The ‘educator must first be educated’

The Socialist Party aims at replacing the present capitalist system by socialism, understood broadly as a system where there will be common ownership of the means of production and distribution. We envisage socialism as a society where material wealth will be in the hands of those who produce it, where the exploitation of man by man will be ended, where production will be used not for private profit, where individual men and women will find the possibilities to develop their abilities.

 The State had little to do with representative institutions; on the contrary, the State was something through which the will of the ruling class was imposed on the rest of the people. In primitive society there was no State; but when human society became divided into classes, the conflict of interests between the classes made it impossible for the privileged class to maintain its privileges without an armed force directly controlled by it and protecting its interests. Its function is maintaining the existing order, which means the existing class division and class privilege. It is always represented as something above society, something “impartial,” whose only purpose is to “maintain law and order,” but in maintaining law and order it is maintaining the existing system. It comes into operation against any attempt to change the system. It is an apparatus of force, acting in the interests of the ruling class.

 The extension of the vote did not in any way alter this situation. Real power rests with the class which is dominant in the system of production; it maintains its control of the State machine, no matter what happens in the representative institution.

The Socialist Party has always supported democracy. We see its defence as one of the fields of the class struggle. Parliaments of today can serve as instruments for winning concessions and at the same time rousing the workers for the decisive struggle for power to bring the new order of society. Therefore the struggle for parliamentary democracy is not purposeless. It is about as Marx explains, “winning the battle of democracy.” Socialism can and will be attained by only the fullest realisation of democracy. That is what the Socialist Party teach. The Socialist Party does not subscribe to any doctrine called Leninism, Trotskyism or Maoism. When the workers form a majority and are conscious of their importance to society, their voting for the Socialist Party signifies that they have recognised their strength and are determined to make use of it.

The class struggle and the State will continue through history as long as human society remains divided in classes. But when the working class takes power it does so in order to end the class divisions – to bring in a new form of production in which there is no longer any class living on the labour of another class; in other words, to bring about a class-free society, in which all serve society as a whole. There will be no class conflict because there are no classes with separate interests, and therefore there will be no need of a State – an apparatus of force – to protect one set of interests against another. The State will “wither away” – in one sphere after another it will not be required, and such ministries that remain will be for the organisation of production and distributed. As Engels put it: “Government over persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production.”

Marx himself had argued that what enabled socialism (ie workers’ control of production, full political democracy, full equality) was the development of the productive forces to a sufficient degree to provide plenty for all the first time in human history. Without this affluence any attempt to establish socialism must fail because to quote Marx, “without it only want is made general and with want, the struggle for necessities and all the old crap would necessarily be reproduced”.

Socialism has had quite a few self-appointed saviours and messiahs. Socialism from ‘above’ always has an appeal as long as we live under a system of domination, hierarchy and exploitation. When struggles are defeated or when workers are beaten back, the loss of confidence that ensues allows for ‘substitutionism - when organisations or individuals step in claiming to liberate the masses ‘from above’

A myriad of groups and individuals preached their schemes to transform the world. There were also well-meaning attempts at building perfect communities. Robert Owen was a Welsh socialist, who owned a factory in New Lanark.He realised that productivity would increase if his workers were given a share of the profits, leading him to suggest communism as a way by which people could live in cooperative communities. He built his workers schools and planted gardens. The problem was that he believed that all it took to change the world was for caring individuals, with a blueprint for change, to lead by good example. His motto was build the perfect community and the world will follow you. It didn’t quite work out as he had hoped and Owen ended up rejected by Victorian society and building utopias in the USA, which fell apart one by one. The utopian reformers both believed that the masses needed to be ‘educated’ and led by ‘good example’. The mass of people were seen as passive, not as active agents of social change. For all their weaknesses the ‘utopian’ socialists did develop serious critiques of capitalist society, elements of which were very important to the development of socialist ideas.

Marx stated in the third of his Theses on Feuerbach that the ‘educator must first be educated.’ He was then drawn to the understanding that the revolution must be a process of mass self-emancipation. The revolt of the working class is a combination of transformation of the world and the transformation of itself. Revolutionary struggle is necessary, not only to destroy the old order, but for ‘the alteration of men on a mass scale’. This process can be seen again and again in every workers uprising. What differentiates the Socialist Party from the the Left is its focus on self-activity and its criticism of elitism and of all substitutes for the self-activity of the working people.