Debating with Vladimir Derer on socialist strategy

Submitted by AWL on 29 June, 2014 - 10:55

In the early 1980s, both John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna (John O'Mahony) of Socialist Organiser (forerunner of AWL) worked closely with Vladimir Derer, the founder and long-time secretary of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy who died aged 94 on 10 June 2014, and debated frequently with him on tactical and strategic issues. This debate, in early 1980, set out the underlying differences of strategy.

"We need a workers' government" - article by John O'Mahony [Sean Matgamna]
"The first task of the left" - Vladimir Derer's critical response
"The fight for socialism: now or never" - reply by John O'Mahony [Sean Matgamna]
Appendix: "What does the Marxist 'micro-sect' do in the labour movement?", by John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna


"We need a workers' government": article from Socialist Organiser 28, by John O'Mahony (Sean Matgamna)

[In the wake of the 1980 Labour Party conference, which saw an unprecedented rank-and-file surge to democratise the party, Socialist Organiser (forerunner of AWL) called for a fight for a workers' government. From Socialist Organiser no.28, 25 October 1980.]

Tony Benn drew an enormous amount of fire from the press with his speech on behalf of the [Labour Party] National Executive Committee at the opening of the Blackpool Labour Party conference.

To read the hacks, and listen to the baying of the Press Lords, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Benn had delivered a paraphrase of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, or of its latter-day supplement, the 1938 Programme of Leon Trotsky. You'd be wrong. Dead wrong.

Benn proposed three emergency measures to be enacted immediately the next Labour government takes office.

- The abolition of the House of Lords.

- A wide-ranging Industry Bill, to be put on the statute books 'within a matter of days'. This would give the next Labour government power (by decree) to extend public ownership, control capital movements, and 'provide for' 'industrial democracy'.

- Within a matter of weeks, a Bill would be enacted to return to the House of Commons the powers which it has surrendered to the Common Market in the last seven years.

All this would be done constitutionally and according to the present rules.

There would be no ringing Roundhead declaration of the democratic right of the House of Commons, as an elected Parliament, simply to dismiss the Lords. 1000 new Lords would be created to get the 'consent' of the House of Lords.

The package amounts to no more than a limited strengthening of the House of Commons. It is limited indeed, because it would leave the monarchy in being, together with its quite substantial reserve powers. (For example, what if the monarch refused to create 1000 peers?).

In any major social conflicts, the formal powers of the monarchy would be a natural rallying point for the reactionaries.

The package also contains nothing about even curbing the power of the civil service or of the armed forces.

How radically does Benn conceive of the Industry Act being used? If a firm is unable to provide jobs when all around us the lives of millions of working class families and whole working class communities are being devastated, it would seem to be a pretty clear indication that private ownership in that industry should not continue. Yet at the Labour conference Tony Benn,,successfully opposed a proposal that any firms threatening redundancies should~be nationalised under workers' control . The recent NEC rolling manifesto omitted Labour's policy for n4tionalising 25 big monopolies.

Tony Benn's programme is ridiculously inadequate as a socialist or working class response to the situation we face.

British society is rotting and decaying all around us, and the Tory government is now deliberately acting as a demolition squad.

it is not only that the Tories lack feeling for the British people, though they are sustained in their work by a brutal upper-class callousness towards the workers. More fundamentally, the desperate decline of Britain, fundamentally the decline of British industry's competitiveness and profitability, makes desperate measures necessary - and for the Tories desperate measures are measures that make the workers pay.

The repeated failures of different government strategies, Labour and Tory, prepared the way for demolition-squad Toryism. Just as mortally-ill people sometimes resort to the most outlandish quackery, the main party of British capitalism opts for the murderous quackery of monetarism because they believe that all the other options have closed for them.

Only one thing can fundamentally change the situation for British capitalism in the period ahead - the driving down of the working class share in the wealth we produce to a dramatic degree and at least a serious weakening of the trade unions. For example, it is because they hope that it will help them in these aims, that the Tories are so ready to tolerate and increase unemployment and the massive destruction of the social fabric that accompanies it.

