(Militant International Review, No. 22, June 1982, p. 25-32)
By Peter Taaffe
“Marxism equals totalitarianism and violence.” This is the persistent theme of the capitalists and their media in their campaign against ‘Militant’. All the notes on the political keyboards, from the ultra-right Daily Mail to the august Times and the alleged ‘Labour’ papers the Daily Mirror and the Daily Star, are struck in a campaign to drive the Marxists out of the Labour Party. This campaign reached new heights, or depths, with the frenzied reaction of the press to the recent speech of Pat Wall, a well known Militant supporter.
In a speech in which he argued against the ultra-left ideas of the Socialist Workers Party, Pat Wall warned the labour movement that, unless it used its power to effect the socialist transformation of society in the decade so that is opening up, the capitalists will seek to destroy the democratic rights of the working or class. He showed that the ruling class would not hesitate to declare ‘civil war’ against the labour movement if they considered their power, prestige and income, that is their domination of society, to be threatened. The press branded Pat Wall as an advocate of violence and civil war. It is as if a health inspector, or doctor, having warned about the danger of bubonic plague, unless certain preventative methods were taken, were to find himself pilloried in the media as an advocate of plague!
Violence and civil war are as welcome to Marxists as the plague. Our policies, if taken up and implemented by the labour movement, could precisely avoid this catastrophe. We have proclaimed hundreds if not thousands of times that we believe that, armed with a clear programme and perspective, the labour movement could effect a peaceful socialist transformation.
Why should Marxism threaten democracy? From its inception, Marxism, beginning with Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was the foremost champion of ‘democracy’. At one stage the Marxists went under the title ‘Social Democrats’. This term has now been stolen by the Liberals and Tories-in-disguise, the traitors who have split from the Labour Party and formed the Social Democratic Party in Britain. The term ‘Social Democrat’ implied that the Marxists stood for socialism and democracy: they stood for the extension of democracy to the economy and society as a whole.
Not one of the democratic rights of the working class has been benevolently granted by the British bourgeoisie
In Russia, under the Tsarist autocracy, the Russian Marxists also called themselves at one stage ‘consistent democrats’. The liberal capitalists were ‘inconsistent’ in their support for democracy. They proclaimed their support for democratic and political rights and the overthrow of Tsarism. However, they implacably opposed giving the land to the peasants and freedom to the oppressed nationalities. No consistent democrat, argued the Marxists, could support the ownership of the land and the factories by a tiny minority, a handful of landlords and capitalists. The Marxists were the only ‘consistent democrats’ in Russia, and the Russian revolution was itself a vindication of this fact.
In supporting and defending ‘democracy’, the Marxists reject the hypocritical ideas of ‘democracy’ propounded by the spokesmen of capitalism. Democracy is not just a ‘nice idea’. Capitalist democracy is distinguished from other forms of rule by the bourgeoisie by the rights which the working class have conquered for itself: the right to strike; freedom of assembly and the press; the right to form political parties, cultural and sports organisations; and of course the right to vote. These are the elements of the new society – that is, of a democratic workers’ state – which are maturing in the womb of outmoded and decaying capitalist society. By using these rights effectively, the working class can strengthen itself, extend its power and its organisations. This in turn can prepare the way for compelling capitalism to vacate the stage of history for a new socialist society. Rather than threatening democratic rights, Marxism advocates the retention and enormous extension of these rights as a pre-condition for the movement towards socialism.
Not one of the rights of the working class has been benevolently granted by the British bourgeoisie. Indeed, the birth of the labour movement witnessed a ferocious, violent and often bloody resistance of the ruling class to the slightest concession to the working class. Imprisonment, transportation, starvation, conspiracies and the use of agents provocateurs, and not ‘democratic’ argument, were the methods employed by the British capitalists to combat the emerging trade unions. The first anti-trade union legislation, the Combination Acts, which were introduced in 1799 and 1800 and specified imprisonment for attempts to increase wages or achieve shorter hours, were only repealed in 1824. Even then, constant harassment, imprisonment, transportation, fines, and all other refined measures of the bourgeoisie to combat the trade unions were employed. Today, Tebbit – the ‘Chingford skinhead’ – is continuing in a more refined fashion the methods which his class have used for a century and a half to hamper and sabotage trade union rights.
