Theses on Party, Revolution and State

Two and a half centuries ago, the Industrial Revolution began in a
developing country on the margins of the world-system, a small state
whose average living standards were no higher than China's, the
economy still backward by comparison. Britain's break-out into sustained
growth catapulted the West from marginality to the core of the world-system.
In 1750 average English per capita incomes were around $200 1960 dollars:
China's were a little higher.

By 1960, English incomes had increased ten-fold; but Chinese incomes had
fallen to $170 per capita. The era of industrial capitalism was a
catastrophe for most of Asia. The pendulum of development swung west.

Since the 1970s manufacturing industry has declined absolutely and
relatively (excluding oil). 16% of GNP comes from manufacturing
industry. Britain is  deindustrialised. Its economy was among the
first to be privatised, deregulated, globalised, its
national bourgeoisie transformed into a burgeoning class of
rentier-capitalists.

The British working class has been restructured out of its birthright and
out of its collective identity. The country is now a fiefdom of
international finance capital, its  working class little more than servitors
of the City, which has now consolidated its national hegemony while totally
internationalising itself.

The country now exists as an adjunct of the City. Apart from
finance capital, Britain's most successful trades are the Intelligence
Service, the Armed Forces and the arms industry. Manufacturing money
is the sole function of capitalism in Britain (one cannot speak of 'British
capitalism' any more), and thus has world capitalism achieved an
apotheosis: it was Marx who first defined capitalism as a mode of
production whose exclusive concern was the production of capital rather
than the production of goods, but no major capitalist power has
accomplished the materialisation of that goal in everyday life before.
For this reason, the world slump which is now in its early stages will
have peculiarly sharp social effects in Britain.

Britain's role as the world's largest financial offshore island, the world's
leading money-launderer (as much as $200bn of narcodollars and dirty money
in some years is washed in the City's giant laundry), its self-appointed
segregation from Europe and refusal to participate in EMU (economic and
monetary union) means that the fate of sterling, pummelled between the euro
and the dollar, will likely be grisly. British capitalism has become a
phantasmagoria where all that should be real has already been virtualised:
in a generalised world economic crisis the first things to disappear will be
the great institutions of world finance: the banks, dealing-houses and true
transnationals, and above them the great parastatal instances like the IMF
and World Bank. The disproportionate weight of banking, finance and
transnational corporate capital in the British economy means that the
effects of crisis in these sectors will spread with lightning speed and
devastating effect through what passes for the specifically-national
economy.

Just as a collapse in the world market will destroy the chains
linking together multinational manufacturing operations, beaching like
dead whales the shiny new hi-tech assembly plants scattered through the
neocolonies, severing the links of trade and finance, so the reverberations
will particularly severe in countries like Britain where so much
transnational capital is headquartered.

The first and most evident consequence of the crisis will be the deep de-
globalization of economy and as in the USSR interstate borders and
barriers will be restored and strengthened and the nations will restore
their full sovereignty including prevention of emigration and extradition
of immigrants and foreigners. Without communist leadership, the British
working class will be easy prey for the worst kinds of chauvinist and
outright fascist manipulations, in conditions of accelerating social
breakdown and mass unemployment. As will be true in large states like
the US and China, Britain will experience centrifugal forces tearing the
union apart. Independent Scotland looks set to be the first major breach.
There will be others.

