What exactly was/is the Enabling Act, and where can I find a text of it online? I hear the term tossed around occasionally, and I've searched the Marxists archive for it but I can only find references to it, not the actual document - and even then, the references are very negative and dismissive. I'd like the CWI's stance on it.
By enabling act, do you mean the thing used by Hitler and his government in 1933? Basically, it said that the (fascist) government could make laws on its own that would otherwise have been unconstitutional. Officially this enabling act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) was only valid for four years, but it was extended in 1937 and again "extended indefinitely" by the nazi-only Reichstag in 1939.
Oh! No, I was referring to the Enabling Act that I hear the Militant Tendency wanted to pass when they were working inside the Labour Party. From what little I know, it seems that the Enabling Act would function as the jump-start to a socialist transition. I didn't know the Nazis used a similar term. :-/
This demand already existed in the 1930s under Clement Atlee. Its probably a typical Labourist "transitional" demand (but the figurative "bridge" is either overextended or has bad foundations?). It depended on the way you defined Labour as a bourgeois workers party. The Labour Party, according to the Militant, was a contradiction: it had both a bourgeois and a proletarian character. This enabled them to foster the idea that in a pre-revolutionary situation the party could move to the left and Marxists could claim proletarian leadership. In the case of the Militant (not Atlee nor Hitler) this act would become part of Labour's political agenda when the masses would actively push that party to the left. A left-wing parliamentary majority influenced by the Marxists of the Militant would then pass this demand of nationalization of the 250 biggest monopolies under workers control. The idea comes close to a magnification of what happened in Liverpool between 1984 and 1987; but on a national scale.
So the Militant tendency still favored an insurrection as the general method of dismantling the capitalist state & establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat? Or were they believers in a "parliamentary route" to socialism?
There's no other way than the militant mass action of the working class. That's because the Labour party needed to be pushed to the left, and only the mobilization of the working class could do that.
Agreed on that. I just wanted to make certain that the CWI didn't have a gradualist, parliamentary vision of how socialism would happen, because certain people on this site make it sound like they are solely because of the "enabling act", but everything I know about them would suggest otherwise. So, did the Militant want to turn the Labour Party into the revolutionary party of the proletarian vanguard, or did they see this happening from splits, breaks etc from Labour? Apologies for the barrage of questions, by the way.
The short answer to your question: More preferably the former but more likely the latter. We did not have a fixed approached in this matter, the road to the revolutionary party is not just a straight line of progress, but inevitably involves sp+lits mergers and regroupments.