The history of struggles of the workers for the vote shows the heroic endeavours of the workers, and the deceit, violence and repression used by the ruling class. The British workers formed the first independent workers’ movement, the Chartists, in the struggle for the right to vote. This movement went to the lengths of threatening revolution before the British bourgeoisie was forced to make partial concessions. Indeed, contrary to the mythology of ‘democratic evolution’ in Britain, every concession in the last 150 years made by the British ruling class has been because of the threat of revolution, either abroad or in Britain. Thus the revolution in France in 1830 led to the first electoral Reform Bill, introduced in 1831 and only passed, after mass demonstrations, in 1832. The revolutionary Chartist movement in 1844-47 led to the 10 hour working day and to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. At the same time, the break-up of the revolutionary movement following the defeat of the European revolutions of 1848 delayed the democratisation of the British parliament.
The Second Reform Act of 1867 came in the wake of the civil war in the U.S.A. with the defeat of the slave states, which the treacherous British ruling class had supported. The 1905 revolution in Russia strengthened the British working class and was a factor in the success of the Labour Party in the general election of 1906, when Labour Representation Committee candidates gained for the first time 29 seats (alongside 25 Lib-Lab MPs).
In 1918, following the Russian revolution and the colossal revolutionary wave which swept throughout the whole of Europe, including Britain, the ruling class enlarged the franchise, and for the first time women were permitted to vote in elections. The traditional response of the British ruling class has been to introduce reforms from the top in order to prevent revolutions from below. However, women under 30 were denied the right to vote in ‘democratic Britain’ right up to 1928. The youth, moreover, between 18 and 21, were denied the right to vote right up until 1969. The same picture emerges in any analysis of the struggle for a ‘free press’ and the right of assembly.
The British bourgeoisie and its apologists have presented the evolution of British democracy as an example of the ‘British genius’, the ability to compromise. But as Leon Trotsky pointed out in his still very modern book, Where is Britain going?, the British ruling class were able to tolerate democratic rights in Britain only on the basis of its enormous wealth. But to a significant extent, this wealth and power was founded on the enslavement of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In other words, the granting of democratic rights by the British bourgeoisie to the working class of Britain was founded on the denial of those very same rights to the masses in the colonial and semi-colonial world.
The so-called British tranquillity and ‘social peace’ in large measure was in inverse proportions to the violence that was employed against the peoples under the British capitalist domination. Thus a previous Tory leader, Lord Salisbury, summed up the policy of the British governing classes in relation to India: “India must be bled”. Britain has never been the democratic arcadia claimed by the ideologists of capitalism and their right-wing echoes within the British labour movement. It is an incomplete democracy, if democracy is understood to mean the rule of the majority. How can a state be described as really democratic, when it tolerates the existence of the hereditary House of Lords and a Monarchy? These remnants of feudalism are not maintained by the bourgeoisie for purely decorative purposes, or for the benefit of the tourist industry. They are a reserve weapon in the armoury of the ruling class to be used to check, sabotage and, if necessary, bring down a left Labour Government.
The law and the judiciary have been used to repress and hamstring the labour movement right from its inception
The demand of Militant for the abolition of the Monarchy as well as the House of Lords – this latter demand is official Labour Party policy – has met with a frenzied reaction from the capitalist press and, predictably, from Labour’s right wing. Compared to the pioneers of the labour movement, the present right-wing leaders are – on this, as on most issues – pygmies. Keir Hardie, the father of the British Labour Party, never hesitated to denounce the monarchy or hereditary rule. He once stated, “The throne represents the power of caste, class rule. The workers can have but one feeling in the matter – contempt for thrones. It is inconsistent with the dignity of manhood to stick to hereditary rule. Never have a monarch or a House of Lords.” On another occasion, Hardie stated: “We all marched and cheered to the watchword ‘Down with the Lords’.”
