To the British reader
from 1975 foreword to What Distinguishes our Party
 

      Great Britain was the mother of modern and imperialist capitalism, and London the centre of the International Working Mens' Association, the First International, led by Marx and Engels. Today it remains one of the pillars of the world conservation of capitalism, though compelled to leave the leadership of imperialism to the U.S.A. ; but it is no longer the centre of the revolutionary proletariat.

      To make up for its relative decline, British capitalism was the first to experiment with a strategy for imposing a ruthless control over the working class, a strategy which it is still refining and which is exemplary of its kind. It blandished the workers with economic and social allowances, while entangling them in the ingratiating webs of the most perfect example of parliamentary democracy that history has ever known. Realistically recognising the class function of the working class within the bourgeois regime, it established relations of permanent collaboration with the Labour Party and with the workers' unions.

      In spite of a long tradition of struggles the British proletariat hasn't yet managed to move beyond the elementary union organization, nor, unlike the other European countries, to express a revolutionary communist movement. The word communism itself is today ignored or mocked, but the policies of the Government and their lackeys, aiming to prevent the self-emancipation of the proletariat, demonstrate how much they loathe communism and the communist dictatorship; namely, the one regime able to emancipate the working class from the capitalist dictatorship.

      Trade Unions and the Labour Party today organise the British workers, and lead them on the basis of collaboration with the capitalist State and its regime. Minority groups such as Trotskyists lack any programmatic and ideological continuity and are therefore incapable of showing the British proletariat the way to the class revolt. In these circumstances the main duty of real communists, the disciples of Marx and Lenin, is to "import" the program of revolutionary communism into the ranks of the British working class; in the knowledge that when the class struggle revives, under the impact of a new world-wide economic crisis, the class will join forces with it, together with proletarians in other countries. The workers of Great Britain are today entitled to sum up the harsh lessons of almost a century of Labour Party and T.U.C. solidarity with the bourgeois State and the democratic regime. In the present situation of increasing economic difficulties, no "left-wing" or "right-wing" Labour or Conservative government is any more able to make concessions to the working class. All that remains are demagogic promises, with ever greater sacrifices imposed on the working masses by means of an ever tougher and more totalitarian statal authoritarianism. It will become increasingly clear that capitalism, in the native land of liberalism, can only survive the attacks of communism by setting up a police State, an open dictatorship.

      The categorical imperative of the present day is, therefore, the reorganization of the proletariat into one single political party, one which has totally broken with the social democratic policies of the bourgeoisie and which is homogeneous in doctrine, praxis and organization; a party, that is, which has assimilated the lessons deduced by the Communist Left from historical experience. It is with this aim in view that the few revolutionaries organised in the International Communist Party are making the effort to transmit intact to their British brothers and sisters the radiant program which led to the October Revolution.