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.

Capitalism is Conflict

 

Horror and indignation. There are no other words to describe the attacks which have struck the cities and towns of Ukraine. No cause can ever justify such monstrous acts.

 

Governments who rule the destinies of nations are but the tools of the moneyed interest. Their quarrels are dictated by avarice and lust of power on the part of the class to which they belong. The people who fight under their flags in the various armies do indeed imagine they are fighting the battles of their own country, but in what country has it ever happened that the people have profited by foreign conquest?

The influence which impels war today is the influence of capitalism. Every war now is a capitalist move for new markets, and it is move capitalism must make or perish. The mad scramble for wealth that this century has witnessed has resulted in lifting almost every country into the circle of competition for trade. Competition between capitalists drives them to seek newer foreign markets.

Modern wars, in the opinion of the Socialist Party, are caused by the conflict of nations for markets, sources of raw material, fields for investment, and spheres of influence. As long as the capitalist system remains, and with it those conditions which flow automatically from the operation of the capitalist system, recurring wars, are inevitable. Our party has always stated that it is impossible to prevent wars without abolishing the capitalist system which breeds war. It may be possible to delay war for a while, but eventually, it is impossible to prevent wars while this system, and its conflicts of rival nations, remain. Wars are caused by international economic conflicts, and not by the goodwill or bad will of some people?

That does not eliminate the possibility of incidental attacks being caused by the acts of this or that ruling group of one country or another, but fundamentally wars are caused by the efforts of all the capitalist powers to expand into other fields. The only way they can get them is by taking them away from some other power because the whole world has been divided up among a small group of competing powers. That is what leads to war, regardless of the will of the people. We do not maintain that the ruling groups of any nation really desired the war. We have stated many times that they would have been glad to have avoided it, but they could not avoid it and maintain the capitalist system in their country. Our party is unalterably opposed to all wars. We do not give any support to any war. We do not vote for it; we do not vote for any that promotes it; we do not speak for it; we do not write for it. We are in opposition to it. We write against it and we speak against it.

Is it the "fate" of humanity always to be at war? Will mankind always be divided into antagonistic camps, which, men call "their country, their fatherland"? And must they always slaughter one another with murderous weapons, murder, mutilate and burn, laying waste to beautiful towns and cities? Must the world always be one vast slaughter-house? Must the world always be one vast arsenal with each war yet greater and more terrible than the other? Yes! Always! as long as capitalism exists! So long as capitalism exists, so long as capitalism rules, so long as the state is in the hands of the capitalists, so long as the bosses hold power, then so long will there be wars! War is a vital necessity for the capitalist class.

Certainly, there is one war we endorse. The class war. The war to end wage-slavery, to end capitalism with its evils of misery and degradation, prostitution and crime. The war to end war. And until that war is ended we do not want peace—because such peace will be the peace of the beggar and the slave.

War will become a horrible memory of the past only with the termination of the system of wealth production for private gain — with the advent of socialism. As yet the dark forces of capitalism are stronger than socialism. Capitalism is the cause of war. To abolish war we must abolish capitalism. This is the whole crux of the matter.

They start wars, not us

For the bankers and industrialists, for the oil magnates, for the munitions makers and stock exchange speculators for all the capitalist vultures, war is an opportunity to make billions out of human carnage. In public, in the media, they yearn for peace and say they have nothing to gain by war, but they have waited for years,  prepared for it and they had secretly wished and hoped for it to happen even if they did cloak themselves in the guise of peace.  The production of war materials can now incentify the bankers and industrialists into investing in manufacturing again, bring back the idle factories; bring back the idle billions resting in the coffers of the banks into the process of circulation. The droves of capitalists and their lobbyists are swarming around governments in order to solicit weapon orders.

 Their hirelings in the media are all striving unselfishly to accomplish one great common end, the defence of the nation against a dangerous outside enemy to camouflage the real character of this merciless plundering and unprecedented pilfering of the people’s pockets, to fill the bosses' bank balances.

The socialist, who has learned to understand the essence of capitalism, sees also clearly the cause of this war. International conflict is a product of capitalism; we cannot destroy the one without overthrowing the other. The socialist struggle against economic slavery at home cuts at the roots of war. The socialist version of internationalism is based, first and foremost, upon the abolition of the capitalist system and exploitation.  Socialists have a different job: to bring to the fore the necessity for a SOCIALIST world before humanity’s hopes of peace and security can be achieved.

It is clear then that working people must be opposed to every war. They look upon the workers of foreign lands as their brothers and sisters, their comrades, but upon the owning class of their own country as their enemies and oppressors. Class-conscious workers desire to carry on the class struggle in order to abolish capitalism and to establish a cooperative community, a socialist society. Workers without class consciousness are easily tricked by the old catchwords, love of nation and patriotism. Thus the war was made popular among the working class. Yet, in pursuit of capitalist self-interest, members of the working class are routinely regarded by their rulers as disposable.

An understanding of the dynamics of society brings the awareness of class interests and how workers should respond to them. That is why we stand out against capitalism's wars. Modern war is fought to settle the squabbles of capitalism’s master class; it does not involve the interests of the ordinary people except that it brings them nothing but suffering. If the working class refuse to fight—as we say they should—it should be on these grounds—and this would apply to all wars.

