Workers' Liberty

This blog is to set out and clarify some of the arguments I have put forward in other debates linked to in this latest post:

Bourgeois democracy and where I also take up the argument again.

I start from what I think is a common agreement amongst the participants in these debates, which is that Bourgeois Democracy is a form of class rule by the bourgeoisie, and that consequently our task is to move beyond it to workers democracy and to socialism. The debate then centres around the issue of whether Bourgeois Democracy can be seen as good in itself, simply on the basis that it is relatively progressive vis a vis more authoritarian forms of regime, such as feudalism, fascism, clerical-fascism or presumably - given the AWL’s support for Yeltsin – Stalinism, which also implies that capitalism/imperialism is more progressive than a mode of production based on nationalised and collectivised property, but which forms a separate debate. The consequence of answering yes to the above question, even if it is a conditional yes, is that Marxists should argue in favour of bourgeois democracy in conditions where socialism is not possible.

My answer to this above question is a categorical no. In stating that my answer is a categorical no, however, that does not at all preclude me from arguing for a defence of bourgeois democracy against say fascism or feudalism in conditions where the working class remain ideologically tied to bourgeois democracy, where they have not yet achieved a sufficient level of class consciousness to recognise that it merely masks the bourgeois dictatorship in a velvet glove, where they have not yet recognised the superiority of their own form of democracy – workers democracy – and the ability of such a method of administration to far better meet their immediate needs, and to provide the basis for the transformation of society. In short to quote Trotsky in the Transitional Programme,

“Of course, this does not mean that the Fourth International rejects democratic slogans as a means of mobilizing the masses against fascism. On the contrary, such slogans at certain moments can play a serious role. But the formulae of democracy (freedom of press, the right to unionize, etc.) mean for us only incidental or episodic slogans in the independent movement of the proletariat and not a democratic noose fastened to the neck of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie’s agents (Spain!).”

That is the level of significance that Trotsky gave it, even in 1938 when all forms of democracy were in retreat against fascism and Stalinism, merely episodic slogans, no more than a tactic to win workers away from their illusions in bourgeois democracy, and to set them on the road to establishing workers democracy. And that is the crux of the debate. It is not about the relative progressive merits of bourgeois democracy vis a vis fascism, or feudalism – it may have been in the 18th and early 19th century, but not now – but about the best tactic for winning away the workers from illusions in the dominant ideas of the ruling class whether they be bourgeois democratic or fascistic. In short, our politics are determined not by considerations of the best form of capitalist rule, but by putting the working class at the centre of our politics, and the best way of winning them to us. To do anything other is to lead us into the camp of bourgeois reformism. It is to go down the road of the Euston Manifesto, whose logic must be to support a war of imperialist bourgeois democracy against the clerical-fascist regime in Iran, for instance, and which has already led to them supporting bourgeois-democratic Israel against Lebanon in order to defeat the clerical-fascist forces of Hizbollah. That is the logic of socialists giving support to one camp of the bourgeoisie over another camp of the bourgeoisie, the democratic camp of the bourgeoisie over the fascistic camp of the bourgeoisie. Its logic is the very opposite of what is required, and the consequences are clear. Instead of winning the workers to the banner of socialism they are driven even more into the hands of the fascists.

Trotsky was quite clear what such defence of bourgeois democracy within the ranks of the Labour Movement represented. He set it out in his Thesis on Fundamental Tasks for the second Congress of the Comintern.

”“Hence, preparation for the dictatorship of the proletariat entails not only explanation of the bourgeois character of all reformism, of all defence of democracy, while private ownership of the means of production is preserved; it entails, not only exposure of such trends, which are in fact a defence of the bourgeoisie within the labour movement; it also calls for old leaders being replaced by Communists in proletarian organisations of absolutely every type—not only political, but also trade union, co-operative, educational, etc.”

