For a New, Revolutionary, Workers Party!
Why were not signing the Socialist Partys
Declaration
The Socialist Partys Campaign for a new workers
party (www.cnwp.org.uk), launched at their Socialism
2005 weekend in November, has produced a Declaration for a New
Workers Party for all who support the creation of a new
workers party to sign. While we are certainly committed to building a
revolutionary workers party, the International Bolshevik Tendency cannot
politically endorse the declaration. This is why:
- We do not believe that the chance to reclaim the Labour
Party has long passed, or agree that In the past the Labour Party,
however imperfectly, provided a voice for the working class. The Labour
Party, while organisationally independent of the capitalists, could never be
reclaimed by revolutionaries; it has only ever provided a voice for
the reformist misleaders of the working class the labour bureaucracy or
labour lieutenants of capital as Lenin called them.
- We do not agree that the recent success of the new Left
party in Germany, winning 8.8% of the vote and 54 MPs, gives a glimpse of the
potential for a new left force. The PDS/WASG electoral alliance did not
represent a serious political break with the SPD traitors - it is a roadblock
to socialism and not a model for revolutionaries.
- We believe that the basic aims of a new
workers party should be to lead a socialist transformation of society.
Anyone serious about undertaking such a project must begin by being clear about
whether they want to get rid of capitalism or reform it. The SP draft instead
attempts to build a false unity between these two counterposed poles within the
working class by calling on all those who want to work together against
the neo-liberal onslaught on the working class, regardless of political
programme.
- For a workers party to be of any use to the working class
it must give no political support to any section of the bourgeoisie, no matter
how radical they may seem. It would therefore refuse any electoral
support to Ralph Nader in the US, Hugo Chavezs Bolivarian slate in
Venezuela, or popular frontist initiatives in Britain such as Respect or Ken
Livingstones 2000 mayoral campaign.
- The party must be internationalist and it would be necessary to
win its members to understand the importance of actively defending the
remaining deformed workers states China, Cuba, North Korea and
Vietnam while also recognising the need for workers political
revolutions to overthrow the bureaucratic regimes in those societies. The party
must stand for the defeat of US/British imperialist forces in Iraq and oppose
all such neo-colonial adventures; it must clearly call for the immediate and
unconditional withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and Ireland.
In Britain, internationalism also means fighting for full citizenship rights
for all immigrants.
- The basic aims of the party must include the goal
of winning the class war destroying the bourgeois state apparatus and
replacing it with a state controlled by the working class. This stands in stark
contrast to the Socialist Partys reformist utopian notion about gradually
taking over the existing capitalist state through gaining control of bourgeois
institutions such as local authorities and parliament.
The British working class desperately needs a new, revolutionary,
party. We look forward to participating in the process of debate and
programmatic clarification that will be necessary to lay the political basis
for creating a class-struggle leadership in this country.
IBT Britain, 21 January 2006 |