Analysis of the present extremely fluid situation, in which the destruction of socialist systems is being accomplished by the same forces who are fostering the drive to a war over energy resources whose ecological consequences could be fatal for the entire planet, precludes hard-and-fast solutions. Still less does it allow us to rest on comfortable, now outmoded ways of thinking.

The following theses are attempts to think about some aspects of revolutionary work which have been considered unthinkable hitherto, such as the nature of Soviet power, the stultifying effect of Marxist dogma, the role of Stalin, and the relationship between strategy and tactics. Being the thoughts of one rank-and-file Communist, they are not presented as a coherent programme, but as theses against which it is hoped comrades will propose antitheses in rebuttal, using the dialectical method to arrive at a correct synthesis as a guide to action.

1. On past mistakes
1. History is very unforgiving, and the bitter harvests being reaped in what we were once proud to describe as the socialist world are the fruits of seeds sown perhaps half a century before. Failure to analyse the causes of the current crises in proper scientific terms dooms us to a constant repetition of the same criminal errors.
2. However, it would be unscientific to deny that the crises have external as well as internal causes. The reactionary forces who invaded the young Soviet republic in its earliest days are still actively perpetuating their rule over the world, and have undoubtedly played a part in overthrowing socialist rule. Also, socialist economies cannot be walled off from the contradictions of capitalism, and are subject to its fluctuations.
3. Our major failure over the seven decades of Soviet power has been that we have not distinguished between the tactical needs of the revolution and its long-term strategy. This is particularly dangerous today, when the long-term strategy of the Soviet bureaucracy coincides with its day-to-day tactics.
2. On Bureaucracy and the "Defeat" of Socialism
1. What we are seeing in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is not the defeat of socialism, but the final abandonment of socialist slogans by the bureaucratic command structure inherited from tsarism. The achievements of socialism, which have been many, despite the distortions imposed upon it by the bureaucrats, were realised in spite of their efforts, not because of them. Now their command is absolute, through their creature, Gorbachev, their inability to solve the problems confronting a modern industrialised state is becoming self-evident.
2. The bureaucratic command structure which is strangling socialist economies is not a consequence of revolutionary rule but a reaction against it, fostered by those whose spiritual home is in the same transnational conglomerates who are also strangling classic capitalist economies and making them, too, unworkable. Though the focus of struggle in capitalist countries may be different from the needs of socialist peoples, their content should be identical: mass action in defence of living standards, trade union rights, social services, and popular power.
3. The failures of the socialist economies are not a defeat for centralised planning, for the constant drive towards "over-fulfillment" of arbitrarily decided targets was the antithesis of scientific planning. The lesson is the same that we are having to learn in the capitalist world: freed from popular control, the bureaucratic power structure eventually strangles itself in its own red tape.
4. During the counter-revolution in the GDR, it was the bureaucrats of the old system who were most assiduous in leading the attack upon its social services and elements of popular control. Now they are serving their more natural masters, the directors of the transnational companies of Bonn and the Ruhr.
5. Since the destruction of socialism in the Soviet Union and the former people's democracies of Eastern Europe is virtually an accomplished fact, it remains for countries like Cuba and, hopefully, the new South Africa, to carry forward the international struggle for a freer, juster world.
6. For all the cant of talk about the relevance of market forces under socialism – slogans which cloak the drive to restore capitalism – the basic contradictions of capitalism remain, and will confront the Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian and other peoples formerly engaged in creating a socialist economic order.
7. The difference between Lenin's New Economic Policy and Gorbachev's surrender to the anarchy of market forces is this:
   Lenin adopted NEP as a temporary tactic to mobilise entrepreneurial greed in the strengthening of the young socialist economy, while Gorbachev is opening the Soviet system to western exploitation under the guise of permitting a growth of petit bourgeois small businesses. This is not a tactic: it is the realisation of a long-term strategy.
8. Bureaucratic control is more absolute in the capitalist world than it ever was in the socialist countries, and while it mouths the slogans of 19th Century laissez-faire, its whole thrust is towards centralisation and monopoly on a transnational scale. In this, its natural allies are those whose dedication to socialism was as hypocritical as their Western analogues' claim to be the heirs of Adam Smith.
9. Transnational imperialism, which has been able to export the resolution of its sharpening contradictions to one region after another of the developing world, is now greedily contemplating its largest and potentially most profitable new market and source of cheap labour: the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Their overthrow of socialist order will be a pyrrhic victory however; having run out of new areas to exploit, the only resolution of their still unsolved contradictions will be through a return to socialism on a global scale. The workers' parties of the world should begin to prepare for this development now, even though it may take several decades to reach its terminal crisis.
