[LET ME give you a word of the…]

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LET ME give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle.. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those. who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did Frederick Douglass, American anti-slavery Michael Foot tries to invoke the memory of Trotsky against his (Foot's) opponents in the labour movement today. The best answer to Foot, expressing the attitude of Marxist revolutionaries to the struggle to deepen, develop and preserve democracy, is given in the words of Leon Trotsky himself, writing 48 years ago Print union leader Keys says: Break the Tory law' And Foot.: ploughing up the ground.

and it never will WHEY you look concretely a how the existing British parliamentary system might be displaced by workers' councils, the difierence between Marxist democrats and the burntout Parliamentarians becomes clear.

Propaganda by Marxists will not by itself win enough workers to workers' councils to threaten the parliamentary system. The relevant historical experience on which the proposal is based is too remote.

Even if it is partly eroded, belief in the parliamentary system as the form of democracy is very deep and powerful in the British people and the labour movement. And the system still has a lot of flexibility.

Soviets have most often emerged in conditions where parliamentary democracy was non-existent or limiied. The precondition for soviets in Britain to move from the realm of propaganda, historical accounts, or analysis of the Polish experience of 1980, to become practical working class politics, would be obviously - mass lief that parliament is an accessible democratic institution or can be such.

Councils of Action have existed in Britain (1920 ). Something like an incipient soviet emerged in Durham during the 1926 general strike. But even if a vast network of Councils of Action were now to emerge in a general strike, it is unlikely that they would starkly counterpose themselves to the existing system, as an alternative system of democratic rule - unless there were a serious erosion of belief in parliament as THE democratic system. The use of elections would be a major weapon of the ruling class and the Right to derail and demobilise any such general strike movement.

How will such an erosion occur? Even if a large revolutionary Marxist party existed, it could not occur as a result of its propaganda alone. It will occur when the ruling class - in response to the exigencies of the struggle to keep or exert control - is forced to begin to abrogate its own system, to downgrade it and to rob its processes of credibility.

Thus the existing system would be undermined from two sides - by growing self confidence, self-organisation, and disillusionment among the working SP: about France:

class, and by growing impatience or desperation among the ruling class.

The recent decision of Lord Denning and the Law Lords on London's fares is a limited example of this sort of process - which Marxists see as inevitable.

But if the Marxist expectation that the ruling class will not be bound by its own parliamentary rules is wrong, then very probably we will be confined to propaganda - and the Right and soft Left has little to worry about.

They worry in fact because they are not quite naive liberals. Foot in his Observer articles talked of the danger of the 'stormtroopers', and says that the Left gains from the Parliamentary niceties because the Right has a tradition of fighting and the Left does not. He knows the political farts of life (bu he lacks the socialist seriousness to call new facts into being — like the fact of a working-class militia, for example).

Meekly

What happens when the bourgeoisie does begin to disrupt democracy and attack it? The labour movement will fight back.

We will not abandon bourgeois democracy or democratic rights.

Soviets may well arise in defence of democracy - as the only way to continue what was valuable in bourgeois democracy, as it is abandoned by the bourgeoisie.

We will defend democratic rights tooth and nail - with guns. Most of the right wing 'professional democrats' won't.

The German Social Democrats helped the Junker army to massacre revolutionary workers in 1919 under the banner of preserving parliamentary democracy: they meekly surrendered it to Hitler in 1933. The Party leader in the Reichstag, Otto Wels, meekly offered his and his party's collaboration to Hitler, who didn't need it.

So it is not propaganda for soviets, or disrespect for parliament, by the Marxists, that worries the Right. It is not even entirely a matter of grabbing a convenient demarcationline to serve an organisational purpose.

The dividing line is extraparliamentary struggle now and the main target is not Trotskyists and soviets but the serious reformist left.

The print union SOGAT is now proposing strike action in open. proud deliance of the law, against the Tebbit Bill.

Art the leaders of the Labour Party seriously proposing to rule out such action? Are they seriously proposing that the labour movement should allow itself to be crippled?i?

Yes they are! In any case they are not fighting back. Their rallying cry is a lie because they will not fight back to defend democracy either. We will.

