 1937-38 the French ruling class was compelling the Pop- ular Front’s parliamentary majority to undo the reforms passed in 1936 – and in 1940, parliament voted for col- laboration with the Nazi occupation under Marshall Petain. In Chile, the ruling class went further and took armed action to impose its will. After a year or more of economic sabotage designed to turn a section of the pop- ulation against the government, there was a military coup. In September 1973 General Pinochet moved tanks into the major cities, bombarded the presidential palace – killing Allende – and arrested and murdered thousands of government supporters. Allende had appointed Pinochet head of the army only two months earlier. In the aftermath of that coup, many of those who sup- ported changing society by working through the existing state – including the leaders of the Italian Communist Party and the British historian Eric Hobsbawm – drew a strange conclusion. They argued the mistake in Chile had been to go too far, too fast, and concluded the only way a reformist government could stay in office was by abstain- ing from implementing the reforms people wanted. It was an admission that you cannot bring the kind of changes we need to society through the existing state. If another world is possible, we will not reach it through such methods.
This does not mean we should simply ignore parlia- ments. They are the focus for what most people see as politics and provide the terrain on which arguments about the direction of society take place. When people want to tackle a social ill, they usually look to parliament to do it. So although election results cannot, in themselves, pro- duce serious social change, they can be a measure of people’s desire for change – and make individuals aware of the degree to which others share their desire. An election campaign can help pull together those who want to change society and offer a chance for them to present their ideas. Success in electing even a single MP or deputy can give a platform for a radical position that can influence the opinions of millions. This was the case in Germany at the beginning of World War One when the revolutionary socialist Karl Liebknecht used the parliamentary chamber to make a stand against the war, breaking the wall of silence imposed by state censorship. It was also what happened in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s when a young socialist from Northern Ireland, Bernadette Devlin, used her election to parlia- ment to denounce repression by the British state. Most recently, in 2005, the election of George Galloway as Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow provided an opportunity to take the argument against imperialist war to the heart of the US government – the Senate. Parliament is a debating chamber in which, at its best, representatives of different classes, with different notions of what society should be like, can air their views in public. A debating chamber cannot overturn the hier- archies of power embodied in the state, but it can provide a means for mobilising people against those hierarchies. However, even when there is a left-wing majority in parliament or a left-wing president, such a mobilisation depends on what happens in the streets and workplaces.
This was shown in a negative sense in Chile in the early 1970s. It was shown in a much more positive sense in Venezuela in April 2002 after a group of generals staged a coup, kidnapped the twice-elected president, Hugo Chavez, and installed the head of the employers’ federation in his place. Millions of the poor of Caracas surrounded the pres- idential palace two days later, leading a section of the armed forces to turn against the generals and restore Chavez. Six months later, mass action by the country’s workers stopped a second attempt to overthrow the president during a man- agement shutdown of industry. Had it been left simply to those in parliament, Chavez would not have survived and Venezuela would have gone the way of Chile. The country’s poor would not have gained the subsequent reforms paid for from booming oil rev- enues, and there would be no talk in Venezuela of “socialism in the 21st century”. As it is, the country’s rich are forced to tolerate reforms out of fear of a renewed mass movement, while biding their time in the hope that the workers and the poor forget how the coup was thwarted.
monarchical government rather than see their economic power threatened by a democratic mass movement. The first great attempt by workers to take power, the Paris Commune of 1871, produced a much greater exten- sion of revolutionary democracy. Following a war with Germany that saw the French army crushed and Paris besieged, the workers of the city took control and estab- lished a commune. They elected delegates from each district to represent them, making them subject to recall at any time and paid no more than the wage of a skilled worker. They implemented decisions themselves rather than turn to an unelected hierarchy of bureaucrats, and relied not upon a professional or conscript army, but on the armed workers, organised as a national guard. New forms of revolutionary democracy began to emerge in the working class revolutionary upsurges of the 20th century – the workers’ councils. The first was born in October 1905, during strikes that came close to destroying the 400-year-old Tsarist Empire. Striking print workers in the capital St Petersburg elected dele- gates to form a council, or soviet in Russian, and delegates from other striking factories joined them. The council became the organising centre of a movement that held the city in its grip, a focus for the economic and political demands of the oppressed classes and, in effect, an alternative government to that of the Tsar.
In their spontaneous origin, in their composition, in their sense of responsibility, in their efficient organisation of food supplies and civil order… and not least in their resemblance to the workers, peasants and soldiers councils which sprang up in Russia in the 1905 revolution and in February 1917, these committees, a network of which now extended over the whole of Hungary, were… at once organs of insurrection – the com- ing together of delegates elected by factories and universities, mines and army units – and organs of popular self govern- ment in which the armed people trusted.
The whole movement was based on a huge wave of workplace occupations. Each striking enterprise sent a delegate to its local MKS. The delegates elected an inner executive committee under this immediate control. The major negotiations with the state were conducted in front of microphones, which were linked to the shipyard tannoy system so that thousands of workers could follow the proceedings… Delegates returned to their workplaces with tape recordings of the proceedings, to report and renew their mandates…Within days of its establish- ment the Gdansk MKS had begun taking control of essential services in the area [Colin Barker, “Poland, 1980-81: The Self-Limited Revolution” in Colin Barker (ed), Revolution- ary Rehearsals, London, 1987].
drew all sorts of other sections behind it and began to unite the whole of society. In doing so, these movements began to show in practice how society could be rebuilt on a new basis. In each case, people of all sorts began to consider how to make a different world.
WHICH CLASS DICTATES?
themselves to counter the violence of the existing state, and would reorganise society as a whole in the interests of the majority. Frederick Engels pointed to the Paris Commune of 1871, with its elected delegates subject to recall, to illustrate in practice what working class rule – the dictatorship of the proletariat – would look like. Where the Commune led, the workers’ councils of the 20th century would follow, providing a taste of the kind of revolutionary organisations we can expect in the upheavals ahead.
the character of capitalist society. Capitalists cannot sur- vive without making profits, but they cannot do that without bringing workers together to exploit and thus creating discontent. This is what Marx meant when he wrote that capitalism creates its own “gravedigger”. Ruling classes before capitalism also exploited the mass of the population. But they did so mainly by exploit- ing peasants dispersed across the countryside, each family tending its own land, living in villages or hamlets with little connection between them, speaking localised dialects, unable to read and write, and possessing little understanding of the wider world. Capitalism, by contrast, concentrates those it exploits in giant cities, in workplaces where improved conditions can only be obtained through collective struggle. In order to exploit workers to the maximum, capitalists demand a level of literacy and numeracy higher than that among most of the exploiting classes of the past. In doing so, the system creates a class with the capacity to organise against it and the potential to turn society on its head.
of production and those who work for them. Lifestyle, dress, income and consumption are products of this division, not its cause. It is irrelevant if occasional mem- bers of the possessing class choose to slum it, or if some of the toilers gain marginal advantages and imitate aspects of the lifestyle of their exploiters. The fact that the head of Barclays and a counter clerk in a branch of the bank both wear suits does not bridge the gap between them. The bank clerk, computer operator and call centre employee are compelled to accept voluntary wage-slavery, five days a week, 48 weeks a year, just as much as a car worker or docker.
noticed with pain that their moral and intellectual condi- tions had deteriorated…In our old Chartist times, it is true, Lancashire working men were in rags by the thousands; and many of them lacked food. But their intelligence was demonstrated wherever you went. You would see them in groups discussing the great doctrines of social justice