To summarise, Marxists main task is to win the working class to our banner. That is the central aim of our tactics. In conditions where the majority or a sizeable number of workers are, for whatever reason, imbued with illusions in bourgeois democracy then we have to win them away from those illusions. In conditions where that bourgeois democracy is under attack from fascists, we are not likely to win over those workers if we remain indifferent. We defend the bourgeois democracy in which they have illusions against the fascists, but such defence does not at all require us to reinforce the illusions they already hold, does not require us to emphasise the relative progressiveness of the camp of the democratic bourgeoisie over the fascistic camp of the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, in defending the bourgeois democracy, in forming a United Front with the workers that retain those illusions, we encourage them to join us in its defence not by means of bourgeois-democratic institutions, but by them joining us in organisations based on workers democracy, in workers militia, factory committees, peasant committees etc. and in so doing demonstrate in practice to them the superiority of these forms of workers democracy over bourgeois democracy, and the irrelevance to their needs of that bourgeois democracy. That is the method Trotsky proposed in the Action Programme for France, which has many aspects of it relevant to Iraq today. He sets out his tactic right at the beginning of the section where he advocates defence of the bourgeois democracy against the French fascists.

”We are thus firm partisans of a Workers and Peasants State, which will take the powerf rom the exploiters. To win the majority of our working class allies to this program is our primary aim.
Meanwhile, as long as the majority of the working class continues on the basis of bourgeois democracy, we are ready to defend it with all our forces against violent attacks from the Bonapartist and fascist bourgeoisie.”

There is nothing in Trotsky’s argument here that gives succour to the idea that we defend bourgeois democracy because of its relative progressiveness vis a vis fascism. We defend it because we are “with the workers” and if the workers retain illusions in bourgeois democracy we have to stay with them in order to win them away, but we do not win them away by accommodating to those illusions, we win them away by merciless criticism of bourgeois democracy, by exposing its class nature as merely a class dictatorship in democratic clothing, and by exposing those representatives of the bourgeoisie within the Labour Movement that foster those illusions.
But the illustration of the possibility of a war between a bourgeois democratic imperialism and a clerical fascist Iran illustrates the issue from the other side of the coin. If Marxists attitude is determined by the relative progressive nature of bouregois democracy compared to say the clerical-fascist regime in Iran rather than a concern to be with the workers and to win them away from illusions of either of these forms of bourgeois rule, then the EM group are right. Marxists should support a war of US imperialism against fascist Iran because it would be “progressive”. But abandoning the Iranian workers or any other group of workers just because they are attahed to some reactionary ideology has nothing to do with Marxism. We do not simply write them off as a “bad” working class, as for example the idiot anti-imperialists do in respect of the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland. Its rather like when during the 1960’s, my old man who had been a militant all his life, but who was beginning to despair of the British working class, said to me one day, “The only way the British working class will get off its feet is when the Red Army marches in.” It is to abandon the idea that progress can only come from the independent class action of the working class, and to slide into a reliance on alien class forces and institutions. It is typical of the kind of ideas that creep into the Labour Movement after a period of successive defeats such as that of the last 25 years or so.

I am familiar with this psychologial process having been through a period of severe depression, because the above is indeed like a form of depression suffered by the ideological leadership of the class. When you begin to suffer from severe depression, you feel that you have lost control of your life. For some that means resorting completely to a reliance on outside forces, drink or drugs as an escape are typical, but so is going over to religion or some other external force in the belief that only by gaining the support of these outside agencies can your life be rescued or some respite achieved. That is basically the state the EM group have achieved. For me it has been rather weird. As someone that has always had a scientific outlook on life that has always sought the rational, that went out of their way to rubbish all forms of superstition by deliberately walking under ladders etc.. I found myself almost split in two. The rational part of my brain, were I to discuss any of these things with someone, continued to argue that it was nonsense, yet another part of my brain led me into becoming obsessive compulsive, forced me into, everday, having to follow a set ritual without which “things would go bad”.
I see some aspects of that duality within the AWL’s poltics.

If a war does happen between the US and Iran, I suspect that despite proclaiming the relative progressiveness of bourgeois democracy over clerical-fascism, the AWL will in fact oppose that war, which would inevitably result in the victory of the progressive bourgeois democracy over the reactionary clerical-fascism. In doing so, the AWL will no doubt argue that it is not siding with the reactionary clerical-fascists, but with the Iranian workers. And that is precisley correct. Our tactic is not to side with bouregois democracy or with the opponents of bourgeois democracy, but to side with the workers even where those workers are confused and give their support to a reactionary, clerical-fascist regime. Only on that basis can we have any hope of relating to those workers and dragging them away from their confusion and those illusions, whether they be illusions in bourgeois demcoracy or in clerical-fascism. We do so by giving no succour to the ideas in which they have illusions be they bourgeois-democracy or clerical-fascism, but by counterposing to both workers democracy, exposing the class nature of both the bourgeois democracy and the clerical fascism, by encouraging the workers to form their own organisations based on workers democracy as the best means of their defence.

