The State and Capitalism

The foundation of capitalist society and civilisation is—as its name indicates—the private ownership of property. The state or the organisation of government in Capitalist society exists nominally to preserve the equilibrium—the balance of antagonistic forces within society—and it does this by maintaining with all the power at its command this private property basis.

In the fulfilling of this, its primary purpose, the State acts in the main according to certain rules—rules of its own making— which collectively are known as “the Law.”

The protection of property and the preservation and enforcement of the social forms and observances dependent upon property is thus the essential function of the Law. These elementary facts are, unfortunately, still unrecognised by the majority of our fellow workers. Their minds are so warped by the media and other agencies of mis-education controlled by the property-owning class that for them, as for the parasites who live and flourish on them, the Law is the great and wonderful preserver of social order without which all organisation would vanish and anarchy prevail.

The Law thus regarded comes to have a halo of sanctity thrown around it. It becomes a god-like power, beneficent in its ruling but terrible in its vengeance upon the transgressors. As a god it has its own sacred books and ritual, its prophets and priests.

Through all this glorification and mysticism the Socialist Party must show the world’s workers that the Law is one of the most powerful weapons of those who exploit and oppress them—that it is an agent of slave owners for the perpetuation of slavery. The Socialist Party works inside the trade union as he does outside, to develop the workers’ knowledge of the slave position of their class. As their knowledge grows they will have their organisation on this class basis instead of on that of craft or industry. We, however, sure of the correctness of our claim that there it no short-cuts to socialism, no other path than the hard and steep one of working-class revolutionary education, no other helpful policy than that based on the class struggle, have resolutely and consistently left such expedients to those others, content to have them provide our object lessons for us.

For our part we still proclaim that the proletariat must want socialism before they can establish it, and that they must understand Socialism before they can want it; we still assert that society is divided into two classes—a master class and an enslaved class—with diametrically opposed interests, and that the freedom of the enslaved class can only be the fruits of victory in a class struggle; we still declare that the basis of society as at present constituted, is the private ownership of the means of living, and that reforms—anything in fact short of the abolition of private ownership in the means of living, and the establishment of common ownership in its stead—must be futile and utterly helpless to effect amelioration of the general condition of the workers' position; we still preach that the road to this overthrow of the present social system lies in the capture of the political machinery, and we are as emphatically insistent as ever upon the point that the means to such end are already in the hands of the workers in their possession of the vast bulk of the voting power in all advanced capitalist countries. Such being our beliefs we have shaped our policy in accordance therewith. We have set our faces against compromises of every shape and form. We have refused to have anything to do with reforms, no matter how alluring they appeared, or how much they ran in the popular fancy. We have conducted all our activities in the light of the class struggle, keeping clear the issue—the overthrow of the dominant capitalist class and the system under which they dominate. We have held on our course without deviation, true to every clause, every statement, every affirmation, of the guiding tenets of our Declaration of Principles.

The aim of the Socialist Party is to persuade others to become socialist and act for themselves, organizing democratically and without leaders, to bring about a new socialist society. We are solely concerned with building a movement for socialism. We are not a reformist party with a program of policies to patch up capitalism. Our aim is to build a movement working towards a socialist society. We consistently advocated a fully democratic society based upon co-operation and production for use. The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader and there are no followers. The more who join the Socialist Party, the more we will be able to get our ideas across. The more experiences we will be able to draw on and greater will be the new ideas for building the movement for socialism. So stir yourselves, fellow-workers, and settle with the capitalist class once for all.