3. On the Party
1. The fact that Western workers' organisations can no longer expect to receive subsidies from fraternal bodies in the Soviet Union and elsewhere – guaranteed orders for their publications, headquarters facilities for international trade union and other organisations, and so on – should be welcomed, not greeted with dismay. No longer can we be insulated from the hard realities of our situation, and must confront them directly. Far from the cossetting of "Moscow gold" encouraging revolution, it impeded it.
2. It is one of the achievements of the reactionary leadership of the CPGB that they have removed membership of the Party from the list of qualifications of the true revolutionary. There have always been more good comrades outside the Party that inside it; we can now learn to work together with members of various organisations – and none – on the basis of their record of working class struggle, without enquiring first about their Party status. Thus we could begin the creation of a true "broad left", in which members of the Labour Party and the various ultra left and Trotskyist groupings join together on issues that unite us.
3. If existing workers' parties abdicate from leading the struggle to defend the working class from the invasions of the transnational companies, then it will be necessary to create new organisations to take their place.
4. When Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and 81 others landed at the Sierra Maestra in December, 1956 to launch a successful guerrilla war, he was not a member of the Communist Party, but the social-democratic Ortodoxo party. Indeed, he and his comrades were denounced as adventurists by the Cuban Communist Party, who operated legally with the permission of the Batista dictatorship. So while the first requirement for successful revolution is a revolutionary party, this does not qualify parties who are revolutionary in word but not deed. In such cases, the workers will by-pass the "official" revolutionary parties and create their own organisations. True revolutionaries will assist them in this.
5. There is a contradiction between the need for a highly disciplined party, able to withstand the oppressive power of transnational imperialism, and a mass party, able to command the support of millions not yet willing to commit themselves to the life of a professional revolutionary. The mistake is in attempting to resolve this contradiction by choosing one or the other. We already have a mass party, commanding the support of the mass of the working class: the Labour Party. The more pressing, and more difficult task is the creation of the revolutionary party, rooted in and learning from the working class, creating the ideological bullets for comrades in the mass party to fire.
6. When Marx and Engels said that Communists had no aims that differed from those of other workers' parties, they were speaking in a specific historical context, but it is worth re-examining this concept anew in the light of today's historical specifics. It could illuminate the idiocy of standing candidates against the Labour Party instead of campaigning for left unity.
7. The limousines, hard currency shops, dachas, and private swimming pools of the nomenklatura have their origins in Lenin's conception of a revolutionary elite, linked with but distinct from the working class.
8. The contradiction of democratic centralism is that its command structure is very susceptible to capture by forces hostile to the revolution. As has happened in Britain. And the USSR.
9. Having originated as illegal, semi-military organisations with the strongly hierarchical command structure required for the seizure of central power, Communist Parties failed to restructure themselves in the completely different conditions after the revolution. Instead of transforming themselves into organisations able to win the support of the masses, they created an elaborate security apparatus to maintain their rule, which itself alienated the people and made such security organs self-sustaining and perpetuating. And security organs were the achilles heel by which counter-revolution could gain control and thwart their revolutionary purpose.
10. When the Communist Party of Britain was "re-established" as the successor to the Communist Party of Great Britain, the new party abandoned the policies but retained the structure of the former body. This was perhaps a mistake, since it is easier to change policies than structures, and it was the structure of the CPGB which allowed a right-wing leadership to trample over the revolutionary aspirations of the Party's rank and file.
11. One of the successes of the Marxism Today clique in hijacking the theoretical high ground of inner-party debate has been their claim to speak for the "new social forces" of black consciousness, gay and lesbian liberation, and feminism. While the attempt to present their struggles as alternatives to the wider class issues rather than part of them serves the purpose of the class enemy, this should not blind us to the considerable lessons we can learn from these movements, not only about their own significance, but as guides on new ways to organise ourselves. To ignore these lessons is to hand new weapons to our opponents in the battle of ideas.
12. Another new social force so far ignored by parties outside Southern Africa and Central and Southern America has been the church. Far from being the Conservative Party at prayer, they are actively seeking a concrete means of creating a more just society, in keeping with the teachings of scripture. We should not allow our secular dogmatism to prevent us from joining with Christians and other faiths in attacking institutionalised poverty.
13. It baffles belief that the same crisis of "eurocommunism" could have affected all the main workers' parties of Western Europe, without the involvement of any outside agency, conveniently at the same time as a similar loss of confidence in socialist economies in Eastern Europe, the USSR, and China. If numbered Swiss bank accounts and new identities are not awaiting the perpetrators, then either the CIA has been getting its work done on the cheap, or the former revolutionaries are not-so-ragged philanthropists, whose generosity to the oppressor exceeds anything Robert Tressall could conceive of.
