The only war we prepare for is class war

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Socialist ideas were born in early nineteenth-century Europe, under the harsh and brutalising conditions of the industrial revolution.  The era we live in today is an age of inhumanity.  The Socialist Party continue to hold the basic democratic socialist values of freedom, egalitarianism and the solidarity of mankind. Socialism can be called the society of the free and equal, and its democracy defined as the rule of the people. We cannot build a strong socialist movement until we overcome confusion in the minds of our fellow-workers about the real meaning of socialism.  

Its misrepresentation has been facilitated for the capitalists but aided to a considerable extent by those describing themselves as “socialists”. Many people who self-style themselves radicals have reconciled with capitalist society and come to the defence of capitalism as a lesser evil and the best that can be hoped for.  The progress  of the socialist movement will not be overcome unless and until we find a way to break down this misunderstanding and prejudice against socialism, and convince workers that we socialists are the most consistent advocates of democracy in all fields and that, in fact, we are completely devoted to the idea that socialism cannot be realised otherwise than by democracy.  socialism as a class-free society—with abundance, freedom, and equality for all; a society in which there would be no state, not even a supposed peoples' democracy workers’ state.

This restatement of basic aims and principles cannot wait; it is, in fact, the burning necessity of the hour. There is no room for misunderstanding among us as to what such a restatement of our position means and requires.  It requires a clean break with all the distortions of the real meaning of socialism and a return to the original formulations and definitions. Nothing short of this will do. 

The authentic socialist movement has been the most democratic movement in all history. The Communist Manifesto said:
 “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority...The first step”, said the Manifesto, “in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” 

A socialist revolution is unthinkable without the active participation of the majority of the working class. Forecasting the socialist future, the Communist Manifesto said: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association.” Mark that: “an association”, not a state—“an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” 
Capitalism, under any kind of government, is a system of minority rule, and the principal beneficiaries of capitalist democracy are the small minority of exploiting capitalists. The socialist task is not to deny democracy, but to expand it and make it more complete. Marxists have always valued and defended bourgeois democratic rights, restricted as they were; and have utilised them for the education and organisation of the workers in the struggle to establish full democracy by abolishing the capitalist rule altogether.  The Socialist Party in the past have used a shorthand definition of socialism as “industrial democracy,”  the extension of democracy to industry, the democratic control of industry by the workers themselves, with private ownership eliminated.  

Today’s widespread illusions in the reform of capitalism solutions will in time give way to the realisation by the working class that they can only rely on their own power to defend their living conditions. Struggles against capitalist exploitation will arise in protests, strikes, and rebellions, and the class war will return with a fury. Those mass struggles will put on the agenda the only possible solution to capitalism’s descent toward barbarism: working-class revolutions that seize state power from the capitalists, overturn the system’s drive for profit and set about building a socialist world of abundance and freedom for all. The Socialist Party oppose any kind of support to capitalist parties no matter how “progressive” or “left-wing” they style themselves. They actually fail to offer any real challenge to capitalism.  It is a tragedy that the working class is confronted yet again and again by a choice between anti-working class parties with no revolutionary working-class alternative. Our goal is the creation of a  world party of socialist revolution which would not promote illusions in reforming the system.