Only Socialism

 

Liberal progressives  are openly committed to the support of capitalism and the rule of the capitalists. The left is openly committed to the appeasement policy of the “lesser evil.” 

We are taught that working class progress no longer lies along the path of class independence and class action, but in the practice of tying the workers movement to one capitalist politician as against another.  The capitalists always defend their class interests. If the labour movement does not fight as a class, capitalist reaction will surely triumph. It is the time to dedicate yourselves to the revolutionary socialist principles and to the struggle for socialist freedom. Turn your back on the base falsehoods and cynical treachery of left-wingers who try to treat you like robots and not like revolutionary socialists! Unite in battle against capitalism. The World Socialist Movement appeals to you to join it and thereby to engage in  the noble fight for working-class emancipation and socialist freedom. We have the right to call upon you to enter our organisation, for we have never flinched from the struggle against capitalism and never forsaken the principles of socialism.

We charge against the prevailing social system that by it the workers are robbed of the wealth that they produce. Internationalism is an essential part of socialist principles. Workers, as Marx said, have no fatherland. We have to translate the slogan ‘Workers of the world unite’, into a reality.

The ground is being ploughed ready for the seed of socialism. Let those whose hands are scored with toil go forth boldly and scatter the seed. Amid scenes of chaos and disaster let us keep alight the torch handed to us by the comrades who in the past nobly played their part.

We have now our opportunity. Let us make the most of it. It is not anti-social for the working-class to aspire to bring about the common ownership of the means of life. It is right. The movement to which we have the honour to belong is approaching a stage in which incessant political activity will be the order of the day.

Much will be expected from the exponents of the cause. They will, however, be encouraged and stimulated by the response they receive.

Conditions existing in the capitalist world leave no option to the working-class : they are called upon by history to emancipate mankind or perish. Whether the time be long or short before a conscious democratic effort is made to transform the system by those to whom the change means so much, it must eventually come.

In times like the present, men’s minds ripen quickly; reality provides an unanswerable argument. “The capitalist class are their own grave diggers”: they are compelled to set in motion those forces that bring about their elimination as a class: they are compelled by the laws inherent in their own system to place in the hands of the proletariat the means of freeing him and all society from economic bondage.

Though capitalism may change its form and give rise to social structures which differ in many respects, yet at rock bottom it remains the same. Its pillars are wage-labour and capital: these are the constants of capitalism, which is based upon the exploitation of wage-labour.

With the establishment of socialism, this exploitation will cease. Man is to-day exploited by man, because the means of wealth production are owned by and operated for the profit of a relatively small section of the world’s population. The masses, without any ownership in the means of production, are obliged, in order to get a living, to work in factories, in mines, on railways, etc., so that the owners thereof can reap profits.

The Socialist Party knows that the ills from which the workers suffer, degrading poverty and the multitude of other evils that accompany it, are due to the present system of society, the roots of which are wage-labour and capital.

Cut Away the Roots

The World Socialist Movement, therefore, wishing to put an end to these evils, logically urges upon the workers the need to abolish capitalism, roots and all, and replace it by a new social system, the basis of which is the common ownership of the means of life by all society.

It will be seen at once that in a socialist society man could not exploit man, because no single person or group of persons would own the instruments for wealth production. The ownership of all these things would be vested in all society.

Of course, with the abolition of private property, capital and wage-labour will disappear. Production will proceed, not to satisfy the profit-making lust of capital, but to satisfy the wants of man.

With socialism, man will enter a new life. No longer exploited by his fellow, no longer grubbing to make ends meet, he will be free. As never before, he will harness nature to satisfy man’s wants. Thanks to the high stage of efficiency industrial technique has now reached, plenty will be assured to all.

When socialists advocate the abolition of private property, capital and wage-labour, up goes the cry: “Would you deprive of ownership those people who have laboured so hard to build up their businesses?”

This is Capitalism

The question itself is an anachronism today. In the early days of capitalism, when the capitalists, the “captains of industry,” worked side by side with the men they employed, there might have been some truth in the statement that owners of industry worked hard to build up their businesses. But that was long ago.

Capitalism to-day is not the capitalism of the small trader. Present-day capitalism is large-scale industry, growing ever larger. In growing it becomes more and more impersonal: the worker-owner of yore is replaced by the absentee shareholder and by the bureaucracy of the State.

The first point, then, that the WSM makes is that capitalism ignores present-day realities.

