SOCIALIST CLARITY

Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. The great only appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.

Society contains many contradictions which have arisen as a result of the fact that production has a social character under capitalism while ownership of the means of production is in private hands. The contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is the principal contradiction. Socialists have always maintained that the change from capitalism to
socialism would be a fundamental change, that is, we would have a complete reorganisation of society, that this change would not be a question of reform; that the capitalist system of society would be completely changed and that that system would give way to a new system of society based on a new form of production.

Capitalism is that system of society in which the means of production and distribution are owned by a few individuals for their own profit. Yet all the capitalist institutions are based on labour-power of working people. The factories, the mines, the land, and all means of production. Labour power is essential to make them valuable and to provide profits for those that own and control
them. All of our institutions are based on the labour-power of the working man. Without that labour-power society could not exist. Not a wheel could turn. Capitalists today controls the creative power of labour for their own particular advantage.

We have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labour to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child—and yet there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue. It is not the fault of nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that must be abolished. The Socialist Party of Great Britain opposes a social order in which it is possible for one person who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence. Although we be still a small minority members of the Socialist Party have learned how to be patient and to bide our time. They  know, that the time is coming the minority will become the majority. When that  day arrives we shall have a harmonious  commonwealth, industrial freedom and social justice.

The  confusion and lack of clarity on the Left enables the the policies of the Labour Party to be labelled as socialist and to confuse the mass of workers about the real nature of capitalism and socialism. Thus the equation of nationalisation with socialism, the description of the Labour Party as a working class party and the demands for nationalisation as a means of making inroads into the capitalist state. The essence of capitalism is property relationships; ownership is merely a formal question, which can take MANY forms.  Hence nationalisation can never be a means of making ’inroads’ into capitalism. One of the battles for the Socialist Party, therefore, to combat nationalisation and argue that it diverts the fight for socialism to a fight for reformism and gradualism.

 Old Labour demand nationalisation as a means of making inroads into the capitalist system – as a form of creeping socialism. The Trotskyists of SPEW (Militant) say that they are making ’transitional’ demands, so their approach is different to that of the Labour ‘leftists’. The SWP claim that slogans for more nationalisation raises the question of state power and heighten the consciousness of the workers. Objectively all these organisations are serving the capitalist in that they are attempting to mobilise the working class in order to bring about the expansion of state-capitalism to rescue bankrupt private industries and enterprises.  In the long-term nationalisation cannot stem the tide of redundancies and indeed may accelerate it. These calls for nationalisation as a means of saving jobs is an aspect of the general reformist outlook of the British labour movement.