The monarchy can be used in Britain in the future against a left Labour government in the same way as the Governor General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, was used to bring down the Australian Labour government of Gough Whitlam in November 1975. Articles in the capitalist press underline the role of the monarchy to frustrate and hamper the wishes of working people. Norman Crowther-Hunt writing in the Guardian (11 January 1982) warned: “Labour governments would find it virtually impossible to abolish the Lords without their own consent; this is because Her Majesty the Queen would almost certainly spring to their defence … [there are] ample reasons for the Queen to believe that if she approved the Abolition Bill she would be failing in her duty of being the ultimate guardian of our rights and liberties – a duty specifically imposed by her coronation oath where she promised to govern the people of the United Kingdom.”
Pat Wall’s attacks on the judiciary also brought howls of outrage. The capitalist press were naturally indignant that these alleged impartial arbiters of ‘justice’ could be attacked in such fashion. What was particularly outrageous for the bourgeoisie was the mere suggestion that the labour movement should ‘interfere’ with the judiciary. However, contrary to the impression given by the Hattersleys and Healeys, the labour movement has never recognised the “impartiality” of capitalist law.
The law and the judiciary have been used to repress and hamstring the labour movement right from its inception. This law, as the experience of the five dockers imprisoned under the Heath government’s anti-trade union legislation demonstrated, is class law. As the socialist French writer, Anatole France once wrote “The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to steal bread, to sleep under bridges and beg for food.”
The great majority of judges are dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries, and unelected at that. Thus, in 1956, 76% of judges were shown to have been educated at public schools. In their outlook, their training, habits and education they are biased against the working class and the labour movement and in favour of the ruling class. One Judge, Lord Justice Scruttom, was honest enough to state in 1922 “the habits you are trained in, the people with whom you mix, lead you to having a certain class of ideas of such a nature that when you have to deal with other ideas you do not give as round and accurate a judgement as you wish … it is very difficult sometimes to be sure that you have put yourself into a thoroughly impartial position between two disputants, one of your own class and not one of your own class.”
This is substantiated by many examples from history; from the Tolpuddle martyrs in 1834, to the legal murder of Sacco and Vanzetti in America in 1927, to the gross bias shown by the German judges under the Weimar Republic in favour of fascist assassins, on the one hand, and against the left on the other.
One eminent legal writer, A.B. Dyson, has stated that: “the judges are the heads of the legal profession. They have acquired the intellectual and moral tone of English lawyers. They are men advanced in life. They are for the most part men of a Conservative disposition.” No truly democratic society could tolerate such a situation. Even in capitalist America the judges are elected. In the light of the gross bias of Lord Denning and his four colleagues in his judgement against London Transport, can the British Labour movement in the struggle for socialism tolerate the maintenance of the power of unelected men “advanced in life,” who are of a “conservative disposition”, in authoritative positions such as judges? A far better and more democratic system would be the election of judges who have demonstrated their lack of bias and impartiality in relation to the majority, i.e. working people.
In their desperate attempt to cast the left, and particularly the Marxists, in the role of ‘Totalitarians’, the bourgeoisie have continually sought to present us as ‘anti-parliamentarian’. However, in the pages of Militant, in pamphlets, and in speeches, we have shown that the struggle to establish a socialist Britain can be carried through in Parliament, backed up by the colossal power of the labour movement outside. This, however, will only be possible on one condition: that the trade unions and the Labour Party are won to a clear Marxist programme and perspective, and the full power of the movement is used to effect the rapid and complete socialist transformation of society.
The struggle to enhance the position of Labour in parliament has always been supplemented by the struggle outside parliament, both of the trade unions and the Labour Party
It is for this reason that Militant, in opposition to the programme of piecemeal reforms of the supporters of the Alternative Economic Strategy, have demanded that a Labour government introduce enabling legislation into the House of Commons to nationalise the 200 monopolies, with minimum compensation on the basis of proven need. Should the movement be restricted purely to a Parliamentary struggle, as the right-wing have argued in the past? The rank and file of the labour movement has never evinced a tendency towards what Marx called “parliamentary cretinism”. The struggle to enhance the position of Labour in Parliament has always been supplemented by the struggle outside Parliament, both of the trade unions and the Labour Party. This has recently taken the form, for instance, of the organising of mass demonstrations on unemployment in Liverpool, Newcastle, Cardiff, and elsewhere. There is a difference between traditional extra-parliamentary activity and the infantile “anti-parliamentarism” of the tiny ultra-left sects on the outskirts of the labour movement.
