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Our “Democracy”
Workers can run things differently. They carry the seeds of a new society within them every time they decide on collective action. In real independent struggles we organise from the bottom. Mass meetings elect strike committees to coordinate the strike and link up with others in the same boat. The committee is responsible to the mass meeting and can be immediately recalled by it. Committee members can be replaced if necessary. Compare this to capitalism’s offer of a vote every 5 or so years for one or other party backed by the millions of capitalist money.
Our system will be based on delegates from local level going to regional level and electing delegates to go to higher bodies beyond that. These are not like MPs who are “representatives”. In fact MPs don’t even represent the voters who elect them but only themselves or their parties. And they cannot be removed for years. A delegate system is entirely different. At every level the delegates can be quickly recalled if they fail to carry out their mandates.
Production to Meet Human Needs
This would be more “democratic” than the current set up. But that is only half the story. You cannot have political “democracy” without corresponding control of the means to live. Beyond a new grassroots-based political structure we have also got to get rid of the system of producing things to be sold at a profit and replace it with production to directly meet individual and community needs. At the same time money will become redundant and a new system of accounting will have to be introduced based on the allocation of labour and resources and collectively agreed priorities. This does not mean the abolition of work, but it does mean sharing it out evenly so that we would have meaningful work for all, without drudgery and wage slavery.
Such a world will be organised according to the original motto of Karl Marx “from each according to their ability; to each according to their need.” This has nothing to do with the nightmare of state capitalism that emerged in the USSR. That model was copied – most notably in China – and directed by parties which stole and totally misrepresented the title ‘Communist’. These monstrous distortions have no part to play in any movement aimed at reaching Marx’s vision of communism – a world without classes, nations and states: a global human community.
Some will argue that “human nature” will prevent us arriving at such a society. This forgets that human nature is not a static factor. It is shaped by the kind of society you live in. We have had 300 years of capitalist competition, war and greed but it can be shaken off. Revolutions have always altered people’s perceptions. They allow them to “get rid of the muck of ages” (Karl Marx). The next one will be no different.
This short piece was the final part of the CWO's agitational bulletin Aurora 44 and should be read in conjunction with the rest of the contents which are already on our website. These are:
Out of this capitalist impasse A New World Has to Take Shape
the full pdf can be found on our site. (leftcom.org)
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Comments
The laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production are pushing towards the ultimate insanity, a third imperialist world war. The horrific series of wars we have seen are stepping stones to that final tragedy, should the ruling class not be stopped in their tracks.
The imperialist appetite cannot be satiated, there is no end to the capitalist imperative to expand. This can only be at the expense of the imperialist competition. The marxist line has always been crystal clear, so long as imperialism stands, the next imperialist confrontation is coming.
That is why mere desire for peace is not enough. Peace under imperialism is not a possibility. The desire for peace has to be coupled with the drive to end imperialism. There is no other way to arrest the drive to war.
But opposing this crystalline perspective we have not only those who profit from imperialist crimes, easy enough to identify, but also the false friends, the left.
The labour movement in general, the labour party, the trade union bureaucrats, those so-called socialists, revolutionaries, marxists, even anarchists, who call for the Corbyn team to come to power. And let us not forget the Stop the War Coalition who palm off totally ineffectual demos along with a condemnation of the victims of imperialist savagery as somehow capable of challenging imperialism's war drive.
Yet another strand call for active support of the regimes in the firing line, praising the progressive nature of "anti-imperialist" regimes. They are preparing for the Third World War as supporters of Russia and China as if those regimes were anything but capitalist and subject to the same imperative to expand at the expense of their rivals, or die.
Against these appeals to line up with this or that imperialist bloc, the attempts to depict one side or the other as somehow favourable to the universally oppressed and exploited global proletariat, the real reponse to the imperialist war drive is exactly as set out above. Not an impossible peace under the conditions of crisis racked capitalism, not a condemnation of one side or the other, but an understanding that the conditions we face now can only be answered by the drive to global revolution and the consequences of that realisation - autonomous class struggle (including resistance to the war drive) construction of a global revolutionary organisation and the abolition of the class system as the only way to prevent the drive to generalised imperialist war from materialising.