The British Prime Minister Edward Heath tried the same trick when faced with a massively successful miners' strike in 1974. But this time the miners were not conned. They kept their strike up - and Heath lost the election.
If workers wait for elections to decide the key issues in the class struggle, they will never reach that high point.
The workers' state
Marx, in his pamphlet The Civil War in France, and Lenin in The State and Revolution outlined a completely different view of how socialism can be won. Neither simply pulled these ideas out of thin air: both developed their views by seeing the working class inaction - Marx saw the Paris Commune, Lenin the Russian `Soviets' (workers' councils) of 1905 and 1917.
But Marx and Lenin insisted that the working class could not begin to construct socialism until it had first destroyed the old state based on bureaucratic chains of command, and secondly created a new state based on entirely new principles. Lenin underlined how completely different this state had to be from the old by calling it `a commune state, a state which is not a state'.
A new state, Marx and Lenin said, was necessary if the working class was to impose its dictates on the remnants of the old ruling and middle classes. That was why they called it the `dictatorship of the proletariat' - the working class had to dictate how society was to be run. It also had to defend its revolution against attacks from ruling classes elsewhere in the world. To do these two jobs, it had to have armed forces of its own, some form of policing of society, courts, even prisons.
But if this new army, police and legal system was to be controlled by the workers, and never turn against their interests, it had to be based on completely different principles from the capitalist state. It had to be the means by which the working class as a majority dictated to the rest of society, not a dictatorship directed against the majority of the working class.
The main differences are these.
The capitalist state serves the interests of a small minority of society. The workers' state has to serve the interests of the overwhelming majority. Force in the capitalist state is exercised by a minority of hired killers, cut off from the rest of society and trained to obey upper class officers. But in a workers' state, force would be needed only so the majority could protect themselves against anti-social acts by the remnants of the old privileged classes.
Soldiering and policing in a workers' state can be done by ordinary workers, who mix freely with their fellow workers, share the same ideas and lead the same lives. Indeed, to make sure that groups of soldiers and police never develop separated from the mass of workers, the `soldiers' and `police' should be ordinary factory and office workers who take it in turns, on a rota system, to carry out these functions.
Instead of the armed forces and police being run by a small group of officers, they would be run by directly elected representatives of the mass of workers.
Parliamentary representatives in a capitalist state pass laws but leave it to full time bureaucrats, police chiefs and judges to implement them. This means that MPs and councillors can always hide behind a million excuses when their promises are not implemented. The workers' representatives in a workers' state would have to see their laws put into action. They, not an elite of top bureaucrats, would have to explain to the workers of the civil service, the army and so on how things should be done.
Again elected workers' representatives would have to interpret the laws in courts.
Parliamentary representatives in a capitalist state are cut off from those who elect them by high salaries. In a workers' state the representatives would get no more than the average workers' wage. The same goes for those who work full time in key posts implementing the decisions of the workers' representatives (the equivalent of present-day civil servants).
Workers' representatives, and all those concerned with implementing workers' decisions, would not be, as MPs, immune to removal from office for five years (or for life in the case of senior civil servants). They would be subject to at least annual elections, and to immediate recall by those who elected them if they did not implement their wishes.
Parliamentary representatives are elected by all the people living in a certain locality - upper class, middle class and working class, slum landlords as well as tenants, stockbrokers as well as labourers. In a workers' state election would be by those who work only, with voting only after open discussion on the issues concerned. So the core of the workers' state would be workers' councils based on the factories, mines, docks, big offices, with groups such as housewives, pensioners, school students and students having their own representatives.
In this way, each section of the working class would have its own representative and be able directly to judge whether he or she was following their interests. In these ways, the new state cannot become a force separate from and against the majority working class - as it was in Eastern Bloc countries which called themselves `Communist'.
At the same time, the workers' council system provides a means by which workers can coordinate their efforts in running industry according to a democratically decided national plan, and not end up running their factories in competition with each other. It is easy to see how modem computer technology would enable all workers to be given information on the various economic options open to society, and to direct their representatives to choose what the majority of workers thought the best set of options - for example, whether to spend resources on Concorde or on a cheap and reliable public transport system, whether to build nuclear bombs or kidney machines, and so on.
The withering away of the state
Because state power would not be something separate from the mass of the workers, it would be much less a matter of coercion than under capitalism. As the remnants of the old society against which it was directed became resigned to the success of the revolution, and as revolutions removed foreign ruling classes, there would be less and less need for coercion, until eventually workers need never take time off from work to staff the `police' and the `army'.
This is what Marx and Lenin meant when they said the state would wither away. Instead of coercion against people, the state would become merely a mechanism of workers' councils to decide how to produce and allocate goods.
Workers' councils have come into being in one form or another whenever the struggle between the classes within capitalism has reached a really high level. `Soviet' is the word the Russians used for workers' councils in 1905 and 1917.
In 1918 in Germany workers' councils were, briefly, the only power in the country. In Spain in 1936 the various workers' parties and unions were united by `militia committees' which ran the localities and were very much like workers' councils. In Hungary in 1956 the workers elected councils to run the factories and the localities as they fought Russian troops. In Chile in 1972-73 the workers began to build `cordones' - workers' committees that linked the big factories.
The workers' council begins life as a body workers use to coordinate their struggle against capitalism. It may start with modest functions, raising strike funds maybe, but because these bodies are based on direct election from the workers, with workers' representatives subject to recall, they can at the highest points in the struggle coordinate the efforts of the whole working class. They can lay the basis for workers' power.
9. How do workers become revolutionary?
In Britain most workers this century have looked to the Labour Party and parliament to change society. A large minority have backed the reactionary ideas of the Tory party. The supporters of revolutionary socialism have generally been few in number.
This indifference or even opposition of workers to revolutionary socialism is hardly surprising. We have all been brought up in a capitalist society where it is taken for granted that everyone is selfish, where people are continually told by the newspapers and television that only a privileged minority have the ability to take the key decisions in industry and the state, where the mass of workers are taught from the first day they enter school to obey orders given by `their elders and betters'.
As Marx put it, `The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class,' and vast numbers of workers accept them.
Yet despite this, repeatedly in the history of capitalism, revolutionary movements of the working class have shaken one country after another: France in 1871, Russia in 1917, Germany and Hungary in 1919, Italy in 1920, Spain and France in 1936, Hungary in 1956, France in 1968, Chile in 1972-73, Portugal in 1975, Iran in 1979, Poland in 1980.
The explanation for these upheavals lies in the very nature of capitalism itself. Capitalism is a crisis-prone system. In the long run it cannot provide full employment, it cannot provide prosperity for all, it cannot secure our living standards today against the crisis it will produce tomorrow. But during the capitalist `booms' workers come to expect these things.
So, for instance, in the 1950s and early 1960s, workers in Britain came to expect permanent full employment, a `welfare state' and gradual but real improvements in living standards. By contrast, over the last 25 years successive governments have allowed unemployment to increase to a real figure of more than 4 million, have cut the welfare state to shreds, and have attempted again and again to cut living standards.
Because we are brainwashed into accepting many capitalist ideas, we accept some of these attacks. But inevitably a point is reached where workers find they can stand it no more. Suddenly, often when no one expects it, their anger suddenly flares and they take some action against employer or government. Perhaps they stage a strike, or organise a demonstration.
When this happens, whether they like it or not, workers begin doing things that contradict all the capitalist ideas they have previously accepted. They begin to act in solidarity with one another, as a class, in opposition to the representatives of the capitalist class.
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