Unity and the SPGB

Callie, the Socialist Party member

A union of people is greater than the sum of its members. That’s why trade unions succeed in securing decent wages and benefits for workers. A great orator alone doesn’t move mountains. But a crowd of hundreds of thousands united in purpose can make a difference. Businesses use the strength of unity as well. They join together in special interest groups that then have the leverage necessary to get them what they want.

Activists want to create a new left party because those that exist appear inadequate. The Left Unity project has raised many issues that the Socialist Party of Great Britain have faced and answered previously. Our critics accuse us of being out in the political desert and it is argued that if we can get workers’ unity, the strength gained will attract more and more towards our movement. But the Socialist Party is not prepared to join with parties whose aims and methods are contrary to the interests of the working class and a hindrance to the achievement of socialism. The Labour and Trotskyist Parties are parties to which that condemnation applies. It is our experience that any other policy is fatal for a socialist organisation. We would require the Left Unity Party to first state exactly what is its objective. It ought, of course, to be unnecessary to ask such a question of a party which declares its aim to be socialism. Unfortunately, there has been a wide misuse of the word socialism, and it is often applied it to the aim of state capitalism, which leaves intact the division of society into a propertied class and a class of property-less wage-earners.

When it was decided to form the Socialist Party those who made that decision did so against the advice of many others who claimed to know a better way of getting socialism. By joining the Labour Party (known at that time as the Labour Representation Committee) they said genuine socialists should get inside where they would have a wide and receptive audience for socialist propaganda. The view at the time held some merit as it was possible in those days to talk and write about socialism within the ranks of the Labour Party and to argue the socialist case with Labour supporters who were at least familiar with the works of the socialist pioneers. They didn't accept the socialist case but they were aware what that case was. The argued that ocialism was to be seen as a worth-while aim,  but workers being what they were, the only practical policy of a labour party was of making capitalism better through reforms and introducing nationalisation as stepping stones to socialism while teaching socialist principles to raise the level of understanding among the workers.

 We can let the readers judge the success or failure of its reforms and state-ownership but on the issue of those who advocated the unity strategy and membership of  the Labour Party it is reasonable for us to ask where is the socialist influence that was to permeate the ranks of the Labour Party?  Has it raised the level of knowledge in Labour Party? Sure, with  accumulation of experience of political office they know all about winning votes and influencing electors. They know all the intricacies of government and administration. They can can hold their own in the string-pulling and double-talk. It is always full of ingenious schemes for solving capitalism's problems but never on any occasion do they put the socialist alternative to capitalism or show a socialist understanding of the nature of the problems. The socialist case is not heard in Labour Party and if  a person  put it forward he or she would be regarded as a crank or an oddity and not to be taken seriously. Far from being influenced by socialist propaganda, the Labour Party has now forgotten what little it once knew. It no longer even argue against socialism for it does not now know what socialism is. There are perhaps some isolated individual members of the Labour Party who can remember the days when strikers were people to be supported and when jingoistic patriotism was a dirty word. What do they think now of their party, a fully fledged party of capitalism, with taking political opportunism is the one and only object of its miserable life?

We now receive similar words of wisdom from those who desire all those on the left to merge into a future Left Unity Party when it comes into being and it too possesses the quality of an aimless enthusiastic spirit of revolt against the iniquities of capitalism. There exists trap which the advocates of compromise always fall. They promise to solve certain urgent problems by entering into pacts and alliances hoping perhaps to gain strength later on to press forward. They forget that in taking on the administration of capitalism they do not gain strength, but lose it. They at once begin to earn the unpopularity and contempt which always centres on an administration which carries on capitalism. The effort to solve problems inside capitalism creates uncertainty, mistrust, apathy and despair among the workers.

The Socialist Party mission is simple. We have to proceed with our educational propaganda until the working class have understood the fundamental facts of their position—the facts that because they do not own the means by which they live they are mere commodities on the market, never have their capacity to work bought unless the buyers (the owners and employers) can see a profit for themselves in the transaction.

