This June the CWI produced a new book, The Revolutionary International, which includes an updated programme alongside a central text, the Historical Struggle for a Revolutionary Socialist International and the Programmatic Foundation of the CWI. This article by HANNAH SELL is based on an introduction and reply to a regional Socialist Party meeting initiating the discussion on the book, which we are publishing in our three hundredth edition as it summarises some of its key themes, focusing particularly on the theoretical tasks facing Marxists in Britain today.
We are discussing a new document about our international programme historically and today, but what do we mean by a programme? We are talking about more than just a list of demands. This is a discussion on our central conclusions about society and the struggle to change it which enables us to draw up that list of demands, our “common understanding” as Leon Trotsky, leader of the Russian revolution alongside Lenin, put it in the article from 1938, which is included as an appendix to the CWI book. “What is the party? In what does the cohesion exist? This cohesion is a common understanding of the events, of the tasks, and this common understanding – that is the programme of the party”.
The fundamental tenets of our ‘common understanding’ have not changed from when Trotsky was writing, and therefore also to when the initial CWI programme, included in this book, was drafted in 1970, prior to the CWI’s foundation in 1974. Far from being ‘old fashioned’ they are more applicable than ever. Today capitalism is more incapable of taking society forward than ever before. It cannot overcome the many and growing crises that it faces, from rising national conflict and war, to environmental catastrophe.
Globally overall levels of economic growth and productivity increases remain low. New technologies, currently AI, fuel speculative bubbles and create huge riches for a few – Elon Musk’s wealth is currently equal to more than the bottom 50% of US households – but are clearly not laying the basis for sustained economic upswing. Rather, new economic crises are looming, which will be fuelled by the growing national tensions between capitalist classes.
It is the experience of capitalism that is leading many to start to search out socialist ideas. The capitalist magazine The Economist, for example, keeps fulminating against the growth of ‘Gen-Z Socialism’ that has surged in the US, Britain and elsewhere. From their point of view they are right to worry; support for socialism in a broad sense has grown, as the objective need for it becomes more pressing by the day. However, unsurprisingly given the lack of mass forces putting forward a clear socialist programme, there is little clarity at this stage on what achieving it requires. Socialism is correctly associated with vitally needed reforms, such as rent controls, a living wage, free healthcare and education, alongside opposing sexism, racism and other forms of oppression. There is also a strong ‘gut instinct’, based on experience, among broad layers of the working class that none of these reforms will be ceded by the elite without determined struggle.
Working class struggle and socialism
However, the conclusion is still to be drawn on a wide scale that achieving these and other measures needed to provide even the basics of a decent life – never mind stopping the devastation of the environment or overcoming oppression – requires confronting and removing the power of the capitalist class. Only on the basis of a socialist planned economy, based on international planning and democratic workers’ management and control, would it be possible to fully meet human needs and develop society in the interests of the majority.
The working class remains the key force capable of overturning capitalism, even in countries where it is a small minority of the population, as it was in Russia in 1917. Today it is globally objectively more powerful potentially than ever before. The role of the working class in changing society arises from its collective role in the workplace and because it faces common attacks from the capitalist class, which it can only defeat through united action. This is preparation for the collective, democratic control and management of society, creating the basis for establishing workers’ democracy and beginning the task of building a new socialist order.
Other subject classes cannot play the same role. The lower and middle layers of the peasantry, for example, can join with the working class in a struggle for power, but cannot themselves play an independent role because of their individual outlook, the inevitable result of their primary interest being in getting and developing their own land holdings. The role of the peasantry, of course, is not relevant to Britain today. Here the middle layers of society as a whole, including small businesspeople and so on, make up a smaller proportion of the population than in the past, with the working class the absolute majority.
In essence the value of the CWI’s programme is in clearly summarising the collective experience of working-class struggle throughout history in order to outline how the successful socialist transformation of society could be carried out. Programme is not separate to organisation, however, but its starting point. To agree with the programme outlined in this book means grasping the urgent necessity of building a revolutionary party on an international basis.
