WORLD SOCIALISM |
Socialism and nothing less is our aim
It is true to say
that the Socialist Party has not garnered any credible political support. The
Socialist Party harbour no illusions that we will get a seat in parliament in
the near future. The support for revolutionary politics in the UK is at a low
level at present and we are well aware that the vote for ourselves will be
tiny, but we feel it necessary to state our views on how revolutionaries should
treat parliament and parliamentary seats. Elections provide a snapshot of the
political scene and relationship of class forces. Under capitalism, elections
permit a periodic measuring of the condition, the will, the combativity, and
the political development of the working class. This is usually shown in votes
for candidates.
To remain at home and not vote is insufficient. In
certain circumstances, people express themselves politically, not by direct
voting, but by write-in campaigns, ostentatiously blank ballots, or
abstentionism. These apparently negative expressions of opinion can, under
certain circumstances, be on the contrary very positive indeed, and such has
been the case in some of our own election campaigns.
Let no worker be
deluded by the liberal rhetoric of politicians. The capitalist class and the
profit system have not changed their character. Neither have capitalist
politicians changed theirs. We must use our ballot to vote out private profit, discarded to join the equally cruel systems of chattel slavery and feudal serfdom of the
past.
If you judge the progress of socialist ideas solely in terms
of the membership of the Socialist Party then our task does seem to be daunting.
Our growth is slow, painfully slow. You can't judge the soundness of an idea by
the number of people who hold it or by the speed with which they may take it
up. Nor does it follow that we are out of touch with the ideas, hopes and
desires of our fellow-workers. We have seen a number of so-called working-class
political parties grow into mass organisations to then dwindle away to nothing.
They once had numbers, but never possessed a sound socialist membership. The
inevitable disillusion that awaits supporters of the political parties that
offer to run capitalism and promise to solve its problems paves the way for
people to consider socialism as a real alternative.
Unlike other parties, the Socialist Party has never tried to
cook the books about its low membership nor made any secret of it. Indeed, it
has never made a secret of anything. It holds no meetings from which members of
the working class are excluded. All its proceedings and deliberations are in
public; under the constant supervision of the members, and therefore — the
working class. A socialist political party can have nothing to hide from the
working class. No gain can ever accrue to a socialist party from seeking and
getting support by subterfuges. Nor can it gain from using political dishonesty.
Such tactics would fail in their object. It's not a question of the end
justifying the means. The end just cannot be reached by such means. Workers
cannot be tricked or coerced. They can only come to such an understanding
through their collective experiences as a class. The Socialist Party has
adhered to clear principles since its formation and will continue to be hostile
to all the sordid and dishonest political tactics which typify the capitalist
system, whoever seeks to run it. The Socialist Party, right from its
commencement, attacked the policy of political bargaining. We held then, as we
do now, that a socialist party must be independent and must be based on the
demand for socialism, not on a programme of reforms to be obtained by
cooperating with capitalist parties.
The Socialist Party will never flourish just on sympathy. It
needs action—your action. We do not accept the permanence of capitalism any
more than we accept the fact that the workers’ ideas of society cannot be
changed. History shows that social systems change, and that these changes are
accomplished by thinking people, and that people’s ideas change with them. The socialist
political party will not appear ready-made. Like other social phenomena, it
will grow out of social conditions. This raises the whole question of the role
of a socialist party in the class struggle.
At present, there are two obstacles
which stand in the way of achieving socialism: the political ignorance of the
working class and the control of the machinery of government by the capitalist
class. To overcome these obstacles socialist understanding must come first. For
this reason, the main activity of a socialist party in its early days must be promotion and propaganda. It must seek to dispel the political ignorance of the working
class.
This does not mean that the relation between the party and
the working class is to be that of teacher and pupil. Socialist understanding
is not something that can be constructed out of nowhere; it must grow out of
social conditions. Such understanding—or class consciousness—will not arise
purely as a result of the propaganda of the socialist party. Ideas only grip
the masses when they are relevant to social conditions. There are any number of
cranks around with Utopian schemes for social reconstruction. What
distinguishes socialists from them is that socialism is in the material
interest of the working class. Socialists have social evolution on their side.
