Don’t just break the link - Break the chains!

Many on the Left are deluded into thinking that the Labour Party could be the vehicle for revolutionary social change. The Socialist Party did not fall into the trap of portraying the Labour Party as in some way less capitalist than the Tories. We exposed the Labour Party as an essential part of a double act, as much as a theatrical performance as those of Laurel and Hardy. It works like this: The Tories try legislative means to curb incomes and conditions; this leads to confrontation, i.e. intensified class struggle. Labour then comes on the stage to bail out the Tories by securing trade union cooperation, thus bringing the country back from the brink. Cooperation with the unions, however, has its limits, as the union leadership, no matter how much they collaborate themselves, do not have limitless power over their members, so Labour in turn reaches a dead end. The Tories then have to return with their customary coercion again. This in turn leads back to confrontation, and so on ... This familiar cycle constitutes the ‘two-party system’. The Labour Party, then, cannot be said to ‘betray’ the working class, for it was not a working class or socialist party in the first place.

The Labour Party has not made any mistakes by not introducing socialism, for it was never created to do that in the first place. Some portray the Labour Party as containing a socialist membership ready at any time to burst free from the control of its leadership but a party’s class nature is determined not by who its members are, or who votes for it, but by its political line i.e. whose interests it actually serves. Just because many workers still vote for the Labour Party does not mean it a workers’ party any more than the Liberal Party was at the end of the last century when most working-class electors voted for it.

 It is common knowledge that whenever Labour has been in power it has worked in capitalism’s interests. To tell people that in voting Labour they can at the same time avoid succumbing to illusions is to shirk the first responsibility of socialists – to wean the masses away from reformism and win them to revolutionary politics. Socialists are duty-bound to expose the hollowness and hypocrisy of the Labour Party which is just as worthy of our profound feelings of class hatred as of the more obvious anti-working class parties.

Where do socialists go from here? The Labour Party long ago hauled down its tattered, torn, discredited red flag of socialism and instead raised the slogan of peaceful co-existence between capitalist and social ownership of the means of production. “Make capitalism work” is what Miliband now proclaims, echoing and parroting earlier Labour Party leaders. For years its leadership has been attempting to cut down the  role as opinion and policy making bodies of the trade unions and transform them into election machines. The “socialist” rank and file with their serious approach to ideas and principles stood in the way of this process. In what, however, has it been, a socialist party? No socialist could have seriously considered the current leadership capable of inspiring the workers in the class battles that lie ahead. Nothing in the Labour Party’s  policy programme is socialist. Yet the Left continue to support it.

The principle function of the socialist movement is to participate in the class struggle, which means to actually support any action of the working class against the capitalist class. we cannot expect results, unless the masses themselves get the understanding
and the spirit of organisation

The way to win workers to socialism is to tell them the truth, the plain unvarnished facts. The continued existence of capitalism will bring unemployment, wage cuts, poverty and insecurity to the majority of people. "Figures and facts, facts and figures!” as Mister Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times would say.

We live with the paradox of poverty amid abundance. The productive capacity of the world, which could produce an abundant standard of living for all, is not being utilised. Industry is being run not for people’s needs, but for the private profit of the financial tycoons, the industrial magnates and the large landowners. It is this that is the cause of the crises which tears society apart.

The socialist movement seeks to establish a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of production. Socialism aims at the establishment of a system of social justice that holds no brief for charity or almsgiving. In the countries where universal suffrage is in operation, however imperfect the system may be, people must  apply themselves principally to returning socialists to the various elective assemblies. Socialists must work to  penetrate more and more the elective bodies, and this implies a constant propaganda.

 It is easy to criticise parliamentarism and to criticise it justly, but criticism does not prevent it from existing. Modify the machinery of democracy if you can, just as much as you. Nevertheless, we still ask, is it worthwhile to undertake special campaigns to secure improvements which, however valuable they would be in another situation, are none the less, at present, of secondary importance?

 What are we out for? Nothing less than a social revolution, a complete transformation of human society. The Social Revolution should not be an aspiration of the future but an immediate reality, and determine our immediate policy and tactics. Not something to wait for in some far-off future. The fight for socialism is now.