Four Principles for the Workers Party
Proposed by George Galloway & Seconded by Edward Renyard
The prospect of four years of an unpopular Government operating with a majority that it does not democratically deserve, alongside a challenging new right wing Government in Washington to which our Government is subservient, means that we, the Workers Party of Britain, have to be secure and united in our principles and work tirelessly to make a decisive attempt at the next General Election to attain effective power as well as sustain our current momentum for progress in local Government and acquiring seats at forthcoming by-elections. In addition, we may have to face attempts to blacken our name or destabilise us by ruthless interests determined on war and international confrontation. In that context, we affirm four fundamental principles to take us through to political power and the peaceful and democratic removal of the current Government.
- Working Class: That we will not deviate from our primary purpose which is to represent and fight for the interests of the working class of Britain which we interpret as all those whose livelihoods (regardless of all other factors) depend on the decisions of the owners or managers of capital or the Crown and have no significant capital of their own beyond what is required reasonably to secure their pensions, care and personal security and those of their families.
- Anti-Imperialist: That we will oppose all forms of imperialism and imperial alliances and that this is in the interests of the working class as well as of the dispossessed and oppressed peoples of the world and we oppose any use of military action, support or imperial subversion or intervention outside these islands except in direct and immediate defence of the people.
- Socialist: That we will make every attempt to recover public support for socialism as the common-sense solution to systemic failure in the neo-liberal economic system and that we will interpret socialism to be the best available, effective, accountable, fair and sustainable means of redistributing power and resources as widely as possible within the nation where all citizens have equal worth in and of themselves.
- Unity: That the WPB will be open for debate on how these principles will be implemented but that there will be no toleration of attempts to breach these principles, which underpin the ten point programme on which the party was founded. While pragmatic political alliances may be regarded as necessary in attaining the implementation of our principles, these alliances will not be permitted to change the character of the Party or its programme.
Congress accordingly approves these three fundamental principles and one organisational principle as the standard instruction to Officers for the next five years with a review only in the light of the results of the next General Election and a reasonable period of reflection thereafter.
I’d second this motion as well. The party’s founding values and mission must be preserved no matter what.
I fully endorse this motion.
I also wholly support this motion which captures the very essence of the Party and settles the matter of ideology at least to the next General Election and beyond. I hope that there are no amendments that would either weaken it or complicate it at Congress.
I support this motion. Everything we put out should be underpinned by these principles and adhered to by all members.
Comrades, well done and many thanks. Reference Principal 3. Socialist.
I would suggest inserting the word ‘capitalist’ in front of of the word ‘neo-liberal’.
Please submit any formal amendments in writing to info@workerspartybritain.org Many thanks.
As a non member who is thinking of joining it is refreshing to see a public commitment to socialism. The party needs to be aware that as it progresses the capitalist state will used a myriad of tried and tested methods to create internal dissension. Look at the differen ways that internal and external forces destroyed corbyns leadership.
Capitalism is the total historical system. Neo-liberalism is its particular and current manifestation. The principles (as I understand the proposal) are designed to carry the party through the next four to five years and be specific to our current historical situation rather than offer an overall theoretical critique. The people we want to vote for us can be more easily persuaded to challenge contingent and recent neo-liberal theory (which is broadly speaking half a century old) than to believe we can over turn capitalism as a system that has developed over half a millennium. By concentrating on neo-liberalism, we strike at the weak link within capitalism so that our challenge becomes credible rather than academic or the interest of informed intellectuals. Although capitalism is at the root of what is going wrong in our society, it is neo-liberalism that is attempting to embed structures that are designed to ensure that our protests remain theoretical. We should strike at the black heart of the beast rather than find ourselves engaged in a wrestling match with something much mightier at this point in history than we are. From this perspective, the wording should stand and the option retained to introduce new language (including the proposed ‘capitalist’) after the next general election based on the success of our national political education programme. It is vitally important, however, that we assert the word ‘socialist’ as the literal red line we must never cross into compromise.
The strongest principles that will endure
This provides very little appeal to the younger generation and in fact enhances that divide between the young voters and the over 50’s who may have composed this.
I respectfully suggest you run a focus group of young disaffected “non-voters” which there are many who may guide you better than me.
Point 1 makes no grammatical sense whatsoever I have shown this to around 20 of my daughters friends (under 35’s) and they are still trying to decode it.
Point 2 is harping back to a bygone era of smoke filled rooms and Stout. Alexander the Great and Benito Mussolini and all that Imperialist holier than thou rhetoric.
The WP needs to get 21st Century and change that whole sense to Globalism and concentration of power which has far more appeal to younger voters.
They seem themselves powerless in a sea of sharks composing of Billionaires/Politicians and their peer group who constantly criticise them with no positive vibes flowing in their direction.
