“We cannot traffic in our principles, we can make no compromise, no agreement with the ruling system. We must break with the ruling system and fight it to a finish." - Wilhelm Liebneckt
The Socialist Party rejects this view which implies that the working class is a simple tool to be used as a mass basis for the capture of power by a left-wing political party. Lenin's theory of the vanguard party — his most notorious departure from Marx which says that the revolution can only be achieved by a party of professional revolutionaries leading the discontented masses — was taken straight from the Russian revolutionary tradition. Its pedigree can be traced back through Tkachev and Ogarev to West European thinkers like Babeuf and Buonarroti whose idea of revolution was coloured by the Great French Bourgeois Revolution. Marx went beyond, and specifically repudiated, the idea of self-appointed liberators leading the mass of ignorant people to freedom. Lenin constantly referred back to the French Revolution and the attitude of the Jacobins for inspiration. The practical policy that grew out of the French Revolution and continued like a red thread through the working class movement afterwards, openly adopted successively by Blanqui and Lenin was based on the idea that an active minority can carry with it an inert and ignorant mass; it is a policy that depends upon leadership and ultimately places power in the hands of one or two outstanding people. Many people still think that Lenin was a socialist. Nothing could be further from the truth. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Jacobin ideas have almost died out in France but were enjoying a revival in Russia, a country whose political and social system had many of the features of France’s ancien regime. Here the idea of a minority revolutionary dictatorship had an attraction for the anti- Tsarist revolutionaries, including some of those who considered themselves Marxists. Among the latter was Lenin. All the guidance by revolutionary vanguard parties with "infallible” leaders like Lenin at their head can never be a substitute for a self-reliant working class.
The change from capitalism to socialism can only be carried out consciously, as the conscious act of the great majority of the working class. Members of the Socialist Party, unlike Bolshevik professional revolutionaries, do not try to latch on to the working class. Socialist Party members are not a special type of person whose ideas are formed in a different way from the rest of the working class. We are simply part of the working class who want and understand socialism, faced with the problem of how to get their ideas over to our fellow-workers. To do this, we need to take no special steps to be with the working class. We are already there. The task of the Socialist Party at present, when they are a tiny minority, is to organise ourselves in as effective a way as possible to put over the case for socialism and to help the evolution of socialist understanding. For this, an independent political organisation and propaganda agency is best suited. This is the only organisational form which allows socialists to express their views fully and freely, openly and honestly. If they were part of an organisation whose aims they did not share, the Socialist Party would have to waste its time on the problems of that organisation. And besides, we would be associated with it and its failures.
There are many ways of getting ideas across to other workers; through your own journal, pamphlets and leaflets; through meetings indoor and outdoor; through canvassing and discussion. This is currently the work of the Socialist Party. We contest elections in opposition to the other parties. Elections are about who shall control the state. At present, because the great majority of workers don't know what socialism is or don't see it as a real alternative, they elect to office people pledged to run capitalism. Socialist Party members, however, vote only for socialist candidates. We play no part in handing over political power to the capitalist class.
The Socialist Party is not opposed to the Parliamentary system. We hold that the only important thing that is wrong about Parliament, from our point of view, is that it is controlled by the wrong people and for the wrong purpose. Its M.P.s at present have been sent there by electors who want capitalism to be retained. When a majority of the electors have become socialists they will send their delegates to Parliament with the mandate to establish socialism. In the words of our Declaration of Principles, the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, will be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation. We have always held the above views, and have never been beguiled by the various opposing views that have had their long or short periods of popularity. Our Party never went in for theories of armed revolt or general strikes, or "taking and holding" the factories by industrial organisations. History is a weapon in the hands of a Socialist party. But for capitalist parties, it is just an embarrassment, especially when the record of their own blunders and compromises is recalled. Apart from minor errors, our party's analysis of political events and social developments has been correct throughout the years we have been working for socialism.
Lenin’s switch in 1917 from aiming at a democratic republic to a "socialist” one took him even further away from Marxism, but it did not invalidate his previous analysis of how Russia’s bourgeois revolution would come. The role of the Bolsheviks in Russia’s bourgeois revolution did indeed turn out to be the same as that of the Jacobins in France’s, that is, to carry through measures against the old order the bourgeoisie themselves were incapable of. The great difference was that while the Jacobins' rule did not last, the Bolsheviks’ rule did and the Bolshevik rulers gradually evolved into a new bourgeoisie (or capitalist class) themselves. The Leninists of today will argue the end justifying the means, that it was done in order to bring about socialism. But undemocratic means can never bring about democratic ends; any minority which seizes power can only retain it by violent, undemocratic methods.
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