The state machine is not simply the government. It is a vast organisation with many different branches - the police, the army, the judiciary, the civil service, the people who run the nationalised industries and so on. Many of the people who work in these different branches of the state come from the working class - they live and get paid like workers.
But it is not these people who make the decisions. The rank and file soldiers don't decide where wars are going to be fought or whether strikes are going to be broken; the counter clerk in the social security office does not decide how much dole will be paid out. The whole state machine is based on the principle that people on one rung of the ladder obey those on the rung above.
This is essentially the case in the sections of the state machine that exercise physical force - army, navy, air force, police. The first thing soldiers are taught when they enlist - long before they are allowed to touch weapons - is to obey orders, regardless of their personal opinions of those orders. That is why they are taught to do absurd drills. If they will follow lunatic commands on the parade ground without thinking about it, it is reckoned they will shoot when ordered to without thinking about that either.
The most heinous crime in any army is a refusal to obey orders - mutiny. So seriously is the offence regarded, that mutiny during time of war is still punishable by execution in Britain. Who gives the orders?
If you look at the chain of command in the British army (and other armies are no different) it goes: general - brigadier - colonel - lieutenant - NCO - private. At no stage in that chain of command do elected representatives - MPs or local councillors - get a look in. It is just as much an act of mutiny for a group of privates to obey their local MP rather than the officer. The army is a massive killing machine. The people who run it - and have the power to promote other soldiers into commanding positions - are the generals.
Of course, in theory the generals are responsible to the elected government. But soldiers are trained to obey generals, not politicians. If generals choose to give orders to their soldiers which are at variance with the wishes of an elected government, the government cannot countermand those orders. It can only try to persuade the generals to change their minds, (/the government knows the sorts of orders that are being given - because military affairs are invariably secret, it is very easy for generals to hide what they are doing from governments they don't like.
That doesn't always mean that generals always, or even usually, ignore what governments say to them. Usually in Britain they have found it convenient to go along with most of what the government suggests. But, in a life and death situation, the generals are able to put their killing machine into operation without listening at all to the government, and there is little the government can do about it. This is what the generals eventually did in Chile when Allende was overthrown.
So the question, `Who runs the army?' is really, `Who are the generals?' In Britain about 80 percent of the senior officers went to fee-paying `public' schools - the same proportion as 50 years ago (17 years of Labour government didn't change that). They are related to the owners of big business, belong to the same posh clubs, mix at the same social functions, share the same ideas (if you doubt this, look at the letters column in virtually any copy of the Daily Telegraph). The same goes for the heads of the civil service, the judges, the chief constables.
Do you think these people are going to obey government orders to take economic power away from their friends and relatives in big business, just because 330 people walk into a lobby in the House of Commons? Would they not be much more likely to copy the example of the Chilean generals, judges and senior civil servants, who sabotaged the government's orders for three years and then, when the time was ripe, overthrew it?
In practice the particular `constitution' we have in Britain means that those who control the state machine would be able to thwart the will of an elected left wing government far short of physically overthrowing it. If such a government were elected, it would be faced with massive economic sabotage by the employing class (factory closures, flights of money abroad, hoarding of necessities, inflationary price rises). If the government attempted to deal with such sabotage using `constitutional means' - by passing laws - it would find its hands tied behind its back.
The House of Lords would certainly refuse to ratify any such law - delaying it for nine months at a minimum. The judges would `interpret' any law passed in such a way as to curtail its powers. The civil service chiefs, the generals and the police chiefs would use the decisions of the judges and the House of Lords to justify their own unwillingness to do what ministers told them. They would be backed by virtually the whole press, which would scream that the government was behaving `illegally' and `unconstitutionally'. The generals would then use such language to justify preparations to overthrow an/illegal' government.
The government would be powerless to deal with the economic chaos - unless it really did act unconstitutionally and called upon rank and file civil servants, police and soldiers to turn against their superiors.
Lest anyone thinks this is all wild fantasy, it should be added that there have been at least two occasions in recent British history when generals have sabotaged government decisions they did not like.
In 1912 the House of Commons passed a bill providing for a `Home Rule' parliament to run a united Ireland. The Tory leader, Bonar Law, immediately denounced the (Liberal!) government as an illegal `junta' who had `sold the constitution'. The House of Lords naturally delayed the law as long as it could (two years then), while former Tory minister Edward Carson organised a paramilitary force in the north of Ireland to resist the law.
When the generals who commanded the British army in Ireland were told to move their troops northwards to deal with this force, they refused and threatened to resign their commissions. It was because of this action, usually called the `Curragh Mutiny', that Ireland north and south didn't get a single parliament in 1914, and remains a divided nation even today.
In 1974 there was a rerun of the events of 1912 in miniature. The right wing sectarian Loyalists of Northern Ireland organised a general stoppage of industry, using barricades to prevent people going to work, against being forced to accept a joint Protestant-Catholic government in Northern Ireland. British ministers called on the British army and the Northern Ireland police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, to dismantle the barricades and end the strike. The senior army officers and the police commanders told the government that this would be inadvisable, and neither soldiers nor police moved against the Loyalists. The joint Protestant-Catholic government was forced to resign, the views of army officers proving more powerful than the views of the British government.
If that could happen in 1914 and 1974 with middle-of-the-road governments trying to push through mild measures, imagine what would happen if a militant socialist government was elected. Any serious reformist majority in parliament would soon be forced to make a choice: either abandon reforms in order to placate those who own industry and control the key positions in the state, or prepare for an all out conflict, which will inevitably mean the use of some kind of force, against those who control those positions.
The third reason why reformism is a dead end is that parliamentary `democracy' contains inbuilt mechanisms for preventing any revolutionary movement finding expression through it.
Some reformists argue that the best way to take on the power of those who control the key positions in the state machine is for the left to obtain a majority in parliament first. This argument falls because parliaments always understate the level of revolutionary consciousness of the mass of the population.
The mass of the people will only believe that they themselves can run society when they begin in practice to change society through struggle. It is when millions of people are occupying their factories or taking part in a general strike that ideas of revolutionary socialism suddenly seem realistic.
But such a level of struggle cannot be maintained indefinitely unless the old ruling class is removed from power. If it hangs on, it will wait until the occupations or strikes decline, then use its control over the army and police to break the struggle.
And once the strikes or occupations begin to falter, the feeling of unity and confidence among the workers begins to wane. Demoralisation and bitterness set in. Even the best begin to feel that changing society was just a wild dream.
That is why employers always prefer strike votes to be taken when workers are at home by themselves, getting their ideas from the television and the newspapers, not when they are united at mass meetings, able to hear other workers' arguments.
That is also why anti-union laws nearly always include a clause forcing workers to call off strikes while secret, postal ballots are taken. Such clauses are accurately called `cooling off' periods - they are designed to pour cold water on the confidence and unity of workers.
The parliamentary electoral system contains built in secret ballots and cooling off periods. For instance, if a government is brought to its knees by a massive strike, it is likely to say, `OK, wait three weeks until a general election can resolve the question democratically.' It hopes that in the interim the strike will be called off. The workers' confidence and unity will then fade. Employers may well be able to blacklist militants. The capitalist press and the television can begin functioning normally again, hammering home pro-government ideas. The police can arrest `troublemakers'.
Then when the election finally takes place, the vote will not reflect the high point of the workers' struggles, but the low point after the strike.
In France in 1968, the government of General de Gaulle used elections in precisely this way. The reformist workers' parties and unions told workers to end their strikes, and de Gaulle won the election.
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