WeeklyWorker

12.06.2025
Members of the League of Struggle in 1897. Standing: Alexander Malchenko, P Zaporozhets, Anatoly Vaneyev; Sitting: V Starkov, Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov

Learning some elementary Russian

Worthwhile unity can only be forged around a democratically agreed programme. But that necessarily involves minorities accepting majority votes. Demanding that majorities discard their programme and compromise on their principles is a non-starter, says Jack Conrad

Given that most of the left is still trapped within the narrow horizons of reformism, economism and tailing spontaneity, it is doubtless positive that the Talking About Socialism comrades have taken time out to write, debate, amend and agree a draft programme for the mass Communist Party in Great Britain that we in the Forging Communist Unity process are all committed to build.

Well, let us hope that is what the comrades have in mind. For us - that is, the CPGB - it needs emphasising that the communist programme is no pious list of election promises or a factional declaration, let alone a hastily written concoction designed to bring about unity for the sake of unity.

No, the programme deals with the nature of the historical period, sets out key principles, maps out the long-term strategic approach and establishes the immediate demands needed to organise the working class into a ruling class. A mass Communist Party, as we shall argue, grows out of the programme, not the other way round.

Positively, the leading TAS comrades, Nick Wrack and Ed Potts, tell us that they now reject Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional programme and the whole so-called ‘transitional method’. Clearly, however, that does not include all TAS members. So the worth of what TAS can draft, debate and agree over the course of just a few short weeks is very much open to question.

True, Karl Marx could dictate the whole of the maximum section of the Programme of the French Workers’ Party almost without stopping to take breath. But he was a genius … and moreover had decades of prior programmatic experience dating back to the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Progamme of the Communist Party in Germany (1848). No less to the point, the minimum section of the Programme of the French Workers’ Party was a year in preparation … and, of course, it had to be debated and agreed by the delegates of the November 1880 founding congress in Le Havre.

Hodgepodge

My fear, though, is that the TAS comrades will produce a hodgepodge, an incoherent nonsense, a parody of the maximalism of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. After all, despite having a whole history of active involvement on the left, the leading TAS comrades have no history whatsoever of championing the need for, working towards, let alone drafting a Communist Party programme. So we are dealing with experienced comrades with no principled programmatic experience. Put another way, their draft programme has its origins in their factional response to our CPGB Draft programme within the context of Forging Communist Unity.

This article will use the Russian experience to shed light on, inform and take forward our FCU process. Why? Because the Bolsheviks, beginning as the majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, went on to successfully lead a revolution that shook - and still shapes - the world. Yes, that revolution eventually went down to defeat through the 1928-29 counterrevolution within the revolution and finally the 1989‑91 counterrevolution within the counterrevolution. But that does nothing to diminish the historical significance of the Russian experience.

Obviously, Britain in 2025 is a very different country from Russia in 1900. Britain is reliant on finance capital and increasingly parasitic. Russia was a colonising semi-colony and dominated by peasant agriculture. The times are very different too. In 2025 there is not a single communist party worthy of the name anywhere on the planet. In 1900 social democratic parties were growing apace and, especially in Germany, with its trade unions, co‑ops, counselling services, libraries, clubs, pubs and schools, constituted a state within the state. It seemed inevitable that working class power would be firmly secured within a matter of a few decades.

To get the idea, have a look at the opening scene - the 1900 new year’s eve celebrations staged by the SDP - in Margarethe von Trotta’s film Rosa Luxemburg. Its leading personalities exude supreme confidence in the future. Nowadays, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”.1

Nevertheless, the history of the Russian Revolution, because it was so intense, because it involved so many varied stages, because it drew on everything that was advanced in Europe, because it ended in victory, is packed full of unequalled lessons for communists that today we ignore at our peril. Of course, while seeking to learn, we cannot copy. That would be a fool’s game.

Plekhanov’s group

The Emancipation of Labour group, the first Marxist organisation in Russia - actually they lived in Swiss exile - was acutely aware of the necessity of programme. It was founded, remember, in 1883, when there was no working class movement in Russia to speak of and the RSDLP was nothing more than an vague idea. The group, it should be added, consisted of Georgi Plekhanov, Vasily Ignatov, Vera Zasulich, Leo Deutsch and Pavel Axelrod. Together they produced some still classic texts, began a sustained polemical war against the Narodnik populists and published and distributed many works by Marx and Engels in the Russian language for the first time.

