A Manifesto of Emancipation

We live in a world dominated by capitalism, which lives by feeding off the sweat and blood of millions and millions of ordinary men and women. Emancipation from the power of capitalism, wage-slavery, and the State, a world without private property or money, will be possible only by the actual alteration of people’s material being. Then and only then will there be ‘freely associated human beings’ and 'a union of free individuals.'

Many have learned by experience that the mainstream parties offer no hope of improving conditions for the workers, and so it is often concluded that the failure of these political parties is evidence of the uselessness of Parliament. This is a wrong conclusion. It is not Parliament as a piece of political machinery which has failed; it is the political parties which have failed. No single M.P. in this country has ever been elected to Parliament as a socialist, for the simple reason that there is no single constituency in which a majority of the workers want socialism. That is the harsh truth of the matter.

We say that when the workers are socialists and are organised in the Socialist Party, they will use their votes to obtain control of Parliament because this will give control of all the machinery of administration and control of the armed forces. While the capitalist class has control of the State their position is secure and we are helpless. Some question our view.

In the modern capitalist democracies, the State has come to control a vast, intricate and continually growing machinery of administration. Not only does it control legislation—the making of laws—but also their administration by hundreds of thousands of civil servants and local government officials, and their enforcement by the courts, the police and, in the last resort, by the armed forces. Every phase of modern life, the ownership and transfer of property, the production of wealth, transport, building, commercial and financial operations, education, hospitals, sanitation, public health, all these activities are carried on under regulations prescribed by the Government and, in the final analysis, under conditions which they determine. The life of modern capitalist society is organised around Parliament as it is the centre of power. Parliamentary control carries with it the power, more or less directly to promote or suspend activity in any and every branch of social life. By organisation and by use, the electorate look to Parliament as the depository of the organised power of society, and by law, by organisation and use, the employees, civil and military, of the central and local authorities derive their authority from the Government which, in turn, is dependent on a Parliamentary majority.

By its very nature, however, this elaborate machine falls if there is an obvious weakening at the centre of things. It is to obtain this enormous advantage given by possession of the central directing machinery, and the authority resulting from control of Parliament, that the Socialist Party seek to gain a Parliamentary majority.

Class distinctions and privileges will disappear together with the economic basis from which they originate and society will be transformed into an association of 'producers'. To live upon other people's labour will become a thing of the past. There will no longer exist a government nor a state distinct from society itself. The Socialist Party calls for the abolition of property, not a new redistribution of it, a free association of producers owning in common their means of production, collectively controlling it, not as any cooperative of small business-owners. Wages, profit, and rent, social relationships peculiar to capitalism are unthinkable in socialism. 

Marxist theory takes it for granted that the members of a socialist community will have to perform certain functions in many ways similar to those performed by their ancestors under capitalism or feudalism. In every social order, men have to produce in order to live. In every economic system, there must be some balance between production and consumption. Every society, if it is not to stagnate and decay, must produce a surplus of goods over and above the sum total of the goods necessary for the upkeep of the producers, the maintenance and replacement of productive equipment and so on. The surplus produce of a capitalist economy takes the form of rent, profit and interest; and this determines the entire mode of life of the capitalist world. In socialism, the surplus produce, belonging to society as a whole, would cease to be profit. The function of that surplus and its impact upon social life would be altogether different from what it was under the old economic system. Reformists and gradualists have taken these socialist visions of the future as either too unreal or too remote to be taken seriously. They have tried to find a compromise between capitalism and socialism and re-shape the capitalist system rather than abolish it. The state would not wither away but would be used by the working masses to protect their interests and those of society as a whole, to nationalize the commanding heights of industry and commerce — banks, railways, heavy industry and much else. Generally, mainstream political parties have stood for the constant extension of the public sector and the consequent increase in state and administrative intervention in all aspects of the community’s fife. They advocated meritocracy in the opening of careers to all talented individuals, an egalitarianism that would reject unearned inherited privilege and authority as sufficient to convert the State into genuine bodies of public servants and the State into what indeed finally became, in some countries, the welfare state.

All left political parties, revolutionary or reformist, applies this model of government as soon as it assumes office. The Left promotes the State and its officials as capable of serving, relatively selflessly, the public interest with or without the owners of private property being expropriated. The Socialist Party has no notion of any ‘workers’ state any political organ standing above society,  the ‘true community’ replacing the capitalist state,  the ‘illusory community.’ Marx would find any idea has been that ownership of the means of production by a bureaucratic state machine would constitute ‘socialism’ as repugnant. Marxism is based upon his conception of communist society as ‘an association of free human beings, working with communal means of production, and self-consciously expending their many individual labour powers as a single social labour power.’

The socialist association of producers and the common ownership are the conditions for universal liberation and emancipation from wage-slavery.