“When once the thin end of the opportunist wedge has forced itself into the policy of the party, the thick end soon follow” -Wilhelm Liebknecht (No Compromise)
The working class have trodden many false paths and taken up many unsound ideas in the course of its history. When sections of organised workers engage in sound action by striking for improved wages or conditions, they receive almost unanimous condemnation from the media. This should indicate to them that such action is in their interest. Industrial action on its own is however very limited and has its best chance of success in a boom time when employers need us most. At best, a strike can win the day on a wage issue, but the capitalists still remain in their privileged position as owners of the means of production.
History has proved when organising for socialism, the offering of reforms on the party programme spells ruin. Thousands may flock to the party, but they are most interested in the reform of capitalism, not in its abolition, and these members swamp the socialist element. Socialists inside a reformist organisation cannot convert it and bring it onto the socialist path. The only logical thing they can do is to break with the reformists and organise the clear-cut programme of socialism.
The working-class cannot hope for Socialism from trade unions, co-operatives or from reform movements.
Trade unions, Rosa Luxemburg, shows, are a part of capitalism itself. They are the workers’ weapons of defence against the capitalist class which aims at increasing its profits. They are useful in that they enable the workers to sell their labour-power under more favourable conditions than would otherwise be the case. However, they are not able to take the offensive against capitalism, to overthrow it, because they are badly handicapped.
Co-operatives are no more able than trade unions to end capitalism. As Rosa Luxemburg points out they can survive within the present system only if they become pure capitalist enterprises. They have to compete with capitalist firms, and to do so successfully they must adopt capitalist methods of production.
Any social reforms that are passed, therefore, will not be harmful to capitalism. Since the struggle for reforms cannot alter the slave position of the working class, it ends by bringing indifference and disillusionment to the workers who look to reforms for emancipation.
The workers must aim at capturing political power. And they must make use of democracy to that end. The Socialist Party will not barter its support for any promise of reform. For, no matter whether these promises are made sincerely or not, we know that the immediate need of our class is emancipation, which can only be achieved through the establishment of socialism. Our interests are opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class without distinction; whether bankers or industrialists, landlords or commercial magnates, all participate in the fruits of our enslavement. All will unite, in the last resort, in defence of the system by which they live. For the party of the working class, one course alone is open, and that involves unceasing hostility to all parties, no matter what their plea, who lend their aid to the administration of the existing social order and thus contribute, consciously or otherwise, to its maintenance. Our object is its overthrow, and to us, political power is useless for any other purpose.
The wage system takes away from the workers what they produce, and creates a situation in which money becomes the sole end of human endeavour. The worker is reduced to a creature who seeks a wage packet. Governments running a system concerned above all else to ensure that rent, interest and profit are secured for the capitalist minority are bound to anger and frustrate workers. After all, workers have no real material interest in capitalist prosperity; indeed, the capitalists' privilege is obtained at the expense of our relative poverty. There is a class division arising out of diametrically opposed material interests. Faced with a multitude of problems arising out of the system where production is for profit rather than need, workers become frustrated, angry and determined to do something to change things. Socialists depend on this active desire to change society: every worker who decides to do something to protest against the way things are — however misguided that action might be — is, at least, proof of the fact that workers are discontented and not brainwashed. After all, if workers were wholly contented and totally indoctrinated, there would not be any socialists. However, wrong solutions to real frustration arising out of real problems will not change society. Socialist understanding starts off with the recognition of the problems and all the anger about them that reformists show.
The Socialist Party stands in uncompromising opposition to reformism. We reject all attempts to make capitalism run efficiently from the working class's point of view. That does not mean that we have nothing in common with reformist workers — in fact, we have much to agree about. They want change and so do we; they envisage the possibility of eradicating unpleasant features of society which conservatives say are inevitable, and so do we; they are anxious to alert their fellow workers to particular problems and so are we. Where is the big difference, then? Socialists are aware that the changes which reformists want are futile for three reasons: firstly, they are usually directed to just one problem of capitalism, leaving all the others intact and, even in relation to these "single issues”, the reformists are often willing to compromise (abolish nuclear bombs but keep conventional ones, for example); secondly, the reformist is unaware of the fact that capitalism produces social problems as a matter of course, and that therefore it is as idealistic to seek to eradicate mass starvation without ending production for profit as it would be to abolish the spots without curing measles; thirdly, socialists want more than to make capitalism tolerable for the working class — we want to end capitalism and, in so doing, to abolish wage slavery as a permanent social condition for the vast majority of people.
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