09.11.2006

Campaign for a Marxist Party

Founding principles

Resolution 1

The campaign has three founding principles:

1. We are in favour of a planned, democratic socialist society and against the market.

2. Socialism will be achieved in a single step when the working class seizes power over society; there are no intermediate 'democratic' or other 'stages'.

3. The campaign is against the destructive incubus of Stalinism and will seek to make clear the counterrevolutionary and anti-human nature of the Stalinist regimes and parties. Stalinism was responsible for mass slaughter, brutal incarceration and the atomisation of the people of the countries under its control. In addition the Stalinists were responsible for the most cynical and costly betrayals of the working class everywhere from Germany to South Africa - no party which has as its aim the liberation of humanity can do other than condemn the Stalinist current and seek to undo the damage done to Marxism by it.

Resolution 2

Twelve principles on forming a Marxist party:

1. Socialism can only be achieved by the self-emancipation of the working class. This consists of the conquest of political power by that class and the revolutionary overthrow of all existing social conditions. Strategies based on the collaboration of antagonistically opposed classes will not lead to socialism and must be rejected.

2. The self-emancipation of the working class requires a political struggle for the fullest possible democracy - both against the capitalist state and within the workers' movement. Revolution is precisely a flood-tide of democracy. It is a fallacy, however, to suggest that there are inevitable intermediate stages in the struggle for socialism, such as a capitalist republic or other forms of 'more democratic' capitalism.

3. Workers of the world, unite. Socialism is international or it is nothing. There is no national road to socialism. Stalinist attempts to consolidate revolutionary power in a single country at the expense of internationalism resulted not in workers' power, but power over workers. We recognise the necessity of rebuilding a working class Marxist international.

4. Reformism and 'socialism in one country' are dead strategies that have wreaked enormous suffering upon the working class and humanity. It is ludicrous to suppose that Marxists can win support within the working class by pretending to be reformists or partisans of one or other national particularity. Marxists must be honest before our class and proudly and boldly put forward the ideas of Marxism.

5. We aim to put an analysis of Marxist political economy at the heart of any decision-making on policy and activity. This means examining the effects of the decline of capitalism; globalisation and the policies of the IMF; and the role of finance capitalism on the lives of the working class. We also need to examine the changing role of the nation-state under globalisation.

6. We recognise that the continuation of capitalism threatens the future of humanity and the planet - for example, in wars, poverty, disease, ecological disaster and the exhaustion of resources.

7. We stand for a Marxist party through which the working class can find political self-expression, which requires that the party operate on the basis of the maximum possible democracy objective circumstances permit. This implies the accountability and recallability of the leadership and individual leaders, and the willingness of minorities to implement majority decisions on particular concrete actions, while expressing their political differences both before and after these actions.

8. Rights of platforms, tendencies and factions. Representation for minorities on leading committees. Freedom of criticism and the right of members to make their criticisms public. Freedom of branches and fractions to produce their own publications within the framework of the party programme. Freedom of branches, fractions and individual members to correspond directly with one another.

9. The creation of socialism can only be the act of the broad millions of the working class themselves, drawing in behind them members of the intermediate classes in a social majority working to remake our lives. It is not a task which can be delegated to a few leaders. Socialism cannot be imposed by law and there is no road to socialism within the framework of the existing capitalist legal and customary constitutions. Equally, state ownership of the means of production (nationalisation), without democratic republican self-government both in the localities and in the workplaces and industries, is not common social ownership of the means of production, but in effect ownership of them by the state officials as a corporation or by the enterprise managers: hence not socialism, but its negation.

10. We reject the idea put forward by some apologists for Stalinism that increasing industrial output without political democracy will lead to socialism, and that human lives and human liberty are to be sacrificed to productive output through labour camps, unchecked pollution, political repression and state control of literature and art. This idea has been sufficiently disproved by the disastrous experience of the 20th century and should not be tried again.

11. A Marxist party is not an instrument of control by an enlightened few over the working class, or a substitute for the action of the working class as a whole. It is a means by which the class can develop an independent political programme, enabling it to act as a class politically independent of the various factions of the bourgeois politicians, and through which it can organise itself and educate itself as a political class. Hence it has to aim to organise the class movement as a whole. But a Marxist party is distinct from the broader immediate working class movement (trade unions and so on): it sees more clearly that the inner logic of the working class organising to defend its immediate interests and impose its collective will on the society is for the working class to take political power and create socialism. Hence a Marxist party cannot counterpose itself to any existing movement of the class which seeks to fight for working class interests as such, but does not yet grasp this logic. It must participate in this broader class movement, fighting within it both against class-collaborationist politics and for the programme of working class political power. In doing so it must aim to lead the broad movement forward politically: neither to take it over by organisational manipulation and render it into a sterile appendage of the party; nor to break it up by splitting for short-term party gains; nor to abandon the struggle against class-collaborationism and for the programme of workers' power in the name of a false unity which requires the Marxists to gag themselves.

12. Since the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself, a Marxist party can only play the role it needs to play if every member of the party develops as a leader and if the party's own organisational form includes means of struggle against the permanent division of labour between managers and managed, leaders and led. We oppose the cult of the personalities of permanent individual leaders, which is commonplace in the existing organised left and has recently taken grotesque forms: the future of socialism rests with organised class-conscious workers, not with the continuity of individual party leaders. We oppose such personality cults, irremovable leaders, etc, equally in the broader class movement.

13. Marxism is not a dogma, but a living method of analysis and must be constantly enriched by debate and action.