalinism with its nationalist theory of socialism in one country obstructs the development of internationalism among the neo-colonial working class thereby capping the class struggle and thereby social revolution. Stalinism and Social Democracy has prolonged the life of bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalism among wide sections of the neo-colonial working class. Mass nationalist movements and parties remain incapable of solving the plight of the workers and peasants. Their acts of defiance against imperialism are carried out only so long as the working class is absent, as an independent force, from the struggle. Once challenged by the distinct demands of the exploited, these “anti-imperialists” become the abject defenders of imperialism. Unless a revolutionary party can dislodge all these forces from the leadership of the working class the working class will repeat its mistakes in class battles ahead. To prevent this it is essential that the class conscious vanguard of workers throughout the world are mobilised around an international programme of communism.

5. A programme of communist demands

The present period is punctuated by defensive mass economic struggles in the imperialist countries and by pre-revolutionary and revolutionary crises in non-imperialist countries.

Only a communist programme can maximize the chances of the gains made by the masses in individual struggles being built upon and consolidated and not later reversed by the forces of reaction. Only the communist programme can resolve the fundamental contradiction that afflicts the international workers’ movement: the readiness of the masses to defend their gains, and even take the revolutionary offensive, on the one hand; whilst on the other, the reformism demobilizes and betrays these struggles. A communist programme strives to address this subjective weakness by establishing the programmatic unity of individual struggles of the proletariat. This dialectical unity takes the form of a dynamically interlinked series of demands which, in their entirety, constitute an overt and direct challenge to capitalist rule. Consequently revolutionary communists seek to fight for demands in the context of the revolutionary programme for communism.

It is politically incorrect to counterpose the communist programme to the existing struggles of the masses as an ultimatum. Such exercises are designed to idealize the struggle for communism into an abstraction that exists in independence from the concrete struggle of the proletariat. To seek to dislocate individual demands entirely from the interlinked system of programmatic demands thereby presenting them as thinly disguised isolated demands is distorts of the communist programme. Such a method is, again, designed to deny the existence of the struggle for communism and the concrete legitimacy of the communist programme. It is an attempt to limit individual struggles by isolating them from their internal dialectical connection to the other forms of individual struggle. By that means it seeks to deny the existence of class struggle in general. Isolating individual struggles is an attempt to render individual struggles ineffective. Similarly any attempt to present communist demands as structural reforms of capitalism amounts to the sowing of utopian illusions in capitalism while denying the revolutionary nature of the communist programme. The very purpose of communist demands is the mobilisation of the masses against capitalism.

The task of communists is to position specific demands of the particular struggles of the masses within the context of a fight for the programme as a whole. In practice this will mean agitation within a particular struggle for focused, relevant communist demands whilst making propaganda for the programme as a whole through the explanation of what the realisation of this or that demand will pose in the next phase of struggle. It also means showing how individual demands are integrally linked to other demands within a programmatic whole.

Communist demands address the fundamental economic and political needs of the masses as determined by the objective situation. Communist demands seek to organise the masses independently of the open political representatives of the bourgeoisie and their reformist agents within reformism and Leninism. This is done through principled work by communists in unions, factory committees, workers’ councils and the revolutionary party. Mobilised around these demands, in such organisations, the working class challenges the rule of the capitalists. Each communist demand embodies a fight for some element of direct workers’ control over the capitalists. In establishing even elementary workers’ control over production in the battle to protect jobs, the struggle will be forced onto a higher level. In turn a successful struggle at plant level puts new challenges before the workers in relation to other branches of industry and to society as a whole.

Communist demands are demands posed within the context of the communist programme. They are demands or slogans posed within the context of the struggle for communism. They are demands made in the context of the revolutionary process. They are made on a revolutionary basis. They are demands made on the understanding that their being met will lead to the development and intensification of the class struggle. They are demands that if met only lead to growing class conflict. Rather than the winning of such demands leading to stability and growing harmony between worker and boss –the opposite is the case. The bourgeoisie only meet demands when they are forced on them or when it is not presently strong enough to resist the demands without in the longer term loosing more. By granting them they may forestall further efforts by the working class to further advance their class interests.

Given that the working class cannot stop at this stage of the struggle because of the class dynamic of the situation the outcome cannot be an enduring stability. The working class follow this success up with further demands and further mobilization or else the bourgeoisie recover lost ground. This particular dynamic in the class struggle manifests itself in the form of changing institutional and political relations. In the context of class struggle the situation either moves in favour of the working class or against the working class. There can obtain no enduring stability in which the balance of class forces remains the same. At most there are rare exceptional periods when, for strategic reasons, a relatively enduring stable balance is maintained.

