The SPGB Case

The Socialist Party case can be put without belligerence, arrogance, condescension or abuse. We are not Marx idolators—we have never been adulators. We have never postulated Marxian Papal infallibility—or produced a special "interpretation” of Marxism. It is perhaps for this reason that we have not forgotten Marx’s contributions to working-class thought. The Socialist Party is most certainly a "materialist" party in the sense that we argue that to understand society fully we must look first at the ways in which people are organised to meet their material needs, how the goods and services that are necessary for life are produced. In capitalist society that production takes place only for profit and people are divided into two classes — the capitalist class which owns the means of producing and distributing goods and services, and the working class which owns nothing except their ability to work. These two classes have opposing interests which cannot be reconciled within the capitalist system. The effects of this class division — and the conflict which it entails — are both material, in the sense that workers never receive the full benefit of their labour, and non-material in the sense that capitalism also engenders insecurity, conflict and division. We recognise that people have what some refer to as "inner needs" — to live in harmony and cooperation with each other — but would argue that the material conditions created by capitalism frustrate the meeting of those needs. Socialism, by contrast, will ensure not only that people's needs for a decent standard of material life are met but will also create a society in which people can live in peace with each other. 

Socialism implies, in the economic field, ownership of the means of production by society as a whole. Under capitalism, the capitalists own the means of production. Workers are forced to sell their labour power and the capitalist exploits and oppresses them. The self-seeking, individualist outlook bred by capitalism will have been replaced by a social outlook, a sense of responsibility to society. Even within capitalist society there is what is known as “solidarity” among the workers – the sense of a common interest. This is not an idea which someone has thought of and put into the heads of workers. It is an idea which arises out of the material conditions of working-class life, the fact that they get their living in the same way, working alongside each other. The archetypical grasping individualist with no sense of collective responsibility is the capitalist, all struggling against competitors to survive. Of course, the ideas of the dominant class – the rivalry instead of solidarity – tends to spread among the workers. But the fundamental basis for the outlook of any class (as distinct from individuals) is the material conditions of life, the way it gets its living. Hence it follows that the outlook of people can be changed by changing their material conditions, the way in which they get their living. In a world socialist system the advances that mankind could make defies the imagination. With all economic life run by a world plan and co-ordinating the plans, with scientific discoveries and technical inventions shared globally, humanity would indeed take giant step forward. Towards what? We have no doubt of the transformation of modern civilisation into socialism, yet we cannot foretell definitely what form the social life of the future will take, any more than a man living at the beginning of capitalism a few hundred years ago could foresee the development of that period in the capitalism of to-day. The Socialist Party never attempts to foretell, because the conditions are too unknown for any forecast. It is necessarily hidden from us.  But it is possible to say for sure that with the establishment of socialism throughout the world, class divisions and class struggles will come to an end. There will be no new division into classes, chiefly because in a socialist society there is nothing to give cause for it to rise.

We are told we must live austerely, work harder and forego claims for higher wages and shorter hours. Capitalists are out for the same thing, making as much profit as possible out of the exploitation of the workers, and they can always find some plausible propaganda to help on their aim. Workers should know, by bitter experience, that their wages at all times are based on the cost of living, i.e., the lowest amount necessary to produce, maintain and reproduce the power to labour and that, subject to some fluctuation of supply and demand, they get no more than that. The cause of workers' problems is capitalism itself and not until workers understand this and organise together to abolish capitalism and establish socialism, can these problems be solved.

 Socialism must be a worldwide social system because a state-free, money-free, class-free set-up could not exist, as a separate enclave, amid a capitalist world of nations, wars, class division, commodity production and so on. It follows that socialism must be established at pretty well the same time throughout the world but this does not imply that workers develop socialist consciousness at exactly the same rate everywhere. Inevitably, there is some unevenness but in terms of social movement this is so slight as to be insignificant.

Ideas mirror material conditions. At present workers all over the world support capitalism and this support takes just about the same form wherever we look. The same false ideas help to keep capitalism in being all around the world. The development of socialist ideas faces many problems and political dictatorship is one of them. An absence of democracy reflects a low state of development of workers' consciousness; its presence is one of the fruits of a flourishing consciousness. That is the direction in which society is moving, as workers' ideas react to capitalism's contradictions. In the struggle for reforms it is the effects that are tackled and not their causes.