Revolutionary Practice

 Most on the Left who are denouncing economic inequality and poverty take the system of private ownership for granted and merely call for greater income equality on its basis. What must be called into question are the reason commodities, money, and other privately owned things exist in the first place. As long as a system composed of private ownership of such things continued to exist, problems such as widening economic disparities, and poverty would be inevitable.

Today a variety of problems related to the economic system exist. Many people are treated as expendable resources by disreputable firms that subject them to excessively long working hours. And an increasing number of workers are unable to find permanent positions and have to settle for temporary jobs. The finance sector has swelled compared to the real economy, and speculative bubbles periodically expand and then burst, generating mass unemployment. All of these problems are peculiar to capitalism, and the fundamental cause is an economic system that prioritises profit. Human lives are sacrificed to money, throwing society into chaos.

 

The working class is the product of capitalist society. As such, its mindset is subjected to the influence of this society. Its consciousness is developed under the pressure of its masters. Education, the media and social life—in short,  all the factors shaping the consciousness of the working people—are powerful conductors of the influence of capitalist ideas and attitudes.

It is based on the recognition of the dependence of people’s thinking on their material environment. Such a recognition was characteristic of many progressive thinkers, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They all recognised that the mental servitude of the masses was generated by the material conditions of their situation in the present society. And all of them drew the conclusion that only a fundamental change in the material conditions in which the people lived,  only a fundamental transformation of society, would render the masses capable of directing their own destiny.

But who will change these conditions?

The intellectuals of humanity who come out of the privileged classes, that is to say, individuals freed from the material conditions that overwhelm the thinking of the masses—that was the answer of the Utopians and political leaders. The task of performing this transformation fell to the legislators and to the philanthropists

Marx observed in “Theses on Feuerbach”:

“The materialist doctrine that people are products of circumstances and education, and that, therefore, changed people are products of other circumstances and changed education, forgets that it is them people who change the circumstances and that the educators must themselves be educated. Hence, this doctrine must of necessity divide society into two parts, one of which is elevated above the other (in Robert Owen, for example).” 

Applied to the class struggle, this means the following. Driven by the very “circumstances” of capitalist society that form its character as a subjugated class, the proletariat enters into a struggle against the society that subjugates it. The process of this struggle modifies the social “circumstances.” It modifies the environment in which the working-class lives. In this way, the working class modifies its own character. From a class reflecting passively the mental servitude to which it is subjected, it becomes a class that actively overthrows all subjugation, including that of the mind.

This process is far from straightforward. It does not take place evenly in all sectors of the working people, nor all aspects of proletarian consciousness. It will not, of course, be complete when a combination of historical circumstances makes it possible or even inevitable the working-class tearing the apparatus of political power from the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The workers are condemned to enter socialism burdened by a significant share of those “vices of the oppressed”.

In the process of the struggle against capitalism, the proletariat modifies the material environment surrounding it, thereby modifying its own character and emancipating itself intellectually and spiritually.

Likewise, in the process of using its conquered power to systematically construct the entire social order, the working class eventually frees itself from the intellectual influence of the old society, because it achieves a radical transformation in the material environment by which its character is determined. of 

But only as the result of a long, painful and contradictory process in which, as in all preceding historical processes, social creativity develops only under necessity,

And the pressure of needs. The conscious will of the members of the working class can appreciably shorten and facilitate this process. It can never bypass it.

Some on the Left assume that if a cohesive revolutionary minority, with the will-power to establish socialism, seizes the machinery of state administration and concentrates in its own hands all the means of production and distribution as well as all organisational institutions of  society it may if guided by the ideals of socialism create conditions in which prevailing attitudes can be purged of its past belief-system and be filled with a new content, such as Che Guavara’s “New Socialist Man”. Then, and only then, will the people on their own and take the path to socialism.

If this ideal was followed, it would lead to the diametrically opposite result, if only because, in Marx’s words, the “educators must be educated,” and because, therefore, such relationships established between the “advanced” minority and the “ignorant” masses, educate the dictators in all possible ways, but not as people capable of directing the course of social development along the path of building a new society.