A generalised slump of the depth that is possible on current trends will
have the effect of making the world market seem to simply disappear.
The most advanced companies, those that rely most on world trade, will
be destroyed. The high technology sector will collapse early on -- until it
is reincoporated into a militarised economy, which will perhaps be the
second stage of the crisis, as the world shapes up for war. Just as
international bodies like UN, UNESCO, WTO, World Bank, etc. will
cease to exist or become vestigial structures without real power or
influence -- and as even the idea of international legislation and
international rights disappears - so too the British state, which is no more
than a rampart around the city and the vast class of rentier capitalists,
middle-class parasites and their servants and menials -- will cease to
function except as a militarised instance of bourgeois class power.
One thing is clear: the major international crises of this century, 1914-
1919 and 1939-1945 -- contained within them the seeds of their own
resolution and were the forcing houses of great news waves of capitalist
accumulation. It is also true that the crisis of 1914 arose on the cusp of a
revolutionary proletarian wave. This was the only occasion in the history
of capitalism when a breach opened wide enough in the system for world
revolution to be thinkable as an outcome, though the counter-
revolutionary wave that began in 1919 aborted this result. Today, so
many planetary potentialities have been squandered irretrievably by
world capitalism and the forces of repression and counter-revolution are
so much stronger and more malevolent now than then. The historical
impasse faced by capitalism is so much deeper now than 80 years ago,
but equally the danger to the revolution is almost unfathomably vast.
Revolution in Britain is part of a wider international process. The
complex interlinking of British society and economy with international
capitalism deepens the international dimension of British communism
and means that the Communist Party Refoundation places an equal
emphasis on international work compared to its national tasks.
In these conditions, proletarian revolution can only succeed if if is led
by a party with iron discipline, a party which is prepared to seize the time
and deal mercilessly with its enemies.

Today, the Labour movement in Britain is a pale shadow of what it
once was. The working class which created the revolutionary democracy
of the Chartist movement, which built the world's first mass trade union
movement, which moved forward towards class independence by
creating a political party based on mass organisation, is in a state of
effective political disenfranchisement.

Under Blair, Labour has turned away from even the pretence of
representing the working class. It is openly pro-capitalist and anti-worker.
The continued support given to Labour by sections of the working class
is the reflection of no more than the absence of a genuinely proletarian
alternative. And the continued electoral support given to Labour by the
so-called revolutionary left is no more than absolute proof of their utter
irrelevance to the pressing tasks of the day.

Kier Hardie and the others who in the first decade of this century
formed the Labour Representation Committee broke with
the Liberal Party, but were still in the tenets of
bourgeois ideo-political hegemony. Their politics were indistinguishable
in all essentials from those of the Liberals they sought to replace as the
elected representatives of the working class.

The Labour Party emerged first as the expression above all of the
Labour aristocracy (see Edwardian Risings). If it represented working class
politics at all, it did so on the basis of trade union politics, which, as
Lenin argued in 'What is to be Done?' is still bourgeois politics.
Inside the early working class movements of Europe, battle was
done between those who sought only to better the lot of Labour
within capitalism, and those who sought its overthrow. This struggle
was over nothing less than the class nature of the Labour movement
itself and whether the movement was to be proletarian or petty bourgeois.
In Britain, the outcome was rarely in doubt. Labour was never a socialist
party prior to 1917, and only adopted Clause 4 as a figleaf to disguise
its real nature from theilitant workers who saw in the Russian revolution
and the tactics of the Bolsheviks the key to their own class emancipation.

Labour was a party of the working class, but never truly a party for the
working class. Its mass membership and support was from the working
class, but its leaders were scoundrels of the worst kind, as Lenin noted:
the Labour Lieutenants of Capital. Lenin captured the essence of the
Labour Party when he described it as a bourgeois workers party. Under
Blair, it is not even that: it is a bourgeois party pure and simple.
The fledgling Communist movement in Britain was never more than a
small minority of the working class. It is doubtful that it would even have
been formed as a party had it not been for the Russian revolution and the
active intervention of Lenin and the Communist International. As it was,
the Communist Party of Great Britain was cobbled together from a
handful of nominally Marxist groups with little influence and even less
tactical sensibility. The largest component of the new party, the former
British Socialist Party, bore no comparison with Lenin's Bolsheviks, and
was riddled with opportunism. The other components offered the
counter-balance of ultra-leftism and sectarianism. That such a party was
built, let alone that it should have consolidated itself within the most
radical sections of the British working class on a national scale, is a
tribute to both the vision and patience of the Communist International,
and the quality and determination of the early CP's members, who faced
up to the challenges as best they could and transformed themselves
beyond recognition in a few short years.

