Speech made by Sid French against the 1977 draft of the "British Road to Socialism". Merton Civic Hall , Wimbledon , 9th June, 1977 - just over a month before the establishment of the New Communist Party of Britain.

 Speech made by Sid French against the 1977 draft of the "British Road to Socialism". Merton Civic Hall , Wimbledon , 9th June, 1977 - just over a month before the establishment of the New Communist Party of Britain.

Whilst not pretending that everyone here is agreed about the draft British Road or what we should do about it, this great meeting is an indication of the tremendous concern about the attempted revision of our basic programme which exists in and around our Party . The meeting is part of a public nationwide debate called by the Executive Committee. It is beginning to look from the reactions in one or two parts of the country that the Executive Committee is not now so keen on the public debate as it may first have appeared to the naive. Criticising such a document does not normally lend itself easily to public meetings of this size and I therefore apologise if you feel there are too many quotations in this lecture. I am not here to criticise the style or even the odd section. The large majority of the Surrey District Committee among thousands of comrades up and down the country believes that this document is a revision of Marxism, that it is an attempt to compromise and to avoid the inescapable class struggle. As such it must be totally rejected and replaced by a Marxist-Leninist programme. In opening a discussion on our District Committee Mick James summarised the stages of the process laid out in the draft and I don't think it is too unkind to the authors to put his points in here. According to the draft we shall proceed as follows:

1. We build the broad democratic alliance. 2. In due course it convinces the majority of the people of the need for socialism. 3. They then elect a Left Labour government which carries out a policy that includes taking over some of the large firms and gradual democratisation of the State machine. 4. This process goes on with the steady improvement of living standards and the extension of democracy and freedom. As a result of this there is the election of successive Left governments. 5. Finally the Movement is strong enough to ease itself into a position of taking State power from the monopoly capitalists. 6. The socialist government will then operate on behalf of the sovereign parliament in a pluralist democracy. 7. If it is defeated in an election by a non-socialist Party it will surrender office and much of what it has been able to achieve will be negated. 8. If it is re-elected the process will start all over again. One is tempted to comment the very best of luck - you will certainly need it.

Capitalism today is in a profound crisis. Moreover, the economic crisis is deepening and this is not disputed by the apologists for capitalism themselves, many of whom concede that this is the worst crisis since the 1930s. In spite of this, the possibility of a revolutionary situation arising from the interplay of the deepening economic and political crisis is not even considered is not even mentioned in the present draft. That certainly explains a number of our problems today. Also it explains why when the overwhelming majority of parties in the world communist movement have a Marxist-Leninist position the minority which have not are in what were previously the so called imperialist mother countries of Western Europe and Japan. The struggle for parliamentary representation is a legitimate part of the revolutionary strategy as is the struggle to get a Left or socialist government reflecting the aspirations, responding to the demands, of the overall revolutionary movement. But it is part of our responsibility to ensure that the revolutionary forces, and through them the masses, are aware that any attempt to introduce a transfer of power via parliament will in all probability precipitate a major constitutional crisis. We should not baulk at this possibility but regard it as an opportunity to be taken advantage of, to be turned into a revolutionary situation in which the possibility of seizing power might well become a crucial necessity. Should the socialist revolution come in this way there would certainly be no question of forces and parties hostile to socialism being allowed to operate freely since the working class would most likely have to impose a state of emergency, something else which is not allowed for in the reformist Road to Socialism. It is not surprising that the lessons of Chile are not taken to heart in this draft. They do indeed come a little too near home to be comfortable. In a number of ways the Chilean Road to Socialism was similar to the one we are proposing. It was a constitutional road - it was to have been a peaceful road. In certain areas, as in the role of the armed forces and police, and in the concept of the democratisation of the State, an insufficiently deep class analysis contributed to the temporary defeat of the revolutionary process that was precipitated by the forces of national and international reaction. Of special significance and of the greatest pertinence to our discussion on the "British Road to Socialism" is the critical and self-critical analysis being made by the Chilean Communist Party in recent editions of World Marxist Review. In particular pages 34 and 35 of the January edition should be essential reading for anyone tempted to fall for the current soft sell of the British Road to Socialism. In addition to this Luis Corvalan in an important speech made in Moscow in January this year showed very clearly that the revolutionary fight to establish the broadest possible alliance against the ruling military Junta and American imperialism in no way negated the necessity of  establishing working class power - i.e., dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact so important and so specific is he on this point that I will quote the passage in full: "In the light of what has happened in Chile, it is now necessary to bring to power a popular government that can repel all the plots and putsches engineered by imperialism, domestic reaction and fascism. There is no question of establishing a proletarian dictatorship in the country today; but at a definite moment in its history that question will necessarily arise and will make the democratic gains more real." Everybody here presumable will agree with the need for the broadest possible alliance whether for immediate economic demands or on political issues. It is the attempt to substitute a government of the broad alliance for the dictatorship of the proletariat as the path to socialism which should concern us all. In order to get this conception over the new draft has to spread confusion on the nature of the working class. After reading some parts of the draft one wonders why it is necessary to have an alliance at all! The working class is so large there is surely no need. It is such a huge percentage of the population that it is itself the broad alliance. What is surprising is the attempt to present these anti-Marxist ideas as something new. They were all dealt with so many times before by all the great communist leaders from Marx down to Harry Pollitt. Lenin the nice Russian leader as distinct from those who invaded Czechoslovakia! said in 1918 -"Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism , always remains , and under capitalism is bound to remain , restricted , truncated , false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor. It is this truth which forms a most essential part of Marxist teaching, that Kautsk though 'Marxist' has failed to understand." It appears that some others have failed to understand it too. What is the real situation? We are experiencing the greatest capitalist crisis for close on 50 years. There are 1.5 million unemployed. "Experts" talk confidently of 3 million. The Daily Mail, a fortnight ago, forecast that shortly one third of all architects in Britain would be drawing the dole whilst millions are without proper houses. Last week it was the turn of medical students who are now promised unemployment. Whilst we cut social services and our health deteriorates. It has begun already for tens of thousands of trained teachers. Don't let the publicity about these sections detract from the plight of hundreds of thousands of young workers without jobs, without training and outside of socialist revolution little future indeed. For those fortunate enough to be in work there is a direct cut in living standards. On the other hand, there is the situation in the socialist world. Many including some who should know better in our own Party are apparently very concerned about a mythical lack of freedom there. They have been so affected that they fail to see the issue in class terms and talk of freedom as though it were something absolute irrespective of the economic and state power in each country. But what about freedom in Russia. What about the rights of dissidents? I'll tell you about the most famous of them all as reported in last Friday's June 3rd Evening Standard: "Solzhenitsyn has one million pounds say Swiss”. Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn reported an income of £192, 000 and a fortune of more than 1 million to the Swiss tax authorities in 1974 after he was banished from the Soviet Union. This official information was published today by Switzerland's top circulation newspaper Blick today in angry reaction to the author's latest book in which he calls Switzerland "A money-miserly republic of Lackeys". Perhaps Maisie a telegram of sympathy to the Swiss people from this great meeting inscribed -ever been had - might be in order. In the socialist countries, particularly in the Soviet Union, living standards are going up by roughly the same margin as they decline in the "free" world. Rents and food prices are basically stable. Though one has to confess that a rent increase was allowed in the Soviet Union as recently as 49 years ago! There have been no unemployed since the twenties. Even the Guardian is forced to admit despite the qualms of the Women's page of "Morning Star" that women are nearer to equality in that country than anywhere else in the world. Their children have four times the opportunity to go to a university as do our own. Instead of our basic position being a stressing of our pride of association with the greatest event of all human history and subsequent advance we seek to trim our sails. Therefore day after day we treat our readers to stories about so called dissidents and their antics. We have now discovered that fact that Russian men do not treat their women as equals and largely ignore the situation of women in the Soviet Union in all the professions throughout industry from manual skills to top management and of course in parliament and local government . In the YCL it is worse with almost open appeals to the Czech Young Communist League to revolt against its socialist government. If the British YCL's appeals to Czech youth are as successful as they unfortunately are in this country the Czech revolution has little to fear! It is clear that this opportunism is designed to ingratiate us with the electors of Britain. If it is, it isn't succeeding very quickly. Three weeks ago we had the biggest round of local elections and that very British phenomenon the swing was about 25% away from us. In the recent Dutch election our seats dropped from seven to two. Ah, but what about Italy? Well in Italy you have a completely different situation in two major respects. The electoral system and its pendulum swing have worked for us there, as we are the electoral alternative party to the Christian Democrats. We did