14. If the soft approach to socialist construction was going to work anywhere, it should have succeeded in Nicaragua, where the revolution had the demonstrable support of the majority of the population. When Yankee intervention prevented delivery of its promises, the moderation of the revolution destroyed it. See also Chile.
15. Since the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a political fiction, not a geographical reality, the idea of a Communist Party of (Great) Britain can only be an instrument of ethnographic oppression.
16. Chaos theory shows that in conditions of extreme disorder, only a small quantity of a catalyst is necessary to precipitate a reversal of the trend and create a new systemic order. A revolutionary party should be ready for such a catalytic role, regardless of its size.
17. The dissident is not the enemy of socialist construction, but an essential constituent of the revolutionary dialectic. But if you make dissidence an easy option for the dissidents (for instance, by permitting factions), you cancel out their significance in the dialectical equation. The life of the dissident is necessarily hard, as for all revolutionaries.
4. On Stalin and "Stalinism"
1. The term "Stalinism" is of dubious value, having been borrowed from the demonology of Trotskyism. Though Stalin made contributions – the value of which need to be reassessed – on dialectical materialism, the national question, class struggle in socialist society, linguistics, and the problems of constructing socialism in the USSR, there is actually no coherent theory one can associate with his name, as can be done with Lenin, Trotsky or Mao. His writings were in the mainstream of Leninism: for instance, the slogan of "socialism in one country" was implicit in Lenin's call for all power to be given to the soviets. So the source of the crimes of the Stalin period must be sought in preceding eras.
2. The scapegoat theory of history, in which its horrors and triumphs are ascribed to individual heroes and villains – Bonaparte, Bismark, Hitler, Churchill, Brezhnev, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Saddam Hussein – not only conceals the way society really works, and protects the truly guilty from responsibility for their crimes. It also denies us the ability to learn from history and take our future into our own hands. Such individuals are the creation of their times, and make choices from a range of options limited by the class forces ranged behind them and against them.
3. Why are we so mealy-mouthed about acknowledging the charisma of our great leaders? Anyone who met Wullie Gallacher, or Harry Pollitt, or Norman Buchan, or any of the other heroes of our revolutionary struggle, was immeasurably enriched thereby. To deny that our lives would have been poorer if they had not lived the way they did is to fly in the face of human experience, which values real people over abstract theories, and the Marxist ethic which declared that "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all".
4. Giants like Lenin, Stalin, Fidel and Mao do not spring up spontaneously, like mushrooms in the night. We look like pygmies in comparison, not because we are somehow lacking individually, but because there lacks the basic motivation for struggle, out of which great leaders arise.
5. The dictator, Stalin, united the Soviet people in the war against fascism and their devotion in battle raised the red flag over Berlin. The democrat, Gorbachev, cannot win support for his policies as he demands greater and greater powers, is presiding over the break-up of the Soviet Union, and has hauled down the red flag over all the countries of Eastern Europe. Objectively, which one is the socialist democrat, and which the power-hungry dictator?
6. The forces responsible for the adulation of Stalin yesterday are those most assiduous today in denigrating him. Their purpose is the same: to conceal the underlying forces within society from those who would seize the mechanisms of power and continue the revolutionary work of Lenin and Stalin.
7. If the power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky had ended up with Stalin meeting Trotsky's fate, then the executioner of the Kronstadt sailors would be synonymous today with bureaucratic terror. And the real perpetrators would be escaping judgement. Just like today.
8. There is evidence that the assassination of Trotsky was a joint exercise between the NKVD and the American Secret Service. The fact that both USA and the USSR are now ruled by ex-members of their respective intelligence organisations suggests that little has changed.
9. Trotskyism was not defeated in the Soviet Union; it triumphed when Stalin attempted to establish socialist countries around the Soviet borders on the bayonets of the Red Army, as Trotsky had urged. The experiences of Eastern Europe have shown that Trotsky was wrong; it is impossible to export revolution. Despite its undeniable contradictions, there is no alternative to the creation of socialism in one country.
10. In 1938, Tukarchevsky and the entire Red Army general staff were executed as a result of a successful Nazi black propaganda exercise. In 1953, Lavrenti Beria was executed as an American agent. Either this accusation was true, or he was the scapegoat after the successful murder of Stalin. Both scenarios contain the possibility that other CIA agents are still in place, in the highest echelons of Soviet society.
