Down with the State

Societies without States have continued to exist down to our own times among the many of the indigenous peoples of the world. As soon as there are in a society a possessing class and a dispossessed class, there exists in that society a constant source of conflict which the social organization would not long resist, if there was not a power charged with maintaining the “established order,” charged, in other words, with the protection of the economic situation of the possessing party, and therefore with the duty of ensuring the submission of the dispossessed party. This from its very birth  has been the role of the State. The offspring of struggles or threats of struggles between conflicting interests. The State, for socialists, is not any neutral beneficial social organization whatsoever. It is the public power of coercion created and maintained in human societies by their division into classes, and which, having force at its disposal, makes laws.  The State, having been created by the division of society into classes, is inevitably maintained by that division. The State is not an independent organism, having its own existence without regard to the interlaced economic relations of men, but is necessarily subordinate to the division of society into classes, and, in consequence, to a particular economic situation, no party whatever can reasonably set up, as the immediate goal for its efforts, the abolition of the State, nor the suppression of the political power that constitutes it. This where the so-called anarcho-capitalists, the supposed, right-wing libertarians are mistaken. The State, being a consequence, cannot disappearance before the disappearance of the social conditions of which it is the necessary result. The economic system  begets classes guarantees of perpetuity in the State. We can abolish the State only after having suppressed classes but unlike the traditional anarchist theory not to directly aim at present at its abolition because it cannot be abolished before the disappearance of classes, a disappearance that it must itself help to bring to pass. The only viable tactic for workers is the conquest of political power, the conquest of the State. It is the complete control by them of the public powers, that all their efforts must have in view; it is to this object that all their tactics must be devoted to make possible the suppression of classes.

State-capitalism is often mistakenly called state-socialism. Whenever an industry was nationalised it was declared an abandonment of capitalism and as an example of socialism in practice,  the transformation of capitalism into socialism. What came to pass was not socialism nor a step towards  socialism, but State- capitalism. Socialism is not state ownership, nationalisation or State management of industry, but the opposite: Socialism does away the state, its first act is to abolish the state. Socialism does not transform industry into the state, but state and industry are transformed into socialism, functioning industrially and socially through new administrative organisations  of the  producers, and not through the state. State-capitalism is not socialism and never can become socialism. A lure that is offered to the workers is that capitalism is  “democratised”  by state-capitalism, placing power in the hands of “the people” and the promise of regulation of working conditions through the fraudulent pretense of “industrial democracy.” But it strengthens the state and weakens the working class. The goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting for the capitalists. It can only be realised by the workers themselves being masters over production. State-capitalism  planned by the rich for their own benefit and survival is quite possible, but it is far from the type of society where the rule rests in the hands of those who produce wealth and services and whose aim is the welfare of the mass of the people.

The Socialist Party must work for socialist  ideas to penetrate more and more the elective bodies, and this implies a constant propaganda among the working class.  For sure circumstances may possibly impose upon the socialist movement later on another mode of action, but that is a matter for the future not the  present. So long as such circumstances have not come to pass, socialism has nothing to gain by departing from its campaign for political power through the ballot box. Those who strive to keep the people out of the field of political action playing the same game of the ruling class. By shouting, “No politics!” they are merely echoing the rallying cry that the wealthy has always given to the working-class - “leave the running of the public affairs to your betters.”

Therefore, The Socialist Party say we must work without ceasing to elect socialists, to permeate and saturate the State more and more with socialist ideas, until, in the hands of the socialist party or the class-conscious, organized proletariat, the State with all its powers, and especially that of law-making, becomes the instrument, which it is destined to be, of the economic transformation to be accomplished. When that transformation is completely accomplished, there will then be, instead of persons to be constrained, only things to be administered, and on that glorious day there will still be a social organisation, but it will no longer be a State.