General Election: Statement of the Political Bureau¶
Core Argument¶
The Political Bureau of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) issues this statement to mark the collapse of Churchill’s wartime National Coalition Government, an event it greets with undisguised satisfaction. The central argument is that the coalition, from its inception, served the capitalist class both nationally and internationally, and that its dissolution—forced not by Labour initiative but by a Tory ultimatum—opens a new and progressive phase in the class struggle. The RCP insists that the Labour leaders did not break with the Tories out of class militancy; they were compelled to do so by pressure from their own rank and file. Churchill, by contrast, is credited with an aggressive class consciousness that the Labour leadership entirely lacks.
The chapter draws on the experience of the previous decade to argue that a deep radicalisation of the working class and even sections of the middle class has taken place, but that this shift in consciousness has not been reflected in parliamentary representation. The rise of the middle-class Common Wealth party is cited as evidence of this frustration. The RCP warns that these radicalised middle-class elements can be won to organised labour only if a militant class policy is pursued. The electoral register is in chaos, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of likely Labour voters—a fact the RCP uses to expose the administrative incompetence of capitalism and its coalition government. Nevertheless, the RCP judges it better to fight an imperfect election now than to remain tied to the Tories.
The statement’s most pointed polemic is directed against the Communist Party of Great Britain (the Stalinists), whom the RCP accuses of pursuing a Popular Front policy that would include Liberals and even Tories like Churchill and Eden. This, the RCP argues, is not a genuine workers’ united front but a continuation of coalition politics with a ‘left’ flavour, one that would ultimately prepare the ground for fascism. The Stalinists are denounced as splitters who serve capitalist interests by dividing the working-class vote. By contrast, the RCP declares itself unequivocally for the united front of all working-class organisations—including the ILP and Common Wealth—against capitalist parties, but irreconcilably opposed to any electoral pact with Tories or Liberals.
The RCP does not pretend that the Labour Party can deliver socialism. It argues that Labour’s programme will fail because the party will capitulate to capital rather than fight. However, the RCP insists that the mass of workers still have illusions in Parliament and in Labour. The task of revolutionary Marxists, therefore, is not to abstain but to enter the struggle alongside these workers, support Labour against the Tories and Stalinists, and allow the experience of a Labour government—its inevitable betrayal—to teach the class the necessity of a revolutionary party and workers’ councils. The election is thus a necessary stage in the political education of the proletariat, not an end in itself.