11. It is remarkable that no one at the time was astonished that the good offices of the CIA were used by the Soviet bureaucracy to distribute throughout the world Khrushchev's "secret" denunciation of Stalin to the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Still more remarkable is the fact that no one seems to have seen in this a clue to the inspiration behind the campaign.
12. Stalin was the son of a drunken cobbler, not a middle-class intellectual like Lenin and Trotsky. Furthermore, he was a member of a subject people. Does this explain the virulence of the attempts to write him out of history?
13. The 1984 edition of Dictionary of Philosophy (Progress Publishers, Moscow) contains no entries for either Stalin or Trotsky. It is not that the authors of The Foundations of Leninism and The Permanent Revolution are unworthy of analysis, but that the Soviet establishment cannot make up its mind what it should say about them, since its internal struggles are not yet resolved.
14. However, perhaps a re-evaluation of Gorbachev and the times since Stalin's death is more urgently required than a scientific analysis of Stalin. Is this why his underlings keep harping on about the evils of past times?
15. The lessons of the continuing cult of the personality in the Soviet Union can be applied to our own experience. For instance, in describing Margaret Thatcher as the iron lady, rather than a weak, petulant, and vacillating tool of forces that dismissed her as soon as opposition to her rule had become too strong to be ignored, we contributed to the success of the forces she represented. Similarly, by characterising her successor as a faceless nonentity, we disarm the vigilance of the working class against the offensive to come. Instead of contributing to the propaganda of the ruling class, we should be explaining how all these policies are the results of increasing desperation, and signs that the apple of capitalism is over-ripe and ready to drop into our hands.
16. By accepting and perpetuating the idea that the succession of the Tory leadership was no more than an internal power struggle within the Parliamentary party, we rob the working class of its victory, of the realisation that they have the power to topple the most autocratic, most solidly entrenched oppressor since Castlereagh. The change in leadership was a panic response to a decade of struggle that was sharpening rather than slackening, despite the efforts of defeatists on the left. The miners, the nurses, the printers, the seafarers and, most recently, the millions who are refusing to pay the community charge, all contributed to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.
5. On dialectical materialism
1. Marx refused to call himself a Marxist. We should follow his example. The method we use in our struggle is dialectical materialism, and we should be dialectical materialists.
2. We should read the Marxist classics not to find out what they say but what they do; not for a theological guide to what we should believe but for a demonstration of the way the dialectical method was applied to the concrete data available at that historical moment. The data may change and the conclusions may be invalidated, but the method's validity will not be affected. In fact, the data has not changed to any significant extent, since the decline of industrial capitalism whose beginning Marx documented is now approaching its conclusion.
3. Different techniques are required to freeze water at the equator than at the north pole. But the physical principles are identical and the change to ice is always sudden, abrupt, ungradual. So the techniques of revolution may differ, but they must obey the same fundamental laws if they are to succeed, and the only way to understand these laws is by the application of dialectical materialism.
4. Marxism, like all belief systems, cannot help but decline into religious dogma. The dialectical materialist method, on the contrary, eschews facile slogans and is applied rigorously to the concrete practice of everyday life. This is why it is so unpopular among political bureaucrats.
5. Materialism is not a belief system, it is a recognition of the nature of reality, which is not static, but constantly changing. Dialectics is the means of coming to grips with that reality, not by attempting to freeze it with dogmatic slogans, but by entering into the process of change.
6. We have avoided the study of dialectics, thinking it is too difficult and "theoretical" for working people, betraying our class snobbery. But if a child can apply dialectics to the problem of learning to walk, which is a kind of falling, then surely we can learn to understand and control the similar contradictions in the development of society.
7. We have forgotten how to be materialists, and instead repeat the lifeless incantations of 19th Century rationalism, an idealistic philosophy which tests reality against a preconceived idea of what is reasonable. Reality and commonsense have very little in common, and the truth is never reasonable.
8. Atheism is the only reasonable religious position for rational humanity. Unfortunately, like all religions, it substitutes a fixed image of reality for the real thing, and must be discarded, along with the capitalist economics which fostered the idea of the universe as a self-perpetuating machine.
9. Because we have failed to distinguish between rationalism and materialism, and to understand that one is the opposite of the other, we have neglected the spiritual side of our work. Yet if we are engaged in the creation of a new man and woman, we cannot also neglect the fact that, as the woman's movement has taught us, the personal is political, and we must apply the ethics of dialectical materialism to our relations with each other.
10. We must return comradeship, which the Biblical writer, Paul, said was greater than faith or hope, to the centrality of our political life. Instead of using it virtually as a term of abuse – "Comrade So and So is a tool of reaction" – we should nurture each other through the stresses and strains of the revolutionary life. If we do not care for each other, how may we presume to be entrusted with caring for the rest of the world?
