No doubt many workers are veterans of mass protests. Undoubtedly, after years of campaigning you will be revolted by the incessant lies of the government as it has tried to justify cutbacks on public services. Week in, week out, the government has distorted the truth and sunk to all manner of low tactics to justify its position. And now, after all of your campaigning efforts, the meetings and demos you have attended, the petitions you have signed, the umpteen arguments with your friends and neighbours, you are here protesting again. Years of protest marches and our cause is not one inch further forward! But do you not think you're asking the wrong questions, making the wrong demands? Repeating the mistakes of the past? We're not saying you are wrong for asking questions, only that you do not ask enough. Indeed, question everything! We're not suggesting you are demanding too much - in truth, you are not demanding enough.
Now we're not being churlish here. It is heartening to see so many united in common voice - it reveals the workers can be mobilised around issues they feel are important. But from our experience - and we've had over a 100 years' experience of observing campaigns and demonstrations and protests around every kind of reform and demand imaginable (we're the oldest existing socialist organisation in Britain, having been formed in 1904) - we can confidently say that these demonstrations in Turkey and in Brasil and in many other countries and cities address the symptoms, not the cause of the problem, and will make no significant difference to the established order or to the way politicians think.
Consider this. Across the globe there are literally hundreds of thousands of campaigns and protest groups and many more charities, some small, some enormous, all pursuing tens of thousands of issues, and their work involves many millions of sincere workers who care passionately about their individual causes and give their free time to support them unquestioningly. Many will have campaigned on some single issue for years on end with no visible result; others will have celebrated minor victories and then joined another campaign groups, spurred on by that initial success.
And, considering the above, two things stand out: firstly, that many of the problems around us are rooted in the way our society is organised for production, and are problems we have been capable of solving for quite some time, though never within the confines of a profit-driven market system; secondly, that if all of these well meaning people had have directed all their energy - all those tens of billions of human labour hours expended on their myriad single issues - to the task of overthrowing the system that creates a great deal of the problems around us, then none of us would be here today. Instead we would have established a world without borders, without waste or want or war, in which we would all have free access to the benefits of civilisation with problem solving devoid of the artificial constraints of the profit system.
If you are now confused, forgive us if we come across blunt, but which part of "We must end capitalism" do you not understand? It's simple! Every aspect of our lives is subordinated to the requirements of profit - from the moment you brush your teeth in the morning with the toothpaste you saw advertised on TV until you crawl into your bed at night. Pick up a newspaper and try locating any problem reported there outside of our "can't pay - can't have" system. Crime, the health service, poverty, drug abuse, hunger, disease, homelessness, unemployment, war, insecurity - the list is endless. All attract their campaign groups, all struggling to address these problems, and all of these problems arising because of the inefficient and archaic way we organise our world for production. You've got it! We're unlike any other group out to reform capitalism, who beg governments to be just a little less horrid, who ask our masters to throw us a few more crumbs from the bread we bake. We are not into the politics of compromise and we certainly are not prepared to be satisfied with crumbs. We demand the whole bakery!
We urge you to stop belittling yourself and your class by making the same age-old demands of the master class. Demand what until now has been considered "the impossible"! Join us in campaigning for a system of society where there are no leaders, no classes, no states or governments, no borders, no force or coercion; a world where the earth's natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled and where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used to the benefit of all; a world of free access to the necessaries of life. Wouldn't such a campaign movement not only address the real root of every campaign and protest currently being waged?
The choice is yours - the struggle for world socialism and an end to our real problems or a lifetime attached to the “pick-your-cause” brigade and the certainty you will be retracing your footsteps on demonstrations and protest marches in years to come.
We fully accept that it is the responsibility of socialists to engage with workers in a battle of ideas but it is to point out that capitalism is the root cause of social and ecological troubles and therefore the course of action is to concentrate on removing the cause rather than trying to deal with a particular problem as a single issue, since as long as the cause remains so, inevitably, will the particular problems. Lacking an honest revolutionary stance for a new society, reformism becomes caught in a pointless and frustrating circular battle. It fetishises the crisis for all the "activists" who long for a campaign to throw themselves into.
Capitalism constantly throws up issues that demand action amongst those who are concerned and by many people who think of themselves as socialists. As a result, protest tends to become a demand for an “improved,better model” of capitalism that leaves the long-term reasons for protest intact. This has been the history of protest. Protest tends to set a stage for further protest and further demonstrations. Though the issues may vary the message stays the same: “We demand that governments do this, or that or the other!” The spectacle of thousands demanding that governments act on their behalf is a most reassuring signal to those in power that their positions of control are secure. In this way, repeated demonstrations do little more than confirm the continuity of the system. The point is to change society, not to appeal to the better nature of its power structures.