We should be wary of looking at the history of the Labour Party
through rose tinted spectacles, and equally careful not to exaggerate the
virtues of the CPGB. Unable to challenge Labour's leadership of the
working class, the party slowly but surely was sucked into the social-
democratic swamp of the Labour mainstream. The party's finest hours:
the National Unemployed Workers Movement, the Hunger Strikes, the
rank and file militancy of the General Strike, the Battle of Cable Street,
the International Brigades: these and more are part of our history and we
are proud of them. But the CPGB was never Bolshevised. In 1926 it
could offer no alternative to the left-wing of Labour, and was powerless
to resist the betrayal of the General Strike organised by Labour and the
TUC. In the 1930s its application of the tactics of the 7th World
Congress of the Communist International bore an increasingly
opportunist stamp. By 1939 the party was so disoriented it initially sided
with its own bourgeoisie in the phony war with Hitlerite Fascism. By
1945, the party was completely at sea: its perspectives, laid out in
countless Central Committee statements and articles by leading party
members, were no longer for the armed overthrow of the bourgeois state,
but rather the gradual transformation of the class nature of the state
through the election of a left-wing Labour government with strong
Communist support outside and inside parliament. The CPGB turned
revisionist nearly a decade before Stalin died, and more than a decade
before the 20th Congress of the CPSU.

Communists in Britain must face up to this ambiguous history, and
learn the appropriate lessons. The fighters for revolution of the 20s and
30s, people like Wal Hannington, Palme Dutt, Tom Bell, Harry Pollitt,
turned into the new revisionists of the post-war boom. And the roots for
this social democratic degeneration must be sought in the nature of the
early CPGB itself, and its failure to truly break with the politics of the
past.

In pre-revolutionary Russia the opportunism of the Economists and the
Mensheviks had been countered by the clear response of the Bolsheviks,
but in Britain the opportunism of the CPGB leaders evoked little
response. A few figures stand out in the anti-revisionist movement which
developed in the 1950s and 1960s - men such as John Buckle, Cornelius
Cardrew, Michael McCreary - but from the outset the anti-revisionist
movement was riven with factionalism, opportunism, sectarianism, ultra-
leftism and personal megalomania, not to mention the undeniable hand of
the state. The anti-revisionist movement failed to establish itself as a
viable alternative. This was due in some part to the actual policies of the
Chinese and Albanian parties which led the anti-revisionist movement
internationally, but there fault also lies at home. Today, the weaknesses
of the anti-revisionist movement are as great as ever, played out the first
time as tragedy, and now as farce.

Trotskyists spent long years denouncing every other force as Stalinist
betrayers but were congenitally incapable of filling the vacuum created
by the inevitable demise of the CPGB. These social-democratic
pretenders have never been more than a roadblock to revolution: they
have done the bidding of the class enemy, wittingly or not. Either way,
the result is the same. They offer no solution to the working class. Like
the reformists they claim to despise, they must be swept aside.
The same applies to the intellectual left, academic Marxists making their
ample living through the sytematic gutting of Marxism of its
revolutionary essence. Their output is prolific, its value slight.

They form an organic part of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia,
distinguishable from the mainstream of academia only by the audacity of
their posturing. They are the opposite of those genuine bourgeois
intellectuals, like Marx and Engels, who came over to the working class and
indentified with it completely. Having failed to proletarianise
themselves, their role was to turn the working class movement into an
adjunct of the petty bourgeoisie. They played a leading role in the final
dissolution of the revisionist CPGB, but today serve no purpose other than
to erect yet another roadblock to revolutionary renewal and regroupment.
Far from being part of the solution to the crisis of the revolutionary
movement,
they are part of the problem.

Tempered in class struggle raging through the entire historical and
social space of the capitalist world system, the proletariat is
entrenching round the bastions of power and privilege. That is
one of the meanings of underdevelopment ('de-development'):
the creation of vast social hinterlands which are in some sense
off-limits to capital; as if capitalism has turned history inside out
and itself become an archipelago of enclaves webbing the world and
laced together by fast transport systems and electronic nets. These
enclaves exist in the South too, in centres of super-affluence and among
newly-formed middle classes which in India and China are hundreds of
millions strong.

