DON’T HATE THE MEDIA – BE THE MEDIA!

DON’T HATE THE GOVERNMENT – BE THE GOVERNMENT!

 ALL POWER TO THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT!

According to Trotsky, who bases his teaching on the experience of the Russian revolution, "Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power!" is obligatory as a revolutionary demand, and obligatory as the culminating point of a programme of transitional demands. In his "Transitional Programme", in the chapter on the "Workers’ and Farmers’ Government", he says that wherever state functionaires speak in the name of the workers’ organizations and are obliged to do so to retain the confidence of the working class, the working-class vanguard must challenge them to take full power into their hands. Only the refusal to do so can provide the masses with their necessary education in the class-nature of the state, and the bourgeois class-dependence of their own reformist representatives. It is not enough merely to challenge the reformists’ programme. The demand must be not merely for a new programme, but for the state-power without which a programme in the masses’ interests cannot be implemented. And at first, when the working-class vanguard is without mass support itself and is therefore not in a position to take power, the demand must be that those representatives of the labour movement who hold the strings of power, and could take it if they wanted to, do so. The masses will agree that there is no point in their electing these people to highest office if they refuse to take the power. The masses vote for power and for action, not for good ideas.

The British revolution can only be won by a working-class vanguard basing itself on the tried and successful methods and experience of the Russian revolution. In the same way, the Russian revolution could not have been won had it not been for the experience — utilized to the full by Lenin – of the Paris Commune. Just as Lenin and Trotsky gained their knowledge from a conscientious study of the works of Marx and Engels combined with their own experience, so we must conscientiously and humbly and exactly study the lessons’ of the past as embodied in the teachings of Lenin and Trotsky.

According to Trotsky himself the Bolsheviks took the power in October 1917 through the strategy of calling on their opponents (Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries) to take the power. It was upon the demand "Take the power!", addressed to the official leadership, that the Bolsheviks mobilized the support to take power themselves. The Bolshevik road to power was not simple and direct but contradictory and dialectical. From April to September 1917, the Bolsheviks demanded that the S.R.s and Mensheviks break with the liberal bourgeoisie and take power into their own hands" writes Trotsky in the ‘Transitional Programme’.⁴

"The demand of the Bolsheviks, addressed to the Mensheviks and the S.R.s : Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power into your own hands! had for the masses tremendous educational significance. The obstinate unwillingness of the Mensheviks and S.R.s to take power, so dramatically exposed during the July Days, definitely doomed them before mass opinion and prepared the victory of the Bolsheviks."

The specific organ which the Bolsheviks in their resolutions called upon to take the power was the Executive Committee of the Soviet. The slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" was, concretely, the demand that the whole power pass to this organ. It was chosen simply because it was recognized as their highest class-organ by the masses themselves and hence was actually in a position to take power. Although, as a body composed of Mensheviks and Social- Revolutionaries, it was very reluctant to pull the strings of power, it at least had these strings in its hands.

Opposition to the demand that it seize power came from two opposite directions. The anarchists and radicals on the extreme ‘ultra’ left saw the Soviet and its E.C. as simply a direct instrument of the capitalists, the landlords and the war machine. Confusing it with the capitalist state apparatus, they thought it had too much power already. From the right-wing

Social-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks and some centrist Bolsheviks came opposition on the grounds that the Soviets were doing fine and had all the power they needed for the present. If they accepted that the full power should at some date be taken, they pushed this date far off into the indefinite future — when, for instance, the European Revolution had been completed. Really both forms of opposition — from left as much as from right – meant in practice supporting the capitalist state against the Soviets, the ruling classes against the masses.

Yet today’s ‘left’ radicals — those who in Britain oppose the slogan of industrial power to the Labour Government because the government is ‘capitalist’ — should sympathise with the Russian anarchist opponents of the slogan of power to the Soviet B.C. For this too was ‘capitalist’ in the sense that it was used by the capitalists and turned against the masses. Although the Soviets themselves were democratic at rank-and-file level, the Executive Committee itself was almost completely free of rank-and-file control. Trotsky ⁵ describes it as a ‘sub-government’ — in general subordinate to the capitalist government, yet itself possessing a state significance. Its main concern was to command the confidence of the bourgeoisie in its ability to subordinate the masses.

Hence Trotsky writes⁶: "The first care of the Executive Committee was to reconcile soldiers with officers. That meant nothing but to subordinate the troops to their former command". The first care of the Soviet Executive Committee was to take away from the masses the gains they had made through the February revolution. That meant imposing the will of the landlords upon the peasants, the will of the capitalists upon the workers, and the will of the old czarist officers upon the troops. As a result, even the lower soviet organs began to be turned into indirect organs of reaction — and even the soldiers’ committees. "Just as the Executive Committee was becoming an instrument of the Entente for taming the revolution, the soldiers’ committees, having arisen to represent the soldiers against the commanding staff, were being converted into assistants of the commanding staff against the soldiers".⁷

In a real sense, the so-called "Soviet Executive Committee" was a fraud perpetrated upon the masses. Trotsky writes :

"The organization created on February 27 in the Tauride Palace, and called ‘Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies’, had little really in common with its name. The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies of 1905, the originator of the systems, rose out of a general strike. It directly represented the masses in struggle. The leaders of the strike became the deputies of the Soviet; the selection of its membership was carried out under fire; its Executive Committee was elected by the Soviet for the further prosecution of the struggle. It was this Executive Committee which placed on the order of the day the armed insurrection.

The February revolution, thanks to the revolt of the troops, was victorious before the workers had created a soviet. The Executive Committee was self-constituted, in advance of the Soviet and independently of the factories and regiments after the victory of the revolution.

We have here the classic initiative of the radicals standing aside from the revolutionary struggle, but getting ready to harvest its fruit… The radical intelligentsia got ready its reserve sub-government at the moment of the February victory. Inasmuch as they had been, at least in the past, adherents of the workers’ movement and inclined to cover themselves with its tradition, they now named their offspring ‘Executive Committee of the Soviet’".

Its social composition was almost totally un-representative of the working-class. "No small number of people got into the Soviet by individual invitation, through pull, or simply thanks to their own penetrative ability. Radical lawyers, physicians, students, journalists, representing various problematical groups — or most often representing their own ambition… Many of these accidental crashers-in, seekers of adventure, self-appointed Messiahs, and professional bunk-shooters, for a long time crowded out with their authoritative elbows the silent workers and irresolute soldiers".⁹

The Executive Committee was the highest state organ of the working masses. It was their highest organ of power. Trotsky writes that "from the moment of its formation the Soviet, in the person of its Executive Committee, begins to function as a sovereign".

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But besides being their organ of power, the Executive Committee, composed as it was almost entirely of bourgeois intellectuals and petit-bourgeois radicals, was the masses’ organ of impotence. The last thing it wanted to do was to take power into its hands. This inability was the essential characteristic of the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries who dominated the Soviets. "At the head of the Soviets everywhere stood the Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks who rejected with indignation the Bolshevik slogan, ‘Power to the Soviets!’" (11) According to ‘Trotsky, immediately after the turbulent "April Days", "the power should have gone over wholly to the Soviets; this could have been accomplished without any civil war whatever, merely by a raising of hands — merely by wishing it. But the Compromisers did not want to wish it, and the masses still preserved their faith in the Compromisers, although it was badly cracked".¹² The Compromisers found power being pushed upon them by the masses they represented and, far from wanting this power, they were actually embarrassed by the power of the masses which they knew not what to do with. And the more power was pushed upon them, the more they hated it and tried to get rid of it. As Trotsky writes:

"…the socialists, having so easily arrived at the head of the Soviets, were worrying about only one question : Will the bourgeoisie… consent to accept the power from our hands? Its consent must be won at any cost. And since obviously a bourgeoisie cannot renounce its bourgeois programme, we, the "socialists" will have to renounce ours: we will have to keep still about the monarchy, the war, the land, if only the bourgeoisie will accept the gift of power".¹³

Since the soviet leaders were in this way actually agents of the bourgeoisie, it was not surprising that the left anarchist and radical opponents of marxism were able to simply confuse the Soviets as a whole with the bourgeois state apparatus. As time wore on, a mood of demoralization and hatred of the Soviets developed even among backward sections of the masses, particularly the peasant troops. Trotsky writes of the growing economic crisis, and of how even the shortage of bread and the continuation of the war got blamed on the Soviets, and in particular on its Executive Committee.

"The commissar of the 12th Army reports to Kerensky at the beginning of July as to the mood of the soldiers. ‘Everything is in the long run blamed on the bourgeois ministers and the Soviet, which has sold out to the bourgeoisie’"¹⁴

There can be no doubt that, had it not been for the slogan of power to the Soviets, which would never have been raised had it not been for Lenin’s personal insistence on this, (against the initial complete opposition of the Bolshevik leadership) and which the Bolsheviks had to raise despite the Soviet’s own policies — the Soviets would before long have been defeated. They would have been defeated not merely by the direct actions of the ruling classes, but also by the masses’ own demoralization and disgust at the Soviet’s sellout. The situation was saved purely and simply by the Bolsheviks’ organized demand that this same Soviet take full power into its own hands.

The situation can be clearly understood by a comparison with the (generally very different) circumstances in Britain, in which the masses are turning against their Labour Party and Trade Union organs precisely because of the misuse of these organs at the highest state level by the capitalist class. In Britain the Labour Government — the organ recognized as sovereign by the class-conscious working people — is being used by the bankers and employers (due to the willingness of the top labour leaders to allow themselves to be used) to impose on the workers

capitalist policies. Harold Wilson and his entourage (whom Trotsky would have classified as belonging to the ‘educated petit-bourgeoisie’) orient themselves on the workers, but hobnob with the bankers and bosses. While forming a part of the labour movement and Labour Government, through which the demands of the lower classes find their way up to the official state, the Labour Ministers serve at the same time as a political screen for the bourgeoisie. The possessing classes "submit" to the Labour Government provided it keeps the dominant power pushed over to their side. The masses submit to the Labour Government, in so far as they hope it might become an instrument of rule by the "working man". Contradictory class tendencies intersect in Westminster and Whitehall and they both cover themselves with the name of the Labour Government — the one through unconscious trustfulness, the other with cold-blooded calculation. The struggle is ultimately about who is to rule the country, the bankers and employers, or the organized workers.

It is almost uncanny how the terms in which Trotsky describes the ‘Soviet Executive Committee’ describe virtually word-for-word Britain’s ‘Labour Government’. Marxism does not merely make comparisons: it isolates from widely different concrete social situations in different periods and places certain essential features which are identical. Here is Trotsky describing the Harold Wilsons of Russia in the months between February and October 1917. Here he is, describing for us the ‘Labour Government which the Bolsheviks toppled over through their demand that it take the power:

"The educated petit-bourgeois oriented himself upon the workers and peasants, but hobnobbed with the titled landlords and owners of sugar-factories. While forming a part of the soviet system, through which the demands of the lower classes found their way up to the official state, the Executive Committee served at the same time as a political screen for the bourgeoisie. The possessing classes "submitted" to the Executive Committee so long as it pushed the power over to their side. The masses submitted to the Executive Committees in so far as they hoped it might become an instrument of the rule of workers and peasants. Contradictory class tendencies were intersecting in the Tauride Palace and they both covered themselves with the name of the Executive Committee — the one through unconscious trustfulness, the other with cold-blooded calculation. The struggle was about nothing more or less than the question who was to rule the country, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat?"

For marxists the difference in name between the so-called ‘Soviet E.C.’ in Russia 1917, and the so-called ‘Labour Government’ in Britain 1969 is less important than their similarity in class-substance. Future historians will see that both were sub-governments trapped (despite all their ‘sovereignty’ in the eyes of their working-class supporters) beneath the dead weight of a semi-monarchist, semi-feudalist state machine which was the direct instrument of the capitalists and old ruling classes. Naturally there are huge differences due to the totally different histories of Russia and Britain. The transition from landlordism to a workers’ state occurred in Russia, politically, ‘in a flash’ — between February and October 1917. In Britain there stretches between these two historical stages an intervening period of bourgeois rule occupying several centuries. The duration of bourgeois political rule in Russia was effectively reduced to a time-span of zero, whereas in Britain the bourgeoisie has ruled longer than anywhere else in the world. But despite these differences and many others there is something essential in common between the extremely unstable and short-lived situation of dual power in Russia’s eight-month transition-period on the one hand, and the prolonged constitutional history of dual and conflicting sovereignties, (Crown versus Parliament, then Parliament versus trade unions and Labour Party), stable, yet occasionally erupting into dual power, peculiar to Britain. Trotsky writes to this effect in his chapter on dual power in the History of the Russian Revolution. In Britain, Parliament’s partial victory over the monarchy (i.e. the victory of the bourgeoisie over the aristocrats, bishops and landowners) did not immediately transform itself into a victory of the lower classes over the property-owners’ Parliament. Three centuries have passed, and we have still not reached this latter stage. Immediately after its

victory in the English revolution of the seventeenth century (‘consummated’ by the execution of Charles Stuart), the English bourgeoisie was able to re-align with the defeated remnants of the feudalist aristocracy it had fought against in order successfully to prevent the semi- ‘proletarian’ plebeians (Levellers) from ‘completing’ the revolution in the direction of communism. In the first dual power conflict (London and Parliament versus Oxford and the King) the crisis was brought to a head and resolved by the victory of Parliament. There then developed a second dual power conflict — the lower ranks of the Parliamentary army, not satisfied by their still merely partial victory against privilege, try to rise up against their own leaders, against Cromwell and against parliament. "But", says Trotsky,¹⁶ "this new two-power system does not succeed in developing: the Levellers, the lowest depths of the petty bourgeoisie, have not yet, nor can have, their own historic path. Cromwell soon settles accounts with his enemies. A new political equilibrium, and still by no means a stable one, is established for a period of years". Whereas in Russia, the victory of the ‘Parliamentarians’ (Provisional Government, dumas, Constituent Assembly etc) over the ‘King’ (the Romanovs) is almost immediately followed by the victory of the ‘Levellers’ (the Petrograd workers and soldiers under their Soviet) over Parliament — in Britain the full development of this second dual-power conflict is only now becoming possible after a postponement of three centuries. England’s ‘Permanent Revolution’ has been of extraordinarily long duration. But it is in its class-features the same revolution: the transformation of a bourgeois victory over feudalism into a proletarian victory over capitalism.

This second victory in England hinges around the constitutional contradiction between the official sovereignty of the ‘Queen in Parliament’, and the unofficial sovereignty, in the eyes of the working-class voters and the labour movement, of the Labour Government as the highest organ of the labour movement and working-class, whose policies are determined by the unions and workers by means of the Labour Party Conference. This is an absolute and irreconcilable contradiction, with on the one hand the capitalists and their state claiming all ministers as ‘ultimately responsible to the Queen in Parliament’, and on the other hand the organized workers claiming labour ministers as responsible to themselves and their class. The final outcome of this steadily developing situation of dual power (as yet still only in its embryonic stages, though this could change with extreme suddenness in the event, for instance, of an economic collapse, strike-wave or Party Conference victory) will be determined not by existing constitutional dogmas but by the respective strengths, organization and class- consciousness of the two main contending classes.

