The SPGB and Marx

Many have observed that there has been a lull in the class war and therefore believe that it is all over and the ruling class has won.  Workers always have to struggle to get by and always have to fight to keep up their living standards. The greatest danger the capitalists are faced with is the steady spreading of the knowledge of the class struggle that must exist in a society divided into masters and slaves. To meet this spreading understanding the master class uses various agents and agencies to mislead the workers, to hide the facts of the case or to strenuously deny them, and to endeavour to increase the confusion of thought existing among those who are beginning to have a faint glimpse of the truth. That is well worth remembering. One great difference between the master class and the working class is the clear grip that the former haveof the insecurity of their position as a ruling class. The workers in a large number of cases have not even grasped the fact that a ruling class exists, and so are quite puzzled at the various social actions going on around them, the effects of which they feel without understanding the cause. But a small number at present are beginning to understand that there is some connection between the evils they suffer from and the fact that they have to work for an employer. This understanding is confused and even vague with many at the moment, but its existence is beyond dispute and causes a good deal of uneasiness among the elite. The cleverest of the master class is always on the look-out for new methods to meet this danger. They and their agents began to popularise the term "socialism" by tacking it on to every little reform or intervention in the market taken by the Government. Various attempts have been made to trick the workers into believing that socialism meant taking part in the internecine quarrels among the capitalists.

What is it that the Labor Party advocate? Revolution? Radicalism? Reform? Well, no—it is respectability! This is the logical end of the Labour Party's road to power via capitalist policies. It is the end which the Socialist Party foretold over a hundred years ago when Labour Party members were busily dubbing us the Impossibilists.

While we strongly sympathise with all real struggles against the employers' attacks, we never cease to urge upon the workers the need for class-consciousness for ending this system of society altogether, by political control. A General Strike tactic as a means of emancipation must surely fail, for the working class are propertyless, and if they cease work deprivation stares us in the face. All acquainted with daily life know the terrible misery that a strike entails; the suffering on the faces of the helpless children and struggling wives,  the crammed pawn-shops: these remind us that strikes hurt the workers as well as the masters. A sectional strike has those at work helping those who are out. But when all the workers strike even that help fails, for they are all in the same boat. True, a general strike may paralyse a nation but we all depend upon continual production, and cessation means pain upon the most vulnerable—we have no stores, no reserves. Our masters have.

 For the workers, the capitalist treadmill will last for as long as the working class chooses to put up with capitalism.  Many claim Marx’s “predictions” did not come true.  Has the control of industry become more and more concentrated into fewer and fewer hands? Has the proportion of capital invested in plant, machinery, and equipment grown more and more in relation to that spent on living labour? Has the process of capital accumulation proceeded, not smoothly, but in fits and starts, periods of rapid growth ending in periods of slump? Have the rich got richer? Have more and more of the old 'middle classes' become employees? Has the peasantry declined? Has the proportion of wage earners in the working population gone up? Have money-commodity relations spread more and more into all aspects of life? Has the economy become more and more international and globalised? Need we continue?

The Socialist Party doesn’t blindly adhere to everything Marx said and did. In fact we criticise him on some points, for instance, his taking sides in wars and his support for some nationalist movements. We recognise that, because he was politically active at a time when capitalism had not yet fully built up the material basis for a world socialist society, he took up positions on day-to-day issues which are no longer relevant today now that capitalism has done this. The reason why we continue to refer to Marx’s views on capitalism and history is not that it was him who put them forward but because he happened to be the first person to “lay bare the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production”. The conceptual tools he developed for analysing capitalism (value, labour-power, surplus value, constant capital, variable capital, rate of surplus value, rate of profit, etc.) are still useful today. Similarly, with the tools he developed for analysing past and present societies and social change (forces of production, relations of production, economic base, political and ideological superstructure, class, class interest, class struggle, etc.).

It is true that Marx’s expectation was that the working class would become more and more class-conscious and that when a majority had become socialists they would take political action to abolish capitalism and establish socialism and that this hasn’t happened. But because it hasn’t happened yet does not mean that it never will. If that was true then capitalism would last forever. But it is of paramount importance that we advance to the next system in an orderly way. If we are not careful we may extinguish all life on the planet before socialism can be established and lose our chance of finally controlling our destiny.

Why are we the enemy of capital, national and international? Because the capitalists own the means whereby we live. All that we own is the power to labour. In order to live we are compelled to sell this to those who own the necessaries of life. It is they who decide whether we shall live or not. It is here where the interests of capitalists and workers are opposed. It is from this the class war springs, with its strikes and lock-outs, its police and bayonet charges, its hellish punishment of the workers.

Poverty, unemployment, almost all the evils we are subjected to, arise from this fact of ownership by a class of the means of life. It comes to this, that in order |that we may exist at all, it is necessary first of all to obtain their permission. If the workers desire to be free and to abolish the class war with all its evils, they must organise themselves as a propertyless class against the property-owning class on the political and industrial fields, and seize from the capitalists their political power, thereby clearing the way for the freedom of the whole human race. This is the work the Socialist Party has set out to accomplish, but it can only be done when the workers decide to do it. Therefore we appeal to ALL to endeavour to understand our Declaration of Principles with a view to accepting it and joining us, so that the day will be appreciably nearer when we shall smash up this rotten and inhuman system, and institute a healthier, happier, peaceful, and truly prosperous state of society. Democracy means participating in the running of affairs, not following leaders. The only kind of politics that is going to work is a do-it-yourself politics aimed at abolishing the profit system.