No to reformism

 Money rules our political system, and government ideology. Capitalism has stretched its tentacles to every corner of the Earth in its quest for capital accumulation and market expansion so that it now poses an existential threat to planetary life. It is for this reason that socialism will never cease to exist as an alternative. Our rulers make critical, world-changing decisions, but they are compelled to do so by an impersonal beyond their personal control: the profit-driven dynamic of capitalism itself.  Capitalists can do whatever they like to mitigate the injustices of the present system, but socialism will always take hold.

The ‘trickle-down’ theory argument goes thus: cut the taxes of high-income earners so they can make more money off their investments; by taking home a greater share, they would spend more, in turn creating jobs and more income for everyone. While this trickle-down economics was being promulgated to ensure the State can afford to reduce taxation, social services were cut. The trickle-down perspective was cruel in practice but understandable from the capitalist’s pressure to accumulate capital by retaining more of the workers' surplus value.

The cause of working-class misery is private ownership of the means of life. The interests of the workers, who do not own the means of life, are opposed to the interests of the capitalists, who do own them. This clash of interests is the class struggle. Although their interests continually clash with those of their masters, many workers do not understand that this is inevitable. Nor do they understand that their masters' ownership of the means of life is at the bottom of the trouble. Now why, with this continual conflict of interest, do the working class remain ignorant? And why are they so desperately apathetic? Is their ignorance not because the truth has not been told? And is their apathy not born largely of disappointment with the results of past efforts of their class to secure some amelioration of their condition?

We are very emphatic that the clear duty of a real socialist party is to work for real socialism. It has no justification for existence apart from that. The only work a socialist can do is to advocate socialism. We can never support anything that conflicts with or socialism while we remain socialists; for that is to obscure socialism. Arguing for reforms means the case for socialism has receded, no matter how temporarily, into a secondary position. Socialism is not being proposed. Secondly, doing reformist campaigns work needs no socialist party at all. Thirdly, the particular reform worked for will not appreciably affect the condition of the working class as such. Fourthly, it will therefore have wasted the working-class strength concentrated upon realising it. Fifthly, it will, because it has effected no material improvement in working-class conditions, have bred disappointment, and, from disappointment, apathy. And finally it will have made existing confusion worse confounded in the minds of the working class. Explaining capitalism and socialism is the proper work of a socialist party not demanding palliatives and amelioration of conditions. If we overleap logic we overleap ourselves and land in a bog of confusion and disappointment. We are only interested in the maintenance of truth. Truth can only be maintained inside the logical method — the truth, even if it means that we become for the time as voices crying in the wilderness.

We need not inquire for the moment into the honesty of working-class leaders. We need only deal with their teaching and leading.  If socialism is the only remedy, and they are not socialists, their teaching cannot be right because they do not teach socialism. Those who profess socialism although they talk of it occasionally, they do not teach it. The important thing in a teacher of socialism is that it should always be socialism that we teach.  If we do not explain every manifestation of class conflict in the light of socialist philosophy, it is little, better than any non-socialist political leader. Our teaching is neither logical nor consistent and lands our audience in a bog of confusion.  Working class ignorance and apathy which must be dispelled before socialism can be realised.

If we were to say that unemployment must last as long as capitalism and were then to recommend the unemployed to send a deputation to the representatives of the capitalists to ask that they, the capitalists, should abolish unemployment, we would either be fools, removed from logic of our position. If we argue that capitalist representatives are in control of the political machinery to conserve their own interests as against those of the working class (as we all agree is and must be the case); and that we must regard capitalist representatives always as a hostile force against whom war must be waged unceasingly until they are utterly vanquished, yet suspend hostilities and enter into alliance with them, we add to the confusion and disappointment of our fellow-workers. If we were to declare that poverty and misery must last till socialism is established, that until socialism is built nothing can materially or permanently affect the position; if we're to say that palliatives are therefore of little use, so little use indeed that we must have a party that shall concentrate upon the thing that matters – socialism - rather than the things that do not matter – palliatives- ; and that our organisation was founded because palliatives were not good enough, we should then concentrate our efforts upon the realisation of palliatives, we are riding rough-shod over logic and engulfing our fellow-workers in impotence and despair.  The Left-wingers might do good work for socialism if only their vaunted adherence to principle was a matter of fact instead of a figment of fancy.  They persist in the folly of emphasising non-essentials and scrimping on the essentials until they are forever remain a stumbling block.

Those who grandly announce “We are all socialists now,” are wide of the mark. Not everyone who proclaims him or herself a socialist shall find place in the real socialist movement. Not those whose desire is personal aggrandisement, nor those who aspire to lead the workers’ activities, nor the experts nor the superior persons nor the compromisers, nor those who are conscious and unconscious perpetrators of ignorance and false friends. But those who, understanding the working-class relation to the economy of production; understanding the forces that have been at work through all history to present in this the twentieth century that appalling anomaly of a starving people in the midst of a riot of wealth of their own creation; understanding how the physical and intellectual well-being of the workers is conditioned by the measure of their control of the means by which they live; understanding that control of these means of life can only be secured by workers similarly enlightened; those who understand these things and the necessity for eliminating every factor tending to confuse the issue in the working-class mind, have set themselves steadfastly to the task of translating their knowledge into clear, logical, consistent action to the end that their fellows may the more readily acquire the knowledge that shall make them free, only these are the socialists and only these can form a real socialist party.