Do-It-Yourself, Majority Revolution
Dear Editors,
Obviously your magazine has a very jaundiced and prejudiced view of the Green movement (Editorial, April Socialist Standard).
Most members of the Green Party, a large proportion of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and none of the various Earth First! group’s activists support capitalism in any form. For a long time now we have seen in market forces the machinery for planetary and human destruction.
People in the Green movement are currently involved in housing and worker’s co-operatives. LETS schemes and permaculture (permanent agriculture) projects that will be examples of how things can be done. We are positively involved in building an alternative. An increasing number of Green folk are involved in the English regionalist-direct democracy scene as well.
We take a proactive stand against centralism and increasing powerlessness of the people. We have not heard your party take a stand publicly. Are you afraid of merging with other radically-minded people while networking with them. Perhaps losing your powers of staying aloof above everyone else!
As to your own brand of ’’socialism" working while others do not, this sounds much like washing powder commercials, "my soap is better than yours" playground childishness. Your political party holds that only it can build “utopia" (literally translated means not a place). I would as an anarcho-socialist contend that being party-political and then opposing the established order is very hypocritical.
I would personally avoid the football-style competitions of major and minor league parties. Instead I and others are trying to shadow institutions' powers, and therefore empower ordinary people to make decisions for themselves and their friends, in a face-to-face direct democracy manner.
This probably all sounds bourgeois to you pure socialists. "How dare politically uneducated people take the glory of genuine revolution from under our noses. Only the SPGB has the answers to the world's problems."
The sad thing is when we are establishing people’s assemblies in inner city boroughs and rural parishes, alternative cooperatives enterprises and land rights campaigns taking back stolen commons (e.g. Reclaim the Land), your party will still be debating in dusty rooms above public houses and making proclamations about your coming electoral glory while contesting a handful of seats. At this rate it will take about 150 to take all the available constituencies. Oh how sad it is.
Tom Paine,
Staffordshire Earth Action Network
Reply:
You’ve got it wrong. We don’t say that it is us, the Socialist Party, who are going to establish Socialism. What we say is that socialism can only be achieved when a majority want it and organise for it, and that it is this majority, not us, who alone can achieve it (naturally we, the present membership of the Socialist Party, hope to be among that majority). The socialist revolution is a do-it-yourself, majority revolution not a party-led revolution.
We also say that, to achieve socialism, this majority will have to organise politically, to take control of state power out of the hands of the present capitalist ruling class (we can't just leave them in control of it, as your strategy implies), and that this will involve, yes, contesting elections and putting up candidates against the politicians who represent their interests (the Majors. Blairs and Ashdowns of this world) and so the formation of a socialist political party. We don’t suffer from the illusion that we are already that part; the most we would claim is that we are the very early beginnings of such a party; and even that might turn out to be an illusion, not that we would care as long as a mass, no-compromise socialist political party eventually emerges from somewhere.
Nor is socialism some ideal society thought up by us and marketed as our patent solutions to society's problems. The idea of a society of common ownership and distribution according to need without buying and selling and money goes back a long way in human history, right back to the original human societies which were actually organised on this basis.
Thanks to the development in the meantime of human technological knowledge and productive capacity it is now possible to (re-)establish a society on this basis, but this time on a global instead of a limited, tribal basis. In fact it is not just possible. but necessary if the problems the world is facing are to be solved.
In dismissing this (which we call “socialism" but which others in the course of history have called “community of goods", "communism”, "pure communism", “the co-operative commonwealth", "making the Earth a common treasury for all" and. yes, ‘‘utopia’’) as just one proposal from one particular political party you are not just factually wrong. You are in fact dismissing an age-old social tradition whose putting into practice today is the only way of providing a framework within which the problems that Greens have highlighted can be solved, and not just palliated as you are trying to do.
If you want to reject the idea of a world community of common ownership, democratic decision-making and production directly for use as “utopian", and to dismiss education and agitation in favour of it as a diversion from the more important tasks of growing organic vegetables on municipal allotments. re-opening public footpaths and opening macrobiotic cafés (not that we’ve anything against these, in fact good luck to you), that’s your prerogative. But at least be honest with yourself and realise that you are not doing anything to get rid of the profit system, but only trying to make things within it a little less miserable and which anyway will in all likelihood be sooner or later undermined by the workings of the profit system and its market forces.
Editors.
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