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PLATFORM |
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This political platform has been drafted by the "Solidarity" tendency in the Scottish Socialist Party, a broad radical-left party embracing a number of different groupings. We welcome readers' comments and criticisms. |
Our tendency stands:
Working-class socialism: Socialism to us means not the police state of Stalinism, but its polar opposite, the self-organised power of the working class breaking the entrenched power of the billionaires and their bureaucratic state machine.
Socialism means a society restructured according to the working-class principle of solidarity. It means an economy of democratic planning, based on common ownership of the means of production, a high level of technology, education, culture and leisure, economic equality, no material privileges for officials, and accountability. Beyond the work necessary to ensure secure material comfort for all, it means the maximum of individual liberty and autonomy.
Socialism can be achieved only by the working class organising itself and liberating itself. Thus we must focus primarily on the trade union movement, rather than on 'radical' movements without a working-class or socialist perspective. The trade unions are the product of long struggles by the working class for the right to build their own organisations to protect them from the arrogant power of the bosses. The unions represent the working class incompletely, unsatisfactorily, binding the class to capitalism. Yet they remain the major organisations of the working class, the major vehicles of class struggle. There is no short-term prospect of them being replaced by new organisations.
We must develop the unions, transform them, reinvigorate them with socialist purpose. To do that, the radical activist minority must organise itself and equip itself with clear ideas.
That is our aim: to spread ideas of unfalsified socialism, to educate ourselves in socialist theory and history, to assist every battle for working-class self-liberation, and to organise socialists into a decisive force, able to revolutionise the labour movement so that it, in turn, can revolutionise society.
The labour movement: The transformation of the workers' movement is a precondition of the socialist transformation of society. Class is the decisive test. Against the fantasies of the 'Third Way' and 'social partnership', socialists must fight to rearm the labour movement with the politics of class-against-class, of confrontation not collaboration. The capture of the commanding heights of the Labour Party by the Blairites threatens to throw back the development of the labour movement in Britain by a century.
The Labour Party was founded to provide the organised workers' movement with political representation. It has never been a socialist party. It was never going to evolve smoothly into a socialist party. But its loose federal structure allowed space - greater at some times, smaller at others - for socialists to fight for working-class politics within it.
Now the Blairites want to destroy the remaining links between the Labour Party and the unions, and to shut down all inner-Party mechanisms which allow for some degree of accountability over the elected representatives. They want to destroy the Labour Party as a vehicle of working-class politics.
The trade union leaders, demoralised by their defeats from the Tories, are offering no resistance to the Blairites. Just as they call for co-operation with the bosses in the workplace, so too they practise co-operation with the agents of the bosses in the leadership of the Labour Party. They have reduced the trade unions to dumb extras in the tragedy of the Blairite takeover of the Labour Party.
Either the workers' movement will reclaim control of the Labour Party - beginning with the affiliated unions using their substantial remaining positions in the Labour structure to fight for their own union policies on union rights, the welfare state, opposition to privatisation, and so on - or the unions will need to break away as large a body as they can from Blair to build a new union-based workers' party.
Either way, we need to combine independent agitation, education and organisation for working-class political representation and socialist ideas with a continued battle within the affiliated unions - and, where it is possible, as it sometimes is, within the New Labour structures. To campaign now for the more left-wing unions to disaffiliate from the Labour Party - rather than using their positions within the Labour structure to advance their policies, and where necessary to defy the New Labour rules - is to help Blair by working for his potential opposition from the trade union base to bleed away piecemeal rather than gathering force.
Workers' Government: The question of government is central to working-class politics. If the workers' movement does not have a socialist notion of government, then it will have a bourgeois one. That is the lesson of Labour's 15-year drift to the right in pursuit of government between 1982 and 1997. Gut anti-Toryism has resulted in one bosses' government being replaced by another. There is no parliamentary road to socialism. But even a reforming working-class-based government could destabilise and weaken capitalism. The scrapping of the Tories' anti-union legislation alone would open the way for a resurgence of working-class struggle.
We propose to all those in the labour movement who want a government loyal to the interests of the working class that they form with us a common front to fight for a government of a Labour Party reclaimed by its working-class activists and purged of the Blair leadership, or of a new workers' party based on the trade unions, which would push through such measures as:
Reform and revolution: Socialism will not be achieved through parliament - no more through a Scottish parliament than through the Westminister parliament. To fight for, win, and hold power, the working class will develop its own institutions of socialist democracy, more democratic, accountable, flexible and responsive than any parliamentary system. Socialism will not be achieved through the reform of the capitalist state, but through the breaking-up of the military and bureaucratic structures of that state.
We do not counterpose the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism to the struggle for reforms. On the contrary: only by fighting for reforms can the working class rally, organise and educate itself to be able to make a revolution.
In even the most democratic of capitalist countries, democracy is stunted and warped by the economic power of the capitalists and the dependence of the workers on wage labour. Compared to workers' democracy it is a miserable farce. Yet even bourgeois democracy is a great advance over military rule or Stalinist dictatorship.
Wherever basic democratic rights are denied to workers, we support the workers in their fight for liberty - even against a self-styled "workers' government". We accept Lenin's dictum that "whoever wants to approach socialism by any means other than political democracy will inevitably arrive at absurd political conclusions".
The Russian Revolution: Since the Bolshevik-led revolution in 1917, the attitude to take to that revolution and to the USSR have been issues that socialists could not ignore. The USSR has now collapsed, but it is still necessary to explain why this collapse is not the "failure of socialism".
