On the road to socialism

The need for educating, agitating and organising to keep the issues clear cannot be over-emphasised. All too many liberals, radicals, intellectuals, and, what is far worse, the much greater numbers of rebellious workers resisting their sad lot in life—all these, sincere, earnest and devoted—have been washed in and out of the so-called socialist organisations and their fringes and in the entire process never did get an insight or an inkling as to what it is all about. The simplicity of the socialist case is buried by friends and foe alike in mountains of “day-to-day” ISSUES so that there never is and never can be time for them to become acquainted with socialism, i.e., the socialist case.

Politics for the workers is usually an exercise in futility. They choose between various capitalist candidates on the basis of a few televised debates, and hope for a law now and then in their favour. In times of social turmoil, most of them support candidates who re-assure them and promise to keep things normal. Having only a vague idea of their own interests, workers are swindled into accepting the best deal they can get from the capitalist parties. Time after time they scab on each other, smash their most militant political organisations, police and suppress the “radicals” among themselves who have begun to wake up, dilute their collective strength by using ethnic minority groups within their class as scapegoats, and fight and die in defence of the very property investments which exploit them. Then they are told that to vote for anything but a capitalist party is “unrealistic” because only capitalist parties can win elections.

The government is a class instrument, the means by which law is made and enforced. It regulates matters which concern the capitalist class as a whole, but which no one corporation or capitalist enterprise can manage by itself: law enforcement, taxation, foreign policies, and suppression of threats to the capitalist system from riots and strikes. The schools teach us that government mediates between classes and that they owe something to the government because it represents us. But no government, in a society made up of two classes with irreconcilable interests, can represent the interests of both classes. If it represents the interests of one class, then it is by definition suppressing the other. Either the government represents our employers, or it represents us. Either the government represents our employer, or it represents us. And since it protects our employers’ monopoly over the nation’s wealth, orders us to risk our lives in its defence, limits our right to strike and safeguards their right to exploit us, and maintains our cages for our “rehabilitation” in the event that we rebel against their authority, we should recognise that “law and order” in their mouths is just one more of the many frauds by which they remain in the seat of power.

The workers, in short, are a subject class. They are prevented from changing their position by their failure to see government as a class weapon. The interests of the working class, whatever their colour, are to find jobs, obtain decent living and working conditions, raise their wages, cling to their civil liberties, and ultimately, put an end to alienated work, take over control of society’s wealth and distribute it for their own benefit.  What constitutes being a socialist? Broadly speaking, it is one who realises that capitalism can no longer be reformed or administered in the interest of either the working class or society; that capitalism is incapable of eliminating its inherent problems of poverty, wars, crises, etc.; and that socialism offers the solutions for the social problems besetting mankind since the material conditions and developments—with the single exception of an aroused socialist majority—are now ripe for a socialist society. If an organisation or an individual or a “victory” supports the continuation of capital-wage labour relationships by advocating or organizing to administer an improved, bettered reformed status quo (capitalism) instead of coming out for the socialist revolution (a frightening word which only means a complete social-economic change) then—it is NOT socialist.

There are many who believe in socialism, but because it is so far in the future, they think it best to spend your energies in the reform movement. Multiply them by thousands upon thousands who have thought, and do think; in the same way. Had all these people spent one tenth of the time for socialism that they spent in fighting for reforms, the socialist movement today would indeed be a large one, and the bigger the socialist organization gets, the closer we are to socialism. Only if people see the need for socialism, and work actively for it, will we ever obtain socialism. On the other hand, if everyone who reaches a socialist understanding comes to the conclusion that socialism will never come about in his lifetime, this is this the best guarantee that we will never see socialism. Indeed, workers who admit they believe in socialism and then fight for reforms under the excuse the workers are not ready for socialism, are in an unexplainable contradiction. They really mean to say that they themselves are not ready for socialism. In not fighting for reforms but in expending all our energy in educating workers to socialism, we know we are at least on the road to socialism. This is our case for not advocating reforms at the same time we advocate socialism. We ask that you consider it.