In 1884 Plekhanov wrote the ‘Programme of the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labour Group’. Its opening point says it all: “The Emancipation of Labour Group sets itself the aim of spreading socialist ideas in Russia and working out the elements for organising a Russian workers’ socialist party.”2 Hence, programme came first. The party would grow from the programme.

2nd draft

A second draft followed shortly afterwards. Like the first draft, what is noticeable is the discounting of the liberal bourgeoisie as the source of any ‘initiative’ against tsarism. That said, the socialist intelligentsia should continue with the attempt to rouse the bourgeoisie, including by means of terror: ie, individual assassination of tsarist bigwigs. However, unlike the first draft, now the leading role in the fight for political freedom is given to the working class. Note, the Plekhanov group discounted the idea of immediately introducing any kind of socialism. A break with the long held perspectives of the Narodniks - theirs was to be based on peasant communes and the nationalisation of all economic resources. Capitalism, for the Plekhanov group, would have to develop, alongside political freedom, before socialism appeared on the agenda. It other words a classic two-stage Marxist programme.

The Plekhanov group influenced a definite layer of socialist intellectuals in Russia, not least the short-lived League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, founded in 1895, by amongst others Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and Julius Martov. It united some 20 workers’ circles in St Petersburg and issued agitational leaflets aimed at exposing factory conditions and readying workers for political action. However, before they could publish the first edition of their paper, Rabocheye Dyelo, the Okhrana secret police raided. Amongst those arrested was Ulyanov (Lenin).

The same fate befell five of the delegates to the 1898 founding congress of the RSDLP held in Minsk. They included all three central committee members - there were only nine delegates in total. The first congress agreed the party name, a federalist constitution and tasked the St Petersburg Union of Struggle with preparation of a policy document. That job was done by Peter Struve - soon to become a revisionist, then a liberal and eventually a supporter of the whites in the civil war. ‘The manifesto of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party’, was published in 1898 and outlined immediate political objectives ... and set the aim of equipping the party with a programme.

It was from prison, then Siberian exile, that Lenin began to systematically work on an RSDLP programme. As he explained, the party had to be (re)established and, to do that in the first place, “it is necessary to work for solid ideological unity”. Marxists in Russia were bitterly divided, especially over economism: that is, giving prime importance to economic struggles and therefore playing down, or ignoring, the centrality of the battle for democracy. Lenin not only fought a war of extermination against economism: he sought to “consolidate” ideological unity in a “party programme”.3

Towards that end, in 1899, he produced ‘A draft of our party programme’. Here Lenin argues that, with rapid capitalist development in Russia and the rise of an independent working class movement, the programme needed to be “closer” to the 1891 Erfurt programme of German social democracy.4

He wanted to change the structure of Plekhanov’s 1884 draft programme, he wanted to discard the polemics against the now defunct Narodniks, he wanted to imitate the Erfurt programme, he wanted to borrow from the Erfurt programme … but he did not want to copy the Erfurt programme. Russia and Germany had their own specifics which had to be fully recognised. Eg, in the 1890s the SDP in Germany could operate more or less openly, had a whole range of local newspapers and the beginnings of a strong Reichstag fraction. In Russia legal opportunities barely existed.

There are those who foolishly dismiss the Erfurt programme. It is stupidly described as reformist, as opportunist, as containing the seeds of the August 1914 great betrayal. Peter Kennedy of TAS appears to hold this view. But he shows little real understanding of the SDP. In reality to dismiss the Erfurt programme is not only to dismiss outstanding worker leaders, such as August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht: it is to dismiss Karl Kautsky, the ‘pope of Marxism’ … and Frederick Engels too. While he had a few remaining criticisms of the agreed text, he enthusiastically welcomed it as a vindication of the position taken by himself and Marx. The Lassallians had been totally routed. The compromises of the 1875 Gotha programme left behind. Indeed, as shown by the work of Ben Lewis, Engels exerted a considerable influence, when it came to the final text of the Erfurt programme.5

To dismiss the Erfurt programme is also, as we have seen, to dismiss Lenin … and not only in 1899. With good reason Lars T Lih describes him as a Russian Erfurtian - a package which not only includes acknowledging the Erfurt programme and Karl Kautsky’s extended commentary, The class struggle (1892). Lenin also saw the SDP as the organisational model to aspire to in Russia.