In seventeenth-century Britain, rather as Parliament after its victory began to ‘submit’ once again to the Crown provided it did not attempt to contradict Parliament (this ‘submission’ of course won the bourgeoisie the support of the squirearchy etc against the Plebeians), the Levellers and plebeians after Cromwell’s victory wished to ‘submit’ to the Parliament of property-owners provided it did not contradict the interests of the property less. The ‘submission’ of Parliament was in reality no such thing; the hope of the Levellers that a conflict with Parliament could be avoided proved, on the other hand, vain. It was their defeat which, in its ‘world-historic re-appearance’ in Russia 1917, turned into victory. Here the property-owners’ ‘Parliament’ was not given an opportunity to develop itself; it remained and died a ‘Provisional’ capitalist Government. Here the ‘Levellers’ have a mighty organ, the Soviet, whose Executive Committee has already, even at the very beginning of the purportedly ‘bourgeois’ revolution, acquired the significance of a state organ. Trotsky describes the situation as follows:¹⁷

"Delegations from the Baltic and Black Sea fleets announced on the 16th of March that they were ready to recognize the Provisional Government in so far as it went hand in hand with the Executive Committee; in other words they did not intend to recognize it at all. As time goes on, this note sounds louder and louder. "The army and the population should submit only to the directions of the Soviet", resolves the 172nd Reserve Regiment,

and then immediately formulates the contrary theorem: "Those directions of the Provisional Government which conflict with the decision of the Soviet are not to be obeyed." With a mixed feeling of satisfaction and anxiety the Executive Committee sanctioned this situation; with grinding teeth the government endured it. There was nothing else for them to do… The Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet actually acquired a state significance. The other Soviets guided themselves by the capital, one after the other adopting resolutions of conditional support to the Provisional Government…"

Return to Britain, but jump three hundred years forward from the time of the Levellers to 1969, and we see instead of Cromwell’s Parliament, and instead of a capitalist ‘Provisional Government’ a peculiar organ, a peculiar remnant of an old dual power — a sovereign organ of capitalism known as ‘The Queen in Parliament’. And instead of a ‘Leveller’ band of armed artisans and peasants, and instead of a Petrograd Soviet E.C., we have an organ of the political ‘party’ (although hardly a ‘party’ in the usual sense of this word) of the trade unions, a ‘Labour Government’. This organ is as useful and as useless to the labour movement in Britain as was the Soviet E.C. to the Russian Soviets. The important thing is that we determine our relationship to it in accordance with the tried and successful strategy and tactics used by the Bolsheviks in Russia on the basis of an accurate understanding of this country’s history.

Rather as the Russian sailors described by Trotsky were at first very unwilling openly and in so many words to refuse recognition to the organ of the capitalists (the Provisional Government), so the British labour movement is by no means willing as yet to admit any contradiction between loyalty to its own organs and loyalty to ‘The Queen in Parliament’. It is naturally felt that such a contradiction should not exist, and that the ‘Queen in Parliament’ should be independent of the capitalist system and responsive to the needs of labour. Hence, despite attempts now and again to agitate against the existence of Parliament, house of Lords, Crown etc, the general feeling amongst the working class tends to be that provided these institutions make no attempt to interfere with the power and functions of a Labour Government as a trade unionists’ organ, then they can be accepted as they are. It is absolutely taken for granted that they have no power to interfere with the processes of democracy as interpreted by the labour movement. And rather as the Russian workers took the Soviet E.C. as their sovereign organ to start with, rather than a Congress of Soviets, so the class-conscious British workers tend to look, not upon Labour Party Conference, but upon the virtually self-appointed ‘Labour Government’ as ‘sovereign’ over the movement as a whole. For this reason, just as the Bolsheviks always demanded of the Soviet E.C. that it ‘seize all power’, we are obliged by objective circumstances to make this demand of the Labour Government. For the Congress of Soviets to have appeared to masses as sovereign, it was first necessary for the Compromisist E.C. to refuse to refuse to take power when called upon to do so. In the same way, only the refusal of the Labour Government to take power when instructed to do so by a united labour movement could turn sovereignty within the British labour movement back upon a (by then) enlarged and seething Party Conference, its doors thrown open to all competing tendencies within the working class – enabling it to become a fully democratic Congress of the whole people constituting themselves the government through their control over the productive forces.

Russia’s February Revolution appeared at first sight as a bourgeois revolution, the powerlessness of the bourgeoisie in Russia, however, immediately revealed it (to the Bolsheviks, but not to the Mensheviks) as simultaneously proletarian. The political impotence of the bourgeoisie in Russia (due to the fatal postponement of its revolution against autocracy) meant a disproportionate political strength in the working class. Hence every political crisis of the autocracy (1905, March 1917) meant the eruption of the workers’ organs in a particularly powerful, direct and ‘dangerous’ form, an absolutely intolerable form from the stand-point of both the weak national bourgeoisie and the autocracy. Quite the opposite applies to Britain. Here the bourgeoisie, due to its having won its anti-feudal revolution before any other

bourgeoisie in the world, has been extraordinarily powerful and has dominated the globe. Hence it has been quite able to tolerate a truly enormous working-class population at home without fear. If 1926 be excepted, it has not suffered a serious threat to its rule since its victory three centuries ago. This power of the bourgeoisie has meant the gradual appearance of the workers’ organs on a very large scale but in the mildest possible form: bureaucratised, strongly influenced by the outlook and even the interests of the bourgeoisie, and, despite occasional sharp flashes of cruel class-conflict, on the whole tolerable to the system. That is the essential difference between the Soviets in Russia and the Labour Party in Britain. Both are class-organs transcending the individual factory or industry and ‘reaching towards’ state power. But the Soviet form springs direct from the factories within a given region, who simply send deputies to a town or regional council — the Soviet. The Labour Party form is just as securely based upon the working class in the factories, and is just as ideologically colourless, providing a forum in which all views can compete amongst one another (this holds generally, despite occasional attempts against this freedom), but it is based in a far less direct manner on the workers at work in their factories. It has arisen as a political organ of the trade unions. This indirectness has always provided a form of ‘cushioning’ between the leaders at the top, transmitting their bourgeois influences down, and the workers at the bottom, thrusting up their proletarian class-demands. A thick layer of bureaucrats has softened the political clash of the classes within the whole apparatus and the state. This bureaucracy has even caused certain socialist sects to consider the Labour Party a direct instrument of capitalist rule against the workers.

As organizational forms the Russian Soviets and the British Labour Party are very different. This applies especially at the lower levels of the two — at the highest state levels the Russian Soviet B.C. (in 1917, not in 1905) and Britain’s Labour Government are not so different. Naturally, the non-existence of a Russian ‘Parliament’ prevented the Soviet B.C. from possessing the parliamentary context of the Labour Government. Nevertheless, despite differences in forms, for marxists the important thing is the identical class-nature. As Lenin himself put it at the April Conference: "The Soviets are important for us not as a form; rather is it important to see what classes the Soviets represent."

In Britain, as a situation develops in which industrial workers are forced to a consciousness of their own position and potential as a class (and this will be partially dependent on the theory and practice of the marxist vanguard within the movement), and as workers begin to feel able to take political matters independently into their own hands, the bureaucratization of the Labour Party will begin to be smashed and dissolved, power will shift more and more to the factories and work-places themselves, Trades Councils and Party General Management Committees will be brought together to form stronger organs, and the gulf between the Soviet form of organization and Britain’s Labour form will be narrowed.

Already the gulf is by no means absolute. Russia’s Soviet and Britain’s Labour organs have in common that they are the traditional political organs of the working class in their respective countries. They are not the conscious creations of political theorists but ‘spontaneous’ i.e. unconscious (from a marxist standpoint) products of the class-struggle itself. Hence the original Soviet of 1905 developed out of a giant strike-wave which of its own momentum became a political strike. The Labour Party sprang from Tory attempts (partially supported by the Liberals) to bring in crippling legislation against trade unions during a period (1880-1900) when British capitalism’s world hegemony was being eroded by foreign competition. The Trades Union Congress responded by forming a ‘Labour Representation Committee’ in 1900;

the object of the Committee was merely to ensure some direct trade-union representation in Parliament. Brom this was bom the ‘Labour Party’ when in 1906 the first twenty-nine ‘Labour Members of Parliament’ took their seats.

It would be a mistake to draw any too close parallels between two such very different organizational forms. But to what has already been said it could be added that neither the Soviet, or the Labour Party, is itself a political party in the usual sense of the word. Both are rather forums within which real ‘political parties’, i.e. definite political tendencies within the working-class, can compete for support and representation amongst one another. Given workers’ power, both forms could become whole ‘Parliaments’ (in the best, not the capitalist sense of the word) of the entire working class and a premise and ‘constitutional’ basis for complete freedom for a limitless multiplicity of political parties possessing the power not only to talk (as is the case in Britain’s Parliament at present) but to act.

For the present, we should base our attitude towards the Labour Party not only on our own experience but, in addition, on the invaluable experience of the Bolsheviks with the Soviets in Russia. For Lenin the Labour Party was not merely a ‘capitalist instrument’ (although he recognized the grain of truth in this attack on reformism) but a working-class forum in which it was essential that revolutionaries should participate.

"It must be borne in mind that the British Labour Party is in a particularly peculiar position: it is a very original sort of party, or more correctly, it is not a party at all in the ordinary sense of the word. It is made up of the members of trade unions with a membership of about four million, and allows sufficient liberty to all the affiliated political parties…

…such peculiar conditions now prevail in Britain that if a political party wishes, it may remain a revolutionary workers’ party, notwithstanding the fact that it is connected with a peculiar labour organizsation of four million members which is half trade-union and half political and is headed by bourgeois leaders. Under such circumstances it would be a great mistake if the best revolutionary elements did not do everything possible to remain in such a party…"¹⁸

V I Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International, 1920.

Lenin’s view did — as it still does -meet with furious resistance from those ‘left’ opponents of marxism who are psychologically unable to distinguish workers’ bureaucracies, reactionary trade unions and other distorted organs of the working class from the direct state organs of the capitalists. In the following passage (from Lenin’s "Left-Wing Communism") we can gain a good idea of the kind of opposition Lenin had to put up with, and also the sense of urgency and perhaps near-exasperation with which he fought it. Here Lenin refers to the refusal to work in reactionary trade-unions. Marxists in Britain cannot help but see his words applying to those ‘ultra-lefts’ who in this country refuse to work in the Labour party, in a period when representatives of millions of workers are for the first time passing from a complete faith in reformism to an acceptance of the class struggle, even to the extent of passing millions of votes for resolutions demanding socialization and workers’ control!

"Millions of workers in Britain, France and Germany are for the first time passing from a complete lack of organization to the elementary, simplest, lowest, and (for those still thoroughly imbued with bourgeois-democratic prejudices) most understandable form of organization, namely the trade unions yet the revolutionary, but unwise, Left Communists stand by, shouting the "masses", the "masses"! — and refuse to work within the trade unions\\, refuse on the plea that they are "reactionary"!! and invent a brand-new, immaculate little "Workers’ Union", guiltless of bourgeois-democratic prejudices and innocent of craft or narrow trade-union sins, which, they claim, will be (will be!) a broad organization, and the only (only!) condition of membership of which will be "recognition of the Soviet system and the dictatorship"!!

Greater unwisdom and greater damage to the revolution than that caused by the ‘Left’ revolutionaries cannot be imagined! Why, if we in Russia today, after two and a half years of unprecedented victories over the bourgeoisie of Russia and the Entente, were to make "recognition of the dictatorship" a condition of trade union membership, we should be committing a folly, we should be damaging our influence over the masses, we should be helping the Mensheviks. For the whole task of the Communists is to be able to

convince the backward masses, to be able to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them by artificial and childishly "Left" slogans…"¹⁹

We can make it clear to the "Left" revolutionaries in Britain today that we certainly do understand their feelings with regard to the Labour Party. Young idealists want immediate action, and the slowness the heaviness — even perhaps the very strength and momentum — of the official trade union, T.U.C. and Labour Party apparatus can be extremely frustrating. This is so even at the best of times for the Labour Party. But now, when there is a deepening mood of utter demoralization throughout the local Constituency Parties, when it would appear that the whole apparatus is rotting and decaying under the leadership of the Wilsons, Castles and the rest, the refusal of young revolutionaries to go anywhere near the Labour Party is particularly ‘natural’ and ‘understandable’. Apparently the Labour Government, by surrendering to the capitalist class and the tories on every ‘principled’ issue (unemployment, school-milk for secondary schools, prescription charges , wage-‘restraint’, anti-union legislation etc. etc.) is busily engaged in destroying itself and its Party organization and morale. "The Labour Government and the Labour Party are reformist instruments of the bourgeoisie" say the young "Left" revolutionaries to themselves, "Why shouldn’t we let them destroy themselves if they want to?"

What would have happened had the Bolsheviks allowed the Soviets to destroy themselves? For this would certainly have happened had they been left to themselves. Without the presence of the growing Bolshevik minority within them, the Soviets would have remained under the leadership of the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, the "compromisists", the Wilsons"
and the "Browns", "Castles", "Jenkinses" and such characters. Under such circumstances what would happen to such organs? Trotsky gives the answer, which under today’s circumstances applies equally to Britain’s Labour organs:

"Remaining compromisist, the Soviets would turn into a spineless opposition under a counter-revolutionary government, and then soon come to an end altogether…" ²⁰

But then everything would have been lost for at least a whole epoch. The possibility is in a certain sense only a theoretical one, for Lenin and Trotsky were really bound to insist on the slogan of power to the Soviets, just as we in this country are bound to insist on our slogan. The objective circumstances, once subjectively understood, in each case simply dictate the correct and only possible course. But it is certain that the Bolsheviks could not have taken power without the Soviets, just as we cannot take power "on our own" but only inasmuch as the traditional organs of labour can take the power as a partial result of our activity. As Trotsky puts it:

"The problem of conquering power can be solved only by a definite combination of party with Soviets — or with other mass organizations more or less equivalent to Soviets".²¹

Instead of allowing the Soviets to destroy themselves, the Bolsheviks carried out a determined campaign of simultaneous attack and defence of the Soviets. As appendages of the petitbourgeois leaders, as transmitters of bourgeois influences on to the masses, as powerless talking-shops instead of state organs of the masses they were mercilessly attacked. But as mass-organs of the proletariat and peasantry, as potential state organs of a new social order they were defended with the utmost vigour. This dialectical approach is illustrated in the following words of Lenin:

"…the S.R. and Menshevik leaders of the Soviets have prostituted them, have degraded them to the role of talking shops, of accessories to the conciliationist policy of the leaders. The Soviets have been rotting and decaying under the leadership of the Libers, Dans, Tseretellis, and Chernovs. The Soviets can only develop properly and expand to the full their promise and capabilities when they assume full state power, for otherwise they have nothing to do; otherwise they are simply embryos (and an embryo cannot endure too long) or mere playthings. Dual power means the paralysis of the Soviets.