The 1917 revolution was a genuine working-class revolution that placed power in the hands of workers' councils. But the Bolsheviks knew that socialism could not be built in one country, least of all one economically backward and devastated by war. They were establishing a bridgehead for a working-class revolution which they hoped would triumph in the advanced countries of Europe, to create a union of workers' states that could build on the most advanced technology and culture developed by capitalism.
Because of the lack of adequate Marxist parties outside Russia, the revolutionary upsurge in Europe was defeated. The workers' revolution remained isolated in Russia. The Stalinist bureaucracy emerged in those conditions of defeat and isolation. It murdered the revolutionaries in Russia and wrecked revolutionary movements abroad. By the 1930s workers' power in Russia had been utterly extinguished. The Stalinist systems, in the USSR and world-wide, were systems of state-organised exploitation, historical cul-de-sacs, based upon atomisation of the working class.
In 1989-91 the Stalinist regimes in the USSR and its East European satellites collapsed, overthrown by popular revolutions. These events showed conclusively that those old regimes were not post-capitalist, in the sense of representing progress beyond capitalism.
The new regimes have privatised their economies and pauperised broad layers of the population. Even so, it was entirely right to support the popular revolutions in 1989-91: they opened up the possibility for the working class to organise independently. Since the emancipation of the working class must be the task of the workers themselves, that is the first essential for any socialist progress. We oppose the capitalist policies of the new regimes and support the anti-Stalinist socialist groups and independent workers' movements in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR.
Imperialism: Decades when Stalinist parties and Stalinist literature dominated the left resulted in semi- or quarter-Stalinist ideas seeping into the thought of even the bravest and most militant anti-Stalinist socialists. We need to reconstruct the political culture of socialism, notably on imperialism and the national question.
Against political domination we fight for the right to self-determination of all nations and for consistent democracy. (And Stalinist imperialism was and is as much to be opposed as capitalist imperialism). Against the impositions of the IMF on poorer countries, we support the struggles of workers and peasants in those countries. Against the depredations of international capital, we fight for social ownership and for the planned use of the world's resources and technology to get rid of poverty.
This fight against imperialism is a part of our fight against capitalism, not something superseding and overriding it. The capitalist classes even of the poorest countries are oppressor, not oppressed, classes.
Every capitalist class has imperialistic impulses. Indonesia's domination of East Timor, or Serbia's drive to dominate Kosova and large parts of Bosnia and Croatia, are as much to be opposed as the imperialist ventures of larger, richer states. Scottish capital is no less imperialist than British capital. The Scottish bourgeoisie has, throughout the history of industrial capitalism, been a junior but rapacious partner in British imperialism, not an oppressed group.
Democracy and the national question: The national question is one of political democracy - national "self-determination" means that a nation may democratically decide, without being threatened with blockade or invasion, whether to form a separate state or to remain in a political union with another nation. The Marxist commitment to international working-class unity implies consistent support for the right of all nations to self-determination.
The notion of "anti-imperialism" should mean the same thing, but in practice it has not. Some socialists divided the world into an imperialist and an anti-imperialist camp. The anti-imperialist camp supposedly included all Stalinist states. Resistance by the peoples of Eastern Europe and by the Afghans to the imperialism of the former USSR was then opposed on the grounds that it would weaken the struggle against imperialism. We reject that approach.
The SSP should adopt a position on Ireland based upon the Bolshevik tradition of consistent democracy in national questions. We believe that the only solution to the British-Irish conflict is a free united Ireland which recognises as much regional autonomy for the distinct Protestant Irish community as is compatible with the right to self-determination of the Irish-majority Gaelic-Catholic people. In practice this means some sort of federal Ireland.
Scotland, Britain and Europe: The Scottish people have an unabridgeable right to self-determination. At the same time, capitalism's development of the productive forces long ago outstripped the framework of the nation states. In every country of Europe, the aim of socialists must be a workers' federal united Europe, not an "independent" socialist system in their own one country, which is impossible.
We therefore stand:
Left unity: Unity of the revolutionary left is necessary if we are to become a real force. Joint work between different organisations of the left is desirable even when fundamental political disagreements prevent broader unity. But no unification of the left can be achieved without political argument and clarification.
The political universe of the left has changed dramatically over the last decades. Although working-class hostility to capitalism remains strong, and in some ways has increased, trade-union strength has declined both quantitatively and qualitatively. The Labour Party has shut down much of the space for trade-union-based politics. The Stalinist states have collapsed.
These changes compel reorientation, and should be taken as an opportunity to open up political debate between the currents of the left. We need to learn from mistakes, not avoid accounting for them, or repeat them in another guise.
The pitiful performance of the bulk of the left in the Kosova conflict, where they gave backhanded support to Serbian imperialism in the name of "opposing imperialism" (i.e. NATO), was an indication of the size of the task to be accomplished in bringing about left unity on the basis of regenerated socialist politics.
Even so, an opening-up of political debate may now make possible the first stages of unification of the revolutionary left, or at least sections of it, and make possible its transformation into a force such as it has not been for three quarters of a century in Europe.
A precondition for unity is rejection of Stalinistic interpretations of party organisation. Coherence in action - disciplined pushing-through of majority decisions for campaigns and actions, and an active day-to-day elected leadership - is necessary for an effective party. But discipline becomes self-destructive if extended to mean that minorities and dissidents should pretend to believe what they do not, or be banned from voicing their ideas outside selected internal party forums. Given loyal co-operation in action, every minority should have a right to express itself in the public press, within appropriate limits of space and balance, and even to publish its own additional discussion journals.
Where the SSP has achieved advances over the previous norms of left organisation, we will seek to maintain and extend such advances. The SSP should also promote dialogue and unity in action with revolutionary socialist groups in other countries, especially in Europe. Our aim is a united and democratic revolutionary party for the whole of the European working-class left.
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