Five Socialist Basics The Left Has Mostly Forgotten

The socialist left is often caught up in day to day politics and because of its relatively small size forced to tail events. But in this chaos certain basics that were common in the socialist movements of the past get forgotten.

ONE: The Merger Theory

Everything socialists do is about inspiring the working class to fight. But the class composition of the socialist left has changed over the years. During the water movement many working class people got involved but when the movement dipped they drifted back out with the tide.

This is even more evident on a longer time frame - since the start of what’s called “neo-liberalism” (commonly called Thatcherism - privatisation, outsourcing, destruction of public services to enrich privateers) our unions embraced social partnership with the neoliberal sharks, class struggle collapsed and the left retreated into the colleges.

So you end up with a situation where there are occasional mass movements of workers (who aren’t yet socialist) and there are socialists (who aren’t yet leading mass forces). This isn’t a new situation and there was a theory developed to deal with it. 

The German socialist Engels argued: 

“[T]he working class movement is divided into two sections, the Chartists and the Socialists. The Chartists are the more backward, the less developed, but they are genuine proletarians … The Socialists proceeding originally from the capitalists, are for this reason unable to amalgamate completely with the working class. The merger of Socialism with Chartism … will be the next step.”

The class origins of the socialist intellectuals made them “unable to amalgamate” with the working class. But the Chartist movement - a real mass movement of workers campaigning for the right to vote - didn’t have socialist politics and was limited by its lack of vision. 

The “merger” of socialist theory with the fighters from the working class was vital. But this merger framework transforms your day to day activity. If you go on a protest for Palestine it is important in a direct sense, to show solidarity and pressure governments to action, but equipped with the merger theory you ask: how do I get workers interested in this and use it to mobilise and politicise them?

The merger theory provides a framework that pulls you out of frenetic tailing of issues and into a mindset that understands the ongoing task of bringing socialist politics to the best workers and preparing them to challenge capitalism

TWO: Mass movements matter

From the climate movement to Palestine actions many people are filled with rightful outrage at the way the world is run by corporations - they pillage resources, destroy the planet and push governments into wars to increase their profit margins. 

But the moralism that pulls passionate individuals into small-scale direct action is a dead end for socialists. People often complain about boring old marches - looking at a protest of 50,000 for Palestine as “pointless walking from A to B”.

But that attitude is wrong.

Governments take note when ordinary people mobilise. They don’t give a damn about 3 people taking some isolated action. The water charges movement involved mass direct action in the working class estates, involving entire communities married with protests of 100,000 on over a dozen occasions. 

It was the mass movement that broke the government’s resolve and gave confidence to the mass boycott of bills. Without visible evidence of mass protest this wouldn’t have happened. 

But mass protest is important for another reason - it creates the best and most “fertile soil” for spreading socialist ideas. As philosopher Karl Marx argued: 

“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and…the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary…a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”

If people aren’t involved in an action, you can’t transform them and your action becomes reformist no matter how radical it seems because your aim is merely to grab the attention of the government, not to transform the only force truly capable of overthrowing capitalism - the working class. 

THREE: We should attack Liberals harder than the fascists do

You’ve heard the argument many, many times - socialists shouldn’t stand in this election, they’ll let the far right in, they’ll split the vote. People argue that you should vote Democrat in the USA to stop Trump or vote for Macron or the Blairites in France to stop Le Pen.

Seems like an attractive argument but it’s wrong and it leads to the result it claims it will prevent - the growth of the far right - after all it was Obama’s mountain of broken promises that gave an opening to Trump.

Liberals are just the smiling face of the same old capitalist system. Voting them in to stop the right just delays the entry of the right into political power while handing them another pile of liberal betrayals and the liberals just don’t fight. 

Why? Because they are the political expression of the bosses and landlords who prefer “softer” methods of ruling. They’d like to rule by duping us. But make no mistake - they’ll take out the stick when the carrot doesn’t work.

It’s short term thinking to give into their blackmail. It’s like going back 100 years in Britain when there were only LIberals and Tories and saying “oh you can’t set up a Labour Party because it’ll split the vote and let the Tories in!” 

But the socialist left should be about building up the forces of the fighting working class, year after year, election after election. That is the only force capable of challenging the system and pushing back the far right threat. 

We should laugh at Liberal blackmail and point to their hypocrisy and ties to neoliberal capitalism. 

FOUR: We need class war, not culture war

One faction of the billionaire class hands out rainbow flags in order to deceive the mass of people as to their true face. It’s everywhere - Disney is for diversity! (Meanwhile their products are made by an army of workers in awful conditions across the poorest parts of the globe.)

Another faction of the billionaire class misses the old Victorian style whip and control mechanisms they had over workers and wants to destroy rainbow flags, roll back social progress and convince workers that they’re anti-system even though they are the system. 

In Ireland you see Fine Gael and a half hearted Fianna Fáil try and appear progressive on social issues while they defend the neoliberal economy tooth and nail.

We have to get back to class war - where every issue is looked at from the point of view of the class struggle of the working class. That doesn’t mean ignoring social issues like the important fight for Repeal or the fight against racism but it does mean asking how the working class should respond to this as workers. 

We have to point out the class interests at work behind the declarations of both wings of the billionaire class. Whenever the capitalists are in trouble they turn to division to save them. We can never tire of pointing that out. 

We fight better when we are united. We are weakened when we are divided. Our aim is to unite the working class and overthrow the billionaire class. Our opposition to division isn’t moralism - it’s practical class politics.

FIVE: It’s never too early to talk about the revolution. 

“Sure some people want to talk about revolution on the doors!” We have heard that used as an insult against the Red Network. But it’s never too early to talk openly about the need for a working class revolution to escape from capitalism. 

To paraphrase the Russian revolutionary Lenin: “those who never talk about revolution are traitors, those who only talk about revolution are fools!”

The whole point of being a socialist is to bring the working class, through struggle, organisation and argument to the conclusion that there is no way out other than a mass people power rebellion against capitalism. 

If you just leave it to the force of circumstance a revolution can never succeed. There has to be a significant minority who know what’s coming and are ready to organise the broader masses who need the slap of a revolutionary crisis to push them to revolutionary conclusions. 

But Lenin also pointed to the dead end of only talking about revolution. There are so many ultra left groups who do nothing except wave red flags and shout betrayal at every one who does mass work or stands in elections.

You have to do mass work, organise in unions, engage in election campaigns and argue we need a revolution. As Lenin argued way back in 1907 the immediate political tasks in the Duma (Russian parliament) were: “

to make clear to the people the complete unfitness of the Duma as a means of realising the demands of the working class… to make clear to the people the impossibility of achieving political freedom by parliamentary means as long as real power remains in the hands of the tsarist government; to make clear the necessity of insurrection.”

There are many divisions we need to overcome to prepare the working class to fight this system. Socialist politics can’t be divided from mass action, we need a merger. Political goals can’t be separated from the mass movements necessary to achieve them. 

We can’t allow divisions in the ruling class between rights and Liberals to become divisions in our class; the vertical divisions of the culture war need to become horizontal divisions of class stratification and rebellion. 

Marxist theories can’t be abstract lessons handed down at Sunday Schools - they need to become frameworks we bring to bear on our day to day work.