Nevertheless, the working class is still completely bound
within the capitalist political party system which serves as a powerful brake
upon it. Unquestionably, there is a mounting anger and discontent but they have
not yet assumed concrete forms. There remain illusions of capitalist charity bestowing
crumbs in a trickle down as a solution still prevail. The working-class
political ideology has not yet reached beyond the boundaries of the capitalist
parties but still swings back and forth, switching allegiance from the
Republicans to the Democrats in hope of receiving the better reforms.
The Democratic Socialists of America have recently been
engaged in greater activity than before. It is attempting, with some success,
to sow its ideas in favorable soil. The DSA is very consciously trying to “radicalize”
a more receptive audience but, in essence, it is merely adding partial demands
for partial objectives to an already plethora of palliative platforms.
Today, the American worker still lacks political consciousness and still moves in an ideologically backward atmosphere. Debs never deviated from the class struggle line. He always remained a steadfast champion of independent working-class action and never compromised that issue as the official Socialist Party of America’s organizational leadership did. Debs lived by his socialist aspirations and his actions corresponded to his words.
The recent successes of “progressive” Democrats give
socialists some grounds for hope. That is not because the “progressives” are
socialists or even close to being socialists. Their reform program aims at the continued
existence of the profit system. Nevertheless, they have shown that it is
possible to provoke hostility from the corporate media and yet still find ways
to establish and maintain communication with ordinary people. If they can do
it, then socialists can, too. The political process might then no longer be
under such tight restrictive control, placing socialists in a broader and somewhat
less constraining political environment. A struggle between the conservative
leaders and the radical-leaning ranks of the Democratic Party is bound to
intensify with the further sharpening of social contradictions.
To properly understand the American scene today, a
perspective is necessary that goes deeper than the political celebrities featured
in the headlines. It is always depressing that our American fellow-workers
should be impressed by—and indeed be part of—slick, high pressure PR salesmanship, cynical drives for political position. Most people in the USA do not care very
deeply about the political scene—and rightly so— for life goes on pretty
much the same. Changes in the political bosses of workers are of no more
concern to them than is a change in the CEO of the corporations for which they
work. People feel powerless to deal with the important questions affecting
their lives. So, they “participate” in politics only to the extent of identifying
with some personality whose victory will offer them some satisfaction. They are
largely unconcerned with policy issues, leaving politicians, bureaucrats, news editors, and all species of intellectuals, to advance proposals that are
intended to solve (and always within the confine of capitalism) society’s problems.
The political elite then bemoan the lack of interest among workers for their
proposals. Workers, through their experience, have developed a cynicism about
such promises. Political class consciousness, a desire for socialism, is still
all but non-existent. The American progressive scene, for all its noise, is silent
about real socialism.
The likes of Elizabeth Warren propose to redistribute wealth
yet she also assumes the continuation of capitalism, the perpetuation of unearned incomes and of corporate profits taken out of the exploitation of
labor, as there is no other source from which it can be taken. In a society in
which capitalist relations predominate there are only two decisive forces – capitalists
and workers. The profit system presupposes a return for the laborer in form of
wages merely sufficient to reproduce his or her labor power. Warren’s (and the
other presidential hopefuls) program assume the continuation of the capitalist
ownership of the means of production, i.e. the means of exploitation of labor.
And it is this economic relationship that governs political action, which is
another way of saying that those who own and control the means of production
are those who rule. By virtue of their economic power they decide the outcome
of elections in the American democracy. They furnish the campaign contributions
and use their ownership of the means of production to control the machinery of
the political state and to dictate the programs for those who are placed in its
executive positions, thereby clearly determining whose government it is. Their
power rests on their legal right to exploitation and their legal right to
appropriate the surplus value produced by labor. These rulers are to be counted
upon, according to Warren, to reduce and split up the large holdings of accumulated
capital and to redistribute the wealth acquired by the exploitation of labor. In
other words, they are to be counted upon to surrender the basis upon which
their economic power rests! They will
not yield this power or give up any part of their privilege without a fierce
struggle. Warren has cast her lot with the system of privilege to exploit labor
and is a part of it. For her first duty is to buttress American capitalism for
continuation of its ruthless exploitation while diverting the working-class from
a path of revolution which alone can guarantee a redistribution of wealth and
social security.
Today capitalist ownership of the means of production and
its legal right to exploitation of labor stands in the final analysis
determines all political relations, which is another way of saying that those
who own and control the means of production are those who rule. The mere change
to government ownership or public ownership, so long as these capitalist
relations remain in effect, is not suffice. It is nonsense to assume that
production for use, which pre-supposes the expropriation of the means of
production and the transfer of the ownership to the producers, can find its
realisation without the overthrow of capitalist rule. A demand for production
for use and not for profit has, as is well known, distinctly revolutionary
implications and presupposes revolutionary action for its realization. In other words, it can find its realization
only through the proletarian revolution.
America is an ailing society and this is becoming more
apparent with each passing day. The United States is a land of hatred, despair,
and violence. Political extremists commit mass shootings. Police savagely
assault and even kill black citizens with impunity. This can no longer be
ignored and so some people are beginning to lose confidence in the system and lack
trust in the politicians. There is an increasing belief in fake news as people
now believe very little about anything officials say. The media messages are carried
out with the intention of clouding American public opinion.