We have to emphasise the fact that no appreciable change is possible in the working-class condition while they remain commodities, and that the only method by which this can be altered  is by the working class taking the means of life out of the hands of those who at present hold them, and are the cause of the trouble. Before this can occur, the workers will have to understand the inevitable opposition of interests between them and the capitalist class who are able to exploit them, so that they will not make the mistake of voting them into power, as they have always done previously.  Representatives of the interests of the owning class dominate political power and  keep the working class in subjection. This is our mission, and we shall conduct it with all the resources we have at hand. It is the task of the Socialist Party by its educational propaganda, to clarify issues so that socialists will stand out us a political party distinct from and antagonistic to every other party to be a power in the land to-day. For the triumph of socialism, national and international organisation is essential, but the organisation must be for socialism and based on socialist principles or such organisation can be nothing to the workers but a delusion and a snare. The new form of society is ready to take shape only consent is lacking. The majority do not want socialism and do not understand it. That being so, it is mere illusion to imagine that working-class unity on a socialist basis is attainable at present. A socialist party cannot yet be more than a minority party.

For unity:-
The objective of common or social ownership, must be clearly understood.
There must be no room for policies of minority action.
There must be no collaboration with capitalist parties. (This would also rule out parties prepared to urge the workers to vote for the Labour Party or nationalist parties.)

 The Left Unity Party may gain its membership partly on the basis of the failures of the Labour Party, but it has also adopted exactly the same erroneous position. The Left Unity Party is committed to a gradualist, reformist strategy: seeking support on the basis of a programme of reforms. The case of the Labour Party is relevant here in that they too originally set out to impose on capitalism something—in their case, social measures in favour of the working class—that was contrary to its nature as a profit-driven system. The Left Unity Party are facing the same choice of strategy as did the first socialists in Britain at the end of the 19th century: to build up support on the basis of the maximum programme of fundamental social change and remain small till people have become convinced of the need for the change in question or to build up support on the basis of reforms within the system and grow faster but at the price of abandoning the maximum programme or relegating it to a vague long-term objective. So much is this the case that we can already anticipate the weak excuses, the shifting of blame and apologies for their inevitable failures to come. There is no need to be Nostradamus in foretelling its future. The widespread rejection of the Labour Party by radically-minded people does provide the basis for the growth of a genuine socialist party on sound principles, but the Left Unity Party does not fill the bill. It has nothing to offer except the failed old policy of state intervention and state control to try to make things better for people. Despite the repeated demonstrations that this reformist policy does not work, the new party wants to have another go, flying in the face of the inescapable conclusion that capitalism just cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority.

At the moment capitalism cannot even sustain the reforms it was able to afford at an earlier period. Since the post-war boom came to and end in the early 1970s, there have been no reforms – no improvements in housing, pensions, health care, social services or state benefits. Quite the reverse. Pre-existing reforms have been whittled away and things have got worse in all these fields. Nor is there any prospect of them getting any better; all the signs are that they will continue to get worse.  Nor can unemployment, poverty in old age, bad housing, inadequate health care, etc, etc, etc be solved within the capitalist system, not even by the most left-wing governments. Certainly, Left Unity says it wants to replace capitalism with a socialist society but this turns out to be, not real socialism, but the state capitalism that nationalisation represents. This is the past. We’ve seen it and it doesn’t work.

Knowing that socialism is the only solution and that it can be brought about only when the electors become socialists, it would be a dishonest political manoeuvre of seeking election on a programme of reforms of capitalism. It is dishonest because those who do it know that the reforms will not solve the problem.  The Socialist Party stands for the policy of independence. Unity is absolutely indispensable before socialism can be achieved, but it must be unity of socialists: on a socialist platform and in a socialist party. Socialist  politics is concerned with a materially realisable future, not with a mythical past, and is actively working towards a more equal and more humane society. A non-exploitative and non-hierarchical society is a practical goal not an ideal, one which necessitates a social order based on the common ownership of natural resources. Workers in solidarity shall overcome.