The Struggle for Socialism

No matter how much we organise, no matter how many resolutions we pass, no matter how often we march, we might still end up in a catastrophe. That is an uncomfortable truth: even as we up our resistance. The capitalist class will attempt to profit from human misery to the very end. Despite record food output globally, hunger still prevails in many parts of the planet and even in regions of the more developed nations. Today’s world is characterised by the coexistence of agricultural bounty and widespread hunger and malnutrition. Recent years have seen a reversal of a decades-old trend of falling hunger, alongside the re-emergence of famine. How will we distribute and share food and water? How do we ensure that national frontiers will be irrelevant when children, women, and men seek refuge. What will we do to protect our sisters and brothers? How will we care for one another when we get sick from hunger and disease? What will we do to keep the greedy and the hateful from doing further harm to the planet? 

When we talk about the inevitability of socialism we assume that the workers will continue to struggle for their rights. Were they, on the other hand, to sit down tamely and wait till socialism came to them, they would soon lose all the rights that they have now and become mere slaves. Socialism can only come when the workers are no longer willing to allow themselves to be exploited.  When the workers become so class-conscious and so well organised as to make their exploitation impossible then capitalism would have reached its end. That is what we understand by social revolution.

The great justification for reformism lies in the fact that they make it easier for the workers to organise themselves and enlighten themselves about the real meaning of capitalism and the part that they are forced to play under it, and show the thinking worker how futile it is to dream of reforming capitalism. They furnish besides that a rallying ground for those workers who cannot see beyond their own nose, and perhaps would not understand Socialism, but do feel the need for a shorter working day. A great danger, however, arises when good-intentioned people try to persuade the workers that socialism only means the sum of a number of petty palliative measure; that the Welfare State is also socialism. By that means socialism gets the credit for measures which were all but in name legislation for defending capitalism against socialism and all their failings which arise are used to discredit socialism.

A socialist means a man or a woman who recognises the class war between the proletariat and the possessing class as the inevitable historic outcome of the capitalist system and of the direct economic and social antagonisms which it has engendered and fostered, who sees that those antagonisms can only be resolved by the complete control over all the great means of production and distribution thus abolishing the class state and the wages system, and constituting a co-operative commonwealth.  The principal function of the Socialist Party is to participate in the class struggle in such a way that the workers are educated to realise their political power. The goal of the Socialist Party is socialism, not a reformed capitalism. Its tactics must be those that will bring about socialism.

The Socialist Party tells the workers that socialism is the only remedy for their troubles. There is no time which is not a proper time for them to work for socialism. This is true whatever the excuse offered by defenders of capitalism. Whether the crisis is a war crisis or a trade crisis, the Socialist Party will continue to preach socialism. Workers who understand the working of capitalism will see through the excuses to the capitalist interests behind them and will help us with our task. The only solution to the economic problems of the workers is socialism. Sadly the average worker is unable to see any alternative to the profit system. With socialism, there will be no wages at all.  With socialism, men and women will receive a share of what has been produced by the common social labour. They will receive it on the basis of having participated in that social labour in one way or another, and not, as in capitalism, on the basis of the amount of expended work they have accomplished. With socialism, goods are produced for the use of men and women and NOT for the profits which they bring in to bosses. Labour power ceases to be regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold. It is not purchased at all, let alone purchased at the lowest possible price to keep it alive and able to produce more value. Men and women in socialism, will work and produce useful goods. But they will produce these for their mutual needs and for their mutual development. The sufficiency of goods which men and machines can create will be given to people to develop their bodies so that their minds can grow rich in the wealth of human knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, and artistic creation. From day to day, from week to week, and from year to year, the spiral of possible individual activity will widen rather than taper, as human productive and intellectual achievements increase. Men and women, no longer fettered by the necessity of working not only for their own maintenance but for the bosses’ profits, will be freed to live more fully. The time that each must work will be less, yet the goods produced for all to enjoy will be plentiful.

We will have been freed from the capitalist system and also from wage labour, price, and profit. That is why, instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” workers must inscribe on their banner the REVOLUTIONARY watchword: “Abolition of the wage system!” Socialism is the ONLY answer!