 

It goes without saying that such an education can only corrupt and debase the masses. The only possible builder of the new society, and consequently the only possible successor to the former dominant classes in the administration of the state, is the working class considered as a whole, including knowledge-workers, the workers of intellectual labour, whose cooperation in the direction of the state and the administration of the economy is so obviously necessary. (Marx wrote Capital to “shorten and lessen the birth-pangs” for socialist society to emerge from the womb of capitalism.

This change must manifest itself in every part of the life of society. This is only possible with the maximum development of the organised self-activity  of all the component parts of the working class—that is, under conditions that absolutely preclude the dictatorship of a minority standing “above society,” along with its indispensable companions of such a dictatorship: authoritarianism and bureaucracy.

This “despotism of capital” allows capital to create conditions for its own accumulation. However, workers eventually see through this mechanism to understand that protecting their own lives requires safeguarding the lives of the unemployed, and “by setting up trade unions, etc., they try to organise planned co-operation between the employed and the unemployed in order to obviate or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalist production on their class.” as Marx explains.

In the process of freely constructing a new society, working people will re-educate themselves and reject those behaviours and traits that come directly into conflict with the tasks they face. This applies both to the working class as a whole and to each of its individual sectors.

Marx points out, “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” The possibility of such revolutionary practice is conditioned by human activities and the environment reproduced through those activities.

Our goal is not to merely to change masters, but to cease having masters altogether.

 

Defend the Vote

 

These days rivalries between the capitalists of the world appear to represent a struggle between democratic and autocratic forms of government, in which one or the other is at stake, the question, “What is democracy?" requires investigation.

 In the UK, assuming a politically educated electorate, the machinery of government can be used to carry out the wishes of the majority. Adults possess the vote. The vote returns members of their choice to Parliament. Parliament is a law-making institution; no law can be passed without its consent, no government could continue without its support; it controls finance, approves appointments to the various administrative departments, the army, the judiciary, the civil service; in all except very minor domestic matters, it prescribes the power of the titular head of the state, the monarch.

The composition of the House of Commons, and, ultimately, the existence of the government rests upon the votes of a majority of the people. The government, therefore, depends upon the will of the people, which on major issues it could not defy for any length of time. The will of the people might be a negative, apathetic or unenlightened, and in that proportion any government might treat democratic practice with indifference. This, however, is evidence of the immaturity of the electorate, not of democratic institutions. An enlightened electorate would have the effect of making Parliament ever willing to placate the wishes and interests of those who can take away their power.

Democracy as it is practiced to-day is adapted to the needs of modern conditions. It is the basis of parliamentary government in the advanced capitalist countries. It has reached, broadly speaking, perhaps the highest point possible in a society where class conflict is dominant. Certainly, it has reached the stage where the workers, who are a majority of the population, can through their elected delegates gain complete control of the state machine. In this country democracy has reached this point through centuries of development and struggle, and has passed through many phases. Parliamentary government in many of the less advanced capitalist countries represents, broadly, stages through which in this country it has passed and through which they are passing. In many cases all the appearances of democratic government exist without the reality.

In Britain the struggle for the reality of power has resulted in the complete victory of democratic Parliamentary government over autocracy. It has reached a point where Parliament is no longer the mere tool of autocrats and cliques, but the highly developed instrument through which the majority can impose its will if it wishes. Fundamentally, it can be stated that each stage in struggle for the expansion of the democratic basis of Parliamentary government has been won by different sections of the people through their ability to exert sufficient pressure upon the governing class of the day. With succeeding sections of the capitalist class, the pressure was exerted through their possession of wealth and of their ability to pay taxes. Money governments must have. With the working class the pressure was exerted through its ability to discipline and organise itself in the industrial field. This is the more possible where capitalism is the more highly developed and the workers are brought more into contact with each other through the massive nature of the capitalist productive forces.

Democracy is not the outcome of an idea. It is the inevitable outcome of the class struggle. Its degree of maturity or immaturity in different parts of the world is a measure of the political stage which the class struggle has reached in different countries. Where economic development lags behind the more advanced capitalist countries, there, too, within general limits and with certain exceptions, does political development and the maturity of democratic government lag behind. So there, in many cases, the conditions are less favourable for the workers to obtain immediate democratic rights. The latter is an important factor to take into account when workers struggling for democratic privileges have to decide on the form that the struggle should take in any particular set of circumstances.