In fact, for Lenin, the Erfurt programme and The class struggle constituted a five-part package:

(1) The ‘merger formula’ - those who refuse to accept the merger of socialism and the workers’ movement (eg, the economists) are considered arch opponents;

(2) social democracy has to bring consciousness to the working class struggle: consciousness of its world-historic mission and role in leading the fight against tsarism for political freedom;

(3) the party has to be solidly based on the working class and make use of the division of labour and specialisation when it comes to its members;

(4) the party has to aspire to bring about working class leadership of the entire people - crucially the peasant masses;

(5) the party has to be internationalist: it must be a worthy part of the Second (Socialist) International.6

In 1900, publication of Iskra began. It essentially represented a fusion between the Plekhanov group, on the one hand, and the Lenin-Martov group, on the other. Hence the editorial board: Vladimir Lenin, Dmitri Ilyich Ulyanov, Georgi Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, Pavel Axelrod, Julius Martov and Aleksandr Potresov. The paper, though its circulation was in the few thousands, proved to be highly influential. Dozens of local social democratic groups declared their loyalty to Iskra. Its staff - crucially Lenin, his wife, his brother and his sister - acted as a sort of “provisional central committee” through regular correspondence and attempts at coordination.7 This is where Lenin won the loyalty and admiration of the ‘practical’ workers in Russia (ie, the praktiki or ‘revolutionaries by trade’). Lars T Lih says Lenin’s identification with, and leadership of, the practical workers “made him a hero” for them.8

In no small part, Iskra’s success was due to Lenin’s polemics ... and his organisational plan. Besides torching economism, and other forms of opportunism, the immediate aim of Iskra was to organise worker-militants around the production, financing, smuggling and circulation of the paper in a way which overcame the past amateurism that got so many easily arrested. There would too be the drafting of an RSDLP programme and, then, convening a congress that would unite all social democrats in the Russian empire into a single, centralised organisation. Note, though, it promoted cultural separatism and the federalist principle that included the General Jewish Labour Union (the Bund), which had some real roots in Russia, organising as it did a good few local committees. Nor were the economists to be excluded. Indeed the Bund and Rabocheye Dyelo were represented at the 2nd Congress.

Not that there was any thought about drafting either rules or programme in the spirit of compromise that would meet them halfway, catering for their special needs and political sensibilities. Everyone, quite rightly, was expected to abide by majority votes.

2nd Congress

In preparation for the 2nd Congress the Iskra editorial board agreed to draft a programme. Lenin suggested Plekhanov write the theoretical section. The other editors agreed the minimum, immediate demands.

However, neither Lenin nor Martov were happy with Plekhanov’s first attempt. Lenin submitted a whole series of amendments. Plekhanov - a haughty individual at the best of times - grumpily produced a second draft. Again Lenin was unhappy. The second draft defined capitalism in a “textbook” fashion. There was too much commentary. What was needed was a militant “declaration of war” against capitalism. The draft also failed to provide direction for the party’s “day-by-day propaganda and agitation” concerning all manifestations of Russian capitalism. Perhaps worse, the contradictory character of the small producers was not properly evaluated.9 The peasantry was always key, when it came to strategy in Russia. Lenin drafted his own programme. However, the EB stuck with Plekhanov’s, albeit with some amendments. Lenin called the result “pasted together” and a “mongrel draft”.10

Doubtless, that is a danger with any programme that has been subjected to substantial amendments. As they say, ‘A camel is a horse designed by a committee’. A classic current example would be America’s F-35 fighter-bomber: overcomplex, over budget, and underperforming. Nonetheless, despite his misgivings, Lenin had to live with what became the Iskra draft programme (published in issue No21).

The history of the RSDLP’s 1903 2nd Congress is well known. Suffice to say, there was an overwhelming Iskra-ist majority. Of the 51 voting delegates, 33 were for Iskra, five the Bund and two Rabocheye Dyelo. Six delegates formed an indeterminate centre (there were delegates with a double vote). Despite some protests the Iskra programme was adopted (after a few minor amendments not to the liking of either Plekhanov or Lenin).

Of course, the Iskra-ites split over the party’s rules. Martov wanted to appease the Bund, the economists and the centrists. Lenin found himself in a minority. Incidentally he, therefore, strongly argued for minority rights. However, neither the Bund nor Rabocheye Dyelo abided with the ban on binding mandates. When the congress voted in what was for them the wrong way, as had secretly been agreed, they walked. This gave Lenin a majority, which he used to elect a 100% Iskra-ite central committee and an EB made up of Lenin and Plekhanov (both majorityists during the course of the congress), plus Martov (a minority Iskra-ite who refused to accept being a minority on the EB). The Bolsheviks (majorityists) and Mensheviks (minorityists) were born and would formally remain factions of the same party right up to the October 1917 Revolution.

