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It is true that material deprivation – at
least in this part of the
world – is less than it was when the Socialist Party was formed in
1904. But it is also true that since then there has been a tremendous
development of the forces of production – the technical means of
producing enough for all – so that, despite the increase in world
population in the meantime, no man, woman or child in any part of the
world need today go without decent food, clothing, shelter or any of
the other amenities of life. The fact that most of the world’s
population do is a damning indictment of the present social order,
capitalism.
Basic contradiction
The case against capitalism and for socialism has always been simple.
With the division of labour resulting from the use of more and more
sophisticated machines and techniques, humans already cooperate to
produce what is needed to sustain life and social activity, but what is
produced does not belong to those who produced it – the working class,
those who are obliged to sell their mental and physical energies for a
living and who make up the overwhelming majority of society – but to a
tiny minority of privileged people who, through historical
circumstances, happen to own and control the means of wealth production.
As a result what is produced belongs to this minority and so is not
available to the members of society to take and use to satisfy their
needs. It is only made available to them against payment but what we of
the working class can afford is limited by the size of our wage packet
or salary cheque, which is always less than the new value incorporated
in what we produce. The difference is profit – the source of the
privileged income of the owning minority and the over-riding aim of
production. So, not only is free access to what is produced denied to
those who, collectively, produced it, but what gets to be produced is
dictated not by what people want and need but by what is most
profitable.
This contradiction between cooperative, collective production and the
private appropriation of the product, arising from the means of
production being monopolised by a minority, is the root-cause of the
problems faced by the working class majority in all fields of life.
Promises to solve these problems, as over housing, transport, the
environment, food safety, are the stuff of politics but the parties and
politicians people vote for never solve them. Not because they are
dishonest or not determined enough or mere self-seekers but because
they cannot. The problems they promise to solve are caused by
capitalism and so can never be solved as long as capitalism is allowed
to continue.
Capitalism cannot work for
all
Capitalism, as a profit system based on the class ownership of the
means of production, can never be made to work in the interests of all.
It always puts profits first. That’s its nature, which cannot be
changed by any government or any other form of activity within the
context of class ownership and production for profit.
This is why reformism, as the attempt to make capitalism work in the
interest of all, is ultimately futile. At most it can only smooth off
some of the rougher edges a little, at least for some people and for a
while, but it can never solve the problems facing wage and salary
workers.
This being the case, what the working class, as the class that suffers
most from the problems caused by capitalism, should be aiming at is
bringing an end to the contradiction between cooperation in production
and private appropriation of the products. This can only be done by
bringing ownership into line with productive reality, by bringing about
a situation where what is produced collectively is also owned
collectively; which is only possible when the means for producing
wealth have become the common property of all the members of society.
The socialist solution
This – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of
production by and in the interest of society as a whole – is socialism
and it is the only political goal worth striving for. Only it can
provide the framework within which production can be re-oriented away
from making profits for an owning class to providing what people want
and need. On the basis of common ownership and democratic control,
enough food, clothing, housing, transport, energy and the other
necessaries and amenities of life could, should and would be produced
to ensure that nobody, in any part of the world, went without what they
needed. Material deprivation, and worries about satisfying material
needs – around which most people’s lives revolve today – will no longer
exist.
But socialism is not just about satisfying people’s material needs.
That will just be routine in socialism, something taken for granted. It
is also about allowing human beings to behave as the social animals
that, biologically, we are. We are not just dependent on each other
materially – on cooperating to produce what we need – but
psychologically and culturally too. We evolved through cooperation and
we need to cooperate and to feel part of a community with other human
beings, but capitalism denies us this. Built-in to it is competition
not cooperation. Competition not only between the owning class and the
excluded majority – the class struggle – but also between members of
the owning class to make profits – which, on a world scale, leads to
wars and preparation for war, as over sources of raw materials, trade
routes, markets and investment outlets – and between members of the
excluded majority for jobs and housing, fuelling nationalism, racism
and xenophobia.
Socialism, by ending the division of society into antagonistic classes,
and by ensuring that every human being has their material needs met as
a matter of course, will stop the rat-race we are forced to participate
in under capitalism and create a real community and a real sense of
community. People will no longer be alienated from their social nature
and from other human beings.
Which way to
socialism?
Those who set up the Socialist Party had a clear idea of how they
thought socialism should come about: through the majority working class
coming to understand that they were an exploited class to whom
capitalism had nothing to offer and organising on the political field,
to pursue uncompromisingly the single aim of wresting control of
political power from the capitalist class and using it to end the
monopoly exercised by the capitalist minority over the means of wealth
production. This political and then economic expropriation was seen as
being a conscious, democratic, political act.
