The policies of the Alternative Economic and Political Strategy constitute a comprehensive, integrated strategy with a consistent class content.
It is a strategy for planning, restructuring and redirecting the British economy and society in a manner which strengthens the collective position of all working people, and which forces the capitalist monopolies to concede wealth and power.
For this reason, the ruling capitalist class—and its monopoly sector in particular—will not sit back and allow such a strategy to be implemented but will, on the contrary, do everything to block and derail it.
What type of government—in alliance with the mass movement—can possibly implement such a strategy against fierce resistance?
The left government and capitalist resistance.
In the past, Labour governments of the old right-wing reformist type could be compelled to carry through some progressive measures—but they were basically committed to managing and protecting the capitalist system.
What is needed instead is a new type of left government, based on a Labour, socialist and communist majority in the Westminster parliament, one which comes about through the wide-ranging struggles of a mass movement outside parliament, demanding the kind of policies contained in the AEPS.
Among other things, this would involve a decisive shift to the left in the Labour Party, particularly in its national executive committee and the Parliamentary Labour Party.
In turn, this shift would depend on a significant turn to the left in the trades unions which form the mass base of the Labour Party, and on the growth in size and influence of the Communist Party working closely with the Labour left.
In the course of the struggle to achieve this, leaders will emerge who would make up a government elected on the basis of the alternative strategy. Alongside the mass movement, they would fight to carry it out, in the process overcoming the resistance of the monopoly corporations, the banks and their backers abroad.
The capacity of the ruling class for resistance should not be underestimated. It will try to use the mass media to whip up a vicious campaign against the alternative strategy.
International experience shows that the British ruling class will seek support from international capitalist institutions such as the IMF or those of the European Union, and from the world’s transnational corporations, in an effort to browbeat a left government. It might seek to organise a capital strike, or encourage transnationals to withdraw their operations from Britain with the intention of sabotaging the economy.
Efforts could also be made to change the law to make the election or re-election of a left government more difficult, or to impose limitations on the powers of such a government. Illegal methods, sabotage and attempts at an armed coup are all possible.
Every effort to create an atmosphere of chaos and disruption should be anticipated, because this could then be used to justify the use of force against the left government.
However, if the economic, political and ideological power of monopoly capital is not to be underestimated, neither should it be overstated. The ruling class is not all-powerful.
It can only work within the limits imposed by the actual balance of forces, internally and internationally. Its resistance can be overcome, providing two essential conditions are met.
Firstly, steps must be taken to ensure the widest possible democratic involvement of all sections of the working population at every step in the implementation of the AEPS.
The alternative strategy should not be seen primarily as a matter of parliamentary legislation and government jurisdiction. It is a strategy which at all stages must be rooted in mass support and participation, to be implemented not only through parliamentary legislation but also through extra-parliamentary struggle.
As well as the established organisations of the labour and democratic movements, this could involve new organs of popular and working class struggle.
Certainly, the most sustained pressure, mobilising the labour movement and other progressive forces, will be needed to keep a left government on course and defeat the resistance of the monopolists and their allies.
In this situation, the Communist Party would have a special responsibility for developing and leading the mass struggle, campaigning on key issues in workplaces and localities.
Secondly, steps must be taken to ensure that the powers of parliament and government are utilised to promote the policies of the alternative strategy and restrict the resistance of its opponents.
These steps should include the democratisation of the media, to allow supporters of the AEPS greater access to the television, radio and newspapers to present their views. It is vital that monopoly control over the media is broken up.
The capitalist-owned newspapers and other media are a powerful factor in conditioning working people to accept capitalism and to believe that struggling for a new society is futile. The mass media do all in their power to distort the issues involved in the struggles of working people in Britain and overseas.
They try to undermine confidence in the achievements of socialist countries in order to combat the spread of socialist ideas among the working class.
Only the Morning Star gives full and daily support to working people in all their struggles, arguing the case for the alternative economic and political strategy and for socialism.
The state apparatus itself will quickly become a central arena of heightened class struggle. Efforts to publicise and implement the AEPS will meet with resistance inside the civil service and associated public bodies including regulatory agencies, the Bank of England, state broadcasting bodies and the like.
