Socialism - Heart and Head

 

The socialist movement is not only the heart but is a combination of the heart plus the head.

It is almost a truism to say that when the workers, as a class, couple their latent revolutionary fervour with socialist understanding, they become an indomitable force sweeping everything before it. 

“Nothing is more powerful than an idea come of age, it is more powerful than the strongest armies.” 

As to any fears that there is no room for differences of opinion in a socialist party, this simply isn’t so. Socialists have varying opinions on matters of a speculative nature, on interpretations of current events, on attitudes to cultural matters, specific aspects of science, even on projections of the actual workings of a socialist society.

 

We emphasise that the ballot is the lever of emancipation. We do this just because the conscious, socialist majority takes political action in order to be in a position to transfer the means of living from the hands of the parasites into the hands of society, as a whole. The ballot symbolises the nature of the socialist revolution. We advocate the ballot because we cannot visualise the need for a socialist majority to use violence. Violence does not symbolise the socialist revolution. However, we can get all tangled up in speculations of projecting possible contingencies that may exist in a future event. History may make liars out of us in predicting the workings of social forces based on scientific analyses. When we say that socialism is inevitable it always implies: barring unforeseen catastrophes such as pandemic plagues wiping out of the human race. However, given capitalism and its laws of motion, the next stage in social evolution is socialism.

For many years we have witnessed the supposed “success” of a series of practical efforts to rally workers to socialism by so-called clever policies. We have seen the transformation of these advocates of pragmatic socialist goals into supporters of the status quo — rebels who have been converted into modifying the system. Their trademark politics has become reforming, improving and administering capitalism.

Where are all the convinced socialists that the piecemeal reform approach was going to make? In the name of building up a socialist movement among the masses, they have emasculated and compromised socialist principles. When elected, they have actually administered capitalism is the only way it can be administered, in the interest of the capitalist class, even to the extent of supporting capitalist wars and crushing workers on strike. Look at the net result. Where are the socialist masses? As far as numbers are concerned the gradualists are not much better off than the Socialist Party. Their practical, realistic policies have proven worse than illusory. They have failed to make socialists. Yet they continue to heap scorn and sneer at the SPGB for our small numbers.

With smug omniscience, they dismiss the SPGB as “ivory tower Utopians,” “dogmatic sectarians,” “impossiblists,” etc. The real question is: Who have ignored the lessons of experience?

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has been confronted with scorn by those who campaign for something “in the meantime” and who are  actively participating in the “workers’ struggles.” The lure and fascinations of protests and demonstrations making demands on the government at every opportunity are very attractive. (In a sense, it does indicate how deeply-rooted discontent with capitalism really is, and it expresses the latent strength of socialism once the masses wake up to the need for changing the system instead of adjusting to it.) But — and this is the vital point — these activities are not in harmony with the immediate needs of our time: the making of socialists.

The lack of socialists is all that stands in the way of socialism, now. You can put these guys on the spot by asking: Where are the socialists you have obtained by your efforts? Their vaunted “fresh new approaches” prove to be very stale indeed.

For years their antecedents — the Labour Party with their gradualism, the Bolsheviks with their “revolutionary” programmes — actually gained victories on such practices. Yet they also served as recruiting sergeants for capitalist wars and the crushing of workers on strike. If there is one generalisation that could be applied to the Bolsheviks, Social Democrats, those who supported World War I, or on the issue of Fascism vs. Democracy, it is that they stood for their pet hobby-horse “burning issue of the day”. Recall the rhetoric: “Immediate Demands” and “Ultimate Demands.” We in the SPGB, are still being told, that “in the meantime” we must fight for some “priority” issue and we should join their ranks, the result, being capitalism administered in the name of “socialism.” All those “socialist governments” merely wound up administering capitalism for the capitalist class. And that is all that the radical progressive Left is able to do.

Had all that wasted energy, much of it earnest and sincere, been for socialism, what a great movement we could have had.