The heart-break of capitalism, the joy of socialism

The Socialist Party believes that only when the whole of the working class rid ourselves of the employing class, their parties and their system, can the people stand up’ and build socialism to begin to control their lives. Socialism is not the conquest of the state by a political party: it is the conquest of society by working people through industrial and political action. Socialism is not State Capitalism, which is simply a means of protecting and promoting capitalist interests and more easily oppressing the workers. Socialism is not government ownership or control of industry. Socialism is the transformation of the State, not the enlarging of its functions. Socialism is not some Utopian scheme.

Capitalism has created the economic conditions for socialism. Today there is social production but no social ownership. Socialism will bring common ownership of social production. It is the next step in the further development of mankind. Socialism will be won through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the capture of political power by the working class. With socialism, the working people will take over the economic forces developed by capitalism and operate them in the interests of society. This will bring a qualitative improvement in the lives of the working people. Because working people will control the great wealth they produce, they will be fundamentally able to determine their own futures. The end of exploitation of one person by another will be an unprecedented liberating and transforming force. Socialism aims at giving a meaning to people's life and work; at enabling their freedom, their creativity, and the positive aspects of their personality to flourish. These are not aspirations about some hazy and distant future. Socialism is autonomy, people's conscious direction of their own lives. Exploiting societies persist because those whom they exploit help them to survive. Socialist society implies people's self-organisation of every aspect of their social activities. Socialism implies that the organisation of a society will have become transparent to its members. Inside socialism, people will dominate the workings and institutions of society, instead of being dominated by them. Socialism will therefore have to realise democracy for the first time in human history. Socialist society will provide a socialist solution to the problem of centralisation.

The word ‘socialism’ is more than the name merely for a new system of economic relationships. Socialism means the ending of exploitation of man by man, a society without class antagonisms, in which the people themselves control their means of life and use them for their own happiness. Socialism is not inevitable. What has been termed its ‘inevitability’ consists in this, that only through socialism can human progress continue. But there is not and cannot be any absolute deterministic inevitability in human affairs, since men and women make their own history and chooses what to do. What is determined is not their choice, but the conditions under which it is made, and the consequences when it is made. The meaning of scientific socialism is not that it tells us that socialism will come regardless, but that it explains to us where we stand, what course lies open to us, what is the road to life.

Socialism means a class-free society, and a class-free society means that a privileged minority of the population are not in a position to enjoy the national wealth, while the majority live only on their labour to produce it. It means especially that privileged individuals who do have excess income cannot invest it in the instruments of production with which others work, thus reducing them to a position of fixed subservience. It means an end of rent, profit, and interest on stocks and bonds, an end of “surplus value,” an end of the exploitation of labour. Marx placed at the very basis of his system the assertion that the workers being the lowest class in society, could not emancipate itself without emancipating all mankind, and he described socialism in consequence as “the society of the free and equal.” The Socialist Party desires the realisation of a humane human community.

The Socialist Party rejects the policy of state ownership and rejects the idea that state capitalism is a phase of socialism. The larger part of reformist propaganda and practice in the past have been implementing state capitalism, often misleadingly designated as “state socialism”. Whenever the state nationalised an industry, whenever the state imposed its control over industry, workers naively accepted this as anti-capitalism, and as a symptom of the growing importance of socialism and the transformation of capitalism into socialism. This is not so. What was passing away is not capitalism, but laissez faire capitalism. What has come about has not been socialism nor an “installment” of socialism, but a brutal and typical expression of capitalist power and supremacy. Socialism is not state ownership or management of industry, but the opposite. When socialism conquers, its first act is to abolish the state, its parliamentary regime and forms of activity. State capitalism is not socialism and never can become socialism. The institutional developments of capitalism do not bring, they never can bring, socialism. State capitalism accentuates and sharpens class divisions, by arraying against working people all sections of the ruling class merged and united. State capitalism regulates and directs capital and labour. The working-class stands against the unified capitalist regime. The workers set themselves against the state, the state against the workers; the struggle becomes more intense and general, the antagonisms more acute and irreconcilable. As the state imposes its control over industry, the working-class challenges that control, contests the authority and force of the state, and itself gradually acquires the power of control over industry. The challenge under the impulse of events develops into the social revolution. The social revolution becomes a fact when the people has acquired sufficient consciousness of its control over production to establish that control in practice.

A lure is offered to the workers to “democratize” state capitalism, transforming state capitalism by “democratizing” the government, placing it in the hands of “the people.” State capitalism is fundamentally and necessarily undemocratic; it cannot be democratised, it must be abolished by the proletarian revolution. The coming of Socialism is a process of violent and implacable struggles, not a dress parade of amicable transformation. The concept of “transformation” in practice doesn’t transform capitalism, it transforms the workers’ movement into a caricature of socialism and a prop of capitalism. Socialism rejects “co-operation” with the capitalist, in industry as in politics. One phase of state capitalism is the policy of trying to maintain industrial peace, and this is attempted alternately by coercion and cajolery. One means of cajolery is an arrangement by which the workers may “co-operate” with the employers in the consideration of matters affecting a particular industry or factory. The state tries to compel this co-operation, making it an impliedly compulsory affair, and it becomes the function of the government to bring the workers under the sway of the capitalist in ways that strike at the independent action of the workers. Autocracy in government is supplemented by a sham democracy, by apparently giving the workers a share in the regulation of their conditions, but which actually is an illusion, as the power of the employers sets it at nought. The purpose is to run the militant spirit of the workers into the ground, to disorganise their independent action.