If you seek to lead a movement - take a laxative

To all workers throughout the world, the socialist message is loud and clear. Don't waste any more time or effort attempting to reform capitalism. Instead of campaigning for this or that reform join the movement which has as its sole aim ending a social system which cannot satisfy the needs of human beings, a world-wide system run by human beings for human beings. The Socialist Party strives to make its case as widely known and fully understood as we can. This is no easy task for the Socialist Party—our rotten system is deeply ingrained into the minds and manners of men and women and it is going to take a lot to shift it. 

The socialist movement is not only the heart but is the combination of the heart and the head. When the workers, as a class, couple their latent revolutionary fervour with socialist understanding, they become an indomitable force. 

The Socialist Party emphasises that the ballot is the lever of emancipation. We do this because the conscious, socialist majority takes political action in order to be in a position to transfer the means of living from the hands of the parasites into the hands of society, as a whole. The ballot symbolises the nature of the socialist revolution. We advocate the ballot because we cannot visualise the need for a socialist majority to use violence. Violence does not represent the socialist revolution. However, we can get all tangled up in speculations of projecting possible contingencies that may exist in a future event. History may make liars out of us in predicting the workings of social forces based on scientific analyses. When we say that socialism is inevitable it always implies: barring catastrophes such as environmental climate change wiping out of the human race. However, given capitalism and its laws of motion, the next stage in social evolution is socialism.

For many years we have witnessed the “success” of a procession of practical efforts by the Left to rally workers to socialism by clever policies. We have seen the transformation of these advocates of socialist goals into supporters of the status quo — rebels who have been converted into offering concessions to the system. Their trademark has become the reforming, improving and administering capitalism. 

Where are the convinced socialists they were going to make? 

In the name of building up a socialist movement among the masses, they have emasculated and compromised socialist principles. When elected, they have actually administered capitalism in the only way it can be administered, in the interest of the capitalist class, even to the extent of supporting capitalist wars and crushing workers on strike. They have complained that capitalist parties have stolen their planks (as though any capitalist party could steal a socialist program). Look at the net result. Where are the socialist masses? 

As far as numbers are concerned the Left-wing are not much better off than the Socialist Party. Their practical, realistic policies have proven worse than illusory. They have failed to make socialists! Yet they continue to heap scorn and sneer at the Socialist Party for our small numbers. With smug omniscience, they dismiss us as “ivory tower utopians,” “dogmatic sectarians,” “impossiblists,” etc. The real question is: — Who have ignored the lessons of experience? The SPGB has been confronted with sneers and scorn by those who fight for something “in the meantime” and who are busily actively participating in the “workers’ struggles.” The lure and fascinations of protest demonstrations and making demands at every opportunity is very attractive. (In a sense, it does indicate how deeply-rooted discontent with capitalism really is, and it demonstrates the latent strength of socialism once the masses wake up to the need for changing the system instead of adjusting to it.) But — and this is the vital point — these activities are not in harmony with the immediate needs of our time: the making of socialists. 

The lack of socialists is all that stands in the way of socialism, now.

 You can put the Leftists on the spot by asking: Where are the socialists you have obtained by your efforts? 

Their vaunted “fresh radical tactics” prove to be very stale indeed. For years their antecedents — the Labour Party activists with their gradualism, the Bolsheviks with their “revolutionary” platforms and vanguard strategies— actually gained victories on such policies and programmes. Yet they were responsible for the recruiting of workers for capitalist wars and the crushing of workers on strike. If there is one generalisation that could be applied to the Bolsheviks and Social Democrats is that they stood for their pet “burning issue”’ not socialism. Recall the phrases: “Immediate Demands” and “Ultimate Demands.” We used to be told and are still being told, that “in the meantime” we must fight for some “priority” issue and you in the SPGB should join our ranks to recruit for socialist objectives. 

Observe the  result: Capitalism is being administered by “socialists” and, often, in the name of “socialism.” 

There it is, in all its stark nakedness. Had all that wasted energy and sacrifice (devoted and sincere as it may have been) been harnessed for socialism, what a movement — or society — we would now have! It is easy to forget that human beings are also part of the material conditions and that they play the active role in social change. All those “socialist governments” merely wound up administering capitalism for the capitalist class. And that is all that Labour radicals and the Trotskyist Left will be able to do if they gain their objectives.