Seize the Day, Seize the Hour

Cities and neighbourhoods decay while housing is both scarce and expensive. Social and economic crisis leads to millions of personal crises, and to increased crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, and violence. Times are hard, and are bound to get harder. Life is unfair. To the victims, day-time television offer self-help and motivation gurus to fix things. The slaves of each country remain unquestioningly loyal and blindly obedient to their masters and set their sights and their aspirations no higher than the miserable horizons imposed by the ruling class.

 The working class is badly divided and lack a collective purpose. Rather than uniting in resisting the crisis thrown different sectors of the working class into bitter competition with one another.  Unable to combine in a common goal, people struggle as much against each other as they do against the ruling class. Sometimes, the employers or the State’s  offensive has been resisted with success and has given hope. Some social movement have made important gains in its struggle against oppression. Environmentalists have made progress in combating the energy companies’ climate change denials. Today the whole system of legalised robbery and murder is once again caught in a desperate and deepening economic and political crisis.  Capitalism has subjected millions here and hundreds of millions around the world to agony and waged wars of plunder from one end of the globe to another.

However, the fact remains that many people only  express their anger against the system by calling for variants of capitalism and often incorporates a conservative with small c populism as witnessed by cranky currency and funny money proponents versus the orthodox banking and financial sector. The protest movements suffer from a lack of a coherent perspective for the self-emancipation of the masses from the oppressions of capitalist society.

Given the lack of an independent working class movement and the political isolation of the World Socialist Movement from the working class, our work towards our socialist goal will not be easy. But the whole history of humanity, as well as the present reality, shows that there is another path –  the path which the oppressed in every society sooner or later take, the path not backward but forward– the path of resistance against their oppressors. Revolution remains the only way the people can break free of the chains of exploitation and degradation of the capitalist system and its vicious cycle leading repeatedly to deeper crisis and more devastating war. Such a revolution will represent an unprecedented breakthrough. It will change the face of the world. This future must be wrested from the hands of those who, at the cost of unspeakable misery and destruction for the people of the world, are determined to chain humanity to the past.

The capitalist class well understands the significance of the vote. In elections, the ruling class only count as a few against we, the many. The force of the majority could, if properly used, ensure the triumph of the people.

Yet at the ballot box they elect the lackeys of the ruling class who loyally hold the reins of government for the bosses.  When will the workers learn that the political power they could wield as an organised body is the greatest weapon in their hands, that the field of politics is the only field upon which the workers can win emancipation from the domination of capital? In other words, when will the workers do as their masters do who, not content with their tremendous economic power, unceasingly strive to secure political power in order to entrench their class in its position of supremacy. The power which the present ruling class wields is through its domination of the State which it wins at the ballot box.

Let us organise to capture political power. Let us direct our energies toward the only object worth striving for; the end of the private ownership and take control of industry out of the hands of a robber class. The ballot box is no doubt a far safer weapon for emancipation than the rifle. If the advocacy of physical force failed to achieve success or even to effect an uprising when the majority did not possess the vote, how can it be expected to succeed now that the majority are in possession of voting power and the secret ballot safeguards the voter?

The vote may well was given to us by our rulers to advance their own interests but now let us use it for our own. Let us demonstrate at that polling station the strength and intelligence of the revolutionary idea; let us make the hustings a platform from which to promote our principles. Socialism will not come through force, but through education, and through the steady pressure of unpleasant economic facts. There is nothing which can be gained by the rifle which cannot be as effectively gained through the medium of the ballot box, if only the democracy knows what it wants and is determined to have it.

 We have the power, but are not conscious of it. This then is part of the election campaign of the Socialist Party - to make workers conscious of their power as a class, or in other words - class-conscious. The Socialist Party is to the worker politically what the trades-union is industrially; the former is the party of the entire class, while the latter is the union of his or her occupation.

The difference between them is that the union is limited to bettering conditions under the wage system, the Socialist Party is organised to conquer the political power and wipe out the wage system.  The union deals with employment issues and the party deals with politics. The union is educating its members in the administration of industry and fitting them for co-operative control and democratic regulation of production and distribution, while the Socialist Party is organising to conquer the capitalist forces on the political battlefield; and having control of the machinery of government, use it to transfer the industries from the capitalists to the workers, from the parasites to the people.  Trade unionism is by no means the solution of the workers’ problem, nor is it the goal of the labour struggle. It is merely a line of defence within the capitalist system. Its existence and its struggles are necessitated only by the existence and predatory nature of capitalism.

The workers of the world are bound up together in one common destiny to become a clearly defined socialist movement, standing for and moving toward the co-operative commonwealth. The Socialist Party points the way but we do not seek to commit trade-unions to the principles of socialism. Conference resolutions committing them to this sort accomplish little good. Nor do we  meddle with the procedures and processes of the trade-unions. But neither do we take a servile attitude towards the union movement. Not by trying to commit socialism to trade-unionism, nor trade unionism to socialism, will the social revolution be accomplished. It is better to have the trade-unions do their distinctive work, as the workers’ defense against the encroachments of capitalism, as the economic development of the worker against the economic development of the capitalist, giving unqualified support and sympathy to the struggles of the organised workers to sustain themselves in their economic sphere. But let the socialists also build up the character and harmony and strength of the socialist movement as a political force, that it shall command the respect and confidence of the worker.

It is important that we so keep in mind the difference between the two developments that neither shall cripple the other. The socialist movement, as a political development of the workers for their economic emancipation, is one thing; the trade-union development, as an economic defence of the workers within the capitalist system, is another thing. Let us not interfere with the internal affairs of the trade unions, or seek to have them become distinctively political bodies in themselves as syndicalists often advocate. But let us view the Socialist Party as the channel and power by which people are to achieve freedom. While taking advantage of every opportunity to secure concessions and enlarge their economic advantage, by the trade union struggle people at the same time must unite at elections to wrest the government from capitalist control.

In the local council elections and for the European Parliament vote for the Socialist Party/World Socialist Party. (or spoil your ballot paper)

Where there is repression, there is resistance