If we go back to the beginning of the 19th century and the Chartist Movement consider a different scenario. The working class did not have the vote, but Trade Unions had been formed, and the Co-operative Movement had come into existence encouraged by people like Robert Owen. Suppose that instead of fighting for the Charter i.e. to achieve universal suffrage and the right to representation in the bosses Parliament, which at the time the bosses would have ought a Civil War to prevent, the workers had recognised that their real strength lay in their collective action rather than in the individual action of casting a ballot. Suppose that in addition to relying on their industrial muscle in Trade Union struggles to win higher wages, they had adopted some of Owen’s ideas on forming Co-operatives. In Capital Marx highlights the fact that there were many instances where capitalist textile firms had gone bust, and the workers had taken them over, employed the former boss as a manager on a much reduced salary, and despite the higher than usual interest rates they were charged, had become not only profitable, but made a higher return on capital employed than the average privately run firm, and Marx argued that with the introduction of Credit the extension of such workers Co-operatives throughout the entire economy was possible as the transitional form to socialism.

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”

“The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and to reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth; on the other hand, to constitute the form of transition to a new mode of production. It is this ambiguous nature, which endows the principal spokesmen of credit from Law to Isaac Pereire with the pleasant character mixture of swindler and prophet.”
(Capital Vol III pp441-2)

Suppose that they had extended these principles into forming their own committees within the workers districts demanding improvements to their environment, demanding or providing for themselves through co-operative efforts decent housing, that they had established their own neighbourhood patrols to cut down on the rampant crime in the workers areas etc., in short that they had established their own system of workers democracy alongside the bourgeois democracy of the bosses. Such a development would not have meant that the workers needed to mount an immediate challenge to the rule of Capital. There would be no reason the bosses should be threatened by workers policing their own districts (particularly at a time when no police force existed), there is no reason that the spread of other forms of co-operation such as co-operative enterprises should cause them to see socialist revolution on the horizon either, particularly those finance capitalists making money from lending to the workers. Because such a situation did not directly threaten the overall rule of Capital this would not be a situation of dual power, merely the development of alternative forms of administration and control within the workers districts etc.

Now if that were the case, and the majority of the working class recognised the advantages for controlling its own life and destiny through such means would Marxists have argued for an extension of bourgeois democracy to give workers the vote? I would suggest that to do so would have been stupid. It would be to demobilise that very workers democracy we seek to develop as the basis of the new society. It would be to suggest to workers that they could have some shared interests with their class enemy that could be debated, discussed and worked out within the context of a bourgeois Parliament, and that such means were better than their own workers democracy.

My reason for opposing raising the idea of bourgeois democracy in Iraq where similarly no history of bourgeois democratic illusions within the working class exist is for precisely the same reason. The first task is to develop the workers democracy to encourage workers to see workers democracy not bourgeois democracy as the solution to their problems. If, despite our best efforts in that direction, the workers still become imbued with bourgeois democratic illusions – and the main reason for that would be because reformist workers leaders, the agents of the bourgeoisie within the Labour Movement, as Trotsky described them, had sown those illusions rather than developing the workers democracy as a Third Camp – then, of course Marxists would have to relate to that in line with the argument set out by Trotsky above, and by Lenin in Left-Wing Communism, where he argues that the Communists would use the elections to expose the class nature of the bourgeois democracy, would use its platform to argue for Communism, and for Soviet democracy etc.

