The Practical Task It is not the job of the Left here or on the Continent just to beat its breast in horror and indignation at the role played by the Labour Party or the Social Democracy. We must also face the practical task of all revolutionaries in these countries-to break the ideological grip of such parties (and the reformist Communist Parties as well) on the organised working class in the process of building a revolutionary alternative.
Labour's Crimes We can list some of the crimes perpetrated by the Labour Party against the British and international working class: - the wage freeze; the calculated re-introduction of unemployment; the campaign of calumny against the Seamen, the 1966 dock strikers, and the Ford workers of 1968; the subordination of British foreign policy to the strategic demands of American imperialism; the capitulation to racism in its egislation on immigrants; the continuing attempt to hamstring the shop-stewards committees by by-passing them through productivity deals while integrating the T.U. leaders more firmly into the state appartus; the attacks on the Welfare State. This list is long and painful, and we should of course utilise these and other examples in fighting the Labour Party and especially Labour Ministers.
What the Bosses Wanted But more than anything else, we must understand exactly what the ruling class expected of instrument of the ruling class embedded in the lives and organisations of the working class; how it has been used during the last six years to try to carry out policies which the ruling class did not feel it could impose through the Conservative Party without a head-on collision between it and a strong working class, a collision which might have created tremendous explosions, even a general strike. The Balance of Payments crisis of 1964 was certainly partly due to an artificial pre-election boom. But that crisis was far more the result of a long-standing and deepening crisis of British capitalism which could only be eased by a big modernisation and concentration of British industry, a renovation of management technique and a drastic reformulation of British capitalism's investment habits.
It was the task of the Labour Government to come to the help of this ailing capitalism. For six years now, every action of this Government has proceeded from its total rejection of the class struggle (of the necessity to ally itself with that class which elected it to office) and instead again and again we have seen it speak and act in the name of "The National Interest which has logically meant nothing more than *What is good enough for British capital is good for British workers too."
To "make Britain viable" has meant something else to the majority of workers in this country; what the whole idea means is an increase in the rate of profit and of the rate of exploitation of labour power, or in other words, less wages per unit of work and more units of work per hour. But the trade-union movement, accustomed to 20 years of full employment, and with the shop-steward movement as its backbone, has been a tremendous obstacle to this process. The bourgeoisie preferred a Labour Government to try and handle tha inh hora. co
BALLOT BOX Tavdeveloping actions which become more and more acute in form and logically lead to insurrection against the capitalist State, In this mass struggle which develops into civil war, the leading party of the proletariat must as a rule secure all legal positions, using them as auxiliary centres of its revolutionary activity and incorporating them in its main plan of campaign, the campaign of mass struggle.
11) One such auxiliary centre is the rostrum of the bourgeois parliament. It is no argument against participation in the parliamentary struggle that parliament is a bourgeois State institution. The communist party does not enter this institution to function there as an organic part of parliament, but in order by action inside parliament to help the masses to shatter the State machine and parliament itself...
12) This activity inside parliament, which at the first request of the party central committee, so that in any given situation resignation from parliament can be carrie in unison...
4) The communist member of parliamen obliged, on the decision of the central committee, to combine legal with illegal In those countries where communist dep enjoy immunity under bourgeois law, thi immunity must be used to support the p illegal activities in the fields of organisati propaganda.
5) Communist deputies must subordinate their activities in parliament to party acti outside parliament. Demonstrative legisla proposals should be regularly submitted instructions of the party and its central committee, not with the idea that they w accepted by the bourgeois majority, but 1 purposes of propaganda, agitation, and or