Consequently it is a dangerous misconception for workers to believe that they can secure a range of demands or, to put it otherwise, secure structural or institutionalized social changes that are a manifestation of a fair distribution of wealth and a corresponding enduring harmony of classes. This can never be so under capitalism. There is always a struggle between worker and capitalist that leads to instability which are reflected in institutional changes and changes in institutional relationships. However sometimes change is slower than at other times.

When workers appear to benefit from wage increases this is often done to keep the working class or layers off it quiescent while they eat into the living standards of other layers. The bourgeoisie create privileged layers within the working class to maintain control over the entire class. There is often the appearance of increased living standards while gains are taken back in other ways. These apparent advances are designed to deceive and confuse the proletariat. The introduction of the welfare state and its benefits for the working class was introduced as a strategic attempt to preclude any offensive by a working class that had already threatened capitalism. In some degree it was a preemptive tactic to preserve its existence as a class. It was a response to the challenge of the working class and the weak state in which much of imperialism existed.

Welfarism was developed in such a way as to give the false impression that capitalist society was a system that served the needs of the working class despite its apparent shortcomings. It was consequently believed that much else that was wrong could be repaired in the course of time. Welfarism was also an ideology. It reinforced reformism within the labour movement and gave the worker the notion that the improvements in living standards were not a result of class struggle but a result of the rational nature of capitalist democracy. Consequently communists were viewed as over the top and out of touch. Many workers then began to perceive society and daily life in a totally class free way. They began to totally misconceive the character of welfarism and what it signified. They did not see it as a tactic within the class struggle. This was a great success for capitalism. But it could not have been done without the help of the reformist leadership of the labour movement. The material developments in the form of welfarism and the ideology and rhetoric that went with it totally misrepresented the real nature of the situation and veiled the very existence of class struggle. What was a product of class struggle and deeply located at the core of the class struggle was seen as its very opposite. What existed as a result of bitter struggle was seen as the very opposite and the proof that class struggle did not exist. It reached such a degree that ideologues, like Castoriadis, began to now believe that there was no class struggle. That it had died or never existed. What had its source in struggle was experienced as transcending class struggle.

The character of the ideology that accompanied the welfare state reinforced this appearance. This ideology was the bourgeoisie’s way of disguising defeat as victory. It was its way of making a virtue out of necessity by presenting what it had to give to secure its class interests as a feature that freely emerged from within society. It used the very reforms forced on it by circumstances as a natural evolution. In this way it was able to exploit its reforms as a means to reinforce among the masses the legitimacy of capitalism. It created its own materialist conception of history --the whig interpretation of history. Consequently the masses misexperienced capitalism. Even when the nasty side of capitalism came through the limits of its conceptual paradigm misrepresented it by painting it in bright colours. Consequently when class struggle became explicit it was not recognized as class struggle –instead as industrial unrest. A fundamental shift in language took place as a form of concealment. The ideology had sunk its roots into the masses so much that the working class had lost the ability to think in class struggle terms.

Now when they cut back and push back welfarism the bourgeoisie use the same technique. It employs rationalist ideology. The rational thing to do is to shrink the state, cut costs and reduce waste –all in the interests of the greater prosperity all –whether capitalist or worker. Yet it is a rationalism that is irrational –reason as appearance. There can never be secured a stable regime in which fairness more or less abounds. Workers are lulled into accepting an abstract moral view of society.

As I have said the class struggle continues unabated under different forms. Sometimes it is more overt and explicit. Other times it is more covert or slower. But it is always a shifting sand. It is imperative that the bourgeoisie conceals the existence of class struggle by forcing it to appear in a disguised form –nationalism, identity politics etc--. Language plays a critical role in this regard. Moving back and forth incrementally or dramatically depending on the particular conditions. This expresses itself in the specific economic and social condition of the working class as a whole and specific layers within it. This expresses itself in the form of improving or deteriorating conditions of work and living standards. It expresses itself too in the level of political and cultural freedom at any given stage. It also reflects itself politically in the political character of the working class. Its level and volume of militancy, class consciousness, its organizational character etc.

The introduction of new technology restructures the composition of the working class as a means of disorganizing the working class. Technology here is not at all neutral. It plays a hegemonic, ideological or political role. It re-configures and atomizes the working class in a variety of ways thereby undermining its class character.

