Socialism. A Brief Summary.

Socialism.A Brief Summary

9th August 1995

There are three trends in contemporary socialism: official socialism or reformism, Stalinism (or State Capitalism) and revolutionary socialism. It is fair to say that the first two varieties hardly merit the title of socialism today, so we are dealing with anachronistic terminology.

'Official' socialism is today at its strongest in Britain where The Labour Party gains the passive support of the vast majority of working people. Historically, the Industrial Revolution which gave rise to the working class movement of combinations (Trade Unions) and political protest movements such as the Chartists of the 1840's took place first in Britain. Hence Chartism was the first manifestation of a Workers Party in the world and it was born in the birthplace of the Industrial movement, Britain.

Today Blair is the leader of British reformism and the unquestioned leader of European reformism. The politics of The Labour Party are those of implementing reforms while allowing a minority of Capitalists to own the means of production, distribution and exchange. The party is nevertheless , as we have already said, the party of the majority of workers. It concedes the right of private ownership to the bourgeoisie, the possessing class. We therefore call this contradictory arrangement a bourgeois workers party.

The practice of The Labour Party and other opportunist and reformist parties is to work through parliament for the amelioration of the condition of the working class. The party is therefore an electoral phenomenon more than a democratic phenomenon!. No basic or violent rupture with the world as we know it is considered.

Stalinism is the historically degenerated form of revolutionary socialism. The Stalinists, are grouped together in the so-called 'Communist Parties. Many of these have become reformists in their own right and no longer challenge private property or fight for the scientific development of society. Stalinism rose out of the ruins of the Great Russian Revolution - a revolution which failed to spread internationally because of subjective factors in the various industrial countries after the First World War i.e. lack of theoretical development, poor leadership and inadequate cadres. When Stalin and the bureaucracy seized power in Russia, state property was turned into state capital and an economy based on state profit and relentless exploitation was initiated. State capitalism abandoned the cause and slogans of International Revolution. In 1936 Trotsky predicted the eclipse of this form of "socialism" by workers' revolutions. (The Revolution Betrayed).

Today only prisoners of past revolutions believe in a renewal of the despotic and montrously cruel regimes of Eastern Europe. In most countries of the East, Stalinists have returned to power, under the programme of a mixed economy with the cataclysmic end to central planning and state property - they now promote the interests of private capitalists while paying lip-service to workers' interests.

Today revolutionary socialism based on scientific theory is undergoing a vast renovation and wholesale renewal. This process is based on the rejection of state capitalism and despotism. The inheritors or Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky build revolutionary parties in over twenty countries on the fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat and scientific planning and the abolition of all but the smallest of private capital in production, distribution and exchange. The ideology and theory of revolutionary socialism has been given a great boost by the experience of Bolshevism in Russia from 1917 to the late 1920's when private property was transformed into public property under workers' control and accounting.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is widely misunderstood amongst workers due to the slanders of the capitalist press. It means the suppression by violence of the few by the many, of the capitalists by the workers. There is nothing so essential to the theory of scientific socialism as this concept for without it there would be no change in society.

JOE MC CARROLL