The bourgeoisie has never restricted itself to the Parliamentary field. In 1976, the International Monetary Fund, backed by the capitalists in this country, compelled a Labour government to abandon its radical manifesto, on which it was elected on in 1974. Denis Healey, who is now loudly denouncing the alleged proponents of “extra-parliamentary” activity, capitulated to the extra-parliamentary pressure of the I.M.F. in carrying through ruthless cuts in government expenditure. The present Tory government has built on the cuts which Healey himself carried out. However, this parliamentary cretinism is not restricted to those on the right. In an obvious aside against the programme of Militant, Jeff Rooker, a member of the parliamentary Tribune Group denounced the call for enabling legislation to be used by a Labour government. It seems this wiseacre considers this ‘undemocratic’. Yet there was not a murmur from Jeff Rooker when the Tory government under Heath used enabling legislation in February 1971 to nationalise Rolls Royce in 24 hours! Not even Labour MPs such as Rooker objected to this measure, which was determined by the ‘emergency’ situation in Rolls Royce and the threat to its workers. An equally devastating ‘emergency’ situation faces the whole of the working class in Britain at the present time.
Even before the economic upswing had not exhausted itself a section of the ruling class was contemplating extra-parliamentary action to bring down a Labour government
In the 1930s, in a situation similar to today, John Strachey and Clement Atlee came out for enabling legislation to be used by a future Labour government. It would be entirely democratic for the labour movement to clearly outline its programme, and then give due warning that its programme would be implemented swiftly by means of enabling legislation. The necessary scrutiny of its measures can be undertaken in the election campaign and in the drawing up of a socialist plan of production which would be possible on the basis of such measures being implemented by a Labour government. Without taking such emergency measures the power will be left in the hands of the ruling class to frustrate and sabotage any attempts to introduce a socialist plan of production.
This is underlined by the experience of the present Socialist-Communist government in France. Within days of that government coming to power, the ruling class had organised a run on the franc. It is using inflation as a means of whipping up opposition to the government. Without the immediate implementation of the nationalisation of the banks and the insurance companies, and the state monopoly of foreign trade, the power of the capitalists to undermine a Labour government would remain intact. The big monopolies would move heaven and earth in order to stir up the middle class against the government. Is this not the lessons of Chile, written in the blood of 50,000 murdered workers? Because the Allende government prevaricated and nationalised only 40% of industry the capitalists, by using inflation, were able to mobilise the support of the middle class and prepare the ground for the September 1973 coup.
Of course, the situation in Britain is not identical to Chile. The working class and the labour movement in Britain are immeasurably stronger than their Chilean counterparts. However, no thinking member of the labour movement would for one moment accept that the British ruling class and the Tories would not act in Britain in a similar fashion to Pinochet and Frei, the Christian Democratic leader, if they faced a similar threat from the labour movement. If they were prepared to deploy their full military might over the Falkland Islands issue, which mainly involves the restoration of their prestige in the world arena, how much more violent will be their reaction to the prospect of completely losing their wealth and control of society? Not for nothing did Leon Trotsky refer to the “cold cruelty” of the British ruling class. They were merciless in carving out their empire and in holding in subjugation the masses in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Faced with the danger to their rule, the present generation of capitalists would not hesitate to act just as ferociously in relation to the British workers as they did to their colonial slaves in the past.
In 1914, the leader of the Tory Party, Bonar Law, said in relation to the proposals for Home Rule in Ireland: “I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them and in which in my belief they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of British people … in our opposition to them [the Liberal government of the time] we shall not be guided by the consideration, we shall not be restrained by the bonds, which would influence us in an ordinary political struggle. We shall use any means – whatever seems to us likely to be the most effective”. The Tory Party leaders supported the mutiny of the officer caste at the Curragh which effectively sabotaged the implementation of the Irish Home Rule Bill, passed by the Commons in 1912 but held up by the Lords until 1914.