Had not the popular creativeness of the revolutionary classes given rise to the Soviets, the proletarian revolution in Russia would have been hopeless, for there is no doubt that with the old state apparatus, the proletariat could not have retained power, while it is impossible to create a new apparatus all at once…"²²

Partly because of the attitude of the Bolsheviks (which really expressed in clear form the already-existent yet mixed feelings of the masses), the masses’ ultimate faith in their own organs was never quite broken, despite the most anti working-class policies of the "prostituted" Soviets. Trotsky writes that despite the endless betrayals of the official soviet organs at the highest level, nevertheless

"…the masses had no intention of breaking with the Soviet; on the contrary, they wanted the Soviet to seize the power… "²³

Trotsky shows how the demand that the Soviet B.C. take power into its hands in fact expressed politically the mixed feelings of the workers and soldiers with regard to their Soviet. The dialectical, two-fold "attack-defence" policy of the Bolsheviks, the challenge to the authority of the official leaders which underlay the demand that these leaders "take the power into their own hands", in other words, the whole policy summed up in the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!", was a clear (theoretically-based) expression of the actual feelings of the masses. Without the Bolsheviks providing the masses with this voice and political language through which to express their feelings, the masses’ will would have remained un-expressed and frustrated. The masses’ need for the Bolsheviks is conveyed by Trotsky, writing of the July days:

"The workers and soldiers felt clearly enough the contrast between their moods and the policy of the soviet — that is, between their today and their yesterday. In coming out for a government of the Soviets, they by no means gave their confidence to the compromisist majority in those Soviets. But they did not know how to settle with this majority. To overthrow it by violence would have meant to dissolve the Soviets instead of giving them the power… "²⁴

After the July days, when the Soviet helped to shoot demonstrators calling for all power to the Soviet, even the Bolsheviks felt temporarily obliged to withdraw the slogan of "All Power to the Soviets!" There was nothing dogmatic or mechanical about Lenin, who always knew how to keep in tune with the actual feelings of the masses (even though in this respect, being forced into hiding, he was occasionally less ‘in touch’ with immediate mass feelings than Trotsky and other, worker. Bolsheviks who were ‘on the spot’). However, the slogan was soon revived when it became necessary to defend the Soviet against Kornilov. Finally the Compromisers were politically defeated by a "compromise" towards them made by the Bolsheviks – namely a complete return to the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" in all its implications, (immediate, and less direct). This "compromise" was really no more than the kind of "compromise" we in Britain are forced to make in calling, not for "All Power to the Factory Committees" or to other rank-and-file organs, but "All Power to the Labour Government!" It was simply a recognition of objective reality — of the authoritative position of the leaders and the illusions of the masses, in so far as both these factors remained as yet not overcome. From the start, "All Power to the Soviets!" had been ambiguous as a slogan – the ambiguity reflecting the real contradiction in the whole situation. In the long run, the Bolsheviks knew, it meant or would mean the transfer of power to themselves and to the masses as a whole, the transfer of power to Bolshevized Soviets. In the same way, "All Power to the Labour Government!"
means, for the marxist vanguard, (and for ourselves in as much as we, with certain other tendencies, provide at least the germs for a real vanguard which will be forged out of events), all power to "us" i.e. to "ourselves" and the working-class as a whole, to a revolutionized labour movement which will take power in the name of the Labour Government, and will, once power is actually in its hands, thereby find itself in a position to ignore the so-called "Labour" Ministers of the Queen and constitute itself the ‘Labour Government’. But this is

only the long-term meaning. In its immediate sense, "All Power to the Labour Government!"
of course means the transfer of full industrial and political power to this Government, the transfer of full power to the Wilsons etc. If they were to take the power there would be no need for us and the working-class rank-and-file of the labour movement to do so: a great deal of trouble could be avoided. In the same way the immediate sense of "All Power to the Soviets!" was not for power to the Bolsheviks but for power to the Compromisers. As Trotsky writes:

"The transfer of power to the Soviets meant, in its immediate sense, a transfer of power to the Compromisers. That might have been accomplished peacefully, by way of a simple dismissal of the bourgeois government, which had survived only on the goodwill of the Compromisers and the relics of the confidence in them of the masses".²⁵

And this "proposal" — the transfer of power to the Compromisers — was the "compromise"
through which the Bolsheviks finally exposed the official leaders and won enough support in the Soviets to take the power. Trotsky writes:

"…Lenin made fun of those phrase-mongers who reject all compromises whatever: the problem is ‘throughout all compromises in so far as they are inevitable’ to carry out your own aims and fulfil your own tasks. ‘The compromise on our part’, he said, ‘will be a return to our pre-July demand : All Power to the Soviets, a government of Social- Revolutionaries and Mensheviks responsible to the Soviets…’"²⁶

This is the "compromise" the Bolsheviks made, this is the slogan the Bolsheviks raised, which finally won them mass support when the Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were seen to refuse to take the power. It was a return to the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!", the demand that the Menshevik and S-R Soviets should seize full power. As a result of it, the authority of the compromisers in the eyes of the masses was shattered and the Soviets came under Bolshevik control. Only then could the slogan be changed to a demand that the now Bolshevik organs take power.

And this "compromise" is the one which we need to make in Britain. We need to raise the slogan of "All Power to the Labour Government!" which is a "compromise" inasmuch as it is a recognition of the objective situation, of our lack of mass support, of the power which the official leadership and the Labour Government still wield over the movement, of the illusions which the masses still have in the Labour Government.

Just as Trotsky writes that, despite everything, the masses in Russia did not want to break with their Soviet, so in Britain, despite everything the Labour Government has done, (wage-freeze, social-service cuts, anti-union attempts etc) nevertheless the class-conscious workers by and large do not want a final break with "their" Government.

Only when large numbers of workers discover that their own leaders are afraid to take real power into their hands even when given the opportunity to do so can a real revolutionary consciousness begin to develop. Only then can a decisive section of the working class reach the conclusion which we have come to as revolutionaries: that if the power is to be taken in this country, we must take it ourselves.

Our job is to become the majority in the rank-and-file of the labour movement. The idea that any tiny group of revolutionaries can make the decision whether the mighty British Labour Movement is, or is not, going to come to power in this country — such an idea is absurd. That decision can be made only by the bodies recognized as sovereign within the movement by the organized workers themselves. In view of the record of the Labour Party in Parliament, it is likely that more and more workers will transfer their loyalties to the Labour Party Conference, the Trades Union Congress or to new bodies as time goes on. Should any of these bodies, in

the course of their struggle against capitalism and the Tories, come to the conclusion that they have no way out but to seize the reins of Government directly into their own hands, using their industrial strength for the purpose, we and all revolutionary groups would support them. But the decision, as long as we represent a minority, is theirs, not ours.

In issue No 3 of SPARK, in October 1965, the comrades around the MILITANT correctly called on the Labour leaders and Government to take the full power into their hands, pointing out that the failure to do so could only help the tories and endanger the whole future of the movement. They wrote:

"We must tell the leadership of the Party that it must take one of two alternative courses. The first is voluntarily to limit itself to working for reform within the capitalist framework. At this juncture, after the peak of the boom, this will in practise mean witholding reforms, and passing to counter-reforms. The price of maintaining capitalism will be unemployment, lower wages, eventually fascism and war. The other alternative is to use the parliamentary majority to put Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution into practise, to pass an Enabling Act giving the Government emergency powers to nationalize the banks, the insurance companies, the land and the 400 monopolies that dominate the British economy, mobilizing all sections of the British population behind it in the C L Ps, the trade unions, the shop-stewards committees, the Co-ops and new consumers’, technicians’, and small business men’s committees. A real national plan of production could then be worked out democratically after full discussion in these bodies, which could, on the basis of Britain’s tremendous wealth created by centuries of toil and sweat, immediately halve the working day and double the standard of living. This should be combined with an appeal to the workers all over the world to take similar steps so that an international plan could be undertaken.

If the Labour leaders took these bold steps, making every effort to confront the population with the real issues, on television, in expropriated space in the press, and in free Government bulletins, the mass of the population would swing into support of them…"

This method of posing the alternatives was absolutely correct. It has pointed out that because of the vast industrial strength and potential of the Labour Party, the Labour Government could use its Parliamentary majority to pass an Enabling Bill giving it emergency powers to implement Clause IV.

The irony is that, at the time this was written, the ideas expressed received comparatively little support within the Labour Party or Movement. The idea that the Government should give itself full powers against the employers and bankers seemed unnecessary to many at the time. It seemed that the Government already had enough power. At that time, it was not necessary for Ministers to try and re-assure the Party that they were not being dictated to by bankers or organized business. Few people thought they were. "Gradualist" hopes — based on the "Parliamentary" illusion that power was in the hands of the elected representatives of the people – were still holding strong. Things are not the same today.

Yet it is precisely today that the MILITANT comrades have abandoned their position. They say that in October 1965 the Labour Government could have introduced a socialist programme, whereas now it could not, even if it wanted to.

We agree that in October 1965 the Labour Government could have introduced a socialist programme. But this was not because of the "high morale" in the Labour Party or the "opinion poll" popularity of the Government. It was simply because of the strength and confidence of the organized working class, a potential strength which is available to a Labour Government (and not to a Tory or Liberal Government) because of the trade-union structure of the Labour Party. And this strength, the power and the willingness for action of the working class, is greater now than it was then.

For that reason it is absurd to say that the Labour Government "could not" mobilize the movement which supports them to take full power. They just do not want to, and there’s an end to it. In that respect fighting the rising militancy within "their own" organizations, they

resemble the Mensheviks and S-Rs who headed the Soviet apparatus prior to October 1917. The demand for power is not less "realistic" now than in 1965, but more so. Not only was there less industrial militancy in 1965. There were widespread illusions then, among

sections of the trade unions and Labour Party, that by gaining the Parliamentary majority they had already gained full power. It is only now that the movement is instinctively realizing that the power has still to be taken.

But even today there are many workers who accept that the Labour Government has "full power". It serves the Tories to cultivate this myth. Their line is even that the Labour Government is "dictating" against the private sector. The myth enables the capitalists who back the Tories to throw the whole blame for the economic policies of their own making back upon "socialism" and the Labour Government. It is this kind of trick that Lenin called "the selfish class-lie of the capitalists". According to the Tories and their allies, Labour has had full power for a number of years — yet has achieved no results in its efforts to end "stop-go" or cure the ills of the economy. Its "planning" has come to nothing. Socialism does not work, and is indeed the cause of the country’s drift towards economic ruin. Lenin fought just such a "class-lie" in the months before 1917 — the assertion that the Soviets already had full power and yet "they could not obtain any satisfactory results in their campaign against economic ruin".

In the above lines (in "Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?") Lenin quotes one Bazarov, a Menshevik, who thinks the Soviets have had "full power" all along and made a mess of everything (his conclusion being that "All Power to the Soviets" is a ridiculous slogan). Lenin’s reply is of invaluable use to ourselves:

"Now, really, to speak of the Soviets as having had anywhere in Russia, at any time, ‘full power’, is simply absurd (if it is not a mere repetition of the selfish class-lie of the capitalists). Full power means power over the whole land, over all the banks, all the factories; a man but slightly acquainted with historical experience, with scientific data concerning the connection between politics and economics, could not have ‘forgotten’ this ‘slight’ circumstance.

The lying method of the bourgeoisie consists in this, that, while refusing to give the Soviets power, sabotaging every one of their serious attempts, keeping the government in their own hands, holding power over the land and banks and so on, they yet throw all the blame for the economic ruin on the Soviets! It is just this that forms the whole deplorable experience of the coalition.

The Soviets never had full power, and their measures so far could yield nothing but palliatives and further entanglements".

Just so. To speak of the Labour Government as having had at any time in Britain "full power"
is simply absurd, or else a repetition of the deliberate class-lie of the Tories. Full power means power over the whole economy, over all the land, all the banks, all the factories. The lying method of the capitalists is this, that while refusing to give the Labour Government power, sabotaging its (admittedly feeble) attempts at planning, keeping the state power in their own hands, holding power over finance and industry and so on, they yet throw all the blame for the "drift towards economic ruin" on the Labour Government! It is just this that forms the whole ‘deplorable experience’ of the attempt to collaborate with these people. The Labour Government never had full power, and its measures so far could yield nothing but palliatives and, as Lenin would have put it, "further entanglements" and utter confusion for the masses. That is why we demand that the Labour Government make use of its industrial power-base in

the trade union movement and take into its own hands the industrial and financial power of this country. In this demand we have the will of thousands of the most loyal Labour trade-unionists behind us.

APPENDIX

Objections to the policy and slogan.

1. The Labour Party cannot be compared with the Soviet. The Soviet was an organ of direct workers’ democracy, the most perfect workers’ organization the world has known. The slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" therefore presented itself naturally as a revolutionary slogan, quite unlike "All Power to the Labour Government!", which suggests giving power to an organ obviously collaborating with the bourgeoisie.

The answer to this is that the usual idealized picture of the Soviets is altogether misleading. Lenin’s slogan had to be fought for with great difficulty, and always despite the official policy of the Soviets. It was by no means a "natural" slogan: it required a tremendous determination and will-power on the part of Lenin to raise it at all. At one point, during the July Days, the Bolsheviks were calling on the Soviet B.C. to "take the power" while this same E.C. was attempting to shoot and imprison Bolsheviks! Those who think of the Soviets, before October, as "pure" political expressions of the working class, "quite unlike" the political expressions of British labour including the "Labour Party", should read the following words of Lenin, written just after the July Days when it had become practically impossible to raise the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" any longer — because the Soviets themselves had gone so far over to the reaction:

"The present Soviets have failed, have suffered complete defeat, because they are dominated by the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties. At the moment these Soviets are like sheep brought to the slaughterhouse and bleating pitifully under the knife. The Soviets at present are powerless and helpless against the triumphant and triumphing counter-revolution. The slogan calling for the transfer of power to the Soviets might be construed as a "simple" appeal for the transfer of power to the present Soviets, and to say that, to appeal for it, would now mean deceiving the people".

Far from thinking of the Soviets as "pure" democratic workers’ organizations, Lenin at this point felt that the Soviets had become useless to the working class, "organs collaborating with the bourgeoisie", and that the working class would have to take the power independently of the Soviets, in order to replace the present Soviets with completely new ones once the revolution had taken place:

"No one, no force, can overthrow the bourgeois counter-revolution except the revolutionary proletariat. Now, after the experience of July 1917, it is the revolutionary proletariat that must independently take over state power. Without that the victory of the revolution is impossible…. Soviets may appear in this new revolution, and indeed are bound to, but not the present Soviets, not organs collaborating with the bourgeoisie, but organs of revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie. It is true that even then we shall be in favour of building the whole state on the model of the Soviets. It is not a question of Soviets in general, but of combating the present counter-revolution and the treachery of the present Soviets."

In the same article ("On Slogans "s Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol 25 Moscow 1964 pp 189-90) Lenin said that "above all else" the people had to know that the Soviets — even though they were in the government — were really without power. The Soviet ministers, the Tseretelis and Chernovs, were "ministers without power, puppet ministers". Both the Soviet and the government itself Lenin described as "mere figureheads, puppets", saying "real power is not

in their hands". It was necessary for the people to know where real power lay, i.e. not in the hands of the Soviet or the government, but in the hands of a ruling class with its armed men, its prisons, its military chiefs and reactionary Cossacks to serve it. "These butchers are the real power" insisted Lenin. The apparent power of the Soviets and government was mere "formal"
power. In this way Lenin drew a careful distinction between formal and real power — a distinction which, he wrote, normal periods obscure but which revolutionary periods must of necessity reveal and bring to the fore as "the fundamental issue of revolution":

"We said that the fundamental issue of revolution is the issue of power. We must add that it is revolutions that show us at every step how the question of where actual power lies is obscured, and reveal the divergence between formal and real power. That is the chief characteristic of every revolutionary period. It was not clear in March and April 1917 whether real power was in the hands of the government or the Soviet."

Throughout the period of Bolshevik agitation in the months after Lenin’s arrival, the masses were taught to see where power lay, and where it did not lie. In the early months, the Bolsheviks insisted that real power lay with the capitalist Provisional Governments not the Soviet B.C., despite the fact that to most people, as Lenin writes "it was not clear in March and April 1917 whether real power was in the hands of the government or the Soviet". As the Soviet was more and more drawn into the government (for reasons similar to those which prompt the British ruling class to draw Labour into the Government in crisis periods) the Bolsheviks insisted that "real" power was represented only by the openly capitalist ministers, whereas the Soviet ministers were mere "figureheads" without power. They carefully distinguished between the two, attacking the openly capitalist representatives with the slogan "Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers", while presenting the "powerless" Soviet ministers with the demand that they take real power into their hands. When, as time went on, almost all actions of the government were carried out with the official seal of approval of the Soviet, Lenin even went so far as to describe the very government itself as without real power — real power being in the hands of reactionary forces operating behind the scenes, plotting counter- revolution behind the peoples’ backs. The official government spokesmen were mere figureheads.

This method of attacking the Soviet and government leaders was of course very effective, since it meant that the Bolsheviks could conduct their revolutionary agitation in the form of merely defending Soviet and government legality from a counter-revolutionary and illegal power. Illegality was thrown upon the enemy. The simple demand that the existing Soviet leaders take the power — the real state power — into their hands was bound to lead to a Bolshevik majority in the Soviets. But, at the same time, we can see that this was a very difficult demand to make, and required a will-power and understanding that only a trained marxist leadership could give.

We have seen that at a certain stage the Soviets, under their Compromisist leadership, were in Lenin’s eyes "organs collaborating with the bourgeoisie". Lenin even felt that the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" had therefore out-lived its usefulness — so far had the Soviets degenerated by July 1917. The lesson for us in this is not that Lenin was right, but that the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!"- far from presenting itself obviously as the Bolsheviks’ slogan — became at times almost impossible to defend.

In his "History of the Russian Revolution", Trotsky shows that Lenin was in fact wrong when he thought that power would have to be taken independently of the Soviets, and that the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" would have to be permanently withdrawn until after the revolution. The mere fact of having campaigned within the Soviets on this slogan ensured that before long the Soviets went Bolshevik. The "new" Soviets called for by Lenin were created precisely out of the organized demand that the "old" Soviets take the power into their hands.