Clearly, many aspects of our ‘common understanding’ are central to every document and article in the book. But that doesn’t mean that our programme is ahistorical and unchanging. On the contrary, it flows from the concrete reality facing the working class at every stage. For example, when Trotsky was asked in 1929 about what programme the Left Opposition – fighting against the bureaucratic Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union – should organise around internationally, he simply replied that just three questions “would provide a decisive criterion for appraising the different tendencies in world communism”. They were – the attitude to the policy of the Anglo-Russian Committee, to the Chinese revolution, and to the economic policy of the Soviet Union in connection with the profoundly wrong Stalinist theory of socialism in one country. These could be seen as just three ‘specific issues’, but Trotsky understood that all those who took a correct approach to these decisive events in the global class struggle could and should be united around a common programme for the struggle for socialism.
Understanding each period
The first programme of the CWI was written in 1970 as part of the preparation for its foundation. It defined our approach by outlining key differences between ourselves and other trends, in particular the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI), of which we had previously been part. However, given the serious character of our differences we had drawn the conclusion it was necessary to organise independently and to turn out to fresh layers of the working class to test our ideas in practise.
As the Historical Struggle document elaborates, the mistakes of the USFI flowed from their failure to understand the global political situation after the second world war. Trotsky, who had been murdered in 1940, had predicted a mass revolutionary wave at the end of the war, which did take place. However, the role of the Soviet Union in the war, and the central role of the Communist Parties in the resistance movements, led to a strengthening of Stalinism, and in the Western European countries a ‘counter-revolution in democratic form’, rather than the socialist transformation of society. Nonetheless, the capitalist class suffered a major blow, ending up losing half the globe from imperialist rule for decades, and were forced to make concessions to the working class in the West. The leadership of the USFI were fundamentally disorientated because they did not understand this new situation.
Without understanding these basic facts about the post-war decades it was impossible for revolutionaries to orientate through that era, or actually – as I’ll come to later – this one! The workers’ movement in Britain today tends to look back at the decades immediately after the second world war as a ‘model’ to be returned to, because it was then that the capitalist class had to concede a National Health Service, mass council house building, and other reforms in Britain. However, those reforms were only granted on that scale because of the unique global class balance of forces, and the prolonged economic upswing. Since that period of unprecedented economic growth came to an end the capitalist class have been relentlessly trying to take back the concessions previously given. By 2019, if UK workers were receiving the same share of national income as in the 1970s, the median full-time salary would have been £5,471 a year higher, plus, of course, all the cuts to the social wage – to public services and benefits – that have taken place over those decades.
Back then, the unique characteristics of the post-war upswing enormously strengthened the working class, but also illusions that reformist governments – in Britain, Labour governments – could gradually transform capitalism in workers’ interests. That had a material basis, because capitalism was temporarily granting reforms in the economically developed countries. Our organisation understood what was taking place, and also understood that new crises of capitalism were inevitable, and would lead to mass workers’ struggles and radicalisation, as happened in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. By contrast, the USFI were disorientated, and started to look for shortcuts resulting in all kinds of opportunist errors. Fundamentally, they discounted any prospect of the working class moving into action in the advanced capitalist countries and therefore searched for other social forces as the agents of revolution.
Building the forces of Marxism
At the time that we set out to build the Committee for a Workers’ International we were an extremely small force. The 1970 document concluded that “an important part of the international work consists of building a viable tendency in Britain… The main argument of the USFI and others has never been a criticism of our theoretical ideas but a denigration of our work. ‘Who are they?’ ‘What have they built?’… The building of a viable and powerful tendency in Britain would demonstrate in practise not only the correctness of our ideas, but also our methods of work and organisation”.
That is what we went on to do. We built an organisation in Britain which, at its peak, had around 8,000 members, led the youth section of the Labour Party and, above all, led successful mass movements mobilising millions of workers against the Thatcher government, first the struggle of Liverpool city council and then the anti-poll tax battle. Today Militant remains a ‘bete noire’ of the British capitalists. More than forty years on newspaper columnists frequently refer back to our success as something to be avoided in the future at all costs. More importantly, our success in Britain was a central factor in attracting new forces to the CWI around the world.