The current Democrat nomination contest for the 2020
presidential election offer, from our point of view, opportunities for
revolutionary propaganda to advance the working-class political level. The
collisions of the conflicting interests between capitalism and the workers are
manifested daily. They can become the focusing points around which the workers
can express their interest from a class point of view and to that extent
further prepare themselves for the struggle for power.
On 7 July 1916 the Workers’ Socialist Party of the United
States was established. It proved a false start. Faced with political
repression, the group was to be short-lived and in with the infamous Palmer
'Red raids' of 1919, it was reconstituted as a social club known as the Detroit
Socialist Education Society. On 12 September 1930, the Workers’ Socialist Party
was re-formed. In 1947 the Workers’ Socialist Party changed its name to World
Socialist Party because it was being confused with the Socialist Workers’
Party, a Trotskyist organization. The change also emphazised the WSPUS’s
internationalism and world outlook.
It was WSPUS member Sam Orner, whom Clifford Odets based the
character of Lefty in his famous play about the New York taxi drivers’ strike,
“Waiting for Lefty.”
Starting in 1976, Sam Leight in Tucson, Arizona, ran a
series of radio broadcasts from which he generated two books: “World Without
Wages” and “The Futility of Reformism.”
Paul Mattick Snr. and Anton Pannekoek were occasional
writers for the party’s former journal, the “Western Socialist”. While in
Harvard to receive a prestigious award for his astronomy research, Pannekoek
forgo a lavish university dinner to address a small meeting of the WSPUS.
Even if the WSPUS is not as active as it previously been, it
still is working to make socialists. For workers to stand up for their
interests often means harassment, repression, prison or death. More insidious,
however, is the history of attempts by the Left to talk workers out of thinking
for themselves. History shows the leaders of working-class movements while
often doing beneficial work also push a bigger agenda - political alliances -
that eliminates our interests. The method of creating mass leader-free
movements is a new one and not without problems. But it does allow for a
measure of real democracy, as opposed to the rigidly organized movements that
have been traditionally typical. The working-class is often cursed with the
worst sorts of friends. These people aren't just offering advice, they offer
themselves as a leadership and give us only division. The leadership fetishism
propagated by certain so-called left-wing groups who would have the workers
believe that everything depends on the "right kind of leaders" must
be vigorously combatted.
Blaming political leaders or union officials for selling out
when incorrect policies are followed will solve nothing. A political party or a
labor union is no better than the members who form it. The character of the
leadership is to a large degree a reflection of the maturity or lack of
maturity of the rank and file. For this reason, socialists should seek to raise
the understanding of the rank and file, to imbue them with an awareness that
their elected representatives should be the servants, not the masters, of the
membership. One thing fellow-workers should avoid like the plague in their
union activity, is the left-wing groups of maneuvering and conniving to use
unions as their vehicle for carrying out their political "line".
Unions are first last and all the time economic organizations operating within
the framework of capitalism. Attempts to use them for purposes other than this
can only be detrimental to the unions and its membership.
What is needed,
really, is to know what not to do: Don’t give up democratic decision making
even if they claim to be leader-free. We all need to have a voice in the
movement. Political organizations are communities of thought that reflect
priorities and assumptions, and a lack of practical democracy mirrors the same
lack of interest in real democracy. Without insisting on democratic control,
workers will find themselves muscled out of the running and
direction of their own organizations. American workers in particular have to
develop a much more critical analysis of the political system and get away from
this idea that we have to support the lesser of two evils. We urge the people
of the United States, that is to say, the working class, to recognize their
common interests, and common plight with the people of all other countries.
These people are not our enemies. The enemy is the capitalist system. We urge
the workers of America to recognize that foreign-born workers of descent who
live in America are not the enemy either. They are trapped in the same
anti-human capitalist system as all other workers.
The World Socialist Party has been organized to provide a
clear and concise analysis of the capitalist system, its methods of
organization and its problems. Workers can only solve those problems by
eliminating capital and wages from the economy, and returning the control of
wealth production to the world’s communities, where it resided before economic
classes and governments arose. Socialism is not utopia or a lunatic's
pipe-dream, but a real solution to many problems. The evils which exist within
present society, be they war, crime, poverty or exploitation, have no solution
other than the abolition of private property relationships. To fight any one
specific evil is not only a losing battle in itself, but a divergence from the
real fight. Hence the only job of a socialist organization is to make possible
the speedy introduction of socialism and destroy with one fell swoop the cause
of war, crime, poverty and exploitation.
The WSPUS must establish itself as the vehicle of the
revolution. It requires to educate, to organize and to prepare the working
class for a clear understanding of the socialist objective. We take heart with
the thought that, although our numbers are insignificant, our ideas will
triumph. The intellectual bankruptcy of capitalism— and its phoney ‘radical’
critics—assure our success. Marxism must remain our weapon and our task must be
to translate it into the everyday language. Our task is to build the
revolutionary movement. Our job still remains the one of building a movement
for socialism. Today and tomorrow the struggle for socialism must go on. The
only big question for the moment is whether workers will finally wake up and
realize that capitalism is a bad system.
The WSPUS war-cry is “Defeat the enemies of humanity.”
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