Left-wing or socialism.
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The Socialist Party has always rejected the idea of “being on the left” because we understand the left as being (since the coining of the term in the French Revolution) the left-wing of capitalist politics.
There will be points of agreement between us (who see ourselves as the party of the workers and hence not part of capitalist politics) and left-wing parties, such as supporting strikes and moves which help workers to secure better conditions. But whereas the Left will stop at these ameliorating moves and eventually make them the basis of their political work, to us they are reforms necessitated by capitalism, and whilst we support them as being such, we do not confuse them with the goal, which is the abolition of capitalism – which every left-wing group has long since abandoned and passively declared impossible.
Take war, for instance.
No left-wing group is against all war. They tend to be against some wars but for others. They join with capitalist factions in supporting some wars.
Only we are against all war, because we understand what it is: the armed conflict between capitalists over control of raw materials and strategic territory.
In fact, the Left will often call just as much as the openly capitalist parties for repressive measures against the workers as part of the war effort.
The Left in power at best is liberal, at worst just as fascist as the extreme Right (e.g. Bolshevik state-capitalism, Jacobinism).There will be other leftists who are likeable. They can have policies we can support as being helpful and beneficial to workers. But these remain about making capitalism appear temporarily livable with, never for its abolition. And the best among the Left inevitably end up going to the wall, pushed out by the sheer rapacity of capitalist politics which they try naively to be part of. We can support their beneficial policies, but we can’t make them the basis of our campaign, which is the abolition of capitalism.
We are, therefore, unlike the Left ( which is at best liberal and at worst fascist ), not participants in the political squabbles of our rulers.
We alone stand for the emancipation of the workers.Are we Leftists now, as two WSM members on Facebook argue, against my statement above?
Should I tell people we are a left-wing party?
We are not a leftwing party, and none of the companion party of the WSM either, I do not see anything wrong with that statement. The ICC that is a Leninist organization calls the leftist the left of capital
#IWantARevolution is ‘trending’ on Twitter following Keir Starmer apparently saying that this isn’t what people want. Unfortunately, for a lot of people on Twitter, “I want a revolution” seems to mean “I wish Corbyn was PM”.
He did say that. The exact quote from Sky News on 1 April is:
“People don’t want a revolution, they do want to know how to pay their energy bills.”
Unfortunately, what he says is true. We draw the conclusion that what Socialists should do is to work to get people to want a social revolution that will convert the means for production from a class monopoly into the common property of the whole people.
Leftwingers imagine that the desire for revolution can arise out of the struggle to reduce energy bills.
That’s the difference between them and us.
The best reply to the question whether we are ‘left-wing’ is to ask what the questioner understands as left-wing and proceed from there. We may or may not be left-wing depending on what is meant by the term.
The short answer is that leftism means: Reformism. Lenin himself in his book on the Left Communists attacked all the left communists, the anarchists, the Mensheviks, and the social democrats, and he was a leftwing reformist. He called them opportunists and he was an opportunist too
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