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Watch the Q&A session that followed Comrade Ranjeet’s presentation here.
Is there a special, parliamentary ‘British road’ to socialism?
What role has the CPB’s revisionist programme played in the degeneration of the working-class movement in Britain?
In the video presentation, Comrade Ranjeet Brar presents his analysis of the CPB’s Britain’s Road to Socialism, which is a reworking of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s 1951 programme The British Road to Socialism.
Published as an election manifesto for the 1951 general election, The British Road to Socialism (BRS) set the orientation of what was then the only communist party in Britain – an integral part of the global movement that seemed to be well on its way to becoming the chief force in global politics and human history.
But within that powerful postwar communist movement there raged a fierce battle for leadership between a revolutionary communist line and a capitulationist ‘revisionist’ economic line – the latter seeking to preserve or reintroduce elements of the market economy within socialist states and to reach a rapprochement with capitalist imperialism internationally.
It was the victory of the latter that led to the demise of the once glorious USSR and has brought the international working class to its present low point, once more facing a global economic crisis of monopoly capitalism and its drive toward world war.
The BRS was a minor wing of the revisionist section of the international communist movement, but nonetheless extremely significant in its impact on the British working-class movement. Its central premise has remained constant ever since 1951, and can be crudely but accurately summarised in the slogan: ‘Vote Labour everywhere!’
This book examines the history and ideas of the BRS, contrasting them with the real history of the Labour party, to demonstrate that the British working class has made and will make no progress towards its liberation from capitalist wage slavery until it discards the practice, slogan and justifying ‘theory’ of voting for and supporting the Labour party.
A century of its policy and practice has incontrovertibly proved that the Labour party is not a party that fights for the interests of the working people, but against them. It has always been and remains a ‘Tory party mark two’; an integral part of the dictatorship of the monopoly capitalist class.
Freeing ourselves from subservience to the ideology of social democracy – that is, of socialism in words, but loyalty to imperialism in deeds, is a key condition for the development of a real, revolutionary, socialist movement in Britain.
