The problems facing the majority of people in Britain will never be solved within the confines of the capitalist system. Crises are intrinsic to capitalism and the ruling class will always seek to place the burden of them on the shoulders of the working class.
The only solution is a fundamental change in the very structure and organisation of society.
But the transition to socialism will not come about automatically. It will only come about through revolutionary struggle, in the course of which the working class and its allies—by uniting and concentrating their forces—take state power out of the hands of the capitalist class.
Under capitalism, the state is not something neutral. It is an instrument used by the capitalist class both to maintain exploitation and to prevent any effective opposition to it. Therefore the working class and its allies must take state power, if they are to change the economic basis of society in order to transform society itself.
But the conditions for socialist revolution in Britain do not yet exist. The major problem is that the persistence of working class consciousness is not matched by a growth in socialist consciousness. The reasons for this are complex.
To maintain divisions, the ruling class is still prepared to provide privileges and benefits to some sections of the working class. It continues to use every possible avenue to promote capitalist concepts and ideals in order to prevent dissatisfaction from being turned against capitalism itself.
In this ideological battle, therefore, the capitalist class exploits—for instance—the growth of home ownership and of limited share ownership among the working class.
Racism and national chauvinism are two particularly damaging legacies of Britain’s imperialist past and present. Overcoming these divisive reactionary ideas, as well as sexism and homophobia, is a crucial part of winning the battle of ideas in favour of socialism.
Reformism in the leadership of the labour movement—including in the Labour Party—also plays an important role in impeding the development of socialist consciousness.
Nor should we overlook the part that anti-Communist and anti-Soviet propaganda has long played in the battle of ideas. Far from it disappearing in the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union and socialism in eastern Europe, there has been a sustained campaign to reduce the experience of these societies to their negative factors alone.
Their many achievements are ignored or belittled. This new wave of anti-Communism, which is aimed at all socialist ideas and ideals, even seeks to paint the “crimes of Communism” as comparable with those of the Nazis.
Such arguments rely upon a one-sided and false portrayal of 20th century history. Moreover, they are frequently combined with ideological attacks on the remaining socialist countries, usually on the pretext of defending human rights.
How can these and other factors preventing the growth of socialist consciousness be overcome? How can the gap be closed between the objective necessity for the working class and its allies to take state power and establish socialism, and the need for greater awareness of these tasks?
A significant part of the answer to this question depends upon the extent to which the main organisations of the left—and in particular the Communist Party—can project socialist concepts and ideas within the ranks of the organised working class and other sections of the population.
But the wider answer must lie in the experience gained by working people themselves in the course of the class struggle.
In Britain over recent years, this struggle has widened in scope as different sections of workers and other people have taken action to defend wages or job conditions, benefits and public services, peace, the environment, democratic rights and social justice.
Where successful, these campaigns help to boost the morale and confidence of the people involved, encouraging them to expand their demands.
Another equally positive aspect is that these struggles help to make people aware that behind the power of the capitalist monopolies stands the power of the state.
The major lesson from all this is that, as a starting point, we need to develop the different struggles on all those immediate issues which face the working class.
More than that, these battles need to be brought into a common stream so that people’s experiences can be pooled, their efforts concentrated and directed so as to make inroads into the wealth and power of the capitalist class.
To this end, there has to be a strategy which—by linking together separate policy demands on a range of issues—can promote a united, co-ordinated and therefore more effective struggle to further working class interests.
The alternative economic and political strategy (AEPS), developed in the labour movement and by the Communist Party in particular, is just such a strategy.
The alternative strategy is not a recipe for instant socialism, but is a programme of action directed against state-monopoly capitalism.
It takes as its point of departure the balance of forces within the existing framework of capitalism. In fact, it is a bridging strategy linking the defensive battles of working people to protect their immediate interests, with an array of campaigns to put people on the offensive against the fundamental power base of monopoly capitalism.
Its achievement will require the building of a democratic anti-monopoly alliance, leading through a process of mass struggle to the election of a left government based on a Labour, socialist and communist majority.
In the course of striving to implement the AEPS, people’s understanding of the necessity for—and viability of—the struggle for state power and socialism would develop.
The immediate aim of the alternative strategy’s economic proposals is to boost the economy.
Value added tax (VAT) should be cut and direct taxes on working people’s incomes reduced. The burden of taxation should be shifted onto the rich, for example through higher top rates of income tax, a wealth tax and stricter measures against tax evasion.
Council tax should be replaced by a local income tax based on ability to pay. The national minimum wage should be raised to half median male earnings immediately, rising to two-thirds over time, with no discrimination against young workers.