Education is not just a question of learning from books and
pamphlets; that is just one aspect of learning from experience. The class
experiences of the working class under capitalism will teach it that socialism
is the answer to its problems. The party can help this development of socialist
understanding by storing up and propagating the past experiences of the working
class so that these are easily accessible. The principles of the socialist
party will be based on these experiences and will serve as a guide to social
issues, being used to expose useless remedies. To carry out this task its
members must necessarily have a fairly high degree of political knowledge, know
their opponents’ case and be able to expose the flaws in their arguments. In
its educational phase, precisely because it is such a phase, a higher degree of
political understanding must be required of the members of the party than the
working-class need have to establish socialism. As socialist understanding
spreads the number and importance of its opponents, and hence also of the need
of a knowledge of their arguments, may well decline.
Once socialist understanding grows to any appreciable
extent, political conditions will completely change. Socialism will become a
political issue. The comparative trivialities of present-day politics will be
cast aside. The issue will be capitalism or socialism. With the changed
conditions will come a change in the role of the party. It will become the
political organisation of the working class which they can use to capture
political power.
It is decidedly not the function of a socialist party to
lead the working class either in the struggle to live under capitalism or in
the struggle for socialism. The working class cannot be led to socialism; it
must emancipate itself. A socialist working class will require no leadership;
all it requires is organisation to put its aim into effect.
Our principles are based on the logic of our socialist
theory; on the knowledge that human society has developed to the point where
the potential exists to provide for the material needs of every human being on
the planet; on the assumption that, faced with the ultimate reality of
capitalism’s failure to solve the ghastly problems that it creates, human
beings will take into their common ownership the means of life; that common
ownership, and the abolition of all the wasteful activities that capitalism
makes necessary, will permit society to function on the basis of free labour in
the production of goods and services and free access to the fruits of that
production.
That is the socialist proposition, the root of our socialist
principles and the Socialist Party does not seek power for itself to enthrone
those principles. We seek to promote and spread a knowledge of socialism and
whether the majority that ultimately takes the required political action to
bring about socialism uses the Socialist Party or some other political vehicle
to take power from the political agents of capitalism and establish socialism
is of no consequence to us. Our task will be completed with the achievement of socialism;
politics will disappear as government over people gives way to a
straightforward democratic administration of social production and distribution.
The important thing is the historical proof that the record
of reformist political parties gives to socialists: capitalism cannot be made
to function in the interests of the great majority of people, the working
class, who are the real wealth producers. However long it takes for that truth
to percolate the consciousness of the working class, for that period we will
suffer the social problems that have been the identification marks of
capitalism since its inception.
Being revolutionary does not mean “picking up the gun,”
reciting the works of Marx, and proclaiming the Revolution has arrived every
time a group of workers walk out on strike or protesters take to the streets.
Being “revolutionary” means acting so as to shorten the time left before a
successful social revolution in which the working class can assume control over
their own lives and constitute themselves as the “dictatorship” over the old
exploiting classes. Anything that advances such a social revolution is by definition
revolutionary, anything that hinders such a social revolution is
anti-revolutionary. What seems like the short-cut to revolution can often in
fact be a dead end resulting in frustration, defeat and disillusionment. Our
strategy for revolutionary change is to unite all who can be united against the
capitalists. Fusing Marxist theory with working-class practice is our central
task.
Today, the Socialist Party has the distinction of being the
longest existing party of the working class in the UK. Our political journal, the
Socialist Standard, despite world wars and slumps, has appeared every month
without fail for over a hundred years. For any ordinary political organisation this
would be a matter for self-congratulation. For ourselves, however, such
longevity is to be regretted as we would rather have seen socialism established
long since. However, we shall continue until the job is done.
We shall continue then to carry on our work of propaganda
and organisation in our own way, trusting that our party will gain the support
of all those in this country who are desirous of achieving unity, and that as
time goes by our present party nucleus will widen until such time as its
strength will have rendered it in reality as in name the worthy political
expression of the whole of the socialist movement. We in the Socialist Party don't
like being unique and different. We don't relish the fact that we are a small
party which does not include millions of workers in its membership. We are
certainly not complacent or proud about the fact that we are small. But we are
proud of the fact that we have been consistently correct about what we have
said over the years.
We have a world to win but nobody said it would be easy. Those
who founded the Socialist Party were aware that the road might be a long one.
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