Copied with thanks from Ian Birchall’s website Grim and Dim.
For a discussion of the context of this document and the response to it see the linked article.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Since the inception of our group we have pursued a policy of
propaganda and education amongst advanced workers, many of them
already influenced by Trotskyist ideas. We have concentrated on
building a cadre rather than on influencing the class struggle. In
spite of occasional attempts at political action, that is to say,
intervention in specific struggles with concrete slogans, we have
remained in the main, a purely propaganda group. (Of course
individual comrades have been engaged in various actions – I am
concerned here with the group as a unit.) I believe that this policy
was absolutely correct in the first period of our existence. We have
succeeded by these means in stabilising our membership, getting rid
of indigestible elements, integrating new comrades, and in publishing
a paper. But we can make no significant further progress along these
lines as the experience of the last six months has demonstrated. The
conclusion to be drawn is, in my opinion, that we must enter into
serious political work with our present cadre. In order to avoid any
misunderstanding it is essential to make clear the difference between
political actions (or agitation if comrades prefer) and propaganda.
If in a local labour party we put down a motion on the textile crisis
saying, in effect, that the crisis is inevitable under capitalism,
condemning the self-defeating class collaboration policies of the
leadership and calling for a struggle against the bosses (as, for
example, is done in the excellent article by Cde. Lowndes in the last
issue of our paper) – this is propaganda action. Everything we say
is true and it is very necessary to say it as effectively as we can.
But it is not a political intervention. Supposing that instead, we
put down a motion demanding work or full maintenance at trade union
rates, mentioning in passing our general thesis but concentrating
our fire on the immediate demand then we are giving a concrete
answer to a concrete question, an answer which wide sections of the
workers can understand and can be induced to struggle for – in
other words a political as opposed to a propaganda answer. At the
present time our answers as a group are all of the propaganda
variety. The decisive proof of this is the paper. We have articles,
excellent articles, on many questions, articles which analyse and
inform, articles for the serious student, but not (with one or two
exceptions such as the articles of Cde. Carlsson) articles calling
for action in any immediate and concrete sense. To say that we must
now enter into serious political work means that we must shift our
emphasis from propaganda to agitation. To do this we need two things,
a programme and a perspective. Again to avoid misunderstanding by a
programme I do not mean a document reiterating the fundamentals of
Communism – though such a document one should certainly also have –
I mean a list of things we tell the workers to do now, by a
perspective I do not mean an analysis of the decline of British
capitalism – again this is a necessary weapon in our armoury – I
mean a concrete plan of work to build the group. I submit the
following as a suitable transitional programme, i.e., as a programme
of demands which can be made to appear both necessary and realizable
to broad sections of the workers given their present (reformist)
level of understanding but which in reality pass beyond the
framework of bourgeois democracy. Naturally, since it says only part
(a fairly small part) of what we advocate, it is only one of several
possible programmes and for that reason I would not be dogmatic in
defending the inclusion of one point and the exclusion of another.
But I would strongly maintain that it is the sort of programme for
which we ought to be actively fighting.
The Socialist Review stands for the overthrow of the Tory Government by all the means at the disposal of the working class movement and the establishment of a Labour government pledged to carry out radical measures in the interests of the workers, including the following:
- Reinstate a completely free national health service and abolish the anomaly of the “private” patient.
- Establish the principle of full maintenance at trade union rates for the unemployed.
- A sliding scale of adequate pensions based on a new and realistic cost of living index.
- A real housing drive assisted by the allocation of adequate capital resources, interest free loans to local authorities, more drastic powers to requisition and rent-free state-owned land.
I will not attempt to anticipate objections to this sort of programme except on one point. It may be argued that because the programme does not call for workers’ councils, democratisation (a euphemism for disintegration) of the state machine, etc., it is a reformist programme. I would reply to that by pointing out that this programme cannot possibly be carried out without a fight to the finish with the bourgeoisie. In the course of that struggle the situation will become clearer to the advanced workers and we can then advance such slogans which will then be seen to be necessary. To advance them now would be simply a waste of time.It goes without saying that in our propaganda we put the Marxist case, but this programme is for immediate agitation in the British Labour movement and must therefore be designed to fit the consciousness of that movement, not of some hypothetical one.
Finally our perspective. Our next steps should be:
I believe that with work and good direction from the centre this is a realistic proposition and is the correct tactic for a Labour Party fraction. We start on the basis of a programme (unlike the “Socialist Fellowship”) which will be acceptable to many elements whom we cannot now reach (“we are sectarian” etc.) and who will in the course of the struggle arrive at a consistent revolutionary position – with our assistance, naturally. This is the road to a sizeable revolutionary fraction and ultimately to the masses.
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D. Hallas |
Last updated on 20 August 2016