No More Reforms...We Want Revolution

As Eugene V. Debs said, “Socialism will completely revolutionize the community life. For the first time in history the people will be truly free and rule themselves, and when this comes to pass poverty will vanish like mist before the sunrise.” As W.E.B. Du Bois said, “the emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor”.

The dream of liberty has persisted from the days of the slave revolts of Spartacus against their imperial masters through to the peasant uprisings against their medieval lords, to the strikes and bloody protests against the industrial barons. Socialist freedom is not something abstract, but something concrete and real that is ensured by providing for human need as the core motivator of society, not corporate greed as under capitalism. So no more homeless, no more hungry, no more desperation for work, no more people trapped in dead-end jobs, no more elderly people choosing between affording food or medication. The right to a life of human dignity, for all. Socialists want all people to enjoy in the fruits of humanity’s labour over countless generations and to be given the opportunities to freely add to those achievements as best they can. People will have the freedom to explore their interests and abilities; to paint, to write, to experiment, to study, to be creative and to develop as human beings.

The Socialist Party holds that capitalism is not worth reforming and that, in any case, it cannot be reformed so as really to improve the workers’ condition, or protect them from capitalism’s recurring depressions and wars, or from displacement by automation. Moreover, as long as workers are deluded by the hope of “improved conditions” under capitalism they will turn to whatever party they think can deliver the goods. And many of these parties are in the reform business precisely to divert the workers from a revolutionary socialist solution to their problems, and to preserve capitalism. Some reform parties denies they are reformist. Trotskyists attempt to disguise their reform demands as “partial steps” or “transitional measures.” They’re still reforms, though. They maintain that some kind of “socialism” is their objective but its realisation is not considered possible for an indefinite period in the future. For the present, they say, the thing to do is to work for measures that will allegedly alleviate the suffering of the workers.

The Socialist Party grasps the fact that revolutions are not made, but that they come, that capitalism itself is bound to create the revolutionary crisis that will ultimately set the working class into motion. It holds, therefore, that it is the duty of a bona fide party of socialism always to hold the issue of the abolition of wage slavery up before the workers clip and clear, and to expose reforms as delusions where they are not concealed measures of reaction. Those reformist parties claiming to be “socialist” have as their concept of socialism as one in which industry is nationalized and administered by the state. The Socialist Party agrees with Marx that “the existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.” When the state takes over all that really happens is that the workers, who remain wage slaves, exchange one master, the private capitalists, for another, the bureaucrat. This definitely is not socialism. In contrast to the “radical” reformist parties, the Socialist Party calls for abolition of the Only when the means of production are owned socially and administered democratically by the workers will we have genuine socialism.

Either the working class takes control of affairs out of the hands of the capitalist class, ends the system of capitalist private ownership, and rebuilds our society on the basis  of social ownership of the means of production, democratic management and  production for use; Or, as surely as night follows day, the capitalist system will lead us down the road to barbarism. The Socialist Party, therefore, calls upon workers to repudiate the parties of capitalism, and to support it for a socialist reconstruction of society. The goal of the Socialist Party is the common ownership by the people of the land and all the instruments of wealth production, and one in which the workers will manage democratically. To bring to birth this society of peace, abundance and boundless human happiness, the Socialist Party appeals to the working class to support the principles of the Socialist Party, and prepare now to help build the socialist ballot. Unite with us to end the social system that dooms us to a lifelong tenure of wage slavery, with unemployment, poverty and wars as inseparable and ever recurrent features. Unite with us to establish free access socialism.