They counterpose the existing parliamentary system to the needs of the living labour movement. They stand for an exaggeratedly slavish legalism -and against resistance to a government that is all outrage against the spirit of even bourgeois democracy Liberal It is the socialists who reject Foot's fetish of the existing forms of parliamentary democracy, or at least reject the rules that would sanctify Thatcher's work as the distillate of pure parliamentary democracy, who oppose the 'sacrifice of generations' We can conceive of a different and better society, and we think the labour movement should fight for it. Politically prostrate, Foot can only hope for a new, tepid, Labour government, to do things more humanely than Thatcher.

Fort is no longer even notionally a socialist: his partist and fascist bourgeoisie.

mere illusion!

and reaction!

worker.

power..

the flag of true communism.

Workers adhering to democratic understand that it is not enough democracy must be regained.

elections can change this.

the state and are still doing so.

programme is liberal humanitarian administration of capitalism.

For Foot now, everything leads to, and must be subordinated to, the holy grail of again holding office and again trying to administer capitalism more humanely. He wants to soften the blows of British capitalism's decline, but no doubt will be willing again to obey the dictats of the IMF, and to make secret deals to sustain the statt apparatus of potential vic ence against the working class (in the same way that he conspired behind the back of the Labour Party to update Britain's nuclear weapons).

That is the grand conclusion from his great historical excursion into Stalinism - don't go for 'remote ends' or a different system, go for a new middle-of-the-road or right wing Labour administration.

He displays a holy terror that Proportional Representation may be brought in by the Liberals and Social Democrats. His conclusion is to mimic the Labour Right (who are politically Social Democrats), and stick to the safe ground that he believes is likely to be acceptable to the electorate.

He is willing to bowalerise the living historica. prosocialism must further to defend democracy; cess by abstracting from it the struggle of socialists for a socialist solution.

He talks of the 'treason' of those on the Left whom he says are now reconciled to defeat in the next election.

But it is the witchhunters who are willing to gut the Party to make it safe for themselves who commit this treason. The Left is not reconciled to electoral defeat.

Minimalism

There is another, and more deadly, sort of defeatism, though - inner political defeatism such as Foot's which abandons the very goal of socialism, and disguises this with a great show of commitment to electoral victory.

Even a Foot Labour government would be better than Thatcher, if only because it would be more amenable to working class pressure. But what Foot leaves out is this: if such a government does not attempt radical solutions to the crisis of British society, it will fail miserably, probably preparing the way for worse than Thatcher.

The policy of Labour minimalism is not just the sure road to the failure of a new Labour government. It will be one more nail in

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Books and pamphlets that you should read Anzi honk-hurning: as society disintegrated in the 1930s, democracy seemed irrelevant Nazi book-burning: as society the coffin of bourgeois democracy.

In the 1930s the effete bourgeois liberals and their radical understudies repelled the rebel youth who were being ground down by the capitalist crisis. Some went over to fascism. Those who thought they were choosing communism found Stalinist totalitarianism acceptable in part because of revulsion against Foot-style worship of passivity in the cloak of formal democracy.

The disintegration of society seemed to show the impotence and irrelevance of democracy. Democracy had either to be renewed and continued, as a weapon socialists fighting to re-make society, or sink into discredit along with capitalism.

Fetishist

There is a fine scene in one of Luis Bunuel's films.

A woman sits in a chair, and a man, a foot fetishist, crouches in Iront or ner, at har fondling her foot, putting it against his face, kissing it.

His sexuality is expressed in this way because in his subconscious the foot has taken on all the meaning that other people find in a partner's body. The In a pallici o vuuj. man is experiencing his ecstasy, locked into a private world - and the woman finds it impossible to suppress a big bored yawn.

Obsessed

The symbolic links in the man's subconscious, rooted in childhood memories and associations (and childish misapprehensions) mean that her foot has the power to trigger his emotions. But they can't mean anything to her. They exist only in his private world.

That is how the legalistic concerns of Michael Foot's political ancestors appearStalin ed to the radical youth in the '30s. And today the PLP are the foot-fetishists of democracy.

They are obsessed with their own symbols and reminiscences of the infancy of parliamentary democracy. The labour movement has its own concerns. In the here and now, the PLP fails to speak to more and more workers about the things that concern them..

