The struggle is for a new society

A great number of workers remained indifferent to socialism and many are opposed to it. In regard to socialism and its aim many workers believe that it consists of nonsensical attempts toward the destruction of every thing that is good about civilisation. Reformist generally accept, without discussion, that the State represent society as a whole; that its parliamentary institutions provided the means for popular opinion to express itself.

However, the path to socialism is not through nationalisation by the State ownership or some government-controlled quango board, but through a fundamental change in class relations. Those who demand the nationalisation or municipalisation of certain services, do not trouble themselves at all about the lot of the workers engaged in them. The offices and workshops of the State and municipality are prisons quite as bad as private workshops, if not worse. State employees, like workers in private employment, strike and engage in a struggle with the exploiters.

 Nor is the road to socialism through the co-operative movement that is presents by its advocates as a form of as nascent socialism. Our ideal co-operative would be and shall be a society in which neither the production nor the distribution of products will give rise to profits or exploitation. At the present time co-operatives are obliged by the capitalist milieu, to go in for capitalism themselves. The antagonism between seller and buyer, which it is the role of co-operation to abolish, is still in existence. It does not even prepare the elements of the new society. Everything is already in place for the social transformation of production and consumption.  The co-operatives are not the means, but the aim of the workers movement, the cooperative commonwealth as some call socialism.

It is a new society that we are working to realise. Socialists impress on the workers the fact that they are a class, but that they ought to be society. Any social revolution must necessarily be international. will have neither to keep its ancient nationalities nor to constitute new ones, because by becoming free the world will be its fatherland/motherland.

The idea of socialism is not the work of any single individual, who, perhaps out of hatred for the existing State, the present social order, and the wealthier classes, propagate the ideas of social revolution and by their power of oratory sway the masses over to their side. If that were true, nothing would be easier than to oppose the socialist movement by the very same persuasion of speeches.

Of all political parties the Socialist Party are the most open and frank about our aims and objectives, and we are the most transparent in the way we organise ourselves. Other parties have chosen inappropriate names in order to deceive people, to get votes under false pretences. They have the same attitude towards political manifestos. They make promises during elections which they have no intention of carrying out. The Socialist Party does not stoop to using cheap election tricks to get votes. It states frankly to the people what it considers should be done. We ask says:- “What is blocking the way to economic and social progress?” And we answer:- “ The system of profit-making, the ownership and control of industry by a few investors and bankers for their own gain and not for the benefit of the people. The solution for the ills of present day society is the common ownership of the industries and production for the common good, instead of profits for the few.”

Some believe that the people are unintelligent who can’t think for themselves, who will never move against the injustices that beset them daily, and that the fate of the people rests in the hands of a small number of the most intelligent or most courageous and active who will take action themselves without waiting for the common herd. According to such people it is “individual heroes” who make history and not ordinary men and women.

We are opposed to such ideas. We recognise, of course, that great men have played a big part in making the history of the world, and there have been and are great men in the workers movement, but their ideas have only been effective when the people have been convinced that these ideas are correct, are beneficial for them. So all our efforts are directed towards getting the great majority of the people to right their own wrongs, to take action themselves in their own interests and we have trust in the ability of the people to do this. We fight, and have always fought against those who have a contempt for the people and who take “short cuts” either by acts of individual violence or sabotage or holding our false promises which we know from bitter experience do not advance the peoples’ interests but hold them back.

 Despite our critics claims, we are not “arm-chair philosophers” who settle themselves back with our books of Marxist theory and wait for the people to “wake up”. We encourage working men and women to fight for higher wages, shorter working hours, decent housing and so on. We do this because we know that unless the workers are organised and active they will make no improvements in their standard of living, in fact, what they have gained in the past will be taken from them. We also do this because we know that it is often in these struggles for the smaller things that people will gain the necessary experience and confidence to fight for socialism. Socialism will not come of its own accord. Socialism does not thrive on poverty and misery. It must be fought for. Marx in “Wages, Price and Profit” wrote:

“... the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labor more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this, to say that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken-down wretches past salvation... By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would. certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement”.