The difficulty of "All Power to the Soviets!" was, as Lenin says, its ambiguity — i.e. the fact that it "might be construed as a ‘simple’ appeal for the transfer of power to the present Soviets". We cannot deny that "All Power to the Labour Government!" faces us with a similar difficulty — it will be construed by many as a ‘simple’ appeal for the transfer of power to the present Labour Government. The fact that the present Labour Government cannot take the real power from the ruling class without ceasing to be the present Labour Government, and that at present Labour has only "formal" power, its Government spokesmen being only "figureheads"
– these are facts which will become fully apparent only through experience. For the moment there is no getting round this difficulty, which is one experienced in a not altogether different way by Lenin and Trotsky before us. Despite the fact that the Labour Government, and to a lesser extent the Labour Party N.E.C. and the T.U.C., are all organs collaborating with the ruling class, we nevertheless are obliged to demand the transfer of all industry and power from the ruling class to these organs as potential state organs of the working class.

For Lenin in his "April theses", and for Trotsky and the Bolshevik leadership from then on, the decisive fact about the Soviets was that they were potential state organs of the working class leading the other oppressed classes in society. The decisive fact about Britain’s T.U.C. and Labour Party structures is this: that they are the potential organs of state power for the British working class. Were it not for these organs, the seizure of power and the retention of power by the British working class would be an impossibility.

Apart from this, however, it is of course true that the Labour Party and Soviet structures have little in common. The Labour Party is a definite political party competing against openly bourgeois parties for votes and for representation in the bourgeois Parliament. It is a bureaucratic organization, with a middle-class outlook, and it excludes communists and other socialists from its ranks because of their political views. The Soviets, however, were not a political party but simply a mass working class arena and "Parliament" for the participation of all parties within it. The Soviet did not compete with openly bourgeois parties, on their terms, for seats in a bourgeois Parliament: it was itself its own, working-class Parliament, taking the place of a bourgeois Parliament altogether.

The fact is, however, as a historical analysis will show, that Britain’s Labour Party, although different from the Russian "Soviet", has developed in place of, instead of, the Soviet as it developed in Russia. To put it another way, the Labour Party occupies the same space or place in class-society as did the Soviet: the differences are to be explained by the differences between British and Russian class-society.

The explanation for the "super-democracy" of the Soviets is simple: they were performing not only working-class functions — they were performing also the functions performed by bourgeois Parliaments and Assemblies in the earlier history of Western Europe.

The absence of a real bourgeoisie in Russia meant that there could not exist in that country even "bourgeois" democracy — except within the framework of workers’ institutions. The only living "Parliamentary" and "democratic" life Russia ever knew — comprising and upholding the freedoms of press, speech and assembly normally associated with "bourgeois"
rights in Western Europe blossomed in 1905 and 1917 within the framework of workers’ organizations and no-where else. Without workers’ power in the streets and in the factories, there could be no "bourgeois" rights. Wherever the 1905 strike-wave rolled, there went freedom of the press, speech and assembly, voting and "bourgeois equality". Wherever the strike-wave receded and collapsed, there fell these bourgeois-democratic rights. The Soviets were the organizers of the strikes. They were therefore at the same time the fighting organs of democracy — performing against the Tsar something like the role performed by Parliament in seventeenth-century Britain against the Crown.

Instead of a Parliament, there developed in Russia in 1905 and 1917 a mass of workers’ councils, peopled to a large extent by petty-bourgeois radicals who had no-where else to go. Attempts by bourgeois politicians to set up a Parliament (or "Constituent Assembly") on the French or British model were doomed to failure. As Trotsky so brilliantly shows ("Results and Prospects", "Permanent Revolution") these attempts were based ideologically on a misunderstanding of Russian and European history. At that time in Russia only the working class had the power to stand up to the autocracy, and so it was in the workers’ Soviets that the real power of the democracy always lay.

To such an extent was this true, that the words "democracy" and "Soviet" became almost interchangeable. As simple organs of democracy — which was all that the petit-bourgeois radicals wished them to be — the new workers’ bodies were called, simply, "councils". The word "Soviet" meant just that — a "council", the idea (like that of "Parliament") being devoid of all working-class content. In reality, however, it was only the action of the working class which formed and sustained these "councils", and all the parties within them were therefore wholly dependent upon active workers’ (and peasants’) support. In this sense, they were all "workers’ parties". A non-workers’ or peasants’ party would find no place in the Soviet and hence, as a force in "the democracy", would not exist at all.

All parties being in this sense "Labour" parties, the idea of a specific "party of labour", embracing the general interests of labour within the Soviets, did not arise. All parties purported to be parties of Labour out of absolute necessity. The question at issue between the factions within the Soviets was the question "what kind of workers’ party?" So from this point of view, the Soviets as a whole formed an amorphous conglomeration of workers’ tendencies — as it were one big open "Labour Party" which was not formed into a political party in Parliament because it itself was its own substitute for a Parliaments and which did not at first think of itself as a specifically labour organ because it was conceived as the organ of democracy generally as against autocracy. The possibility of making the Soviets into organs of the separate class-interests of labour as against those of the bourgeoisie was realized only by the Bolsheviks.

Just as the non-party formation of the mass organs of the Russian working class is explained by the non-existence of a powerful Parliament or bourgeois party-political life in Russia, so, conversely, the exceptionally well-defined party-political formation of the mass British working-class organs is explained by Britain’s uniquely well-developed bourgeois Parliament and political life. The conditions giving rise to Soviets have never existed in Britain at all —
for here, bourgeois democracy has always had its own, bourgeois institutions. The dependence of "bourgeois" rights on workers’ power, while very much present as an underlying relationship, has never been direct and immediate in the way it was in Russia. History did not give the British organized working-class the task of winning bourgeois-democratic rights from an all-powerful monarchy. Britain’s bourgeois democrats and liberals have not had to garb themselves in the ideology of socialism, or fight within workers’ institutions, to anything like the extent required of their counterparts in Russia.

Bourgeois democracy in Britain has been the oldest and strongest such democracy in the world — and the fight of the British working class has historically been a fight for a place within this democracy already in existence. Hence the fight of the Chartists was for "One man, one vote!", and the political expression of the industrial working class has developed in the form, not of Soviets replacing Parliament, but of a political party finding its place within Parliament. The declared purpose of the Labour Party has been, not to secure "democracy" in general, but to safeguard the interests of the industrial working class through trade-union representation in Parliament. Its opponent has been not a Tsar and autocratic power incompatible with democracy in any form, but a bourgeoisie whose political parties have been

concerned only to subordinate "democracy" to its particular interests as a class. Hence the Labour Party has thought of itself not as "the democracy" but, specifically, as the political party of Labour. As such, it has attempted to exploit the rights gained under bourgeois democracy for its own purposes — obtaining the vote, payment of M Ps, the trade union "political levy", and, occasionally, even office as "the government". Virtually the whole life of the British working class this century has taken place in and through this party as its political expression. Politically, the existence of the working class has been the Labour Party. Its illusions have been the illusions of the Labour Party, just as its strength has been the Labour Party’s strength.

We have seen that, for straightforward historical reasons, where the Russian working class formed Soviets, the British working class has formed the Labour Party. Where the potential state organs of the Russian working class were the Soviets, those of the British working class are the organizations of the trade unions and Labour Party. However different, each form is simply the political expression of its own working class. If the Russian proletariat had to take power through the total political conquest of its "Soviet" organs, the British proletariat will have to conquer similarly its "Labour" organs in order to take the power. The traditional organizations of the British working class are quite capable, in a revolutionary or pre- revolutionary situation, of breaking out of their Parliamentary straight-jacket, quite capable of freeing and opening themselves, in the absence of bourgeois state power, into the form of the directly democratic original Soviets of the Russian (and, in 1918-19, the German) working class. To replace Parliament, to extend "Parliamentary" life from its sterile bourgeois confines into the factory workshop itself requires only that they take the power into their own hands:

which means, as soon as conditions permit, taking industrial action, occupying the factories, universities and all other places of work, disarming the present ruling class and occupying its buildings, and handing over the whole power to a special Trades Union Congress and Labour Party Conference, with the purpose of re-constituting the Labour Government on the basis of workers’ power.

REFERENCES

1.  F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, p 123.

2. L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, Pioneer Publishers, New York, pp 50-51.

3. F. Engels, op, cit., p 120.

4.  L. Trotsky, The Transitional Programme of the Fourth International, Socialist Labour League, London 1965, p 233

5. L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Victor Gollancz, London 1965, p 233.

6. Ibid. p 265.

7. Ibid. p 385.

8. Ibid. p233.

9. Ibid. p 234-235.

10. Ibid. p 177. 11. Ibid. p372. 12. Ibid. p 373.

13. Ibid. p 187.

14. Ibid. p 439.

15. Ibid. p 578.

16. Ibid. p 226.

17. Ibid. p 237.

18. VILenin On Britain, 2nd Impression, Moscow, pp 543-544.

19. Ibid. p 459.

20. L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution , p 817. 21.7^. pl021.

22. V I Lenin, Will the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? Little Lenin Library, Vol 12, International Publishing Co. N Y 1932, p 18.

23. L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, p 526.

24. Ibid. p 575.

25. Ibid. p 816.

26. Ibid. p 817.

Interview with Chris Knight and Pauline Bradley on 9th March 2002. Video recording by Peter Woodward and transcription by Heather Stephenson. Edited by Alan Woodward.

Alan: Chris – you were the main link between the Liverpool Dockers and Reclaim The Streets. My first question is: How did Reclaim The Streets first become involved with the dockers and with the London Support Group?

Chris: Well, first of all I wouldn’t quite say I was the main link. Yes, from the point of view of the London Support Group I was the main link, but a friend in ReclaimThe Streets itself – Ian – was the main link between the dockers and Reclaim The Streets . But anyway, how did it happen? OK, let’s go back a bit. I’d become involved with Reclaim The Streets back in May 1994 – the very first Kill the Car action in Camden. I’ve had a connection with them ever since, partly because my students at the University of East London felt very good about this new movement. Something about their politics just seemed completely fresh, completely different and I really learned a lot from them.

And it was about things which really the Left had lost sight of, ever since I knew about the Left really. There’s just been no music for example. People on the Left didn’t think that on a demo you had music. They didn’t think you danced or enjoyed yourself very much – a lot of chanting maybe, but not much else. And it was clear that this action in Camden was just infectious and brought people in, involved people in just a totally new way. It was completely new to me, obviously. It wasn’t new to the people themselves, who’d been at, say, Claremont Road and other anti-roads actions. For them it was a cultural thing which had been happening, but I just wasn’t aware of it until it hit me really, especially on this Camden event, and after that I decided to get myself a drum.

I was in Chicago for a conference when I passed a Native American shop. I bought one drum for myself and one for Lionel Sims – big elk skin drums. We’d only had them a few weeks when the third big London-based Reclaim The Streets action took place, on July 13th 1996 – a huge street party across the M41 motorway in west London. As we were assembling, Lionel and I just banged these drums. We weren’t much good at it, but we just banged them. Still, as it happened, it was incredibly useful to the organisers because we had to get from Shepherd’s Bush along some railway sidings, through a tunnel, moving the whole crowd – evading the police – leading everyone through a hole in the wall, through a hole in the wire, up onto the motorway.

The Reclaim The Streets people didn’t have any drums at that time because all their music was electronic stuff. So they just grabbed me and Lionel and said “We need them drums – bang ‘em”, which we were doing already. They led us through this complicated route, still drumming, with this huge crowd behind us – and as a result we had this very successful occupation of the whole motorway.

We also had a dragon, a big red dragon, on that M41 street party. People in my group, the Radical Anthropological Group, had made it as a symbol of resistance. So, OK that happened. And that was certainly nothing to do with the dockers and not a lot to do with the trade unions actually – except that on the M41 street party one of the biggest banners, stretched right across the motorway, said ‘Victory to the Tube Workers!” – a tube strike against privatisation was just then beginning to get under way.

So, immediately after that M41 event I just had it in my brain. A definite element of solidarity with the tube workers had been prominent on that action. I thought ‘Well, these anarchists and environmentalists, they’re not just what they’ve been branded by a lot of the left – just middle class environmentalists. They’re obviously part of the movement.’

So I thought "Well OK’ ". I’d already been involved with the dockers for a while. That was basically through my sister Liz, who had got involved via the J.J. Fast Food dispute up in Tottenham near where she worked. I’d been going to that picket every week in the morning and a docker had turned up to that and expressed solidarity. My sister had made very good links between the Turkish and Kurdish Day-Mer community – whose supporters were heavily involved in that dispute – and the dockers. The Day-Mer comrades including J. J. Fast Food strikers would go up to Liverpool for demonstrations and I went up on one particular occasion late in 1995.

And again something struck me really forcefully. The Kurdish contingent had their drums and traditional costumes and they were dancing on the demonstration though Liverpool. So with the dockers you had a really classical class struggle, a courageous demonstration, which previously had been somehow lacking something. This extra thing was what the Kurdish and Turkish comrades provided – an extra real energy from dance and drums.

So that was already there through the Day-Mer comrades. That had already been going on. This was nine months before the M41 street party. So, as I say, I had already been involved with the dockers, largely through my sister. So after the M41 I thought ‘Well, why not find out where London Reclaim the Streets are meeting each week? Why not suggest to them maybe they could make a link with the dockers?’

About a week after the M41 thing, I found out that the next RTS meeting would be in a big bus garage behind Kings Cross. As I got to the disused enormous garage, I found a hive of activity. It was all just buzzing. These young people were making costumes and banners for an action in support of the tube workers. The guy there who seemed to me to be most prominently inspiring this action in support of the Tube workers was Ian. So we soon made friends.

The Tube workers action planned for 3 weeks time would be relatively small. And so RTS were still thinking about what to do for the next major action. I knew that September 28th would be the anniversary of the dockers’ dispute. So I said “Well, why not make a link with the dockers on that day?” There was support, but also quite a lot of opposition. There were people who thought Reclaim The Streets should remain fundamentally an anti-car campaign, fundamentally environmentalist. One argument was ‘What on earth are we doing supporting the dockers? I thought they imported cars? What on earth have we got in common?’ I just said “Well, why don’t we invite some dockers down and let them explain?”

Using the Day-Mer community centre’s FAX machine, I outlined this plan and checked that the dockers (by now good friends of my sister) would themselves welcome RTS support in Liverpool. They sent back a FAX – ‘Chris, go for it!’ So at the next meeting in that bus garage, Mick and Nick from Liverpool came down to explain to Reclaim The Streets why they should support their year-old dispute.

Meanwhile I’d gone up to Liverpool and talked to Mike Carden, one of the dockers’ shop stewards who’d obtained new information about why the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company wanted to smash the union. According to Mike, certain members of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company had interests in a proposed new waste disposal company; they needed a workforce of pliable scabs who’d unload anything for money. The dockers had historically caused trouble by supporting Greenpeace and other environmentalist organisations, acting on their advice and just simply refusing to unload crap. On several occasions, the dockers had been told to unload radioactive waste and had said, “No, we don’t unload that stuff. We’ve got information from Greenpeace, we don’t do that. We’re not scabs, we’ve got a sense of responsibility. It’s a health hazard. You unload it!” And they refused to touch it.

Mike had all his dossiers and papers, which are still around – I think I’ve probably still got them all. He briefed Mick and Nick with all this information. So when the two dockers came down to Reclaim The Streets the following week, they were very convincing, although there was still considerable opposition. I have to say there were still some people who just thought ‘this is the wrong way to go’. But my new friend Ian and those organising the tube solidarity action were adamant.

There was quite a lot of polarisation there really. But anyway, the two dockers got a good reception. And shortly afterwards, with Reclaim The Streets and the cyclists’ movement Critical Mass, we occupied the St. James Park headquarters of London Transport. And you can see, can’t you, that from Reclaim The Streets’ point of view, supporting the tube workers was directly logical? Here we had an anti-car movement, a pro-cyclist, public transport movement supporting tube workers. It was logical because RTS naturally wanted to defend public transport. So there had been little disagreement around this tube action, really. It was easy to do.