“Yes, but that was in the past,” the apologists of capitalism will say. But a Tory Party theoretician, an ex-Cabinet Minister in Thatcher’s government, Ian Gilmour, stated in his book Inside Right: “conservatives do not worship democracy. For them majority rule is a device….democracy is not an ultimate or absolute value and must be judged by what it will achieve. And if it is leading to an end that is undesirable or is inconsistent with itself, the there is a theoretical case for ending it”. This book was written in 1977. It was widely reviewed in the capitalist press, yet the great majority of reviewers glossed over Gilmour’s admission. There were no banner headlines denouncing Gilmour as a ‘totalitarian’.
A similar cover-up was organised in relation to the conspiracies of Cecil King and the late Lord Mountbatten to topple the Wilson government in 1968. Lady Falkender, Wilson’s political assistant at the time, was quoted in the Sunday Times (29 February, 1981) as saying in relation to the incident: “Harold and I used to stand in the state room in Number 10 and work out where they would put the guns. We reckoned they would site them in the Horseguards”. Lord Zuckerman, whom the conspirators attempted to draw into the plot, walked out of the meeting shouting, “This is treachery, rank treachery! I’ll have nothing to do with this”. There was an element of comic opera about the whole affair, but what it does demonstrate is that a section of the ruling class, even at that stage, when the economic upswing of capitalism had not exhausted itself, were contemplating extra-parliamentary measures to bring down a right-wing Labour government. In 1974, too, as the former leader of the Transport and General Workers Union, Jack Jones revealed, there were discussions within bourgeois circles about the possibility of a coup to prevent what the capitalists considered was a “unacceptable drift to the left”.
Again, there were no shrieking headlines of a threat to democracy or the possibility of ‘civil war’. Nor was there any extensive press comment about the recent revelations that before the last election Airey Neave – who at the time was Thatcher’s right-hand man, subsequently murdered by the IRA – actually approached MI6 agents to discuss possible ‘action’ against Tony Benn. Lee Tracy, a former MI6 electronics expert, stated in an interview for Panorama – an interview which was suppressed by the B.B.C. hierarchy – that “violent action to stop Tony Benn ever becoming a Labour prime minister was secretly discussed between former MI6 employees, and the late Airey Neave, MP, just before the election.” (There allegations were printed in the New Statesman, 20 February 1981). It seems that the Tory leadership had concluded, wrongly as it happens, that if Labour won the election and Callaghan retired, then Tony Benn would be elected as the leader of the Labour Party. Such a development, they considered, would be dangerous for them and their system.
All of this proves conclusively that the danger to democracy, the threat of violence and civil war comes from the bourgeoisie and its political agents, not from the labour movement. Of course, the labour movement and Marxists are not pacifists. We would be prepared to take up arms in defence of the right to strike, freedom of assembly, and the right to vote, if they were ever challenged by the ruling class.
As Tony Benn recently pointed out, “if the labour movement and the left were ever to resort to force in Britain, it would not be to overthrow an elected government but to prevent the overthrow of an elected government, that is, in defence of and not in defiance of Parliamentary democracy. There is clearly an inherent right to take up arms against tyranny or dictatorship, to establish or uphold democracy, on exactly the same basis, and for the same reasons, that the nation will respond to a call to arms to defeat a foreign invasion.”
The bourgeoisie and their political echoes within the Labour Party, the right-wing ‘Solidarity’ leaders, counter these arguments by pointing to the “inevitability of violence” where a socialist revolution has occurred. In particular, they point to the Russian revolution. They are facilitated in their task of equating Marxism with violence by the ultra-left sects. Both use quotations from Trotsky and Lenin, completely torn from their historical context, in an attempt to show that Marxists today favour “revolutionary violence”. Yet, again and again, in the course of the Russian revolution, Lenin advocated the peaceful transformation of Russian society. In May 1917 he declared: “Agitators and speakers must refute the despicable lie of the capitalist papers and of the papers supporting the capitalists to the effect that we threaten with civil war. This is a despicable lie. There must be full compliance with the will of the majority of the population and free criticism of this will by the dissatisfied minority; should violence be resorted to, the responsibility will fall on the Provisional government.”