It was also seen as being a revolutionary act, not in the sense of
street-fighting and bloodshed – even if some violent incidents might
not to be able to be entirely avoided – but in the sense of a decisive
break, a rupture, involving the rapid conversion of the means of
production from the class monopoly of a minority into the common
property of all the people. In other words, a social revolution as a
rapid and abrupt change in the basis of society carried out by
political means.
At the time there were others who called themselves socialists who put
forward a different approach: the gradual transformation of capitalism
into socialism through a series of social reforms which would improve
conditions for the working class by supplementing their wages with
state benefits and which would convert individual industries, one after
the other, into public services producing what people needed not for
profit. This went under various names: gradualism, Fabianism,
revisionism (when put forward by former Marxian revolutionaries),
reformism. In Britain, at the time the Socialist Party was formed, it
was represented by the now defunct Independent Labour Party, which was
one of the constituent parts of the Labour Party and then, after the
adoption of a new constitution in 1918, by the Labour Party itself, at
least by those of its members and leaders who had any long-term
perspective.
Gradualism fails
This strategy denied the need for a consciously socialist majority as a
preliminary condition for establishing socialism. According to its
proponents, all that was required was a parliamentary majority acquired
on the basis of votes for a programme of reforms to be achieved within
capitalism. It was a strategy that was put to the test, in Britain, in
1945 when the Labour Party won a landslide election victory giving them
a huge parliamentary majority.
But it didn’t work. Labour, having taken on responsibility for
governing capitalism found, as it had as a minority government in 1924
and 1929-1931, that capitalism had to be governed on its terms:
priority had to be given to profit-making not social improvements for
workers; in fact, even wages had to be restrained. The Wilson and
Callaghan Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s fared no better at
reforming capitalism in the interest of wage and salary workers. They,
too, ended up administering capitalism on its terms, i.e., in the
interest of profit-making and against the interests of the wage and
salary earning majority. As did all similar government in other parts
of the world.
The experience of the 20th century proved the gradualists wrong.
Instead of such parties gradually changing capitalism, it was
capitalism that gradually changed them. Nowadays, they don’t even claim
to be aiming at socialism, only to be able to manage capitalism in a
more efficient way.
 The Socialist Party
in Britain were not the only critics of gradualist
reformism. Indeed, the early members initially saw themselves as part
of the wing of the international Social Democratic movement that was
opposed to the revisionism and opportunism that was spreading within
the movement. However, most of the other pre-WWI opponents of
gradualism, including Rosa Luxemburg, author of a pamphlet with the
title of Reform or Revolution?, did not see the danger, in terms of
attracting non-socialist support and becoming its prisoner, of a
socialist party advocating reforms. After the ignominious collapse of
the international Social Democratic movement when the war broke out,
many of the other anti-gradualists turned to Lenin’s Bolshevism for an
alternative strategy.
Minority action fails too
Whereas the gradualists had still been committed to democratic methods
and majority action even though only by non-socialists, Lenin argued
that under capitalism only a minority would ever be able to reach
socialist understanding and that it was therefore up to this minority
to organise itself as a vanguard party to seize power on behalf of the
majority.
In other words, the Leninists’ alternative strategy to gradualist
reformism was not the consciously socialist, majority political action
advocated by the Socialist Party in Britain, but minority socialist
action: socialism was to be introduced by a dictatorship exercised by a
minority of socialists. This was how the seizure of power by the
Bolsheviks in the course of the 1917 Russian revolution was presented.
This was never going to work as a way to socialism since socialism can
only exist on a democratic basis with majority
participation in
decision-making. And it didn’t. Instead of the Bolshevik dictatorship
in Russia leading to socialism, it led to state capitalism with the
members of the “socialist” vanguard evolving into a new ruling class
exercising a brutal dictatorship over the workers of Russia.
The 20th century confirmed that minority dictatorship was no more a
route to socialism than parliamentary reformism. The worst thing about
it was that the Russian dictatorship claimed to be socialist, with the
result that millions of workers all over the world were put off the
whole idea of socialism. To tell the truth, socialism is still
suffering from this unwelcome legacy, with the view that “socialism has
been tried (in Russia) and failed” being widely held.
In fact, of course, socialism has not been tried. What has been tried
are two strategies – gradualist reformism and Leninist minority
dictatorship – for supposedly progressing towards socialism. Both
failed. But what has not been tried is the strategy proposed by the
founding members of the Socialist Party in 1904: conscious, majority,
revolutionary political action.
Just as socialism remains as relevant today as it was in 1904, so too
does this strategy. “No socialism without socialists” remains as true
today as it was then. And “making socialists”, as a step towards the
emergence of a majority desire for socialism, remains the task of those
who want to see established a socialist world of common ownership,
democratic control, production to meet people’s needs and free
distribution on the principle of “from each according to their
abilities, to each according to their needs”.
ADAM BUICK |
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