Against this has to be added the character of the economy. Due to cyclical movements, the political situation or a combination of these living standards of the working class may have suffered a decline. This may lead to the working class going on the offensive with the consequent balance of class forces going in its favour while its livings standards deteriorate. Sometimes the fall in living standards of the working class is caused by cyclical and systemic change that has nothing to do as such with the bosses voluntaristically seeking to cut back in their living standards --although the crisis may lead to this. It may be due to a mechanical cyclical downturn. Just as an improvement in living standards may due to an upturn.

Improving absolute livings standards among the working class has had its cause in falling real values due to increasing productivity. This is a technical matter that has nothing to do with capitalism rationally and kindly deciding to redistribute wealth. Indeed under increasing productivity leading to improving living conditions caused by accelerated accumulation of capital the profit of capital increases faster than the living standards of the working class. This has to happen otherwise there would exist no motivation to develop technology.

Even under conditions of falling values and the consequent improvement in the living standards of the working class the capitalists will seek to pass as little of this onto the class. Consequently the class has to fight to avail of this. A certain amount may automatically and involuntarily benefit the masses. However the bosses will seek to take as much of this away as possible. In so far as they don’t fully do this is a combination of the strength of the working class, the price the bourgeoisie have to pay to displace any challenge presented by the working class quiescent together with the contradictory irrational character of capital.

No benefits received by the class are due to capital being fair and rational. They are not due to capitalism agreeing to cutting a fair deal with the workers and leaving things be. The living standards and conditions of work of the working class are in continual flux. That flux is a function of a combination of conditions that are inherently related to each other: the specific character of the class struggle, the specific relationship of class forces; the strength of the capitalists; the specific objective conditions obtaining. Because these conditions are in continual change sometimes more change at one time than another the condition of the working class is always in a state of flux

It is incorrect to assume then that the working class can achieve an enduring modus vivendi with the bosses. It is a recipe for disaster that totally misconceives the nature of capitalism and class struggle. What is consistent with capitalism is not increasing wages but efforts by capitalism to reduce wages. It is to think that the situation of the workers or a specific group of workers can be transfixed in a sea of impermanence or flux. It is to rob struggle of its dialectics. For workers to believe that a strike for more pay is an individual issue that is not inherently related to the class struggle and to the general political and economic situation, is a disastrous political misconception. An individual strike for more pay is an individual struggle that inseparably exists in the context of the general class struggle. It is an individual form of the class struggle. It cannot be conceived in independence from the general class struggle. It forms an inherent part of the class struggle. This is why we argue that individual struggles must be viewed from within the context of the communist programme.

To present individual struggles as merely bearing an external relation to other individual struggles is to promote the isolation of individual struggles from each other. It is to prevent individual struggles from realizing their inherent character as forming an integral par of the general class struggle. It is to prevent struggle from attaining its full potential and rendering itself effective as class struggle thereby denying struggle its programmatic character. It is to challenge history. It is a strategy to fragment the class struggle by isolating individual struggles from each other – rendering secondary picketing illegal is an example of this. Such reactionary strategies render individual struggles less effective –less effective at the level of the particular and the general. This reactionary strategy of reformism and Leninism involves a corresponding ideology inculcated into the masses. It is to fix an individual struggle in its particularity thereby stripping it of its universalizing dynamic --its universal character. These political events reflect themselves in the programmatic difference between reformism, Leninism and communism.

Even when the bourgeoisie succeed in fixing struggles with the help of reformism and Leninism their universal dynamic irrepressibly manifests itself in a distorted form. Indeed reactionary trade unionism invests the struggle with this external unity in order to preempt any emerging revolutionary unity.

Even if the wage increase is won it can be snatched back within six months by inflation, cut backs in social welfare. To defend living standards means seeking to defend them on a class basis –not individually in an isolating form. This is why communists seeks to deepen and broaden individual struggles so that they are generalized. Such an escalation of the struggle on the basis of the communist programme inevitably leads to raising the question of state power. The objective reason for this is that it is not possible for the working class to gain enduring reforms or improvements in their living standards and conditions of work and being in general under capitalism. If such were possible the basis for the communist programme and capitalism would be absent.