The steps forward we made were, however, cut across by another major historical turning point: the collapse of Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe. These totalitarian regimes bore no resemblance to socialism, but they were nonetheless non-capitalist societies that acted as a counterweight to world capitalism. The destruction of the planned economies on which they rested, despite the gigantic economic distortions imposed by the bureaucracy, was a serious defeat for the working class internationally, which has had seismic consequences with reverberations, albeit diminishing, still felt today.
Just as in the period after 1945, the most important task for Marxists was to understand what had happened and what it meant for the struggle for socialism. We had recognised much earlier than others how rotten the Stalinist regimes had become, incapable of taking society forward and how in some countries, like Poland, illusions in capitalism had developed. We raised the possibility of capitalist restoration, as Trotsky had done in a previous era.
Most importantly, the fact our international understood what had happened when capitalism was restored was an enormous achievement. We recognised the defeat, and how it was being used by the capitalist class as a weapon to push back socialist consciousness and working-class organisation. At the same time it allowed the capitalists to accelerate attacks on the working class, taking back much of what had been given in the post-war years. The era of globalisation – in reality the increasingly unfettered global movement of capital and US capital in particular – was used to bludgeon workers’ wages, terms and conditions in a ‘race to the bottom’.
But we also understood that the triumphalism of capitalism, summed up in the Wall Street Journal’s headline “We’ve won!”, would not be able to overcome the inherent contradictions of their system, which were preparing the ground for new crises and above all mass working-class struggles. That understanding was vital in orientating our international through a very difficult period for Marxists, where many others gave up on the possibility of socialism. We were able to remain intact, albeit smaller, but with an important base in the workers’ movement.
Throughout the entire history of the CWI, the transitional method – based on the approach of Lenin and Trotsky – has remained crucial. Our programme has always attempted to act as a bridge from existing consciousness, and the immediate demands of the working class, to the objective need for the working class to conquer power: to the socialist transformation of society. Of course, the programme of a small group is not able to affect the outlook of the working class as a whole, or even more than a tiny minority of the most advanced section of the working class. But that does not mean that a transitional approach was something we began to apply after we had been able to dig significant roots among at least a section of the advanced layers of the working class. On the contrary, it was a prerequisite to winning that base.
The abstract ultra-left phrase mongering, with no attempt to connect with consciousness, adopted by some small groups is an utterly unserious approach to building a revolutionary party. Even if it enables the winning of a few radical students, that is worthless if they are not then educated about how to engage with, listen to, and, in the course of struggle, win the confidence of broader sections of the working class. Equally, to opportunistically merely echo the demands of existing movements or consciousness, without attempting to link current struggles to the necessity of socialism, is a pointless exercise for a revolutionary party. Even in the immediate post-collapse of Stalinism years, when our ‘transitional bridge’ had to try to cross an enormous chasm between objective reality and the outlook of the working class, we maintained that approach.
Orientating to the working class today
However, this new discussion on the programme of the CWI comes when the capitalist triumphalism of the 1990s is a very faint memory. Far from delivering the promised peace, democracy and rising living standards to the world under the leadership of US imperialism, capitalism today is a system rotting on its feet. The US is still the strongest power, but is in relative decline, no longer able to ‘set the terms’ in an increasingly multipolar world. Slow growth or stagnation is the best capitalism has to offer, combined with squeezed living standards for the working class and poor, attacks on democratic rights, and rising national tensions between capitalist states including increased military conflicts. It is utterly incapable of preventing the accelerating climate crisis.
In response to this situation, we are seeing a growing number of mass movements, revolts and uprisings against the existing order, including most recently in India, Bolivia, Peru and Albania. Over the last five years strike waves on a level not seen since before the collapse of Stalinism have taken place in a number of economically developed countries, including Britain and the US. The general strike is being rediscovered as a weapon of struggle, particularly in Southern Europe, and including political general strikes in Italy over Gaza. And in virtually every country, the social base of the parties through which capitalism traditionally ruled has been completely hollowed out, and many parties have shattered altogether.
