Review: How Solidarity Can Change the World

Submitted by Anon on 30 June, 1998 - 3:57

How many Trots does it take to change a lightbulb?
I don’t know.
You can’t change the lightbulb, comrade, you’ve got to smash it!
Oh yes, very funny.
It’s true, you know. Let’s face it, this system stinks. Millions of children dying in the Third World. The Government selling arms to Indonesia to massacre students. And even here we’ve been sold down the river by Blair.
So?
So what we’ve got to do is build a revolutionary party to smash the system.

Like the lightbulb?
Yeah.
Are you worried about Blair then?

Worried?

Yes, worried. Like on the poster: hate the Tories, worried about Blair, join the socialists?
I’m more than worried about him. He should be put up against a wall and shot.
That’s your problem. On the one hand you’re “worried about Blair” and then on the other hand we’ve got to smash the lightbulb — sorry, the system. How do you get from one thing to the other?

Are you trying to be clever?

Not particularly, I’ve just been reading a book called
How Solidarity Can Change The World.
What’s that then? Give it here.

There you go.

“A handbook of socialist politics. Articles by Frederick Engels, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky.” Sounds all right. Nice cover, too. Where’d you get that then?

Off that woman from Workers’ Liberty.

You don’t want to be talking to them. They’re dreadful.

Well, I don’t know. This book is pretty good. You know what I was saying about how were you going to get from being worried about Blair to smashing the system?

Yes.

In here, there’s a thing by Trotsky called “The Death Agony of Capitalism” and it says: “It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.” That’s what I meant when I asked how you get from the situation now to the revolution.

Look, the problem with that transitional demands business is that it’s all about socialists who think they’re clever putting forward these demands which look reformist but are secretly “revolutionary”. They’re not being honest with the working class.

I don’t think that’s true. There’s a section here by Rosa Luxemburg: “Only the working class, by its own efforts, can change these sounds into actuality ... The workers must learn to transform themselves from mere machines, which the capitalist employs in the process of production, into free, active, thinking leaders of this process.” It’s about making the workers class conscious, educated.

That’s why we call on workers to join our party.

That’s not enough. Look at what Trotsky says again: “The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of militancy.” You’ve got to relate to what’s going on in the labour movement, get yourself respected as a serious union militant. Then when things kick off, you’re in a position to make a real impact.

You don’t want to get tied down into trade union bureaucracy — or the Labour Party. Reforms can’t make socialism. We need a revolution.

That’s in here too: Kautsky writes about the working class and parliament. “Where the proletariat ... takes part as a conscious class in parliamentary life, the nature of parliamentarism begins to change. It ceases to be a mere means towards bourgeois rule ... in short these struggles are among the most powerful levers for raising the proletariat from its economic, social and moral debasement.”

We don’t ignore the labour movement. We’ve got lots of people in trade unions. We’re having a lobby of Labour Party conference.

Yes, I know. But it’s back to what I said before. You’re having a lobby of Labour Party conference, and you’re going to smash capitalism but what happens in the middle? Tell you what, why don’t you read this book? Anyway, must be off. Got a movement to build.

Cath Fletcher

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