Educate the Educators

The education of the people, not the few alone, but the entire mass in the principles of industrial democracy is the task of the people themselves. The socialist’s is to set them thinking for themselves, and to hold ever before them the ideal based upon mutual interests. A capitalist world can never be a free world and a society based upon warring classes cannot stand secure. Such a world is full of strife and hatred and such a society can exist only by means of repression and domination.

The Left has often advocated state capitalism, sometimes misleadingly designated as “state socialism”. Whenever the state nationalized an industry, whenever the state imposed its control over industry, the Left naively accepted this as an abandonment of capitalism, as a symptom of the growing importance of socialism and the transformation of capitalism into Socialism. State capitalism emphasizes the fact of the state, of government, being an economic agency of the ruling class. State and capitalist industry, government and ruling class, become one and indivisible. State capitalism, accordingly, is not an abandonment of capitalism: it is a strengthening of capitalism. What came about was not socialism nor a step towards socialism but merely another expression of capitalist power and supremacy. Socialism is not state ownership or government management of industry, but the opposite: Socialism’s earliest act is to abolish the state. State capitalism is not socialism and never can become socialism. State capitalism attempts to regulate and direct capital and labor. State regulation may, to some measure, prove onerous to the capitalist, but is accepted as the necessary condition for the progressive promotion of his interests, however, it proves much more onerous to the employee. Socialists rejects “co-operation” with the capitalist, in industry as in politics and the policy of trying to maintain industrial peace by coercion and cajolery. One means of cajolery is an arrangement by which the workers may “co-operate” with the employers in the consideration of matters affecting a particular industry or factory. It brings the workers under the sway of the capitalist in ways that weakens the independent action of our class by offering a sham democracy in the factories and offices. Industry is not transformed into a state function ruled through a ministerial department, but transformed into new administrative norms of the organized associations of producers. The Socialist Party rejects state ownership, rejects state capitalism as a “phase” of “socialism” that can “grow” into “socialism”.  This concept of transformation in practice doesn’t transform capitalism, it transforms the socialist movement into a caricature and a prop of Capitalism. The Socialist Party insist upon the social management through industrial democracy.

For sure, there is still some room for reform and betterment of conditions in the present social system, but this is of minor matter compared to the need for industrial and social reorganization. The real great change in history must be the socialization of the means of our daily life. Privately owned production for individual profit are no longer compatible with civilisation’s progress. With all its tremendous technology through invention and discovery this capitalist world of ours has not yet learned how to feed itself. There is no longer any excuse for hunger. All the materials and all the forces are at hand and easily available for the production of all things needed to provide food, clothing and shelter for every man, woman and child, thus putting an end to the poverty and misery which sicken humanity. But the technology must be released from private ownership and control, socialized, democratized, and set into operation for the common good of all instead of the private profit of the few. Common ownership and democratic control are inseparable. To the working class belongs the future.

There is no room for misunderstanding among us as to what our position means and requires. It requires a clean break with all the perversions and distortions of the real meaning of socialism and democracy and their relation to each other, and a return to the original formulations and definitions. Nothing short of this will do. Only a revolution that replaces the class rule of the capitalists by the class rule of the workers can really establish real social democracy. Socialists seeks to inaugurate a system of industrial democracy in place of capitalist autocracy and control. Like capitalism itself industrial democracy knows no boundaries, color, race, creed or sex. As capitalism knows only profit, industrial democracy knows only the exploitation by which profit is possible. Socialists organize to make exploitation an impossibility. Socialism is not about getting more wages, less hours and better conditions, but achieving social power. It means solving social problems and of making the workers themselves representative of a new society working for the good of all and the profit of none. The workers ensuring their own free development, their own liberation—is the liberation of all society, for the workers are society, in fact and numbers. The capitalists as a class, are a useless parasitic minority that can be dispensed with. Workers have no interests in common with capitalists and in fact, their material interests are in conflict. It is declared purpose of the Socialist Party to abolish the wage-system, and supplant it by a system of industrial co-operation in which the community shall have full control for its own benefit. The social revolution becomes a fact when people have acquired sufficient consciousness of their control over society to establish that control in practice. The capitalist state will weakened by socialist parliamentary criticism and action. The capitalist state will be undermined by the developing class power and struggles of workers’ movement by all the means of action at its disposal. But for parliamentarianism to be of value it must relate itself to other forms of struggle and abandon its policy of reformism.