But having said all that, we can at least draw comfort from the fact that the workers cannot now be dismissed as totally apathetic and that people can unite in common cause; that humans are at their best and will work together, when faced with the worst. We must pose our own resistance and socialist education. They started this phase of the class war, and we’re all in it together whether we want to be or not. The SPGB welcome any upsurge in the militancy and resistance and organisation of our class. But we also know, from bitter experience, that work of a more patient, more political kind is also needed. The class war must be fought but we must also seek to stop the skirmishing of the class struggle by winning the class war. That means that the working class as a whole must understand the issues and organise and fight for these ends themselves. Here is where socialists have their most vital contribution to make to make clear the alternative is not mere utopianism, but an important ingredient in inspiring successful struggle.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain's case is that understanding is a necessary condition for socialism, not desperation and despair and we see the SPGB's job as to shorten the time, to speed up the process - to act as a catalyst. This contrasts with those who seek to substitute the party for the class or who see the party as a vanguard which must undertake alone the sectarian task of leading the witless masses forward. We await the mass "socialist party". Possibly, the Socialist Party's might be the seed or the basis of the future mass "socialist party" but there's no guarantee that we will be (more likely just a contributing element). But who cares. As long as such a party does eventually emerges. At some stage, for whatever reason, socialist consciousness will reach a "critical mass" , at which point it will just snowball and carry people along with it. It may even come about without people actually giving it the label of socialism. At the later stage, when more and more people are coming to want socialism, a mass socialist movement will emerge to dwarf all the small groups and grouplets that exist today. In this situation unity and fusion would be the order of the day.
Workers must acquire the consciousness which must comprise, first of all, a knowledge of their class position. They must realise that, while they produce all wealth, their share of it will not, under the present system, be more than sufficient to enable them to reproduce their efficiency as wealth producers. They must realise that also, under the system they will remain subject to all the misery of unemployment, the anxiety of the threat of unemployment, and the deprivations of poverty. They must understand the implications of their position – that the only hope of any real betterment lies in abolishing the social system which reduces them to mere sellers of their labor power, exploited by the capitalists. A class which understands all this is class-conscious. It has only to find the means and methods by which to proceed, in order to become the instrument of revolution and of change. class-consciousness is the breaking-down of all barriers to understanding. Without it, militancy means nothing. The class-conscious worker knows where s/he stands in society. Their interests are opposed at every point to those of the capitalist class.Without that understanding, militancy can mean little. Class-conscious people need no leaders.
Marx expected the working class to develop from a mere economic category (a "class in itself" ) into a revolutionary political actor ("class for itself")—but although the process started it did get stuck on route. A "class consciousness" did develop among particular sections of the working class but this did not develop into a revolutionary socialist consciousness. It stopped short at trade-unionism and labourism. Even if a working class "for itself" has never developed, a class consciousness of a lesser sort did.
Marx believed as the workers gained more experience of the class struggle and the workings of capitalism, it would become more consciously socialist and democratically organised by the workers themselves. The emergence of socialist understanding out of the experience of the workers could thus be said to be “spontaneous” in the sense that it would require no intervention by people outside the working class to bring it about. Socialist propaganda and agitation would indeed be necessary but would come to be carried out by workers themselves whose socialist ideas would have been derived from an interpretation of their class experience of capitalism. The end result would be an independent movement of the socialist-minded and democratically organised working class aimed at winning control of political power in order to abolish capitalism. As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto:-
“the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”.
The SPGB does not minimise the necessity or importance of the worker keeping up the struggle to maintain wage-levels and resisting cuts, etc. If he always laid down to the demands of his exploiters without resistance he would not be worth his salt as a man, nor be fit for waging the class struggle to put an end to exploitation. The class war is far from over but it can only end with the dispossession of the owning minority and the consequent disappearance of classes and class-divided society. However successes through such actions as striking may well encourage other workers to stand up for their rights in the workplace more but the reality remains that the workers' strength is determined by their position within the capitalist economy, and their victories will always be partial ones within the market system. Only by looking to the political situation, the reality of class ownership and power within capitalism, and organising to make themselves a party to the political battle in the name of common ownership for their mutual needs, will a general gain come to workers, and an end to these sectional battles. Otherwise, the ultimate result of the strikes will be the need to strike again in the future. The never-ending treadmill of the class struggle. Workers can never win the class struggle while it is confined simply to the level of trade union militancy. It requires to be transformed into socialist consciousness. Conversely, socialist consciousness cannot simply rely for its own increase on ideological persuasion. It has to link up with the practical struggle. The success of the socialist revolution will depend on the growth of socialist consciousness on a mass scale and that these changed ideas can only develop through a practical movement. To bring about socialist consciousness involves understanding socialism which means talking about it, sharing ideas about it, educating ourselves and our fellow workers about it.Socialism will also be established by the working class as a result of the intensification and escalation of the class struggle. To overthrow capitalism, the class struggle must be stepped up.
