Organising for socialism

When millions of people feel alienated—politically, economically, psychologically—they are easy prey for spectacles inviting them to displace their feelings about themselves for someone or something else. National hysteria is nationalist hysteria. The nationalist illusion that UK Plc is "our" company and its ruling elite are our compatriots is precisely the way that the vast millions of workers have been kept in line ideologically over the decades of capitalist history-and earlier.  Far better to have the workers marching to the beat of the patriot drum and flag than behind a union brass band and banner. What it all boils down to is this: if you support capitalism, you will end up by backing this or that capitalist state against the others, even when it goes to war, kills innocent men, women, and children, and commits the most barefaced aggression. It is only the Socialist who sees all capitalist states for what they ar and sees that when their own interests demand it they will all kill, execute, and commit aggression however much they have denounced other states doing the same things in the past.

The emancipation of the working class must not be conceived as a simple, single step to be taken either on the political or the industrial field. It is nothing of the kind. On the contrary, it is to be a process, and an elaborate process at that, carried out upon both the political field and the industrial. The process commences on the political field and ends on the economic. The Socialist Party holds that the process of emancipation involves, first of all, the disarming of the master class. This must be the fruit of a political struggle, and therefore renders political organisation necessary at all events up to the time of its achievement.  When the revolutionary working-class organisation has accomplished its political aim, it has not by any means emancipated the working class. It has only, by destroying the State, made it possible for the workers to complete their emancipation. This they must do by taking possession of the means by which alone they can live, and operating them intelligently and collectively so that they may live. This is what we mean when we say that the workers must organise both politically and economically. The emancipation of the working class necessitating organised action upon both the political and the economic plane obviously necessitates both political and economic organisation. The economic organisation as part of the organisation of the working class for the achievement of their emancipation must be admitted by every socialist. That such organisation, since its aim is the organisation of the working class, must be upon class lines, is the simple logical implication of the facts. That such an organisation, since its object is revolutionary, must have a revolutionary basis and be composed of revolutionaries admits of no dispute. But beyond certain general conclusions clearly arising from the given premises, and which no changes that do not first disestablish those premises can alter, the Socialist Party is not called upon to pronounce. The work the Socialist Party is to make adherents to the socialist whole, not to blueprint socialism in detail. We do know before we can have socialism we must have, not merely Socialist Party members but a socialist working class; and before we can have even the socialist economic organisation we must have the socialist material with which to form it. 

The Socialist Party endeavours to guide the progress of society into a more harmonious form, wherein classes shall cease to exist, and class-war have no place. This is the mission of the working class, and by joining the Socialist Party each person can take a part in inaugurating the new human society. This will be a world without armed forces and all that goes with them, without money and all that that entails, without the need for charities. It will be a world in which human interests are the Number One Priority, in which the only motive for human activity will be a human benefit. the position of the Socialist Party has always been, no matter whether it is the economic organisation or the socialist commonwealth that is in question, that all matters of detail most be left to those upon whom the necessity to consider and arrange them is imposed by social development. Social development does not impose this task upon the Socialist Party at the present day. In every walk of life, the broad scheme comes first. No organiser ever proceeds from the particular to the general—from the detail to the whole.

The Socialist Party is clear that the trade union is not the starting point of the political organisation if for no other reason than the fact that the unit of the union is the work-place, while the unit of the political organisation is the geographic locality; and in the second place that the workers’ effort towards their emancipation must be made voluntarily as the result of conviction of “class-consciousness”; certainly not as the result of watering down the position to appeal to a majority, and then using that majority to enforce the financial support of the minority of a type of organisation which has been enabled to build up its membership partly owing to the fact that party feeling in political matters has been rigidly excluded.