Occupying London Transport HQ was a reasonably courageous, daring action and again this kind of appealed to me. I’d been so fed up with the left where we just go preaching and giving out leaflets saying the leaders must do this and the leaders must do that. Reclaim The Streets aren’t like that. They don’t say the leaders must this or that. They go and do it. They don’t just worry about passing resolutions. If something needs to be done, do it yourself! They occupied the LT headquarters and strung this great big banner off the roof – ‘Don’t Squeeze the Tube’ – and got right to the top of the building. And I mean these are slender kids in some ways. There were a number of young women who were very courageous in doing that. And it made a big impact.

A couple of days later we got a letter from the London Region RMT, signed by Bob Crow. It was an official letter of thanks. It said: "Reclaim the Streets achieved for the tube workers in one day more than the TUC has done in a decade ". We framed that. It was a beautiful letter of acknowledgement of what Reclaim The Streets is all about.

I might as well tell you the whole story while it’s in my mind because that day was very, very significant. During the action on that same day, someone came up to me with bad news. "Chris, there’s a real problem about going up to Liverpool on September 28th". The anti-Criminal Justice Act contingent, which at that time was a huge part of Reclaim The Streets – all the floats, all the music, all the people that provide the extra stuff – were planning a demonstration in London on exactly the same day.

So my heart was sinking. I thought "Oh my God, how can we get Reclaim The Streets up to Liverpool when they’re all going to be down in London on the same day, going from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square?" Then the same person remembered something: “Chris, if you just go down to the Oval this evening there’s a meeting happening where you may find out something which would help ".

I raced down there to the Oval. It was all very conspiratorial and really quite exciting. As they say, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean the police aren’t trying to bug you. So during the meeting they kept moving from place to place. Eventually we got to a pub garden. Then the meeting of this group – Justice as they were called – at last started. They’d just received a letter from Westminster Council and the police, saying they wouldn’t give permission to use Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square on September 28^th. Everyone was so dejected and depressed. And I was thinking "Whoopee, wow".

I said “Well, how about going up to Liverpool? It’s the anniversary of the dockers’ dispute. It would give us all a completely different image – signalling that we’re not just London-based, we’re not just middle-class. We’d be branching out into a big industrial dispute up in the North West which has lasted almost a year. We would get a lift, adding a completely different dimension to Reclaim The Streets."

There wasn’t a murmur against it. Everyone just thought "Absolutely". I remember thinking: “Thank God I knew about this crucial meeting!” As agreement was reached, it felt like such a big achievement. And I remember coming home that night and saying: “Something really big has happened today. Now we’ve got Reclaim The Streets and Justice and the whole wonderful bandwagon to go up to Liverpool on the 28th.”

Ian, who’d been very strong in supporting the Tube workers, was very excited and we all met regularly all through the summer. And it was just so impressive to me, the way they organise. It was anti-organisation. But somehow it seemed to work a lot better than the organisation I’d been familiar with. It just seemed to work in such a quiet way.

You almost never had decisions made. It was like you’d sit in some dreadful disused cinema, some squat, somewhere, all afternoon. Everyone sitting in a circle. No one really hogs the floor, everyone’s really quiet. It takes a long, long time. As the hours pass, you feel a kind of decision apparently emerging and when it emerged you knew it was solid, you knew it wasn’t just by a vote. There weren’t going to be people unhappy with it. There weren’t going to be subsequent arguments or recriminations about it. That decision was really going to stick. And we got these little fliers out, lots and lots and lots of them – tens of thousand of these very small fliers inviting people up to Liverpool for the 28^th. And that was how the link was made.

Alan: You’ve mentioned Reclaim The Streets but I saw lots of banners for Reclaim The Future. Presumably that was the same thing?

Chris: What happened was we spent the summer planning the occupation of the quayside on the anniversary of the dispute, there were lots of discussions about what to do. Reclaim The Streets, to be honest, actually wanted quite a bit more really. Their angle was to have a big street party in the centre of Liverpool – a big cultural festival and celebration of the dispute.

I have to say as well there were big, big disputes within the dockers shop stewards committee over this whole thing, from very early on. Someone had told Jimmy Nolan – the Chair of the Port Shop Stewards’ Committee – that anarchists were going to come and dig up the roads in the centre of Liverpool. And he said “No way are we going to let those kids dig up our roads! We’d lose all support!” There was a big discussion and I think one of the key things was that Jimmy Davis Junior – that’s the son of the Treasurer of the Shop Stewards Committee – he was a bit of a raver and he really got the idea. He really understood the whole plan and so did Billy Jenks as well.

So we had a big meeting with the Shop Stewards up in Liverpool about six weeks before the anniversary, and the proposal was formally put. And by this stage Jimmy Davis junior, Billy Jenks and others had got together with Ian, in particular, from Reclaim The Streets and had talked it through. The dockers by now were just absolutely brilliant. And Jimmy Nolan was persuaded it would be a great idea, although of course the decision which eventually emerged was a bit of a compromise compared with what RTS had originally had in mind.

In the end, then, the plan belonged just as much to the dockers’ as to Reclaim The Streets. It wasn’t to have a big street party in a big busy street in the middle of Liverpool. It was to have a demonstration through Liverpool and then to have the cultural festival on the quayside. So this is what happened, and thanks to Pauline we’ve got some brilliant pictures of that demonstration winding its way through Liverpool with the fire-breathing dragon.

It was an absolutely fantastic thing. This was in many ways my dream – the dream those Kurdish dancers had given me when they’d come previously, when they’d celebrated with their traditional costumes and their drums and music. By the anniversary there was a really vibrant, wonderful atmosphere to the whole thing. This dragon was actually breathing smoke. We were passing a MacDonald’s shop in Liverpool and there were rows and rows of armed riot cops, and this carnival dragon – the guy inside the dragon got carried away – he was nosing right up to these coppers with this smoke billowing out and they all looked worried and it was really very, very funny. Afterwards, the dockers would endlessly repeat that particular story.

And what was absolutely magic was the next day. We occupied this Customs House at about 2.00 a.m. There must have been about six or seven hundred of us. Our trucks drove out very quietly and groups of us got through the wire so that by the time Women of the Waterfront arrived for their morning picket, at 5.30, they thought -"This is funny . . . . "

It was dark, but they could hear these whistling sounds coming from the top of the nearest gantry and from the top of the rat house, the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company offices. Later that morning, I was told by one of the women “Oh God, that was magic!” It was a fantastic feeling and it just absolutely transformed the dispute because the occupation was so successful.

We didn’t stop everything from crossing the picket line, but we certainly stopped a hell of a lot on that particular day and it made a huge difference to everyone’s morale. In fact the dockers mostly said, didn’t they, that without that big action on the anniversary they’re not sure the dispute could have carried on. But following the action there was no question it was going to carry on. Also there was no way now that the media could simply ignore it.

And it went right across the planet, right across the world that this action had happened. It just looked so good. When you have labour disputes, the word ‘sexy’ doesn’t occur to you normally. But that action was like that. It really was a brilliant, vibrant show of imagination, courage and solidarity – connecting environmentalists and trades unionists in a kind of unheard-of way.

As I was saying, many people in Reclaim The Streets had previously thought their movement was an anti-car thing. Some tended to be a bit maybe middle-class about keeping cars out of our neighbourhood and not having too much fumes and stuff. This class stuff was a bit new.

It also has to be said, though, that on the side of the dockers there were also some reservations. “Who are these people? We’re trying to defend our jobs. But these people don’t even want jobs! They’ve never worked in their lives!” But when the two sides met up there was this terrific bonding. The dockers began saying “Well actually, since being out on strike we’ve never worked so hard in our lives!” All this networking and organising – a different kind of work – was actually the same kind that Reclaim The Streets were always involved in anyway. It was “work” on a different level. So on that basis the old divisions melted and a real bond was formed.

But after all that, I forget: What was the question you were actually asking me?

Alan:Many of the reports, like John Pilger’s, don’t mention Reclaim The Streets. They just mention Reclaim The Future.

Chris: Sorry, yes. OK, I’ll tell you what that was about. As I was saying, I went along to the Oval to meet with Justice and they were thinking of a name for their 28th September anti-C.J.A. event. They were going to call it Reclaim The Future. When the Liverpool action was decided instead, that name might well have been abandoned. But I thought to myself "Well actually what’s wrong with Reclaim The Future? It could well be taken to mean a future without casualisation, without capitalism. A future which the dockers could look forward to. So why not keep that name?

When I put this to the London Dockers Support Group, everyone agreed. One benefit was that the umbrella itself now had its own name. We weren’t exactly Reclaim The Streets, we weren’t exactly the Liverpool dockers. We were Reclaim The Future and this was something all of us could be part of.

Pauline: There was also a newspaper that the dockers put out – ‘Reclaim The Future’.

Chris: Yes. I’ve got a copy of that if you’re interested.

Alan: OK, so that was the first anniversary in . . .

Chris: That was 28th September 1996. And, as I say, our action projected the dispute onto a new plane. It had already been internationalised, so I don’t want to exaggerate. Clearly the dockers had made their dispute international right from the word go, from the very beginning of their dispute. They had gone out with plastic buckets and collected money in these to buy air tickers fly out to Seattle and other U.S. ports, establishing picket lines and inspiring solidarity action. So we already had that. But there’d been a huge media blockade on it, so almost nothing had got out about the dockers. September 28^th just blasted that to smithereens. It was just gone from then on. There was no way the media could pretend that there wasn’t that dispute going on. So it helped overlay the dockers’ international action and connections with this new level of connectedness and publicity.

And of course it meant that right across the world, wherever there were dockers in support of Liverpool – especially in Seattle and Los Angeles, and right along the west coast of America – environmentalists took their cue from what happened in Liverpool. The U.S. environmentalists woke up to the fact that here was a dispute on their doorstep which was worth supporting. So in a way that was what the whole action became – a bit of a move to Reclaim The Future across the world.

Alan: A precursor to Seattle?

Chris: Oh, there is no question that it was a precursor of Seattle. I don’t want to be a sectarian, but I mean there are still comrades on the Left, you know, who have never acknowledged this. Obviously a very valuable and important part of the left is the Socialist Worker Party. Many good comrades of mine are members and they’re doing great work. But their official line regarding Seattle is that it didn’t come out of the dockers’ dispute. The dockers are never mentioned in anything they write about Seattle. Well, that is just inaccurate. Maybe certain comrades weren’t involved with the dockers very much, but even so they should know – everyone should know, actually – what really happened.

The truth is that the groundwork for Seattle 1999 was done by the Liverpool dockers back in 1996. I mean, we’ve got the fact that on our International Day of Action on January 20th 1997, we already had the whole west coast of America out on strike in solidarity with Liverpool. Now these actions brought together environmentalists and trade unionists long before Seattle on November 30th 1999 — you know, nearly three years before. So Seattle didn’t come out of nowhere. The ground was prepared by the Liverpool dockers.

Alan: I’d like to return to that topic later, but for now can we just look at the way in which the Reclaim The Streets influenced the strike. People traditionally think of Reclaim The Streets in terms of big demonstrations etc – we’ll go on to the second, the London demonstration in a moment – but did Reclaim The Streets do any more than just participate, lead, give vibrancy to the big demonstrations ?

Chris: Oh, a huge amount more. I wouldn’t say Reclaim The Streets are about big demonstrations. They don’t really like demonstrations and they also don’t like protest – they don’t really have protests. They don’t think in that way at all. They think of it more like D.I.Y. – if you want something done, do it yourself. Action comes first.

And the truth is that many of the dockers – maybe especially the younger ones, but not exclusively those – thought that wasn’t such a bad idea. Occupations of gantries and of outfits that provided scabs to the employers – occupations of their offices and so forth – were conducted jointly between the dockers and these young activists.

People in Reclaim The Streets, including myself, we planned some of these actions. People were very courageous and before long, the dockers just ran with it. They did far more than just stand on that picket line. They did far more than just demonstrate. There were a lot of serious direct actions conducted by the dockers themselves and it was a very important part of their struggle. I’m not saying that they learnt it exactly from Reclaim The Streets, but what happened on September 28^th was certainly a model. And of course the key point is, it wasn’t just Reclaim The Streets that occupied the gantries and got on the roof of the offices on that anniversary celebration – the dockers themselves did that.

They insisted on getting there. I remember Jimmy Davis Junior. Come hell or high water, he was going to get up onto that roof. And it was quite funny because, in order to do that, we had to get the drums out before dawn and place them around a particular area of the fence, to create a commotion while hacksaws and cutters were making a big hole. Some quite thick metal railings had to be cut. So, while all the drumming and music was going on, the sawing and rasping took place to the same rhythm so the police wouldn’t hear the difference. While I was drumming, the dockers were going ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching – cutting through that fence. I remember particularly because Jimmy Davis just had to get up on that roof, and the dockers just had to climb up the gantries, to show solidarity with the Reclaim the Streets activists who had already made that climb. They weren’t going to be outdone by a few anarchists or environmentalists. As soon as this was going on they thought "We can do it". There was absolute equality. So, once that precedent had been set – it was part of what the dockers were very much into.

Alan: Can you give us any other examples of direct action taken later by the dockers or by Reclaim The Streets?

Pauline: I can tell you of one beforehand because, as Chris says, the dockers insisted on climbing up the gantries and all that. I also thought they felt quite protective of Reclaim The Streets as well. Obviously the dockers know the ins and outs of the docks and the safety hazards and that kind of thing.

And I do know that before this action, in Canada, two of the dockers, Terry Southers and one of the others, climbed up the gantry dressed in the clothes of the Canadian dockers and that was like they were setting up a picket line. Because they were up there at their picket, on top of the gantry with their mobile phone, the Canadian dockers wouldn’t cross that picket line. So the Canadian dockers were then on strike in support of the Liverpool dockers.

Alan: Right.

Pauline: Those kinds of actions took place quite a lot all around the world. In the call for international solidarity the dockers around the world, people in other countries would say to Liverpool: “Well, we just need one or two of you to come here to say here’s the picket line”. And then nobody else went across it. That’s what they did in lots of places.

Alan:OK. Well, of course the other big event that people associate with Reclaim The Streets is the demonstration a year later, the big London one – was that a year later?

Chris: Yes, the March for Social Justice.

Alan: How central were Reclaim The Streets in that ?

Chris: Well, I would say that by 12 April 12th 1997, by that stage, there was this big network which involved the Dockers Support Groups – maybe particularly London, but across the country – and people in Reclaim The Streets that had now become really committed to the cause of the dockers. The dockers – those who were most active – were equally central to this same network. So again, obviously, there was a little bit of tension, we always had to discuss things. As for the event on 12th April – it was designed to be a bit more than a demonstration from Kennington Park to Trafalgar Square. Part of the plan was to stage an occupation of a very large building.

Just beyond Westminster Bridge, before you get to the House of Commons – on the other side of the river – there were these huge big offices of the Department of the Environment. And the idea was to occupy that building. Well, I can’t go into details, but basically the dockers – some of them – were a little bit worried about it. They weren’t quite sure it would work and some of them were more keen on the idea than others. But essentially that was the plan and the fact that it didn’t happen meant that plan B had to be implemented, which was to have the big action in Trafalgar Square.

Here it was Reclaim The Streets who shinned right up the building surroundings in Trafalgar Square with big, big banners, ‘Victory to the Dockers’,. It was more than the usual kind of thing – people arriving there and then speeches. Obviously we did have speeches, but it was quite a bit more than that. That was an enormously powerful march and demonstration and celebratory action. It was a hugely successful coming together of environmentalists and trade unionists and activists. It was a very, very powerful thing I would say.

And again, I don’t think that would have happened without the link having been made on the anniversary of the dispute. It was all part of the same thing. It was really growing, getting bigger and bigger. In the months which followed, it all actually started to unravel – I think we would agree on that. It began to go downhill from then on, really.

Alan: But the 12th April demonstration itself, presumably the bulk of the mobilisation was done by the London Support Committee?

Chris: Yes. Although I would say it was a sort of twin track thing. We probably did most of it, or at least half of it, but the Reclaim The Streets – they had their own way of organising and they had some brilliant posters everywhere and they pulled their people out, there’s no question. I wouldn’t want to be competitive. It was really a very good partnership I would say. What would you say, Pauline, on that?

Pauline: Yes. I would say that the London Support Group organised the structural bit of the March. Anybody who’s organised a demonstration will know that one of the jobs is you have to talk to the police and there is always a committee of three or four people. And they have big arguments about where the March should go and we wanted a Central London March. So the London Support Group organised the structure of the March and where it should go and we organised getting trade unionists on board and getting sympathetic people and so on.

