The
aim of the Socialist Party is to establish socialism and abolish the
right of one person to rob another of the fruits of his or her
labour. This is what makes the Socialist Party different from all
others. Nowhere in the world has socialism been established.
Socialism. in the old days was often called the society of the free
and equal where democracy was defined as the rule of the people. In
the old days, the socialist activists and the IWW used to give a
shorthand definition of socialism as "industrial democracy,"
the extension of democracy to industry, the democratic control of
industry by the workers them. selves, with private ownership
eliminated. That socialist demand for real democracy was taken for
granted in the time of Debs. These simple definitions still ring
true. You never hear things like that said today.
When
some people say it would be a fine idea for all of us to get together
in the struggle for socialism and democracy, it is appropriate to
ask: "Just what do you mean by socialism, and what do you mean
by democracy? Do you mean what Marx and Engels said? Or do you mean
what Lenin and Stalin did?" They are not the same thing as can
be easily proved and it is necessary to choose between one set of
definitions and the other. Our task, as socialists living and
fighting in this day and hour, is simply to restate what socialism
meant to the founders of our movement, and to bring their
formulations up to date and apply them to present conditions. This
restatement of basic aims and principles cannot wait; it is, in fact,
the burning necessity of the hour. There is no room for
misunderstanding among us as to what such a restatement of our
position means and requires. It requires correcting all the
perversions and distortions of the real meaning of socialism and a
return to the original formulations and definitions. Nothing short of
this will do and no formulation can improve on the classic statement
of the Communist Manifesto, which said: "All previous historical
movements were movements of minorities, in the interest of
minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the
immense majority”, later reiterated that "the emancipation of
the working class is the task of the workers themselves," a way
of saying that the socialist reorganization of society requires a
workers revolution and that such a revolution is unthinkable without
the active participation of the majority of the working class, who
are the majority of the population. Nothing could be more democratic
than that. No party has a right to call itself socialist, unless it
stands four-square for the workers.
Marx
and Engels never taught that the nationalisation of the forces of
production signified the establishment of socialism. That's not
stated by Marx and Engels anywhere. All Marxists define socialism as
a class-free society - with abundance, freedom and equality for all;
a society in which there would be no state, not even a democratic
workers' state. Capitalism under any kind of government, whether
bourgeois democracy, or fascism or a police-state - under any kind
of government, capitalism remains a system of minority rule, where
the principal beneficiaries are the small minority of exploiting
capitalists. The formal right of free speech and free press is
outweighed rather heavily by the inconvenient circumstance that the
small capitalist minority happens to enjoy a complete ownership and
control of all the main media.
Socialism
cannot be anything but global. All attempts to make Socialism
national have failed, because the economy is global and there cannot
be a socio-economic solution of the problems within the narrow
borders of a country. For
most members of the Left socialism has been a chimera and reforming
existing society by spreading its benefits around was their solution,
no matter how militant the rhetoric or the means used to achieve the
end. The Socialist Party has always attempted to project a more
radical ambitious political and economic platform on these movements
but it has never stuck because it was alien to them. They were solely
concerned with eliminating the
“glass ceiling” that deprives their constituency of the rewards
due them under the rules that apply to others in this society.
Socialists cannot expect a movement with such concerns to worry much
about what a socialist society would look like, nor expect people who
are trying to remove the glass ceiling to help you demolish the
building. Their demands tend to split movements along lines of gender
or race identity. They do
not automatically lead to a progressive, class-based, inclusive
movement but lead to the further fragmentation.
Socialism
is not made, but it is grows out of the needs and struggles of
organised labour. We can’t force consciousness upon our
fellow-workers, we allow it to develop and to ripen. Let's start with
understanding what it means to be truly Marxist. We cannot make a
cult, as it has been done for Mao or Stalin. Being a Marxist today
does not mean agreeing with everything that Marx wrote or said, but
to know how to critique or exceed him.
