24.07.2025

Without lights to guide us we walk in the dark

The road needs illumination

Minimum demands and clear principles are vital. Mike Macnair responds to those who think that the working class can dispense with the minimum programme

Last week¹ I responded to Peter Kennedy’s June 15 article, ‘Socialisms have prevented communism’,² but also made limited reference to Nick Wrack’s June 11 ‘Communist unity - a change is needed’.³ This week I focus more on comrade Wrack’s arguments, in particular in relation to the need for a minimum programme. Just as last week I also referred to some of comrade Wrack’s arguments in order to clarify my reply to comrade Kennedy, so this week I will also refer to some of comrade Kennedy’s arguments in order to clarify my reply to comrade Wrack.

I said last week: “Paradoxically, the articles by comrades Kennedy and Wrack might in some ways have opened the way to narrowing the points of difference - if the [Talking About Socialism] comrades had not voted to break off the talks.”

In both cases, the aspect that might have opened the way to narrowing the points of difference is the recognition of a process of transition from capitalism to communism that has already begun under capitalist rule. That is, that what we need to overthrow is not ‘pure’ capitalism, but a capitalism that has already been heavily modified in response both to the rise of the proletariat and to problems resulting from capitalism’s internal decline.

Education

The flip side of this point is that there are substantial tasks of development of the workers’ movement under capitalist rule that are necessary in order for the question of the overthrow to be posed. Comrade Kennedy, for example, argues in ‘Differentiating socialism and communism’ that:

The level of productive forces and related science and technology, coupled to the size and power of the working class, and, more crucially, the heightened level of political consciousness among workers implied by such intensification of class power, mean the transition [after the working class takes political power - MM] will be rapid rather than prolonged. It also seems improbable that highly politicised and educated workers will have any truck with specialist management and bureaucratic functionaries running state affairs, and it seems much more realistic to assume that they will be replaced by workers and/or brought under the democratic control of workers, where their existing specialisms will be utilised for the common good.⁴

With UK union density at 22% in 2024, and the present degradation of education that has been running since Margaret Thatcher’s government,⁵ we have a long way to go in this country to get to the “highly politicised and educated workers” of comrade Kennedy’s argument.

Similarly, comrade Wrack argues:

A decisive imposition by the majority working class of its own class interests on society as a whole, which is comprised mainly of itself, would represent the interests of all in society except for the capitalists. The middle class will see that its interests, too, are protected and improved by this act. Of course, it is not automatic. We have to win the argument. I believe that argument can be won, largely in advance of the working class coming to power …

The organised working class, through its own organisations, including the mass communist party, will have to have prepared in advance how it will approach the questions of organising production, distribution, keeping data, how to use the latest computer technology, how to cooperate with workers in other countries, how to operate the ports, the railways, the factories and the farms.

While we cannot set out now a blueprint for the future, a mass communist party will have in its ranks and be able to call on every sort of expert, scientist, computer programmer and much more. The working class now ensures that the trains run, using complicated technology, that containers are unloaded from the ships, using complicated technology, that bread and milk is delivered to your local supermarket or corner shop, using complicated technology. This can only improve with the working class democratically planning and directly running everything.

Again, this argument supposes a lot of change from the present situation before the question of power is posed. We are talking, here, about a communist party of millions (and not any sort of small ‘revolutionary party’ cog driving a larger mass-movement wheel). That - a communist party of millions - is an aim shared between the CPGB and TAS.

Capitalist rule

But it tells us, again, that we have a long way to go under capitalist rule to get there; and that it involves the reversal of the current dynamics, which display both a drift of the left to the right and deepening fragmentation.⁶

The case for the minimum programme is partly for a programme that can project the overthrow of capitalist political rule and can orient immediate policy if capitalist political rule is overthrown without either the prior economic marginalisation of the middle classes (‘classic’ petty bourgeoisie of the self-employed and micro-businesses; employed managerial and bureaucratic middle class; petty rentier class) or that the proletariat becomes so strong that the middle classes are politically a null factor.

But it is also, and as importantly, a case for a programme that can orient working class policy under capitalist rule. That is, for the conditions that necessarily exist, assuming the (partial) truth of comrades Kennedy’s and Wrack’s own arguments for the strengthening of the proletariat relative to the middle classes under capitalism.