6. On strategy and tactics
1. Both long-term strategy and short-term tactics are beggared by basic contradictions. While the working class is entitled to ask us what kind of new society we are offering, and how we shall bring it about, we are not fortune tellers, and cannot pretend to be able to forecast the concrete conditions under which revolution will take place, apart from the certainty that they will be different from what we expect. The working class is also entitled to expect us to lead it tactically, improving its lot and defending it against the depredations of a decaying capitalism, though all such efforts are doomed to ultimate failure until we tackle the root cause of their problems, capitalism itself.
2. A purely tactical approach, with no long-term strategy behind it, inevitably concentrates upon purely economic demands, ending up in the sort of reformist, legalistic movement which has successfully held back the tide of revolution in capitalist countries like Britain for eight decades. Reliance upon long-term aims, with no attention to attainable short-term objectives, not only abandons the working class to its oppressors so that we may luxuriate in our revolutionary "purity", but also delivers it to the very reformists whose pragmatism is so seductive in these times, when capitalism cloaks its decadence in a facade of invincibility. As in any dialectic, the correct resolution will be achieved not by choosing one or the other of these contradictions, but both, since each will interact with and act as a corrective upon the other.
3. Tactics which are not informed by a long-term strategy will be reactive rather than active, granting the initiative to the class enemy instead of allowing the working class to determine its own agenda for action. Strategy which is not expressed through every-day work with achievable, concrete gains will be remote from working class experience, focussed on a "pie in the sky" millenarianism which is the revolutionary analogue of religious other-worldliness.
4. The increasing desperation of the ruling class, as it becomes unable to use its surplus to buy off the working class with such crumbs from the rich tables as free medical care, universal education, cheap housing and transport, not to mention a decent living wage, presents the revolutionary with a wealth of issues around which to organise. We must beware of always fighting on ground chosen by the enemy, or – worse – from conducting struggle in a manner which assists their long-term objectives.
5. For instance, when we call the community charge the poll tax, we encourage the idea that if people do not register to vote they may escape the charge. As a result, the very sections of the working class who most require a Tory defeat are disenfranchising themselves from the electoral struggle. Is someone getting paid for shooting our movement in the foot like this, or do we do it for sheer, masochistic pleasure?
6. The function of the community charge is to destroy local democracy and to increase the centralisation of power. Thus, the "can't pay won't pay" campaign contains an internal contradiction, since as it undermines the funding of local government it will foster the very purpose it aims to frustrate. This is not an argument against the campaign, but for an understanding of the way in which a coherent strategy can resolve the contradiction and carry the movement forward to a qualitatively new stage when the inevitable breakdown of local government takes place. Our failure to present such a strategy is a consequence of the lack of dialectical practice in our work. So we tail after the leadership of the movement against the poll tax, and become accomplices of the ultra left in achieving the purpose of the ruling class, their traditional role.
7. None of the democratic liberties and economic advantages gained by the working class during the century of capitalist expansion was given to them without a struggle. It was always unreasonable to expect them to surrender these advances after the victory of the revolution; now that capitalism can no longer afford them, and rights like full employment at a proper living wage, equal pay, medical care, free speech, access to the media, trade union organisation, and local democracy are being legislated out of existence, it would be quixotic for the left not to propose the extension of these threatened rights in the course of the revolutionary struggle, rather than their limitation.
8. Huey Long predicted that when fascism came to the United States it would call itself anti-fascism. Similarly, socialist democracy is being destroyed in the name of democracy.
9. In any case, democracy is not a synonym for mass popular power; it is its antithesis, devised by a Greek tyrant to divide the people of Athens along demographic lines, making it easier for him to rule. The drive towards multi-party democracy in socialist and developing world countries serves the same purpose, though the tyrants are faceless and as yet unrecognised.
10. No mature revolutionary seeks violent overthrow of the established order just for the sake of violence, but it is obvious that no truly revolutionary government can expect to be allowed to continue its business without the armed opposition of the class it intends to expropriate. No matter how much a peaceful transition is to be desired, it will therefore be necessary to anticipate armed struggle immediately after the establishment of popular power. To suggest any other possibility lacks credibility, since the working class knows of the tenacity of its rulers from its own every-day experience. We should openly acknowledge this basic fact about revolutionary change, and plan for it, without providing our enemies with a detailed scenario of how the revolution would be defended from the possibility of a military putsch.

Published on January 4, 1992 as a contribution to the discussions on the  establishment of a truly revolutionary party, distributed at the national congress of the Communist Party of Britain,.