Labour in office prepared the way for Thatcher. Not just in the obvious sense that Healey and Callaghan introduced their own savage cuts in 1976 and '77, but by its thoroughgoing failure to regenerate industry and British society.

Put into office in the wave of industrial direct action that scuttled Heath, the government behaved a; a straight-line capitalist government. It abused the confidence of the workers. Basing itself on the trade union bureaucracy (until 1978) at one side and the state machine on the other, it ruled in defiance of Labour Party conference decisions. It got wage 'restraint' and actually cut real wages for two years running.

But what the ruling class learned from that experience was the insufficiency of even a relatively successful (in their terms) Labour government. They needed to make the sort of attacks Labour could not make without shattering its base. Thus Thatcherism.

Against Thatcherism, the Labour Left now has a sort of consensus in favour of trying another policy for running capitalism - it will have a different driver, a state wheel added here, and a few control screws tightened or added there. But it will remain capitalist.

Import controls, state intervention perhaps to the level reached in* wartime Britain, and the collaboration of the working class (read restraint; read incomes policy, perhaps cosmeticised by some regulations on profit distribution) are supposed to ensure the regeneration of British industry and society.

This is nothing but edition 3 of the sort of delusion that dominated the 1964-70 and 1974-9 Labour governments. In so far as they administered capitalism at all successfully, it was by attacking the working class; and they failed miserably to arrest the decline of British industry and society.

The time for patching is long past - and in any case it is in the working class interest not to patch but to transform and bring about fundamental change towards democratic working class socialism - that irreversible change in the balance of wealth and power that the 1974 manifesto tantalising talked about and Labour in power forgot all about.

We must replace the fundamental mechanism of capitalism - profit - with a new one: the needs of the working people, fulfilled in a society organised, owned collectively, and run democratically by the working class.

This demands that we plan our lives by planning and organising the economy on which we must build our lives, and this in turn demands the social ownership of the land and major industries.

We need a radical working class alternative to capitalism.

Whether the next Labour government - in 1984, or earlier if we do as we have the industrial strength to do and kick out Thatcher - will be a more or less radical new instalment of the sort of Labour governments we have had this century, or not, will be determined by two things:

- By whether a real attack is made on the wealth and entrenched power of the ruling class; and,

- by whether or not it rests at least in part on the organisations of the working class instead of on those of the state bureaucracy, the military, and Parliament - that is, whether in response to the direct demands of the working class it can do what we want, or endorse what we do (taking over factories, for example) without being a captive of the state machine.

The working class itself would not only serve and protect its own interests by organising itself outside the rhythms, norms, and constraints of Parliamentary politics, expanding its factory shop stewards' committees, combine committees, Trades Councils, etc., and creating new action committees, to be an industrial power that could as necessary dispense with the Parliamentarians.

The Brighton/Blackpool decisions to control MPs and to give the majority of votes on who shall be prime minister if Labour has a majority in Parliament to the CLPs and trade unions (if we are not cheated) could open the way to a new kind of 'Labour' government - a workers' government, -instead of a government of the trade union party which merely administ6rs capitalism according to capitalism's own laws.

Revolutionary Marxists believe that there must be a socialist revolution - a clean sweep of the capitalists and the establishment of the state power of the working class, leading to the setting-up of a workers' democracy. The big majority of the labour movement don't yet share our views. But we have a common need and determination to oppose and fight the Tory government and to oppose any moves, even by the Labour Party in government, to load the cost of capitalist decay and crisis onto the shoulders of the working class.

If we cannot agree on a root-and-branch transformation (or on precisely how to go about getting it), we can at least agree on a whole range of measures to protect ourselves and to cut down and control the capitalists.

To get the most out of the breakthrough for democracy at Brighton and Blackpool, we must fight to ensure that the next Labour government does act radically in our interests and does base itself on the movement, not on the bosses' state bureaucracy. And at the same time we must prepare and organise ourselves to be able to protect our own interests however it acts.

