Saturday, October 12, 2019

Socialist Knowledge is Power

"One advantage the workers do have—that of numbers but numbers are useless unless organised by experience and guided by knowledge." - Marx (Inaugural Address of the First International)

We believe that socialism is the only way to solve the economic worries of the world. The Socialist Party strives at all times to bring to the notice of the workers of the world our ideas. But what good our efforts do is too often dissipated because of the confusing influence of what we call "pseudo-socialists”. Socialism is not central planning and a command economy. It is not nationalisation of the banks, railways, transport, coal mines and heavy industries. It does not mean the bureaucratic dictatorship which rules over the workers as in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states. None of these are common ownership. These are some of the things which are not socialism.

Socialism will have been reached when the raw materials contained in the earth, and all the industrial products which men and women use, all those instruments of production and distribution will be commonly owned, and in that day there will be no nations, but only a community of' people. Democratic control means majority control, and that is directly opposite to state control, which is government for a minority, even though elected by the majority.

 It is the Government, and all the paraphernalia and trappings which go with it, that is the "State." The workers of every country are dimly conscious that the capitalists exploit them. So the State machinery uses propaganda to check their consciousness so long as it is quiescent, and force to put them down if it becomes. The educational machine is used by the State to instil into the minds of children the idea that each nation, and the people living in it, is an almost divine unit that is held together by ties of blood, language, love of country, religion, and way of life. That is the job of the State, to bully and persuade the workers over whom it has power into a perpetual belief that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

 Those workers who succumb to its influence are its willing wage-slaves. Of those who do not, some become Socialist Party members.


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