The Cry of the People

“And yes, we do need hope, of course we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.” - Greta Thunberg 

Many people these days will tell you ‘socialism is dead’, usually with the collapse of the USSR. However, the reformists do not know what they want; they are everything and nothing. It is amazing these days to see how many and how diverse are the people who mean to change the world. Those ‘world changers’ find that they do not suddenly decide to change the world and—hey presto!—it is changed. They offer us a new world…but later…far, far later.

The support of the majority of the population is necessary for the socialist transformation of society. No social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.

In his first draft of ’The Civil War in France’ Marx wrote that ‘the general suffrage, till now abused either for the parliamentary sanction of the Holy State Power, or a play in the hands of the ruling classes’ was ‘adapted to its real purposes, to choose by the communes their own functionaries of administration and initiation’

Engels wrote to Paul Lafargue in 1892: ‘Look what a splendid weapon you have now had in your hands in France for forty years in universal suffrage if only you’d known how to make use of it!’

In ’The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ Engels recognised that ‘the possessing class rules directly through the medium of universal suffrage’, but only for so long as the working class is ‘not yet ripe to emancipate itself. To the extent that the proletariat ‘matures for its self-emancipation’, it ‘constitutes itself as its own party and elects its own representatives, and not those of the capitalists. Thus universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class.’

For Marx and Engels the democratic nature of a socialist revolution depended on its enjoying the support of the majority of the people. The majoritarian nature of the proletarian movement was emphasised, as we have seen, in the ‘Communist Manifesto’, “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority." The winning of a majority was considered essential by Marx and Engels not only on grounds of expediency, but also because of the democratic nature of the socialist project. In a revolution, wrote Engels, where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, ‘the masses must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul’.

Socialism offers the only solution to the contradictions of capitalism, so every serious attempt to find a way out leads surely and inexorably to socialism. From the old World to the new World means a change, a very great change, and those who propose to take the job in hand had better make a study of Marxism, if they wish to know how to get on with the job. The interests of working people in all countries are the same. Society's crying need is for the international unity of the working class to abolish capitalism and substitute for it a cooperative world of abundance and freedom. It is the need for dignity, for progress, for survival. The people of the world can have socialism if they want it or they can choose, in one way or another, extinction.

The aim of the master class is to keep the workers ignorant, for an ignorant subject class, not knowing how to act in their own interests, can be more easily and inexpensively kept in subjection than an educated one. In fostering this ignorance the first thing to be done is to preserve the inertia of the mind – the tendency of the mind to run in an unchanging direction. Fellow workers, there is but one meaning attaching to class rule, and that is class plunder. As long as you are ruled poverty will be your lot, for those who rule over you can always plunder you and always will. You are ruled, not by kings, but by those who possess the land, mines, factories, machinery, railways, and other means of production and distribution, and just because they possess those things. Since you are denied access to those things all the doors of life are shut against you except that of the labour market. You must become wage slaves – must sell your energies to those who own the productive forces. This means that goods are produced for profit, and that profit, that wealth you produce but which is taken away from you, goes to glut the market and to throw you out of work, so that you and your children starve when the warehouses are fullest.

The remedy for all this is to take these means of production and distribution away from their present owners and make them the property of the whole community. Food will then be produced to feed people, not for profit, and clothes to clothe them, and houses to shelter them. All able-bodied adults will take part in the necessary social labour, and all will partake freely of the wealth produced.

Month after month, year after year, our fellow-workers appear to be too satisfied with the capitalist system—or too apathetic — to want to put an end to it. They seem to look with an almost fatalistic resignation on the possibility of another recession. We, too, hope that the day will soon come when they will realise that whether at the forthcoming election they vote Labour or Tory politicians into power; they will still continue to live under capitalism and will have to suffer the worries and indignities of that system. When that day comes—and it cannot come too soon for us—they will decide to abolish capitalism and establish socialism. To do this the workers must first study socialism and organise to capture political power, in order that the political machinery may be used to end for ever the class domination which political power alone upholds. To try and bring that day nearer is the aim and work of members of the Socialist Party, its companion parties in the World Socialist Movement and friends and sympathisers around the world.