Secondly, not socialism but capitalism is the great expropriator. Capital has already deprived of ownership the vast majority of the population. Even in his day, in 1848, Marx was able to answer this self-same question by showing that for the masses private property had been destroyed. Since Marx’s day, the tendency has continued; capital becomes concentrated into fewer hands. Periodically we are able to see this closely: when small businessmen are driven out of business by big trusts. How many small capitalists have such firms as giant corporations reduced to the ranks of the working-class ?

It is worthwhile thinking for a moment about how businesses are built up. Certainly big businesses are not usually built up by the labours of the capitalists.

Big businesses are, of course, built up by the exploitation of workers. Proof of this can be seen all around us. Who would say, for example, that the shareholders (the owners) of the railways have built them up and make them work ? Long ago, Engels pointed out that the capitalist class has ceased to contribute by its labour to production. Frequently the capitalist never visits the works in which his capital is invested. No longer does the capitalist even figure as a supervisor—his place has been taken by “well-paid” managers—members of the working-class. The role the capitalist plays today is of a parasitical character. He appropriates the profits produced by the exploitation of wage-labour.

 

 Fortunes come to the capitalists, not because they are intelligent or hard-working, but simply because they own, and because masses of people, without any means of life, are driven to work to provide profits for the owners.

 

 

 As with the passing of time, small-scale industry counts less and less, and the struggle becomes one between a capitalist-class who do nothing towards production, and a working-class who do all the work and run industry from top to bottom.

 

An Appeal to Fellow-Workers

 We address you as socialists and that may well be the reason many of you will have for not listening to us. Socialists, some will say, are impractical visionaries holding mistaken theories. Yet it is forgotten that our fellow workers hold to theories not their own but those of the mainstream media, ideas proven false and found useless.

 

The great goal of socialism is the abolition of capitalism and its protector, the State, and the aim is the transformation of society  into a socialised communal world. We know it requires a mental effort to envisage such a future because you are contemplating a society in which all share rule and all are free. A complete collective ownership of the means of production and of distribution will necessarily deprive  governing and governed, rich and poor, master and wage slave of distinction. In place of the present miserable existence everyone shall receive all that one requires, not only food, healthcare and shelter, but leisure and cultural arts. This can be done by associated effort only – call it communismor socialism, as you will. 

 

It is a question of human freedom versus wage slavery. The Socialist Party offers the only remedy, which is world socialism. The overthrow of capitalism—that is a DEMAND—it is THE demand. It advocates men and women to think for themselves and have convictions of their own.

 

Anti-capitalist parties  may initially aim to follow a different course, but if they gain strength, they tend to be assimilated by the State that they set out to reform and to become buttresses of capitalist rule. Three factors come into play:

• The party acquires an apparatus of well-paid staff and elected officials with a stake in the existing political system, and this bureaucracy gradually takes control.

• The party dilutes its programme by giving political support to the  government in return for minor reforms.

• The party takes office, but finds itself the prisoner of the surrounding capitalist state (ministerial department, courts, the police and army, mechanisms of financial control, all backed up by the capitalist media), and is forced to abandon almost all of its programme as the price of “power.”

What is needed to challenge their power is a party with a different class foundation, one rooted in the struggles of working people. Building such a party is today the common task of all who seek an alternative to the misery and exploitation of the present capitalist order.

We are committed socialists out of conviction–because we see capitalism as harmful to the vast majority of  the world’s people. This system we live under, by its very nature, grinds the poor and working people, sets one group against another, and acts violently against people at home and around the world when they resist.

 

We see in socialism the seeds and the method of achieving a more just, more cooperative and more peaceful society. The Socialist Party can offer an alternative which can meet basic needs of people and which is based on cooperation. The alternatives which capitalists will propose will be based on hatred or fear of particular groups. Socialists will inspire confidence among working people and win them over. Socialism offers a future free from the fears of poverty, sexism, racism, dog-eat-dog competition, joblessness, and the loneliness of old age.

 

As our movement grows, we will be nearer to creating a society that allows each person to create and produce according to her or his ability and to obtain what she or he needs.

 

We see the primary task of the Socialist Party to assist in the building of a mass movement of the working class to fight for socialism. People are our most precious resource.  We see capitalism tas a destructive system that hurts, divides and exploits the vast majority of our people for the sake of profits and power for the few. We advocate and work for socialism–that is, common  ownership and collective control of the means of production (factories, fields, utilities, etc.) We want a system based on cooperation, where the people build together for the common good.

