The Reality of the Real World

Something dangerous is happening. Manipulation of the media has become one of the growth industries where fake-smiles present fake news offering fake facts. People are abdicating their power to control their own lives to those committed to the continuation of their exploitation and whose task is to trample all over their political intelligence. All sorts of people who profess to know the facts go on telling us that the old inequalities have disappeared and the rich are no longer with us. Something dangerous is happening and it is only if we all organise ourselves for ourselves that it can be overcome.

But the facts are not really in dispute. The ownership of land, factories, transport, etc, is still predominantly vested in the numerically small capitalist class. Capitalism has performed the historical task of clearing the way for socialism; apart from anything else it has reduced the class struggle to one where there are only two classes. When the working class have won the struggle they can set up socialism immediately; there is no need for any half way house.

The proponents of a transitional society never define it in any concrete terms; what sort of class structure will it have; who will own the means of production; will there be a coercive state machine? When the international working class want socialism they can have it; the socialist revolution is the next step in social evolution and there is nothing in between.

The Socialist Party stands in opposition to capitalism, a system of minority power where the productive machinery is possessed by a minority class: 10 per cent of the British population own more than half the accumulated wealth. Under capitalism the vast majority of people own no major stake in the productive machinery—they only own their mental and physical energies which they must sell to capitalists. The working class is in a position of compulsory exploitation, and are only permitted to produce wealth if it can be sold on the market. And it will only be sold on the market if it is profitable for the capitalists. In other words, wealth is produced under capitalism for profit and not for use. If there is no profit there are devastating consequences: food is dumped in the sea while people starve; cars are left standing in fields; homes remain unoccupied; workers are actually paid not to produce wealth. The Socialist Party seeks to end the profits system, not to re-arrange the furniture within it. Our message is quite clear: abandon the broad church; reject the high priests of the Labour Party and their self-appointed vanguards; dismiss the archaic dogma of reformism.

When workers understand socialism they will consciously and democratically organise their own emancipation. You cannot get social change in the interest of the majority of the people unless the majority of the people want it. If the state is not used by the working class it is going to be used against the working class. So a socialist majority must gain control of the state machine. The socialist majority will elect delegates to do what the workers want, not leaders to act on our behalf. The ruling class cannot rule without the acquiescence of the working class. Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the socialist revolution will be unlike all previous revolutions because it will be a revolution of the majority. It is true that Socialist Party does not support demonstrations demanding capitalist reform. We do not kid workers that the system can be humanised.

We run society from top to bottom; workers produce all the wealth. It is the working class which possesses the power to determine the future. Any attempt to establish socialism which left power in the hands of a parliament committed to the running of capitalism and armed forces committed to the defence of capitalism would be bound to fail. The present system survives because of minority power. Any conception of revolution or social change which is based on working class followers placing their faith in an enlightened vanguard is fundamentally anti-socialist. Where access to the state does not exist, workers must establish political democracy. The Socialist Party wants socialism without leaders or followers. We don’t need shepherds because we’re not sheep. It is claimed that the average worker cannot understand the case for socialism and that we are too bookish. It is elitism to imagine that workers cannot understand what we can understand. The Socialist Party relates theory to experience in all our propaganda: we talk about and analyse capitalism and socialism. The Socialist Party will not participate in struggles to appoint new leaders because we are not followers. The Socialist Party has a clear analysis of capitalism and our case against what exists is based on a clear idea of the future socialist system. Unlike the non-socialists and the reformist organisations, the Socialist Party seeks to make the working class aware of the nature of capitalism, the necessity of establishing socialism in its place, the need for democratic political action to achieve this and the impossibility of doing so by means of social reforms.

It is true that the struggles for reforms of the working class, their resistance to exploitation, have helped to gain “elbow room” and that these struggles, along with the needs of industrial capitalism, have brought about, in varying degrees, the electoral franchise and the possibility of organising and carrying on propaganda. Nowhere has it produced socialism, nor will it do so. That will be done only after the working class have been won over to socialism—the function of socialists and carried on by no-one else. How much farther and faster the movement for working class emancipation from capitalism would have gone if, instead of allying themselves with sterile movements to “reform” capitalism, and nationalist movements to establish one capitalist rule in place of another, the working class had understood and acted upon the international socialist message of the Socialist Party.