At the same time, there should be a renewed drive to achieve equal wages for work of equal value for women, ethnic minorities and other sections of the workforce that face discrimination.
In addition, there needs to be a massive and sustained increase in public spending in several priority areas. Particularly necessary is a big investment drive in the traditional heavy and manufacturing industries, and in the newer industries based on modern advanced technology.
Such a drive would have to be accompanied by measures to ensure an all-round increase in employment and equal opportunities for access to these jobs for all sections of the working population.
Alongside that, a regional economic development strategy will have to be rebuilt to stimulate industry and employment in Scotland, Wales and the English regions suffering economic depression and severe social inequalities.
Within the framework of planning at an all-Britain level, the peoples of each region and nation must have the powers to ensure that industrial development is made accountable to them, and that curbs are placed on the freedom of big business and property speculators to wreck and distort local economies.
Implementing a shorter working week would help to ensure that investment in new technology does not lead to an overall loss of jobs. Funds should be made available to provide high-quality education and training for all young people, particularly for working class youth.
It is also important to provide a programme for training and retraining adults, especially women and ethnic minorities, to allow them entry into the more skilled, secure and better-paid jobs in the manufacturing sector.
The education system should be of the highest quality and free to all sections of society. Nursery and childcare provisions need to be improved and made available to all, thereby ensuring that women with children can escape casualised work on the margins and obtain better jobs in the mainstream of the economy.
Primary and secondary education should be adequately staffed to enable all children to receive a full and comprehensive education. Further and higher education, including the universities, must be accessible to every section of society, with grants generous enough to support students without recourse to loans or family contributions.
Student grants should be a right for all adults engaged in full-time study, with no place for tuition fees.
Another priority is social and welfare provision. There must be a substantial increase in public sector spending on housing, hospitals and other health services, and on leisure, cultural and recreational facilities.
The involvement of private capital in the public sector and services will have to be stopped and reversed, thereby securing local and democratic control.
The basic state pension needs to be immediately upgraded, and the link with earnings restored. It should be equally available to men and women at the age of 60. The state earnings-related pension scheme must also be reinstated, and social services expanded to enable the elderly to live in dignity and comfort.
The job seekers’ allowance, incapacity benefit and single parent benefit should be replaced by mandatory benefits at least equal to the upgraded national minimum wage. Child benefit and maternity grants should be increased, and the Child Support Agency abolished.
The arts are not something apart from life. But the potential flowering of community arts has been hamstrung by lack of money.
The labour movement must take funding of the arts seriously, and help to mobilise people involved in cultural production in order to widen the appeal of progressive advance and socialism.
How are these alternative policies to be financed and what types of controls are required?
Firstly, the British government will have to take back control of interest rates from the Bank of England, to end the domination of the City of London over financial and economic decision-making.
There would also need to be capital and currency exchange controls to ensure that the huge sums of capital being channelled abroad are repatriated and invested in domestic industry and jobs.
In addition, selective import controls would be necessary to protect and redevelop key areas of British industry such as vehicles, electronics, textiles, steel and coal.
The protection of these industries would be crucial to the restoration of Britain’s manufacturing base, and would allow for balanced development of other interlinked or dependent sectors of the economy.
Secondly, we should make clear our unequivocal opposition to wage restraint or controls of any form as a means of forcing one section of the working class to finance improvements for other sections.
On the contrary, the Alternative Economic Strategy seeks the collective improvement of the living standards of all working people, forcing the capitalist class—and its monopoly sector in particular to foot the bill out of their profits.
This could involve higher rates of tax on company profits, a levy on dividends, and “windfall” taxes where super-profits arise in specific sectors such as oil or banking.
There also needs to be a system of price controls. A prices’ commission must be set up to ensure that wage increases are not passed on to consumers through price increases, but are absorbed where necessary by a reduction in monopoly profits.
At a more fundamental level, there should be a system of investment controls which must, as a priority, include the policy of democratic nationalisation.
The major areas of industry and the utilities that have been privatised should be re-nationalised; not on the old lines, but on a new basis which ensures worker and consumer representation in management, to guarantee that they are run according to social criteria and not the criterion of private profit.
There also has to be democratic nationalisation of strategic sectors of the economy, including the banks and financial institutions to ensure that the vast funds at their disposal are directed towards investment in British industry.
Nationalising North Sea oil would be the only way to ensure that revenues here are used to help restore Britain’s manufacturing base.
There also needs to be a comprehensive system of planning agreements whereby government, with the fullest participation of the trades unions and workforces concerned, can, if necessary, impose guidelines for investment and growth on major private companies.