We must fight to commit the Party to radical socialist policies, and use reselection to make sure MPs are held to those policies.

But if the Labour Party really were to strike at the power and wealth of the bosses, they would strike back, using their army and state forces to repress the movement if necessary - or simply to cow the Labour government.

Whoever wants to break out of the limits defined by the interests of the capitalists must be prepared to disarm the ruling class and destroy its state. Only the working class can do that, organised in squads like those which the flying pickets organise, which can arm themselves when necessary.

Any Parliament-based government that attempted really radical change would put its head on the block, and while the present armed forces exist the axe is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Alarmist? An intrusion of insurrectionary politics that are out of place in Britain?

Unfortunately, no. In the last decade the Army has become highly politicised through its work in Northern Ireland. Early this year the pacifist Pat Arrowsmith debated with Field Marshal Carver, chief of the British Army during the struggles that got Heath out in 1974.

"Fairly senior officers", said Carver, "were ill-advised enough to make suggestions that perhaps, if things got terribly bad, the army would have to do something about it..."

So it is either resign yourself to Thatcherism (or a new edition of Healey- Callaghan, or worse) - or fight on all fronts.

The power of the ruling class is not entirely, nor even essentially, in Parliament. That is the terrain to which they now go out from their redoubts in industry, the civil service and the armed forces, to meet and to parley with the labour movement, and to put on a show for the people.

But if the labour movement insists on new rules for the parleying game, they have a reserve language to resort to - force. So have we.

But the bosses' greatest real strength is that they have convinced the majority of the people that force is no part - not even a re~ serve part - of British politics. That was not the view of the officers in 1974.

The top brass told them then to shut up. But they won't always: some of the coup-talkers in 1974 are themselves now the top brass. In any case we should not rely on their restraint.

Thus we see that Labour's decisions on Party democracy and the new attitude to Parliament open the possibility of a new type of 'Labour' government. But only the possibility.

With the present political positions of the Party and the leaders of its Left, you would get a Labour government which would fundamentally be more of the same with radical trimmings. It would not serve the working class, and in t)resent conditions it would not be able to adequately serve the ruling class. It would not even placate them.

Neither the ruling class nor the working class can afford to muddle along indefinitely - or for much longer.

If Thatcherism fails to regenerate Britain - and it will fail, because of its own vicious absurdities and because the working class must make it fail - that will only increase the desperation of the ruling class. There is no room left for reformist tinkering.

In the last decade and a half, the working class has defeated successive attempts by Wilson and Heath to solve British capitalism's crisis and decay at our expense. We even drove Heath from office.

The tragedy is that, while strong enough industrially to stop their solutions, we have not been politically able to develop a thoroughgoing working-class socialist solution.

The result is the sort of stalemate that has often in history been the prelude to attempts at ruling-class 'solutions' through military coups or fascism.

One cannot foresee or predict how long the present stalemate will continue. It is certain only that - if all past experience has any bearing on what will happen in Britain. - it cannot continue indefinitely. A solution to the decay and crisis must be found, and it will either be theirs, or ours - that is, working-class reconstruction of society on a socialist basis.

The drive to clinch the decisions on Labour democracy is the centre of the struggle now. Unless the Labour Party is thoroughly democratised, talking about it now as a vehicle for struggle and change is as absurd as calling for the Labour Party to come "to power with socialist policies" was in the '60s and '70s. The Blackpool decisions must be consolidated, extended, and made to work. And no Labour democracy can be secure unless the trade unions are democratised. The rank and file militants in the unions must be organised.

But if we do not simultaneously organise a drive for the minimally necessary socialist policies, then the consequences of democratisation may well be very unlike what the left expects.

As Tony Benn said at Blackpool, a Labour Government will be tested by the banks, the IMF, etc., from the first hours. If it does not go on the offensive in the working class interest, against the capitalists and their system, then it will have to go on the offensive against the left in the labour movement.

