ALB
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Hch wrote:Finally, if the SPGB supported TUSC and the Campaign for a New Workers Party, you would come into contact with workers who are supportive of socialist ideas.
Why would we need to “enter” a reformist organisation to meet workers and get our ideas across? In any event, judging by the results of the last general election TUSC has no wider an audience than we have. In fact, in the Vauxhall cobstitutency in London, which we contested, the Trotskyist candidate got fewer votes than us. He was incidentally from a Trot group that wanted to join TUSC but was denied access to it. The rumour was that TUSC leader Bob Crow, as an unreconstructed Stalinists, didn’t like Trots. I’m sure he’d like us even less.
Hch wrote:I can only conclude that the SPGBs dismissal of the Campaign for a New Workers Party shows a lack of confidence in your own ideas.What’s the point of forming a Labour Party Mark 2. It would fail just as the existing Labour Party did, and for the same reason. Seeking support on the basis of reforms to capitalism, if it gets elected it will have no mandate for socialism and so will have no alternative but to run capitalism. But capitalism can run only as a profit-making system in the interests of those who live off profits. It can never be made to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers. In the end instead of Labour-style parties changing capitalism, capitalism changes them so they eventually end as simple managers of capitalism. That’s one of the mistakes the workers movement made in the 20th century. We don’t want this to be repeated in the 21st.
Why don’t we support TUSC, ie the Trotskyists United Supporters Club? You’ve got it right in one. It’s because they are reformists. Either genuinely because they mistakenly believe that the minimum wage can be tripled, pensions doubled and a massive public works programme for paid from increased taxes on profits implemented under capitalism. Or because they are practising the machiavellian trotskyist tactic of “transitional demands”, of trying to lead workers in reformist struggles which they (but not the workers) know are unachievable in the hope that when these reforms are not achieved the workers will turn to them who as a vanguard will lead them in an assault on the state, overthrow it and set up … state capitalism. No thanks.We tell the workers the truth: that capitalism can never be made to work in their interest and that the only way out is the establishment of socialism as a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, production solely and directly for use and distribution on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.