My point here, though, is to stress the attitude towards programme. Whatever the shortcomings of the Iskra programme, there was never any thought of drafting it, amending it, to make it acceptable to the Bund or the economists or the centrist marsh. As already mentioned, they were supposed to abide by the congress vote (something Martov presumably expected - a miscalculation).

It should be added that in the summer of 1905, in the midst of the revolutionary storm that culminated in the December Moscow uprising, Lenin wrote his Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic revolution. There were two production runs in Russia during 1905 - the second of 10,000 copies. Another edition was published in 1907 (with additional notes).

Effectively Two tactics was the 1903 programme supplemented by Bolshevism, in that it envisaged a bourgeois revolution led by the workers, leading the peasant mass, in an anti-tsarist revolution that would not put into power the liberal bourgeoisie - that being the aim, the expectation, of the Mensheviks. On the contrary, the Bolsheviks were more than willing to participate in a provisional revolutionary government that was committed to sweeping away all vestiges of feudalism and spreading the flame to Europe (perhaps through revolutionary war). A perspective agreed at the 3rd (London) Congress of the RSDLP in April 1905.

In algebraic terms the Bolsheviks fought for the ‘revolutionary dictatorship (decisive rule) of the proletariat and peasantry (a popular majority)’ which depending on progress in Europe, would proceed uninterruptedly to the socialist tasks of the maximum programme. This is exactly the programme that they, the Bolsheviks, put into effect in 1917 with the government of workers’, soldiers’ and peasant soviets and the coalition between themselves and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

Nonetheless, it should not be forgotten that the Bolsheviks agreed, in 1919, at Lenin’s urging, to maintain the minimum section of the programme. Nicolai Bukharin had been calling for the Bolsheviks to abandon the minimum programme in the summer of 1917! Lenin called this premature - to put it mildly. The provisional government had not been overthrown. Bukharin renewed his call post-October 1917 … Lenin successfully argued that even now this would be premature. The Bolsheviks might be forced to retreat and once again operate under conditions of capitalist rule.

Incidentally, both the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions only became mass organisations with the 1905 revolution. Put another way, going back to 1884, programme came first. It was not the masses first, or even gaining support from a significant number of worker-militants … and then the programme. It was always the programme, then the class. The party being built from the programme outwards. Of course, as already illustrated, that does not mean that the programme is inviolate, cannot be amended or supplemented. It can be and, when circumstances demand it, it most certainly should be.

Our programme

With Russia in mind, it is unfortunate that the TAS comrades characterise our insistence that the CPGB’s Draft programme be central to unity discussions - specifically our stated intention of presenting it for consideration of a fusion conference - as a rejection of “collaboration”. By the bye, we could have used Germany and the Gotha programme, France and the Programme of the Workers’ Party, etc, etc. Russia was chosen for the reasons discussed above.

Of course, we have not issued ultimatums. On the contrary, we have consistently said our Draft programme is open to debate and amendment. But we must be allowed to present it for consideration. Yes, we have rejected out of hand the proposal that we put our Draft programme aside, begin again from scratch and write an entirely new programme, along with TAS and the pro-talks wing of Prometheus, over perhaps a month or two. Nothing serious could come from such a presumably three-way commission (as proposed by the pro-talks faction of Prometheus).

Neither TAS nor the pro-talks Prometheus faction has any sort of consistent political record (except eclecticism). Leave aside the pre-history of tailing the Socialist Workers Party in the Socialist Alliance and Respect and the semi-anarchist Anti-Capitalist Initiative. Neither of the two organisations have a history of treating the programme question as central.

Where are the critiques of the programmeless SWP, the reformism of the Communist Party of Britain’s British road to socialism, the Labourism of Militant; what we stand for, the economism of the 1938 Transitional programme or the maximalism of the Socialist Party of Great Britain? Maybe I am mistaken. Maybe that work has been done. But, if it has, such work remains a secret ‘locked with seven seals’. Not unreasonably, I reckon that such necessary preparatory programmatic work remains undone. Programme for the comrades constitutes an afterthought … brought about solely by engagement with the CPGB.

