Elections – yes or no?

Engaging in the bourgeois democracy process and contesting elections has always been the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the World Socialist Party of the United States. It has brought us up against those who disagree and who otherwise would have been comrades such as Proletarian Party of America and the council communists such as Paul Mattick.

The SPGB position as it presently stands is that this should not be an either/or issue. Neither action is exclusive but extra-parliamentary activities should be engaged alongside electoral action in a coordinated complementary strategy.

We suggest a read of the SPGB pamphlet (if you have not already done so)

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/whats-wrong-using-parliament

Having fought and died for the ballot, we tend to forget it is not the X on the voting paper which counts but the person's consciousness behind it. We want the working class to take over the State and convert it into an unarmed democratic administration of things. We want to see an end to capitalist class rule not the breakdown of society. The workers en masse don't need to create a different and more democratic decision-making structure from the ground up. What they need to do is to take over and perfect the existing, historically-evolved structures. We don't need to construct a socialist society from scratch; this is not the way social evolution works; there will be a degree of continuity between what exists now and what will exist in socialism as there always has been between one system of society and another.

We are not utopian system-builders. You don't abolish the state, getting rid of your control of your society at the point of actually having won the thing, and then play at utopias. You grab it and hang on against anything and everything the capitalist class, nationally and internationally, throws at you. During this process also you are transforming the institutions you hold from capitalist into socialist ones. People recognise it will be by both parliament and non-parliament means to socialism. It is the democratic result that we want. Our case for Parliament is that it is the most efficacious application of the workers' will to establish socialism. We seek the least disruptive method of revolution and in the UK, at this moment in time, parliament is that route. It is by no means a universal one size fits all prescription.

Socialists appreciate that many people focus are engaged in all kinds of worthy projects and struggles, but why do they often focus on the ephemeral and ignore the serious issues and their consequences. The Socialist Party seeks to conceivably become a lasting democratic participatory organization preserving and enriching the movement for social change. We also expect many new organizations to emerge from neighborhoods and workplaces but, alas, we are not there yet. The SociaIist Party endorses both electoral and social activism without letting either be exclusive political strategies. The Socialist Party seeks to capture the state for the purpose of abolishing the state which will ‘wither way’ and be replaced merely with an ‘administration of things’. There is no necessary clash between socialists and anarchists in their conception of future society – both are state-free.

Unable or unwilling to look beyond the short-term horizon of the next election, politicians are essentially prohibited from taking a long view of things. To avoid making hard decisions on the environment costs are pushed into the future, glossed over by an optimism on the technological innovation and market mechanisms. From this perspective, there is no need for urgent change. We must, therefore, reinvent democracy at the ballot box. The Socialist Party rejects the need for a ‘vanguard party’ to capture the state through forceful means, instead calling for the democratically mandated institution of socialism via the mechanisms of parliament. The Socialist Party argue that the state under capitalism is merely an instrument or tool of the capitalist class, meaning that politicians (knowingly or unknowingly) can only enact laws and policies that furthered the narrow interests of that class. We do not think that political representatives of the ruling class will advance the genuine interests of the working class.  Socialism is the alternative to the capitalist mode of economy. What is needed is a revolutionary movement, driven by the working class, which would dismantle the capitalist state, abolish private property, and establish socialism which means ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.’ Various revolutions have taken place, masquerading as socialist, but none Marx nor any Marxist would consider genuine.

One of the most common objections to the Socialist Party’s vision is framed in terms of ‘human nature’. The criticism is that free access and production for use sounds all very nice in theory, but it would not work in practice because generally human beings are too weak in character, selfish, or lazy to be able to function without being ruled over either by employers or government with their structures of laws, deterrents, and incentives. We view people who are capable of living co-operatively without coercion. And indeed there is much evidence indicating that societies based on cooperation rather than competition are most likely to prevail in the long term. Our case denies that there is such a thing as a fixed ‘human nature’ that we are born with. Granted, human beings are products of a long evolutionary history that doubtless shapes our psychological constitution, but ultimately we are free to choose how we behave through our decisions (which means we have no pre-determined nature, as such – humans are neither inherently good nor inherently bad). Socialists can turn the human nature objection on its head, arguing that even if it is true what our critics claim in human beings are inherently weak and greedy, that is all the more reason not to uphold the concentrations of power. Socialists recognise the reality that structures and systems within which we live deeply shape and influence us. It is all well and good to try to ignore the state or to ignore capitalism, such as to ‘build the new world within the shell of the old but from the perspective of socialism may be naïve. Establishing environmentally sound public transport networks or extending bike lanes, creating co-operatives and credit unions, are more readily achievable in the short term via state policy. Likewise, looking towards a crisis or collapse situation for capitalism may not be at all an unrealistic scenario  but it would be the case where the the state would be strengthened and reinforced to maintain and administer the most basic social services and infrastructure (e.g. electricity, water, hospitals, food rationing etc.). A complete societal breakdown and the suffering such would bring would prove counter-productive for any socialist revolution. The Socialist Party believes it is better to plan and design a post-scarcity economy rather than rely upon the crises of capitalism to deepen and intensify further.

If a mass movement is what is needed and desired then recognising the importance of ‘presenting’ our visions in the best way possible is an issue that cannot be dismissed as secondary. Socialists need to think about how best to ‘brand’ our political perspectives. We have to be as clear as possible. We need to be heard and that means understanding different audiences and adapting our language when we need to. In other words tailoring our message and using a diversity of mediums to express our ideas yet somehow managing to remain united under one banner.