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Thursday, June 20, 2013

Social Reforms or Social Revolution?

 “The old master class was not deprived of the power of life and death, which was the soul of the relation of master and slave. They could not, of course, sell their former slaves, but they retained the power to starve them to death, and wherever this power is held there is the power of slavery. He who can say to his fellow man, “You shall serve me or starve,” is a master and his subject is a slave.Frederic Douglass

There is a great deal of talk in all of the left-wing press about the importance of building the workers’ movement. If one just counts the number of times this is mentioned, one would be very impressed by how seriously these groupings take the task of revolutionizing this movement. Reading a bit more carefully, however, one discovers very quickly that they rarely ever get beyond vague generalities and abstract aspirations when it comes to the question of actual socialism and how it can be achieved.

With all the best intentions many reform campaigns rather than politicalising people they are reduced to an emotional appeal to them much akin to charities. To attack social  problem but not to attack the wages system which produces them is at best shortsighted and at worst false radicalism. Reformists have leapt upon and seized hold of any panacea that has been proposed, that aimed to prove that the class struggle was redundant or there is no need for a revolutionary movement. But the built-in conflicts within capitalism are the seedbed of working-class consciousness and constantly re-surface and assert itself.  We should organise and be prepared for what might be described as a revolutionary moment. What we have to do is to help this development and to prepare the way for it. The trade unions call for the support of all socialists, in so far as they are manifestations of the class struggle, and represent an organised effort of the working class to prevent or restrict their exploitation by the capitalist class.

Revolutionaries wage the class struggle within capitalism with the aim of organising the working class to capture the state machine to overthrow capitalism. Reformists, however, participate in the class struggle in order to gain improvements for the working class within capitalism. Reformist movements organise workers to protect their conditions of life. To the extent that they are successful they create supporters within the working class. But they perform the role of lightning rods to divert the discontent of the masses into harmless channels. For the essence of reformism is that it only aims to weaken and disorganise the struggle of the workers and strengthen the forces of the enemies of the workers.

 The expansion (boom) or non-expansion of capitalism (crisis) determines the ability of the system to concede reforms. In a prolonged or continuing crisis situation reformism is doomed. Being powerless to change conditions by themselves through the course of revolution, people place their hope in their representatives in Parliament. They still believe that hoped-for improvements can be gained if only their representatives made use of all appropriate means with the right demands.  Illusions only lead to disappointments for which the reformist is made responsible; that, if the mass of the people are given exaggerated hopes of “positive achievements,” and then when those achievements will not materialise the people will no longer make capitalism responsible for their misery, but they will hold the “anti-capitalists” responsible – no longer will they blame the ruling class, but their own representatives. Devoting time, energy and resources to drawing up detailed plans for such things as co-operatives in a capitalist society will ultimately be disillusioning and demoralising at best or strengthen capitalism at worst.

Many self-help, self-improvment schemes are generally regarded beneficial to workers, but as a matter of fact they often afford excellent examples of what may be described as bogus reforms. Under present circumstances the more frugal, thrifty, and abstemious, working people, as a class, become, the more cheaply they have to live, the more cheaply they have to sell their labour power to the capitalist class. Wages being determined by cost of subsistence, the lower the standard of life of the workman the lower are his wages. This applies to all the various charities which aim at reducing the cost of living to the workman. These  so-called “social reforms” are part and parcel of a broad approach of offering palliatives which are not distinctly of advantage to working-class interests, and may even be inimical to them.

There is, for instance, proposals for taxation reform, which would mean merely shifting the burden of taxation from the shoulders of one section of the employers and placing it upon another, but affording no benefit to the worker.  For instance a popular proposal is what is called the taxation of land values which would afford relief to those industrial capitalists who derive their profits directly from manufacturing, at the expense of those who draw their incomes from land and property rent, but would not in any way reduce the amount of surplus-value taken from the working class. We should be minded that taxes are paid out of the surplus-value taken from the workers by their exploiters. The return to the workers — their wages — is determined by their cost of subsistence, regulated by competition in the labour market; consequently they have nothing wherewith to pay taxes, and whether these be high or low, or whoever has to pay them directly, the position of the worker remains the same. The worker gets, on the average, his or her subsistence, that is all.

What is central and essential in a revolutionary transformation is not a bloody violent revolution, to maintain this is both historically faulty and dangerous – since it would  provoke adventurism, and needlessly call down repression.  All socialist activities must be determined by the need to ensure the widest possible spreading of socialist ideas amongst workers with the exact purpose of winning them to socialism. In this perspective, it is tactically wrong for socialists to put their energy into setting up intermediate immediate demands. This is not to be narrowly construed that the Socialist Party opposes the various workers’ struggles to extract improved and better conditions but rather we argue that as a socialist organisation we should not advocate reforms. If we do not say, openly and publicly, that supporting  capitalism will do the working class no good at all, what the hell are we in politics for? The socialist message must be clear and unambiguous, and consistent. Voters are responsible for every vote they cast. Voters have created the current conditions by consistently voting for the “lesser evil”. The Socialist Party offers a vote for the “greater good”.

 It is not an era of Social Reforms that we work towards, but the great epoch of Social Revolution! 

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