In fact, it is in this area of established bourgeois democracy that I disagree with Lenin. In his argument with Kautsky, set out in “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky”, Lenin argues that no meaningful advances can be achieved through bourgeois Parliaments. The reason for this argument is effectively two-fold. Firstly, Lenin believes that workers cannot achieve full class-consciousness within capitalism. The ruling ideas will continue to be the ideas of the ruling class. Only a minority of the working class will achieve class-consciousness, and of those only a minority will be sufficiently class conscious to join its vanguard i.e. to become Bolsheviks. That is basically the position Lenin had developed when he wrote “What is to be Done?” It is the basis of his vision of the revolutionary party, that because the workers will continue to be dominated by bourgeois ideas the socialist revolution must be carried through by a determined and well organised minority dragging a large section of the working class behind it, with a much larger section remaining passive. On that basis socialism can never be achieved through Parliament, or any really meaningful advance made, for the simple reason that there can never be a sufficiently large number of truly class-conscious workers to ensure the electoral victory of a truly revolutionary party. Workers Parties can be elected to government, but these workers parties can only achieve such victories by putting forward a programme that is short of a socialist transformation of society, it has to be a reformist programme seeking not to replace capitalism, but merely to ameliorate its worst effects for the workers. If it seeks to go beyond such a programme not enough workers will vote for it. The second leg of the argument is that even were such a government to try to implement policies which seriously challenged the rule of Capital, then Capital would simply undermine this government by one means or another including the use of force.

I think that Lenin is wrong in the first part of his argument, because I think he underestimates the potential for the working class achieving a sufficient level of class consciousness to enable it to proceed to socialism without the need to resort to a vanguard party to carry through a political revolution to seize state power as the precondition for bringing about the social revolution i.e. the transformation of economic and social relations. Lenin’s ideas were influenced both by the fact that he drew conclusions from the condition of the working class in backward Russia rather than the experiences of the working class in more advanced capitalist countries. To the extent that he did take into account the experiences of workers in the advanced countries he saw the extent to which they had been influenced by bourgeois democracy and their Labour Movements led into reformism as further vindication of his thesis. He was also influenced by the idea of the working class as a slave class, and one, therefore, denied access to education and culture, the very things necessary, and which had enabled the bourgeoisie to develop its own ideology as a class, and which had allowed it to become class conscious in fighting for that ideology.

I think that in respect of large parts of Western Europe, and of the US Lenin was wrong in 1903 let alone 1918. I am absolutely sure that his perspective is wrong for today. It is, however, necessary to be careful in this not simply to accept the other side of the coin, the basic ideas of reformism. Looking back on the last 50 years in particular, it is clear that considerable reforms have been implemented through bourgeois Parliaments, reforms which have benefited the working class. To simply argue that these reforms have been implemented because in some way they were clever ruses by the bourgeoisie, that they in some way were things the bourgeoisie wanted, that they enabled them to extract more surplus value or whatever, is in my opinion facile. Many of these reforms were introduced in the face of opposition from the bourgeoisie, particularly reforms introduced by the 1945 Labour Government such as the Welfare State, and we only have to look at the current attacks on the Welfare State and the NHS to recognise that. And even the mildly reforming Government of Harold Wilson in the 1960’s was too much for some sections of the bourgeoisie, which were seriously plotting with sections of the state for a military coup to overthrow him. The second part of Lenin’s argument that the bourgeoisie will not allow a bourgeois Parliament with a workers majority to simply legislate away its power remains completely valid. The experience of the Allende Government is clearly proof of that.
The degree to which the bourgeoisie will accede to such reforms depends upon the nature of the reforms, and the particular conditions under which they are put forward. For example, it is ironic that at the very moment when the bourgeoisie in Britain, through the agency of Blair, is seeking to privatise the NHS, large sections of big Capital in the US are arguing for the introduction of some form of socialised healthcare. Their reason for doing so is simple. Private healthcare provision in the US is bureaucratic, and hugely expensive. As workers in the US have, in many large companies, negotiated deals, whereby the employer meets the costs of private medical insurance, these costs are crippling US corporations, making them unable to compete on the world market. The companies are trying to get out of such deals with their workers, but to do so means large confrontations with workers who are the most organised section of the working class. Moreover, even if they get out of the deals, the likelihood is that workers will simply demand larger wage increases in order to cover the costs of taking out their own cover. The logical answer for big US Capital is socialised healthcare.

In the 1930’s Roosevelt in the New Deal introduced a whole raft of measures in support of workers, including minimum wage rates etc. But the background was rapidly rising membership of the US Communist Party, even amongst members of the middle class, the thought in the mind of the Russian Revolution that had happened only 16 years earlier, a Soviet Union whose economy was booming whilst the US and the rest of the capitalist world was in what looked like possible terminal decline. Meanwhile, of course, other sections of the bourgeoisie were making other arrangements just in case these reforms did not buy off the workers. Henry Ford a long time anti-semite and perpetrator of the idea of the world-wide Jewish conspiracy, from whom Hitler took many ideas, was giving financial and political support to US fascists.

