The Left-Wing

 

 If socialism means anything then it is the antithesis of capitalism. If capitalism means commodity production, production for profit, and wage slavery, then socialism as a competing political ideology must stand for something else. And it does. It is everything capitalism is not and everything every mainstream political party does not stand for. The Labour Party certainly has nothing to do with socialism. 

Socialism to us means a global system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the world’s natural and industrial resources. It means a world in which each person has a free and equal say in how their society is run. It means a world without borders or frontiers, social class or leaders, states or governments, force or coercion. It means abolishing the money system, releasing production from the artificial constraints of profit and establishing a world of free access to the benefits of civilisation. It means a world in which people give freely to society whatever skills or abilities they have, for the betterment of society, and take in return whatever they need, according to their own self-defined needs, from the stockpile of communal wealth. And we keep referring to “a world” because socialism can only exist on a global scale, just as capitalism, does. It can’t exist in one country, in isolation.

Dozens of organisations claim the socialist title and spread all manner of reformist gobbledygook. They spread nothing but confusion and make the job of genuine socialists all that more difficult when it comes to untangling the mess of ideas they have created in people’s minds. And it’s at this stage you get to realise just what a Sisyphean task being a socialist really is.

The idea is that:

1) you urge the workers to support Labour;

2) The workers support Labour as asked;

3)  Labour gets into power, fucks up and can make no improvements to capitalism;

4) The workers then get disillusioned and turn away from support of Labour’s brand of capitalism and turn to the SWP

5)  Who also supports capitalism, albeit state capitalism in which the revolutionary hierarchy will manage the exploitation of the workers instead of private capitalists, shooting anyone who will not comply for being a counter-revolutionary.

And you wonder why we are over the use of the word ‘socialism’?

“Why don’t you socialists all get together and form one big Socialist Party?”

So we explain that there are not just little differences that separate, say, ourselves from the SWP, or the SPEW or the CPB or the RCP or the AWL and which stop us from joining forces, but an unbridgeable ocean. They defend capitalism and we support socialism. They all want to reform the system, to ameliorate the harsher effects of capitalism. We are alone in wanting to abolish it. It’s like asking why we don’t get together with the Conservative Party – we, after all, all breathe oxygen. And the poor woman will walk away totally bewildered; under her arm half a dozen newspapers from the various stalls she has visited and which you know she is just not going to read. This may lay us open to the charge of sectarianism. But the SPGB are the oldest existing socialist organisation in Britain. Most of the leftist groups out there are the result of a split from a split from a split, Johnny-come-lately. We have not compromised our position. Our standpoint is as it was in 1904 - the abolition of the wages system - whereas many leftist groups change their policies more times than they change their socks, as if the generals of capitalism are forever changing their battle plan prompting them to retreat, regroup and attack again in a different formation. In truth, capitalism has not changed – it is still the same social system it always was and to which the time-honoured Marxian critique still applies.

Being a socialist means you become a myth shatterer – because you spend the greatest portion of your activity shattering myths, dispelling illusions, and setting the record straight.