Abolition
of the wage system? Yes, we’re for it. Let’s organise to manage
industry, eliminate private profit, plan production to suit the needs
of the people – for peace, prosperity and plenty. But there is a
war raging between the capitalist class and the working class. The
capitalist class is easy to identify, they are the handful of
millionaires and billionaires who own or control and who milk the
factories, mines, and fields of our world. They are the class that
owns and sells the products that we make and often can’t even
afford to buy. We sell our labour to this class for a living wage,
and very often less than that. The boss’s appetite for profits is
looked after and protected by the State. The government is run by the
capitalists for the purpose of maintaining the flow of profits. This
is done in a lot of ways. Bail-outs for the corporations who also
receive tax breaks and subsidies. A system of courts and police guard
the property and the profits of the capitalists from the working
class by injunctions against strikes and picket lines and strikes
enforced by police who escort scabs into work. The government
protects the boss’s right to practically dictate the terms of
employment to us.
There
are many people who say that they are for socialism and claim to be
in favour of the emancipation of workers. However, we mustn’t be
taken in by these “socialists”. The function of the Socialist
Party is to educate the people by criticising all attempts at
so-called reforms, whose aim is not the realisation of socialism, but
the hindering of it; and by encouraging the unity of the working
class towards revolution and the abolition of capitalism. As
socialists, we base our political policy on the class struggle of the
workers, because we know that the self-interest of the workers lies
our way. We raise high our unsullied banner, and with principles
inviolate and ideals undimmed, we stand forth as the representatives
of the Socialist Party, appealing to the toilers and producers to
join us in building up the party of their class. We all hope and work
for the co-operative commonwealth of socialism.
Engaging
in the democratic process and contesting elections has always been
the position of the Socialist Party. Our position political
action is not the sole strategy but that extra-parliamentary
activities should be engaged alongside electoral action in a
coordinated complementary strategy. Having fought and died for the
ballot, fellow-workers tend to forget it is not the X on the voting
paper which counts but the person's consciousness behind it. We want
the working class to take over the State and convert it into an
unarmed democratic administration of things. We want to see an end to
capitalist class rule not the breakdown of society. The workers en
masse don't need to create a different and more democratic
decision-making structure from the ground up. What they need to do is
to take over and perfect the existing structures. We don't need to
construct a socialist society from scratch; this is not the way
social evolution works; there will be a degree of continuity between
what exists now and what will exist in socialism as there always has
been between one system of society and another.
Those
in the Socialist Party are not model system-builders. You don't
abolish the state, getting rid of your control of your society at the
point of actually having won the thing, and then play at Utopias.
transform the institutions you have captured from capitalist into
socialist ones. People recognise it will be by both parliament and
non-parliament means we achieve socialism. Our case for Parliament is
that it is the most efficacious application of the workers' will to
establish socialism. We seek the least disruptive method of
revolution and in the UK, at this moment in time, parliament is that
route. It is by no means a universal one-size fits-all prescription.
The SociaIist Party endorses both electoral and social activism
without letting either be exclusive political strategies. The
Socialist Party seeks to capture the state for the purpose of
abolishing the state which will ‘wither way’ and be replaced
merely with an ‘administration of things’. There is no necessary
clash between socialists and anarchists in their conception of future
society – both are state-free.
Unable
or unwilling to look beyond the short-term horizon of the next
election, politicians are essentially prohibited from taking a long
view of things. To avoid making hard decisions on the environment
costs are pushed into the future, glossed over by an optimism on the
technological innovation and market mechanisms. From this
perspective, there is no need for urgent change. We must, therefore,
reinvent democracy at the ballot box. The Socialist Party rejects the
need for a ‘vanguard party’ to capture the state through forceful
means, instead calling for the democratically mandated institution of
socialism via the mechanisms of parliament. The Socialist Party argue
that the state under capitalism is merely an instrument or tool of
the capitalist class, meaning that politicians (knowingly or
unknowingly) can only enact laws and policies that furthered the
narrow interests of that class. We do not think that political
representatives of the ruling class will advance the genuine
interests of the working class. Socialism is the alternative to
the capitalist mode of economy. What is needed is a revolutionary
movement, driven by the working class, which would dismantle the
capitalist state, abolish private property, and establish socialism.
There
are those liberals, progressives, all concerned, well-meaning
individuals who decry society’s illnesses but possess no clear idea
of their fundamental cause. They see around them the unequal
distribution of wealth, endless war, rampant racism, unemployment,
and people's diminishing expectations yet hold no coherent analysis
of how such injustices come about. They favour amending the current
system, hoping that gradually, bit-by-bit, it can be converted into
something fundamentally different. If you vote for the lesser of two
evils, you’re compromising your political values and you’re
sabotaging future real change. You’re guaranteeing the ruling class
will put you in this position again and again. Lesser evilism
proclaims “there is no alternative,” and works to enforce that
claim, inducing people to knowingly vote for parties that do not
represent their views or interests. Stampeded by revulsion and fear,
we are left with the choice of voting for the mainstream and
right-wing whose strategy then enables a further rightward drift. The
more the “left” compromises and capitulates, the more boldly the
conservatives express their vision and the further to the right
the mainstream moves. Every year, the Left concedes more ground to
the right, under the mistaken impression that this will bring
everything closer to the centre to capture more votes. In fact, there
is no centre. The Left tailor their appeal to undecided voters and
narrows the terms of political debate. As long as voters engage in
lesser evilism, workers miss out on the political opportunities that
elections should present. If
you don't like present-day society ... if you are fed up with the way
you are forced to live ... if you think the root cause of most social
problems is the profit system, then your ideas echo closely with
ours. We are not promising to deliver socialism to you. We are not
putting ourselves forward as leaders. This new society can only be
achieved if you join together to strive for it. If you want it, then
it is something you have to bring about yourselves. Nobody can do it
for you.
USE YOUR VOTE WISELY - SUPPORT SOCIALISM |
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