2:30 pm to 5:30 pm
The Socialist Party of Great Britain Head Office
52 Clapham High Street ·
London SW4 7UN
The Socialist Party is made up of people who have joined together because we want to get rid of the profit system and establish real socialism. Our aim is to persuade others to become socialist and act for themselves, organising democratically and without leaders, to bring about the kind of society that we advocate. We reject the idea that people can be led into socialism. Socialism will not be established by 'good' leaders but by thinking men and women. Democracy and majority decision-making must be the basic principle of both the movement to establish socialism and of socialist society itself.
A real democracy is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of leadership. It is about all of us having a direct say in the decisions that affect us. Leadership means handing over the right to make those decisions to someone else. We don’t vote for leaders to implement this or that decision; we vote to give them a “free hand” to make decisions. Democracy under capitalism is reduced to people voting for competing groups of professional politicians, to giving the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down to the governing or opposition party. This contrasts with the Socialist Party's concept of democracy which envisages popular participation in the running of affairs.
If a majority of workers really were as incapable of understanding socialism as many on the Left maintain, then socialism would indeed be impossible since, by its very nature as a society based on voluntary cooperation, it can only come into being and work with the conscious consent and participation of the majority. Socialism just could not be imposed from above by an elite as envisaged by the Left. Democracy is not the mere counting of noses; it is the only principle of organisation compatible with a class-free society.
There can be no socialism without socialists.
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