REVOLUTION OR REFORM

Part 1. Ramelson opts for the peaceful road of stagnation Bert Ramelson, industrial organizer of the Communist Party, has attacked the Socialist Labour League in an article in the CP's paper 'Morning Star'.

Without mentioning the SLL by name, Ramelson has made accusations about League policies under the headline: 'Ultra-left tactics hold back advance'.

"To impose upon the rank-and-file movement political objectives which at present only a minority could be got to support would be to completely narrow it—to the joy of the right wing,' Ramelson writes.

'It is the negation of leadership in developing class struggle to narrow participation by imposing tasks beyond the level of political achievement.

*This not only makes it more difficult to achieve successes in immediate struggles, but hampers the revolutionary movement in its efforts to help workers learn from their experience in struggle the need to change society'.

This is essentially a shevik position against which Lenin conducted an all-out struggle from 1903 on wards. Lenin understood that i f workers learned from their 'experience in struggle' alone, they would never rise beyond the level of spontaneity.

The Bolshevik position was that the Marxist theory of revolutionary leadership had to be brought into the working class's practice, not by imposing it, but in a necessary conflict with workers' spontaneous action. Only this conflict can produce the consciousness needed for the working class to transform itself into the ruling class.

Spontaneously, the working class will always fight against capitalism. It has done this in Britain for over 200 years, since long before political parties of the working class were formed.

But without revolutionary theory, the working class could go on for another 200 years and never take the powers away from the capitalist class.

cadres Ideas must be brought into the labour movement which go beyond workers' immediate trade union experience of fighting for extra money or in defence of trade union rights. This requires training revolutionary cadres within the trade union movement.

Ramelson states that:

The involvement of workers in struggle on issues of struggle [sic] helps to develop political appreciation of the nature of capitalist society and can indeed change rebels into revolutionaries.' But this will never happen unless the question of power is made the central issue.

It is only by taking revolutionary demands into practice that the working class will make a real advance in their understanding. By making bringing down the Tory government the main demand, the working class sees its real enemy clearly, and learns from this.

Ramelson is guilty of the most 'narrow' thinking in dividing 'immediate struggles' off from 'the revolutionary movement's efforts to help workers learn from their experience in struggle the need to change society,' quoting his Menshevik formula.

There is no dividing wall between them and only an out-and-out reformist, posing as a revolutionary, could invent one.

Transitional demands are precisely those which express the immediate needs of the working class but which challenge the existing political framework if they are to be carried out.

Trotsky described transitional demands as 'stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of by the frequent unity between the Stalinists and the right wing. Septembers Congress, Communist Party delegates voted to allow the bureaucracy to enter collaborationist talks with the government to introduce the pay laws.

The Stalinists are ascribing to the working class an unwillingness and unpreparedness to challenge for state power, which in fact are their own failings. They are blaming the working class for their own weakness, which is the weakness of all middle-class strata.

History shows that in all great struggles, the middle class has no independent position but will go over to the strongest side in a crisis. The middle class depends on the bourgeoisie and acts as its spokesmen and administrators.

It is a characteristic of the petty-bourgeoisie to surrender without a fight to the ruling class. It is in their class nature as appendages of the bourgeoisie. Leaders compromise Stalinism grew out of precisely these attitudes prevailing among some sections of the leadership of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s who following Lenin's death, abandoned the world revolution out of fear of the strength of imperialism.

So it isn't the working class that it not ready to take on the Tory government in a General Strike; it is Ramelson himself.

The only thing that in fact holds back the working class from a revolutionary confrontation with the ruling class is its own leaders, whether Labour Party or Communist Party, and their determination to compromise the fight.

But things cannot stay this way for long. The old ways of fighting, of purely trade union struggle ending always in a compromise, are being made obsolete by the quicklyOn the docks, for example, the National Dock Labour Scheme has been seriously eroded because the struggles over the Devlin and JonesAldington Reports, container depots, unregistered ports, supplementary dockers, and other issues have all been conducted as single issues and confined to isolated sections of workers by the CP.

The demand by the Socialist Labour League for a united fight by dockers, lorry drivers, and container depot workers for the nationalization of the whole port transport industry under workers' control and without compensation is increasingly seen as the only answer to immediate struggles' on the docks as well as raising a transitional demand which will pose the question of political power.

Similarly on the question of basic democratic rights. The two major trade unions have been fined by the National Industrial Relations Court, the rent Act pushed through, strike pickets arrested, and free negotiations for wages made illegal. Single-issue protest politics of 'Kill the Bill' and 'No Wage Freeze' have been unable to prevent these things.

The SLL correctly identified Tory policies the moment this government got into office in June 1970 as an unprecedented attack working-class rights, made inevitable by the crisis and based on new laws, which could only be defeated by a General Strike to force the government to resign.

But this demand must of necessity start with minority' in support. If it were otherwise, it would mean the working class were spontaneously revolutionary and Marxism would never have been historically necessary.

Ramelson's real concern, however, is not whether ideas have minority support. His aim is to keep the working class away from revolutionary ideas altogether.

CONTINUED TI

Thursday