Later, one month before the October Revolution. Lenin pressed the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries to form a government based on the Soviets. Such a government, he said, could “in all probability secure a peaceful forward march of the whole Russian Revolution.” On the very eve of the Revolution, 10 October, he again declared, “Having seized power, the Soviets could still at present – and this is probably their last chance – secure a peaceful development of the revolution, peaceful elections of deputies by the people, a peaceful struggle of parties inside of the Soviets, a testing of the various programmes of the various parties in practice, a peaceful passing of power from one party to another.”
The threat of violence and civil war comes from the bourgeoisie and its political agents, not from the labour movement
The revolution itself was relatively peaceful, particularly when set against the horrors of the First World War, which the revolution effectively terminated as far as Russia was concerned. Five million Russians were either killed or maimed in the War between 1914 and 1917. During the February revolution, 1,433 were killed in Petrograd. The October revolution was “almost bloodless”. The loss of life was entirely due to the armed resistance of the landlords and capitalists and their representatives, to the democratic election, through the Congress of Soviets, of a Bolshevik government. The bourgeois today deliberately conjure up the image of bloodthirsty Bolsheviks during the October revolution. On the contrary, the Bolsheviks took power through a democratic vote of the Congress of Soviets convened on 25 October, 1917. Moreover, in the initial period the Russian workers and the Bolsheviks were incredibly generous (over-generous, in fact) to their defeated rivals. Thus General Krasnov, a reactionary ‘white’ general, was released by the Bolsheviks shortly after they came to power, on an assurance of ‘good behaviour’ from Krasnov himself. He subsequently went on to organise a white army which resulted in the murder of thousands of Russian workers and peasants. All parties continued to exist after the October overturn, with the single exception of the Black Hundreds, the Russian equivalent to Fascists, who were banned. The Russian equivalent of the Liberals maintained their existence in the first period after the revolution.
The Bolsheviks only banned a Party after it was shown that they had resorted to force of arms in an attempt to overthrow the Russian workers’ state. The terrible violence, famine and suffering experienced by the Russian workers emanated not from the Russian revolution, but from the attempt of the dispossessed propertied classes, with the backing of the 21 armies of imperialism, to overthrow the revolution.
However, the analogies, so laboriously and painfully drawn by the ideologists of capitalism, between the perspectives and programme of Militant for Britain and the Russian revolution are entirely false. The Russian revolution constituted the greatest single event in the history of mankind. It was the most democratic form of government experienced up to that time, with the management and control of society and the state vested in workers’ and peasants’ councils. But it took place in a backward country where the great majority of the population were peasants, scratching out a bare existence from the land and with mass illiteracy. It was this cultural backwardness and the isolation of the Russian revolution which led to its degeneration, the growth of the bureaucratic privileged elite, and the usurpation of power, by this elite, personified by Stalin.
The situation in Britain today is entirely different. The relationship of forces are crushingly in favour of the working class. Former sections of the middle strata have been drawn more and more into the ranks of the working class. We only have to compare the situation today in Britain to the time of the 1926 General Strike. Then teachers, civil servants, students were either directly opposed to the strike and it aims or participated in blacklegging. Now these layers have been more and more proletarianised. Under the guise of incomes policies, their former privileged status has been undermined and they have been compelled to move into action. There has been a growing radicalisation of unions such as the Civil and Public Services Association (CPSA), NALGO, the NUT, and many other white collar unions who have been compelled to struggle, at least in the trade union field. Even the ‘First Division’ of Civil Servants, representing the top Whitehall officials and Colliery Managers Association, refused to collaborate in Tebbit’s Bill. Moreover, there is a growing trend, albeit a minority, within those unions in the direct of seeing the need for political action, specifically through the Labour Party. The power of the working class expressed through trade union membership is immeasurably stronger than in the inter-war period. The recent drop in trade union membership because of the recession in no way parallels the drop of almost 50% of trade union membership which followed the ebbing of the first revolutionary wave after the First World War. Union membership dropped from 8 million to just over 4 million in the period from 1921 to just before the General Strike. Today, the union membership is 55% of the labour force. Such is the power of the labour movement in Britain today, its cultural level and its powerful democratic traditions, that nine tenths of the task of the socialist transformation of society is to make the working class conscious of its power. Once it is conscious and it understands the almost limitless possibilities which exist on the basis of socialism, no power on earth would be able to withstand it.