Chris: That’s right.

Pauline: And then Reclaim The Streets had their separate meetings and occasionally some Reclaim The Streets people would come to the meetings of the London Support Group so we could share information. But on the whole they organised separately until a few days before the March actually.

Chris: Yeah, I was very much on both sides. I was Chief Steward for the March and negotiating with the police along with Kevin Hargreaves and others. I was also very much involved with Reclaim The Streets at the same time. Pauline’s right, there was obviously a bit of tension between having something where you’d negotiate with the police and it’s all set in stone beforehand, and then doing the kind of thing that Reclaim The Streets want to do. They never negotiate with the police. They just don’t want to know.

And of course they’ve got a strong case – if you talk to the police and anything goes wrong, you’re held under some kind of moral pressure to do as you’re told. And they’re just not into that, so it was quite tricky – as Pauline’s hinting – to keep the whole show on the road. But we did and the thing was very, very powerful.

What actually happened? As we were coming up Whitehall there were mounted police charging up and down. I don’t know, there may have been some of the older dockers might have been a bit worried about what was happening, thinking "If we go along with this it will be anarchy!". It was beginning to transcend those boundaries a bit, but still one had to make sure that the whole movement stayed together. We had disputes within the London Support Group – never bad disputes, by the way, they were never sectarian disputes, they were always comradely. But there were genuine difficulties in keeping the whole thing together really, as there were bound to be. After the September 28^th action, Jimmy Nolan had introduced Reclaim the Streets activists to the 500 dockers, to a prolonged standing ovation. The T&G officials had been denouncing RTS as “anarchists”, so Jimmy invoked the Spanish civil war and said “I am proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with these anarchists!” But now at the end of the Social Justice March it was getting quite tricky in practice.

Alan: So essentially what we are saying then is that there was a difference between Reclaim The Streets and the dockers and their supporters in terms of political ideas, forms of organisation and the methods of doing things, but they were resolved in discussion ?

Chris: I wouldn’t say there was a difference between the dockers and Reclaim The Streets. It’s not quite as simple as that because Reclaim The Streets had their differences and the dockers had their differences. I would say, from where I was, the dockers I work most closely with – Billy Jenks, Jimmy Davis Junior and so on – and also the Reclaim The Streets people I was working most closely with – for example Ian – and thirdly Pauline and my sister and others, weren’t always in total agreement. But we didn’t have serious disagreements , I think we were very much together.

On the Reclaim The Streets side, there were people who were saying " What were we doing, why are we talking to the police at all, why do we have a march from A to B and all that?" Among the dockers, there were also concerns and worries. But in the end I have to say the plans were agreed collectively as to what we did on that day, as Pauline said. So Pauline was right to say that it wasn’t until last minute really that things gelled together and we went for it.

Pauline: I think I arrived late to this meeting, but I do understand that there was a dispute about something that Reclaim The Streets were going to do and the dockers were saying that “If you do this, we’re just pulling out straight, we’re just not going to have anything to do with you” and that conflict happened a day or two before the March.

Chris: Yes, but it was some of the dockers and not all. Billy Jenks and Jimmy Davis Junior were with Reclaim The Streets right the way through, all the time, right up to late in the night and phoning up Liverpool. And then we had a meeting, didn’t we, the night before in the Cock Tavern near Kings Cross. But Pauline’s right. There were concerns and nobody could tell what was going to happen.

You can’t have a direct action, which is illegal – and remain legal. The Reclaim The Streets idea, which was to take over the Department of the Environment building, had to be on a need to know basis. So some of the dockers knew the details and others didn’t, which is always difficult for a democratic movement, but what do you do? I’m sure Lenin had the same problems. There’s moments when you’re not sure.

Alan: I’m sure that Lenin had lots of problems. But in a sense, what we’re saying is that the political views of the dockers tended towards keeping to the law and . . .

Chris: I don’t want to say that.

Pauline: I just want to say as well that a lot of people came down from Liverpool to that March including a lot of women and their children. Obviously one of their concerns that they wanted to make sure that the March was safe.

Alan: So it was non-violent ?

Pauline: Yes, they were worried about violence. And of course the media was playing up the fact that there would be violence and so that does attract violent elements. So there’s always this threat that there might be violence and we didn’t want it.

Alan: Reclaim The Streets ?

Chris: Reclaim The Streets are not either violent or non-violent. They’re certainly not violent, but like all of us on the left – revolutionaries – we don’t think we’re in favour of violence at all, but on the other hand to go round saying we’re not violent when the police are beating you over the head is ridiculous. So Reclaim The Streets do try very hard, in all my experience, to get dance and music and rhythm and other forms of energy to make violence not necessary, to be infectious and have numbers and find other ways than violence. Maybe some people relish violence, but Reclaim The Streets are certainly not that kind of people, they’re just not. But on the other hand obviously there were fears, worries. We were all concerned because there would be women and children there and we weren’t sure how violent the police would be. We just didn’t know.

Alan: Well, organisations like Earth First!, out of which Reclaim The Streets grew, were traditionally being linked to things like non-violent direct action, and that’s always been their line from pretty early on.

Chris: Well, Earth First ! is one strand. The word non-violent isn’t used within Reclaim The Streets. They don’t say non-violent actually, they don’t say that. I think they’re right really. I think the whole idea of being non-violent is just missing the point really.

Of course we know we’re not the source of violence – the State is and the police are. We find that debate isn’t very helpful. In practice Reclaim The Streets have found much more effective ways of organising. All the costumes and dance and music and stuff and the symbolism and the appeal is central to that. It doesn’t mean that on occasions people from outside haven’t just come along and wanted to chuck bottles and stuff, which they have, but that’s never been approved of, never been thought of as particularly intelligent.

Alan: So the Reclaim The Streets forms of activity were things like occupations, things like demonstrations with music?

Chris: It came out of Claremont Road. This was a formative experience for the Reclaim The Streets people in London. It was non-violent. It would be ridiculous to say that Claremont Road was violent. It wasn’t.

Alan: So essentially then we’re saying in terms of political ideas the main emphasis of Reclaim The Streets was the emphasis on reclaiming the streets, meaning anti-car, etc. ?

Chris: It had been the emphasis before the Tube workers’ action and the link-up with the dockers. Once the dockers’ thing had got off the ground, the signal that Reclaim The Streets was putting out was different. It was no longer just anti-car, it was obviously a proletarian thing in many ways.

It was linked up with the big international day of action in Seattle and across the west coast of America and elsewhere across the world. So it wasn’t too long before we had June 18th in London, where we became labelled for the first time “the anticapitalists” by the media. All of us in Reclaim The Streets accepted that. But it would have been impossible again without the dockers, without the link with the dockers.

I admit that Reclaim The Streets was already anti-capitalist, against the system – because it’s difficult to be a consistent environmentalist without being. But it wasn’t explicit at all. It was the dockers, it was the link with the dockers that made it clear that this was an anti-capitalist class struggle movement of some sort.

Alan: So what you’re saying is that in the same way as the dockers were influenced by Reclaim The Streets in terms of direct action and things like that, the reverse process took place as well?

Chris: Absolutely. I would say so.

Alan: Whereby Reclaim The Streets were politicised ?

Chris: I would say so, yes.

Alan: By the actions that they undertook

Chris: Enormously. They learnt from the dockers. They learnt first-hand the meaning of class struggle, class solidarity and the values of trade unionism. For many in Reclaim The Streets that was a foreign country. They were not familiar with it at all. But in Liverpool, they had been living with the dockers, bonding with them, becoming friends. The key people that were involved in this anniversary action became very, very close to the dockers. Terrific friendships were formed and links made up in Liverpool.

Alan: Coming now to the point about the development of the anti-capitalist movement. You’ve said that certain political points of view tend to emphasise that Seattle happened out of the blue, and that there was nothing really that went before it, so it was a dramatic and sudden change. But your perspectives are that the activities of the dockers influenced the Reclaim The Streets and influenced a wider audience, particularly in America, that paved the way for the events that happened in Seattle?

Chris:Yes, I’d say that June 18th 1998, the great anti-capitalist event in central London, which stopped the City for a day – that wasn’t to us a surprise, those of us who’d been linked with the dockers, we’d seen that happening. But I know that for many comrades in the SWP it was a complete surprise.

“Where the hell did that come from?”, they asked. Anti-capitalists suddenly stop the city for a day. I mean, an incredible big thing. Of course, they were not claiming that anti-capitalism came out of the blue. They have been able to construct a story. The trouble is that the story misses out the dockers. You will not find in their version any mention of what the dockers and their International succeeded in doing across the planet, especially on that stupendous day when you could say that the whole planet skipped a heartbeat – January 20th 1997.

Let’s remind ourselves of that. The West coast of America was brought to a halt. That included Seattle and Los Angeles. It had been an incredible coalition between environmentalists and all kinds of other political activists with trade unionists. We’d already done that. So when Seattle erupted on November 30th 1999, it was a development from that.

You cannot write an honest account of the development of the anti-capitalist movement without seeing that the dockers, in a way, constructed it with Reclaim The Streets. There’s no question that’s what happened. But that story is completely missing. You’ll read anything about anti-capitalism by, say, “Globalise Resistasnce” and all their publications. They’ll make a kind of story about how it happened, but it misses out the key thing.

Obviously huge things have happened in Argentina. Huge things have happened through People’s Global Action in India, all around the world. Enormous important things are happening. But one thing which specifically happened back in 1998 was that the media woke up and started labelling us the anti-capitalist movement, and that hadn’t happened before. That development began in this corner of the world, and it was through the dockers that it happened. And it just made it much easier to organise and sense that we’re part of a global movement.

And nowadays it’s a different situation. We can think globally. We’re using the internet, using these new media in a way which transcends that old idea of the International. I remember when I got into politics, Internationalism meant writing to Ceylon or something and having comrades trying to form a thing called "Something or other Committee for the Fourth International ". Nowadays, things are immediately international. We are a global movement against capitalism, which the ruling powers are really quite scared of.

And, I would say, the dockers have a right to be proud of it. If you had to give credit, I would say more credit to the dockers than anybody. The dockers built an International. In a way they, "lost". They "lost" that dispute. But the planet has changed as a result. By winning over a whole swathe of other political activists to their cause, they added a whole new dimension of struggle. And I’m obviously annoyed, unhappy that for what seem to me internal sectarian reasons, the dockers have been written out of that story by some who’ve written those histories.

Alan: I’m sure it’s more of a political perspective rather than anything of that nature, but it may well have happened.

Chris: Yes, it comes from a political perspective. But the political perspective, as Pauline was saying, was "Why on earth should the dockers mix with environmentalists? What’s all this about? What do you want to dance on the streets for?”

There’s a real contempt and dismissal of Reclaim The Streets by sections of the traditional hard Left. And I’m in Labour Briefing and I won’t excuse them for it either. They suffer from it. The whole of the hard Left, all of the Left, have suffered from that blindness with respect to this new generation of activists. They just didn’t see what they had to offer.

Alan: To a certain extent, though, it may well be that the split in the labour movement occurred in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, with the rise of Stalinism and the defeat of what was termed the “ultra left”, etc

Chris: That’s right, yes.

Alan: And is still being felt today and is only slowly being overcome.

Chris: Yes, I think that’s true. I think there are some parallels between Stalinism and some of these lethargic attitudes towards new developments in the class struggle. And I think that that’s really quite an important parallel. And I think that it’s partly a failure to listen and to learn from each new generation, because each new generation brings up new methods of struggle and all of us have to adapt. And the dockers have adapted so quickly so incredibly quickly.

Pauline: I think it’s a lack of will. It’s a lack of will to win and it’s a lack of will to look outwards and to grasp what’s there is out there, to bring in to win the struggle. People get stuck in old habits when they get into a group. They’ve got their friends, they’ve got their comrades. They give up to a degree and the group becomes the end in itself rather than the struggle, rather than the big picture. And I think every group on the left has to watch out for that.

Alan: Coming back to another aspect of the situation. In this country it’s fairly clear that the dockers themselves were powerfully behind their stewards and there was certainly support from Magnet strikers and even hospital strikers. Trades Union Councils and a fairly wide range of the rank and file were in support of the dockers, whereas it seemed it seems equally clear that the leadership of the T&G had to be pushed every inch of the way towards support. And certainly many people have alleged, it did very, very little to assist. And some people have portrayed people like Bill Morris as traitors, etc.

Chris: Well, I mean, Bill Morris wasn’t just “not doing a lot to assist”. I mean, he was definitely trying to defeat the strike. Definitely, no question, trying to undermine it and stop it. That was the perception of all the dockers. And that was what was going on. And that’s their own union. The dockers were just about able to use the T&G offices in Liverpool. They were able to use that as a base from which to organise, but, I mean, it wasn’t just they didn’t get a lot of support from the national officers. The national officers were very strongly trying to get the whole thing called off. Especially Bill Morris. He played a disgraceful role, to be honest, a shameful role.

Alan: Yes, I think great play was made of his speech and his total failure to implement it .

Chris: When he first turned up, he said “I want to hold my head high to my grandchildren, telling them that when it mattered, I supported the dockers!”. Well, he cannot hold his head high, that man – he can’t.

Alan: Drawing that comparison, then, across the wider picture. The support that was gained in America and around the world – did that come primarily from what we might describe as rank and file dockers, or was there any support from the equivalents of Bill Morris in these countries? So essentially was it rank and file support that was engendered or was it wider than that?

Chris: Well, the thing is that in many countries the dockers union, like for example in Sweden, the whole dockers’ union supported the Liverpool dockers. I’m not best qualified to describe the details of the official support. If you talk to some of the dockers, they’d give you the chapter and verse on that.

Pauline: Jack Hayman on the American West coast was extremely supportive. Then there was the International Transport Federation.

Chris: The ITF was on the brink of giving official support. In fact they did give official support, but

Pauline: . . . they were waiting for the Transport and General Workers Union

Chris: The only thing which stopped the ITF giving official support and calling out dockers world-wide was Bill Morris. Bill Morris actively said “Don’t do this, we don’t want this support" and put a spanner in the works.

Alan: So, coming back to our central point, in a sense, the development of the anti-capitalist movement. The support that’s been gathered in America was primarily from the rank and file that had been involved in the dispute, but also extended to the lower levels of the official trade union movement.

Chris: Yes. In Australia, it was both lower and higher levels. In the west coast of America it was right up to the top. And, as Pauline said, in many other countries it was almost unanimous support from dockers right across the world. The least support probably was from the dockers own union in this country.

Pauline: That’s a reflection of the anti-union laws in this country. It was due to those eighteen years under the Tories when they brought in all these anti-union laws and that was demonstrated in practice. Everywhere else in the world, trade unionists were able to pull out the dockers. You had the whole of Australia on strike in support of Liverpool. You had the whole of the west coast of America, Greece, Cyprus, Canada.

Chris: Cape Town.

Pauline: These huge countries. All the dockers on strike.

Chris: Every port in Japan came out. I think forty ports in Japan came out on that day.

Pauline: In support of this little town in England, you know, Liverpool. And yet you couldn’t get the dockers in this country, their own country, out on strike. And that really just brought home to everybody just how backward things have become for the labour movement in this country and how damaging the anti-union laws are.

Alan: Well, carrying on with this theme, another dimension to the anti-capitalist movement is it’s internationalism. The fact is that there is activity around the world wherever the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, etc, attempt to meet. . To a certain extent, can this international activity again be traced back to the support for the Liverpool dockers?

Chris: Yes. The first of these actions actually happened in Birmingham very soon after the end of the strike. On that day, the dockers turned up, quite a lot of the dockers with their banner, so they very much wanted to be part of that.

Alan: Yes, Cancel the Debt.

Chris: And I think that was that was the first thing that the media regarded as one of those events in that series. It was the first of them and it was born out of the dockers dispute and you could say that the dockers were very much part of it. They weren’t part of the organising of it, but they wanted to be there and they were there.

Alan: Right, did you want to add anything, Pauline, about the international element from the dock strike leading indirectly to the anti-global capitalist movement?

