Plan for Revolution

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is a political party, which means that its concern is the struggle of the working class as a whole for political power and the capture of the State. The primary concern of the trade unions is the economic struggle for better conditions. The Socialist Party strives to fill our fellow workers with the spirit of the class struggle, focusing upon overthrow of the capitalist system.  It looks upon every activity of the workers from this point of view. The Socialist Party participates in the election campaigns as a separate and distinct political party. We are not there to help the capitalists govern the working class. We do not spread the false belief that there can be cooperation between the exploited and their exploiters. It is idle to deny the war between the classes and we will go into Parliaments in the spirit of the class struggle. The Socialist Party does not solicit votes in order to reform the capitalist system and thereby to make it more effective for the capitalists. We go into Parliament not to tinker with the system for the benefit of the capitalists.

 Social revolution is the essential objective of the labour movement, the end towards which every step it takes must directly tend. If we look at the production of wealth in present-day society, we find that that production of wealth can only take place through the co-operation of many diverse trades and industries interlocked one with the other. Within a given workshop, the whole variety of workers, manual and mental, co-operate together in order to produce a common product. Within society as a whole all industries co-operate together in order to produce wealth, the raw material of one industry being the finished product of the other. Without this co-operation of all the useful elements of society in production, there can be no society as we understand it to-day. Wealth to-day can only be produced and industry maintained through this co-operation. The vast industries in which men and women co-operate to produce wealth to-day are not the creation of any particular class, but have only been created and can only be maintained by the co-operative labour of all useful elements in society. The ability to produce wealth grows every year, and therefore the welfare of the mass of the people should grow also. However, in capitalist society the opposite process is taking place. Alongside growing power to produce wealth there is growing poverty. In a period of the greatest expansion of capitalism, colossal wealth exists alongside the most heartrending poverty. It is not the case the more capitalism produces wealth the better off everyone will become. The more wealth capitalism produces the greater its difficulties as a functioning system; the more difficult it is to obtain resources and gain markets, the more intensive international competition becomes; the greater becomes the danger of the antagonisms created by this competition ripening into war.

In a single factory, or even within a single industry, production may be planned according to the most scientific methods, but in capitalist society as a whole there is no plan regulating the production and distribution of wealth. Marx called it the anarchy of production. The whole system is based on the pursuit of profit by the owners of the means of production. The regulator of the whole system determining whether industry shall be expanded or shall go on short time is the rise and fall of prices on the market, reflecting the rise and fall in the possibilities of profit for the capitalists whose industries produce for the market. The scramble for profit leads also to the scramble for markets for sources of investment and raw materials on an international scale, and leads inevitably to war.

The Socialist Party make it their business to talk and explain to our fellow workers the meaning of socialism. We distribute our journals  pamphlets and books. Once workers has begun to read a paper or pamphlet explaining the class struggle, they soon recognises the truth of that explanation which they can supplement by numerous facts from their own experiences. Reading about the class struggle is a step to actual participation in the class struggle.  Let the workers recognise their class interests, and they will fight for the final liberation of his class.  In this current economic crisis  the reformists stand for concessions to capitalism, in order to help capitalism to get back to “normal,” while the socialists stand for a resistance to the demands of the capitalists, not “business as usual”, but support the struggle for social revolution.