Socialism is a class movement

Red Rosa

Socialism used to be easy to understand until university professors started to do their dissertions on Marxism. Describing a world without private property or money is not too complicated. Socialist conceptions like universal human emancipation and of the free association of individuals are not complex. Those who make up the ruling class are determined to defend their interests against those they exploit, and they are ready to any means necessary including confusion. Socialists aim at no less than human freedom, our self-liberation. Socialist revolution is not merely a change of regime but a new economic system and in this process we change our relationships with each other and we change ourselves. We no longer live fragmented lives, alienated from each other and from ourselves.  We will not be isolated individuals but social individuals. Socialism releases the human potential to become a true community of freely-developing individuals and this new socialist society is not just a variant of the old one. Wherever labour-power is bought and sold humans are treating each other and themselves as if they were objects.

Mankind is frustrated at every turn by capitalism. We desire security, but this we cannot have. We desire peace and prosperity, only to find ourselves fighting devastating wars which bring in their wake economic catastrophes. The potential of most men and women are never realised. Their intellectual and artistic talents are warped on every occasion. Attempts to satisfy human needs are frustrated under capitalism.

Socialism offers a simple solution. All the things created by the ingenuity of man, all that science and art had given to the humanity over  generations is to be used, not for the few, but for the benefit of mankind as a whole. A new economic system of common ownership of the means of production and distribution, that raises production to a higher level, and ends all social conflict by creating a community of free and equal producers, striving not for sectional interests, but for the common good, these are the things which we aspire towards. This socialist commonwealth, liberating the individual from all economic, political and social oppression, will provide the basis, for real liberty and for the full and harmonious development of the personality, giving full scope for the growth of the creative faculties of the mind.

Yet academics have vulgarised the idea of Socialism, corrupting the meaning of socialism to a mere alteration of the property system and the introduction of planned economy on the basis of a barrack-like collectivism. The idea of socialism was divorced from the idea of liberty. State capitalism became regarded as a stage on the way to socialism. State capitalism concentrates an overwhelming power in the hands of the state, and places the citizen completely at the mercy of the State. The State, as the owner of banking, industry, agriculture and transport becomes the universal employer, the universal landlord. It controls everything on which the fate and happiness of the individual citizen depend. The citizen is dependent on the State as regards employment,  housing,  amusement, and education. State capitalism does not yet solve any of the outstanding problems. It does not abolish crises, the classes, the wage system. Under state-capitalism there is production of commodities for sale, not production for use.

Socialism is based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, upon production for use as against production for profit, upon the abolition of all classes, all class divisions, class privilege, class rule, upon the production of such abundance that the struggle for material needs is completely eliminated, so that humanity, at last freed from economic exploitation, from oppression, from any form of coercion by a state machine, can devote itself to its fullest intellectual and cultural development.  Anything less will not be socialism.

 Together we can transform the world. Our problem is not that people do not like what we say but that they believe little can be done. We want a different world and people to agree in a common vision that prosperity and peace are possible.  If our shared wish common is a world without poverty and war, why don’t we say so?  Why be silent about it? We should no longer be a scattered attempt to modify capitalism, but each one of us being part of a global effort to end this self-destructive system.  Across all divisions of national borders, religions and  races, we must be the alternative, insisting upon an end to capitalism. Let you, yourself be the starting point for the a universal call for the wholesale abolition of capitalist exploitation.

 People are tired of armaments and war. People are mobilising and resisting non-violently. They are saying no to militarism and war and insisting on disarmament. They have seen that they release uncontrollable forces of tribalism and nationalism. We need to acknowledge that our common humanity, our class unity,  is more important than our different nationalities. Socialists set about to build structures through which we can co-operate and which reflect our interconnected and interdependent relationships.

