Better futility than false roads

Our flag is the red flag

The capitalist class has managed society and its management has failed yet workers have not rallied to the red flag.

Will socialism benefit people, the Socialist Party is asked.  Will rest benefit the weary? Will food benefit the starving?  Will fresh air benefit the suffocating?

Some have convinced themselves that socialism is dead as a door nail.  We do not agree. Nor do we wholly accept that leaders have led the movement astray. The movement – that is to say the socialist movement – has not been led astray. But the general movement of the working class refused to support the socialist movement; and its leaders watched for what way to jump, and led their forces, not in the way the workers should have gone, but in the way they wished to go.

It seems rather inconsistent now however, to chide the workers for having preferred “Labourism” to socialism when, for they were advised to do so by all its present critics on the Left. They lost sight that if the wrong road be taken, every mile travelled takes us only farther from the right one and  after years of marching along the wrong road they now find themselves wallowing in the New Labour swamp. Socialists have never wearied in pointing out the right road; but the mass of the workers have preferred to take the wrong way, encouraged to do so by the Left-wingers.

 If they want socialism, they must join the Socialist Party, and agitate, educate, and organise for socialism.  Workers must rightly use their political power. But they have not done so.

 Capitalism leads to the bloodiest anarchy, to the destruction of the few cultural achievements which have been created, to the deepest misery of the masses and their literal enslavement, seared into the minds of the of the working class.

The “Communist” Parties have failed to offer the masses a substantial alternative. With a blindness which only shows how superficial their socialist knowledge has been and  miscalculating the distance which separated their countries from the situation in which the Russian Bolsheviks had found themselves they rejected the weapon of parliamentary agitation and education, and thereby, ruled themselves off the political stage, and condemned themselves to an existence in obscurity. Their repeated attempts at insurrection found no echo among the still unenlightened masses, and far from succeeding in becoming a political and social force, have now hopelessly split into several factions. Thus everything the Leninists advocated combined in preventing the development of the revolution from a political into a social one.

 The revolution cannot be vague uprising of a large mass of discontented and miserable people—a blind and instinctive knee-jerk reflex to hurt and suffering . On the contrary, it has to be intellectual; a movement based upon economic necessity and  in line with social evolution. Socialists are no starved slaves but working people who see the shambles waiting for them and  their children and recoil from the descent into barbarism.

AJJ