Education towards Revolution

The Socialist Party has one aim — the propagation of socialism. We hope to see society transformed, to be changed into something quite different from what it is now. It is a new society that we are working to realise, not tidying up our present political mess. The real business of socialists is to impress on the workers the fact that they ought to run society. It is not too much to expect that the whole working-class can be educated in the aims of socialism in due time. History teaches us that no revolts that are without aim are successful even for a time. We are no mere debating club, or philosophical society and so we must take part in all popular movements where we can make our own views unmistakably clear; that is a most important part of the education in organisation.  Regular and co-ordinated exchanges are a necessary part of education; no independence is sacrificed by sharing knowledge, and propaganda is made much easier by it. One word to those who hold a tendency aloof from joining a political party. If you really disagree with our principles, or the tactics which follow from them, your membership would inevitably result in disputes and splits. But if you share our principles and tactics as practically the same, it seems a great mistake to maintain a distance. The present is no time for the formation of separate political organisation. We appeal to all who agree with us to join our Party so that we may confront in unison our common enemy in these troublesome yet hopeful times that are ahead.

The Socialist Courier blog aspires to attract attention to the study of our principles from those who have not yet thought of socialism, or who are hostile to it through ignorance. We seek to awaken the apathetic and  to strengthen the wavering. It is its task to attack unsparingly the miserable system  of capitalism with its rich and poor, slaves and slave-owners. We invite from all discussion of anything we post, in the belief that even criticism may bring forth useful information which might otherwise have been neglected.  Our appeal is to the workers chiefly for it will be through them alone, wage- slaves , the present misery will end. Socialism above all things aims at obtaining for the worker the desire for beauty, for knowledge, for more abundant life, in short. Not the sham art of commercial consumerist commodity capitalism, void of life or reason for existence. The way of working when people are not working for wages, but for the wealth of the community will mean the work would be done deliberately and thoughtfully for the good’s sake and not for the profit’s sake.  In work so done there is no drudgery; whereas ordinary work now is nothing but wage-slavery. Work will be done with variety with real workmanship and artistry.  Our function is to educate the people by criticising all attempts at so-called reforms, whose aim is not the realisation of socialism, but the hindering of it; and by encouraging the  the working class towards Revolution. The true aim of the people is to learn how to live, and to assert their right to do so in the teeth of all opposition.

State or municipal ownership is not socialism. There is a certain section of left-winger who never tire of hailing all such demands for nationalisation, a form of ownership in which the private capitalist is seen to be superfluous as a sign of the growth of the socialism. Calls for such demands is highly misleading. It is only state capitalism, not an abandonment of capitalism: but the strengthening of capitalism. Socialism abolishes the state and industry is transformed into new administrative norms of the organised producers, and not through the state. Socialism rejects state ownership, rejects state capitalism as a phase of socialism. State capitalism is not socialism and never can become socialism.

The lure offered to the workers is the struggle to “democratise” state capitalism by transforming state capitalism into socialism by “democratising” the government, placing it in the hands of “the people.” This policy is equally condemnable as strategy and tactics, – as strategy, it dispenses with the necessity of overthrowing the state as an indispensable phase of the social revolution; as tactics, it strengthens the state and weakens the proletariat by obscuring the fact that its power resides in control of the industrial process. Moreover, state capitalism is fundamentally and necessarily undemocratic; it cannot be democratised, it must be abolished by the working class. The coming of socialism is a process of  implacable struggles, not a dress parade of amicable transformation. The concept of “transformation” in practice doesn’t transform capitalism, it transforms the workers’ movement into a caricature of socialism and a prop of capitalism.Socialism is a struggle for proletarian power.

On the strictest definition, socialism is the movement of working class people trying to build an alternative to capitalism; and a "socialist" mode of production would likewise be a new set of self-reproducing relations of production (associated labour, worker control, etc) - however there is no complete agreement over how exactly these relations of production are to be like. What we do know is that state-ownership is just another separation of workers from control over means of production and thus another type of class society, and conflating that with all forms "socialism" gets socialists irate.

 People say ‘I want to see a plan as it were of the new state of Society.’ Our reply is when the plan is visible the new state of society will be realised, it cannot be visible before.