The Principles of the Socialist Party

The Socialist Party adheres to two vital tenets of Marxism.

That the “proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority". The Socialist Party takes seriously its implications. "Self-conscious" implies that the class itself must understand the full significance of its actions. “Independent' implies that the class itself must decide the objectives and methods of its struggle free from other classes interests.

That the "The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves". The working class cannot entrust its task to anyone else. No "saviours from on high" as the workers' anthem The International puts it, will free us. The working class will never achieve its power, if it leaves the revolutionary struggle to others.

Thus according to the Socialist Party, socialist political understanding and mass participation in the process of the revolutionary project is essential. Socialism, unlike all previous revolutions, requires the knowledge and involvement of the majority. It is therefore important that at the very outset we state precisely what socialism means.

What socialism means to members of the Socialist Party is that there are inequality and misery in the world; that this is the outcome of our social conditions; that the essence of these social conditions is that the mass of the people, the working class, produce and distribute all commodities, while the minority of the people, the capitalist class possess these commodities; that this tyranny of the possessing class over the property-less class is based on the present wage-system, and maintains all other forms of oppression; that this tyranny of the few over the many is only possible because the few have obtained possession of the land, the raw materials, the factories and machinery, in a word, of all the means of production and distribution of commodities, and have, as a class, obtained possession of these by no virtue other than by either force or fraud; last but not least, that the approaching change in society will be a revolution. The system of human society as it exists at present must be overthrown from the foundations. The two classes at present existing will be replaced by a single humanity consisting of the whole of the healthy and sane members of the community, possessing all the means of production and distribution in common, and working in common for the production and distribution of commodities.

The Socialist Party believes that the means of production and distribution should be the property of the community.  The owning class can and does dictate terms to the man or woman of that non-possessing class. “You shall sell your labour to me. I will pay you only a fraction of its value in wage. The difference between that value and what I pay for your labour I pocket, as a member of the employing class, and I am richer than before, not by labour of my own, but by your unpaid labour.” This is the teaching of the Socialist Party and why we claim to be socialists.

But we acknowledge that there were others before us. Earlier socialists also sought a better world founded on common ownership, equality, and democracy. In this they saw the means to meet all mankind’s material needs Among the Chartists, for example, Ernest Jones declared: “Money-capital did not create labour, but labour created money-capital; machinery did not create work, but work created machinery. It, therefore, follows that labour is, by its own nature the sovereign power and that it owes no allegiance, gratitude or subjection to capital.” 

Socialists have held that the ending of private ownership of major productive resources was the precondition for a socialist society. Today, in the name of socialism we see common ownership changed into state slavery, equality denounced as the barrier to the very socialism which it seeks as an aim, democracy denied as incompatible with working-class power.  The events in the former Soviet Union in the twentieth century has provided ample evidence that it is possible for the working class to possess less political power, to enjoy less civil liberty, to exercise less control over the circumstances of its working life, to be, in every sense of the word, more ‘exploited’, under regimes based on state ownership. The Bolshevik tradition, whether in its Leninist form or in its Trotskyist guise, has come so completely to dominate what passes for socialist thinking today that these facts are now regarded by some as a refutation of the principles of socialism, by others as a cause for redefining socialism into some monstrous Big Brother State. The Socialist Party, far from unaware of the dangers of a concentration of economic and political power within the hands of an all-powerful state, warned that the outcome of the Russian Revolution would be something approximating to what later emerged. Socialism means the administration of production by society, rather than by the state. This was not accomplished by the 20/20 vision of hindsight and the experience of Stalin's show-trials but the application of theory and contemporary analysis of events

Socialism means a class-free society, and a class-free society means that a privileged minority of the population are not in a position to enjoy the national wealth, while the majority live only on their labour to produce it. It means especially that privileged individuals who do have excess income cannot invest it in the instruments of production with which others work, thus reducing them to a position of fixed subservience. It means an end of rent, profit, and interest on stocks and bonds, an end of “surplus value,” an end of the exploitation of labour.