Central

By contrast, as an organisation, programme has always been central for our project. We began the preliminary process of working towards a party programme in the early 1980s by critiquing the ‘official communist’ Alternative Economic Strategy.11 James Marshall then dissected the 1978 BRS in The Leninist No4.12 From these foundations we went on to tackle the Eurocommunists’ Manifesto for new times and Peter Taaffe’s Militant: what we stand for.

The 4th conference of the Leninists of the CPGB, meeting in December 1989, agreed the following resolution:

Neither the 1978 edition of the British road to socialism, nor the CPB’s updated version, nor the Euros’ Manifesto for new times represent any sort of communist programme. All are thoroughly imbued with opportunism and revisionism. Hence none of them can serve as any sort of guide to revolutionary practice.

The essence of the struggle being conducted by the CPGB (The Leninist) is to equip our party with a Marxist-Leninist programme. The provision of the CPGB with a Marxist-Leninist programme depends on reforging the party and then convening a congress.

Taking this into consideration, our conference resolves that the Leninist wing of the party must:

(a) Prepare a draft programme.

(b) Establish a commission for that purpose.

(c) Present the draft programme for discussion in party organisations and in our working class.

(d) Present the draft programme in the form of a proposal to the congress of a reforged CPGB.

That preparatory work took book form in 1991 with Which road? There were two concluding appendices. Appendix one, ‘The communist programme’, dealt with the necessity of a programme and its architecture. Appendix two, ‘Outline of a draft programme’, sketched out first thoughts and provided the bare bones.

However, having meticulously prepared a draft programme, not least using cell meetings and weekly seminars to draw up and debate every section and every clause, we finalised our Draft programme in 1995.

Since then we have done some updating and fine-tuning … the second edition came off the press in 2011 and the latest - the third - edition, in 2023. Needless to say, though, our Draft programme was never intended to be some confession of faith for a small group of communist militants. No, our Draft programme was intended from the first to be our submission to a “refoundation congress of the CPGB” - an organisation which, despite its “early limitations and later failures”, was “undoubtedly the highest achievement of the workers’ movement in Britain”.13

With this in mind, the idea that CPGB representatives in Forging Communist Unity would, or could, abandon our Draft programme was never on. Rightly, if they did anything like that, they would be subject to immediate recall by the next CPGB membership aggregate.

We have no fear of being in a minority. If sufficiently important principles were involved, we would reserve the right to constitute ourselves an open faction in a fused organisation. But we envisage winning a majority through argument and persuasion.

We would insist on every delegate to a unity conference agreeing to be bound by the results. We would insist too on existing group discipline being ended. Ours included. Consultation, discussion, coordination - yes, but nothing more. So, as with the RSDLP 2nd Congress, no binding mandates.

With that in mind, we have to rely on persuasion, education and political understanding within our ranks too. We have no wish to sire a Menshevik wing that looks for the middle course of compromise and conciliation. An ever present danger. But we are prepared to risk it. If the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB finds itself in a minority, we have no intention of walking. As long as proceedings are fully, unambiguously democratic, we will accept, if we must, being a minority … and fight, perhaps as a public faction, to become a majority.

Frankly though, we expect to have a clear majority. Though in objective terms our forces are miniscule, they are greater than TAS and the pro-talks Prometheus faction. And we would expect to win them over too, or at least the best of them, through reasoned argument.

Even if we fail in this, we are not about to abandon our Draft programme and begin with what? A bowdlerised version of the SPGB’s ‘Who we are’?14 A lowest-common-denominator compromise? That would not be ‘collaboration’, but surrender to the dominant left culture of economism, unprincipled unity and diplomatic manoeuvring. That we shall not do.

Our differences

The TAS Wrack-Potts leadership obviously have differences with us over the middle classes. How big? How important? That aside, there is, though, a related, but crucial difference. Should the transition between capitalism and full communism involve an extended phase, which we, following Lenin, call socialism?

We say ‘yes’. Perhaps it will take a generation or two before we can realise full communism and the ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ principle. We need to change people, as well as relations of production. But we leave the question open-ended. For TAS, however, there has to be the immediate nationalisation, socialisation, of all small to medium-sized enterprises: corner newsagents, pubs, fish and chips shops, curry houses, alternative health set-ups, hairdressers, little businesses of every kind. A recipe, in our view, for handing over millions of people to the camp of counterrevolution.