In supporting an individual struggle communists must clearly state what needs to be done to increase the chances of winning the struggle. It is not about what appears plausible or is populist. Consequently when an individual struggle breaks out communists must support it in the context of the communist programme and the struggle for communism. Communism must render struggle’s implicit nature explicit. This is done by actively participating in struggles by propaganda, agitation and organization within the context of a communist action programme. It is not the purpose of communism to engage in opportunist populism by seeking to increase its influence among the workers by opportunist maneuvering and manipulation. Influence secured in this way is not real influence. It is influence based on communists abandoning their politics for that of the agents of the class enemy such as reformism Leninism and anarchism. The aim of communism is to deliver workers to opportunism but to irrevocably break them away from it. It is the duty of communists to say what must be done if striking workers are to be victorious. It is the duty of communists to outline what is logically necessary for an effective and victorious strike. Irrespective of the circumstances communists are obliged to skillfully present to the working class the reality of a specific situation. If it is greeted with hostility of a particular group of workers then maybe this particular struggle is one that communists may have to distance itself from.

Communists advance demands because they are the correct demands. While communism is in a incipient stage of its development demands are advanced as propaganda devices. To win the odd worker over while presenting workers as a class with the communist alternative. By joining individual struggles communists gain fruitful experience in how to understand, actively relate to and organize individual struggles. The more diverse the struggles the richer the quality of their experiences and the corresponding lessons learned. We learn too from the mistakes we make.

6. Women and the working class

Because of the character of the social conditions imposed on working class women the tendency towards dependency on working class men still exists. The price of their labour power tends to be less than that of their male counterparts. In the world today legal restrictions reinforce continuing dependence of women workers on husbands or fathers. In addition to its role in the reproduction of labour power, traditional family relations play an important role in maintaining capitalist society. The respective roles of men, women and children are influenced by the family institution that legitimizes hierarchy, unquestioning obedience and servility. These conditions generate division, hierarchical relations and passivity within the working class. Even when the nuclear family may have ceased to be numerically the prevalent form of the family, as may now be the case in many imperialist countries, its strength as an “ideal” is such that it continues to ideologically influence every aspect of women’s’ lives. From the type of education girls receive, through the jobs women do, to the relationships they seek—all these find their mediation in bourgeois family relations. The roles of men and women in the working class family restrict the development of both sexes while imposing a particularly repressive effect on women.

The family leads to a division within the working class which is maintained by the ideology of sexism. In the labour movement this is not just a question of backward ideas concerning the role of women workers. It can involves the exclusion of women from unions. Such sexism leads to a failure to fight for equal pay and refusal to support women in struggle. Whilst women workers’ oppression is not caused by the attitudes of male workers, the sexism of many working men reinforces it. Often, such as domestic violence and abuse, this happens in the most brutal way. Male workers tend to enjoy real material benefits as a result of the oppression of working class women. They tend to have a higher status within the household and social life generally. They tend to secure better jobs and wages while enjoying a lighter burden of domestic chores. These privileges help to reinforce sexist ideas and behaviour within the working class.

To end the oppression of working class women the capitalist separation of domestic labour from social production must be abolished. Only when women are drawn fully and equally into production, with domestic work being organised collectively in a planned socialist economy, will the conditions of the freedom of working class women from oppression be present. The communist programme is the guarantee that the socialization of housework and child care will be achieved.

In addition part time jobs for women have been used by the bosses to increase the exploitation of women workers through low pay without employment protection while providing a flexible workforce. We demand full employment protection for part time work combined with the fight for reductions in the hours of all workers, with no loss of pay. We demand the provision of socialised care for children and other dependants to allow women to participate in social production equally with men. The working class must fight for the social provision which would enable them the choice of work outside the home. We are for the collective provision of laundries and restaurants, subsidized by the state, under working class control.

Women workers are systematically denied control of their own bodies and are forced into having unwanted children or prevented from having children they do want. Women are also forced into arranged marriages and obstructed from availing of divorce. In short, women are denied control over their own fertility. Child-bearing must be the subject of a woman’s choice if they are to participate equally with men in production, social and political life. The provision of free contraception and abortion on demand for all women is essential.

Where women work alongside men in industry we oppose the call for separate women’s unions or workplace committees. A struggle must be waged to unite male and female workers, whilst defending the right of women to organize within the unions and at all levels of the labour movement. A movement which draws in wide layers of working class women leads to the organization of women excluded from production. Such a movement, based on women organised in the workplace and the community in general can fight for the interests of women workers and for the revolutionary overthrowal of capitalism. In the present period, where revolutionaries are not in the leadership of the mass of working class women, the task of organizing a women workers’ movement still exists. Consequently we may enter in to a united front with the most militant sections of working class women and, through joint actions and communist propaganda, seek to win them towards communist politics. To follow the feminist line of an all-class women’s movement would be to surrender the interests of working class women to the bourgeoisie –the source of their oppression as women workers.

