Worker V Capitalist

The lesson of past decades is that the problems facing the great majority of people will never be solved within the confines of the capitalist system. The system of exploitation must be abolished and replaced by a new, higher system, socialism. Our argument with the Left and the policies it is advocating is not that they would not be some degree of benefit to working class, but that measured against the criterion of achieving socialism which is, after all, what the Left claims as its goal, they fall far short. The aim of the Socialist Party is to establish socialism and abolish the right of one man to rob another of the fruits of his labour. This is what makes our Party different from all others. Our aim to make the working class the masters of their own destiny, to win political power, and establish socialism.

The attempt to cover the road to socialism in small steps, to start it off through changes or reforms which are possible under capitalism, leads inevitably to forgetting the final aim and making the means an end in themselves. Changes of capitalism become changes under capitalism. Many reformist ‘socialists’ consider state capitalism the progressive unfoldment of a new social order. The theory envisages capitalism which leads to state capitalism to socialism. State capitalism is not socialism and never can become socialism. State capitalism regulates and directs capital and labour; it seeks to realise the Utopia of peace between the classes, of the abolition, or at least suspension, of the class struggle. State capitalism’s control of the industry will not make it any less ugly than it is under capitalism. Indeed, the direct intervention of the government in its affairs will increase workers’ difficulties.

State capitalism is the old conception of “growing into” socialism, – transforming capitalism into socialism by “democratising” the government, placing it in the hands of “the people.” As a strategy it it strengthens the state and weakens the workers. Capitalism is fundamentally and necessarily undemocratic; it cannot be democratised, it must be abolished by the socialist revolution.

The social revolution becomes a fact when the working class has acquired sufficient consciousness of its control over production and distribution to establish that control in practice. Socialism rejects “co-operation” with the capitalist, in industry. One means of trickery is an arrangement by which the workers “co-operate” with the employers in the consideration of matters affecting a particular industry or factory. All proposals for a sham industrial democracy are useless and dangerous; they are schemes directed at the independence and action of workers, aiming to subordinate the worker to the capitalist.