In the struggle to control those transnational corporations still in private ownership, the potential of the public sector as a powerful economic lever will need to be exploited to the full.
The role of the Co-operative movement should also be strengthened and expanded through the promotion of workers’ and consumers’ co-operatives.
To enable industrial and social development to take place in a planned and balanced way, the big landed estates in town and countryside will have to be taken into public ownership.
The free market in land will have to be brought under local and democratic control, within an overall national plan. Monopoly domination of both agricultural supplies and food distribution will have to be broken, with a state support programme to guarantee decent incomes to working farmers and agricultural workers and safe, affordable, high-quality food to the consumer.
Strict measures are necessary to protect the environment. The atmosphere, the oceans and the land can no longer be treated as dustbins. Manufacturers must be required to minimise their energy consumption, and waste—both domestic and industrial—must either be recycled or used as the starting point for another process.
Reliance on fossil fuels for energy production must be reduced by conservation measures, the expansion of cheap integrated public transport, the shift of freight from road to rail and the development of renewable resources. Existing nuclear power and reprocessing plants are unlikely ever to be safe and should be phased out.
Finally, arms control is necessary. Britain continues to devote a higher proportion of its economic output (GDP) to military use than any other capitalist power except the USA. The end of the Cold War removes the last false argument against a massive reduction in Britain’s military spending and the conversion of industrial production, research and development to socially-useful projects.
The struggle to promote the economic and social interests of working people is directly linked with the battle to expand democracy.
Policies which aim at increasing jobs, social provision and living standards also require a comprehensive set of policies that can guarantee political and human rights, not least so that the people and their organisations can take action more freely and effectively.
This means, in the first place, repealing all Tory and Labour laws that have suppressed civil liberties and democratic rights. The trades unions must be fully independent and free from government and state interference or control.
In particular, this would require the repeal of all anti-union laws and the restoration of immunities from repressive common law. There should be no time limit on the right to take industrial action without dismissal.
Greater democracy inside the trades unions themselves, strengthening accountability and the links between the leadership and the membership, should be a matter for the members to decide—not the subject of state imposition. All workers should have full and equal rights at work from the first day of a job.
A crucial aspect of the battle for democracy is the fight against all forms of oppression and discrimination. Vigorous measures are needed to combat racism in all walks of life. Racist organisations and the dissemination of anti-Semitic and other racist ideology through the mass media—including the internet—should be banned.
Immigration, asylum and nationality laws which institutionalise racism must be abolished, to be replaced by legislation that outlaws all forms of discrimination and guarantees equal opportunities to black people and other ethnic minorities.
This same principle must underpin measures to ensure genuine equality for women. While this can be fully achieved only under socialism, it has to be fought for here and now.
Policies for economic expansion and wider social access will lay the material basis for women’s liberation, but at the same time there would have to be legislation and other measures to end discrimination at every age and in every area of life.
The democratic character of this struggle must also embrace support for campaigns to end all discrimination against lesbians, gays, transexuals and the disabled, or on grounds of age.
To strengthen freedom of the press, there should be a legal right to distribution and sale for all newspapers, with public funds being made available to minority publications.
All broadcasting organisations should be required to reflect the diversity of our society and its social, cultural and political life.
Winning the battle of democracy will require more open and democratic forms of government. Elections should be conducted using the Single Transferable Vote system in multi-seat constituencies, to reflect more accurately the wishes of the electorate.
The minimum voting age should be reduced to 16. Elected representatives should have greater control over the executive, but in turn be subject to recall by the electors.
Democracy must be restored to local councils, with powers to decide levels of tax-raising for local services and to end privatisation in any guise.
The Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly must be transformed into genuine parliaments with wide-ranging legislative and tax-raising powers to tackle economic and social problems, to fund the development of industry, to control the conditions of employment and to defend each nation’s distinctive cultural and linguistic identity.
They have the potential not only to bring democratic decision-making closer to the people, but also to strengthen the challenge to monopoly capital in Britain as a whole.
A Cornish Assembly with economic powers could help to secure more balanced development and higher living standards there. Part of Cornwall’s rich natural resources should be devoted to the development of Cornish culture in schools and local communities.
Democratically-elected regional councils in England should be established with comparable economic powers, including control over services currently administered by non-elected public bodies (‘quangos’) in fields such as regional economic development, training, further education and health.
The special status enjoyed by capital in the Isle of Man and Channel Isles, which are run as semi-feudal big business fiefdoms, will have to be ended.
