The Anti-capitalist Campaigners

Capitalism continues to generate recessions, waste and wars. Amid the many crises today people are once again debating the meaning of socialism. The nearest thing to a common understanding of the various “socialisms” is the negative “anti-capitalism” yet more and more parties on the Left spectrum, have virtually dropped the building of socialism from their manifestoes, promising to maintain some sort of version of regulatory capitalism until it makes us wonder in what sense are these parties still “socialist”? One reason why the Socialist Party view reformists with such antipathy is that they made the abolition of that system and the creation of a socialist society more distant and difficult.

The simplest description of a socialist system of production is that, unlike all class societies, there is no ruling class that extracts surplus labour from the producers. The capitalist class profits because they control. As Rosa Luxemburg contended, until a socialist revolution is successful, the most important result of any struggle is the building of working-class self-confidence and self-organisation. If the class must rely on itself, it must be united.

The Socialist Party’s central message was stated in the Rules of the First International, "that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves." We strive to get fellow-workers to trust in their own power to achieve their own emancipation and that our belief is that there is no task that a worker cannot accomplish. We educate fellow-workers to look inward upon their own class for everything required, to have confidence in the ability of their own class to fill every position in the revolutionary movement. In short, we ask fellow members of the working class to take to heart the full meaning of socialism, a free association of social individuals. The revolutionary movement is the gravedigger of capitalism. It is part of the world movement of the global working class for peace, social democracy and socialism. The emancipation of the working class is the revolutionary act of self-emancipation. The Socialist Party declares that its aim is to develop the class consciousness of the workers through our agitation in the class struggle. The job we envisage for is to bring together social and political analysis that has special relevance to the waging of the class struggle and the deepening of working class consciousness. Our ambition is to achieve socialism alongside the working class as a whole, for the whole of mankind. The central core of the Socialist Party’s politics is the belief in socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. This involves a rejection of the Leninist vanguards and national liberation anti-imperialists.

The Socialist Party swam against the current by rebutting reformism and left reformist illusions that capitalism could be transformed by the action of various social groups such as technocrats without the conquest of power by the working class. It involved, repudiating the widespread belief that capitalism can permanently solved its inherent tendency to crisis and the associated idea that capitalism will collapse without the agency of socialist revolution. Capitalism continues with its ups and downs. These ideas were unpopular amongst broad circles of the left. They were widely regarded as ‘dogmatic’ and ‘sectarian’.  Countless reformists have come and gone, believing that within the framework of the capitalist system, of commodity production and of exploitation they could achieve a better society. It is a hard and difficult job struggling for real socialism and not piecemeal palliatives. It may the efforts of several generations. But for anybody to whom the word “solidarity” remains meaningful, it is worth all the effort. The endeavour of total human emancipation, the endeavor to build a socialist society on a worldwide basis, is in our hearts. The Socialist Party represents the continuation of the essence of Marx's thought: the self-emancipation of the working class as its fundamental guiding principle to establish a new society built on the "association of free and equal producers."