Accountability can mean - as it does in European social-democratic parties - tight central control to keep the hands of the leaders free. If there had been accountability in 1975 when Jack Jones and the trade union bureaucracy collaborated with the government to set up the £6 pay limit, then there would have had to be a purge of the left (such as newspapers like the Sunday Express and Observer did try to launch).

With accountability, the leaders would not have the option of placidly ignoring the Party, as after 1975.

The Right and Centre, even backed by the big unions, would have difficulty carrying through such a purge. But the point to focus on now is that it is a serious possibility unless we step up the drive to arm the movement - or at least big sections of its rank and file - with socialist politics.

And not at the "next stage" If the labour movement is to be ready to offer a real socialist alternative at the "next stage", its foundations must be laid and built upon now, and urgently.

That is what the Socialist Organiser groups exist to do, and what we are trying to do.


"The first task of the left" - Vladimir Derer's critical response

Vladimir Derer, secretary of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, outlines a perspective for the Left and criticises John O'Mahony's perspective for a Workers' Government. Socialist Organiser 32, 10 January 1980.

The correctness of the diagnosis that this year Blackpool was not just another Labour Party conference Is being gradually confirmed.

The election of Michael Foot by the Parliamentary Labour Party in preference to its favourite son, the defection in all but name of Shirley Williams and David Owen, the acceptance of the wider franchise for the election of the Leader by union leaders previously hostile to the idea, are all indications that the process set in motion in the Ball Room of the Winter Gardens is going on.

We may argue whether Blackpool really amounted to 'half a revolution' as suggested by John O'Mahony. But an exact assessment of the decree of change that has occurred is not really all that important. What is important is whether the Left will be able to take advantage of the situation created by that change.

One can therefore only agree with comrade O'Mahony that "if we organise to make these reforms work for the working class, they are the beginning of a situation that has not existed in the three quarters of a century since the trade unions developed a political arm".

The obvious question is, how are we to do this. Comrade O'Mahony claims that "Our central weakness is that the working class movement does not yet have a coherent policy to deal with the enormous crisis of British society. It has a hodgepodge of measures which propose more or less drastic tinkering with the economy and the political system - not its replacement by a radically new system".

What we need, according to comrade O'Mahony, is "the submission of the economy to democratic planning on the basis of social ownership..." and the takeover by the working class of 200 monopolies.

To do this "we need to organise ourselves to take on the existing rulers" and here "the great hole in the leftward-looking renewal of the Labour Parry is on the question of the state''.

The use of the army and even of the police against a government enjoying legitimacy by bourgeois standards is not a simple operation. But, of course, no serious socialist would deny that such dangers do exist.

However, should the reiteration of old truths — particularly when they are presented in a somewhat dated setting — be our first priority? For the whole underlying trend of argument in comrade O'Mahony's 'viewpoint' is directed against reformist illusions.

These certainly do exist among the broad masses (who do not read SO) and among many Labour Party members (who are just a little less likely to do so). But these illusions do not exist amongst the many socialists who do read SO and who comrade O'Mahony hopes to rally round its platform.

The main problem on the Left at this stage is not reformist illusions but sectarian illusions and practices. It was not reformist illusions which prevented — during the last forty or so years — the Left from producing a credible alternative to Labour's right wing leadership. It was the Left's preference for a fantasy world inhabited not by real people but lifeless formulae. And it was the Left's steadfast refusal to engage in such political struggles as are possible in the environment we actually live in.

It is true that comrade O'Mahony wishes to see "the broadest possible alliances for the immediate struggles around the January conference, the cuts... etc." But these battles, important thought they are, are already going on. What is not going on. and what needs to be started, is the struggle to give the Left political credibility.

Participation in existing struggles is not enough to do-so. Nor will tireless repetition of the somewhat abstract .recommendation. to the working class to break with reformism and to adopt a radical socialist programme achieve, it. This approach has been tried for decades and failed to produce results.

