Break the Chains

As revolutionary socialists we recognise that capitalism can’t grant all the reforms workers need. At this stage of the descent of capitalism into barbarism the only thing the capitalist system can offer workers is austerity—the choice between less and less. This is what’s happening everywhere across the globe. As revolutionary socialists we know that no socio-economic transformation of society has ever been achieved through reforms within the power structure of that society. Supporting (critically or otherwise) candidates of the parties of the capitalist class is deceptive because it implies that the system can be changed through such reforms as long as we elect the correct capitalist candidates.

Workers’ democratic control over the means of production and the establishment of socialism is the only solution to austerity, unending war and the destruction of our environment. And it is the only road to the reversal of the current descent into barbarism. Working class democratic control over society is the goal of revolutionary socialism and, practically speaking, the only thing that will save the world. This cannot be reformed into being. Supporting radical sounding or so-called socialist candidates of capitalist parties (because one can’t really distinguish between them) muddies the truth that the system of capitalism itself is the real enemy of the working class. 

Revolutionary socialism is not just about fighting for reforms or demands. A minimum wage, while it’s better than nothing, is ridiculously inadequate. We need to organise independently of the capitalist class and their parties. We need to show the working class that we have strength and power on our own because we do. This is socialism.

 Supporting the candidates of capitalist parties weakens us. It ties our hands to the capitalist system to resolve our problems. It’s a dead end. Reformism is not the same as revolutionary socialism. We can’t make that distinction clear if we lend our support to capitalist politicians no matter what they call themselves. It’s the job of revolutionary socialists to clarify what socialism means and how it will be achieved—specifically through mass, independent struggle of the working class. Describing capitalist candidates as socialists will not clarify anything. Progressives share the idea of socialism as the Swedish or Norwegian model. But those countries are also enforcing austerity—cutting back on social welfare programs and privatizing them because they are capitalist countries that called themselves socialist to win over their population. It gives false hope that electing a capitalist candidate can achieve all the reforms workers need to survive or all the reforms the world needs to keep the planet from being destroyed.

We know that the only solution to the plight of the working class and the planet is socialist revolution—the complete overthrow of the capitalist mode of production for profit and replacing it with a system of production for want and need, democratically controlled by the working class—to end hunger, homelessness, oppression and inequality. We can’t substitute fake socialism for the real thing. It will only lead to defeat and demoralization.

Socialism has to do only with the mass power and mass action of the proletariat, and scorn the futile acts of individual terrorist violence which are unrelated to the organized proletarian movement. Nobody ever was or could be urged to individual acts of violence or sabotage through the propaganda of revolutionary socialism. Reformists conceive of political action in terms of a modification of the political and economic regime of capitalism. Reformism is little more than making capitalism the better-ordered slavery of the wage-worker.

The work of the Socialist Party is to develop the consciousness upon which depends the overthrow of capitalism; to develop the organization for the expression of this consciousness; and to formulate the general tactics for  both in winning power and in using this power to make the basic economic changes upon which the socialist order of society depends.

The class struggle is not a theory but a fact, not a dogma but a grim reality. Out in the mines, the steel hells, in sweating dens of the exploiters, and everywhere that our class is drained of its vitality, there is the class struggle. Get in it. Be of it. Know its reality and the theory will take care of itself. The socialist movement in  depends today on the rise of a politically-conscious working class.

The Socialist Party dedicates itself to the purpose of hastening and influencing such a development. And then we shall see the Revolution.