The Socialist Party and Socialism

 

The Socialist Party maintains that as the enslavement of the working class follows from the ownership of the means of living by the capitalist class the interests of the working class can only be served by the establishment of socialism. A system of society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community. For world socialists, socialism means a money-free, wageless, class-free and stateless society.  Socialism is a world society with no production for sale, money, buying and selling, prices, wages, or profit.

 The Socialist Party reject all forms of minority action to attempt to establish socialism, which can only be established by the working class when the immense majority have come to want and understand it. Without a socialist working class, there can be no socialism. The establishment of socialism can only be the conscious majority, and therefore democratic, the act of a socialist-minded working class. If we use terms such as “majority” this is not because we are obsessed with counting the number of individual socialists, but to show that we reject minority action to try to establish socialism – the majority as the opposite of the minority. Socialism can only be established when through the experience of capitalism, including hearing the case for socialism (itself the distilled past experience of the working class), a majority (yes, but in the democratic rather than mere mathematical sense) have come to want it. 

This vicious system that we live under has not always been, and it need not continue. But before it can be superseded by socialism, which is a system of society based upon the common ownership of the means of life, socialism must be understood and desired by the workers generally.

To agitate for the reform of a system which has such a basis as the capitalist system has, to endeavour to palliate its inevitably harsh bearing upon those who possess nothing, is a waste of energy and time. Worse than that, the struggle for reform obscures the main issue. One thing, and one thing only, will change for the better the condition of the workers generally, and that is the OVERTHROW OF CAPITALISM and its supersession by socialism.

The abolition of capitalism and the inception of socialism is a work that necessitates knowledge of the system now obtaining, of the system that can replace it, and of the necessary work that shall make socialism an accomplished fact. To gain this knowledge the workers must think for themselves. Socialism will not come until it is generally understood and desired.  Our position always has been that Socialism essentially includes democracy—the genuine thing, not the pitiful caricature some confusionist lips and pens love to portray. We have always held, as one of the primary tenets of our political faith, that a knowledge of the principles of socialism, even together with an avowal of acceptance thereof, is not of itself sufficient to make a person a socialist. Something more, we have maintained, is required.

The surest way for such a socialist majority to gain control of political power in order to establish socialism is to use the existing electoral machinery to send a majority of mandated socialist delegates to the various parliaments of the world. This is why we advocate using Parliament; not to try to reform capitalism (the only way Parliaments have been used up till now, which has inevitably failed to do anything for the working class since capitalism simply cannot be reformed to work for their benefit), but for the single revolutionary purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism by converting the means of production and distribution into the common property of the whole of society.  At the same time, the working class will also have organised itself, at the various places of work, in order to keep production going, but nothing can be done here until the machinery of coercion which is the state has been taken out of the hands of the capitalist class by political action.

Socialists distinguish between society and the state. In their view, the State, as a coercive instrument, only flourished in class societies and was the instrument whereby a ruling class controlled society. In the class-free society of the future, there would be no coercive government machine, and central control would be purely administrative. Unfortunately, many people, including some who called themselves socialists, overlooked this distinction between society and the state.