The SPGB - Educate, Agitate, Organise

If we seek progress in finding the right strategy for the transition to the better world we aspire towards, then it is necessary first to correct any mistakes in our understanding of the present situation and, in general, create clarity about the matters being discussed. If the various trends in the workers’ movement at the end still disagree, then we shall at least know on which points exactly we disagree. That too would be some progress in the discussion. When two or more groups participate in a strategy discussion, then one logical assumption is that they share a common goal for it is nonsensical to search for a common strategy for different goals. No socialist seeks differences. If the differences exist, they are real. If you continue to go down the wrong road, at a certain point something happens.  A revolution from the left statists? A revolution from the right? Is it violence followed by state violence?  Or will it be a sudden decision by a critical mass of people that they are not going to take it anymore? Capitalism is and always has been deeply antagonistic to participatory democracy. Capitalism wants a political order subservient to the needs of the economy.

 The words the Socialist Party uses are very clear so it is actually the contents of our writings, not the way we express ourselves that is the problem because for the 99%, unfortunately, it is still inconceivable that they must abolish capitalism. When faced with this incontrovertible fact what do we do then? Do we  change our goals, give up our convictions? Do we then hide inconvenient facts, saying only acceptable messages, against our conviction, in order to appeal to the majority? Or do we strive to be noncommittal and say vague generalisations and truisms that cannot put anybody off like your typical politician. Do our calls for more radical goals actually harm social and environmental movements? Is the time is not ripe yet for them? Are people not intelligent or mature enough yet to receive our case for revolution?

The Socialist Party thinks everybody in the world should be fully informed about the dire situation humanity and the Earth are in today and thinks all people are capable enough of understanding the basic truths of this situation. Our task as political activists is to present them to the people. The goals some call “too” radical are actually absolute necessities. In the times we are living in, it is necessary to tell the truth, no matter how unpalatable they may be. People are not little children from whom you must hide inconvenient facts. It is necessary, if need be, to become unpopular rather than succumbing to the common ground of accepting the status quo.  It is the Socialist Party’s duty to honestly criticise the majority, even if the political price to be paid for that be high. In practical life, for just living, we are compelled to make many compromises. Let us not make compromises even in our thinking and expressing our thoughts. We may safely say that no ideal path has yet been found that guarantees success in our efforts to achieve our goals. We can also safely say that whatever path we take, it would be full of difficulties and pain. However, it has been seen in the history of mankind that we humans are also capable of being inspired by ideals and values. There are 1001 reasons to be pessimistic. But we are not dead yet. So let us go on trying.

Regarding the possibility of whether and under what circumstances socialism could replace capitalism, Marx wrote of two prerequisites:
(1)  a clear understanding of socialist principles with an unambiguous desire to put them into practice; and
(2)  an advanced industrial economy so that free access is technically possible.
As far as (2) is concerned, there's a broad consensus that there's no problem that couldn't be dealt with now, once we've collectively reached (1). The political ignorance of many of the working class has to be the major challenge.

More and more people are recognising that the capitalist monetary solution is not viable for a sustainable world and it is here that we can see the schisms in society becoming deeper. People take so much and then, as they reach the final straw, they are compelled one way or another to seek to get their voices heard. We have to have a vision to see beyond the intellectual paucity that drives current day society. Ending poverty, hunger and enabling all to have adequate living conditions these goals are all part of what is to be achieved in the period of social reorganisation and will be planned for in full consultation with local communities. Once decided democratically that we are heading for a socialist world it becomes a much simpler matter. Quite how this will happen is open to conjecture. As expressed on numerous occasions, we have no blueprint. Depriving the capitalist class of the state and its functionaries is the first objective. Once the decision is made, then it becomes a matter of organisation. Suffice it to say there will have been a period of planning and co-ordination by mass organisations in work places, in neighbourhoods, in educational establishments, in organisations with international links and in civic organisations, which will culminate in the collective and proactive decision of the people to take control over the direction of their lives immediately and for the future. With ever-increasing numbers, discussion and debate will have begun to determine the direction of the path to be taken. Democracy and majority decision-making must be the basic principle of both the movement to establish socialism and of socialist society itself.

 There is of course a perpetual tension between theory and practice that no political organisation, whether liberal, Marxist or anarchist, gets right all the time. Anyone who thinks that socialists are intellectuals, academics or armchair philosophers would be pleasantly surprised at the disdain with which these ideas – far removed from anything actually to do with working class experience - are viewed overall.

As far back as 1792 the London Corresponding Society argued for the alternative to a system where they were completely cast out from an influence upon political power and one of the objectives of the London Corresponding Society expressed at the trial of one of its members was:
"To enlighten the people; to show the people the reason, the ground of all their complaints and sufferings, when a man works hard for thirteen or fourteen hours a day the week through and is not able to maintain his family. That is what I understand of it: to show the people the ground of this: why they are not able."

Five decades later Julian Harney, editor of The Red Republican, wrote in 1850:
"It is not any amelioration of the conditions of the most miserable that will satisfy us; it is justice to all that we demand. It is not the mere improvement of the social life of our class that we seek; but the abolition of classes and the destruction of those wicked distinctions which have divided the human race into princes and paupers, landlords and labourers, masters and slaves. It is not any patching and cobbling of the present system we aspire to accomplish; but the annihilation of the system and the substitution, in its stead, of an order of things in which all shall labour and all shall enjoy, and the happiness of each guarantee the welfare of the entire community."

 In his Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth, William Thompson who had never read Marx; never heard of Marx - wrote:
"The idle possessor of the inanimate instruments of production not only secures to himself by their possession as much enjoyment as the most diligent and skilful of the real efficient producers but in proportion to the amount of his accumulation, by whatever means acquired, he procures ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times as much of the articles of wealth, the products of labour, the means of enjoyment as the utmost labour of such efficient producers can procure for them."

What is important is that those words in many respects sum up what the Socialist Party today stands for and their ideas  lives on in the thinking of the Socialist Party. We see the socialist revolution as changing away from divide and rule, fear and hate, to connecting to each other, see ourselves as basically sharing and reaching for the same goals such as peace and harmony with nature - it is a revolution of attitude that will lead to political  change.