Jack Conrad at an Online Communist Forum meeting said: “My fear is that what they [TAS] will produce is something at least along the lines of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. This is a maximalist programme that rejects all notions of reform, all notions of transition between capitalism with capitalist state power and communism.” Comrade Wrack responds to this in the first place by quoting TAS’s statement, ‘Who we are and the ideas that guide us’, where it says:

So long as the working class is not yet able to win power for itself, a socialist/communist party would support and actively participate in working class campaigns to defend past gains, to improve living standards and extend democratic rights. But any reforms will only be partial and temporary, so long as capitalism continues.

And a little later in the article, he says that “Communists must fight for all reforms, to improve the position of the working class in society. But we fight against reformism as a political strategy.”

Comrades Wrack and Potts’ ‘Draft programme v 20’ is largely an explanation of what is wrong with capitalism, followed by ‘motherhood and apple pie’ stories about what could happen if the working class takes over. The subhead, ‘The communist future, and what we fight for now’ (clauses 89-95), has the same approach, clause 95 saying: “We fight for any and all improvements in the here and now. But we always make clear that only a fundamental change in society will be able to solve society’s problems.”

The question posed is, then - what reforms? The problem is that the governments, the Labour Party, and so on, commonly present as “improving living standards” or “improvements in the here and now” changes which, while having an appearance of an immediately ameliorating effect, strategically weaken the position of the proletariat as a class and increase dependence on the capitalist state.

For a simple example, in relation to housing, council house building programmes and rent control are measures that strengthen the working class as a class and weaken the (large and small) rentier classes. In contrast, housing benefit, though it offers an immediate amelioration of living standards, is actually a subsidy to the rentier classes (and to employers) out of taxpayer funds and spreads working class financial dependency on the state.

Another example. The regime of the Trade Disputes Act 1906 (as reinstated by the 1945 Labour government by getting rid of Tory ‘reforms’ introduced in 1927) strengthened working class collective action by limiting judicial intervention in strikes. The judicialised system planned by Labour’s In place of strife in 1969 and implemented by the Tory Industrial Relations Act 1971 offered a ‘carrot’ in the form of industrial tribunals (today’s employment tribunals) but also a large stick, which, however, was effectively defeated by the ‘Free the five’ struggle in 1972. Labour’s Trade Union and Labour Relations Act and Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act 1974 then appeared as a reform making major concessions to the trade unions, but in fact preserved most of the 1969‑71 scheme and actually radically weakened the trade unions by centralising power in the hands of the bureaucracy and maintaining judicial power (which was then exploited to the hilt under Thatcher). The “improvements in the here and now” represented by the tribunal system have actually reduced the frequency of reinstatement after victimisation relative to the pre-1971 regime.

There are many other examples. The same is true of “extending democratic rights”, posed at this level of generality. Referendums are held out as extending democratic rights - but are actually instruments of fraud, as we saw in 2011, 2014 and 2016. Directly elected mayors, and so on, are held out as extending democratic rights, but actually reduce available choices to voters. And so on.

Sectional

A related issue of fundamental importance is the difference between the common interests of the working class as a class, on the one hand, and sectional interests, on the other.

Sharon Graham supports UK arms expenditure - in the sectional interests of Unite members working in the arms industry: “Once rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun” (Tom Lehrer). In reality, of course, the immediate impact of arms spending will be cuts on health and social welfare, which will impact on even well-paid arms industry workers by way of their aged parents or in the event that they are in accidents or fall seriously ill; and the end outcome of UK rearmament as part of the US-led war drive will most probably be bombs falling on UK cities.

This particular example of sectionalist politics is not one that is attractive to the far left. But ‘Lexit’ - the idea that Brexit could ‘restore British democracy’ and open the road to a British ‘alternative economic strategy’ - was a view held not only by the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, but also by the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party in England and Wales, among others. It is just as sectionalist (any actual improvements from a ‘Lexit’ policy would have been at the expense of French, German and so on workers) and just as deluded: the actual result of Brexit was continuing British economic decline, increased immediate dependence on the USA and, contrary to the claims of the Brexiteers, a massive increase in legal net immigration (explicitly with a view to holding down wages under the Tories’ visa policy), which has to be covered up by media screaming about ‘small boats’.

