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Since the later years of the nineteenth century a notable change of emphasis has taken place in the issues dividing those calling themselves Socialists. Earlier discussion about the means by which Socialism could be achieved has been increasingly turned into disagreement about the end itself.

In this country the Socialist Party of Great Britain has stood alone in its insistence that ends and means cannot be separated; that the wrong means must inevitably lead to wrong ends.

At the earlier time various groups calling themselves socialist were more or less agreed about the socialist society they aimed at but were unable to agree about the methods needed to reach it. There were those who held to parliamentary action and those who opposed it; those who advocated physical force or the general strike for the conquest of power; those who thought in terms of minority movements and those who relied on democratic methods; those who believed that Socialism could be built up gradually within the capitalist framework, either by the Fabian policy of permeating the existing capitalist political parties, or by the policy, which was to become that of the Labour Party, of working for a Labour Government and using governmental control to introduce reforms and improvements which would, they said, transform capitalism into Socialism.

How much agreement there was about the nature of the transformation they hoped to bring about by their different policies, can be seen for example in the Manifesto of English Socialists issued jointly in 1893 by the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation and the Hammersmith Socialist Society. The signatories including William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, H. M. Hyndman and Sidney Webb, were able to agree on the following declaration which appeared in the Manifesto:

“On this point all Socialists agree. Our aim, one and all, is to obtain for the whole community complete ownership and control of the means of transport, the means of manufacture, the mines and the land. Thus we look to put an end for ever to the wage-system, to sweep away all distinctions of class, and eventually to establish national and international communism on a sound basis.”

Keir Hardie, later to be prominent in the formation of the British Labour Party, did not sign the manifesto but elsewhere declared as his objective “free Communism in which… the rule of life will be – ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.” (‘Serfdom to Socialism’, 1907, page 89.)

At that time they were all thinking of the future, of the socialist society they would inaugurate when they came to power. Two of the schools of thought claim that they have been proved right, on the one hand in the rise of Labour Governments to power, and on the other in the long period of Communist Party rule in Russia.

From the standpoint of socialists (and indeed from the standpoint of those who issued that Manifesto in 1893), both claims are completely unjustified.

It is not disputed that in the countries ruled by Labour or Communist parties, as in other countries, many social reforms have been introduced, such as old age pensions, health services, unemployment and sickness insurance, and that many industries have been taken over by the government; but these are features, in greater or lesser degree, of capitalism everywhere – they are not Socialism but arrangements within which the capitalist system operates.

The essential features of capitalism continue to exist in Labour Party Britain and Communist Party Russia as in avowedly capitalist America; the class monopoly of the means of production, the wages system and the dependence of the workers on the sale of their mental and physical energies to an employer for wage or salary (that the employer may be a private company or a state organisation makes no material difference); great inequalities of wealth and income; the coercive and persuasive powers of the State used to keep the workers in their subject position; the production of commodities for sale and profit; housing scarcities and problems of wages and prices; and the perpetuation of armament production, national rivalries and war. This is not the “socialist brotherhood of man,” or the rule of life based on “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs”.

Among the ironies of the present situation is that the ‘cold war’ between the Western powers and Russia is paralleled by the new cold war between Russia and China; and that while a Minister in the Labour Government, Mr. George Brown, was assuring business men that “without any question at all, private enterprise should be allowed to earn its profits” (The Director, April 1965), the Russian authorities were openly encouraging the development of the profit motive in Russian industry.

To the socialist these developments were inevitable. They are not to be explained as the failure of Labour and Communist Party rulers to choose the right path; in the circumstances in which they hold power they had and have no choice but to continue capitalism.

NO SOCIALISM WITHOUT SOCIALISTS

What are the circumstances which determine the actions of these rulers? Apart from the necessary development of the means of production to a stage at which Socialism is economically possible, the necessary pre-requisite of Socialism is the existence of a majority which understands and wants Socialism and is determined to achieve it.

This condition does not exist in the Labour or Communist Party-controlled countries. Socialism cannot be ushered in gradually by a Labour government or imposed by a Communist Party dictatorship.

This was an issue that was well known to the Socialist Party of Great Britain at its formation and in its controversies with the other two schools of thought. Because the Socialist Party of Great Britain insisted that there cannot be Socialism without socialists it was dubbed ‘impossibilist’: it was charged with running away from the possibility of achieving Socialism by Labour Party reformism or by minority dictatorship. But those who chose gradualism and those who chose dictatorship have failed to advance to Socialism.

Both groups claimed to have found the speedy road to Socialism and both rejected the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s principle that the vital task was to win over the working class to an understanding of Socialism. While the ‘gradualists’ were promising that with Labour government Socialism would come in “like a thief in the night”, Lenin was making the exaggerated declaration that “If Socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years”. (From a speech in 1918, reported by John Reed in ‘Ten Days that Shook the World,’ Penguin Books, 1966, p.263.)

Labour governments in Britain have had years of office in which to prove their case and the Russian Communist Party has had fifty years of continuous rule, but capitalism everywhere is still strongly entrenched. What those parties have done (falsely claimed to be in the name of Socialism) has made harder than ever the task which the Socialist Party of Great Britain knew to be necessary, the task of gaining working class understanding of and support for Socialism.

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