Socialism cannot be 'given'. It has to be won by a politically conscious majority, who know what it is. The democratic 'ends determine the means' rather than the Leninist/Stalinist justifying of them. All the parties of the right, Left, centre, blue, green, purple, red and tartan are parties of class rule.
It is not going to happen until a majority recognise their common interests to make it so happen. But this doesn't stop us struggling to deal with the day to day effects of capitalist exploitation. Countries like China didn't get their timings wrong, as they established capitalism with all of its birth pangs, accelerated by their states, in the absence of a capitalist class, to take them out of feudalism. Effectively post-feudal revolutions. A fiction, useful to the capitalist class, the idea of socialism ever existing.
"State capitalism would be a step forward for us." (Lenin)
"What you have is state capitalism." (John Foster Dulles to Nikita Khruschev)
Common ownership is NOT state ownership. There is no government over people in a socialist/communist society. Rather people themselves administer things (production and distribution etc.) Unfortunately, 'social ownership' was confused with state ownership. A 'meet the new boss' result. Common ownership and social ownership (means the same) has no need for a state as it is a classless society managed by us all in condition of free access to the commonly owned and created wealth.
"From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." (Both abilities and needs are self-assessed)
We have a World to win.
"The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.’ (1879 Marx and Engels)
Capitalist democracy, flawed though it is, can and must still be used as the 'Achilles heel' of capitalism, as long as a sufficient majority are convinced of socialism, i.e. the establishment of a commonly owned society then the capitalist class will be unable to resist. (Peacefully if we can violently only if we must).
Clause 6 in the S.P.G.B.'s Declaration of Principles, (1904) states:
"That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic."
It would be foolish to expect the capitalist class to voluntarily give up its privileged position in society. Governments exist solely to administer the society as it exists, in the interests of the ruling (capitalist) class, so governments will not end the privilege. Capitalism will continue as long as the working class accepts it. The working class will have to force the capitalist class to give up its position of privilege. Socialism will be the result of workers democratically choosing a new, classless society based on the satisfaction of human needs. And since capitalism is a global system of society, it must be replaced globally. The machinery of government has to be captured in order to prevent guns being fired upon the workers. Direct action as such will consist of workers being self-organised for the event.
No post-capitalist society has ever existed anywhere. Please do not conflate claims of 'socialism', which are really reformist capitalist positions, with the real thing, a commonly owned, democratic, wage-free, a World of free access. It is impossible to have some oasis of socialism inside a global capitalist society. It can only arise out of an advanced capitalism with a majority of educated and politically conscious workers, self-organised to this end. Nothing will stop this when it occurs. People will be caught up in the new post-capitalist Zeitgeist, nothing will stop an idea which time has come. Ultimately, everyone wants a World without war (business by other means) and poverty (absolute and relative). You can't have capitalism without those twin concomitants.
Wee Matt
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