MILITANT OR REVOLUTIONARY?

As a political party we convey our message to our class and we point to our Declaration of Principles and say “This is what the Socialist Party is.”

When it comes to what is our vision of a socialist society “post-revolution”, that’s something that needs to be developed more fully. But this is also something an organisation needs to be careful and cautious about. While such a thing, more fully developed, will help inform and explain our ideas in the here and now, it may also turn the membership inward.

Individual capitalists or factions of the capitalist class don't necessarily pursue the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. Often there is disagreement among the factions of the capitalist class about what is the best course of action to pursue. That a given faction is dominant does not mean it necessarily does what is best for the capitalist class, but usually the dominant factions, and those who the State acts in service of, will believe they are doing what's best for capitalism over all. The dominant faction can be wrong, though. For example of this is health insurance in the US. Sometimes an individual capitalist or group of capitalists pursues things that are believed by the dominant capitalists to be detrimental to the capitalist class as a whole and and so they need to be brought in line.

Sometimes capitalists oppose reform because they're reactionary ideologically; sometimes they do so because they believe that they will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in the new version of capitalism that will exist after the reform.

 The historian of slavery Eugene Genovese, in his book Roll, Jordan, Roll wrote:
"the great object of social reform is to prevent a fundamental change in class relations." This means that reformers "must fight against those reactionaries who cannot understand the need for secondary, although not necessarily trivial, change in order to prevent deeper change…reactionaries will insist that any change, no matter how slight, will set in motion forces of dissolution."

The state is in part a mechanism for helping identify problems that are systemic – tied to the interests of the capitalist class as a whole – and a way to work out politically how to respond to the capitalists’ class interests. That is, “visionary” capitalists and their functionaries in foundations and think tanks can use the state to put forward proposals and communicate them to others to try to win them to this view. If that fails, with enough political support from other capitalists (and some workers, in many cases), particular parts of the capitalist class can get the state to do certain things, to discipline individual capitalists who aren’t acting in line with what is believed to be the capitalist class’s over all interests.

To quote Eugene Genovese again:
"The most advanced fraction of the slaveholders - those who most clearly perceived interest and needs of the class as a whole - steadily worked to make their class more conscious of its nature, spirit, and destiny.… For any such political center, the class as a whole must be brought to a higher understanding of itself - transformed from a class-in-itself, reacting to pressures on its objective position, into a class-for-itself, consciously striving to shape the world in its own image. Only possession of public power can discipline a class as a whole, and through it, the other classes of society. The juridical system may become, then, not merely an expression of class interest, nor even merely an expression of the willingness of the rulers to mediate with the ruled; it may become an instrument by which the advanced section of the ruling class imposes its viewpoint upon the class as a whole and the wider society. The law must discipline the ruling class."

The State, by backing workers' struggles in some cases, bets on the potential power of those struggles to help capitalism. Workers' struggles can do so by helping discipline capitalists into acting in ways that support capitalism, or by helping identify practices that are particularly prone to creating social friction, and perhaps by helping identify potential solutions to those practices.

Workers' struggles can sometimes be temporarily made to serve as a tool which some capitalists use to get an advantage over others and can sometimes be a source of innovations within capitalist institutions, innovations that strengthen the system and boost profits. Struggles and efforts can play this role even when strongly opposed by actually existing capitalists because capitalists, like workers, don't always believe in or act in accord with the interests of their class as a whole. That capitalists fight or fought hard in opposing a reform can sometimes make it seem like a given struggle or victory is more radical than it really is.

The class struggle is over the product of our labour and is settled at various points in time at various levels of division of our product, depending on the organised power of the contending class sides. Knowing what the wage system is and how it works to keep our class in servitude is ESSENTIAL.

AJJ