not get into that position by policies of an Italian Road, the historical compromise, we want Italy in NATO, Britain should be in the Common Market etc., the Communist Party of Italy came out of the war as the alternative electoral party not through these policies but through its revolutionary struggle in the fascist factories, in the national armed uprising in 1944,  and against the background of the colossal sacrifices of Russian and other communists Unfortunately in Britain we are not the electoral alternative to the Tories. Therefore our opportunism is not even succeeding in buying us votes. I have already mentioned the state the YCL is in but all the Party EC does is to congratulate them on their advances. As we reach the end of yet another card issue campaign our membership is down and looks like ending up two or three thousand light. Morning Star circulation falls practically all the time despite an almost continuous campaign. Since January we have already lost over a thousand daily readers, a rate of 1% per month. You might expect our Party to be self-critical but no, instead two things flow from it, the first is that we rationalise it in this latest draft by agreeing to surrender the vanguard role of the Communist Party. The more we do so of course the more our members and supporters fail to see the need of a Marxist-Leninist party and tend to cease membership and activity. Nowhere is this more apparent over recent years than in that most decisive sphere the trade union movement. The TUC General Council and the General Secretary's Offices are littered with Left members of our broad alliance who were previously members of our Party. Hugh Scanlon, Lawrence Daly and Clive Jenkins are only a small section but they prove the point. Secondly we have a very comfortable explanation. We don't need to be self-critical because we are not responsible; it is the wickedness of the Soviet Union that is holding us back. Therefore disassociation from the CPSU is the magic key which will open all doors for us in Britain. Dispensing with such unpleasant things as the dictatorship of the proletariat opens up the road to even further disassociation from the Soviet Union which some of our leaders now forlornly think is the way to ingratiate us with the electorate. This dream is not working, and will never work. We are not suggesting that everything is perfect in the Soviet Union any more than it will be in the Socialist Society of Britain but it clearly is the greatest card which British communists today possess. One could spend all night on the points that are wrong in this draft. The most important is the attempt finally to ditch any conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Of course we are all democrats but anyone not knowing too much about politics will believe that we were engaging in a schoolroom exercise in which the prize was awarded to whichever pupil could get the word democracy in the most number of times. The pages are not numbered but have a look at the page which starts line 1231. There are only 65 lines on the page and the word democracy appears on 15 separate occasions. This may be the most extreme example but the whole document has the same disease. I know that Shakespeare was not a Russian poet but he did say something about "Methinks thou do protest too much". The draft does however reluctantly refer to the 14 countries which are on the road to socialism in the world today. What it doesn't point out is that nowhere in the world is anybody advancing to socialism by applying the theories of or under the leadership of men like Karl Kautsky , Ramsay MacDonald. or even Jim Callaghan. In fact these 14 have all had four things in common. 1. They arose out of violent confrontation. 2. They did not give promises that they would hand back power to the capitalists if defeated in a free election, whatever that is. 3. They have all established a dictatorship of the proletariat. 4. They were all led by a vanguard Marxist-Leninist party.

Now we all accept without any reservations whatsoever the desirability of bringing about socialism as peacefully as possible. There is no doubt for instance that if Monaco is the last country to go to socialism that Princess Grace will find it difficult to lead much armed resistance. However, what we must not do is allow our hopes for the future to blind ourselves to what has happened in the past. The historic world breakthrough which was made under the leadership of Lenin's party arose out of a struggle against the bloody imperialist war where millions had been slaughtered. Then following the revolution many more were murdered by the armies of intervention. Then came the blockade by the "democracies" which led to the death of millions more. Then came the second world war when 20 million Soviet youth gave their lives to save mankind. But of course it wasn't only the Soviet Union. We have the world experience of what reaction will do in the twentieth century to prevent social advance. The war in Spain , the American invasion of Vietnam , the US backed fascists in Chile, the British overthrow of Jagan in Guyana , the overthrowing of the elected communist government in Kerala . Many things may be in doubt but one thing is absolutely certain that if as we hope we take the peaceful road to socialism in Britain, the main , in fact the overwhelming factor making it possible will be the change in the balance of world forces which the Soviet Union is primarily responsible. Having use the word democracy as often as possible and expressed the almost racing certainty that we shall go to socialism the peaceful way line 1483 in the draft is fairly natural "The declared position of the labour movement, including the Communist Party, is that it will respect the verdict of the electors, and that a Left government will stand down if it is defeated in an election ." As I have already