The Left exclude the working class from controlling and decision making positions, and workers are rendered passive, kept in ignorance and are controlled from above by a political leadership that looked first and foremost to secure its own position.  ‘Revolution’ for the Left-wing is purely political and not social and hence envisaged only as the transfer of political power from one class of leaders to another. The leadership of the party, therefore, simply seeks state power for itself and looks to manipulate people to that objective. This regimentation from above might have been appropriate to a backward Russia looking to industrialise a semi-feudal uneducated society but the adoption of Leninism by the Left suffocated the vital and constructive life forces that alone were capable of overthrowing capitalism.  In the capitalist developed parts of the world, the problem was not that of establishing a dictatorship to impose progress but on the contrary, of acquiring complete liberty. Exalted claims were made for the ‘revolutionary vanguard party’ and, workers own organisations were deemed redundant and devalued. The ‘workers party’ had acquired absolute hegemony.

And what did it achieve? A defenceless, unorganised and a depoliticised working class left to face repeated recessions and war. The whole character of socialist movement was lost to the politics of party-building.  Whoever challenged this was immediately vilified as counter-revolutionary even if it as those very same party cadres engaged in the process of Bolshevisation  that were sabotaging the workers movement and betraying the workers. Left-wing leaders shared with the capitalist class the same conception of the inability of the workers to do anything autonomous and creative in politics. The workers had to be disciplined, organised and directed from above. With such a negative view of the working class potential it is no surprise that the professional ‘revolutionaries’ would demand political power for themselves deny it to the working class.

Lest we be accused of misrepresenting the Left, Lenin himself openly declares that the workers are ‘so degraded’ and ‘so corrupted’ that they can only be liberated from above by a revolutionary vanguard.

“The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward), the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts… that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class… It cannot work without a number of ‘transmission belts’ running from the vanguard to the advanced class, and from the latter to the mass of the working people." - (Lenin, The Trade Unions, The Present Situation and Trotsky’s Errors, 1920)

This vanguard, Lenin claims, embodies the ‘revolutionary energy of the working class’. More accurately, the ‘vanguard’ appropriates and usurps the position of the working class in the socialist movement. What Marx had explicitly sought to transcend, the so-called Marxists introduces, a bureaucratic centralism in the name of democracy and a rigidly hierarchical structure that subordinates the working class to the party, the party to the vanguard, and the vanguard to the leader.

It is no surprise that in this new age of social movements such as Occupy has shied away from what they perceive as the discredited party-politics of ‘isms’,  rejecting the ‘old class-politics’ of socialism. The Left vision should indeed be seen as an alien aspiration. Revolution is a process in which the proletariat develop their class-consciousness and their own organs of self-emancipation, winning control of society by these means. Horizontal democracy, the democracy of general assemblies, a delegate system of communication, liason and coordination between the councils between layers of decision making local, regional, worldwide are not antagonistic aims. People through its own efforts, develop a new mentality, new values and new skills. Workers  will emerge as the self-acting class capable of assuming the responsibility of providing the welfare of the world in their own hands. The working class educates itself in how to administer in a self-managed society regulated by its own associations.

We should caution against making in advance a fetish of particular organisational forms. The working class will be quite capable of knowing what is and is not the appropriate organisational structure, the more it actually becomes the revolutionary, class conscious, class. New conditions, relations and struggles require new forms, for sure. The principle of creative human agency requires that human beings be free to create the organisations best suited to its circumstances and its aspirations. To claim anything more than this is to fetishise the organisation and to invite the dogma that effectively constrains revolutionary activity.

Manufacturers of systems and models (and we could name many), believe they have discovered the remedy for society's ills, seeing socialist movement as a fertile ground for making converts. Rather than liberators such intellectuals enter the workers’ movement as the bearers of the very hierarchical attitudes which is the expressed aim of working class socialism to abolish. Socialism is a creation of the working class, self-organising in society itself. Socialism is constituted from below, not imposed or legislated from above. Class consciousness  is a self-transformation, not something that can be achieved from the outside.

Rosa Luxemburg explains:
 "Socialism must be created by the masses, by every proletarian. Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be broken. That is socialism."
 Elsewhere she says:
 “If the proletariat fails to fulfill its class duties, if it fails to realise socialism, we shall crash down together to a common doom.”
 And again Luxemburg states:
  “The essence of socialist society consists in the fact that the great labouring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction.”

 A ‘socialist’ revolution that lacked this collective class agency may well be able to seize state control but political adventurers and intriguers would take over. Any ‘socialist’ state would simply be a counterfeit version of the capitalist state.