These broad strata of new wealth were created out of the one-sided
booms of the 1980s and 1990s, on the backs of deregulation,
privatisation and opened markets. These social layers no longer identify
with 'their' nation or culture, or even their native tongue. They are
rootless, cosmopolitan, dreaming of different horizons, fanatical only
about brand names, despising and repudiating their poorer fellow-
citizens. They are the body and substance of the New World Order, and
they owe their allegiances to the MacDonaldised, Hollywoodised cultural
utopias of western philistinism. These are the true beneficiaries of
globalism, and they have the most to lose, so they are the natural
constituency for neofascist movements, craving strong men and fearing
the submerged, sullen masses surrounding them on all sides.
Outside these super-affluent enclaves and the middle class outworks that
cluster round them like merchant settlements at the foot of a Norman
castle, are vast and growing reservoirs of marginalised and lumpenised
humanity -- which exist in the opulent North, too. The surging
populations of the barrios and megacities are vast sources of inscrutable
discontents and potential revolt. Just as the Victorians, fearing social
cataclysm in the new industrial cities of England, built schools, invented
new forms of social incorporation and created a whole new mass
psychology to capture the working class which in 1848 Marx and Engels
mistakenly thought were ready for revolution, so too the votaries of
globalism have had their tasks set them.

But in the same way that productive capital has been centralised to a
fantastic, unheard of degree, so too has cultural production become
focused in a few locations, Hollywood supreme among them, eclipsing
the rest and converting world culture in every capital city into a
subordinate form of Hollywood. Similarly, US imperialism has now
begun a colossal experiment with information technology; for, compared
to a century ago, there is now no possibility of constructing such luxuries
as schools, institutes, centres of learning and research.

The social infrastructure the developed world takes for granted will
never exist in the neocolonies. The West's complex systems of education,
health and social welfare arose out of a historic process of accumulation
which has ended. Caught in the scissors of growing resource and
environmental constraints and burgeoning population, such social
programmes cannot keep pace with existing deman let alone meet the
unsatisfied expectations of the billions of new city-dwellers in the poor
South.

Their educational opportunities will be confined to 'distance learning',
and capitalism will take the cost out of education in the same way and at
the same time that it dumbs down the content. That is the real meaning
behind the hosannas raised to the fantastic, magical powers of the Net:
nothing more elaborate as the prosaic, same-old, same-old: social control
and indoctrination at minimum cost, with the added bonus of almost total
surveillance. And such dismal prospects do not only await young people
in the neocolonies. In the West, too, capitalism has embarked on multi-
pronged strategies for sucking the value of all forms of social provision;
US universities already point the way to the bleak McDonaldised future
of Microsoft-run Internet 'faculties', in which not merely the values of the
liberal arts and sciences are debauched, but even human contact between
teachers and learners will become the exception, not the rule.
Yes, the Net will guarantee the success of something which the
bourgeois has dreamed of since the time of Jeremy Bentham: the
Panopticon society where all communications of every kind will be
monitored and controlled, the real Big Brother world where all authentic
space within civil society will be shut down amid blazes of Hollywood
fireworks, and it will become literally impossible for any opposition
movement: let alone the Communists! -- to gain a foothold and develop.
It is a hopeless dream and a fantasy. With it go darker, still more
atavistic fantasies: perhaps genetic engineering will endow the super-
privileged with immortality? Perhaps the white races of the North will
engineer their own successors, a race of true supermen, thus realising not
just Nietzsche's dream but Hitler's too? Just as the poets of imperialism:
men like Kipling and even Jack London: anticipated the fruits of
imperialism as a world inm which lesser races would meet their
inevitable doom, as indeed the Indians of the American plains already
had: so too, the modern poets of cybertopia (people like Kevin Kelley: a
whole lot more dumbed-down and idotically philistine, needless to say)
envisage a futureworld not much different from the set of Star Trek.

For Communists there is no Law but Party Law. No justice but Party
justice. No truth but Marxism-Leninism. The Party is the honour, mind
and conscience of our epoch. We serve its cause, hold high its banner,
strive to rebuff the Party's enemies, and we acknowledge no higher duty.
Communists cherish as their dearest possession, the vitality of the Party
and strive by all means to safeguard its material basis. Service to the
Party is the highest form of service, fulfilling its tasks our single
obsession. Our lives are one with the life of the Party. Soldiers of the
Revolution, Party-fighters show indomitable will to win and, fearing
nothing themselves, arouse terrible fear in their enemies, since
Communists are implacable foes of imperialism, relentless grave-diggers
of capitalism.