The Socialist Party cannot provide the answer to what is it that is going to provoke the working class into intensifying/escalating the class struggle and/or acquiring socialist consciousness. If we say that socialist consciousness comes from life experience then that automatically implies that every worker should achieve it and it should have happened. It leads to a belief of the old "historical inevitability" of socialism, that inevitably people will come around to becoming socialists. It is mechanistic. There is no reason in our interactions with capitalism that dictates that we must necessarily become revolutionary socialists. Experience could just as easily turn us to the BNP/ENL or in America, the Tea Party. Our interaction with the world around us is mediated by ideas. How are we supposed to become a "revolutionary" without engaging - and eventually agreeing - at some point with the IDEA of what such a revolution would entail.
The Socialist Party wants a revolution but one involving much more than a change of political control. We want a social revolution, a revolution in the basis of society. A sweeping, fundamental change in political and economical organisation. For Marx the key task of the working class was to win "the battle of democracy". This was to capture control of the political machinery of society for the majority so that production could be socialised. Then the coercive powers of the state could be dismantled as a consequence of the abolition of class society. Marx said that you cannot carry on socialism with capitalist governmental machinery; that you must transform the government of one class by another into the administration of social affairs; that between the capitalist society and socialist society lies a period of transformation during which one after another the political forms of to-day will disappear, but the worst features must be lopped off immediately the working class obtains supremacy in the state. This completely harmonises with the position laid down in our Declaration of Principles. The vote is revolutionary when on the basis of class it organises labour against capital. Parliamentary action is revolutionary when on the floor of parliament it raises the call of the discontented; and when it reveals the capitalist system's impotence and powerlessness to satisfy the workers wants. The duty of the Socialist Party is to use parliament in order to complete the proletarian education and organisation, and to bring to a conclusion the revolution. Parliament, is to be valued not for the petty reforms obtainable through it, but because through the control of the machinery of government will the socialist majority be in a position to establish socialism.
Socialists recognise parliament as an institution geared to the needs of capitalism, and therefore inappropriate as the vehicle for a fundamental transformation, but yet we regard its electoral practices as coinciding, to some extent, with the possibility of a peaceful transition towards socialism. There need be no straight-forward, exclusive and exhaustive choice between constitutionalism and violent seizure of power. Certain elements within existing institutions may be of value while others may not. It does limit violence to the role of counter-violence in the event of resistance when a clear majority for revolutionary change is apparent, rather than seeing the use of violence as itself a primary means of change. Rights to organise politically, express dissension and combine in trade unions, for example, are valuable not only as a defence against capitalism, but from a socialist viewpoint are a platform from which socialist understanding can spread, while the right to vote the means by which socialism will be achieved.
To be a socialist means first and foremost to be on the side of the working class. Socialists are not against reforms but oppose reformism as a political practice. Socialists support any reform that will help the cause of the working class and the poor. The working class can win concessions but only for a certain period before the ruling class tries to take these reforms and concessions back. In a class society, the struggle between workers and the capitalist ruling class is of a permanent nature. The intensity of this class conflict and struggle can vary and there can be lulls at times. Both classes have different interests and clash with each other to protect and further their interests. The capitalist ruling class wants to exploit the working class to the maximum. On the other hand, the working class has no other option but to fight back for their survival.
Any conception of socialism must include the empowerment of the working class to be the master of its own destiny. Whilst we can debate and sketch visions of what a future society might look like, all these discussions will prove meaningless unless we can find away to acquire the power required to make them concrete. The working class already has a massive latent power over society just waiting to be realised, the task then is unlocking this power. When workers are organised in accordance with their class interests they will be better able to wield this potential power. The working class is the real agent of change. The slogan of “revolution” has been misused so blatantly that it has lost its meaning. The workers’ movement is lacking political clarity. The problem is the lack of of consciousness. If you don’t know where you want to go, then no road will take you there.
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