Popular fronts

Equally, ‘intersectionalism’ as such - the attempt to construct a series of single-issue popular fronts with big capital and the human rights departments round race, sex, gender, sexuality, etc discrimination - has been very popular among the far left. It issued in the USA in ‘Vote Clinton, get Trump’ in 2016 and ‘Vote Harris, get Trump’ in 2024. And as a result it produced the appointment of extreme-right Supreme Court justices in 2016-20, and the actual overthrow of Roe v Wade in 2022 in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation - and since January 2025 an accelerating series of white-supremacist, male-supremacist and police-supremacist decisions.

In the UK, the pursuit of a sectionalist agenda of ‘improvements in the here and now’ for trans people as a group distinct from non-binary people, intersex people, and so on, through the ‘gender recognition policy’ in alliance with Theresa May and then with Nicola Sturgeon, and, going along with that, the speech-policing agenda, set out to claim an indefensible salient and opened the way for the counteroffensive of the Christianist right wing round this issue.

I argued back in 2007 that the line of the Third Congress of Comintern on the party question and on tactics, which lay behind the ‘transitional method’ and ‘transitional demands’, amounted to the idea that “the party has to lead the masses, as it were by the nose, through linking their defence of their immediate interests to the idea that the conscious minority of communists should rule”.⁷ But this is the theory. What happens in practice is that, by tail-ending ideas that are popular among broad masses, the left is led by the nose by the capitalists’ parties and their media. Karl Marx, in fact, already made the point in his November 1871 letter to Friedrich Bolte:

Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power - ie, the political power of the ruling classes - it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands, as the September revolution in France showed, and as is also proved up to a certain point by the game messrs Gladstone and co are bringing off in England even up to the present time.⁸

Recent experience has confirmed and reconfirmed the point.

Comintern

In these respects, the case for the minimum programme has a (perhaps paradoxical) common element with the case for ‘transitional’ programmes and demands at the 1922 Fourth Congress of Comintern. In the debate at that Congress, Nikolai Bukharin argued that the draft programmes of Comintern and of the communist parties should not include immediate demands, which should instead be part of “an action programme, which takes up purely tactical questions and can be changed as often as necessary - perhaps every two weeks”. He argued that including immediate issues was “an expression of comrades’ opportunist attitude” and that supporters “wanted to set down in the programme this defensive stance in which the proletariat finds itself, thereby ruling out an offensive”.⁹ His substantive argument, that immediate demands should not be included in the programme, but left to general agitation, is close to comrade Wrack’s argument.

August Thalheimer, in contrast, argued that this separation would precisely tend to promote opportunism, and had done so in the revisionism debate around 1900. Thus:

What I am saying is that the specific disagreement between us and the reform-socialists is not the fact that we put demands for reforms, demands for a stage, or whatever you want to call them, into a chambre séparée [separate room] and keep them outside our programme. Rather, the difference is that we link transitional demands and slogans very tightly with our principles and goals. This linkage is, of course, no guarantee in itself, any more than having a good map guarantees that I will not lose my way …

… The danger lies in the roads that lead from a given starting point to socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

If we leave large parts of this road without illumination, there is a danger that in the dark patches (Interjections: ‘Bukharin’) many errors will be made …¹⁰

He went on to quote at length from Lenin’s defence of the minimum programme against Bukharin in early October 1917.¹¹

I argued in my article last week that it is “inconsistent with … scientific socialism, to cling to the texts of Marx, or those of the first four congresses of Comintern, as a dogma without regard to the actual defeat of the Russian Revolution or the various other experiences of failed leftist reform projects and failed revolutions”.

That does not mean that we should ignore these texts or aim to start from scratch in some way. ‘Forget the history’ is the political equivalent of, on an individual level, seeking to get Alzheimer’s, or volunteering for some sort of brain damage that wipes out both your existing memories and your ability to form new ones.

Rather, we need to be aware of the texts, which if nothing else are the story of where the left’s ideas came from; but then to make use of the ideas in them, having regard to how far they are confirmed and how far falsified, with the benefit of hindsight.

In the case of the Fourth Congress debate on ‘transitional demands’, it seems clear that Thalheimer’s argument is more persuasive than Bukharin’s, which is at the end of the day hand-waving. But the idea that linkage to economic socialisation was enough to make demands ‘transitional’, to illuminate the “roads that lead from a given starting point to socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat”, was mistaken. The Trotskyists have made serious attempts to make sense of the approach, and have repeatedly collapsed either into dogmatic repetition of the specific demands of the 1938 programme, or into “action programmes” of the sort Bukharin argued for. With the latter come tail-ending mass beliefs and as a result being made a plaything by the pro-capitalist parties and media.