Guided by the moral and intellectual disicpline of Marxism-Leninism,
communists do not  shirk battle but seek it out. No flag has a prouder
history, or been more stained with the  betrayal than ours. Both stories are
our story and we cherish all that is in our history. With revolutionary
humility we declare uncompromsing war on corruption, sloth, routinism
and betrayal in our own ranks, the better to carry the fight to the enemy.
We pledge to uphold the dignity and honour of the Party.
We are glad of the hatred of our enemies and we welcome it as a sign of
the justice of cour cause hypocrisy of the enemy, we do not fear them.
The greater the frenzy the whip up, the more vigilant and certain we shall
be. Stripping away the sanctimonious veils of hypocrisy behind which the
imperialists hide their bloody crimes, the Communists indict them before
history, subjecting imperialism to the hammer-blows of encompassing
revolutionary war.

The Party is a fortress of revolution, the arsenal of our theory and
practice. Imperialists steeped in the blood of the oppressed recognise the
menace to their interests of the Communist Party. They have always and
will always do their best to strangle the infant revolution in its cradle,
knowing no law or conscience. Those who will tell any lie, make any
promise, commit any crime, must face the consequences. The Party
stands for revolutionary justice. The criminality of ruling regimes must
be answered in kind. They are without honour, their law is a sham, their
morality an obscene mockery, they hold nothing sacred -- even their own
laws. Then why should we? We shall keep faith with our Party and our
Class.

They can bury Communism a million times, they can besmirch the
name of Lenin, they can ridicule the achievements of Marx. But the Party
lives and shall live.

Communists have the task and duty of fiercely criticising the
weaknesses, backsliding and defects of the Party and that also is a way of
defending the Party from informers, backsliders and traitors. The test of a
Communist Party is the attitude its members take to it. If the inner life of
a Party is characterised by freedom to criticise, if criticism is not
stifled
but encouraged, then the Party is healthy and has not been subverted by
the enemy and its political police.

The Party is intellectually open. Party fighters engage on ideological,
theoretical and cultural fronts in a general contestation of ideas  and to
destroy the legitimatory apologetics of the imperialists. The importance
of these battles is in disarming bourgeois science and ideology, blinding
the enemy and liquidating his ideological hegemony.

More, it is a preparation to assume state power. The proletariat must
learn to rule and to create its own future. This task is impossible unless
the Communists master science, technology, culture and philosophy.
Marx and Lenin proclaimed this as an overriding task: the conquest of
power also means seizing the heights of culture and science, means
capturing the superstructure. The slogan 'socialism or barbarism' also
means this: without its effortless mastery of science, technology and
culture, the proletariat and its Party cannot avoid barbarism. Without
mastering the whole of bourgeois civil society and conquering the
intellectual division of labour, the proletariat itself will be incapable of
becoming autonomous and of leading society forward to Communism.
The Party must become a forcing-house of ideas, an intellectual ferment
of new thought and new theory which is more vital, vibrant and
significant than the Academy. Only through a sharp struggle of ideas can
Marxism-Leninism be salvaged from the scrapyard of dumbed-down
cop-created theory and be pushed back centre-stage.

Marxism-Leninism can never be a sterile liturgy or an empty patristics.
No set of ideas is sacred and immune from criticism; no dogma is so set
in concrete that we do not have the right to criticise it with all our force
and skill.

Marxism has lost all revolutionary content and become a plaything of
the University left, a variant of political sociology or left-economics.
Marxism became core-curriculum in the Academy, who parasitically
depend on its insights. But Marxist theory was also asphyxiated by
mindless sectarianism.

