The Position of the SPGB

'The Position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain

The SPGB has a single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources (land, water, factories, transport, etc.) are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants. This aim is central to the SPGB’s view on the role of ‘the party’.

The abolition of private property in the productive resources will be mirrored by free and equal access for all to the wealth (food, clothing, housing, telecommunications, health and education services, entertainment) that can be produced socially. Its abolition will also be mirrored by democratic control of those productive resources – there will be a need, for example, for informed decision-making about how much effort is to be expended on the consumption goods and services mentioned above and how much effort to expend on production goods (like machinery and new factories). This would take place on a local, regional or wider level, depending on the scale of each issue.

Clearly, such a society will not build a completely new system of production from scratch. In fact, it depends for its establishment on the existence of the productive capacity that wage workers have developed under the rule of capital. It will inherit, or more precisely, appropriate the existing system of production, which is, of course, an interconnected worldwide system. This of course means that the new society must be worldwide.

Considered from the perspective of the current situation, where a minority own and/or control almost all of the productive resources, where production is determined solely by the need for profit, realised by the production and sale of commodities on a world market, we can describe the key aspects of the socialist (for us, socialist and communist mean the same thing) society that the SPGB advocates as one that is without classes, without money or any other form of economic exchange, with neither states nor frontiers. And one in which people work collectively and co-operatively to meet society’s material and psychological needs.

It’s not for us to describe in detail how people will choose to organise their lives once a socialist form of production has been introduced: the different resources, technology and mindsets which will exist then are difficult (impossible?) for us to empathise with now. But there is one very important fact of which we can be sure, and it is this: where there is free access to socially-produced wealth, there will be no connection between what an individual consumes and the amount or type of work that they do or don’t do at any given time in their life. The lash of poverty, or threat thereof, that the owning class currently wields over the wage-earners to coerce them into work, will no longer exist. 

Yet the natural circumstance that we, as a species, need to work in order to survive (and also, we would argue, to fully realise ourselves as human beings) will remain, despite the utopian nonsense about fully automated luxury communism. 

So, throughout and after the revolution, the majority will have to be ready to be proactive participants in the socialised system of production, and have the confidence that a socialist form of production will better serve their various needs and wants than the capitalist system ever could.

The Role of the Party

For the SPGB then, the role of the revolutionary party in the present non-revolutionary situation is to put forward the case for a socialist system and against the capitalist system, to help our fellow workers to understand why, as wage earners, they can never be free from economic insecurity and exploitation, and to understand that the threats of war and environmental devastation have their roots in the capitalist system of production.

Obviously, we must seek to attract members to share the work of developing and spreading socialist ideas, but we have never tried to do so by promoting reforms of capitalism – nor will we do so in future. Experience has shown that the dynamics of capitalist economics turn reformism into an eternal misery-go-round that might catch a few crumbs as they fall from capital’s table during a boom, only to have many of them sucked away again in the inevitable succeeding slump.

For this reason, when the SPGB stands candidates in general and local elections, we make clear our stance against reformism, as opposed to all reformist parties left or right. We stand candidates in capitalist elections in order to make use of what passes for ‘democracy’ to promote socialist ideas until such a time that enough socialists are voted in to power over the state machine in order to abolish it, as part of the revolutionary process, and establish an administration of things rather than a government over the people. 

If we are to establish the non-coercive, non-hierarchical, classless society, the majority will have to understand, want and be actively involved in the attainment of the objective. Given that mass socialist understanding, the political vehicle the socialist majority choose to win control of political power must be fully democratic, reflecting the sort of society they are seeking to establish.

Leaderless and Democratic

So, the mass socialist party must not be a vanguard party controlled by a leadership, but a democratic party controlled by its members; in fact there must be no leaders or leadership, just administrative bodies carrying out the democratically-arrived at decisions of a membership that wants and understands socialism. When there is a mass socialist party with aligned parties across the world, the revolution will be a more readily-achievable goal, and so the party should have practical proposals for how the means of production will become owned in common. The party in a pre-revolutionary climate, such as now, has to primarily work to attract support to grow the movement. It should be organised in a way which puts the principles of democracy, equality and co-operation into practice as far as possible. This demonstrates that people can work together in ways which go beyond what is demanded by capitalist organisations with their hierarchies, to get as close as we can now to unalienated labour. To this aim, the SPGB is organised through branches, which nominate delegates to various committees to carry out party work, with some roles and decisions agreed through majority vote of the membership as a whole. This framework isn’t intended as a blueprint for how organisations should be run in socialism, and it would also likely have to be adapted to suit the circumstances and size of a mass socialist party, but what would remain constant are the socialist values underpinning the organisation.'

https://prometheusjournal.org/2024/12/13/the-end-and-the-means/