Pauline: I was in Prague and there were a couple of American dockers there, who’d been involved in Seattle, and one of them, Robert Erminger, had been very supportive of the Liverpool dockers and, in fact, was threatened with prison in America for getting workers out on strike to support Liverpool. And when we were in Prague they were telling the story about Seattle because they had all been involved in Seattle.

And it was apparent to me that, because they were dockers and knew about the activities around the Liverpool docks, they were well prepared. When Seattle happened and the police were trying to get the labour movement and the environmental movement to split, the American dockers or longshoremen – longshore workers they call them now – did a revolutionary thing in a sense. They broke through the police lines.

One of them had a megaphone and was shouting “Over here, come over here, come and join us, come and join us”. And all the environmentalists came and joined them. In fact they broke with their own leadership and got the environmentalists to come over to their side, then they got sprayed with tear gas. But they were all together and they all had to help each other out because they were being attacked by the police.

Chris: If you think of some of the names of places which have been a focus of joint environmentalist and trade union activity and you take Montreal, Sydney, Genoa, Seattle, Gothenburg – these are all places where dockers were part of that Day of Action. They are all places which, since then, have come to prominence as centres where there’s been this fusion, this ferment of activity and linkage between direct action, including environmental direct action, and classical trade union action.

And all of that was inspired in all those different places around the world in 1997 on 20th January. So, it isn’t a coincidence that those same places have recently come to notice, have recently hit the headlines. It isn’t – the dockers did it.

Alan: So what you’re saying is there’s a direct link between the support for the dockers and the actual anti world-capitalism movement in practice?

Chris: It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing a few years later. It’s exactly the same thing, it’s not a different thing.

Pauline: It’s planting the seeds and this is the result

Chris: That’s it, exactly.

Pauline: Plants growing.

Alan: Yes. So we’ve heard that the rank and file were directly involved in the Seattle dispute, but again it’s sort of typical of the activities in this country, which reflects the emphasis being on the rank and file. So this consciousness, then, that’s been developed of the movement, has blossomed out and we’re now in a different situation, as you’ve identified. It would be interesting just to trace the subsequent history of Reclaim The Streets, which I know was targeted heavily in this subsequent period. I mean, what is the situation with Reclaim The Streets now?

Chris: Reclaim The Streets were kind of upset and annoyed about the way which, on their actions, people turned up who hadn’t prepared, hadn’t been part of the planning. These were people who didn’t want to send out the signals that Reclaim The Streets needed putting out. It gave the impression that they were kind of lager louts or something. And that has happened. They got really upset about that, really annoyed about that. As I say, it’s not about being non-violent as a sort of absolute rule. It’s just about needing to get a message across, whereas, of course, the media don’t want that at all.

So, there has been a lot of thinking about what exactly to do. Let’s take, for example, 11th September 2001. Obviously quite an important date. Myself and many others connected with Reclaim The Streets had for many months been planning to close down the Arms Fair which was being opened on that day in Docklands. It was a working class area, Canning Town, and the last thing we needed down in that housing estate was to attract a lot of violence. So the leaflets didn’t use the word Reclaim The Streets. On that day we had our samba band, we had this pink and silver idea, which came from Prague. It had been the pink and silver block, the samba block, that got closest in among the delegates in the conference centre in Prague, and this ‘pink and silver’ flag was carried over into the Arms Fair action..

So there we were, all wearing pink ribbons and pigtails. Everything was pink and silver and looking as fluffy as it could possibly look, although, of course, the aim was to get into that Arms Fair and close it down. But as a result of soft-pedalling on the Reclaim the Streets identity, I think we unintentionally minimised the number of people that turned up. We were taking such measures to avoid a huge ruck that the signal hardly got sent out. We weren’t that many there, something like 1000 on that day. It was good, but there is now a lot of thinking going on as to how to get it right really.

My feeling is, although we’ve been doing very well with May Day – I mean May Day last year and May Day the year previously with the guerrilla gardening – the press again just treated us as hoodlums because MacDonalds got trashed. Still, it was an important event. But last year, when Ken Livingstone’s police tried to completely ban May Day and prevent us from having any kind of celebration, we did very well, we turned it round. We certainly won the publicity war and from now on May Day it will be a contest and I’m sure there’ll be some good actions at May Day this year.

Just to finish, I think my own feeling is that when there is in this country another big industrial dispute anything like the scale of the dockers dispute, Reclaim The Streets will come into its own again. It will seize the chance with both hands and champion that. We’re kind of waiting for something big to happen. It could be the tube workers, it could be postal workers, could be who knows what. There is a need for something to celebrate, some real struggle to focus around. Then we can act. In a way, it’s been a bit hard to find one in the last couple of years.

Alan: Of course the forces of the state are always very heavily oppressive towards organisations like Reclaim The Streets, the IWW for example. And they’ve traditionally taken a sort of hard line in terms of harassment. Has this had a serious effect on Reclaim The Streets do you think?

Chris: No, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t say it’s had no effect, but we’re still around. I mean, just yesterday was International Women’s Day. We marched all through London. We had a ‘No Sweat’ action through Oxford Street. We stopped Gap – we closed the whole shop down. We stopped Next, we stopped Nike, we stopped Walt Disney. In some ways, dispersed in different campaigns, there are more of us active than ever.

It’s true that some very brave people have been locked up and it’s obviously been difficult. But I don’t think that’s dented anyone’s morale or stopped us from campaigning one bit really. If there’s been some decline in RTS activity recently, it’s not because of state harassment. My explanation would be that there’s been a slight loss of direction since we haven’t had that dockers dispute, with its international dimensions, to focus around. And I think we’re confident there’ll be another such eruption of the real class struggle to get behind.

“A most important, novel, well-argued and monumental piece of work.”
J. D. Lewis-Williams, Rock Art Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand

“This book may be the most important ever written on the evolution of human social organization. It brings together observation and theory from social anthropology, primatology, and paleoanthropology in a manner never before equalled. The author, Chris Knight, who teaches social anthropology at the University of East London, is up to date on all these fields and has achieved an extraordinary synthesis. His critiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss on totemism and myth are a sheer tour de force.”
Alex Walter, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University

“Blood Relations is an extraordinary work, in which imaginary creatures and magical events are orchestrated on a global scale, from Australia to Amazonia, into a single vision of how humans created humanity….Though Knight does tend to resemble a shaman with a spread-sheet, he is not concocting some syncretic religious brew of Darwinism and tribal initiation rites. He is every bit as materialist as Dennett or Dawkins – ultra-Darwinian, in Stephen Jay Gould’s terms – but unlike them, he has an intuitive understanding of the sacred. The trick here is to retain one’s sense of magic after one stops believing in it. Blood Relations appreciated the importance of sacred ritual, and of sociobiology, the better for being able to stand outside them. Writing under the influence of Primate Visions, Donna Haraway’s feminist interpretation of primatology, Knight felt able to refer to his own narrative as myth, and free to bring his own props to the sociobiology show. ‘If you could have calculating, maximising capitalists operating in human origins narratives, why could you not also have militant trade unionists?’ he asked. ‘If you could have profits and dividends, why not also industrial action, pay bargaining and strikes?’ Culture, he proposed, was the settlement that followed the world’s first strike.”
Marek Kohn, Science correspondent, Independent on Sunday

“The Most Brilliant Anthropological Study Ever Written. The many words used to describe Chris Knight’s ‘Blood Relations’ include, monumental, encyclopedic, brilliant, original, ingenious, and a tour-de-force. It is all of these and more! This work is simply the most brilliant and imaginative book about human cultural development ever written. Its range is astonishing. Its arguments are cogently made with great detail. Its synthesis of primatology, sociobiology, and anthropology are compelling. Where others have depicted women as the victims of a dominant male hierarchy, Knight reveals how the sex roles and behavior of both men and women developed together in a dialectic relationship. Where others have stressed the loss of oestrus and continuous sexual receptivity in the female, Knight spotlights menstruation and its associated marital and other cultural taboos. Where others stress man the hunter and woman the gatherer, Knight envisions paleo-women as evolving an increasing solidarity to shape the structure of both hunting and gathering. Women are not the passive creatures that are so often depicted by the radical feminists who have an interest in portraying women as the victims of dominant males. Females have been active participants in shaping culture, behavior, and human destiny…Somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago, Knight believes, a massive social, sexual, and cultural explosion occurred and he does an ingenious job of providing us with insight into how this may have happened. A major change in reproductive strategy had to take place before males could take off as hunters and leave their women behind. Women synchronized their ovulatory cycles with one another; the concept of the “sex-strike” is the heart of the book. Blood as a symbol of menstruation provides a key to much of human culture and Knight uses it to explain the inner logic of many of mankind’s myths and taboos. Because the disruptive effects of sex can be enormous, these controls have played an important role in the development of human culture. The riches of this deeply learned book cannot simply be conveyed in a brief review. It is a work to be read over and over and contemplated. The many insights into human culture and the relationships among the sexes will surely provide any open minded person with a new perspective as to why we are the way we are”.
Amazon.com reviewer Dec 25 2000 (Cincinnati, Ohio U.S.A.)

“Chris Knight’s model is one of the rare successful attempts to solve the many apparent contradictions between anthropological universals and what we expect from evolution through natural selection. His great achievement is to put logic in what, otherwise, looks like a vast mess of anecdotal anthropological facts.”
Jean-Louis Dessalles, Télécom ParisTech

“This book was a revelation to me. Having struggled through numerous turgid anthropological works by the likes of Lévi-Strauss, Róheim etc., it was thrilling to read such an ambitious clear-sighted and compelling account of the origins of human culture, together with an excellent critique of much current anthropological thinking. ….a wonderfully stimulating book”.
Mick Hartley, Amazon.com

“A man writing about menstruation as empowering not polluting; a Marxist analysis in which sex solidarity and class analysis assume equal explanatory power; a fully social and revolutionary account of our human cultural origins that privileges women; an explicitly political narrative of science in the first person; an interweaving of anthropology, biology, history of ideas, and philosophy; an attempt not just to interpret the world but to change the world: Blood Relations is all this and more”.
Diane Bell, American Ethnologist

“Ignoring this book is a mistake. It is a very readable, witty, lively treasure-trove of anthropological wisdom and insight….Chris Knight has taken on the task of explicating not only the whys and hows of human cultural evolution, but also vast constellations of cultural behaviour covering Australia, Africa, Europe and all of the Americas.In this endeavour he is extraordinarily cross-disciplinary in his approach, utilizing insights from cultural anthropology, sociology, sociobiology and palaeo- and ethno-archaeology.In short,Knight is a complete anthropologist, one who realizes the value of exploring all corners of his field to synthesize disparate work into a cohesive whole. His deep commitment to such synthesis should give pause to those of us who refuse to look outside our own areas of expertise for support or contradiction of our theories. His Marxist perspective, while of questionable practical value, is metaphorically rich. And his scholarship is impeccable. While many of us rarely bother to read ‘the greats’ of our field any more, Knight delves deep into Durkheim, Frazer and Lévi-Strauss and many others, coming up with long-forgotten insights and providing his readers with an enormously useful review of a century of evolutionary theory and ethnographic data…In fact, as a feminist, I would very much like it if Knight’s story turned out to be true, since it gives so much credit to women’s collective solidarity, strike power and biological and intellectual creativity…. Best of all, it’s a story that’s ‘good to think with’. It made me review in my mind everything I ever learned about evolution and rethink it in a new way.”
R. E. Davis-Floyd, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“Revolutions in science seldom appear ready made…. But I suspect that the basis of a new synthesis between anthropology and biology may well lie within the pages of this book.”
Robin Dunbar, Times Higher Educational Supplement

“Imagine a time when women lived together, worked together, sang and danced together, and our lives, work rhythms, songs and dance rhythms were all governed by the cycles of the moon. Imagine a time when all our skins were dark, Europeans having newly arrived from Africa. Imagine a time when women had the power and solidarity to make men leave their warm hearth-sides, go out into the howling wastes of Ice Age Europe to hunt giant and ferocious mammoths and then transport their kills proudly back to the women’s camp.This is not a feminist matriarchalist dream. This happened somewhere between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, according to the latest scientific account of human cultural origins given by male Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight in Blood Relations. The ‘Human Revolution’, as archaeologists call it, sparked an explosion of symbolic culture that was carried from Africa into Europe, Asia and all the way to Australia 40,000 years ago, and later all over the planet.”
Camilla Power, Everywoman

“No, this is not another Man the Hunter origins myth, with man simultaneously inventing technology, culture and the nuclear family, and teaching it all to his dumb wife sitting at home with baby, waiting for the bacon. On the contrary. First it is not about Man or even Woman: it is about women organising in solidarity with one another. Yes, it is about culture: how women’s solidarity was at the core of it. And yes, it is also about the family: how women’s solidarity exploded the ‘natural family’ of most primate societies, in which the females are the sexual possessions of the male or males. Knight argues that the first human societies were communist. For him, as for Friedrich Engels, this means something historically specific (and nothing whatsoever to do with the monstrosity of Stalinism). Communism meant a society in which women – as never before or since – were free. Women collectively said No to rape, and men obeyed. Responsibility for children belonged to the whole community. Women’s rule – matriarchy – in this sense meant freedom for everyone. Language, co-operation and science replaced physical coercion, animal individualism, and the rule of genes.”
Liz Dalton, Sulfur Magazine

“Read this book and be changed. It is another of the great books of our time whose far-reaching influence in modern culture has not even begun to be felt. BLOOD RELATIONS is beautiful.”
Earl Hazell, Amazon.com

“Chris Knight has produced a book of absorbing interest. The author likens himself to the palaeoanthropological storytellers and it is a fascinating tale that he has to tell. His setting is some 40,000-45,000 years ago…Recommended for health sociologists and students, especially those interested in the gender order of society and in the social significance of biological processes. The book is a narrative, best read through from cover to cover, and this is an agreeable and thought-provoking task.”
Agnes Miles, Sociology of Health and Illness

“One of Knight’s chapters is headed ‘The Revolution’…, but his whole book might well have had this in the title for his thesis has revolutionary implications for modern scholarship as well as hypothesising a revolution in the remote past.”
Emily Lyle, School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh

“A refreshing alternative to the plethora of prosaic and sexist variations on the ‘Man-the-Hunter’ theory of the origins of human culture.”
Cris Shore, Dept. of Social Anthropology,Goldsmiths’ College London

“Blood Relations is magnificent. Comprehensive in design, powerfully informed in execution – this book clarifies not only the problems of the past, but posits the need for a new cultural leap if we are to survive the present.”
M.R.A.Chance, Department of Anthropology, University College London

“Chris Knight in Blood Relations has this ‘extraordinary resolve’. His is an immense work of documentation and close argument. For all its obvious risks, the model offers no hypothesis which is not rigorously testable. Not only this, but it appears to solve most of the outstanding conundrums in contemporary anthropology.”
Peter Redgrove, Times Literary Supplement

“Blood Relations points us all in a refreshingly new direction.”
Clive Gamble, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton

“Encyclopaedic in scope, this is a seminal work that will certainly stand as a classic example of the application of the Marxist anthropological model to an examination of the origin of human culture…”
Choice, American Library Association

“Chris Knight has a political agenda, and he is not going to hide it from us. He is a good Marxist (‘old fashioned’ as some readers are bound to conclude), believing in class struggle, trade-union activism, workers’ solidarity, and most of all in Engels’s version of primitive communism and the early matriarchate….This theory is designed to cock a snook at every premise which sleeps undisturbed in our current assumptions….The result is an exhilaratingly original edifice of astonishing range.”
Caroline Humphrey, London Review of Books

“Blood Relations is an incredible work of scholarship, and in particular of Marxist scholarship – a vindication of scientific socialist theory at a time when Marxism is supposed to be dead. Here we have the actual proof that Marxist theory works. Not by ignoring facts that don’t fit – but by putting the facts first. The facts are sacred. The theory must fit the facts. We’re so used to having paraded before us Marxism and Marxism-Leninism as it was prostituted by the Soviet Union – where if the facts didn’t fit they were ignored – that we’ve forgotten what Marxism really means.Chris’ book is based on the facts. These facts were well-known within a variety of scientific disciplines – sociology, anthropology, archaeology. You look at these facts, and a lot of them seem completely inexplicable. They appear bizarre. Why do women co-ordinate their menstrual cycles? Why do so many religions have taboos onmenstruation? Why do they have taboos on eating bloody meat? And this is not just in one or two societies, but all round the world, in societies which appear to have very little else in common.Now, men were not very interested in these facts. They just seemed to be bizarre things that primitive societies did. Their importance is that they’re the key to understanding how we became human….Chris’ theory may not be 100 per cent correct. But so far, it explains all the known facts. None of the other theories did. And I don’t think it’s too strong to say that in time to come it will be seen as significant perhaps in the way Darwin was seen as significant, in really changing the way we look at what it is to be human.”
Dorothy Macedo, Vice-Chair, Campaign for Labour Party Democracy

“A quite remarkable contribution to our subject.”
Marilyn Strathern, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester

“From the evidence of burials and symbolic objects, rituals and religious beliefs probably go back more than 100,000 years, but could they actually have been central to the origins of modern humans? A British anthropologist, Chris Knight, certainly thinks so, and in a wide-ranging synthesis of data from present-day anthropology, primatology and sociobiology, together with archaeology, he and his collaborators have argued that women collectively produced a social revolution in Africa over 100,000 years ago. The symbolic use of red ochre began as part of a female response to accumulating social and reproductive stresses caused by the increasing demands of pregnancy, infant and child care, and the need for male provisioning. The blood-red pigment was deployed by menstruating and non-menstruating women, speared on their bodies to spread the taboo on menstruation across alliances of female kin. This instituted a “sex-strike”, which could only be broken when the men returned from collaborative hunts with food to share. Female rituals evolved around the sex-strike, male rituals around the hunt (begun under a dark moon, returning at full moon, thus linking menstrual and lunar cyucles and the blood of women and of animals), and tribal rituals of celebration and feasting would follow the return of the successful hunters.”
Chris Stringer, London Natural History Museum

“From apparently modest beginnings, this is the most ambitious project on the origins of culture to have emerged for decades.The effort to establish a collectivist point of departure for the theory of human communication has had to struggle against the individualist assumptions that dominate cognitive science, but this very struggle makes the book original and important”.
Mary Douglas, C.B.E., F.B.A.

