DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

United action by the workers and their allies is most effective when their alliance is founded on democratically elected local committees committed to the systematic promotion of mass anti-capitalist action.

As the class struggle sharpens and the working people take the initiative to impose their own solutions to problems created by capitalism, experiments in self-organisation multiply in the workplaces and localities. Along with this, there are more and more examples of workers' control going beyond the framework of individual workplaces. In order to coordinate their actions, the working people will need to elect representatives from their workplaces and neighbourhoods to city-wide councils of working people's delegates.

The development of such councils and the broadening of their sphere of action poses a direct challenge to the authority of capitalist rule. The development of workers' control can reduce this authority in fields such as communications, public transportation, banking, and industrial enterprises.

This weakening of the authority of capitalist rule can reach into the armed forces as well. Under the impact of mass mobilisations, antimilitarist work inside the capitalist army, and the struggle for the democratic rights of soldiers, rank-and-file military committees can be encouraged inside the army, posing a major challenge to the functioning of the military apparatus and making it possible to win the soldiers to the side of the insurgent masses.

As the conflict between the major classes sharpens, the capitalist rulers will almost certainly resort to legal and extra-legal forms of violence against the workers and their allies. For this reason, the working people must be prepared to defend their activities, organisations, headquarters and press against such violence through the formation of broadly-based self-defence squads.

The generalisation, coordination and centralisation of the councils of working people's delegates will increasingly challenge the legitimacy of the institutions of capitalist democracy. The capitalist class and its labour lieutenants will seek to discredit any forms of popular power by maintaining that the parliamentary institutions of the capitalist state are the only legitimate organs of democracy. To clear the way for the overturn of the state power of the capitalist rulers and the establishment of the state power of the working class the masses must first understand the real role of the capitalists' parliamentary institutions. Practical experience of mass struggles and mobilisation, in which they can test the limits that these capitalist institutions impose on their freedom of action, will demonstrate to working people the superiority of their own independent bodies of democratic self-organisation.

The disintegration of the capitalist state apparatus under the impact of the growing counter-power of the working people's councils will lead inevitably to a showdown between the masses and the capitalist regime. The resolution of that confrontation in favour of the working class and its allies depends on the development of the following basic conditions:

1. The impasse of capitalist rule and the resulting confusion within the capitalist ruling class and the leading personnel of its state machine.

2. The sharp dissatisfaction and desire for radical change in the ranks of the middle classes, without whose support the capitalist regime cannot maintain itself.

3. The consciousness of the intolerable situation and the readiness for action in the ranks of the working class.

4. The existence of a revolutionary party that enjoys the confidence of the broad masses and is capable of offering clear and decisive leadership.

Once a certain threshold in these conditions has been reached, the workers and their allies will be in a position to topple the capitalist government and replace it with a government of their own. The creation of a working people's government, based on democratically elected councils of working people's delegates, will open the road to the socialist reconstruction of society.