The failure cannot be put down lo the new lease of life capitalism seems to have won during the fifties and early sixties, for. after all. prior to 1914. strong socialist parties were built up during a similar period of economic upswing. The possibility of becoming politically influential is not limited to periods of economic decline

But even if this was so, it would still need to be explained why the Left was not more successful during the late sixties and in the seventies.

The Left's political impotence is in fact not due to any 'objective factors'. It is entirely of the Left's own making

A socialist group, to become politically influential, must show its capacity to gain support among the

as well as among the most class conscious elements of the working class. But people can be organised only around such demands as they are already prepared to support. The programme of the Left, at any given stage, must therefore correspond to the existing level of consciousness of the people to whom we are appealing.

If the great majority believe that improvements in their condition can be achieved through the pursuit of social reforms, it is no good lecturing them about the need for a revolution. Whether social reforms can actually be achieved without radical change in the political structure can only be shown in practice and in any case most people will learn only from their own experience.

Only if those who oppose major social reforms resort to extra-parliamentary resistance will it be possible to convince people that extra-parliamentary means are required to reinforce the powers of reforming governments trying to carry out their programme.

Clearly the possibility that the ruling class may resort lo force in order lo safeguard its privileges must always he taken into account, as must the need) to prepare appropriate counter-measures. Nevertheless this is not the situation we are facing at this stage The problem is not what extra-parliamentary action is appropriate to organise support for a reforming government, it is to get such a government.

And there is, of course, no guarantee, to put it mildly, that the next Labour government will be a reforming one. Given the present level of consciousness among Labour Party members. Labour supporters and Labour voters, there is not a hope that they would be prepared to support the kind of programme of radical social change that comrade O'Mahony advocates. Does this mean that there is no hope for socialism in our time? No.

The problem with the last Labour government was not that it lacked a programme which was sufficiently radical — which of course it did. The trouble was that it failed to carry out even the programme of the mild social reforms on which it was elected.

This failure was not due to the fact that "nothing can be achieved within the system", It was not "the system" which stopped virtuous men and women from carrying out their excellent intentions.

Barbara Castle when discussing the difficulties of getting through some of her social reform schemes put her finger on the real problem: It was not the Civil Service, let alone the police and the army, which prevented her mild reforms from going through. It was her Cabinet colleagues.

The first task of the Left must therefore be to ensure that the next Labour government is composed of men and women ready to honour Labour's election pledges and to ensure that these pledges are as radical as the present level of consciousness among our Party members allows.

Labour Party members would respond positively to such aims and would rally around an organisation campaigning on such a platform. If the Left agreed to campaign on a programme of reforms it would be the first step towards winning political credibility and support.

Every Labour Party member realises that the last Labour government went back on its pledges and thus helped the Tories to win the election. They do not want this to happen again.

But only the Left can actually initiate a campaign of this type. No one else will. We must engage in such political class struggle as is possible in the present situation. To refuse to do so on grounds of doctrinal purity is to contract out.


The fight for socialism: now or never! reply by John O'Mahony

"People who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society, they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society... Our programme becomes not the realisation of socialism, but the reform of capitalism, not the suppression of the system of wage labour, but the diminution of exploitation, that is the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself" - Rosa Luxemburg, Reform and Revolution.

No serious socialist would counterpose socialism to the fight for reforms. Now, on the contrary, the fight for reforms and against the vicious Tory counter-reforms is especially Important, in a situation where the Right of the Labour Party, those who built their plans for mild reforms on a continually expanding full-employment capitalism, are public political bankrupts.

But It would be a self-neutering exercise if the Left were to confine Itself to reforms and see that as counterposed for the Immediate future to the fight for a new society, for socialism.

That would be to mistake where we are at, what we need to try to do, and what we can realistically attempt to do in the period ahead.

What kind of reform programme would Vladimir Derer put forward now? That is the key question. Would it be limited to what was considered — by an a-priori calculation — to be 'possible' without having to shake or overthrow capitalism? Or would it be drawn up according to the minimum that the working class can settle for if it is to begin to solve the problems loaded onto it by the crisis of capitalism — mass unemployment for example?