 Socialists understand the historic nature of democratic government and its relationship to the goal to which human society is moving: There can be no socialism without democracy. Socialist support for democracy, therefore, arises out of an understanding of the nature of capitalist society. The more that understanding is spread the less danger there is to democracy.

Something on Labour Theory of Value

 

To the working class, a  lesson should be clear. Unless they organise to take and control these great social forces, they will soon be the hopeless serfs of gigantic monopolies embracing whole continents. What are the workers doing about it as their masters organise into larger and still larger corporations, nationally and internationally. We are faced with the greatest aggregations of capital the world has ever seen.  They must resolve that socialism is an issue to be decided now, in the immediate present.

Many allege that Marx is out of date. The real fact is that the capitalists and CEOs are aware of the truth of the labour law of value with their continual and unceasing efforts are made to reduce the time taken to produce commodities. It is not the price-fixing that we see at work specially in the monopolistic corporations. It is the cost-cutting schemes and planning to so increase output per man that less labour is embodied in each article, thus enabling them to outsell their rivals and increase their profits.

A business that cannot invest enough capital to install the most up-to-date technology cannot compete with the efficiency and labour-saving methods of others. If it was simply a matter of will to charge higher prices there would be nothing new or modern about the super-capitalists. All sellers have the will to get the highest price the market will bear, but to-day, as well as a century ago, the seller’s will depends upon suitable conditions for its gratification. The huge firms find the way to wipe out their rivals is to produce cheaply. The way to produce cheaply is to reduce the amount of labour involved in producing each product. Hence capitalists invests in  modern large plants with the latest machinery and enforce working conditions that  speeds up their workers.

A business’s power to charge higher prices is limited by—

1. the purchasing power of its customers ;

2. the similar goods to be obtained from rival firms ;

3. the use of substitutes when price is too high;

4. the decline in amount sold of these commodities if price is higher than market will bear.

 Attacks on “monopoly prices” lead the workers to look at things from the point of view of consumers of commodities.

Actually the workers are the smallest consumers of the total national production. Their purchasing power is limited to the amount of their wages. The capitalists are able to buy the largest quantity because their “share” of the total output is largest in the shape of rent, interest and profit.

The workers must view matters as producers, being the only class engaged in production. It is where they produce that they are exploited. The demand then must not be “lower prices,” but the “abolition of exploitation.”

Leader-Free

 If you wonder why there are so many socialist, anti-capitalist and otherwise radical-left parties, the answer is there is no way of challenging and refuting the confused theories and spurious programmes other than by building up from the ground an organisation of socialists working only for socialism.

 

The goal is not to make a socialist society for the working class but to encourage the working class to build socialism for itself. 

Using the words of Eugene Debs:

 ‘If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out.’

 

These are not times for reform and tweaking the system. Capitalism is in the process of destroying the Earth. The Socialist Party knows that no leaders are going to pull the workers into socialism. The change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. Mainstream politics cannot comprehend the absence of leaders in the movement and that it is not a weakness but a strength, testifying to our determination not to be followers.

Forget about looking for leaders. What we need is a movement that rises from the people and empowers ourselves. People need to stop looking up and start looking around. There is an old adage, that if the people lead, the leaders will follow. People need organisations, and people need to come together. But by self-organisation from the root, you will find that you have got no leaders – and do not want them because you do not lead them.

A leader may say “all that our organisation has gained is because of me”. But it is not so. It is not because a leader persuades the government to be nice, but because the actions of mass movements force the government to give back some of what has been taken from us.

Leaders, indeed, will sometimes pretend that they know best and that the movement depends on them. But they can do this only by withholding knowledge and denying power from others. This is why it is important to make organisations as democratic as possible. The individual leader substitutes for and holds back the capacities of the ‘led’. If we rely on one leader or a group of leaders we are putting ourselves in a vulnerable position because we can easily be misled. Nor is there a leadership to be bought off. A leader comes to symbolise an organisation’s cause and projects it onto one individual that his or her reputation and personality come to represent and embody the cause.

The working class have nothing to gain and everything to lose by relying on leaders.

Leadership is one of those problematic words that needs qualifying. When we say “don’t follow leaders” we mean by this something very specific – a narrow political sense of the term – to denote the idea of surrendering power to an individual or group to change society on our behalf. We are not promoting the false idea that socialism is about “making everyone equal” in their endowments, abilities and so on. There will always exist those who will be better orators or write more lucidly than others.

