We make the revolution

Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto "The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority".

Some only pay lip-service to this idea. Many do not take it seriously. A number even fail to understand its implications. ‘Self-conscious’ implies that the class itself must understand the full significance of its actions. 'Independent' implies that the class itself must decide the objectives and methods of its struggle.

It is reaffirmed by the First International declaration “The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves". The working class cannot entrust its historical task to anyone else.

Even the lyric of the workers’ anthem, ‘The International’, states “no saviours from on high will deliver” socialism.

 In an official manifesto addressed to the National Labour Union of the US, Marx explains:
“On you, then, devolves the glorious task to prove to the world that now at last the working classes are bestriding the scene of history no longer as servile retainers, but as independent actors, conscious of their own responsibility . ..”

Trade unionism first arose in England, where industrial capitalism first developed. Trade unions first arose out of the battles of working people to defend themselves from the abuses and oppressive conditions imposed by the very system of wage labour. The rise of capitalism brought an increasingly greater concentration of industrial production in factories and mills, with ownership concentrated in the hands of a small class of capitalists. Stripped of any means of survival other than the sale of their labour power; workers were forced to compete against each other, thereby enabling profit-hungry capitalists to drive down wages and force long hours and inhuman conditions on the masses of people. In this situation workers were bound to resist. In the days of the industrial revolution, this resistance tended to take the form of smashing the very machines which seemed to be the immediate cause of their enslavement and impoverishment. In the course of these outbreaks and through their own experience, workers soon learned that their most effective weapon against the combined power of capital was to combine their own resources, to unite the working people in one craft or one factory so they could exact better conditions for work and also better terms for the sale of their labor power. Workers began to form various societies, organizations and common funds for mutual protection.

When the unions were in their early of development, carrying out guerrilla war against different employers, Karl Marx recognized the enormous potential of the unions far beyond the fight against day-to-day abuses. In “Wages, Price and Profit,” written in 1865, Marx warned that workers should not be “exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights.” The trade unions failed as centers of the working-class struggle, he noted, when they limited themselves to fighting only the effects of the capitalist system, “instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wage system.” In addition to their original tasks in defending workers, the trade unions, as Marx pointed out, “must learn how to act consciously as focal points for organizing the working class in the greater interests of its complete emancipation.” In supporting every social and political movement directed towards this aim, the unions “must convince the whole world that they are not fighting to further their narrow personal interests, but to free millions of oppressed people.”

Political parties are the product of the class struggle. In a classless society which has rid itself of the remnants of class interests and ideology there will be no political parties. They will be unnecessary. But we have not reached the classless society. We are in the midst of a society torn by class struggle, and the political parties of necessity express and reflect the interests of classes in conflict. The more fierce the class struggle becomes, the more society is divided into two camps marshalled for decisive struggle, the greater is the tendency for a fusion of parties in terms of the classes upon which they are based.

The simplistic critique against the Socialist Party is the belief that we declare that until the masses are educated in socialism by ourselves we can’t have socialism. If the changes in society from one social system to another lead waited upon the development of the individual and the education of each individual, then mankind would still not have progressed beyond  primitive society. But society has not waited in this way. The intellectual and moral transformation of society depends upon and follows in the tracks of economic change. This is described in the concept of the historic materialism. Man is the maker of history, but he makes that history with the tools and material at his disposal. His relationship to these instruments of production is a dialectical relationship changing the materials and the tools and himself in the process. At each successive stage when property relations became a fetter upon the development of the forces of production those property relations had to be changed. They were changed. But they were changed when the class which was primarily interested in their transformation developed the will to fight for the change and fought and conquered.

Revolution occur because of the objective conflict between the new forces of production and the old relations of production. In other words, the way this society is organized holds back the development of the material well-being of the society.  The vast resources and wealth of the world have gone to a handful of rich capitalists and corporations , while the masses of people struggle to even survive in the face of unemployment,  the threat of war, and hunger. The problem is not that there isn’t enough to go around, the problem is that what is there exists an abundance but it is hoarded by this small minority. The objective conditions for revolution fully exist. But the objective conditions alone are not sufficient to successfully make revolution. It is the relationship of the objective to the subjective conditions which determines the victory of the revolution. The level of class conscious struggle on the part of the working class is expressed in many ways, but the most important expression is the existence of the political party of .the working class, the socialist/communist party. It is the masses who make revolution, but it is the socialist party which must bring forth organisation.