In short, in times when the working class is strong, and the ruling class see the potential for trouble they have learnt to tack and to allow even considerable reforms to the working class, provided those reforms do not seriously threaten the existence of Capital. In fact the reforms are the best guarantee of its continuation by avoiding revolution. Its notable, in fact, that in Britain where the Labour Movement was in disarray during the 1930’s, the Labour party having split etc. the ruling class did not feel compelled to introduce the same kinds of reforms that Roosevelt had done with the New Deal, or even to use the kinds of Keynesian economics introduced in the US or in Norway.

At times when the working class is weak, as it has been for the last 25 years, the bourgeoisie rolls back those reforms as it has done in relation to Trade Union rights, welfare rights etc.

In a situation where the majority of workers remain tied to these bourgeois democratic illusions then, I would argue that it is not only the task of Marxists to try to win workers away from them, not only to build the workers democracy as the alternative to that bourgeois democracy, but is to also utilise the bourgeois democracy, where possible to win reforms, and thereby to exacerbate the contradiction between the form of bourgeois rule – the bourgeois democratic Parliament – and the instrument of that rule – the bourgeois state. Contrary to Lenin’s formulation, which tends to conflate the Parliament and the State, workers can take control of one, but not the other.

Let me try to explain how I see that in a situation like Britain today through a number of examples. Take an example like the Miners Estate in the ward where I live. The state has been run down, the Coal Board sold the houses it continued to own to absentee landlords in London, who frequently sell them to other absentee landlords so that its impossible to keep track of who is responsible for them. The landlords put in tenants that no one else wants because they are anti-social etc., who then cause problems for other tenants or home owners who then move out leaving further properties vacant for the absentee landlords to fill with even more anti-social elements.

The tenants and residents on the estate formed a TRA to take up these problems. Some of the leaders of the TRA are current or ex union branch secretaries etc. Like most British workers they remain tied to the Labour Party and to bourgeois democracy. But that democracy was not resolving their problem. They elected Labour Councillors and a Labour MP but the problem persists. So they took it into their own hands and established a form of workers democracy to resolve it. I went to one of their first meetings, and argued that they had done the right thing setting up their TRA, that by taking matters into their own hands they had given themselves the best chance of resolving the problem, and that they should rely on their own strength and organisation rather than on the possibility that I or any other Councillor or MP could wave a magic wand, make some amazing speech in a Council Chamber and resolve their problem for them.

The Tenants began to do things for themselves. Plots of land on the estate that were derelict were cleaned up, and turned into play areas for the kids. I provided them with funding, first for a computer to do their administration, then for a big mower for dealing with their grounds maintenance, and for a shed to keep their equipment in. There are of course other measures that they could take. They could, for instance, begin to police the area themselves, and in short put the entire estate under their own management, and they could go on from there to argue that as they are doing this for themselves they will withhold a part of their Council Tax that should have gone to the Council to undertake these tasks it was failing to do.

But short of a social revolution, some of those things would bring them directly into conflict with the Council, and with the bourgeois state. In order to legitimise some of those things it is necessary to actually utilise the structures of the Council. If we had a real Workers Party what would it say to those workers on that estate in those conditions? It would say “Look you have proved that you can run your own lives, and your estate without the need for Landlords, for Council officials, for police or any of the other panoply of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Unfortunately, for some of the other things we need to do we need to have them legitimised. So, although we have shown we have no need of the Local Council to run our lives it will make lives easier if we get the Council to legalise some of the other things we need to do. The best way to do that is for us to take control of the Council, and to put that legal seal upon it.” (The reason I argue that this does not apply in Iraq is precisely because these alternative structures of bourgeois democracy such as Local Councils do not exist, and so workers could quite legitimately in the first place establish control of their communities through their own Workers Committees and allocate funds to them accordingly).

That gives no credibility to bourgeois democracy. It means the workers party takes its strength directly from the workers democracy below it, it merely says we are not ready for a struggle for power yet, and so we will legitimate the actions we have already decided upon. And if the bourgeois state then tries to ignore that legitimation it further drives a wedge between the bourgeois form of rule through bourgeois democracy, and the instrument of rule through the bourgeois state, it demonstrates even more clearly the fact that bourgeois democracy is merely a façade hiding the bourgeois class dictatorship.

