The task of establishing socialism has come to be associated with social reforms to make capitalism run more smoothly and iron out its myriad of social and economic problems.
Because capitalism cannot solve the problems of the working class, there is questioning and dissent. However, dissent is not enough. Nor is questioning social problems and leaving it for politicians. For every social problem facing the working class there is a social reformer standing in the way of social revolution. Nevertheless, reforms are not an option.
Dissent, political dissent must have with it a socialist objective, or it is nothing. Capitalism as a social system with a beginning and an end and class struggle must be seen as something to be abolished and replaced by a new social system based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
However, it is not the task of socialists to impose socialism onto a working-class majority. Socialism must be global. It must replace a world system based upon class exploitation with a social system based on “from each according to their ability to each according to their need”. Socialism must be established by a socialist majority taking hold of the machinery of government. The world working class must establish socialism no one else can.
Some claim workers are too stupid to establish socialism and they can only be led. Others say workers are not cut out for socialist politics.
Yes, it is easy to sneer at incredibly slow development of the working class. But socialists and socialist ideas come out of the class struggle not from philosophical textbooks.
Marx and Engels rejected this political elitism and the dismissal of workers as political idiots. Marx and Engels believed that workers could become active socialists and that all workers can reason and learn by experience. Thinking and acting as a socialist is within the realm of any open-minded worker free from prejudice and ruling class propaganda. This has been proven by workers becoming socialists.
They produced one of the most important political propositions in human thought: that workers were not only capable of establishing socialism, but they could do it by themselves without leaders.
This is what they wrote in the ‘Communist Manifesto’:
“Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class……The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority…What the bourgeoisie, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”.
And this proposition influenced socialists in establishing the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. In clause 4 we said:
“That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex”.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain was established by members of the working class in 1904. Workers were able to establish a socialist party by their own work alone and to sustain the Party under difficult political circumstances united around a socialist object and a set of socialist principles.