We oppose the idea of an “autonomous” movement because it excludes the possibility of the women’s movement being won to the revolutionary programme, and seeks to prevent communist women from intervening as disciplined members of their communist organizations. Communist women seek to win the majority of the proletarian women’s movement to support the revolutionary programme. The slogan of “autonomy” also involves the exclusion of men from the organisations, and often meetings, of women. Working class women cannot destroy capitalism and end their own oppression without uniting in struggle with the rest of their class, namely, male workers. The exclusion of male workers from the activities of a women’s movement places an unnecessary barrier in the path of the fight against sexism. This fight must involve the education of male workers in the process of common struggle with women.

7. Racial oppression

Modern nations cannot be identified with so-called races. Racial oppression is the product of the emergence of the bourgeois nation. In the mercantilist period of early capitalism slavery was fundamental to the primitive accumulation of capital in certain countries. The extension of capitalist colonial empires brought with it the systematic denial of basic human rights of the indigenous populations. Racism has taken its most virulent form in the imperialist epoch. Racism exists as both a feverish fantasy of the petty bourgeoisie and a conscious tool of the imperialist bourgeoisie. The “race” problem in our century is not one of supposed racial differences but is a function of racism. The victims of this systematic racism are many. In the forefront stand the Jews, who suffered genocide during World War Two, and the black people of Africa, the Caribbean, the USA and those who have emigrated to Europe.

The post-war boom sucked millions of workers from the neo-colonies to the imperialist heartlands, from one semi-colony to another and from less developed to more highly developed imperialist countries. These migrant and immigrant workers are also racially oppressed. The victims of racial oppression are systematically denied democratic rights. State racism press down on them. This further serves to encourage violent attacks by individual racists, gangs and organised fascists. The racially oppressed suffer discrimination in education and all spheres of welfare provision. They are subject to super-exploitation at work. Whenever capitalism enters recession racial minorities suffer most from unemployment and low pay.

For the racially oppressed working masses there is no capitalist solution to their oppression. Capitalism’s tendency to integrate and stratify immigrant communities always benefits the petty bourgeois and bourgeois strata at the expense of the working class as a whole. Even this tendency is repeatedly thrown into reverse as capitalism resorts to crude racism and national chauvinism in its periods of crisis

Revolutionary communists conduct agitation and propaganda within the oppressed communities for the strictest separation of the class interests of the workers from the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie and clergy. For this purpose the revolutionary party may set up special forms of organization. Communists resolutely oppose separatism.

In the US the black struggle began with passive protest, led by the black clergy and the intelligentsia. The black resistance developed into mass revolt leading to armed clashes with the police and national guard. But it was faced with a massive crisis of leadership. On the one side the integrationist petty bourgeoisie were ready to demobilize mass revolt for the sake of reforms and greater access to local and state government. The radical opposition to these sell-outs—the Black Panthers, Malcolm X—was unable to make a complete break with separatism and guerrillaism. Cut off from the mass of white workers and from the masses of the black community the vanguard was crushed by the US state. After inflicting this defeat US imperialism incorporated a black bourgeoisie and a caste of professional bourgeois black politicians which left the overwhelming majority to rot in America’s disintegrating inner-cities.

Only the overthrow of imperialism, the freeing of the productive forces from the chains of national boundaries, can remove the material roots of racial oppression. The struggle against racism must form an integral part of the programme and activity of the revolutionary party in every period. It must focus its action programme around the day-to-day struggles of the racially oppressed which hit at discrimination in education, wages, employment and working conditions. The inherently bourgeois trade unions reflect the racism and chauvinism of the ruling class. They are frequently racism’s instrument. But there is no road to liberation for The racially oppressed achieve emancipation through the general struggle to win the majority of the working class to united action against racism.

Revolutionary communists fight within the workers’ movement for united action against all racist attacks and for workers’ defence squads against racist attacks. We struggle for full citizenship and democratic rights for all racial minorities including immigrant and migrant workers. We fight to abolish all immigration controls.

8. Expropriation and nationalisation

The communist programme is for the complete expropriation of the capitalist class, the destruction of their state and the establishment of workers’ power. In the imperialist epoch a whole series of state capitalist nationalisations have been ca

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