The Socialist Party and the Workers' Future

“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.” - Communist Manifesto

Socialism at its core does not depend on theory or programmes but is based on real life. Socialism expresses the desire for a free, non-governed society, which offers freedom, equality and solidarity for its members. Our oppressors do their best to distort the ideal of socialism. The idea of socialism is bound up with mankind's awareness of the suppurating sore of injustice in capitalist society. Capitalism is for the preservation of the Master/Slave relationship. It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor to submit. In order to live we MUST SELL OURSELVES every day and hour. The greed for wealth is closely associated with the greed for power. Wealth is not only a generator of more wealth, it is also a political power. The goal of a world in which the working class organises and controls its own destiny can only be achieved through the combined development of socialism in individual nations. Socialism cannot be imposed from outside – it can only be made by, and for, the working class. Working class unity makes it impossible for the capitalists to go on in the old way of divide and rule. Working class unity enables us to combine our tactics for defending our class with the strategy of liberating our class. Working class unity is revolutionary.

The socialist movement will not advance significantly until it regains the initiative and takes the offensive against capitalism and all its agents. What is needed is not a propaganda device or trick, but a formulation of the issue as it really stands; and, indeed, as it has always stood with real socialists ever since the modern movement was first proclaimed. Our task, as socialists living and fighting in this day and hour, is simply to restate what socialism means. This restatement of basic aims and principles cannot wait; it is, in fact, the burning necessity of the hour. There is no room for misunderstanding among us as to what such a restatement of our position means and requires. It requires a clean break with all the distortions of the real meaning of socialism. A return to the original formulations and definitions, the authentic socialist movement, as it was previously conceived Nothing short of this will do.

Marx and Engels never taught that nationalisation signified the establishment of socialism. That’s not stated by Marx and Engels anywhere. Still less could they have imagined the monstrous idea that socialism would be without freedom and without equality, controlled by a ruthless police-state. Marxists defined socialism as a class-free society—with abundance and equality for all; a society in which there would be no state. Capitalism under any kind of government, is a system of minority rule, and the principal beneficiaries of capitalist democracy are the small minority of exploiting capitalists; scarcely less so than the slave-owners of ancient times were the actual rulers and the real beneficiaries of the Athenian democracy. To be sure, the workers have a right to vote periodically for one of two sets of candidates selected for them by the two capitalist parties. And they can exercise the right of free speech and free media. But this formal right of free speech and free media is outweighed rather heavily by the inconvenient circumstance that the small capitalist minority happens to enjoy a complete monopoly of ownership and control of all the press, and of television and radio, and of all other means of communication and information. We who oppose the capitalist regime have a right to nominate our own candidates. That is easier said than done. But even so, with all that, a little democracy is better than none. We socialists have never denied that. After the experiences of fascism and of military and police dictatorships in many parts of the world, we have all the more reason to value every democratic provision for the protection of human rights; to fight for more democracy, not less. The socialist task is not to deny democracy, but to expand it and make it more complete. That is the true socialist tradition. 

Without freedom of association and organisation, without the right to form groups and parties of different tendencies, there is and can be no real democracy anywhere. The Marxists, throughout the century-long history of our movement, have always valued and defended bourgeois democratic rights, restricted as they were; and have utilised them for the education and organisation of the workers in the struggle to establish full democracy by abolishing the capitalist rule altogether. The right of union organisation is a precious right, a democratic right, but it was not “given” to the workers. It took mighty and irresistible labour upheavals to establish in reality the right of union organisation. In the old days, the agitators of the IWW—who were real democrats—used to give a shorthand definition of socialism as “industrial democracy”, the extension of democracy to industry, the democratic control of industry by the workers themselves, with private ownership eliminated. That socialist demand for real democracy was taken for granted in the time of Debs and Haywood. The class struggle of the workers against the capitalists to transform society is the fiercest war of all.