“No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear.”
Or in the words of Eugene Debs:
“I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition”
Capitalism depends on the domination of the overwhelming majority by a small minority. Part of the task of the Socialist Party is to help people to understand that we are faced with this stark choice of socialism or barbarism, and to encourage a vision of self-emancipation as both means and end of revolutionary socialist practice, the only means of creating socialism and the essence of what socialism would be. We try to get our fellow-workers to trust in their own power to achieve their own emancipation.
Some expect the cooperative commonwealth to be accomplished without human endeavour. Not so. It means hard work. It involves physical courage. It presupposes earnest convictions. Each will contribute according to his or her ability to promote the socialist movement and our task will not cease until the cooperative commonwealth has been achieved and plenty banishes poverty, where labour is no longer a scourge and a curse and life becomes worth living.
But honesty forces socialists to admit that we have so far not been successful in our mission to advance the case for socialism. Our fellow-workers doubt that socialism can offer them anything better than they already endure. They equate what was described as socialism under Soviet despotism and its satellite states with what socialism really means. There is no longer a positive aspiration for a better world. For too many of our fellow-workers, the Thatcherite maxim, “There Is No Alternative” is a reality. Those “socialist” parties that campaigned on the strategy that with sufficient reforms, capitalism could be made into socialism like the alchemy of turning base metal into gold. The problem is not an re-casting of capitalism, but its abolition.
The working class remain at the core of any potential socialist movement. It might appear as if class consciousness is no longer present. The workers form a class "in itself". But they are not conscious of this. It has not manifested that they have common interests and tasks. As yet they do not form a class “for itself.” For sure, there may exist a vague feeling of class loyalty, but it is still overshadowed by sectional sentiments or national group than with the class in general. From being a class "in itself", the workers must grow into a class "for itself". Only the working class as a whole is capable of transforming an entire society. It is the productive class under capitalism, and as such it alone is in a position to wield the social forces of production. The working class is the only force capable of taming them. The working class, which creates the surplus value, is also the only class capable of stopping up the source of surplus value, in that it makes wage labour impossible. Only the working class and only the working class alone.
It is class power that we need. Socialists do not strive to establish a form of self-managed capitalism, nor sectional ownership such as syndicalism or cooperatives. The goal is of a non-market socialist society as the only alternative to the existing worldwide capitalist system. This means, if need be, advancing socialist ideas even if momentarily in opposition to the immediate actions and concerns of the working class.
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