The Socialist Party’s case against war arises from an analysis of capitalism and our opposition to it. Capitalism, based on class ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution, generates a relentless search by the various capitalist powers for markets and sources of raw materials. These are essential ingredients in the ever-growing chase for profits — the lifeblood of the system. The capitalist class tries to solve this antagonism between powers by diplomatic measures, or the turning of the screw by the more powerful on the weaker. But if this fails then war can be the outcome, and even in this age of nuclear annihilation the threat of war still dominates the foreign policies of in particular the major powers. So the socialist opposition to war is not a pacifist or a moral one but an inescapable conclusion of our general case. M The total abolition of war and the threat of war will only be realised with the overthrow of capitalism and the restructuring of society on the basis of common ownership and production solely to meet human needs. 

How to End Wars

 

The people of the world have had far more than enough of war. The Socialist Party bases its answer to the problem of war squarely upon an analysis of the nature of war and of capitalism. Any other basis must lead to lies, illusions, or demagogy. It points out that so long as capitalism endures, wars will come, that war under capitalism is not an “accident” or an “exceptional event” but an integral part of the very mechanism of capitalism. War is just as much a part of capitalism as are economic crises. You cannot have capitalism without having periodic crises, and you cannot have capitalism without periodically having wars. The causes which bring about wars, the inescapable need for every advanced capitalist nation to attempt to expand its markets, gain cheaper sources of raw materials, find new outlets beyond the internal market for capital investment, can none of them be eliminated without eliminating capitalism itself.

Every government is therefore committed to war as an instrument of national policy by the very fact that it is a capitalist government. To ask it to renounce war is like asking a person to renounce oxygen.

It follows that the struggle against war, the genuine struggle, is simply an aspect of the struggle against capitalism and for socialism. This is the truth of the matter, however unpleasant a truth it may seem. If capitalism necessarily brings about war, you obviously cannot get rid of war without getting rid of capitalism. To divorce the struggle against wars from the struggle against capitalism is in reality to give up the struggle against war, so far as any possible effectiveness is concerned.  This simple truth is systematically obscured by the corporate media. So many people wish to satisfy. their consciences by feeling that they are working for peace but at the same time they do not wish to take the risk of working against capitalism. To these persons, we must say: Deliberately or unconsciously you are fooling yourselves. Which do you really want – peace or capitalism? You cannot have both. If you are unwilling to give up capitalism, then your pretended fight for peace is a fraud, and a fraud that aids no one but the war-makers.

The day-by-day class struggle of the workers, which by strengthening the working class is implicitly directed against capitalism, is thus a far more realistic means of checking the war preparations than all of the pacifism, isolation and collective security ever imagined. Fear of what the workers may do is the only real hindrance to the war-makers. They laugh at, and exploit to their own ends, the propaganda of isolation and collective security.

In the end, however, the overthrow of capitalism itself is the only conceivable means for stopping war. Socialism, and it alone, will end wars because socialism and it alone will root out the causes of war. The program of the socialist revolution, when the question is finally and fully understood, is the only anti-war platform. The answer to war, the only answer, is the socialist revolution.

The world socialist revolution

 

There is ample room in a socialist world for the peoples of the world cooperating for their common good, but there is no room in a capitalist world for rival powers, each seeking profit through the capture of markets, the conquest of raw materials and the control of trade routes and strategic points for their strategic protection. For all of them, the watchword is “grow or shrivel.” it is the law of capitalism, the law of the jungle. The only programme the ruling class will maintain is one that is calculated to save their own skins.

We do not venture to cast the horoscope; we cannot inform our readers what the stars foretell. When the working class understand their class position they will establish socialism and in doing so remove all barriers to world unity, but they will do it in their own way, not according to any leader’s plan but in a manner that will surprise all leaders and would-be leaders.

Workers aspire to real changes, not illusory ones. This does not mean replacing one government with another. It means getting rid of the government of the capitalists. The political power we want, workers' power, will grow from the upsurge of mass struggles. It must be based on the organs of struggle the workers create for themselves – plant and neighbourhood committees supervising production, expropriating the bosses and managing a planned economy directly, a society radically different from the sinister caricatures of socialism provided by the former USSR. The socialism we want will be international. It will be built by the workers of the entire world. Workers' power is not the power of a party but the exercise of power by the workers themselves organised in their own councils and factory and neighbourhood committees.

We are against violence in general and want to build a socialist society and socialist world free of violence. Violence is inherent in capitalist society-not only in its police and army, and not only expressed in the horror of war, but also in the daily, continual violence done to individuals in the exploitation of man by man. We want to eliminate the source of this massive violence: capitalism.

 Real socialism has nothing to do with reforming capitalism, making it run better. We enter the elections, applying the democratic rights that are part of the electoral process. These rights themselves were wrested from the ruling powers by the people in past struggles. We do not create illusions in the electoral process, but, unfortunately, the vast majority of the people still hold such illusions. Since these illusions do exist, however, the working people take the elections seriously. To abstain from them would mean to allow the reformists, who do reinforce illusions in the elections and in capitalism, to go unchallenged.

The Socialist Party knows that the working class, being the lowest in the social system, cannot emancipate itself without as a result emancipating all others. Is it always necessary for one generation to wade through oceans of blood and heap up mountains of human sacrifice that the next generation may learn a grain of truth from it all? It is not enough to join the pacifists, who proclaim peace among the nations while helping to perpetuate the war among the classes, a war which in reality, is at the bottom of all other wars.

It is this war of the classes that we must concentrate upon, and in that connection the war against false values, against evil institutions, against all social atrocities.