The Communist Party Refoundation stands on its head a sixty-year
history of defeat and betrayal. The Party stands for vigorous intellectual
life; the Central Committee will not tolerate dogmatism and ideological
or theoretical sterility. The Party will stake out its claim for
ideological and theoretical, as well as political hegemony.
Just as Communists have a right and a duty to participate fully in the
inner life of the Party and above all to exercise the right to inner-party
freedom of criticism, so to does the working class.
The Party engages in all kinds of mass work, in political campaigns and
even in armed insurrectionary struggle. Communists have a duty to
struggle against the reflexive passivity, fatalism and submissiveness of
the workers themselves, which centuries of subjection have inculcated.
Communists have a duty of care for the lives of workers and the
oppressed. They cannot give orders or make demands. They can serve,
and offer all and any material, moral and political assistance to workers
which is in their power. Communists are not bosses.

They also have a duty of care for their comrades, and should strive to
have comradely, harmonious relations with other Party members, and
never to show arrogance or vainglory, never to refuse justified criticism
or to avoid self-criticism, never to indulge or humour others whom they
know to be wrong.

Theses on the State and Revolution

1. The state is the product of the division of society into classes. So long
as class society exists, the state can be nothing other than the political
expression of the domination of one class over the others. Whatever its
form, it must always be the dictatorship of a class. This is as true of the
modern democratic republic as it is of open fascism. Under capitalism, the
state is always in the final analysis the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
And this dictatorship always rests upon special bodies of armed men:
the armed forces, police, courts and prisons of the bourgeoisie.

2. The working class cannot simply lay hold of the existing state
machinery and wield it for its own purposes. In order to establish its rule,
the working class is forced to create its own organs of state power in the
course of its struggles. These embryonic organs of working class rule
inevitably clash with the traditional organs of bourgeois dictatorship. In
the course of the revolution, one state faces another. The fate of the
revolution depends on the outcome of this confrontation. Either
the proletariat and its allies will smash the existing state and
establish its own dictatorship, or the
bourgeois state will drown the revolution in blood.

3. A primary function of the bourgeois state is to secure the conditions for
the expanded reproduction of capital. Its function is to represent capital
in general. The state must therefore defend the long-term interests of the
capitalist class as a whole against the short term interests of individual
fractions of capital. This was the case with social legislation such as the
19th century Factory Acts. The state is guarantor of capitalist relations of
production and their conditions of existence. Unless it is able to operate
in autonomy from the interests of particular capitals, it cannot fulfill
this
role.

The one commodity which capital cannot produce, is labour-power. This
commodity is the only source of value and therefore of profit. Capitalism
cannot exist without labour. It is therefore a primary function of the
capitalist state to secure the reproduction of labour power as a commodity,
which is to say the reproduction, and also subordination of the proletariat
as a class. This is no simple process. When the British capitalist state
intervened to protect the interests of the working class within capitalism,
it was doing so in order to secure the expansion of capital. And yet by
doing
that, the state appeared to be intervening on the behalf of labour against
capital. It was doing nothing of the sort. This is the masquerade which
feeds illusions about the beneficence and impartiality of the state and
which constitutes the principal mechanism of mystification about
the true function of the capitalist state. From here spring illusions about
democracy, the idea of the state being above society, representing
the interests of the 'whole people' against the narrow sectional
interests of capital.

Without the state, the reproduction of the capital-labour relation is
inconceivable. But equally, without its relative autonomy with respect to
individual capitals, the capitalist state itself cannot perform its central
tasks.

The autonomy of the state, far from establishing the independence of the
state from capital, is no more than a condition of existence of the
capitalist mode of production. The capitalist state is part and parcel
of the capital- labour relation, the primary safeguard of its continued
development.

Without the state, no capitalism. By the same token, without smashing the
state, it is impossible to smash capitalism. Lenin wrote that politics is
the concentration of economics. Capitalism cannot be destroyed without
liquidating its political conditions of existence.

4. So long as the bourgeois state exists, the bourgeoisie is still in power.
Until that state is overthrown and a proletarian dictatorship erected in its
stead, there can be no talk of building socialism. This is the fundamental
lesson of all revolutions and counter-revolutions of the past two hundred
years. In Chile from 1970-73, a left-wing social democratic government
held office. The failure of the Chilean working class to recognise the real
class nature of the state, and its failure to confront the armed might of
that
state with its own armed force, inevitably led to the blood bath ushered in
by the Pinochet coup. No change of personnel, no structural reforms of the
bourgeois state can change its class nature. The bourgeois state cannot be
reformed, it must be overthrown.