This rapidly turns in to a vicious circle of despair and frustration one which they will possibly never escape from.
Point 3 again fingers left/right rhetoric which many young people are getting 100% fed up with. Universal suffrage with a greater focus of presumptive inclusion. Young people feel left out and frequently excluded from the political process and need a newer focus.
Do not make this mistake of backsliding into the old fashioned mantras of mainstream politics.
Point 4 by implication this immediately contradicts itself. Any party mechanism or a modern one must be open to criticism and open debate. This is the major downfall of current political parties which work on the “closed loop” principle of internal policing by whom? Who has the right to summary execution of voices within an organisation?
We see this very much in evidence within the Labour Party with the other Political parties following hot on their heels.
Thank you and there is not much in the above which has appeal to the under 40’s.
Keith Yarde
Dear Keith,
I believe you have misinterpreted the purpose of this motion. This is an instruction to the leadership to follow a particular set of principles. It is not a leaflet to be used to engage the public at large.
Ed Renyard
This is incorrect. The Party has a very significant number of younger members. Our analyses suggest that Generation Alpha (the youngest politically active generation) has been radicalised in a positive way by its experience of COVID, neglect, high student debt, lack of housing, career opportunities and so forth. The generation that is problematic is the ‘woke’ generation between roughly 30 and 50 who have abandoned all attempts at political education for themselves and have been seduced by a culture of things provided by the techno-feudalist billionaires. They have been like frogs slowly boiled in the internet.
If the ‘friends’ of your daughter do not understand Point 1 then this may say more about the educational system than it does about the Motion. The wording is clear. It just requires a reasonable amount of concentration. The point is not to pander to the mind map of generations seduced into liberal left idealism (which has proved totally ineffective for four decades) but to change those maps through asserting fundamental principles and then providing political education and discipline to take on forms of capitalism that are radically different from anything we have seen before but which require the restoration of a strong and much more fundamentally democratic nation state than the weaklings of liberal left activism can possibly contemplate.
And, of course, they see themselves as impotent. That is because they are. And they are impotent because they are disorganised. Bleating in outrage at world events and still trotting out to vote for the lesser evil changes nothing. The nation does not need another bunch of idealistic liberal left watchers from the side lines whose front end will sell out at the first sniff of a ministerial car. The WPB core principles are rigorous and disciplined because they are the basis for a rigorous and disciplined cadre of organisers, activists and ordinary members who are prepared to recognise the scale of the task ahead in order to commit to it. ‘Youngsters’ who think listening to an eco-song by a superband at Glastonbury will change anything are just getting in the way. If they want jobs, houses, healthcare and not to be conscripted into an early death on the black earth of Ukraine (which is certainly a risk for Generation Alpha), then they will need to make a decision – whether to be the flotsam and jetsam of history or support at the least those who do have the energy and resilience to change things. Anything else is left-wing fakery.
These four principles provide discipline and yet freedom within a core framework. Every other so-called Left wing group is all over the place, substituting intellectual theory, emotion, outrage and idealism for a practical understanding of just what is necessary to reverse decades of a deliberate weakening of the working class. The ones currently picking up on widespread discontent are the right-populists. This is entirely the fault of the detached theorising and laziness of the liberal Left. They are responsible for Starmer and not the WPB. We will be to a morally bankrupt Labour Party what Farage is to an inept and corrupted Tory Party.
As a member of a younger generation, I disagree that a commitment to socialism will somehow ostracise people in my age group. Most young people in Britain today are open to socialism of some form or another – they’re sick of having their futures mortgaged off in this late capitalist dystopia.
I’ll be enthusiastically supporting this motion at congress.
I fully support this motion, particularly the call to end Neoliberal Economics. As someone who was fortunate enough to afford a home under the Keynesian economic system—albeit within a capitalist framework—I recognize how drastically the landscape has changed. My heart goes out to those struggling to buy a home or even rent a property in today’s economic climate, a struggle that began with the rise of Neoliberalism, introduced by Thatcher in the 1980s. The shift has disproportionately burdened younger generations and widened economic inequality, underscoring the urgent need for change.
So we don’t wish to represent the self-employed electrician, plumber, plasterer et al who we regard as capitalists since they have had to invest in their own van and tools and are dependent on their own efforts in seeking and obtaining work? This excludes a lot of what I would describe as working class people, not mini-capitalists who have no alternative to try to make a living in a capitalist society.
Dear Forbury Lion,
I suggest you reread: “…and have no significant capital of their own beyond what is required reasonably to secure their pensions, care and personal security and those of their families.”
