Strikes and demonstrations are a constant feature of resistance to capitalist society, but they often proceed in isolation from each other and fail to confront the system itself.

So what is needed to overthrow this cycle of booms, busts and wars orchestrated by a minority of business barons - an arrangement dominated by financial speculators and millionaire politicians who steal the wealth produced by the labour of others?

Britain's Road to Socialism (BRS) argues that two fundamental, interlocking elements are needed if state-monopoly capitalism is to be challenged successfully.

First, a coherent alternative economic and political strategy (AEPS) has to be developed that inspires and unites the organised working class and progressive movements.

Second, a popular, democratic anti-monopoly alliance of forces has to be built to pursue such a strategy - an alliance that is sustainable and unstoppable.Progress towards socialism will require the left and the labour movement to learn from the disparate industrial and community battles that take place, and work to unite a mass movement in which the organised working class would be the leading force.

The new BRS recognises that such an alliance must take account of the different conditions in Scotland and Wales, with their own distinctive legislatures, politics and policies.

However, as the majority of the capitalist monopolies are owned and controlled at the British level, and political power is predominantly exercised through the British state, it is essential to maintain and strengthen the unity in the labour and progressive movements built up across the three nations of Britain.

To be effective, the AEPS must have at its heart a left-wing programme (LWP) of policies that promotes the interests of the working class and the majority of ordinary people.

As the class struggle has three distinct but inter-related fronts - economic, political and cultural-ideological - the LWP addresses these areas.

The economic objective must be to protect and improve living standards for working people and their families based on full employment in a modern, productive, balanced and sustainable domestic economy.

The People's Charter for Change, the Charter for Women and the Charter for Youth all contain policies that set out the first steps in this process.

In doing so, they lay the basis for more advanced policies to be developed by a future left-wing government committed to curbing the City financial domination of the economy.

The LWP therefore proposes taking the financial sector and key industries into democratic ownership, imposing controls on the export of capital and ensuring that Britain can pursue its own foreign policy independent from the US and the European Union.

This, alongside establishing a progressive taxation system, would make it possible to fund the massive investment needed in public services, manufacturing and housing, and to develop an integrated, publicly-owned transport system and new and safer forms of energy production.

In order to expand democratic rights and popular participation in every form of struggle, the LWP proposes the repeal of all anti-democratic, racist and anti-trade union laws, abolition of the House of Lords, the renewal of local government and progress towards a federal republic including a parliamentary chamber for England.

The LWP also includes policies to promote the values of collectivism, co-operation, multiculturalism and solidarity, encouraging the development of a people's, democratic culture.

The media monopolies that promote racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism and the values of monopoly capitalism would be broken up in favour of wider participation.

The Morning Star - as the only daily paper of the labour movement and with an editorial policy based on Britain's Road to Socialism - will play an increasingly important role in the battle of ideas to inform, mobilise and inspire the popular and revolutionary movement.

The election of a left government based on a Labour, Socialist and Communist majority - backed by a popular democratic anti-monopoly alliance and committed to the LWP - would mark the opening stage of Britain's socialist revolution, but it will not be achieved without the working class fully engaging in the electoral struggle.

Whether such governments are won with or without electoral alliances or pacts is less important than the need for socialists and communists to approach electoral strategy with a combination of political principle and tactical flexibility.

Different levels of left co-operation, co-ordination and unity are possible in election periods, although the Communist Party's preference is to build strategic alliances based on mass campaigning in between elections rather than rely upon short-term tactical agreements.

Winning elections in England, Scotland and Wales will be necessary to ensure that such a LWP has the democratic endorsement of the people.

Popular support and participation will be vital when countering attempts by monopoly capitalism and its supporters - within and outside the state apparatus - to challenge and sabotage the left government and its policies.

The new edition of Britain's Road to Socialism can now be ordered from CPB, Ruskin House, 23 Coombe Road, Croydon CR0 1BD for £4 (including £1 postage).

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/109135

The revolutionary strategy proposed by the Communist Party's programme Britain's Road to Socialism (BRS) is based on the understanding that the state is a machine for the oppression of one class by another.

This is not an over-simplification or a one-dimensional view. Indeed, Marxists have been at the forefront of identifying and analysing the complexities of the modern state and its various functions.

However, these complexities cannot be allowed to confuse the question and mask the essential nature of the state - it exists to defend the economic and social system and the ruling class in whose interests that system operates.

Whether it's the workings of a legal and judicial system founded on the principle of private property, the use of the armed forces to ensure the extraction of super-profits abroad or the role of the state broadcasting system in marginalising dissent and whitewashing the crimes of imperialism, the state acts to maintain and reproduce the current system of inequality and exploitation.

The election of a left government will not change this. A host of mechanisms within Parliament and the political system, as well as outside them, help to maintain and where possible widen the gulf between the people and their elected representatives.

It is on this question that the strategy outlined in the new BRS differs fundamentally from those on the left who support a parliamentary road to socialism.

For communists there needs to be fundamental change not only in terms of who runs the state apparatus, but in the very structure, role and character of the state.

A left government in Britain would be surrounded not only by top state personnel who are hostile to socialism, but also by a state apparatus designed to protect and maintain capitalism - not to abolish it.

Even the most modest measures to shift the balance of power towards the working class are likely to come under sustained attack from within the state, the capitalist media and elsewhere.

The only long-term solution to this problem is to move beyond the parliamentary struggle.

The working class must take state power from the capitalist class and use it to begin building socialism and defeating all attempts at counter-revolution.

Britain's Road to Socialism does not envisage this struggle as a single decisive battle.

Rather, it will be a revolutionary process going through a number of distinct but interconnected stages proceeding from the contradictions within capitalism and within the state itself.

The inability of a democratically elected left government to make changes without facing serious opposition from within the state will help to expose the nature of capitalist democracy.

This leads directly to the need to replace it with a socialist democracy in which the great mass of the people can participate directly in the exercise of state power.

As the BRS argues "new bodies of working-class and popular power are likely to be necessary to monitor or take over state functions," the aim being to "restructure and then replace the administrative and political apparatus with one designed to dismantle capitalism and construct a system that serves the interests of society as a whole."

Although this struggle is an ongoing process, its purpose is the essence of revolution - the taking of state power by the working class.

While mass extraparliamentary activity and the election of a left government would represent an important first stage, it is the process that follows that will prove decisive.

The new BRS also addresses the question of the international balance of forces during the struggle for socialism.

It is highly likely that a left government in Britain would face a huge propaganda offensive - attacks on sterling and the government's ability to borrow in financial markets, denunciations and diktats from the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the European Court of Justice, restrictions on imports from Britain and other measures of destabilisation.

Nonetheless it is important not to overestimate these dangers.

As BRS puts it: "The policies in the left-wing programme are intended to reduce vulnerability to outside pressure and sabotage. This can be done, for instance, by taking strategic sectors and enterprises in the British economy into public ownership. Taxing the wealthy and monopoly profits would reduce the need for government borrowing. Britain should keep out of the eurozone as public opinion is prepared for possible confrontation with EU neoliberal policies. Britain's industrial base must be rebuilt and economic and political relations strengthened with non-imperialist and developing countries."

Ultimately it will be for the working class and the popular antimonopoly alliance it has constructed to lead in both building and defending socialism in Britain.

There are many lessons we can learn from previous and existing socialist countries.

But socialism - and the higher stage of communism - will be an expression of the will of the British working class and popular movement.

There is no reason why people should not comprehend that we share this earth in common, that we are interdependent, that the individual good of the vast majority requires the collective good and that co-operation and unity is better than conflict and division.

For the sake of humanity, the future is communism.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/109181