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Post by dodger on Jul 31, 2013 5:52:56 GMT
. As Lenin himself said, "We do not at all regard the theory of Marx as something complete and inviolable. We think that it is particularly necessary for socialists independently to analyse the theory of Marx, for this theory provides only general guiding propositions which must be applied differently in England from France, in France from Germany, in Germany from Russia."
That said what kind of party is required to advance our class interests? Even today, decades after I am humiliated by the memory of joining the SWP. Barely over a week(probably still listed) the culture was foul. Not even 10,000 Comrade Deltas would induce me to march in step behind them. Post traumatic stress? More banal, realized what a fool I was to allow others to do my thinking for me. Lack of common interest compounded by members-- 'paper members'--full time paid 'officials'. inadequate understanding of democratic centralism. A simple idea, dreamed up by workers themselves, wary of bureaucracy when local organization were built into national bodies. They saw the need to maintain control of their creation. Democratic Centralism is a simple concept transparent, it depends on members embracing it to work. A culture. Grown, that is built.
After 90 years and any number of vanguardistas planting their banners, I would venture that people in countries such as Britain should at least look anew.
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Post by dodger on Aug 5, 2013 8:09:23 GMT
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Post by dodger on Aug 10, 2013 8:57:00 GMT
The Force for Revolution
www.workers.org.uk/thinking/revolutionary_force.html
WORKERS, FEB 2011 ISSUE
How do we counter capitalism’s relentless and absolute decline? How do we gather together our power (recently often left dormant) and commence our absolute rise?
Though our class has considerably less material strength than it used to have, we should not doubt its role or underestimate its potential. The only force capable of challenging and removing capitalism is the working class. The fact that so far it has chosen not to go down that revolutionary route does not negate the stark truth: whilst capitalism cannot do without workers, a working class can live without capitalists.
Experience over centuries has proved that there will be no salvation for workers by pledging allegiance to bourgeois parties or placing faith in bourgeois institutions, both of which are utterly wedded to the ways of capitalism.
Only by re-building our class strength, by regenerating our networks of class power, can we challenge capitalist decline and fashion our own agenda. Our starting point must always be – how do we create a collective response to the issues and problems facing us? How do we unite the many against the few? How do we assert and press our needs? Gradually, in this way, we can change the balance of forces between the exploiting and exploited classes in our favour and transform Britain into a nation fit for workers.
Yet inside too many of our trade union structures there prevail many trendy, harmful notions that are completely at odds with this necessary approach.
The most pernicious is the assertion that activists are essential to conduct and mobilise “campaigns”. This arrogant “elite” impedes natural class organisation. All that is needed is the mass involvement of members in their unions pursuing their class interests and out of struggle will be thrown up their leaders as well as appropriate forms of organisation.
Another debilitating obsession is the pathetic squabble over the “left” dominating the “right” (and vice versa) instead of a desire to unite the class wherever it may be. Everyone knows that the “left” can’t agree on who is its “best representative” and spends most of its time in unproductive bickering while Rome burns.
It needs the whole range of the working class, not an introspective sect, to develop correct thinking, distilled and refined in action and through dialogue. Once a particular section of the class truly gets involved in their trade union, then these diversions of left and right reliably disappear, replaced by a true preoccupation on the things that actually matter. There is a working class discipline.
We are of and for the supremacy of the working class.
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Post by dodger on Aug 16, 2013 8:45:10 GMT
Party of a new type
WORKERS, April 2012 ISSUE
Our Party is unlike any other in Britain, a new type of political body wedded to a different destiny, one of workers taking control and refashioning the world.
Founded in 1968, fresh and confident from the then revolutionary revival in the world, the CPBML was the special, dedicated creation of a group of industrial engineers led by our founding chairman, Reg Birch. From birth, our Party has had one unshakeable purpose – to change the thinking of the British working class – to secure the understanding that our survival with dignity is impossible under a declining capitalism, that only revolution and working class rule will assure work, peace, security – civilisation – for all.
We do not seek to instruct or command the working class. Workers are thinking beings who must be convinced themselves of the need for any course of action. Our party is of the working class, not a set of special people above it, external, doling out an alien theory. We attempt from the conditions of material existence to refine the strategic thinking of a working class and return it to its proper owners in pristine form. In our founder’s metaphor, the working class is the seed, the communist party the fertiliser, enabling the class to flourish more expansively.
We are an unpaid, voluntary community of doers and thinkers with everyone expected to take responsibility and play a full part in developing the party. We attend regular meetings, we study together, we pay our financial commitments, we reflect on and analyse current affairs in Britain and the world, we develop a strategy and tactics that not only make sense of the predicaments we face in the world but also chart a way out of the mess. We produce our own publications, website and public meetings from the ideas we generate after collective exchange. Without rich or foreign backers, our financial resources are either self-generated or come from workers’ donations.
We have democracy within our party with members always expected to think and contribute. Our highest authority is our three-yearly representative Party Congress, which sets out a direction for progress and elects a leadership to administer and safeguard our precious jewel. Discussion establishes the political line, but once established it is adhered to and embellished. We have no factions.
All party members are workers first and foremost, sharing the weal and woe of our class. We have no full-time professional revolutionaries and never will have. We operate on the willing, equal commitment of members.