I believe that broad description does not exclude what can be classed, if you want to be pedantic, as petit-bourgeois tradesmen who own their means of production. Large sections of this class are being ‘proletarianised’, we have no quarrel with them, their interests align more and more with the working class at large as they are crushed by capitalism. Indeed the party has many such tradesmen in its ranks, both current and former.
Ed Renyard
This is a misunderstanding of what is intended here. You should look at the Manifesto for further clarification. These are just the general principles that drive the energy of the party but the WPB remains (within those principles) committed to the aspirations of all working class people. Those aspirations include the ownership of their own small businesses (including family farms) where the households work the business themselves rather than sit in some head office and direct labour through managers.
The WPB definition of working class is much more extensive than that of (say) Communists because, under late liberal capitalism, both the household small business owner and the worker are in the same boat when it comes to the depredations of international and large-scale national capital and their pals in the two main political parties. The time when the interests of these two sub-classes were separated is over because both are victims of radical cuts in public services and vicious neo-liberal competition. There will be no more robbing one side of the working class to pay for the other and leaving the upper middle classes and elites in secure possession of their gains.
This is why the WPB has beeen vociferous, perhaps counter-intuitively to some Leftists, in supporting small farmers in their protests against Labour’s inheritance tax because it is certainly designed to force many of them to sell out to agribusiness and renewables companies, the latter of which would take the land out of agricultural production or for inappropriate housing in flood plains. Labour has ignored the household farmer as custodian of the land. Small farmers are victims here of a Labour Government manipulating the market rather than having a national land use plan that encourages resilient local agricultural production, sustainable housing and an energy policy that is truly rational rather than driven by intellectuals living in the fantasy land of Net Zero policy.
Not only is the WPB not a problem for the self-employed electrician, plumber, plasterer et al but it is their only long term salvation since they will soon find out that Reform (which appears to pander to their prejudices) is wedded to the very sort of libertarian economics that inevitably leads to capital concentration and the destruction of the ‘little man or woman’. Indeed, we have many small business owners as members. They sit alongside employed workers in the same fundamental project. I trust you are reassured. The motion has no negative implications in this respect for the working class micro-business.
Love it. Will be voting FOR this motion.
Answers a lot of questions that some members have had and provides clarity on our path forward.
What is commonsense socialism? For me, it is a gimmick.
It is essential to examine the idea of socialism with care, considering its long and complex history, which includes both its progressive development and the various betrayals it has faced.
From the pioneering utopian visions of Robert Owen to the practical insights of John McLean from Clydeside and James Connolly in Ireland, socialist thought has consistently, but slowly, evolved in Britain.
The concept of socialism as defined by Marx and Engels to the modern concept of cybernetic socialism being pioneered by Paul |Cockshot in Britain pose a considerable challenge for our contemporary discourse.
Tushar Sarkar
When we’re out on the doors during election time. It is vital that we have a manifesto and policies that reflect the commonsense of the electorate to win them over to our politics on a populist program and build up our forces. We are on a party building project. Going to the people with literature regarding ‘cybernetic socialism’ would not win us 20 votes in a constituency.
Analysis and deep theory are important. But it is equally important to know where to have an appropriate separation between theoretical work and the practical tasks that face us. That is the proper way to have unity between theory and practice.
Door step socialist election party
Even if we are just a party “on the doors during election time” still we will not be judged by the electorate on the door step just by what motions we passed on “socialism” at a Congress. The beautiful word ‘socialism’ would be Greek and Latin to most of our electorate . Instead, we will be assessed based on our actions leading up to the election, which should reflect our interpretation of socialism. If socialism is perceived as a “populist program,” then there is no shortage of such initiatives in contemporary Britain. Throughout my long political career, I have encountered 32 different brands of socialism, none of which effectively communicated any specific socio-economic vision to the electorate.
During the time Clause 4 was in place, Harold Wilson promoted the idea of a ‘social contract,’ while James Callaghan referred to the ‘winter of discontent.’ Following the abandonment of Clause 4, Tony Blair decided to invade Iraq.
It is important to clarify that socialism is not merely a ‘populist program’; it is a scientific socio-economic concept. Our constituents will recognise our IDENTITY not through the pamphlets we distribute, but through the NATURE of our efforts over the five years preceding the election.
Fully Support
Tim,Ed and Terry.
Well said.
And Yes, I totally agree with the principles of this motion.
One paragraphs got missed out from my comments above. To insert before the last paragraph
Neil Kinnock sang “Keep the Red Flag High” once a year and, during the earth shaking miners’ strike, criticised Arthur Scargill for his lack of understanding of compromise. Glenys, his oher half, who brought him to the circus, nearly fell off her chair at the yearly Labour jamboree while singing also the same song. The bewildered British workers question: is this what they mean by sooialism?