Structure doesn’t necessarily mean a leader. The best examples of organisation historically can be found in the trade union and labour movement at its best. Take, for example, the structures of trade union branches. These are a product of a long tradition of members debating, agreeing and renewing clear, transparent written rules that create a framework of mutual accountability, self-discipline and individual responsibility. They are there on paper, the responsibility of every member, to be used, contested and, once agreed, followed. That is not to deny that apathy and inertia can set in; the rules become a barrier to creative thinking and change; officials become corrupt or complacent. Yet the rules and basic principles remain, always available.

A socialist party must be a party of no compromise. Its mission is to point the way to the goal and it refuses to leave the main road the side-tracked that leads into the swamp of reformism. Nor does a socialist party advocate violence in the labour movement because it knows the capitalist class has the advantage. It is not cowardice but common sense and it is not heroism that makes a fool rock a boat in deep water, it is idiocy.

The capitalist class can gerrymander elections, miscount and steal votes, plus resort to a thousand and one other political tricks, but such is simply to tamper with a thermometer, it cannot change the temperature. And the temperature is the organised power of the working class.

Power to no one, and to everyone!

Net Zero 2050 (video)

 

Towards Socialist Clarity

 All around us are the signs of a world in crisis. Resources that should be used to feed the hungry are squandered on ever more costly and destructive weapons. But all is not lost. There is the socialist tradition founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the tradition in which the Socialist Party stands. It is solely concerned with the revolution to abolish capitalism, which can only be the work of a working-class politically aware, participating and united. This is why socialists are concerned with working-class unity. Socialists have had enough division, of human beings opposing each other without reason, when the world is desperate for them to unite to change the basis of society. We struggle to persuade the working class that all of them—in the words of our Declaration of Principles “without distinction of race or sex”—have the same interests to work together to rid the world of capitalism with its artificial and destructive divisions and replace it with socialism,  a society of abundant production and free access to the fruits of our labour.

Socialism is not a reform, it is a revolution. This is the position held by the Socialist Party. Usually, when the word “revolution” is mentioned it is certain to be misunderstood. Bloody violent insurrection is often associated with the word so we should be clear about what we mean by revolutionary socialism. The Socialist Party does not seek violence or bloodshed and would regard it a calamity to the socialist cause, as well as to humanity, to have a violent upheaval in society. Socialism offers a possible, peaceful solution. We mean by“revolutionary socialism” the capture of the political powers of the nation by the working class as opposed to the capitalist class. Whoever holds firmly the necessity of the organisation of the working class and those in sympathy with them into an independent political party, distinct from and opposed to all capitalistic parties to capture the state machine in order to carry out the principles of socialism is a revolutionary socialist. On the other hand, the one who thinks we are to get socialism through any of the old political parties, or without organising a new, Socialist Party, that person is not a revolutionary socialist and, indeed, probably not even a socialist at all.

There are many powerful influences that run against the idea that working-class interests lie in unity. A potent force for dividing the working class is that of nationality. All over the world workers are taught that the artificial boundary which separates “their” country also confines special qualities like courage, verity and intelligence which are denied to those across the frontier. And there is the propaganda about “race”, which divides human beings on grounds of prejudice, malice and pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo.

There is no alternative for the working class other than socialism. The fundamental issue is socialism versus capitalism, that the working class must learn that the problems confronting them will not be solved in a fundamental manner except through the end of the capitalist system; that fighting for palliative reforms was like struggling to cure the symptoms and not the disease.

Private property society has divorced its workers from the means of wealthy production and has reduced many of our tasks to simple manipulation. It has also brought about a uniformity of taste, ideas and general behaviour that social reformers may wail about but which none of them can alter. We hope we have said enough by now to show that only a class-free, property-less society will make any radical change in this state of affairs. It will be then that we can express ourselves fully and encourage variety in the truest sense of the word.

Knowledge is Power

 Visitors to this blog will have understood that we attach great importance to fellow workers having a knowledge of some basic socialist principles and being able to apply them to the questions of the day. We hold that is how socialists are made, education, and is the only way.  This requires a certain amount of study, but it is well within the reach of our fellow workers.

