The social revolution has begun and no-one can stop it

Everyone is aware that usually a person gains office on the strength of fiery impassioned speeches, which strangely contrast with those given at a later date after a period in office. It is now a difference from a person who reflected the working-class conditions and now who is remote from them. The person is removed from the rank and file, meeting a new class of people, and mingles in separate circles from before. Things which were once primary are now secondary. Not that the person has ceased to feel interested, or has become dishonest but the influence of new factors results in a change of outlook. As long as leaders are in the fore, little thinking is done by the mass. If one can sway the crowd in one direction, another can move them in the opposite direction. We desire for men and women to think for themselves. Hope replaces fear; trust replaces repression; abundance replaces poverty.

The members of the Socialist Party are class-conscious revolutionaries who devoted their energies to the great cause of freeing humanity from the poverty and wars of the capitalist system. This, they believed, could be accomplished only through construction of a worldwide socialist society of peace and prosperity. We adhere to the basic conceptions of Marxism because they have proved again and again that their essential elements have proved to be true. No better set of ideas has been shown to be superior to Marxism – and not because no attempts have been made to think of better ones. On the contrary, the attempts have been countless. 

Socialist consciousness lies in the awareness and understanding in which the workers themselves realizes that they and they alone are the creators of socialism. So long as capitalism exists, so long as an exploitive society resting on industrial production exists, so long as a working class remains indispensable to modern production, the necessity of socialism will remain. All socialists recognise the class struggle as a vast school of socialist education. Marxists, however do not believe socialist consciousness arises automatically. Ideas about socialism are also necessary to differentiate between the need for social change, or just an improvement of conditions under the existing social orders. Socialist knowledge is a weapon with which to change the world.

Labour politicians talk about socialism. We judged them by their deeds, not just by words. In practice, they carried on running capitalism.  They did introduce certain reforms which ameliorated the effects of some of the worst features of capitalism in the spheres of health, housing and family support. Collectively, these became known as the ‘Welfare State’ – but they were not socialism. The essential feature of capitalism, that very thing which makes the system one of exploitation and robbery of the mass of wage workers by the ruling class of capitalists, namely the private ownership of the means of production and exchange, this remained untouched.

In a class society, a small number of the community, by virtue of the ownership of the means of production, has control over the whole productive process and possesses corresponding privileges, together with the control of government. The other much larger part of the community possesses nothing but a minimum of personal goods, the ability to work, and a few hard-won political rights. Conflict of interest is inevitable. Sooner or later the dominant class will be actively opposed by the dominated class. 

Capitalism subjects men and women to the restrictions of organised labour and then robs them of its fruits. Less than a tenth of the population possess anything but a pitiful minimum of property. Not less but more private property is needed. But it must be the right kind of property. There are two kinds of private property. Private property in the means by which things are made – factories, land, mines, gives to the owners power to control the lives of others. That must cease. It is wrong private property. The other kind of private property consists in consumer goods – food, clothes, houses, personal possessions– all that ministers to comfort. The two can readily be distinguished. Private property in the means of production yields money income. Private ownership of personal property yields none.

The working class must strike out on the road to independent political action, independent of pro-capitalist parties. The working class needs a socialist party. The working class need to break with the bourgeois parties and forge their own political trend to establish socialism.