Nonetheless, while the working class ‘is back’, it has not yet decisively entered the scene of history in the sense of seeing itself as a potential governing power. Support for socialism in a general sense has grown but that still does not have mass organisational expression. When seemingly viable means to forge such an expression appear, they are grasped by large sections of young people and workers, as we have seen in Britain with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, the initial potential for a new party founded by Corbyn, and most recently the Green surge. However, mass workers’ parties do not yet exist in the vast majority of countries.
The lengthy period that it is taking for the working class to fully recover after the collapse of Stalinism has led to new opportunist pressures and searches for alleged ‘shortcuts’. In essence, that is what lay behind the 2019 split in the CWI. At that stage in Britain and other countries the level of strikes was very low, and the idea that the working class would re-enter the scene as an organised force appeared remote. That changed decisively in the strike wave of 2022-23, but nonetheless we are still only at the beginning of the working class rediscovering its strength.
Some point towards deindustrialisation to say the working class no longer has the power it had in the past. Deindustrialisation has taken place in every Western developed economy, while China has become a manufacturing behemoth, with potentially the most powerful working class globally. But Britain’s deindustrialisation started earlier, and went further and faster than in other countries. Nonetheless, traditional manufacturing workers still have enormous power in Britain, even with fewer numbers. For example, in 1970 there were 850,000 workers in vehicle manufacturing in Britain, whereas in 2025 there were only 142,000. However, increased productivity means that the number of engines built in Britain had only decreased a bit – from two million in 1970 to 1.6 million in 2025. Beyond manufacturing the strength of other key sectors of the working class remains intact – like transport and energy workers, for example.
At the same time, other sections of the working class have grown dramatically in numbers, such as tech, logistics and delivery workers. True, it is a struggle for some of these sections of the working class to become organised, but that process has begun. And we should not prettify the past. At the time of the 1926 general strike there were still around a million domestic servants in Britain – hard-to-organise sectors have always existed! And large sections of the workforce who in the past would have seen themselves as middle class have had their pay and conditions driven down and are now adopting working-class methods of struggle – look at the resident doctors.
Trade union organisation
For any revolutionary party serious about building a base in the working class, an orientation towards the trade unions is always essential. As Trotsky put it, in an incomplete article he was working on when he was murdered in 1940, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, “the matter at issue is essentially the struggle for influence over the working class. Every organisation, every party, every faction which permits itself an ultimatistic position in relation to the trade unions, ie, in essence turns its back upon the working class merely because of displeasure with its organisations, every such organisation is destined to perish. And it must be said it deserves to perish”.
In 2025 trade union membership increased by 192,000 to 6.57 million, the biggest increase in a single year since 1995. Nonetheless, trade union density is only 23%. Today, the trade unions organise a far smaller percentage of the working class than in the post-war upswing. In 1980, for example, around 70% of employees’ wages were set by collective bargaining. Today it is only 40%, mostly in the public sector. However, it is the wrong starting point to assess the state of the trade unions via a comparison to the unique period of the postwar upswing. In every sense, we are today much closer to the situation during the huge class battles of the interwar period. One hundred years ago, at the time of the general strike just under 30% of the workforce were members of trade unions. That is not qualitatively higher than today. Nonetheless, then and now the trade unions were the first line of defence in the workplace.
Of course, we do not yet have struggle even close to the level of 1926, but the ground is being prepared for it in the future. The deep-seated reformist illusions that capitalism could take society forward that existed in the post-war period have been eaten away by forty years of assaults on workers’ rights and living standards. At the same time, at this stage the vast majority of national trade union leaders see their role as – at best – fighting for a few crumbs more from the bosses or the government’s table. They cannot conceive of the working class taking power. Many would describe themselves as socialists, but in general without any concept of fighting for a fundamentally different society.
Nonetheless, while the deep-seated union loyalty of the past, and strict demarcation lines between different union’s fields of organisation, is no longer as strong as during the post-war upswing, most workers initial response when they move into action is still to join the established union in their sector. In Britain we have seen some ‘new’ unions established, mainly in sectors which were not previously organised, but they are relatively small scale. The IWGB, for example, had just over 7,000 members in 2024. We take a flexible approach, but our priority is where workers are, which means, in the main, being in the existing trade unions putting forward a programme to transform them into combative democratic bodies, and to win the most determined class fighters to our ranks.
