State power and socialism.

From the moment a new type of left government is elected - one committed to implementing the alternative strategy - the class struggle in England will enter a more acute and protracted phase.

At the point where the struggle for advance envisaged in the AEPS brings into play the question of state power, and its use by the working class and its allies, the fight for the alternative strategy becomes transformed into the fight for socialism itself.

The capitalist class will seek by every means to resolve that struggle in its interests, while the working class and its allies will seek to resolve it in theirs. Which side wins will be decided, ultimately, by which class controls state power.

As long as the capitalist class continues to maintain control over every layer of the state apparatus, policies for increasing living standards and extending democracy can never reach the point where capitalist exploitation itself is abolished, and a new system - socialism - is established.

Only when democratisation of the key sectors of the state is taken to the point where the working class actually takes over the whole state apparatus, and transforms it into an instrument that enforces its policies, will it be possible for the working class to remove the basis of its own exploitation.

Through this process of struggle, parliament and the mass movement must begin to enforce changes in the structure and top personnel of state bodies, in particular the armed forces and security services, the police and judiciary, and the civil and diplomatic services.

This will help ensure that they begin to carry out their functions in the interests of the working class and its allies. Depending on the circumstances, it would be necessary to create new structures and to abolish those which exclusively serve the interests of monopoly capitalism.

The process would also include steps to involve the independent organisations of the working class, along with elected MPs, in exercising the functions of the state.

In this struggle for state power, the strength and political consciousness of workers and their trades unions within the state apparatus - including its 'coercive' sectors - will be vital factors in deciding how and when revolutionary change will be achieved. These workers will constitute important contingents of the labour movement at the head of the democratic anti-monopoly alliance.

How can the working class and its allies be won to understanding the tasks ahead of them?

Here the alternative economic and political strategy plays an indispensable role.

In mobilising to secure a strategy which serves their economic, social and political interests, working people will - in the concrete conditions of modern Britain - themselves place the issue of state power on the agenda.

Their realisation of the need to take state power to block state monopoly capitalist opposition will be formed in a mass, practical way - shaped and conditioned by struggle itself. So, too, will the realisation that the economic and political base of that opposition will have to removed altogether, and replaced by socialism.

The achievement of state power by the working class and its allies will open up a qualitatively new stage. Socialist state power - now based on democratic participation and control by working people at every level - will be used systematically to take resources out of the hands of monopoly capital and allocate them in a planned way for the needs of society.

This will make possible a new type of democracy, one which ensures the economic conditions for personal freedom and an unprecedented extension of human rights.

This must include safeguards for the pluralism of views and their political expression, freedom of dissent, respect for the views of minorities, religious freedom, and freedom for all the shades of interest that will exist in a socialist system to press their demands.

Socialism will be merely the first, lower stage of communist society. The state would still be needed - not only to help plan production - but to defend the socialist system against internal and external attack.

But by continuously planning and expanding production to meet everyone's material needs, liberating humanity from exploitation and want, socialism will lay the basis for a second, higher stage.

As the threat from capitalism recedes nationally and internationally, the socialist state begins to wither away, except for some technical and administrative functions; humanity can finally create a world free from all forms of oppression, based on common ownership of the means of production, working them co-operatively and ecologically to produce abundance for all.

The guiding principle of full communism will be: “from each according to their potential - to each according to their need.”

A new morality will characterise the social relations between people: the egotistical individualism of capitalism will be replaced by collective care and concern for every individual and for the full, all-round development of the human personality.