Lothian Socialist Discussion

Wednesday, 22 November
 7:30pm - 9:00pm

The Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh,
17 West Montgomery Place, 
Edinburgh EH7 5HA

The Socialist Party welcomes any upsurge in the militancy and resistance and organisation of our class. But we also know, from bitter experience, that work of an altogether quieter, patient, more political kind is also needed. The skirmishes in the class war must be fought if we are not to be reduced to beasts of burden. But as human animals capable of rational thought and long-term planning, we must also seek to stop the skirmishes by winning the class war and thereby ending it. This is only possible if the capitalist class is dispossessed of its wealth and power. That means that the working class as a whole must understand the issues, and organise and fight for these ends themselves by organising a political party for the conquest of state power. 

The Socialist Party does not minimise the necessity and importance of the worker keeping up the struggle over wages or to resisting cuts. There are some signs that union membership and general combativity are rising. And this is vital if our class is to develop some of the solidarity and self-confidence essential for the final abolition of wage slavery. We recognise the necessity of workers' solidarity in the class struggle against the capitalist class and rejoice in every victory for the workers to assert their economic power. But to struggle for higher wages and better conditions is not revolutionary in any true sense of the word; the essential weapons in this struggle are not inherently revolutionary either. It demands the revolutionising of the workers themselves. If there were more revolutionary workers in the unions—and in society generally—then the unions and the host of other community organisations would have a more revolutionary outlook.

We state to achieve socialism requires a clear understanding of socialist principles with a determined desire to put them into practice. For socialism to be established the mass of the people must understand the nature and purpose of the new society. Our theory of socialist revolution is grounded in Marx's - the position of the working class within capitalist society forces it to struggle against capitalist conditions of existence and as the workers gained more experience of the class struggle and the workings of capitalism, the labour movement would become more consciously socialist and democratically organised by the workers themselves and would require no intervention by people outside the working class to bring it.

 Socialist propaganda and agitation will indeed be necessary but will be carried out by workers themselves whose socialist ideas would have been derived from an interpretation of their class experience of capitalism. The end result is an independent movement of the socialist-minded and democratically organised working class aimed at winning control of political power in order to abolish capitalism.  The responsibility of the Socialist Party is to challenge capitalist apologists and pseudo-socialists in the battle of ideas and that requires talking to, leafleting and debating and engaging with our fellow workers.

Socialist ideas arise when workers begin to reflect on the general position of the working class within capitalist society. They do then have to be communicated to other workers, but NOT from outside the working class as a whole. They have to be communicated by OTHER workers who, from their own experience and/or from absorbing the past experience of the working class, have come to a socialist understanding. It's not a question of enlightened outsiders bringing socialist ideas to the 'ignorant' workers but of socialist-minded workers spreading socialist ideas amongst their fellow workers. We see socialist consciousness as emerging from a combination of two things - people's experience of capitalism and the problems it inevitably creates but also the activity of socialists in making hearing the case for socialism a part of that experience.  We are not against reform campaigns, co-ops, the trade unions, or any other way in which workers struggle. What we do say, is that these are not means towards socialism, and we advocate socialism as the better and lasting answer.

We insist on the necessity of majority understanding behind socialist delegates with a mandate for socialism, merely using the state and parliament for one revolutionary act, after which the state and the Socialist Party has no further existence. We can be proud of our long history in exposing the oxymoron of the "workers state" and attacking the concepts of Leninism (and its offspring, Stalinism and Trotskyism).