indicated no successful Marxist party or socialist government has ever given such an undertaking. It is not only the recipe for disaster - the Australian Labour Party's recent history offers some advice on this. It is also a formula for undermining the Leninist understanding of the state. If we were to stand down does anybody seriously expect the ruling class just having mobilised its resources , its lies , its tricks , its whole weight, then to hand back to us like the gentlemen they are. They may have been taught social conduct on the cricket grounds of Eton and Harrow, but we are talking about what they have been taught in the class rooms about class rule. There appears to be some confusion judging from the correspondence in the Morning Star and comment among the supporters of the new draft as to whether we are ditching finally the dictatorship of the proletariat or only the unfortunate words! Happily for historians but unfortunately for Italian workers our mentors the Italian Party are in no doubt. According to the Morning Star February 18th 1976, the Head of their International Department, Comrade Pajetta said that they have long abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat. The working class should have a leading guiding role in society, but only as a result of a concensus . "This does not contradict pluralism. Capitalist society has long lived through a period of bourgeois democracy with many parties, and the middle class has had a genuinely predominant social, cultural and political influence inside the party system." To read some of the supporters of the draft you can be sure if Marx and Lenin were here today they would of course be voting for it lock, stock and barrel! Unfortunately for these apologists Marx and Lenin are not here today. They, like mary other communist leaders were never men to mince words and when they believed that something should be valid in all circumstances, they said so. That is why they laid it out so clearly, their views on the absolute necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the critique of the Gotha programme which of course was a polemic with a social democratic programme, Marx said "between capitalist and communist society lies a period of the revolutionary transformation of one into the other . Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1916 that is a year before the Russian revolution, Lenin wrote that slogan which you can

see up there if the sight of it doesn't make your eyes blanch . It continues "The dictatorship is state power based directly on violence and in the twentieth century - as in the age of civilisation generally the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat ." There are some of course arguing 1916 was a long time ago, if Lenin were alive today he would take a different line. Didn't the Party leadership in this country abandon the whole idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the first edition of the British Road in 1951? They certainly didn't and if they had, they didn't tell John Gollan they had because in 1961 writing on behalf of the Executive Committee in a booklet appropriately called "Democracy and the Class Struggle" he said among other things "these 44 years of Soviet experience have proved both the essential need and the historically transient character of the dictatorship of the proletariat." Why then should our leadership be trying to hide the whole idea rather than try to win the support for it as the only road to socialism. Is it only because the words are not the sort of language that very English institutions like the MCC prefer to use? Well that is a matter of opinion, and I would like to tell you the opinion of one very successful communist leader Comrade Zhivkov when he said on behalf of the Bulgarian Party at the 1969 World Conference of Communist Parties: "What is unnatural in this case is that certain communist functionaries join in such Criticism on the 'undemocratic' nature of the system in socialist countries and the ruling role of the Communist Parties there . "Criticising the social system in socialist countries they, unfortunately, deviate from the Marxist-Leninist teaching of the state, ignoring the scientific, class analysis of the progress and requirements of socialist construction in our countries , they , in fact , proceed from the notion of 'ideal' bourgeois democracy of 'pure' democracy: its multi-party system, opposition parties, struggle for electoral votes, parliamentary manoeuvres in forming this or that government etc ." There cannot be any doubt about one aspect of the 1951 original version of the British Road. It clearly laid out the need for a Marxist-Leninist party playing a vanguard role. Now of course the Party leadership has abandoned it . However, pleasant this may seem in the comfort of this hall, it is a dream world. In fact when the workers see the Labour Party moving to the Left after a socialist government has been elected many of them will turn even more strongly towards that government and not towards the Communist Party . No, this is not the road to socialism, this is the road to opportunism and disaster. It must be defeated at the coming congress . The size of this great meeting is a sign that the forces who can do this are gathering. Therefore step up the fight everywhere possible in the next five months to ensure the defeat and for total rejection of this draft. Socialism will not be built anywhere least of all in the oldest capitalist country in the world without a mass Marxist—Leninist party . A party based as it must be on proletarian internationalism, proud to be associated with the great victories of the socialist world and in particular the Soviet Union and as such taking its place in the world array of Communist Parties. Win, lose or draw in November we pledge ourselves to continue the fight for the building of such a party.