Any attempt by the capitalists, for instance, to use the armed forces will result in the army splitting in their hands. It is of course vital, as part of the democratisation of society, that soldiers should be given basic democratic rights, including the right to form trade unions. If in Iran a much more powerful army was shattered by a movement of the working class, how much more so would the hands of reactionary army generals be tied by a similar movement of the British working class? For this to be realised, however, the labour movement would need to embrace the programme and perspectives of Marxism. The strategists of capital are quite conscious of this. This accounts for their ferocious campaign against the Marxists.
In contradistinction to the present capitalist democracy, a democratic socialist Britain would open up colossal opportunities for all those denied a voice in the management and control of society
It is precisely the leaders of the right-wing who virulently denounce Militant and its supporters who stand in the way of the peaceful socialist transformation of society. Their programme of piece-meal reforms – which in the modern epoch, as experience has shown, is in effect a programme for counter reforms, i.e. cuts in the living standards of the working class – will not satisfy the working class, but will irritate the bourgeoisie. Even if a left Labour government comes to power and does not take out of the hands of the capitalists the levers of economic and political power, an opportunity would be given to the ruling class to organise a violent counter stroke against the labour movement and the working class. They will organise their extra parliamentary forces in an attempt to topple the government. In particular, there is the threat, at a certain stage, of a Royalist Bonapartist coup – that is, the imposing of a military-police dictatorship – to crush the labour movement.
Such measures are ruled out at the present time. The relationship of forces are against the capitalists at the moment. However, the experience of the attempted coup in Spain is the music of the future, not just for Spain, but for Britain too (and indeed for all the capitalist world). Even in a period of economic upswing, there has been four attempts in Italy to organise a coup. The generals and the secret service police only drew back at the last minute because of the fear of an uprising of the Italian workers, which could have resulted in the complete overthrow of Italian capitalism. The British ruling class will hesitate many times before proceeding down this road. However, the writings of Brigadier Kitson are an indication that they are preparing for a trial of strength with the labour movement in the future. Therefore, the horror of a military-police dictatorship, buttressed by the monarchy and a section of the Tory Party, is not ruled out in Britain if the labour movement fails to effect the socialist transformation of society. But the conspiracies of the capitalists can be completely cancelled out if the labour movement is armed with a clear Marxist programme and perspective for change in society.
In contradistinction to the present capitalist democracy, a democratic socialist Britain would open up colossal opportunities for all those denied a voice in the management and control of society. Thus the press, presently muzzled by the millionaires, would become truly democratic. Unlike the present situation where the labour movement, with 11 to 12 million votes in elections, does not have a single daily newspaper supporting its point of view, in a socialist Britain all parties will have access to the media.
The media facilities – the printing presses, and radio and television – will be nationalised under democratic workers’ control and management. This would not create a “totalitarian, government-controlled press”. On the contrary, all parties, in proportion to their votes in elections, would have access to the media, including the pro-capitalist parties such as the Liberals, Tories, etc. The cutting of the working day would for the first time allow the majority, the working class, to participate in the management and control of industry, the state, and society in general.
Democracy is not some kind of optional extra for Marxism. Without the massive extension of democratic rights, which is only possible on the basis of a socialist plan, there can be no movement towards socialism. The aim of a democratic workers’ state would be to begin to put art, music, science and government, hitherto the preserve of the privileged governing class, into the hands of the mass of people.
A Stalinist degeneration would be impossible in a socialist Britain. With all the means of modern technology at its disposal, particularly computers, the micro chip, etc., a socialist Britain would be able to cut the working day not just to 35 hours but very rapidly to 30 hours, 20 hours, and even less. Then the working class would have the necessary time to gather into its hands the control and management of society and the state. Real democracy, rule by the majority, would then become a reality.
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