Why the Socialist Party

Any effort to increase workers awareness for a new society - a socialist cooperative commonwealth - has to to be viewed favourably. We need to know where we are going if we set out on a journey, otherwise, we all risk ending up in different places. Agreeing a consensus on the route and the mode of transport is desirable. We all must learn from our own particular exploitation but it is also necessary to go further and recognise the commonality of how we are controlled and conditioned. Then we seek common cause and action. We cannot create an hierarchy of degree of individual exploitation. 

In order to fit themselves for this task, the working class must acquire the consciousness which alone can enable them to do so. This consciousness must comprise, first of all, a knowledge of their class position. They must realise that, while they produce all wealth, their share of it will not, under the present system, be more than sufficient to enable them to reproduce their efficiency as wealth producers. They must realize that also, under the system they will remain subject to all the misery of unemployment, the anxiety of the threat of unemployment, and the cares of poverty. They must understand next the implications of their position – that the only hope of any real betterment lies in abolishing the social system which reduces them to mere sellers of their labour power, exploited by the capitalists. They will see then, since this involves dispossessing the master class of the means through which alone the exploitation of labour power can be achieved, there must necessarily be a struggle between the two classes – the one to maintain the present system of private (or class) ownership of the means of living and the other to wrest such ownership from them and make these things the property of society as a whole. This is the struggle of a dominant class to maintain its position of exploitation, on the one hand, and of an enslaved and exploited class to obtain its emancipation, on the other. It is a class struggle.
A class which understands all this is class-conscious. It has only to find the means and the method by which to proceed, in order to become the fit instrument of the revolution. What is the role of a revolutionary organisation except to bring under its umbrella all the struggles of the working class into a mass movement? To unify towards one goal. The abolition of capitalism.

With or without revolutionary organisations, workers and oppressed peoples will and do resist and they discover for themselves the best means of that struggle. Unlike the Leninist/Trotskyist parties, the Socialist Party has no programme of assuming leadership of such struggles and its only advice is simple - such movements have to be democratic, and adding the caveat, that such victories which are achieved will never fully satisfy aspirations and may indeed be only transitory and require constant defending.

So, therefore, understanding that the working class (and, of course, it is accepted that we are a heterogeneous class - with conflicting interests at times and in certain places) do engage in the class struggle and require no declaration of class war from any political group, what then is the role of a revolutionary party but to advocate and educate, until itself is in a position of being a mass movement that can go on to organise as the expression of the class.

And what is it we advocate and educate for? A new society that is an alternative to the existing one. And if that is considered as abstract propaganda-ism, so be it, we plead guilty. The real crime, though, is to forget what we struggle for. We understand the limitations of a revolutionary organisation in our present time and make no grandiose claims of our own organisation's importance to the workers' actual battles in the class struggle, that they can and do conduct without the intervention of a revolutionary political party. 

The aim of the Socialist Party is to persuade others to become socialist and act for themselves, organising democratically and without leaders, to bring about a new socialist society. We are solely concerned with building a movement for socialism. We are not a reformist party with a program of policies to patch up capitalism. The Socialist Party seeks to deepen and better articulate our understanding of the world, Publishing and stating our case wherever and however possible while supporting our fellow-workers in the trade unions (and other movements of the working class), supporting their strikes and actions. The Socialist Party consistently advocates a fully democratic society based upon cooperation and production for use. The more who join the Socialist Party, the more we will be able to get our ideas across. The more experiences we will be able to draw on and greater will be the new ideas for building the movement for socialism. The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader and there are no followers.