Clearly, not every mass struggle will develop via the trade unions. On the contrary, all kinds of different movements will erupt, mostly with youth to the fore, as we have seen with the Gen Z protests internationally, the movement around Gaza, or a few years earlier with the Black Lives Matter protests. We are in an age of explosive mass protests. The fragmented character of the movements in many countries at this stage reflects the absence of mass workers’ organisations that generalise and bring together the different struggles. Marxists have to put demands on the leadership of the trade unions to take up every issue around which a section of the working class is fighting, not only those directly related to immediate workplace issues. We also take part in the various movements that erupt, always putting forward a programme that links immediate demands to the socialist transformation of society, and points towards the potential role of the working class in the struggle.
The call for workers’ parties
One of the most pronounced differences in our approach in the 1970 programme and the current material is on the question of workers’ parties. In the years after the collapse of Stalinism the old capitalist workers’ parties – both the parties of the Second International and the Communist parties – were in the main ‘bourgeoisfied’. Their leaderships moved to the right, no longer even formally adhering to socialism, and the democratic structures via which the working-class had the ability to pressure the leadership were destroyed. Above all, so was the consciousness among much of the working class that Labour – and other similar parties – represented the interests of the working class. As a result, in the vast majority of countries the working class was left without any mass party that it saw as representing its interests. A key plank in our programme therefore became the demand for ‘a new mass workers’ party’.
Why do we put it forward? This is above all a political demand, pointing towards the working class seeing itself as a potential governing power. It is a demand designed to help ‘cohere’ the working class – to overcome sectional interests and develop class consciousness. A demand which can help enable the working class to, as Marx put it, develop from being a class ‘in itself’ to a class ‘for itself’. In other words, to become conscious of itself as an alternative governmental power to the capitalist, ruling class.
Where mass workers’ parties exist, or mass left formations that have the potential to become workers’ parties, of course we don’t leave it there, but instead demand their transformation into parties that wholeheartedly fight in the interests of the working class – that adopt a full socialist programme, have a democratic structure, drive out pro-capitalist elements, and so on. But where they don’t exist we have to call for them to be established. In the Historic Foundations document and elsewhere we have summarised this as ‘the dual task’ because there is not the slightest hint in our approach of firstly building a broad workers’ party and only later a revolutionary party – at every stage we have to fight for both together. Actually, we always, in all circumstances, have dual tasks. You can go right back to the Communist Manifesto where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that “the communists fight for the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class, but in the movement of the present they also take care of the future of that movement”.
That is another way of putting the same thing. Calling for a new mass workers’ party is fighting for an objective step forward for the working class. But that in no way lessens the necessity of a cohesive revolutionary party that has understood the lessons of history and has a programme for the working class to conquer power. When new parties develop, they will inevitably be arenas of class conflict. We will argue in favour of the most democratic constitution, and for a socialist programme. But, even if we were to win those debates, it would not prevent the capitalist class fighting inside a broad party to push it to the right, to make it safe, an instrument through which they can rule. Actually, dialectically, the absence of such parties is both a conquest for the capitalist classes and a problem for them. Where such parties exist and come to power their authority in the working class can sometimes be used by the capitalists to force through policies that traditional capitalist governments could not.
The document explains how Podemos and Syriza, which were left radical parties in Spain and Greece in the post Great Recession period, very rapidly betrayed the working class in power. It makes the point that this was easier because they were not workers’ parties – the working class voted for them but in the main did not participate in them. In contrast, for example, in Britain in 1931, when Labour was a capitalist workers’ party, the second Labour government could not carry out the huge austerity demanded by the capitalist class because of the role of the trade unions in Labour. Instead, the capitalists had to split Labour and rely on a national government to carry through the austerity they required.
