Where are we going?

The Socialist Party platform is for the abolition of the system of capitalism and the establishment or a socialist system of production. All the material resources for a socialist economy are present in abundance–raw materials, industrial plants, energy-producing enterprises, transportation, highly developed agricultural resources. The Socialist Party is accused of being dogmatic. We are dogmatic in so far as we hold ideas that make us strive to end capitalism, not to patch it up. We are dogmatic because we explain economic theory such as surplus value, the source of rent, interest, dividends, etc. We are dogmatic because we preach the class war, asking our fellow-workers to cut adrift from the capitalist parties and reforms. We fight for nothing short socialism, because we believe that nothing short of that will save the workers. It is a platitude that the struggle for socialism requires the broadest possible working class unity. But unity on what basis, unity for what ends

The vast majority live by, or are dependent on, the sale of labour power to industries and businesses owned or dominated by the few. The natural resources and the means of production now in the hands of the few, and which are the source of their economic and political power, must be taken from them and become common property.

In a capitalist society, the ruling class not only controls the productive and state apparatus but also shapes and moulds the ideas, attitudes and very sentiments of the people with remarkable success and their ideologies suffuses whole of society. The more successful the capitalist class, the more deceived the working class. Workers must break with the patterns of thought and conduct which help to maintain capitalist class relations. Reformism is based upon the belief that there is no irreconcilable contradiction between labour and capital and that compromise and the gradual transformation of capitalism into socialism is possible. Socialism can only come about through a successful overthrow of capitalism by a self-organised working class. The Socialist Party will take possession of the means of production (land, mines, factories, means of transport and communication), which in the hands of the capitalists are the means of exploiting and oppressing the working masses, and will make them into social property. By suppressing the division of society into classes, it will put an end to the exploitation of man by man. The victory of the working class, the destruction of the economic and social bases of the possessing classes, the putting into practice of the principles of the planned production – all these will lead to the creation of the class-free society, where there will be no exploited or exploiters, nor class struggles, and all the efforts of society will be deployed to the common good. Society will determine for itself the forms of its confederations and its organisational structure. The victory of socialism means the emancipation of all humanity. Socialism will create not only the new economic and social order, but also the higher civilisation of free mankind.

Our party, which must still strive to get a hearing from the as yet indifferent working class. Socialism has nothing in common with violence practiced by individuals or of small groups, where individuals or minorities attempt to substitute themselves for the the working class. Engels wrote, in his Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France:

“The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of the unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisations, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for, body and soul. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that.”

A socialist party which lacks a mass base as we ourselves presently do, must reach out to our fellow-workers with patient explanations, and pay no attention to premature demands for “action.” We confine ourselves to campaigning designed to win over the majority. We do not represent ourselves as pacifists. We are not pacifists. But we have adopted the age-old maxim of the Chartists, “peacefully if possible, forcibly as necessary.” We are organising, speaking, writing, and explaining; in other words, carrying on propaganda with the object of winning over the majority to our case for social revolution and socialism. The Communist Manifesto, defined the movement of emancipation as follows:

“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”

The Socialist Party aims to make the social transformation with the majority and not for the majority.