Bolshevik Caucus Platform

We are a revolutionary tendency within Your Party. We argue that “power and wealth to all” cannot be achieved until capitalism is overthrown and replaced with a system of collective ownership run by the working class that prioritises human need, not private profit. This is not just a “maximum programme” to be implemented in the future but the goal that informs revolutionary strategy and tactics today.

Meeting Working-Class Needs

Capitalism is devoted to the pursuit of profit and tramples on the needs of people and the planet we live on. Only a system of collective planning can safeguard humanity and the environment. To move towards this, Your Party should be running campaigns nationally and in our local communities and trade unions to fight for better living standards, housing for all and collective use of resources. We do this not by begging for crumbs from the ruling class, but by taking what we need, eg, by striking for higher wages or occupying empty buildings to house the homeless. Elected representatives of Your Party at local and national level must reject the constraints of capitalist budgets and instead aim to provide what the working class needs.

Elections and Elected Representatives

We should stand in elections under the party name to raise our profile and show that we are serious about what we fight for. The campaign is more important than the result. Elected MPs and councillors should be under the discipline of the party and required to stand down if they lose the confidence of the members that selected them. We must have no illusions that we can achieve our objectives through parliament and local government.

Building the Party

Local branches are the lifeblood of the party. They should decide the most appropriate local units in which to organise and manage their own activities. Branches should be adequately funded with full access to membership lists. The formation of the party has been plagued by the action and inaction of secretive unelected leaders manipulating voting options and making up rules as they go along. This has to stop.

Debate among all Socialists

Your Party must be a real break from the Labour Party, both organisationally and politically. It should seek to unite the many different viewpoints within the left and workers’ movement to debate the way forward. This means no restrictions on dual membership of other workers’ organisations. Bans and expulsions create a poisonous atmosphere of distrust and political dishonesty. We must defend the rights of members to form tendencies and factions. We need clarity on political views and open debate at all levels of the party alongside unity in action.

Working-Class Political Independence

We should not, however, aim to unite across class lines. Any alliance with capitalist parties such as the Greens will threaten our working-class foundation. Regardless of any “progressive” talk, the Greens in power default to administering capitalism and make our socialist objectives impossible. We must be absolutely clear on our identity as an independent working-class party.

Trade Unions

Your Party members should form caucuses within the trade unions, arguing for party policy and leading union branches to take action, not passively follow bureaucratic leaders. We should fight to organise the whole class, with a focus on young people and the gig economy. Trade unions need militant class-struggle tactics like strikes and blockades to fight for economic needs, international solidarity, stopping racist/fascist threats and to defend the oppressed.

Fight All Oppression

Your Party has declared our opposition to sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia and all forms of oppression, while also affirming that the party has “the working class at its heart”. This means we need to use class-struggle methods to fight oppression. Issues of particular importance today are the defence of asylum hotels, fighting against detention and deportation and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. We answer fear of immigrants taking supposedly scarce resources with a collective fight for more resources for all. We must fight for equal pay, abortion on demand and free quality childcare, oppose all attacks on trans rights such as the recent Supreme Court ruling and fight for bodily autonomy for all.

Fight State Repression

The right to protest is being eroded with anti-protest laws, anti-union laws, the ban on Palestine Action and false accusations of antisemitism against the Palestine solidarity movement and the left as a whole. Police violence increases, the state spies on our organisations and political prisoners are held for years without trial. Police and prison guards are part of the repressive force of the capitalist state and have no place in the trade-union movement. We know that any gains we make are always under threat and therefore we must defy this repression and organise to defend our rights. We call to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords and seek to build a workers’ republic, a new state based on workers’ control and genuine workers’ democracy.

Imperialism

The British state is an imperialist power, co-operating and competing with other imperialists to plunder the world. We stand against all imperialist occupation and war, including that carried out by Western imperialism’s Zionist allies in Israel. Inter-imperialist rivalries and the threat of world war are intensifying and must be challenged with global working-class fraternisation. The war in Ukraine is an inter-imperialist conflict between NATO and Russia and we are for the defeat of both at the hands of their own workers. China is an unusual non-capitalist state form established by the 1949 revolution. It works within, but is not completely a part of, global capitalism, and it is therefore seen as a threat by the imperialist powers. We must defend China against growing imperialist aggression, while supporting Chinese workers in overthrowing the bureaucratic ruling caste to establish genuine democratic working-class power.

International Class Struggle

Our main enemy is the British state, at home and abroad. Your Party should work within the unions to block manufacture and transportation of weapons to Israel, Ukraine or anywhere else and for British troops out of all current and former colonies, including the North of Ireland. Our allies are the oppressed of the world and we should build alliances with workers in struggle, not their social-democratic or nationalist leadership. We have a world to win!

If you agree with the points above or would like to discuss, please do get in touch, here or at bolshevikcaucus@gmail.com.