A Future That Works

A Future That Works
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Friday 27 May 2011

New Draft of Britain’s Road to Socialism by Gawain Little Communist Review issue 59, 2011

‘‘Since the end of the 19th century capital has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, through a process of merger, take-overs, financial crises. This has led to a situation where a small number of capitalists companies control whole sectors of the global economy’’. (Little p20, 2011)

Lenin argued that we must ‘‘take advantage of bourgeois democracy which, compared with feudalism, represents great historic advance, but not for one minute must [We] forget the bourgeois character of this ‘democracy’, its history conditional and limited character. [We must] never forget that the state even in the most democratic republic, and, and not only in a monarchy, is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another’’. (Lenin sited in Little p23, 2011)

The British Road to Socialism called for a broad democratic alliance, it has called this an anti-monopoly alliance since 1989 and the new draft calls it a democratic anti-monopoly alliance and for it to take control of state power in order that society can move towards socialism. The ‘state’ and in the case of the European Union ‘super-state’ is an instrument of the social, economic and political system and as such a tool of the ruling classes, if we are to achieve a socialist system where the working class control the instruments of social, economic and political power then we need to control the super-state institutions as well as the institutions of the nation state.

As Gawain Little points out in his article parliamentary democracy ‘‘is a tool we must use in the fight for socialism’’. (Little p24, 2011)

4 comments:

  1. The Marxist-Leninist party needs to take the lead in order to form what Antonio Gramsci called a ‘‘historic bloc’’ that can oppose the capitalist state and super-state. The new-right formed such a ‘‘historic bloc’’ in the 1970’s based around the ideology of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism to overturn the hegemony of Keynesian welfare capitalism in the advanced western bourgeois democracies and to oversee the dismantling of 20th century social-democracy along with socialism in the former Soviet bloc.

    Capitalism has become global through the institutions of finance capital and global governance through the World Bank, IMF and WTO and regionally through blocs such as the EU. Therefore the dialectical reality of the material history of the late 20th century means if the British Road to Socialism is to have any chance it also has to encompass a European and Global Road to Socialism as parts of an overall strategy towards socialism in Britain.

    The role of the Marxist/Leninist vanguard is to lead the ideological battle for a new consensus for socialist polices just as the right-wing theorists of the 1970’s led the ideological battle for a neo-liberal/neo-conservative consensus which created the hegemony of the new-imperialism we know as globalization.

    Therefore there will only be a new-hegemony for socialism if we have both theory and practice that can create this new ‘‘historic bloc’’ that is capable of confronting the right-wing hegemony of capital and the ideology of a neo-liberal market and neo-conservative state and super-state.

    This is the historic role of Marxism and Leninism and therefore it’s the role of communists to form and promote a new hegemony of the working classes that can overthrow the current hegemony of the capitalist classes and the capitalist institutions at the national, regional and global level.

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  2. ‘‘Workers of the world (and specifically Britain and Europe) unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains’’. (Wolfie 2011)

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  3. If we are serious about being more than a resistance movement in permanent retreat in the face of the forces of British, European and global capitalism then we have to take the battle for socialism beyond the borders of Britain. Taking a purely British road to socialism in the political and economic historical material reality of the 21st century is infantile idealism and doesn’t relate to the dialectic-materialist scientific evidence of the global political economy.

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  4. Therefore my conclusion is that if we are serious about achieving socialism in Britain we must look for a strategy that involves the European Left.

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