Vladimir Derer should think out what even a modest reform like the 35 hour week (which would only go part of the way, to answering the workers' needs) implies in today's conditions. Such a reform is inconceivable without mass industrial/political mobilisations of the working class. Even should a Labour government decree it, it would not be implemented unless the labour movement mobilised itself and fought to impose it. Otherwise it would suffer the fate of the 40 hour week decreed by a reforming .government in France in 1936: a dead letter within a short time.

The capitalists would resist, defy the law, evade it, use the courts to obstruct it, or organise lockouts if necessary. They could probably be defeated only through sweeping nationalisations and replacement of the present managers by people elected by the workers.

We will only win any serious reforms now on the basis of struggles which shake the capitalist system, perhaps to its foundation. That does not mean, as one might conclude from what Vladimir Derer says, that it is all hopeless.

For Vladimir Derer's picture of the situation is too pessimistic and his conception of how the presently reformist workers will be won to tight for socialism is inadequate.

Suppose it is true that only reforms are likely to be accepted as goals by the mass of workers now. How do we get from this to a struggle for a different society.

There have been different answers to this problem, a recurrent one in the history of the labour movement. According to one, the struggle for reforms would be organised by the socialists, who would build up trade unions — and a party committed to carry out the socialist transformation of society when it had convinced and organised enough workers.

Their method would be the ballot box. backed by force if (as they expected) the ruling-class state was used to stop them.

This was the Second International before 1914. Essentially it was an apparatus-building, bureaucratic, and propagandist view. It led to a situation where in fact the goal of socialism was forgotten and reform became everything, leading to reconciliation with the national capitalists. The day to day activities became everything; the goal came to be nothing.

Against this view there came to be counterposed another one: the struggle for reforms should be linked to a struggle for socialism. Reform demands should not be formulated as a minimum programme drafted to be compatible with capitalism and therefore not attached to the goal of socialism, nor even necessarily pointing to it.

Reform demands should be formulated according to the needs of the working class, without regard to whether or not they were compatible with capitalism (that is, with the maintenance of the principles and boundaries within which the capitalists owned industry and controlled the political system).

The name such 'reform' demands are known by in the history of the socialist movement is 'transitional demands'.

The working class would mobilise and be mobilised on its felt needs to gain such demands. Engaged in the struggle for them, it would learn with great strides about the system and about itself. It would choose between achieving its own needs at the expense of capitalism — or abandoning its own needs and confining itself to a 'minimum' reform programme none of which challenged the capitalist system.

In fact, in a situation or capitalist crisis, the minimal approach yields practically no reforms at all. To return to the example above, the 35-hour week is a rather modest demand — in Britain now only an onslaught on capitalism could achieve it throughout industry.

The new approach argued that the working class needed stable organisations, but as a fighting class it could rouse itself in tremendous industrial mass strike mobilisations, and for political ends too. In the struggle it could learn in days or weeks more than in decades of slow organisation and propaganda.

Is this idea of a mass transformation of consciousness an irrational appeal to belief in and reliance on miracles? Not at all.

The spontaneous strike of ten million in France in 1968 came a few weeks after the failure of an attempt by the trade union bureaucrats to call a token strike. The defeat of the riot police by the students on their barricades galvanised the workers and gave them a model of victory to which they responded eagerly and with an explosive energy.

The idea is emphatically not that socialists manipulate. We say who and what we are and what our goal is — and we say more than transitional demands. The key idea is that the workers can and do mobilise with limited immediate objectives, but that the struggle unfolds and has a sharp anti-capitalist logic when the fight for satisfaction of even limited, immediate needs brings' the workers into clear conflict with capitalism.

A linked chain of demands can be constructed — beginning, say, from the 35 hour week or the sliding scale of hours and wages, and going on to the struggle for workplace and other workers' committees, to the struggle for workers' control to challenge the employers' untrammelled rule in a factory, to the creation of a workers' militia from (for example) flying pickets — all the way to the overthrow of the political power of the bourgeoisie.