Labour’s working-class base at that time made it harder for British capitalism to bend the Labour government to its will, but it did not prevent the class struggle being fought out within Labour, just as it was within Syriza and Podemos. And had sizeable revolutionary parties, with real roots in the working class existed in Spain and Greece at the time of Podemos and Syriza coming to power, they would have been a powerful factor in the struggles and could have altered the course of events. Even if such revolutionary parties were not powerful enough to prevent the defeats, they could have ensured that lessons were learnt for the next round of struggle much more quickly and widely.
The united front tactic
Broadly, this approach applies to all working-class organisations, and all stages of struggle. In most countries today we raise the demand for a workers’ party, which connects with existing consciousness. But revolutionary movements can erupt without workers parties having been formed. That would mean a higher level of working-class organisation – workers’ councils, or soviets – being posed rather than simply parties. But this too, would be one element in a ‘dual task’. In the Russian revolution soviets posed the question of power, but they didn’t answer it. In the first period of the revolution reformist forces had the majority in the Soviets. The Bolshevik party was able to win a majority by ‘patient explanation’ at every stage, combined with winning the confidence of the working class in practice, above all in the most successful united front in history, that defeated General Kornilov’s attempt to drown the revolution in blood.
The method of the united front remains crucial for our work today. Trotsky summarised the united front as “march separately, strike together” – meaning that a revolutionary party must keep complete independence, whilst also proposing concrete common action with reformist and centrist forces on the immediate issues facing the working class. We face very different circumstances to when the young Communist International agreed to turn to the united front in 1921. Writing on the necessity of that turn, in March 1922, Trotsky made the point that where the revolutionary party has won ‘one third or one half’ of the working class it follows that the rest still support reformist parties. In Russia 1917 the working class had conquered power, and the Communist International was a huge poll of attraction. Nowhere today have revolutionary parties yet won the firm support of one third of the working class, or even anywhere near it. And nor do mass reformist workers’ parties exist in most countries. Instead, the deep and growing anger of the working class has not yet found organised political expression, with workers picking up different electoral weapons to express their rage without, generally, any deep-seated support for the party they are voting for – whether they are on the left or populist right.
Nonetheless, the united front method still runs through all our work. For example, it is the approach of our members in trade unions who maintain complete independence from those trade union leaders who argue that a Burnham government will act in workers’ interests. Socialist Party members warn that Burnham is heading up a pro-capitalist government with an agenda no different, in fundamentals, than Starmer before him. At the same time they call for the whole trade union movement to unite around a policy of militant struggle to maximise the pressure on Burnham.
Or to give another example, in May’s elections a section of workers and young people voted Green, hoping that the Greens would oppose austerity in office. As a result, particularly in parts of London, Greens now lead local councils and there are widespread hopes that they will spearhead a struggle against austerity. We put forward a programme of how that could be done, and offer to use our authority in the trade union movement to mobilise in support of any Green council that takes the road of struggle. But in doing this we do not give an inch in our criticisms of the Green party, not least its failure to lead a struggle against austerity in any council it has led up to now.
What we are preparing for
The Revolutionary International book is a very valuable read, particularly for young members of the Socialist Party wanting to understand the CWI’s long struggle to win support for the ideas of genuine Marxism. To have maintained our international, above all the clarity of our programme, through the protracted winter sleep of the working class after the collapse of Stalinism is an enormous achievement. We have to fight to make sure that the fruits of that labour are harvested in the coming period.
We can already start to see, in the different movements that have erupted internationally, the enormous capacity of the working class and oppressed to fight in defence of their interests when they see the possibility of doing so. Of course, there is not a mechanical relationship between entering struggle and drawing conclusions about the urgent need for the global socialist transformation of society, and the central role of the working class in achieving that. At this stage working-class consciousness still lags enormously behind objective reality.
Nonetheless, we must not underestimate how it will catch up in great leaps at a certain stage on the basis of experience in struggle – both of defeats and victories. The capitalist lie – that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the death of support for socialism – has already been disproved as successive waves of young people look towards the left in the face of the catastrophe of capitalism. In the coming period more far-reaching conclusions will also be drawn about the necessity of a socialist planned economy – not on the Stalinist model – but on the basis of genuine democratic workers’ management and control. The duty of the CWI to speed that process up by winning support for the ideas of genuine Marxism could not be greater.