Proud of our achievements over 44 years, we readily admit the greatest challenges lie ahead. We aim to grow and prosper in these difficult times.
Interested in these ideas? www.workers.org.uk/thinking/party.html
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Post by dodger on Sept 4, 2013 8:49:24 GMT
Why be a Communist?
WORKERS, JANUARY 2010 ISSUE
There is no inevitability about the course of human progress. As Marx and Engels so pointedly put it to us in the opening chapter of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” just over 160 years ago: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
For the capitalist class, common ruination of society is preferable to the dictatorship of the proletariat – Britain run by the working class. Hence, the original Cold War speech by Churchill at Fulton, an Iron Curtain coming down across Europe and all that followed.
As workers, we do have choices, however. We can believe that we can maintain the status quo; that this is as good as it gets. So we vote for Thatcher and acquiesce until we are sick of her and then believe Major might not be a version of the same thing. Then we believe Blair when he says, “I’ll be different.”
But if we are serious about changing this world for the better rather than willingly putting our faces in the mud or waiting for the afterlife, we have to take a different route. First we have to decide who we are; then what we need and then how we’re going to change the world. For us as workers, Britain is where our fight must be.
If you are a worker who believes in skill, industry and self-reliance then you should be a communist.
If you are a worker who values national independence and sovereignty – the right to deal with our own capitalists first – then you should be a communist.
If you’re against interference in the affairs of others and against the pursuit of unjust wars then you should be a communist.
If you see yourself working in an honest way, not as an expert or guru but as a worker rooted in the class not somehow levitating above it, then you should be a communist.
In our document The British Working Class and Its Party, published in 1971, we said: “The unmistakeable conclusion is that our task is nothing less than to change the ideology of our class.” We in the Communist Party are open about our aims and never set ourselves above the class and separate from it. If you think you can live with that, you should be a communist.
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Post by dodger on Oct 30, 2013 2:25:03 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/thinking/society.htmlSociety and the Working Class
WORKERS, JAN 2012 ISSUEHuman life is utterly dependent on social organisation and activity. As the poet John Donne observed, “No man is an island entire of itself.” Yet addicts of the free market declare that there is no such thing as society. We should interpret their odd claim as a call to arms of a ruling class determined to stop its rival leading a dignified life. Capitalism’s innate urge is to dragoon working class existence inside purely economic parameters, within exclusively market constraints, free from other civilising influences.
Left to itself, capitalism operates a system where the only connecting mechanism, the only functioning link between classes and people is the cash nexus of the profit drive. Capitalism is obsessed by maximising profits and keeping costs – particularly those of labour – down. It is not concerned by workers’ working conditions or quality of life (unless these factors happen to hamper their ability to maximise profits). Accordingly, in recent decades it has set about dismantling and undermining those enhancing aspects of society that support or benefit workers, spawning a stark age ever more bereft of professionally delivered social provision, churning out privatised profit-grabbing organisations as alternatives. As wealth accumulation for capitalists soars, workers plummet into deprivation and suffering.
Society does exist, but today it only finds expression, it only has a source, within the working class. The capitalists, acting as if they are beyond and outside of society, want to remove the protections and enhancements of society from workers. Two opposing perspectives are clashing. Workers, propelled by the nature of their economic position, are having to combine to press their class interests, to counter the incessant exploitation and degradation stemming from the market. Letting the barbarism of profit be the supreme arbiter of human existence would otherwise cripple us.
If we want to survive we must sweep capitalism aside. Civilisation means meeting collective need and fostering the blossoming of social organisation and activity. Nowadays there is society only when workers act together to pursue and enforce common interests.
While denying and hemming in society, the capitalists shamelessly wield power in their favour through the mechanism of an increasingly corporate state. So we live in a paradox where the working class majority are without the trappings of power whilst the ruling class minority selfishly dictate the direction of life. But who pays for the state? Workers do, via a range of taxes. The state must not bulldoze society. Nor should we be reduced to mere individuals or families at the beck and call of callous market forces. Rather we must grow into a class wanting to exercise power as a mutually supporting society.
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Post by dodger on Dec 6, 2013 13:51:46 GMT
Many of us, old enough perhaps wish to be be ruled over 'in the old way.' Impossible. Can we simple ignore the putrefaction? Some days the stench wafts across from the Atlantic. Other days we hold our noses , it is coming over from Brussels. None can escape the stink. We can try. We look across at Westminster, universally held to contempt. Could we not simply 'kettle' them? The City too, the reek from there is pointing to contagion of biblical proportions. Yet Britain was the inspiration for communism, the natural home of Marxism. We have to think of Britain as a small component part of an eventual Communist world. Communism can only exist as a world system; the State cannot wither away in a single country surrounded by others armed to the teeth. Our own advance depends on the advance of workers everywhere. To use another military term 'advanced detachment' not vanguard covers what is needed. To expect a vanguard not to make errors whilst the rest of us are rich in error is not born out by our history. Good if a party could generate a few ideas, even discard some too. Above all else workers must take responsibility. Get back to the workplace. Many are. Conflict ? A breeding ground. Encourage defiance.
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