"Our" Socialism

Capitalism is barbaric. It has out-lasted its time. It must go. That is the task of our Party. It is your job too, all of you, wherever you are, to struggle for the emancipation of your class. There is no easy road, there is not a gradual road. The whole conception of gradualism is to introduce one “good” law after another; and one fine day the workers will wake up pleasantly surprised to find themselves in the midst of a socialist world. It isn’t going to happen.

The capitalist class and the working-class stand opposed to each other. The class lines are clearly defined. There is no mistaking who is a capitalist and who is a worker. The capitalist class has at disposal all the power of the State. These forces comprise, a well-organised bureaucracy, a strong judiciary, a powerful police and military. The capitalist class has at its beck and call an extensive and potent media reaching out to millions, colouring their views on life, determining largely their political opinions, fashioning their thoughts, moulding their minds into a servile acceptance of things as they are or as the controllers of these mouthpieces of capitalism wish us to believe they are. As soon as there is rumour of discontent in the factories or a strike, employers use their power to ensure the smooth running of the industrial machine. The duty of the Socialist Party is to expose and resist this by every means possible. Workers are becoming more conscious of the nature of the struggle  and more determined. Revolution is no longer some utopian fantasy but is now being forced upon us as the only practical solution. Those who saw socialism as an ideal, now try to translate it into a social reality.

Two lines of conduct are possible for a political party representing the working class. Reform capitalism, making the lot of the working class tolerable under that system. Another method to educate people and gain support for the socialism. Our manifesto has nothing to do with reformist programmes, which are like shopping lists, including all sorts of demands for various reforms. These party platforms aren’t the basis on which members join a party. Rather, they’re a hodge-podge collection in which everybody can find something which satisfies them, while rejecting those parts he or she disagrees with. The question of creating reformist illusions in the minds of the workers is an important one. Goodness knows they have been too many such illusions as it is and the function of our party is not to add to them but to attempt to destroy them. If we fail to educate, to organise and to prepare the working class for a clear understanding of, and for the attainment of the revolutionary objectives, temporary concessions gained can, instead of becoming partial victories on the way, be turned into retardation of the struggle.

The Socialist Party declares unhesitatingly to all the workers that the various protest movements cannot realise their full power so long as they remain sectional, separate and limited in their scope and character. The many streams of the rising forces of the workers must be gathered together in one powerful mass movement. The Socialist Party does not reject the policy of struggle for reforms in the immediate condition of the workers. But not as ends in themselves.

A socialist is not the ordinary man-in-the-street who is saturated with ignorance and prejudices pumped into him every day from a hundred sources. The socialist endeavours to think about social problems scientifically. The first question to ask about any problem that needs tackling, is this: How has this problem arisen? Only if this question is answered as ably as social science permits, is it possible to tackle intelligently and effectively.

Every student of politics bursts his seams when he hears this: “There are many socialisms, and which of the 57 varieties are you referring to?”

Socialism has been a long time on its journey from the past to the present. When Marx came on the intellectual scene there were any number of socialisms; and there were socialisms before Marx was born; and there were socialisms promoted after he died. There were the “True Socialists”, the Christian socialists, the reformer socialists, cooperative socialists, bourgeois socialists, feudal socialists, agrarian socialists, Bismarckian state-socialists. They existed and continue to exist under different names. We had “National-Socialists”; we have had “Stalinist socialism”, the socialism of the Labour Party and of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. Usually members of the Socialist Party in support of our ideas will  counter by describing them  as “real socialism”, “genuine” socialism not fake socialism, and perhaps term it “scientific socialism” or the “socialism of Marx.”

Perhaps we should simply say “Our” Socialism - and we are the working class. That is the essence, that is the durable characteristic as distinct from all other varieties of socialisms - our socialism is working class socialism.

When speaking of socialism and socialist revolution we seek “no saviours from high to deliver", as our workers anthem, the International, so ably puts it. We do not believe that reforms will solve the problems of society, let alone bring socialism. We trust that task to the working class alone, that the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself. No leaders. No vanguard parties. There can be no socialism without the working class of the world. Socialism cannot be built without the working class and against the working class. Socialism represents the declaration of independence of the working class. It runs through everything we say and everything we do and everything we want others to do. The working class, themselves,  are the masters not only of their own fate but the masters of the fate of all society if they but take control of society into their own hands! That is the hope of us all. It will remain our hope in the greatest hours of adversity, even while everywhere lies in deepest pessimism.

Our role in the Socialist Party is to teach Marxism and working class socialism. Our idea of politics boil down to this basic revolutionary idea – to teach the working class to rely upon itself, upon its own organisation, upon its own democracy and  upon its own ideas rather than  to subordinate itself at any time to the interest, the needs, the leadership or the ideas of any other class. We regret that for the other “socialisms” that proposition does not dominate their thought.

Socialism was born of the class antagonisms of capitalist society, without which it would never have been heard of; and in the present state of its development it is a struggle of the working class to free themselves from their capitalist exploiters by wresting from them the tools with which modern work is done. This conflict for mastery of the tools is necessarily a class conflict. It can be nothing else, and only the socialist who perceives clearly the nature of the struggle and takes a stand squarely and uncompromisingly with the working class in the struggle which can end only with the utter annihilation of the capitalist system and the total abolition of class rule. All others are “socialisms” are for no other purpose than to emasculate working class socialism.

 We are proud that “Our” socialism  starts by teaching workers to rely upon themselves,  that there is no socialism and no progress to socialism without the working class, without the working class revolution, without the working class in power, without the working class having been lifted to “political supremacy” (as Marx called it) to their “victory of democracy” (as Marx also called it). No socialism and no advance to socialism without it! That is our rock. That is what we build the fight for the socialist future on. That is what we’re unshakably committed to. For the Socialist Party, we have nothing in common with any of their 57 varieties of “socialisms”.

If we, as socialists, do not impress into our audience’s minds the truth that we are working and fighting for a complete social revolution, which shall abolish the present State and establish a free society in its place, we mislead our readers and listeners, and induce them to think we, too, are merely tinkerers with present system. Words still count largely in the formation of ideas.

The make-up of a State is through departments and ministries dominated by bureaucrats and civil servants, who therefore dominate the people. The arrangement of administration in a cooperative society is by delegates nominated by the community, who act as functionaries, not as controllers of the society. Socialists argue that organisation is possible without a State, and that the State appears only in societies divided into classes.

Some societies without States have continued to exist down to our own times among the Indians of South America. Harmony in these communities is admirably maintained spontaneously without any system or apparatus of coercion, despite the number of common affairs to be arranged, because their way of life do not give rise to any antagonism between categories of individuals, for all are free and equal. As soon as there are in a society a possessing class and a dispossessed class, there exists in that society a constant source of collisions and conflicts 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. Now, from its very birth, this has been the role of the State. The State has evolved with the development of that division, i. e., in short, with the economic relations which form the basis of that division; but, under the various appearances it has worn, its object has remained the same because, ever since the appearance of classes, it has always had a privileged economic situation to defend and conflicts to repress. We know what the State - a class-instrument.

As soon as it is understood that the State is not an independent organism, having its own existence outside the  interlinked economic relations of men, but that it is necessarily subordinate to the division of society into classes, and so no party whatever can have as its immediate goal the abolition of the State. The State cannot disappear before the disappearance of the social conditions of which it is the necessary result. A party can abolish the State only after having suppressed classes, and one cannot modify the economic relations of which classes are merely the personification, without acting first upon the State. The only practical line for socialists is the conquest of political power, the conquest of the State.