He firmly believed that the struggle itself would spontaneously generate socialist consciousness, absolving the party of its role as a political leader of the class. Though Cliff abandoned his Luxemburgist opposition to the Leninist party in the late 1960s, for him the party was primarily an organisational mechanism rather than the embodiment of a programme and the instrument for translating that programme into action. This remains a hallmark of SWP politics, a legacy of Cliff that the SWP must re-evaluate and break from. This particular joke falls flat when you give it a moment's serious consideration. After all, if this is true, what need is there for revolutionary theory or a revolutionary party, let alone a programme.
Workers go into struggle with their own version of a programme.
Take Rover today. Sadly, thousands of Longbridge workers are campaigning for a capitalist solution to the car crisis. The whole purpose of a revolutionary organisation is to break workers from this programme so that they will take action in their own interest. And their own interest is embodied in a revolutionary programme - which in this case can be very concretely posed around demands for the nationalisation of Rover with no compensation to the bosses, for workers' control over production, for the opening of the management and government's books and accounts. Such demands do not fall from the sky - and they are certainly not the spontaneous products of the struggle at Rover.