If we are to seriously challenge the current hegemonic ideology we must relate to people through their current lived experience, by acting in solidarity with their struggles, on their terms. If we do not do this we will remain an ineffective rump – but pat ourselves on our ideologically pure backs.

So please work with people in their communities and workplaces and stick around for the long-term rather than adopting the latest protest. This has to be a long-term project or it is pointless!

And be open or be redundant

These are things that are desperately needed but which would imply then end of the dictatorship of capital and the beginning of the dictatorship of the proletariat over it. A minimum programme is purely for opportunists made even worse when combined with dewey-eyed maximalist propaganda for Sunday speechifying. A communist programme should pose the question of power. This platform does not. It is an excuse for subordinating our policy to that of the right wing and horse trading.

I spoke to the CPGB’s Mark Fischer during a break at the Transitional National Council of Left Unity on Saturday (which clashed with the Communist Platform meeting) and he said that the CPGB do not necessarily oppose PR in a socialist society, but don’t want to be prescriptive about how socialism will work – and he commented on the fact that there weren’t actually councils of workers, etc. (“soviets”) when workers first took power, in the Paris Commune. [I’ve heard elsewhere that despite the massive support for Syriza, and large levels of workers’ activity including general strikes, which could lead to Syriza becoming the biggest party in the next Greek elections, soviets haven’t exactly been springing up in that country.]

The TNC decided (by a large margin) to adopt a form of PR (STV – Single Transferable Vote) for internal elections rather than the misnamed first-past-the-post, so, combined with the rather ambiguous support of the Communist Platform for PR, it looks as though some sort of “dictatorship of the proletariat” (rule just by the working class, which David Ellis commented on above), alienating those who would support socialism but aren’t or don’t consider themselves working class, is less likely. Good!

The source of the confusion that David Ellis referred to is the mixture of a “minimum programme” (reforms under capitalism) with a “maximum programme” (how socialism would be organised after a revolution). The SWP gets round it by not having a programme at all (except when they have to due to being in a broader coalition) and the Socialist Party (that I was in from 1990-98) uses a “transitional programme” (including reforms some of which can’t be implemented under capitalism and are designed to help bring about a socialist revolution, including pressurising Labour when using entrism within that party as the Militant Tendency at the point I joined).

I doubt if anybody got beyond that part of the programme for laughing too hard.