Instead, the peoples of those islands should be democratically represented in the Westminster parliament, with their democratic institutions at Tynwald and in the States strengthened by proportional representation and economic powers like those proposed for Wales and Scotland.
The monarchy and House of Lords should be abolished. A constitutional council, based on representatives of the national parliaments and assemblies, could act as the guardian of the legal framework of the constitution and ensure the transfer of executive power after elections and at other times but should have no other role.
Demands for further changes, including an English national parliament and the establishment of a federal republic, may arise in this process of fundamental change.
There needs to develop a mass understanding that democracy is not itself an institution—it is a process of emancipation. People must be won to involvement in the struggle for all their legitimate needs to be met.
They need to use and improve their own organisations in collective action to win their objectives at each stage—and to gain vital experience for the exercise of state power when the time comes.
The progressive and democratic principles that underlie domestic policies for Britain should also extend to its foreign policy.
Britain should pursue an independent foreign policy, based on the principles of peaceful co-existence and co-operation with all states irrespective of their social system. It should withdraw from NATO, unilaterally renounce nuclear weapons, dismantle nuclear war bases in Britain and remove all foreign bases.
It should support a treaty to outlaw the manufacture and possession of nuclear arms by all nations and the similar prohibition of germ and chemical warfare, and should work for general and complete disarmament.
Britain could also contribute significantly to world peace by nationalising the profit-driven armaments industry and the arms trade.
The colonial status of Britain’s few remaining overseas territories should end, including the withdrawal of all British troops.
Britain’s support for reactionary and repressive regimes in different parts of the world should be terminated, to be replaced with a policy of active support for national liberation and independence.
This would have to include the repudiation of neo-colonialist economic policies, combined with increased assistance to developing nations.
Britain has a special responsibility to ensure a democratic solution in northern Ireland. In particular, all repressive and undemocratic laws and practices in northern Ireland must be ended immediately, and substantial financial and material assistance provided to tackle the problems of poverty and unemployment which have been made more acute by British imperialist exploitation.
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was accepted by the vast majority of the people in Ireland—north and south—in a referendum, as the basis for the way forward.
For a lasting peace, it will be necessary to remove the gun from northern Irish politics entirely, whether held legally or by the state or by paramilitaries. It is vital that the British labour movement throws its weight behind full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, and behind the demand that the British government becomes an active persuader for unity and ends the long legacy of national oppression in Ireland.
At some point there should be a declaration of intent that British troops will be withdrawn, opening the way for the Irish people to determine their own future in a united, sovereign and independent state.
Every aspect of advance in Britain requires the defence of the democratic sovereign power of the British people. Above all, this means the power to control capital.
But the European Union’s fundamental treaties, institutions and charters proclaim the sovereignty of capital. They are fundamentally anti-socialist, favour privatisation and the unfettered movement of capital, cannot be tinkered with—and have therefore to be rejected.
The alternative strategy demands that the Westminster Parliament and other democratically elected bodies in Britain—not the European Commission or the European Central Bank—should control interest rates, currency policy, the movement of capital, taxation and public expenditure, and have the power to nationalise industries and services and ensure that they are run for the public good.
To argue that the EU can be transformed into an instrument to advance socialism ignores the realities of who controls the European Union and how.
The fact is that the European Union intentionally undermines the sovereignty and democracy of all member states—and the weakening of Britain’s democracy weakens the fight for socialism.
The minor concessions offered by the EU to employees and consumers could be legislated for—and vastly improved upon—by the parliaments within Britain.
Therefore, in order to exercise the powers and controls required by the alternative economic and political strategy, there must be a clear commitment to Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.
This is not a call for withdrawal from the European economy or from international economic relations in general. On the contrary, it is a call for a different form of participation in these relations.
It should be combined with growing solidarity between the workers of all European countries—particularly those employed by transnational corporations—in defence of workers’ rights, living standards, the welfare state and democracy.
By withdrawing from the EU, it would become possible to restructure British industry through a system of balanced and equitable relations with all countries in Europe as well as in the rest of the world.
The struggle of the labour and progressive movements in Britain against monopoly capitalism requires the maximum unity and solidarity with the struggle against the TNCs and imperialism on a world scale.
This means solidarity with the working class throughout Europe, the USA and Japan; and with the people of the developing countries who, under neo-colonialism and debt-bondage, are plundered by imperialism and so remain in abject poverty.
In specific economic terms, this solidarity should mean not only planning for balanced and mutually beneficial trade between Britain and the Third World, but also cancelling debts and providing credits and other forms of direct aid to assist industry and trade in the developing countries.
Next: IV. The Forces for Change