As to why this is the case, the answer is - I think - that downplaying political democracy in favour of socialisation fails. It fails in the first place because - as the experience of the former ‘socialist bloc’ countries demonstrates - planning without political democracy fails, because the managers lie in order to keep their jobs and the result is ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Every child is taught in school that this failure is the result of planning as such; so that it is illusory to imagine that the passage of time since 1991 will erase the problem.

It fails, secondly but equally importantly, because bureaucratic-managerial control of workers’ organisations is demobilising, and as a result hands power to the capitalist class. This is as much true of the bureaucratic-managerial control of left groups as it is of Unite; the mode is merely different, as among the left groups bureaucratic-managerial control forces splintering and blocks unification.

Confession?

Comrade Wrack says of our argument that ‘socialism is not a mode of production’:

Mike Macnair accepts that it is unorthodox. Mike is correct. It is unique and idiosyncratic. It is a confession of faith. It is designed to make the CPGB different. It is its point of difference, to justify its separation from all the other Marxist groups which it criticises. It is nothing but an ‘article of faith’, to use a CPGB term. It makes the CPGB a confessional sect …

I made the first point against this claim last week. The characterisation of ‘socialism’ as what succeeds capitalism was the normal view of the left wing of the Second International and is, in fact, commonplace among ‘official communists’. It is not, then, a point of difference of the CPGB with the large majority of the left, but only with the Trotskyists, and in particular with those Trotskyists who insist on ‘socialism = the higher stage of communism’ as a point of dogma.

Pursuing this idea, I pointed out in the May 29 article, ‘Questions of communism’, that the dogma that ‘socialism = the higher stage of communism’ arises because the Russian oppositions of the 1920s found it impossible to defend the view that there could be no dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist construction in a single country - which was what the ‘socialism in one country’ debate was originally about. Hence they displaced ‘socialism’ onto fully-developed communism. In doing so the Trotskyists de facto accepted ‘socialism in one country’ (SIOC)/national roads.

Comrade Wrack is outraged that we think TAS’s perspective is one of national revolution. He quotes extensively from an excellent posting of his own back in 2016. But even within that posting he writes:

This is not to argue that there has to be a single simultaneous revolutionary act of the working class across Europe at the same time, though that would certainly be the best development if it could be achieved. The working class may well enter into battle against the different national bourgeoisie at different stages, but the need to see that there is a broader struggle beyond national boundaries is an essential prerequisite for a successful socialist transformation.

And in the ‘Communist Unity’ article he goes on to say:

… in my opinion a revolution anywhere in the world would inspire and provoke revolutions elsewhere, just as happened in 1848 and 1917. Again, we cannot look at things as they are now, but as they must be if the working class is on the verge of assuming power in any advanced economic country.

The way in which the SIOC issue was posed in our Forging Communist Unity discussions was that CPGB comrades made the point that, even if the middle classes are marginal in the UK (which we doubt), they are certainly not marginal in continental Europe. A European programme would therefore need a minimum programme, taking account of the need to reject forced collectivisation. And revolution in the UK on its own would not “inspire and provoke revolutions elsewhere”, since in the absence of immediate spread to continental Europe it would merely produce mass starvation.

In this context, comrade Wrack’s second passage, saying that “we cannot look at things as they are now, but as they must be if the working class is on the verge of assuming power in any advanced economic country”, is true - the question of power will not be posed in the UK in the absence of a general crisis in Europe, and probably a global crisis of US world hegemony like the 1914-45 death agony of British world hegemony. But it is hand-waving. The death agony of US world hegemony would not dissolve the problem of the middle classes. If comrade Wrack’s imagined future is to dissolve the problem of the middle classes as a strategic and programmatic problem, it is to put off the question of power to the indefinite and probably never-to-arrive future.

The second point is that comrade Wrack and other TAS comrades argue that the CPGB is heretical and sectarian (or ‘Stalinist’, meaning ‘official communist’) in failing to define what replaces capitalism as Karl Marx’s “first phase of communism” in The critique of the Gotha programme: that is, general nationalisation, plus payment in ‘labour tokens’ that do not circulate and are therefore not money.

