![]() A large percentage of them voted Labour in 1945 because there was nothing else at that point they could do to express their desire.)īut what did they vote in? They voted in a political party which had been hypocritically posing as working class since its foundation while working hand in glove with the ruling class. This last point of Engels is particularly appropriate to the 1945 General Election, described, ludicrously, by Dutt at the time as, “the counterpart of the sweep to the left throughout Europe, following the victory over fascism, the alliance with the Soviet Union, the tremendous role of the Soviet Union and the Resistance movements in the struggle, the triumph of the Left in the French Municipal Elections, and the formation of new democratic Governments with Communist representation in the majority of European countries” ( Labour Monthly, August 1945) The anti-fascist war had indeed awakened the British working class to the need to challenge capitalism. had learned and were learning more and more that the middle class can never obtain power over the nation except by the help of the working class.” (Preface to the English Edition of The Working Class in England 1893 (Writers emphasis) ![]() “The manufacturing capitalists form the Chartist opposition. Similar historical contortions have been made regarding the Chartists and the 1945 General Election, Gollan and company have conveniently forgotten the Chartist involvement failed.Įngels wrote of the Charter itself, “as regards the workers it must be stated, to begin with, that no separate working class party has existed in England since the downfall of the Chartist Party in the 50’s.Nor could it have been otherwise.In a country where the ruling classes have set themselves the task of carrying out, parallel with other concessions, one point of the Chartists programme, the Peoples Charter, after another.” “The English Elections” published in Der Volkstaat, March 4, 1874). It would appear that the revisionists, going one better than contemporary bourgeois historians are travelling back to Good Queen Victoria’s days. Many modern bourgeois historians would be amazed to hear that Cromwell’s Parliaments were a means whereby “the British people expressed their aspirations”, although bourgeois historians of last century, at the height of British capitalism, like Macaulay, were quite convinced that the bourgeoisie were the people and that parliament therefore was a popular tribute. Through it the British people have expressed their aspirations for social advance for centuries (English Revolution 1640 Chartism 1840 General Election 1945), parliament could play a key role in the development of socialism in Britain. Let us take a conception of central importance to the parliamentary road put forward in the Communist Party Syllabus for New Members, Our Aim is Socialism, in 1962. “Parliament is rooted in British History”? It is topical, and one contribution Marxists can make to the forthcoming General Election, for an analysis to be made of views of revisionists of electioneering in the light of the facts of the British electoral system. But in Britain Gollan and company have evolved their own special variety of nonsense and in fact they claim (and rightly so) to being the pioneers of the “parliamentary Road”. These are important contributions to the exposure of revisionists. Experience has been pointed at again and again in showing the impossibility of achieving working class political power via a parliament. In the past year or more a large amount has been written on the sheer idiocy of “parliamentarism” as a prospective revolutionary method, by the C.P.C. ![]() Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work as well as make derivative and commercial works. Transcription, Editing and Markup: Sam Richards and Paul SabaĬopyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. The Road to Nowhere Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Lineįirst Published: FORUM for Marxist-Leninist Inner-Party Struggle, Supplement, October 1964. ![]()
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