by Frank Maitland
Socialism has established that the working class cannot organise a new social system by means of the political and economic organisations of capitalism. The working class must create new forms of organisation, socialist forms, bodies new in form and content and method.
The joint stock company, the trust system, these triumphs of the organisation of capital, must be replaced by the workers' organisations works councils and industrial unions. Municipal councils, parliament, churches, university system, charitable, scientific and educational bodies and all the political and semi-political organisations of capitalism must be replaced by the organs of the proletarian revolution. The state machine itself must be replaced. First it is necessary to destroy the old in a revolutionary fashion, breaking it to pieces under every form of attack, reducing it to its component parts, rescuing those which are useful to a socialist society and cleaning them of the capitalist dirt still clinging to them, destroying the useless with implacable thoroughness.
The institutions of capitalism must be abolished and the institutions of socialism created.
The groups in the revolutionary movement argue fiercely the question of the organisation of socialism. There is no need for confusion or dismay at this conflict. It is good. Indeed, there is not enough of it, and it is not sufficiently based on a study of the examples already produced by proletarian revolutions and of the experiences, rich in lessons, of the working class in the period from 1917 to 1939. It is not sufficiently worked out and there is not enough drive to put it into practice. Discussions of every problem arising on socialist organisation must be encouraged.
MINIMUM AGREED
In spite of disagreements, we are able to lay down a number of basic propositions in regard to the new socialist organisations.
1. They will be universal - they will organise all workers, of whatever race, sex, religion, age or opinion.
2. They will be industrial - they will be organised in units of factory, workshop, store, yard, mine or other enterprise.
3. They will be proletarian - they will be the workers' own organisations, representing only the working class.
4. They will be democratic - they will be organised in the simplest possible way, with the participation of all workers and with all offices held on the basis of democracy, that is, no special privileges whatsoever for office holders.
5. They will be revolutionary - they will struggle for the overthrow of capitalist authority.
6. They will be educational - one of the main tasks of the councils is to educate the workers in the job of "ruling" i.e. of running the country ourselves.
The basis of the revival of the struggle for a revolutionary party on a national and world scale is the recommencing of the struggle for working class organisation in industry.
It is the duty of all revolutionary groups, while they continue to argue out among themselves the details and to struggle around the party question, to carry out the widest propaganda for workers' councils, to explain over and over again to the workers the historical basis, the organisational need and revolutionary role of workers' councils, to encourage and help the workers in every way to organise and develop the workers' council system.
All groups can co-operate in this general class propaganda and commence a really effective campaign. Anarchists, ILPers, 4th Internationalists and revolutionary socialists of all groupings can agree on the basic points outlined. Here let us emphasise point 3, which stresses the independence of the workers' councils, and this is meant, not only in the sense that they must be independent of capitalist control and must inoculate themselves against bourgeois opinion, oppose themselves to capitalism, but also in the sense that they must be class organisations, that is, not councils initiated or controlled by a particular party or subscribing to a particular programme or financed by a particular union - they must represent the workers as workers. The universality of the councils, their class character, is the foundation of their strength. If the emancipation of the proletariat is the work of the proletariat itself, it must have class organisations to accomplish that emancipation. These are the Councils.
ACT NOW:
Let a general campaign be started now. A million leaflets, a series of pamphlets dealing thoroughly with the theory of workers' councils and their practical organisation, a chain of meetings, the maintenance of constant propaganda in industry, the nation-wide popularisation of the idea of workers' councils, the creation of a discussion organ for the exchange of theoretical opinion - these are some of the tasks which can be undertaken immediately and in which all tendencies can participate without violating their independent attitudes. If every group or party produced a leaflet - a small group may duplicate 1000, a factory cell may produce 200 for that enterprise alone, a large branch may print 10,000, a party like the ILP, 100,000. If every group produced the maximum it could effectively distribute, we would be able to add up to a million in a short time. The benefit of such a campaign to the groups themselves - increased interest, membership, support - are obvious.
Let the campaign for Workers' Councils be launched.
(October-November 1942)
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