I have argued, here, a similar line on a broader scale.
Some New Thinking
where I have argued that in conditions of a struggle to for instance, establish a monopoly of Labour as a means of raising wages it would be necessary to legitimise such a monopoly in the face of inevitable legal challenges to it by the bourgeoisie, that for as long as workers have not reached a level of class consciousness adequate for an assault on state power it would be necessary for a Workers Party to legitimise other actions of the working class, to seek to strengthen it in other ways.
But Marxists within this Workers Party would at all times be arguing for it not to limit its programme simply in order to obtain a majority of seats. The primary task of the Workers Party they would argue would be to build the Workers Democracy outside Parliament, to utilise elections for that purpose to propagandise for that workers democracy as an alternative to bourgeois democracy, to expose at every opportunity the sham nature of the bourgeois democracy. Only on the basis of the strength of the workers democracy outside Parliament would the strength of the Workers Party inside Parliament be reflected. As Engels put it the Parliamentary representation is an index of the maturity of the working class for socialism. Only at the point where the class consciousness of the working class, developed through that workers democracy, is sufficiently developed that a majority of the class have been won to the need for a socialist transformation, would a Parliamentary majority become possible, and that Parliamentary majority would then simply legitimise the dismantling of the bourgeois state, an action which would inevitably lead to an attempt at counter-revolution by the bourgeoisie, but who would then be the ones seen to be acting illegally, and whose slave-holders revolt would be the more easily subdued precisely because of the strength of the workers democracy built up outside Parliament, and educated in the inevitability of such a response.

In short, the attitude of Marxists to Bourgeois Democracy depends upon the conditions they find themselves in. At all times their attitude is determined not by some need to defend bourgeois democracy as progressive vis a vis other forms of class rule, but is determined to win the working class to its banner to become a Third Camp against Bourgeois Democracy and other forms of class rule. For us, winning the working class to that Third camp is the primary task, and at times, in order to be with the workers, in order to win them over, will require us to defend bourgeois democracy against fascism, when the workers are attached to bourgeois democracy. Equally, it may require us to defend a country ruled by a fascistic regime against bourgeois democracy, e.g. Iran, if doing so enables us to win the workers in that country to us. In neither case do we defend by giving credence to either bourgeois democracy or to fascism, in neither case do we utilise the ideas or institutions of our class enemy for such defence, but on the contrary organise that defence on the basis of socialist ideas, and organs of workers democracy, because that is the basis of proving the superiority of those ideas and those forms of organisation to the working class, and that is the basis of winning them to our banner.

In countries where bourgeois democracy is established, and where the working class has illusions in that bourgeois democracy, then generally we will use elections within that bourgeois democracy as a platform to expose its true nature, and to propagandise for workers democracy. Where elected we continue to use that position to support the self-activity of the class, to emphasise its need to organise its own democratic structures, and to put no faith in the bourgeois democracy resolving its problems. We recognise that without a strong workers democracy, outside Parliament, representing the development of a well entrenched class consciousness, Parliamentary majorities for a Workers Party are meaningless, because such a party would be forced either to limit its actions in Parliament to what the ruling class will allow it to get away with, or will simply sweep that Government away without the necessary forces existing outside Parliament to defend it. We recognise, however, that in conditions where the class consciousness of the class has reached a level where it recognises the need for a transformation of society such a transformation can be facilitated by a Workers Party legitimating the actions of the workers democracy outside Parliament, and legislating away the bourgeois state apparatus, thereby forcing the bourgeoisie to be the ones acting illegally when it tries to organise a counter-revolution. Such legitimation is not irrelevant in winning over other classes in society to the working class, or in minimising the basis of foreign intervention.

In conditions where bourgeois democracy is not an established fact, where the working class does not, therefore, suffer from illusions in it, and where bourgeois democratic forms – local councils, bourgeois parliaments etc. – do not exist, we should focus primarily on the development of workers democracy immediately as the basis for workers resolving their immediate problems, and organising their own self-administration. The development of such workers democracy does not at all equate to the need for an imminent struggle for power or overthrow of the rule of Capital. There may be many instances where the working class is too small for that to be a feasible proposition, but there is little point in imbuing such a working class with illusions in bourgeois democracy, when their problems can be better addressed by workers democracy even within capitalism, only to have to then wage a fight against those illusions at some later date.