Britain's Road to Socialism
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Britain's Road to Socialism (BRS) is the programme of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and is adhered to by the Young Communist League (YCL) and the editorship of the British daily newspaper The Morning Star. It was first published in 1953 as the programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and has gone through several revisions since then, most recently in 2000, bringing the document into its seventh edition. The CPGB's programme before the adoption of BRS was entitled For Soviet Britain.
When the CPGB's leadership abandoned Britain's Road to Socialism in 1985, elements in the party that remained loyal to the programme, including the editorship of The Morning Star split to form the CPB. A few years later the CPGB collapsed. The first edition of the document famously received the personal approval of Joseph Stalin prior to publication. In contrast to earlier programmes of the CPGB, Britain's Road to Socialism proposes that socialism can be achieved by the labour movement working initially within Britain's existing democratic structures. Although the document characterises itself as a revolutionary programme, other groupings on the British left, such as the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, argue that this claim is mere sophistry, that the CPB is a reformist party, and that their current stance is a repudiation of the original rationale for forming the party.
External links
- Britain's Road to Socialism (current edition) (http://www.communist-party.org.uk/index.php?file=brs)