Scottish Communists

OUR AIM: SOCIALISM

BRS pp. 4-5: 'The Communist Party aims to replace the crisis, insecurity, profiteering, inequality and social conflict of capitalist society with socialism. A socialist Britain would be run for and by the people, not for private capitalist profit. to achieve socialism, the working class and its allies must take political, economic and state power out of the hands of the capitalist state decisive advances towards socialism can only be achieved by mobilising the mass of people in support of an intermediate alternative economic and political strategy .. the socialist revolution will be carried through in Britain by organised mass struggle outside parliament creating and combining with a socialist parliamentary majority'

In sum: to dismantle state power as exercised by monopoly capital and replace by the state power of working people organised as a class committed to socialist development.

OUR MEANS: WINNING THE BATTLE OF DEMOCRACY

Marx and Engels: Communist Manifesto

'the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, ie of the proletariat organised as a the ruling class.. '

Assumption: that the working class on winning the vote would use it collectively as a class, organised primarily through trade unions, for class objectives - and that in Britain the working class, already in 1848, constituted a big majority of the population. This was equally the fear of the British ruling class.

THE STRUGGLE OVER DEMOCRACY IN BRITAIN

Successive strategies of the British ruling class

• to delay full democracy as long as possible without denying it entirely [Britain was the last major industrial country to concede full democracy]
• to depoliticise the trade union movement and if possible develop chauvinist and racist attitudes
• either to break the link between the collective trade union organisations of the working class and political action (to prevent the emergence of a mass Labour Party and make the political use of strike action illegal or illegitimate) or to capture labour's political/parliamentary organisation and use it to depoliticise the trade unions

The struggle between this strategy of the ruling class and the working class objective of 'winning the battle of democracy' provides the secret formula for understanding all British history from 1848 to the present. This was the essence of the crises of the 1890s, in the 1920s, the 1940s and the 1970s. It remains so today. Each crisis resulted from specific contradictions of capitalism as manifested in Britain, changes in the world balance of forces and the ability of socialists within the working class movement to mobilise wider alliances.

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF MONOPOLY CAPITALISM IN BRITAIN TODAY

Building a political alliance that can begin to dislocate and break up capitalist state power depends on understanding the specific contradictions of capitalism in Britain today - making a concrete analysis.

What are the specific characteristics of British imperialism, of monopoly capitalism in Britain today ? (BRS Chapter 2)

• High concentration of capital ownership in the hands of relatively small number of financial institutions (less than 50 banks, insurance companies and investment trusts) ultimately controlled in the interests of less than one per cent of the population with large personal holdings of capital
• The highest level of external capital ownership of any major capitalist power (mainly in US and Europe)
• The highest level of interpenetration of investments with the United States of any major economy
• The biggest dependence on financial services of any major economy - together with oil (mainly from external sources) and armaments production (second highest concentration after the US)
• The lowest levels of productivity and capital investment per head of any major economy
• Its weak position in relation to other imperialist powers in a period of gross over-capitalisation, declining profits and financial instability

Question for class discussion: what are the main resulting contradictions economically, socially and politically ? Why has monopoly capitalist rule been forced to rely so heavily on the Labour Party ?

WHAT ARE THE FORCES FOR CHANGE ?

Lenin on the necessity for alliances - from Left Wing Communism (SW X p.111/2)

'To carry on war for the revolutionary overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war a hundred times more difficult, prolonged and complicated the most stubborn war between states, and refuse beforehand to manoeuvre, to utilise conflicts of interest (even though temporary) among one's enemies, to refuse to temporise and compromise with possible (even though transient, unstable, vacillating and conditional) allies - is this not ridiculous in the extreme .. those who fail to understand this fail to understand even a grain of Marxism'

But Lenin also laid down conditions for such alliances.

Question for class discussion: what are the forces for change in Britain and what alliances can be used to destabilise monopoly capitalist rule ? What is the role of the Labour Party ?