I am happy to say that this is not ‘orthodox’ in the sense of imagining that everyone after Marx went wrong (as ‘New Left’ authors and today’s ‘Marxist-humanists’ like Peter Hudis have argued). I said above that we could not treat the classic texts as dogma, but have to consider how far they have been confirmed or falsified by subsequent events. I personally have argued specifically about this particular schema of Marx’s that it is for a developmental communism, which is to incentivise workers to work more hours (to get more labour tokens and hence more consumer goods). And that the natural limits of which we are all now aware as a result of human-induced climate change and so on mean that such an incentive scheme is positively undesirable.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, the principle of distribution according to need is dominant in public health and education services at least, and should be in housing, and enormous unemployment and under-employment (but not mass starvation) means that “labour is life’s prime want”. So that Marx’s radical separation of the lower and higher phases of communism is superseded in the light of developments since 1875.¹²

We have put forward in the Draft programme, section 5,¹³ a conception of the transition that is consistent with what I have argued - but also consistent with a lot of other people’s arguments. What it is not consistent with is the arguments of ‘New Left’ Trotskyists or of ‘Marxist-humanists’.

Do we insist on this as a sect marker that is the ground for us refusing to collaborate with others? No. Our Draft programme is a draft. We are perfectly willing to work as a minority in a broader group, and have done so repeatedly. We insist merely on the right to put forward our Draft programme as a possible basis for the programme of a broader group or new party; and on majority voting.

It is our insistence on open polemical engagement, and on majority voting, as opposed to private diplomatic agreements, which are the real targets of comrade Wrack’s polemic and (I think) the real ground of TAS’s decision to break off the FCU talks.

mike.macnair@weeklyworker.co.uk

weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1547/cold-war-economism.↩︎
Slightly different text at talkingaboutsocialism.org/a-reply-to-mike-macnairs-questions-of-communism (June 2), since the Weekly Worker version is edited for our style guidelines. The TAS text also has extensive comments.↩︎
talkingaboutsocialism.org/communist-unity-a-change-is-needed.↩︎
talkingaboutsocialism.org/differentiating-socialism-and-communism.↩︎
For union density, see www.gov.uk/government/statistics/trade-union-statistics-2024/trade-union-membership-uk-1995-to-2024-statistical-bulletin. For education, P Kennedy, ‘Struggles in the cathedral’ Weekly Worker March 6 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1528/struggles-in-the-cathedral). Compare this with my article, ‘What kind of education?’ (May 4 2017): weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1153/what-kind-of-education. Consider also the points about education and class made by Dan Evans in his A nation of shopkeepers London 2023 (chapter 4); though I have criticised in my review of the book his use of the issue as a way of defining the boundary between the employed middle class and skilled working class (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/rising-middle-classes), the development of an anti-education culture in sections of the British working class (sedulously promoted by the Tory media) is a real phenomenon.↩︎
Comrade Wrack’s point also radically understates the complexity of the planning task (a point made by Moshé Machover orally and in a recent letter - July 3) and the extent to which under capitalist class rule information essential to successful planning is actively concealed, both by commercial secrecy and the construction of official statistics on the basis of marginalist economic theory; so that planning in advance of the overthrow of capitalist political rule is more problematic than might appear, even for a communist party of millions.↩︎
‘Spontaneity and Marxist theory’ Weekly Worker September 5 2007 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/687/spontaneity-and-marxist-theory).↩︎
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_11_23.htm. The “September revolution in France” refers to the fall of the regime of Napoleon III in September 1870, when some ‘left’ radicals were included in the republican provisional government to give it a spurious appearance of political breadth. The “game messrs Gladstone and co are bringing off in England even up to the present time” was the Liberals holding themselves out as backers of the workers, most immediately through the Trade Union Act 1871, which attempted to legalise trade unions.↩︎
J Riddell (ed) Toward the united front: proceedings of the fourth congress of the Communist International, 1922 Leiden 2012.↩︎
Ibid. Similar arguments were made by Khristo Kabakchiev from the Bulgarian CP and the Russian delegation came down on the side of ‘transitional demands’, producing a resolution which was then passed. (It should be noted that Thalheimer here uses “socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat” as synonyms …)↩︎
CW Vol 26, pp170-73.↩︎
‘Socialism will not require industrialisation’ Weekly Worker May 14 2015 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1058/socialism-will-not-require-industrialistion). See also ‘Transition and abundance’, September 1 2010 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/831/transition-and-abundance).↩︎
communistparty.co.uk/draft-programme/5-transition-to-communism.↩︎