Looking Forward to 2016

WE HAVE A WORLD TO WIN
WE HAVE A PLANET TO SAVE 

Today, on the first day of a new year, there is doubt and uncertainty about the future. But our New Year message is one of hope and confidence that once the working people take political power into their own hands, they can build world socialism using all its resources for the benefit of its people and contributing to human progress throughout the world. We remain convinced that socialism can only come as a result of the taking of power from the hands of the capitalist class by the working class. The fact that it is possible for this revolution to take place peacefully does not make it less of a revolution. The degree to which the capitalist class resists the establishment of socialism depends in the first place on how well organised, how politically conscious, how determined, and how strong are the forces of the working class.  In the second place, it depends on whether, faced with this overwhelming force, the capitalists decide to yield to the democratic will of the people, or stake everything on a desperate resistance. It is not possible to give any final guarantee as to what the capitalists will do. But the aim of the working people should be to ensure that the transition to socialism is a peaceful one. The first condition for this is the organisation of overwhelming majority of the working class for the ending of the capitalist system. The more this strength is mobilised, the less likely it becomes that the capitalists will resort to violence. If they do, the responsibility will be on them, not on the working class. Let us repeat and never forget, that democracy, even under capitalist economy, offers the best field for the development of the class struggle.

 Democracy has always been a bread-and-butter question. The demands of the Chartists were democratic demands for one vote for every man, for annual parliaments, and so on; but the Chartist leader Stephens was right when he said the Charter was a ‘knife and fork question’. The workers who rallied behind the Charter wanted the vote, because they wanted to end their economic slavery, their twelve-hour day, to end child-labour in the cotton mills and women’s labour in the mines. Having won the vote in 1867, the workers in further struggles were able to force through laws giving better conditions to miners, to factory workers, to seamen; in 1875 they won the right to picket. And after they had gained a firm legal position for the unions in 1905, British workers were able to win big strikes for wage increases and shorter hours in the year before the war. Democracy is not abstract. It means that the people have definite rights – the right to organise, the right to strike, the right to vote, the right to free speech. These rights are weapons without which the British people would be no better off today than they were a hundred years ago. These rights did not drop from heaven. Men died to win them. Nor can we say that once these rights are won they are safe forever. They always represent a concession which the capitalists would like to take away. The struggle for democracy is always going on. In the coming new year, the Tories are intent upon weakening the power of the trade unions. We need to stop them.

Transforming Parliament into an instrument of the will of the working people, is one of the most important points of our position. When we speak of Parliament’s role in the transition to Socialism we do not mean the same thing those who talk of the “Parliamentary road”. We mean a mass revolutionary movement resulting in a parliamentary majority which takes decisive action to break the power of the capitalists and transfer political power to the working class. We do not think capitalism can be “reformed” into socialism. It is impossible to proceed to the building of socialism if the existing capitalist state machine is left as it is.

What we mean by socialism is what the Marxist pioneers meant—the ending of the exploitation of man by man, the abolition of the system of rent, interest and profit, planned production for use instead of private profit, and the common ownership of the means of production and distribution by the people. This is the reason why our Declarations of Principles is set out in the clearest terms to explain the way towards our aim of socialism. It is only through this change in social relations and in the material basis of society that the transformation of man himself can come about, with a great educational and cultural advances. We reject the standpoint that capitalism has found a way to solve its problems. We are against all theories which seek to argue that some sort of “reformed” or “people’s” capitalism can abolish the possibility of slumps, guarantee full employment and rising standards, and remove the drive to war. The mounting problems of the workers, the pensioners and benefit claimants, the women and young people, together with the constant menace of wars, shows how wrong are those who would have us believe that we are living in a paradise on earth today. And behind and at the root of all the immediate difficulties facing the people are the great fundamental problems which only socialism can solve. Increasingly, people are asking questions about the world’s future to which only socialism can provide a constructive answer. The world is ripe and over-ripe for socialism. Only socialism can end the contradiction between social production and individual appropriation, abolish the exploitation of man by man, make possible long-term planning, and utilise the planet’s resources and every new development in technique and scientific knowledge for the benefit of the people.

They think us dull, they think us dead,

But we shall rise again.

A trumpet through the land shall ring,

A heaving through the mass,

A trampling through their palaces

Until they break like glass.

Ernest Jones

FOR WORLD SOCIALISM