SIT THERE - CLASS FIGHTER Problems - and Policies

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Healey go ill not serv working class' çovern ussed what We argue that it is not enough to get a new Labour government - though the achievement of such a government even under a Dennis Healey is of course a central objective of the labour movement. We need more. We need to fight for accountability in the labour movement and for socialist policies. And we need to organise and agitate to push that fight to the most radical conclusions.

With the present political positions of the Labour Party and even of the leaders of the left, we will get a Labour government which is fundamentally more of the same, possibly with radical trimmings. It will not serve the working class, and in present conditions it will not be able to adequately serve the ruling class. It will not even placate them.

The right wing know this: and so they want to make the Labour Party a stable bourgeois governing party again by means of a purge.

The only serious alternative to the right wing programme is for the Left to go forward - to fight for a Labour government which is controlled by the labour movement rather than the established state apparatus and which starts a real attack the wealth and entrenched power of the ruling class. We propose a fight to transform the labour movement so that it becomes able to create such a government.

As revolutionary Marxists, we believe that there must be a socialist revolution - a clean sweep of the capitalists and the establishment of the state power of the working class. The big majority of the labour movement don't yet share our views. But a common need and determination is shared to oppose and fight the Tory government and to oppose any moves, even by the Labour Party in government, to load the cost of capitalist decay and crisis onto the shoulders of the working class.

We can organise a joint fight for a workers' government which begins the assault on capitalist power.

That does not mean losing ourselves in consoling fantasies: if the Labour Party really were to strike at the power and wealth of the bosses, they would strike back, using • their army and state forces.

Rhythms Even under a workers' government, the working class itself would only serve and protect its own interests by organising itself outside the rhythms, norms and constraints of Parliamentary politics, expanding its factory shop stewards' committees, combine committees, trades councils, etc., and creating new action committees, to be an industrial power that could as necessary dispense with the Parliamentarians.

But to counterpose the full revolutionary programme of a state based on workers' councils to the actual political processes within the actual labour movement is to make the revolutionary programme empty words. To the labour movement activists engaged in the fight for Labour democracy and socialist policies, we propose the objective of a Labour government based on the labour movement and taking serious measures against capitalist power.

We propose this to serious reformist and semirevolutionary militants, without demanding prior agreement on our view of the full revolutionary impliSocialist Organiser

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dtarpx.. 10. 108 November 11 1982 Page 14

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The last SO delegate meeting disı

we mean by 'workers' government