Steps must therefore be taken to bring the powers of government departments and public sector organisations under tight scrutiny and control by central and national parliaments which themselves are made more responsive to the people and their democratic mass organisations.
The civil service and other key areas of the state—including the police, judiciary and armed forces should be democratised and their top personnel replaced. The aim must be to make these bodies directly accountable to parliament and the people. Members of the police and armed forces should be entitled to join trades unions.
In this context, the struggle for disarmament assumes added importance. The existence of a large professional army, together with foreign US bases and US military personnel, would pose a potential threat to a government determined to implement the alternative strategy, since they could obviously be used in any military coup that might be attempted.
Nevertheless, the point remains: democratic mass activity is the decisive factor in guaranteeing the effective use of government power to legislate and implement the alternative strategy, and to overcome resistance to it.
From the moment a new type of left government is elected—one committed to implementing the alternative strategy—the class struggle in Britain will enter a more acute and protracted phase.
At the point where the struggle for advance envisaged in the AEPS brings into play the question of state power, and its use by the working class and its allies, the fight for the alternative strategy becomes transformed into the fight for socialism itself.
The capitalist class will seek by every means to resolve that struggle in its interests, while the working class and its allies will seek to resolve it in theirs. Which side wins will be decided, ultimately, by which class controls state power.
As long as the capitalist class continues to maintain control over every layer of the state apparatus, policies for increasing living standards and extending democracy can never reach the point where capitalist exploitation itself is abolished, and a new system—socialism—is established.
Only when democratisation of the key sectors of the state is taken to the point where the working class actually takes over the whole state apparatus, and transforms it into an instrument that enforces its policies, will it be possible for the working class to remove the basis of its own exploitation.
Through this process of struggle, parliament and the mass movement must begin to enforce changes in the structure and top personnel of state bodies, in particular the armed forces and security services, the police and judiciary, and the civil and diplomatic services.
This will help ensure that they begin to carry out their functions in the interests of the working class and its allies. Depending on the circumstances, it would be necessary to create new structures and to abolish those which exclusively serve the interests of monopoly capitalism.
The process would also include steps to involve the independent organisations of the working class, along with elected MPs, in exercising the functions of the state.
In this struggle for state power, the strength and political consciousness of workers and their trades unions within the state apparatus—including its ‘coercive’ sectors—will be vital factors in deciding how and when revolutionary change will be achieved. These workers will constitute important contingents of the labour movement at the head of the democratic anti-monopoly alliance.
How can the working class and its allies be won to understanding the tasks ahead of them?
Here the alternative economic and political strategy plays an indispensable role.
In mobilising to secure a strategy which serves their economic, social and political interests, working people will—in the concrete conditions of modern Britain—themselves place the issue of state power on the agenda.
Their realisation of the need to take state power to block state monopoly capitalist opposition will be formed in a mass, practical way—shaped and conditioned by struggle itself. So, too, will the realisation that the economic and political base of that opposition will have to removed altogether, and replaced by socialism.
The achievement of state power by the working class and its allies will open up a qualitatively new stage. Socialist state power—now based on democratic participation and control by working people at every level—will be used systematically to take resources out of the hands of monopoly capital and allocate them in a planned way for the needs of society.
This will make possible a new type of democracy, one which ensures the economic conditions for personal freedom and an unprecedented extension of human rights.
This must include safeguards for the pluralism of views and their political expression, freedom of dissent, respect for the views of minorities, religious freedom, and freedom for all the shades of interest that will exist in a socialist system to press their demands.
Socialism will be merely the first, lower stage of communist society. The state would still be needed—not only to help plan production—but to defend the socialist system against internal and external attack.
But by continuously planning and expanding production to meet everyone’s material needs, liberating humanity from exploitation and want, socialism will lay the basis for a second, higher stage.
As the threat from capitalism recedes nationally and internationally, the socialist state begins to wither away, except for some technical and administrative functions; humanity can finally create a world free from all forms of oppression, based on common ownership of the means of production, working them co-operatively and ecologically to produce abundance for all.
The guiding principle of full communism will be: “from each according to their potential—to each according to their need.”
A new morality will characterise the social relations between people: the egotistical individualism of capitalism will be replaced by collective care and concern for every individual and for the full, all-round development of the human personality.
Next: VI. Conclusion