“I suspect that it will be a slow burning classic, revived from time to time, but then discarded because it repudiates bourgeois metaphysics.” Keith Hart, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

“As women all over the world fight for control over their own sexuality and fertility, Chris Knight in Blood Relations has performed a service. We can now prove that we’re demanding nothing new. We once had collective control over our own bodies; our fight now is to regain it.”
Leonora Lloyd, Secretary, National Abortion Campaign

“Chris Knight is reconstructing a human revolution that occurred many thousands of years ago. Whether his argument is true or not I am not qualified to judge. But what I want to convey here is the excitement – and the quite extraordinary sense of homecoming and comradeship – which this magnificent book has caused me. But also relief, such relief: as if I am at last in the presence of an understanding which allows something hard and knotted and perverse and intrinsically unshareable, to unfold, stretch, breathe. The release of tension as I read page after page of the detailed, passionate and ironic argument was extraordinary, and something for which I still feel great waves of gratitude.”
David Holt, Lecture to The Guild of Pastoral Psychologists

“This book is a revolutionary textbook for socialists and feminists. It turns upside down the reactionary developments in biology and evolutionary theory that dominated the1980s….Communism – the ideas of revolutionary change, of solidarity, of feminism and of a society organised for the benefit of everyone – is not only still the spectre that haunts Europe, but it is the very thing that created us as human beings…”
Keith Veness, Labour Briefing

“How did human language and culture first emerge? The answer has now been found. It points us back to the very place where we all learned our craft. Human solidarity and culture began on the picket line.”
Jim Perry, Secretary, Cannock Chase & Littleton National Union of Mineworkers

“Blood relations is a bold, panoramic and, in my opinion, easily the most persuasive account of the human revolution. Like any great work there are gaps and unfinished lines of thought – doubtless they will stimulate scholars in the years to come. However, Knight has made the decisive breakthrough which anyone who wants to be taken seriously must develop … or decisively disprove.”
Jack Conrad, Weekly Worker

“What we find most remarkable in Knight’s work is precisely this effort to bring together genetic, archaeological, paleontological and anthropological data in a ‘theory of everything’ for human evolution, analogous to the efforts of the theoretical physicists who have given us super-string or quantum loop gravity theory.”
‘Jens’, International Review

“Knight offers us a model of the birth of culture which, born in practices and needs which are firmly rooted in our biological nature, nevertheless takes form in the real will of our ancestors to impose a collective and liberatory solution to a common problem.”
Timothy Mason, University of Paris

             Full text of this review       

At the request of the UCU both regionally and nationally, I had been invited to convene a response to the G20 London Summit scheduled for April 2nd 2009 at the ExCeL centre a few hundred yards from our campus. My university management at first gave permission, whereupon we assembled an exciting line-up of climate scientists, economists, social scientists, artists, activists and others to speak at our Alternative Summit. When management at the last minute instructed me to cancel everything, I could hardly believe it. Cancel Tony Benn? Cancel Oliver Tickle? Cancel Richard Wilkinson? At this late stage? What were my employers thinking of? Besides, the Summit had been called for and organized by my union, not by UEL management. It was not theirs to cancel.

In the event, I felt unable to obey the instruction. A raft of accompanying instructions – not to speak to my trade union comrades, to any of my long-term friends and colleagues at my own place of work, to any of my students, to anyone who might be a journalist etc. etc. – seemed equally absurd and impossible. Only a university modeling itself on a police state, surely, could expect literal compliance with such draconian restrictions on my personal freedom? My conscience urged me strongly not to collude.

The Alternative Summit was opened by Tony Benn on the afternoon of April 1st with nearly all the invited speakers attending. The passionate lectures and other contributions were delivered as planned, except that the 300 participants were forced to meet outdoors in the central plaza, management having closed off the entire campus. Ironically, the university canteen remained staffed and was offering hot drinks and food – although exclusively to security staff and police. When the 84-year-old Tony Benn arrived (‘If I don’t make it’, he had earlier assured us, ‘it won’t be for lack of trying!’), we couldn’t even offer him a cup of tea.

My presence in my union capacity on my own campus on that April afternoon has since been deemed by my employers an example of ‘gross misconduct’ under Section f) in Appendix B of our Staff Disciplinary Procedures: ‘Serious insubordination and/or refusal, without reasonable cause, to carry out legitimate instruction given by an authorised member of staff’. Likewise, words attributed to me in my Government of the Dead street theatre role – ‘Eat the bankers!’, for example – have been taken out of context and interpreted by my management as literal incitement to violence. Such intentional misrepresentation and disproportionate punitive action would have been inconceivable had Professor Martin Everett remained in his post as UEL’s respected Vice Chancellor. Neither is it conceivable that the former Vice Chancellor would have thought it appropriate to cancel our Alternative G20 Summit – on the contrary, he’d have helped publicize it and celebrate it. Unfortunately, the free market ideologues who have decided to suspend and dismiss me are the very corporate team that on political grounds suspended and dismissed Professor Everett in a secretive operation condemned by the University and College Lecturers’ Union as a corporate take-over.

Although I have been summarily dismissed from employment at UEL, I am pleased to report that the Alternative G20 Summit proved a memorable and inspiring occasion. While I believe UEL’s current management should hold their heads in shame, I am proud of my university community, my passionate and committed students and my trade union colleagues who have been vigorously resisting my victimization. I also remain proud of my own role in defending academic autonomy and freedom of speech and assembly at the University of East London and beyond.

If you oppose UEL management’s recent course of action, please sign this online petition and (even better) add your own comment to the many heartening messages already there.

You may be interested to know that another petition has gathered over 3400 signatures in protest against UEL closing its doors to freedom of speech and assembly on the occasion of the G20 London Summit.

The Government of the Dead presents:

The Death and Astonishing Resurrection of the Labour Party!

A travelling circus in which governments fall, Parliament is sacked and politics exceed the wildest possibilities of art….

http://current.com/items/89920520_government-of-the-dead-hang-a-banker.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/mar/31/g20-protests-chris-knight

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Launching Mister Mayhem’s ‘Project to Destroy the Labour Party’

“In Knight’s parallel universe, he will become general secretary of the Labour Party, while John McDonnell, Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, replaces Mr Brown as leader.”

David Cohen,“Meet Mister Mayhem”, London Evening Standard, March 23 2009.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23666748-details/Meet+Mister+Mayhem/article.do

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What’s in a name?

What’s the ideal name for the new party of the working class? You’ve been bombarding us with ideas:

1. The Gordon Brown Nightmare Labour Party
2. The Walking Dead Zombie Labour Party
3. The Astonishingly Resurrected Labour Party
4. The Radioactive Mutant Labour Party
5. The Monster Raving Loony Labour Party
6. The Street-Fighting Direct Action Labour Party
7. The ‘Bash-the-Rich’ Anarchist Labour Party

In the end, however, we decided to call ourselves, very simply,

“THE Labour Party”

Here’s why:

SHORT VERSION: The best way to destroy matter is to force it into contact with anti-matter.

LONGER VERSION:

1. ‘New Labour’ is currently impersonating our party. We want to seize back the name, preventing our enemies from using it any more. By identifying ourselves as ‘The Labour Party’ and printing membership cards, we’ll force ‘New Labour’ to react. Will they take out a High Court injunction against us? However they respond, it will trigger a public contest between ourselves and ‘New Labour’ as to who has the right to campaign and recruit members under this name.

2. John McDonnell’s ‘Labour Representation Committee’ already exists. This must form the core of any resurrected Labour Party with trade union affiliates capable of displacing ‘New Labour’. Although no decisions have as yet been made, the LRC can be expected to re-name itself as the Labour Party once it splits from ‘New Labour’, as seems likely soon.

3. ‘The Labour Party’ was the name printed on every ballot when we won the May 1st 1997 General Election and subsequent elections. ‘New Labour’ dared not print its name on any ballot paper in any election: Blair and his coterie knew they would lose if they did. We won the vote, but they stole the power. It’s time we seized back that power.

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While our party is nothing if it’s not an all-night mayhem party – the party to end all parties – our more serious political friends have been demanding to read the small print. At the risk of sounding boring, here’s what’s been worked out so far.

SERIOUS STUFF. LONGEST AND MOST TURGID VERSION:

1. THE Labour Party is the PARTY OF LABOUR. ‘Labour’ is meant in the dictionary sense, as in ‘labour is the source of all value’. Our job is secure political representation for our class. We oppose capitalism and will be replacing it with freedom and socialism, guaranteeing a home, a job and a future for all.

2. THE Labour Party is a broad church. But not so broad as to include free-market ideologues, benefit-cheat, tax-dodging MPs, war criminals, corporate and financial criminals or fascists. We’ve nothing in common with ‘New Labour’, an entryist organization of Thatcherites who for too long have been impersonating our party. Their ‘Labour Party’ is now thankfully dead. Surviving remnants may cling to the hope that it can somehow be ‘reclaimed’. We say: Repudiate the corpse! Sever all links with it! Fight with us to bring LABOUR to POWER!

3. The Party of Labour is not wedded to any specific ideology. As an umbrella uniting multiple ideological strands, we view ourselves as a direct action working class Parliament. The Labour Party welcomes affiliations from all sections of the trade union, co-operative, green, socialist, communist, anarchist and anticapitalist movements.

4. In the past, Labour has been an electoral party. Yes, we’ve shouted at anarchists, expelled socialists, barred communists. Yes, we’ve believed in the British parliamentary system. Yes, we’ve spent ordinary workers’ trade union subscriptions to sponsor career politicians eager to become Councillors and MPs. Yes, we’ve repeatedly won victories in elections.

5. But why keep fighting elections if the system keeps denying us power? Why sponsor people in Parliament if they switch sides once in office for their own private gain?
Beyond electoral politics lies the struggle for real power in the workplace, in the streets, in the media and in society as a whole. Having gained legitimacy on the electoral plane, our task now is to translate office into power. This means mobilizing our extra-parliamentary strength and overcoming the resistance of the rich.

6. Are we advocating a proletarian dictatorship? We want freedom, not dictatorship. But the rich have enjoyed their dictatorship for too long. They’ve fixed things to ensure that regardless of how you vote, they’ll still be in power. The time to turn the tables on them is now. How can you have democracy without dictating back to the dictators? Democracy means stopping politicians from accepting bribes. It means deploying the full force of the law. Instead of one law for the rich and another for the poor, let’s apply the same law to all. Let’s have a crackdown on crime – starting at the top. In a free and democratic society, no-one is above the law.

7. THE Labour Party under present circumstances has no special interest in holding parliamentary elections. Before yet another election, why not act on the mandate we already have? It was not ‘New Labour’ whose name was printed on every ballot when we defeated the Tories on May 1, 1997. On that date and in each subsequent election, the victorious party was ours. The people voted Labour but the capitalists stole the power. Let’s take it back.

Interview for Norwegian State Radio on Language Evolution (April 1998)

Interview for Danish radio programme on Language Evolution (April 1998)

Academic consultant for BBC TV’s ‘ Stonehenge ‘ programme (January 1998)

Academic consultant to Lara Owen (independent film producer), Her Blood is Gold (April 1996).

Academic consultant to BBC, The Seven Ages of Life (March 1996).

Interview for Carlton Television’s ‘Shift’ programme (February 1996).

Interview for Greater London Radio, Magic, Myth and Folklore (January 1996).

Academic consultant to BBC2 Science Features (1994/5).

Feb 24: Mardi Gras

Archive: Government of the Dead – Hang The Bankers from Jason N. Parkinson/reportdigital on Vimeo.

Interviews & Articles

June 18: The Slow Death of Gordon Brown & Astonishing Resurrection of the Labour Party!

June 1: Arrest the Returning MPs, Houses of Parliament

Government of the Dead Picket Parliament

Government of the Dead calls for citizens arrest of MPs

May 23: Sack Parliament!

Sack Parliament!: Guy Fawkes outside Houses of Parliament

United Campaign Against Police Violence: Scotland Yard Kettle

May 1: May Day Merriment, Bank of England

May Day Flashmob party

May Day – Revolution

April 11: Justice for Ian Tomlinson

Ian Tomlinson Memorial March

Ian Tomlinson Memorial

April 1: G20 Meltdown, Bank of England

G20 – The Laughing Professor

G20 Meltdown: The Movie

The G20 protests: Global Economic Meltdown

Death of the Black Horse of the Apocalypse

The Guardian. G20 Protests

Demotix. Government of the Dead picket Parliament. (June 2009)

Press TV, Canon. Chris Knight debates with Vice President of the Police Federation of England and Wales, Simon Reed (May 2009)

Times Higher Education. Anarchist scholar sued over v-c web disclosure (April 2009)

Times Higher Education. ‘Mr Mayhem’ lifts lid on UEL charges (April 2009)

The Guardian. G20: The revolution will be taught (April 2009)

BBC News. G20 protest professor quizzed (March 2009)

BBC News. G20 protest professor suspended (March 2009)

CNN. Chris Knight, G20 Meltdown (March 2009)

Evening Standard. Meet Mister Mayhem (March 2009)

Evening Standard. Professor Chris Knight renews threats against G20 police (March 2009)

Open Anthropology. Anthropologist Under Attack: University of East London Punishes Chris Knight Over His Public Speech (March 2009)

The Guardian. G20 protests: The laughing Professor (March 2009)

The Guardian. Professor suspended over claims he incited G20 violence (March 2009)

The Guardian. Alternative G20 summit cancelled (March 2009)

The Guardian. G20: The alternative summit will go ahead (March 2009)

The Guardian. Academic questions (March 2009)

Telegraph. Academics and ex-model lead demonstration against G20 summit (March 2009)

Telegraph. G20 protest leaders: the professor, the page 3 girl and the people-watchers (March 2009)

Telegraph. G20 – Protesting Professor Chris Knight (March 2009)

Telegraph. G20 Summit: university professor suspended over bankers ‘hanging from lampposts’ comment (March 2009)

Times Online. G20 protesters take fiery rhetoric and bunting to ‘big tent City’ (March 2009)

Times Online. Anarchist professor Chris Knight suspended after G20 ‘threat’ (March 2009)