John complains about the prospect of "all members of the capitalist class and their counterrevolutionary hangers-on each (having) a vote equal to that of revolutionary workers". What's he worried about? Either there's so few of them that they can easily be out-voted or there's so many of them that a revolution is not practicable at that time and attempting an insurrection would be doomed to almost certain failure. He argues that "the capitalist class will, as at present, have total control of newspapers and the mass media". He is wrong - what about the role of the left press including the Weekly Worker and the internet? He is also confusing a pre-revolutionary situation (in which those who control the mass media may try to exclude left-wing voices) with the situation after a revolution in which the masses coming to power can control the media irrespective of whether a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is established (but doing so suggests that dictatorship would try to keep dissenting voices completely out of the media leading to the opposite problem - giving parties access to the media according to their level of support would be preferable). Although John says that "the task of communists is not to hold polite conversations with fascists" but "to shoot them", I suspect he considers that the same fate should await anybody who objects to all power being in the hands of the working class.

I will attend the SWP's upcoming event Marxism 2009, and call for a democratic revolutionary socialist party, which stands for proportional representation and what is sometimes called "participatory democracy" (involving some degree of workers' control: soviets), in contrast to the wishy-washy "half-way houses" (as you have called them in your paper) - broad formations like Respect, the Scottish Socialist Party, Solidarity and No2EU that blur divisions between revolution and reform. Such broad formations were in my view a good idea before the current economic crisis, but it would have been better if revolutionaries within such parties had put forward their views more rather than such parties almost entirely putting forward reformist lowest common denominator politics. However, now that capitalism is self-destructing and with the mainstream parties set to all stand for massive public spending cuts and/or tax rises at the next general election, we need to point out the need for a sudden thorough change of society, whether or not we use the word "revolution". A reply to the SWP's open letter to the left by Michael Rosen (Socialist Worker, 20 June) suggests "a federation or umbrella" of cooperating groups/parties that don't stand against each other as the way forward, and this is probably the best that can be achieved in the short term bearing in mind the hostility and sectarianism between different left groups in Britain. It would be a crying shame if such a federation was constructed and none of its participants put forward such a revolutionary programme, to determine which sort of party is most effective in practice.