 

The Reason The Socialist Party Exists

 

Vast changes are taking place in the world. Those who try to investigate what is going on around them are fobbed off by politicians with trivial phrases and meaningless soundbites.  Too often our reaction is to be turn  off by politics altogether, to becoming completely cynical to frequently feel powerless and to sink into apathy. The Labour Party is committed to an all-out effort to make capitalism work indefinitely.  It does not see a revolutionary transformation of society as the way to solve the problems capitalism has shown itself incapable of solving. It does not want power to pass from the existing state to a revolutionary society set up by the workers to dispossess the capitalist class and create a class-free society. But there is no escape from the problems of our time. We cannot remain passive about issues which affect our daily lives. The slogan calling for unity neglects the vital question: unity for what purpose? It glosses over the class struggle and the need for the workers to increase their own understanding and become conscious that their class has the power to carry through the necessary revolutionary transformation of society.

In every epoch the class commanding the means of production was the governing class. In the Middle Ages, before the manufacture of commodities, the land-owning barons were the dominant class. In this age of commodity production the owners of factories, machinery, raw materials, and banks, constitute the capitalist class which is the dominant class. As methods of production change, those interested in the new methods find their development restricted by the laws and customs framed by the ruling class. Gradually, the class that depends for its rise to power upon the development of the new methods of production grows in numbers and influence, and assumes definite opposition to the existing order. Ultimately the ruling class is driven from power, and the control of society passes into the hands of the class that represents the new methods of production. These now reconstruct society in order to allow the free development of the system, favourable to themselves. In this way the capitalist class gained power, overthrew the landed aristocracy, and instituted constitutional government. The change may be rapid, as in the French Revolution, or slow as in England, where the struggle between the rising capitalist class and the landed aristocracy commenced with the Cromwellian Revolution and did not terminate in the victory of the middle class until the passing of the Reform Act.

In each form of society, there have developed certain antagonisms: the struggle of classes has arisen and created the movement for the overthrow of the existing order. The change does not come from without, but from within, and as a result of conditions created in the old order. Modern capitalism is subject to the same laws as the preceding forms of society. The capitalists’ exploitation of the propertyless worker engenders the class antagonism. The methods of production have changed from simple individualist manufacture to complex machine production. Production is no longer individual, but co-operative. Already the foundations of the new order are laid. The superstructure will be raised when the passage from individual to co-operative production has been completed by the cooperative ownership of the means of production in place of private ownership. We say that the only class—as a class—that is interested in this change is the working class. Socialism, therefore, must come through the medium of the working-class action. Whatever its faults, it is this working-class alone that can take power and establish the Cooperative Commonwealth. It must, of course, possess the necessary ardour before it can achieve this objective.

Marx did not intend his message for select disciples. Marx viewed the working class as a whole. From his vast store of knowledge, he deduced that the workers, by their adoption of the principles he had enunciated, would fulfil his anticipations of the form the working-class movement would ultimately take. To Marx, the workers when they become socialists do not become different from the rest of the working class. Their change in thought is evidence of transformation in the working-class movement. They remain of the workers, struggling with them for emancipation. There are ‘socialists’ who pose as superior but, in any case, the advance of socialism is governed by the progress of socialist thought among the workers. The current socialist movement of today cannot bring about socialism. 

The Co-operative Commonwealth will be inaugurated by the majority action of the mass of workers. To assert the contrary is a denial of the very principles Marxists support. Steadily the workers move along the road to socialism. Circumstances compel them to take that road. Economic laws operate whether they are known or not, but if we understand their operation we can bend them to our purpose pad assist society along the course it tends to travel. 

As a Socialist Party, we must bring this knowledge to the workers and what tactics must be pursued to that end. The necessity for political action is essential. Whenever the power of the governing class asserts itself, then the workers must fight. The State is the political expression of the dominant class, and since that dominant class uses the machinery of the State—law, justice, coercive forces—to maintain its own privileges and to impose its will upon the labouring mass, the workers contest their claims by political action. The distinction between political and industrial action is false; they are the two poles of the same movement. The reason why some participate in the every-day struggle in the industrial field, and yet decline to take a part in political action, is that they regard industrial action as more important than political. That belief is without justification. If the political movement is the pole, opposite to the industrial movement, the standard of political activity is governed by the level of industrial activity. When a worker votes for a Socialist Party candidate he or she votes against the whole of the capitalist class; votes for one's own class without regard for craft or industrial divisions.  The Socialist Party does not act for a particular group, but for the whole working class. 

The Labour Party is not a socialist party. Socialist parties are an integral part of the working-class movement. They are the centre from which propaganda is disseminated; members of the trade unions should be the agents of the socialist parties. The stronger the socialist body the better can it permeate the working-class movement. Socialist parties give imagination, and vitality to the workers’ movement.