A socialist party

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE

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

He later elaborates in his address to the First International:
 “To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes...One element of success they possess — numbers; but numbers weigh in the balance only if united by combination and led by knowledge.”

So there must be both organisation and knowledge in the workers’ hands if they are to emancipate themselves. A socialist party only functions as a catalyst for the working class to act on its own, combining the “ knowing" with the doing. The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not strive to lead each and every struggle, nor is it an association of cadres offering themselves up as enlightened leaders.

The purpose of the socialist party is according to Engels in ‘Socialism – Utopian and Scientific’:
“To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.”

And as Marx addressed the Brussels Communist Correspondents’ Committee:
“To address the working man without a strictly scientific idea and a positive doctrine is to engage in an empty and dishonest preaching game, which assumes an inspired prophet, on the one hand, and nothing but asses listening to him with gaping mouths, on the other... Ignorance has never yet helped anyone.”

It is clear that class consciousness is the prerequisite for the class party, but just what is meant by class consciousness, still less how it is fostered, is never properly dealt with by professed socialists. Working class consciousness can only develop to the extent that capitalist and reformist attitudes  are driven out by working class ones.  The working class is not only held prisoner by the chains of the capitalist mode of production. It is shackled by the unperceived but overwhelming intellectual, social, political and moralistic hegemony of the bourgeoisie, which anchors it in capitalism. The working class remains a prisoner. It is necessary personally to re-experience that total rupture with bourgeois society. It is necessary personally and critically to recover the historical experience of successive generations of communists.

The dominant form of struggle is trade unionism -  bargaining for the sale of labour power. Under capitalist production it is both inevitable and spontaneous. Bargaining as they do within the limits set by capitalist production, unions are forced constantly to compromise with capital, and are entities not constituted to go for working class power. On the contrary, the trade unions become an essential structural element in the system of the production and reproduction of the relations of production.  To call either for revolutionary trades unionism such as the anarcho-syndicalists call for, or to argue for the dissolution of trades unionism as some Left Communist groups do, lacks any viability. The first, revolutionary trades unionism, is a structural impossibility; the second, precludes any substantive intervention into the arena of the workers most generalised form of struggle.

What appears to be  required is a form of organisation of the labour struggle that recognises the necessity for bargaining and compromises on the economic terrain, but which provides the opportunity for the labour struggle to develop into an economic and then political class struggle. The most representative form of such organisation so far has been the  'One Big Industrial Union’ model of  the Industrial Workers of the World. Changes, however, in working class organisation cannot be brought about simply by ‘seeing and weighing up’ relative advantages and disadvantages, but only when the historical conditions are ripe for change, and when the conditions which have sustained previous forms of organisation have been undermined. Craft union,  the basis of trades unionism as it has hitherto existed – that of selling particular categories of labour power to individual employers – has been undermined and that form of union is now obsolete, as it divided the working class and prevent an effective labour struggle. Unions amalgamated, became “general” unions and industrial unions and these mergers are still continuing.