There Is no a-priori schematic sequence in the way a struggle will unfold, and no a-priori order in which a sequence of demands will be raised. The logic and intensity of the struggle will determine that.

The role of Marxists in the great working class struggles on which such a view is based is first to learn from the working class. But Marxist theory acts as the codified memory of the class, and Marxists try to bring that 'memory' to the living struggle around them. They try to raise transitional demands appropriate to the given level of working class struggle, according to the logic of each stage in the struggle.

Transitional demands are a bridge between the consciousness of labour movements dominated by the reformist allies of the ruling class, and the consciousness of the need for a radical break with capitalism: the energy and dynamism is provided by the struggle. The movement grows in consciousness by way of its escalating mobilisations and struggles, and through interaction with the more-or-less stable groups of revolutionary socialists.

But Vladimir Derer asserts that "people can be organised only around such demands as they are already prepared to support. The programme of the Left, at any given stage, must therefore correspond to the existing level of consciousness of the people to whom we are appealing". Obviously people can be organised only around such demands as they are prepared to support. (But already prepared to support? Where have those ideas 'already' come from? Can we not help to shape the ideas people support?). The conclusion does not follow that the Left's programme must correspond to the existing level of consciousness. If it did, either you would have no such thing as a stable Left, defined by some difference from the existing level, or you would have a privately-defined manipulative 'Left'. (And where do their ideas come from? How would new people arrive at them? Why?)

• There is not just one level of consciousness, nor are we appealing to a known homogeneous group.

• A given consciousness is not homogeneous: it has many contradictory elements which make rapid changes in consciousness possible under pressure of events.

• The Left must be defined by an overall analysis of society and a basic historical programme for the working class, to create a socialist society.

• The tasks of the Left are many, not one task, because the class struggle takes place on a number of fronts (at least the economic, political, and ideological). A central task of the serious Left is to prevent these fronts falling apart into mutually exclusive activities (and therefore organisations) by integrating them into a strategy.

Over-adaptation, chameleonism in one area, means repelling the others. The Left is either a force of integrating the different fronts, issues, struggles, campaigns, etc., via a comprehensive programme and organisation which creates specialised groups for specific areas and tasks without dislocating them from the whole, or it is itself a chaos and a force for creating chaos via one-sidedness and mutual repulsion of 'Lefts' with different assessments and focuses.

• It is necessary for the Left to explain (and develop) a socialist overview, goal, and criticism of society, and win people to that; and to educate the people with whom it is active on specific issues to see those issues in that framework.

• The Left organises first as a minority. It does not only relate to the masses, h relates to individuals, groups, etc., and only by first organising them can it acquire the levers to reach, let alone organise, the masses.

• That is why the SO groups are important. While fighting together with people who will struggle only for reforms it is essential to explain about socialism — on the basis of their own experience — and organise in an all-round way.

Vladimir Derer says that a socialist system could not arise overnight, that there would be a transitional period. The point however is that today's "hodgepodge of measures" (Alternative Economic Strategy etc.) would not come anywhere near effectively transforming society.

There would indeed have to be a transitional period between capitalism and socialist society — but is there a point at which there is a qualitative breakthrough out of capitalism and towards socialism (with the transitional period beyond it)? Is there a dividing line between the two systems?

There is a dividing-line and a break — at the point where the working class deprives the capitalist class of, the possibility of exploitation, by making industry its own democratically owned and controlled social property, and by breaking the power of the army and police to make a bloody counter-revolution against the workers.

The state is not a monolith, comrade Deter adds. But does it not have a core of ‘armed bodies of men’, backed up-by the state bureaucracy? Are not both linked directly by a thousand strings of education, wealth, family, and therefore loyalty, to the ruling class, and committed to the defence of the existing system?

If that is agreed, then it can usefully be added that Parliament is part of the state, formally in control of it, and that there are, or can be, contradictions (potentially contradictions which will lead the ruling class to turn on Parliament).