5. Following the successful seizure of power by the armed proletariat, the
new revolutionary order is forced to defend itself ruthlessly against its
class enemies within and without its borders. The dictatorship of the
proletariat
must be merciless with its enemies. It can allow no room for manoeuvre to
the bourgeoisie, which, despite its overthrow, retains much of its strength
and redoubles its efforts to regain what it has lost. While it is an
enormous liberating force for the great majority, the dictatorship
of the proletariat is under no circumstances to be confused with
 unbridled democracy. For workers, it represents the fullest flowering
of democracy and liberation. For the bourgeoisie, it is unbridled
repression. For the intermediate strata, the only choice is to side
with the triumphant proletariat, or suffer the same fate as the bourgeoisie.

6. Just as it is the prime function of the bourgeois state to secure the
material and social conditions for the further reproduction of the
capitalist mode of production, so too the prime social function
of the proletarian dictatorship can only be to secure the political
conditions for the suppression of capitalism and its entire division
of labour. Just as the capitalist state itself constitutes an indispensable
component of the social relations of production of capitalism, so too
the proletarian state constitutes
the key element in the suppression of those relations. Without the
proletarian dictatorship, the transition to communism is impossible.

7. Class struggle continues during the transition to communism and even
intensifies as bourgeois resistance grows desperate. Engels said a
revolution is the most authoritarian thing imaginable - the process by which
one class overthrows and represses another. There are consequently no
grounds for liberal illusions in the transition period: so long as classes
exist in the transition period, the working class exercises its iron
dictatorship over every aspect of life. Without this iron dictatorship,
the transition to communism and the eradication of classes is simply
impossible.

8. The higher stage of communism, when classes have ceased to exist, is
organised on the basis of from each according to their ability, to each
according to their needs. This is inconceivable without the overcoming of
the bourgeois division of labour, without the transcendence of the division
between mental and manual labour, between town and countryside. Only
when this has been achieved can it be said that classes have been
completely eradicated. Until that time, the proletariat must maintain its
dictatorship.  It is clear that this is a protracted process stretching over
an entire historical epoch. It is equally clear that this great leap on the
part of humanity is impossible without a cultural revolution which
raises the level of the working class and lays the foundation for the
supersession of the old division of labour.

Without this cultural revolution, it is idle to talk of the
transition from capitalism to communism.

9. The first act of the proletarian dictatorship is to seize control over
the means of production, and the organisation of production on a
rational, planned basis. But just as the proletariat cannot simply
seize hold of the existing state apparatus and wield it for its own
ends, neither can it simply adapt the existing process of social
production and continue its current pattern of development.

Engels described the seizure of the means of
production and putting them under the control of the state as simply the
first step which provides the formal means for the solution that is needed.
The real solution, the construction of a truly human society which is free
from exploitation and alienation and in which the condition for the full
development of one is the full development of all, requires the
revolutionising of society, and above all of production, from the bottom
up. It is not enough to take over capitalist technology and capitalist
industry and to use them to raise the living standards of the masses. The
construction of socialism is not the extension of capitalist methods of
industrial development to every corner of the globe. On the contrary, the
construction of socialism is the revolutionary reconstruction of society on
a totally different basis. Socialism is not about the satisfaction of
existing
demands on the basis of the abundant production of consumer durables: it
is about the unleashing of the full potential of human creativity and
productivity in a way which is inconceivable under capitalism.

10. The transition to communism is simultaneously the development of a
new society, new relations of production, and a completely new human
being. The conditions of life will not only be improved, they will be
revolutionised and put on a fully human basis for the first time. The
transition to communism is not the culmination of history: it is the end of
humanity's prehistory. It is the start of history in the true sense.
Communism is not the further development of the capitalist division of
labour, it is its complete supersession.

Mark Jones
Moderator, Leninist-International listserv
November 1999

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