Social Democracy

Democracy promotes the illusion that all the citizens have indeed equal rights, and that, therefore, it is impossible for a minority to tyrannise over a majority. If this does, it is exceptional and must be the fault of the majority themselves to have neglected their own interests. It is only a question of getting the right men in sufficient numbers on to the representative bodies, especially into Parliament, and that they, when there, should do the right thing, especially that they should only demand that which is in the interest of the majority of the people, and which the people will, therefore, support. Thus voting becomes not only the central point of all political life, it becomes the paramount interest; and from the point of view of bourgeois democracy, for whom the law is the result and expression of the popular will, and at the same time the determining force in social and political life.

 The Socialist Party is one of class-struggle, which is out to conquer the state-power in order to use it for the liberation of the proletariat, and has no holy reverence for the laws which regulate and protect private property. Nor does it believe that this system of private property ownership can be abolished from the world by merely exercising the vote. Where the political and economic associations of the working class are on a solid basis and well organised, filled with class-consciousness, there is no room for riot or insurrection.

 Violent action by individuals will find an echo and only flourish where the working class movement is weak and allows itself to be  controlled by passing incidents and circumstances. In such situations despair of the lack of power of organisation creeps in and individual activists begin to believe that they are only hindered by the majority, and could attain more by acting independently and autonomously. Such militancy is valueless.  Politically they are for the most part futile and mischievous. Often these tactics attract  unsocial elements who break the laws, not in order to serve the workers cause, but merely to cover their own crimes in the name of the revolution. If the revolutionary becomes a robber, the thief proclaims himself to be a revolutionary. Terrorism weakens the workers movement and it that of our enemy. Terrorism  unites the ruling class as they take refuge behind police and military absolutism. And this rule of brute force must always be injurious to the workers struggle as it is always the weaker party. A strong movement has no need for violent deeds on the part of individuals or minorities. The individualists who rushes ahead of the rest, or chooses “short cuts”, more often than not lose their way and become lost.

A dictatorship can only exist so long as it answers to the wish of the people. If that ceases to be the case, and if the will of the people expresses itself in a decided manner, it has to submit. If it does not do so, then the people possess the right to use force.  But this is not the case where the political process grants to all the citizens the same rights, where the expression of the popular will is not restricted by extra-legal forces. The Socialist Party is opposed to violence but if it ever becomes necessary for us to enlist such a strategy it will be to wipe out capitalism, the common enemy of the oppressed and downtrodden in all countries.

 The Socialist Party of Great Britain  is a democratic party to the highest degree, since it wants to organise the freedom of all and to give every individual the means to fully realise it. The socialist association of producers and the common property of the instruments of production have become the conditions for universal liberation. Social democracy, as its name implies, before its meaning was devalued by its adoption by various reformist liberal parties, is the application to the social life of the nation, of the fundamental principles of democracy. Social democracy must proceed from the bottom upward, whereas capitalist “bourgeois" democracy is organised from above downward. This conception of socialism answers all the fears of a bureaucratic state, ruling and ordering the lives of every individual , and thus gives assurance that the future will be an extension of the freedom of the individual, and not the suppression of it.  It is the fullest democratic control. Nation-states, territories, or provinces will exist only as geographical expressions, and have no existence as sources of governmental power, though they may be centres of some administrative bodies of resources.

Our present social system is altogether against the weak and certainly in favour of the strong. It is  a struggle in which a person possessing the least conscience wins the race. The weak are crushed down and on their prostrate bodies rise to eminence the unprincipled men, who crush them. The principles of socialism aim at giving exercise to the highest and very best qualities of human life. Times were when we could not advance the social system as we can do to-day. It was not clear that we could have a sufficient food supply without working a considerable more number of hours than we now find necessary. Now, we know no limit to nature’s productiveness. To-day the cry is advanced that we are over-produced. Too much food, while at the same time there are too many hungry people; too much clothes and an immense number going about in rags.

 Are we to be satisfied with this condition of things when it is in our power to alter it? Surely, we deserve  something better. How many young men and women have said that there is nothing for them worth living for, and that they would almost as soon die. How long is this condition of things to remain with us? What is a life worth, unless it has been doing something to add to the sum of happiness of the human family? This social system of ours is wrong in every aspect.  We have to make changes those changes to come quickly. The thoughts and actions of reformers  who let things run as they are retard progress by taking us in the wrong direction. There must be unity and co-operation if we are to take upon ourselves to take the responsibility of proving that we can accomplish what they are aiming at in all parts of the civilised world — to establish socialism. We think that we can do it. We can if we set our minds upon it.

“The best State-form is that in which the social antagonisms are not obscured, and are not forcibly or artificially covered up or restrained. The best State-form is that in which these conflicts can be fought out freely, thereby attaining their proper solution.” - Marx, “Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, June 1848.