In fact, though, Parliament itself is directly under the bourgeois influence. For example, Tony Benn has shown from his experience in government how the permanent bureaucracy has something like a parallel steering wheel and drives the vehicle of state often against the will of some or all of those elected to that function.

In reality, not a great deal even in the way of reforms has been pushed through against the serious opposition of the ruling class, and nothing fundamentally against their interests.

"Under certain circumstances", says Vladimir Derer, "its representative institutions can be used against the interests of the ruling class, and the reassertion of bourgeois supremacy within the state is by no means automatic".

Yes, the labour movement has used Parliament, and must use it now. But Parliament has also dominated and even tamed large sections of the labour movement. Surely that is what much of the fight to make the MPs accountable is about: to reverse the historical experience and subordinate Parliament to the priorities and concerns of the working class.

The great significance of the decision on re-selection of MPs, and what may be decided on the Party leader, is that it would bring Parliament itself under the direct influence and partly even under the control (if Labour had a majority) of the labour movement.

But what would happen then? Certainly the direct grip and real control of such a Parliament over the 'armed bodies of men' and over the bureaucrats would diminish. If such a parliamentary majority reflected the working-class, and fought the ruling-class interest, then it would be shown that Parliament does not control the state.

If the conflict between Parliament and the state became intense, then parliamentary control would cease to be real; and to the degree that the Labour MPs really fought for the working-class interest, then the conflict would become intense. Either the working class would disarm the ruling-class state, or it would face disaster.

At issue here is not a choice for 'bloody revolution', but the protection of the labour movement from bloodier counter-revolution.

Of course, parliamentary legality would be of very great advantage to the working class movement. But the ruling class would probably erode and begin to destroy the power of such a Parliament and Government before they attacked it directly. The bourgeoisie would not need to reassert supremacy within the core of the state. Their real supremacy is a direct system of class links, loyalties, and connections, consolidated by their economic supremacy in society. It would be fatal to confuse Parliamentary with State power, or to believe in an eternal loyalty of the armed forces to Parliament.

Comrade Derer is right that only the Left will fight even for reforms. Then who but the Left can be trusted to push them through?

No-one in the leadership of the Parliamentary left has a real record of struggle: on the contrary, they went along, protesting privately no doubt, with Healey and Callaghan. The working class and the labour movement must travel as far as possible with the present leaders who do now contribute to the struggle. But we must be prepared to go on marching.

We must fight for the maximum direct control by the movement outside Parliament over the MPs, and, if Labour has a majority, over Parliament.

This too leads to the conclusion that the Left must organise itself on a real socialist programme, and fight to add a radical political content to the Labour Party as it renews its structures and procedures. For if we start a serious campaign for reforms in the present situation, it is certain it will escalate way beyond what we start with, 'such struggle as is possible in the present situation'. We need a labour movement politically prepared for that.

To conclude: if it is not now possible, in the present terrible state of our society, to put forward a real socialist programme and an immediate socialist answer, and hope to win the working class for it, then in which conditions will it ever be possible and reasonable to do so?

If it is not right to pose to the militants of the Labour party and trade unions. who arc now attempting a thorough transformation of their movement, that they should adopt such politics as their answer to the crisis of British society, then who can socialist politics ever be proposed to, and in which circumstances? If we do not now put forward a programme of reform and transitional demands that answer the immediate situation of the working class and mobilise the working class to fight for them, what is the way out for the working class now?

And if the radical socialists around Socialist Organiser, the SCLV, the CLPD, etc. do not elect to do it themselves then who will do it?

To me, the answer seems clear: if not now, never; if not the existing mass-movement militants and ourselves, no-one; if not a fighting reform and transitional programme, then no way.

Space rules out taking up Vladimir Derer's comments on the far left. Perhaps it will be possible to come back to that sometime .


Appendix: What does the Marxist "micro-sect" do in the labour movement, by John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna

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