Canterbury Street Stall (29/6)

There will, however, be a stall in Canterbury on Saturday, 20 July - same time and place.

Saturday, June 29, 
12:00 pm 
The Parade,
Close to the cathedral

Across the world, the left radicals have turned toward reformism. We are not speaking of supporting reforms under capitalism, which many socialists have done. Instead, what we are seeing today is the wholesale embrace of the anti-working-class reformist ideology, along with attempts to create whole new reformist institutions to replace the discredited ones while openly building or supporting populist parties. 

Reformism by its nature means class collaboration. They are creating political traps for the growth of the world party of socialist revolution. The emancipation of wage-slaves is the task of the wage-workers themselves. ; it is a task it must carry out without those “condescending saviours.” Reformism is not a moderate or too slow form of socialism. It is its mortal enemy. At every turn, we insist our war-cry should be “abolish the wages system.”

Reformism and reforms are two different things. Reforms are legislative and other enactments deemed necessary for governments in running the various forms of capitalism. The Socialist Party is opposed to reformism – the policy of advocating reforms, either as a way of ‘improving’ capitalism or as a means to socialism – but we are not necessarily opposed to individual reforms which may be of benefit to the working class. However we do not advocate any reform, because we hold that to do so would lead to a socialist party changing into a reformist party, attracting the support of non-socialists.

Today the class struggle is very simple. A handful of capitalists and financiers are in control of the factories and the natural resources and they are steadily whittling away at the living standards and democratic rights of all the working people. It is clear that the systematic nature of the capitalists’ attack is not meeting with the necessary opposition from the working class. The bosses divide our class with reformism. As a result of this reformism we find fellow-workers trying to made adjustments in their situation, trying to get capitalism off their backs by reforming it rather than uniting to face their class enemy.