The examination of economics and politics from the working-class viewpoint is not only interesting in itself but it touches at every point on the actual conditions of the life of the working class. That is to say, it is a study that, so far from being divorced from action, leads directly to the adoption of policies in line with our own economic interests. Knowledge of socialism influences the everyday thoughts and actions of the socialist, enables him or her to understand and appreciate at the true value of the social forces and gives confidence which is indispensable for the organisation of the working class, the conquest of the powers of government, and the building up of socialism.

 

Through this blog, socialist principles have been applied to current problems, every aspect of capitalism has been explained, every policy presented to the workers has been criticised and its value assessed, every anti-working-class party has been exposed. Hundreds of well-informed articles have made accessible useful knowledge from almost every field of study, and hundreds of questions have been answered. The blog carries a record of the past history of working-class movements, packed with invaluable information on their failures and on the false theories and policies which made failure inevitable.   It is no exaggeration to say that there is no other comparable source to which the worker with limited leisure and means can go for reliable guidance in the study of social problems.

Socialists argue that human behaviour arises from the way society is organised. People’s attitudes and actions reflect the social relationships they form to produce wealth. Thus, for instance, from the Marxist standpoint, war arises from the struggle for profits and can be abolished when capitalism (the system of profits) is removed.

The capitalist class and their story-tellers cannot accept such a proposition. War for them is something apart from society, which arises from the brutal and selfish nature of man. In order to give their system an air of permanence, they have to concoct myths about men being naturally greedy and war-like so that all the violence and inhumanity can be accepted without endangering capitalism.

Modern capitalism with its hideous means of mass destruction and its ever-increasing contradiction between wealth and want can only be understood when seen as a period of history, a phase which because of its own internal contradictions, will be superseded by socialism. Here it is important to understand that Marxism does not envisage blind or abstract “contradictions” changing society by themselves. We are talking of men in society and the consciousness they develop of and in society. It is the working class whose worldwide majority consciousness and democratic political action will abolish capitalism.

Marxian economics shows that the whole structure of capitalism rests upon the exploitation of wage-labour, not the quest to “allocate scarce resources” as taught to unwary students today. The further economists get away from this fact and concentrate exclusively on “inflationary spirals”, share-price movements, and the like, the more mysterious capitalism seems to become.

Economics then appears as a subject for academic study in order to try to manipulate and stabilise the trends in this crisis-ridden system. The actual mechanics of the wage-labour and capital basis, are taken as natural. It all becomes a question of adjustments and regulation. The idea of getting rid of this base is not even considered.

 

Profits are the mainspring of capitalism. When profits clash with human interest, it is profits that come out best. It might be thought that sometimes profits retreat and human interest prevails. But the class which lives from profits knows that it can be damaging to its long-term interests if the profit motive falls into disrepute and that it is wise to appear to concede a point and survive for greater plunder another day.

The capitalist class and its political servants are well aware of the public relations aspects of their system. A gloss has to be applied, and the myth has to be maintained, that the big business edifice of modern capitalism is there to supply and serve us. The consumer is supreme. This is the blatant humbug dished up in the name of economic theory by the “learned” pundits whose unsavoury task is to justify capitalism.

 

The fact that most consumers are members of the working class, who spend their lives ekeing out their wages, is played down. Where are the modern capitalist economists who regard the wages system as a barrier, restricting the distribution of wealth to what it takes on average to maintain the wage earner in working order and provide replacements? They are so buried in a morass of market trends, charts and diagrams, and so bewildered by their own complex terminology, that they spare hardly a thought for the quality of life in terms of what is consumed.

The economists would have us believe that what is good for capitalism and its profits, is good enough for all of us. Another of their myths is that there is a ‘national interest’ and we are all in it together. Unfortunately for them, capitalism the world over abounds with examples of the antagonism between wage-labour and capitalism, and of profits having priority over human beings.

 

No wonder the politicians use glib phrases. To sound lofty is the best they can hope for. If the intricate workings of capitalism bamboozle the “experts”, what can ordinary workers do except abandon themselves to their fate? This is another subtle ploy of the ruling class. The workers must always be discouraged from thinking that they themselves can affect a solution. No matter how rife the chaos and the turmoil, our lives are in the safe hands of those who know what is best for us —even if they do disagree among themselves and constantly contradict each other.