In the present condition of Britain, either democracy will be linked with an effective programme of socialist transformation, or democracy will be radically umdermined and discredited.

Hopelessness

Only the struggle for a workers' government which will base itself on the roused and active masses of the working class that is, on mass workers' democracy - offers a road out of Britain's impasse.

Only a labour movement which is willing and eager to use its strength in industry and on the streets to challenge the government, and to deny its claims to démocratic validity, will be able to rally the forces to carve out that road.

Foot's reasoning and its conclusion of hopelessness offers nothing to socialism and not much to democracy, either.

He talks airily and at length about parallels which he supposes to exist between the Labour Party since the 1979 defeat and the Party after 1931 - as if we are on a roundabout with a fixed recurrence of events. He does not notice that the apparently circular motion is on a downward spiral - that Britain is declining and rotting, that Thatcher's drastic action needs to be met with a working class alternative for drastic action in our interests.

The labour movement needs to rouse itself into a campaign to bring down this undemocratic and anti working class government.

We need a perspective of hope and belief in the possibility of an alternative system. The labour movement needs to have its vague commitment to socialism honed sharp and clear, in a campaign to fight the Tories with everything we've got and to prepare a working class socialist alterhative. Martin Thomas outlines some aspects of the Communist Manifesto.

THE 'Communist Manifesto' of 1848, together with The Poverty of Philosophy' (1847), was Marx's and Engels' first statement of their theory of class-struggle socialism. And as the first statement, is still fresh and vivid today as not even the most brilliant re-statements can be.

The Marxist theory did not drop from the sky or spring suddenly from the private genius of Marx and Engels. They based themselves on painstaking study of earlier writers and, decisively, on their own experience in the workers' movement.

Marx and Engels started their political activity as radical democrats. They were educated and won over to revolutionary socialism by the workers communist groups they came into contact with.

Instinctive

Later Engels recorded: "when it appeared, we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. In 1847 two kinds of people were considered Socialists.

"On the one hand were the adherents of the various Utopian systems... On the other, the manifold types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate social abuses through their various universal panaceas and all kinds of patchwork without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases, people who stood outside the labour movement and who looked for support rather to the 'educated' classes.

"The section of the working class, however, which demanded a radical reconstruction of society, Socialist Organiser, Thursday Engels convinced that mere political revolutions were not enough, then called itself Communist.

"It was still a roughhewn, only instinctive, somewhat crude Communism. Yet... Socialism was, on the Continent at least, quite respectable, whereas . Communism was the opposite.

"And since we were very decidedly of the opinion as early as then that 'the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself • we could have no hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose."

Socialism had become a political movement with the French Revolution of 17891799. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, radicals sought to find a road to the society of fraternity, and equality which the revolution of the French middle class had tantalisingly promised but been unable to create.

Schemes for cooperatives, 'labour banks' miniature socialist communities, were one road. Supporters of each scheme, of course, considered the rival schemes wrong.

'Social quacks'

Marx criticised the utopians, too-but showed how they reflected a real stage in the development of the socialist movement, when the working class was still barely developed. Their /OTA reachonar character. inculcated universal asceticism and social The Manifesto was in fact the manifesto of an organisation-the Communis League-directly descended from Babeuf's conspiracy.

What Marx meant by the "reactionary" of Babouvist doctrine, he had explainec some years earlier: "The crude commun ism is only the culmination of this levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived How little this annulment of private property is in reality appropriation in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor. and undemanding man who has But has n In short, this communism did not propose to develo system human liberation including everything positive in bourgeois individual freedom. It did not propose to strip that individual freedom ot its competitive, alienated ratrace character, and to lift the burden of material inequality which makes that freedom a mockery for the exploited majority under capitalism.

Marx later called

barMary took, from the Babouvist tradition its programme of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the common ownership the means But true e down, succeede winning the ammuni League to a programme of socialism as a step for human liberation which goe beyond and eNcompasses alt he positive achievements o bourgeois civilisation. In the restone pain or Manesiu.

capitalism's tremendou:

development of the produc tive forces, which makes it

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