Something must be done

Discontent is mounting. Something is desperately wrong with the world; everyone knows it. Every day people are more and more disgusted by the present political, economic, and social order. The old claims about the virtues of capitalism don't convince any more; in fact, they're not really even made. For the first time in generations, we're not being sold even the imaginary vision of a better, but still capitalist, future. Instead we're offered the grim assertion that, however bad this might be, there's no alternative. And that, it seems, does convince. So people relapse into cynicism and disillusionment: no point joining a party, no point voting, no point demonstrating,  just keep your own head down and stay above water. Millions are turning away  from the political status quo –but, so far, only a tiny fraction of them are coming over to theside of revolutionary change. Most lapse into empty cynicism, or else they look for solutions from religious cults, conspiracy theories, the far Right, or identity politics.

Everybody knows there is going to be another Labour government sooner or later. But no one gets very worked up about it. No one seriously believes that it is going to mean any real important changes. Even their most loyal party activists do not expect great things when it is office. Such scepticism is hardly surprising when one looks at Labour’s past and read their future intentions. It has always been fashionable among frustrated leftists to attribute Labour’s failures to its leadership. But leaders reflect tendencies, even though they may distort them. If they did not reflect tendencies, they would cease to be leaders. Labour’s leadership is merely a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. The error is to see Labour as part of anattack on capitalism. In fact, the Labour Party was in no way designed to further the achievement of a socialist society, but represented the continuation of capitalism.

It would be quite wrong, however, to believe that most people are apathetic about politics. Certainly, people are bored by the narrow little side-issues and cults of the personality that pass for politics in Parliament and the media. But politics, in its full sense, embraces every part of life. Wherever you begin, global poverty or your own working conditions, art or civil liberties, jobs or the war, if you dig down to the roots of the matter you will find yourself dealing with the basic structure of society. We need to reach an understanding of every aspect of contemporary life and to analyse the experiences of the various popular movements. We need to educate ourselves and others. We need to engage with people who are already discontented, already looking for ways out, and convince them that socialism offers the only adequate explanation and the only real solution.

A social order isn't something natural, like a weather pattern; an economic crisis isn't something natural, like a hurricane. The current system is a set of relationships between people. It has historical origins, and it can be replaced. People on the left inevitably spend a lot of their time talking about single issues, and perhaps the core point doesn't come across clearly enough: capitalism has outlived its usefulness, but it won't just fade away of its own accord. It needs to be abolished.  Let us unashamedly make the case for a better social order.

 Capitalism, even in its liberal democratic forms, remains a system of domination and exploitation. It is a system which involves a formidable concentration of economic power, based on the private ownership and control of the means of production. There were no doubt important differences between countries. More was done by way of social welfare in the Nordic nations  than in Britain; and in Britain more than in the United States. But in all cases, social relationships based on domination, exploitation and competition continued to structure the everyday experiences of the populations of advanced capitalist countries; and the reforms which were then achieved by dint of pressure and struggle remained limited by the social relationships of capitalism.

With every day that goes by, the socialist  analysis of capitalism appears more convincing, not less. There is an increasing centralisation of production and finance into fewer and fewer hands. Competition governs the system ever more ruthlessly as global corporate giants and anonymous financial markets compete over rates of profits.  Old industries are abandoned or ‘rationalised’; and through constant mergers and speculation new areas of accumulation are fostered on a global scale. Militarism is ever more blatantly a necessary prop of accumulation and the evidence grows daily of the undemocratic lengths to which capitalist governments are prepared to go to protect business interests.  Weighed down by enormous national debts, leads to demands for ‘austerity’ measures and these measures naturally fall most heavily upon already desperately impoverished populations. It has meant a fierce offensive on the part of capital upon the working class advances of previous decades. A vast reserve army of the unemployed has emerged in every major capitalist countries. This has involved severe restrictions on the right to strike, to picket, more generally the curbing of ‘activist’ rights-the right to organise, demonstrate and protest.

Many people on the Left today who strongly feel the need of a party free of the various shortcomings which have burdened the workers' movement in the past. There is indeed a crying need for new organs of socialist transformation will sooner or later come to be seriously addressed. There is, however, a  loss of confidence and even belief that the socialist project is more than a utopian vision. Some new social movements that have arisen have enlarged the meaning of socialism. However, no such ‘new social movement’ can obviate the need for a socialist party (or parties). Nor can they replace organised labour as the main force on which a socialist movement must rely. The task of a socialist party is to afford a degree of coherence to a class which is inevitably fragmented and divided, and to do so without any pretension of achieving a necessarily artificial and imposed monolithic unity.

Our task critical and it is to persuade workers that capitalism is their enemy, that their interests and aspirations are bound up with the struggle against capitalism.