The Socialist Party of Great Britain wants to make the revolution as soon as possible. When we speak of revolution, we speak of the capture of power by the working class itself. Many who call themselves socialists urge the formation of a “revolutionary party” but such a party cannot be revolutionary. The “revolutionary party” is based on the idea that the working class needs a new group of leaders who vanquish the capitalist class for the workers and construct a new government. According to this theory, the leaders will build a workers’ state and create the socialist society by means of decrees; in other words, the working class is still incapable of administering and organising for itself its work and production. The working class are not deemed capable of revolution, so it is necessary that the revolutionary vanguard, the party, make the revolution for it. From experience of history and the failure of past “revolutionary parties”. These often well-meaning activists merely conclude that they will have to do better. They do not realise that the failure of these parties is due to the fundamental conflict between the self-emancipation of the working class through its own power against the substitution by a vanguard because they see the majority of workers indifferent and inactive. But the working class are inactive only because they cannot yet comprehend the course of the struggle and the unity of class interests.
The Labour Party throws all the blame for the crises upon the ConDem Government and contends that it could permanently improve the material comfort of the people if it were returned to power. The Labour Party occupies a most important and strategical position in appealing to the workers because it is the most important and only real influential opposition to the present government. Past Labour governments revealed it as the defender of capitalism and profit, and oppressors of the working class. As socialists we know that the Labour Party cannot solve any single important economic problem at present bearing upon the working class. We know that their servile acceptance of the propertied interests can only result in the perpetuation of capitalism and its many problems. The Labour Party as a government will not only prove as helpless as the present one, but it will become identified as the Party of Capitalism, just as it was before. The Labour Party has become discredited in the eyes of the many.
There is only one class to defeat the capitalist class. Whatever its faults, it is the working class alone that can take power and establish the Cooperative Commonwealth. Steadily the workers move along the road to socialism. Circumstances compel them to take that road. Economic laws operate whether they are known or not, but if we understand their operation we can bend them to our purpose and assist society along the course it tends to travel. As a Socialist Party we must bring this knowledge to the workers. The Socialist Party must carry its propaganda to the workers; the workers will not come to us.
Whenever the power of the governing class asserts itself, then the workers must fight. The distinction between political and industrial action is false; they are the two poles of the same movement. Although engaged in the class struggle, often in conflicts on a gigantic scale, the trade union movement acts without coherence, and with a dim perception only of its reason and purpose in the struggle. Workers, in spite of the long traditions of trade unionism, are gradually becoming aware of the inadequacy of their trade unions in modern class-warfare. Trade unions cannot effectively express the class interests of the workers. However, when a worker votes for a Socialist Party candidate he or she votes against the whole of the capitalist class and for his own class without regard for craft or industrial divisions. The essential thing is the direction in which things are moving.
What is Democracy? It is the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people. It is the workers’ battle-cry in the fight against the capitalist class. The establishment of a genuine democracy the working class can possibly enable us to painlessly to do away with capitalism. The establishment of a full and unrestricted democracy is best means of achieving socialism. Our work in the Socialist Party is one of education, organisation, and agitation. We, as Marxists, hold the interpretation which alone can help the people to crystallise their scattered dispersed ideas of rebellion into an ordered, co-herent demand, backed up by political and industrial action. Never before have the capitalists provided such favourable conditions for the spread of socialist knowledge. Through the class war workers themselves, via their own varied organisations, elected solely by themselves , will take and hold for the benefit of the whole community the power that administers all things which are necessary for the life of the community and it will be the workers of the world who have won the world for the workers.
The socialist revolution will not be brought about by an act of parliament nor through the trade unions but in one form or another by the masses themselves, outside Parliament, outside the trade unions and, probably also, outside the Socialist Party. Revolution must involve a majority of the active population. How and when this will come about, is not within human competency to forecast. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. If there were a general will to establish a socialism a way would be found even by those very people who either have never heard of socialism or think themselves its enemies. Wherever a wage worker confronts an employer strife and conflict is born. Not ideology but necessity brings the masses into revolutionary motion.
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