So, whereas we talk of taking things forward, post-revolution, voluntarily, ‘as fast as possible, but as slow as necessary’, the TAS comrades insist on ‘as fast as possible’. Without that workers in the SME sector will remain exploited, they say. True, but, with a ‘fast as possible’ approach, the danger is that we go down to bloody defeat. That despite their delusion that a socialism starting in one country would see the workers in other countries finding “inspiration” in this and seeking to “copy what has been achieved”. No. on the contrary, an isolated socialism, not least in Britain, would face chaos and dire poverty.

Production is global. We not only rely on huge imports of food: when it comes to industry, (say the car industry), there is a reliance on imports too. An isolated socialism in Britian could, for example, produce cars. But without German or Japanese engines and gear boxes these TASmobiles would have to be horse-drawn.

On this ‘as fast as possible’ basis the TAS comrades unwarrantedly charge us with wanting to limit the revolution to the immediate programme and what we call ‘extreme democracy’: ie, the form we envisage for the rule of the working class. Obvious nonsense, as any objective reading of our Draft programme will show. Here we emphatically state that communism, the realisation of human freedom and full individual and collective development is “what we want to achieve”.15

Then there is the criticism of Mike Macnair and his recent articles on transition.16 Because he raises the distinct possibility of a generalised nuclear exchange, he stands accused of failing to “inspire the international working class”.17 Presumably the same goes for the distinct danger of civilisational collapse between 2070 and 2090 due to climate change (raised by, of all people, insurance actuaries18).

But this is no different to Rosa Luxemburg writing about humanity facing a choice between ‘socialism or barbarism’ in her 1915 ‘Junius pamphlet’.19 To complain about that failing to “inspire” workers is surely to give the game away. Presumably what is preferred is ‘official optimism’. Not our approach in the CPGB. Our Draft programme starkly, honestly, warns about the danger of global war and capitalism’s degradation of nature in two short opening sections (1.3 and 1.4). It is, yes, either socialism or barbarism.

Yet another reason to recommend our Draft programme for consideration at a fusion conference.

  1. A phrase commonly attributed to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek - see M Fisher Capitalist realism: is there no alternative? London 2009, p2.↩︎

  2. G Plekhanov Selected philosophical works Vol 1, Moscow 1977, pp359-63.↩︎

  3. VI Lenin CW Vol 4, Moscow 1977, p354.↩︎

  4. VI Lenin CW Vol 4, Moscow 1977, p235.↩︎

  5. See Ben Lewis (ed and trans) Karl Kautsky on democracy and republicanism Leiden 2020, pp307-28.↩︎

  6. LT Lih Lenin rediscovered: ‘What is to be done?’ in context Chicago IL 2008, pp113-14.↩︎

  7. R Mullins The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, 1899-1904: documents of the ‘economist’ opposition and ‘Iskra’ and early Menshevism Leiden 2015, p36.↩︎

  8. LT Lih Lenin rediscovered: ‘What is to be done?’ in context Chicago IL 2008, p29.↩︎

  9. VI Lenin CW Vol 6, Moscow 1977, pp56‑58.↩︎

  10. Ibid p70.↩︎

  11. F Grafton ‘The road from Thatcherism or the road from Marxism’ The Leninist No1, Winter 1981-82.↩︎

  12. J Marshall ‘Some thoughts on the British road to socialism’ The Leninist No4 April 1983.↩︎

  13. CPGB Draft programme London 1995, p6.↩︎

  14. www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/who-we-are.↩︎

  15. CPGB Draft programme London 1995, p48.↩︎

  16. Weekly Worker May 22, May 29 and June 5 2025.↩︎

  17. Nick Wrack, Facebook, posted June 6 2025.↩︎

  18. actuaries.org.uk/news-and-media-releases/news-articles/2025/jan/16-jan-25-planetary-solvency-finding-our-balance-with-nature.↩︎

  19. She attributed the origin of the slogan to Friedrich Engels, who apparently once said: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads: either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” “Until now,” she wrote, “we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness … Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilisation, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism - that means the conscious, active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war” (R Luxemburg The Junius pamphlet London nd, p16). However, according to Ian Angus, the phrase most probably comes from Karl Kautsky - for his original article, see climateandcapitalism.com/2014/10/22/origin-rosa-luxemburgs-slogan-socialism-barbarism. For his follow-up comments, see johnriddell.com/2014/11/21/following-up-on-luxemburg-and-socialism-or-barbarism.↩︎