The Promise of Revolution

Every day workers sweat on the production lines and experience the exploitation on which the capitalist system is built. They take part in struggles, together with fellow workers against the abuses and outrages of the capitalist system. The handful of billionaires who dominate the political and economic life has no right to rule. They have built an empire on the foundations of exploitation, oppression, and inequality. We know their interests are international as much as national and they are the most powerful group since their control of the means of production and of the state is most extensive and absolute.

Is there is an alternative to the system we live under? Is socialism a better system? Can it be achieved? Many people have asked these and similar questions. Intellectuals, academics and the mass media have rushed to defend the capitalist system. The aim of these apologists for capitalism is to turn workers away from socialism and to discredit Marxism, claiming that its ideas are no longer relevant. They claim socialists have been incapable of explaining the failures of socialism and the restoration of capitalism in previously “socialist” countries. It requires socialists to redouble our efforts in the ideological struggle against these arguments. We must show that socialism is a valid and necessary alternative and remains an effective guide for the working class. The productive forces developed in capitalist society have outgrown the form of private ownership of the means of production. Fundamental changes are imperative. The mission of rebuilding society on a basis of social justice to-day rests with the workers' movement.

Socialism does not arise automatically out of the development of the productive forces themselves. If it were purely a question of the automatic change in society once the productive forces are developed, revolution would not have been necessary in the changes from one society to another. As has been explained many times, the nationalisation of the productive forces alone does not abolish all social contradictions. The State is not an autonomous, self-determined structure hovering over the social and property relations of a particular regime. It is the fully conscious expression of the collective interests of the dominant class in a particular society. Therefore, to bring something under state ownership does not mean to socialise it where ownership is transferred to the whole of society. To bring something under state ownership, simply by having the workers get their wages from the state rather than from private bosses, is not sufficient to transform social relations in a socialist sense.

Objective conditions, therefore, can create a revolutionary situation or at any rate a revolutionary opening, whether or not there is a subjective revolutionary factor with a mass base. But these conditions alone are not enough for the situation to evolve in some sort of automatic way towards ‘victory’; they are not enough to finish off the process that has been begun. To accomplish this leap, people power has to exert its force.

By bringing men and women together primarily as buyers and sellers of each other, by enshrining profitability and personal gain in place of humanity, capitalism has always been inherently alienating. A socialist transformation of society will return to mankind its humanity and end the sense of being a mere commodity. We will continue to make our contribution to the struggle to break their power and overturn the exploitative system we live under.

Our organisation is not large. While we have had some success in our campaigns, there is no reason to be arrogant or boastful. The oppressed and exploited working people do not need a reformist party. Of those there are plenty to choose from. People need a Marxist-based one. The achievement of socialism awaits the building of a mass base of socialists, in factories and offices. The Socialist Party can be seen as the parliamentary wing of a wider movement dedicated to fundamental social change.