The "If" Man Again. (1921)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Sirs,

As a regular reader of the Socialist Standard I read with interest the article “Parliamentary or Direct Action,” also “Where Russia Stands” in May issue. I fully recognise the importance of parliamentary action in the struggle to establish Socialism, but should like to ask a few questions. Any talk of armed rising in face of the up to-date bloody methods of warfare employed by capitalist States is mere madness. I agree there.

But what is to be done if the master class refused to allow the use of the ballot box when the workers understood their position? Again, why shouldn’t Socialists get into the Labour Party to convert its rank and file to Socialism as in the trade unions ?

The Labour Party is a working class party, its rank and file being anti-capitalists.

Do you favour Socialists working for the development of Socialism from craft and industrial basis? And concerning your article on Russia, suppose the SP.G.B. had been the S.P. of Russia, what would have been its position in 1917.? I believe the Communists of Russia to have done the only thing possible considering the time, country, and conditions. Our methods will be different, as our conditions will be different.

S. Warr.

Our Reply.

The master class can only refuse to allow the use of the ballot box at the expense of chaos. As pointed out in the article “Parliamentary or Direct Action,” capitalism has become far too complicated a system for the capitalists to manage personally? Hence the continued delegation of powers and functions to various and increasing bodies, as County Councils, Borough Councils, Town Councils, Boards of Trade, of Education, of Agriculture, of Asylums, etc., right down to the little Parish meeting.

These bodies carry on the normal and detail functions of society under the laws made in Parliament, and under the general control of that central body of power. The extension of capitalism and the concentration of wealth into fewer hands compels the ever-increasing delegation of these social functions with the necessary growth in the number of elected persons and the consequent extension of the Franchise. To attempt to hold up all this elaborate machinery would result in appalling chaos, far worse than anything described in the worst tales about Russia. If the capitalists ever dreamed of taking such a course it could only be as a last act of despair when the circumstances and conditions would render such an action too late to be effective.

Trade unions are organisations that the conditions of capitalism bring into existence. They arise out of the imperative necessity which the workers are under of debating the price and conditions under which they sell their labour power. Their essential work is confined to the industrial field. Socialists as workers, are faced with the necessity of joining trade unions for the purpose of carrying on this daily struggle, just as other workers are. Inside the unions they use the opportunities offered to carry on Socialist propaganda.

The Labour Party is a political party supporting capitalism—see, for instance, its actions on the War, and the other evidence in our Manifesto—while its rank and file are obviously not anti-capitalist, or they would have compelled their representatives to oppose instead of supporting capitalism. Hence for a Socialist to join the Labour Party means supporting a defender of capitalism and is in direct contradiction to Socialism.

The Socialist works inside the trade union as he does outside, to develop the workers’ knowledge of the slave position of their class. As their knowledge grows they will have their organisation on this class basis instead of on that of craft or industry.

It is easy to suppose all sorts of absurdities when endeavouring to place ideas developed from one set of conditions into an entirely different set. If the S P.G.B. had been the S.P. of Russia, clearly the S.P.G B would have had all the misunderstanding and ignorance of the European situation that the S.P. of Russia had, and would have acted as the latter did. If, however, our correspondent means if the S.P.G.B. with its knowledge and understanding of European conditions had been in Russia in 1917, then that party, at all events, would not have made the great mistake of the Russians— the mistake of thinking that the working class of Europe were ready to rise in revolt against capitalism and to establish Socialism in its place.

Whether the Communists did the only thing possible is a debatable question, as full knowledge of all the circumstances is not yet available. The position of the S.P.G.B. at the time of the upheaval in Russia was that conditions there made the establishment of Socialism impossible. The evidence and events since then have shown the correctness of our analysis.

Editorial Committee

Violence in politics (1970)

From the May 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The upsurge of violence in modern society probably means that “Law and Order” will be the most explosive single political issue of the 1970’s. What concerns socialists most is the political violence which has been seen of late in Paris, London, Tokyo and many large American cities. This has been carried out by large numbers of people, mostly young, who have the avowed intention of changing society and of even instituting “Socialism”. Indeed, many of these insurgents claim to adhere to the theories of Karl Marx. Not surprisingly, Marx is once again widely regarded as the apostle of violent revolution, barricades and fighting in the streets.

At a recent debate in Edinburgh the audience heard our opponent claim that Marx had never supported the use of the ballot in achieving Socialism and had always advocated using force of arms. Whether this statement was due to ignorance or “tactics” is unknown. We say Marx’s views on the revolutionary use of the ballot by the working class are not a matter for debate, they are a matter of record and were dealt with by us in the April issue of the Socialist Standard.

Why this obsession with violence, then? After all, it is only a few years since the emphasis in the protest movement was on the non-violent. The theme of the earlier Aldermaston marches was that “we shall overcome” by pacifist methods, a far cry from the bloodthirsty spectacle of recent Easters.

The key lies in the fact that as capitalism continues on its not-so-merry way its problems not only increase but intensify. For example, the Spanish Civil War pales to insignificance with its post-war parallel in Vietnam, and prior to 1939 the disarmers were aghast at the thought of submarines and mustard gas. Today, it is thermonuclear and bacteriological warfare.

Most of the current crop of “revolutionaries” came into politics through their disgust at one or another of capitalism’s evils. Many of them were originally supporters of the Labour Party and helped get it elected in the belief that this would be a step towards eliminating certain social problems. Of course, the reality has been very different. To many it has seemed that governments lack the will or are too treacherous to deal with the problems and that it doesn’t matter who the votes are cast for, the result is the same — human misery on a vast scale. Thus they come to the conclusion that the ballot is useless, a kiss on a piece of paper.

Is it as simple as that? Is it really lack of will that prevents governments solving the problems? The myth is that governments could take capitalism by the scruff of the neck if they really wanted to. Actually, it is the other way round. How can a government determine or forecast the actions of the rest of the world? And how can it deny — if it wishes to retain popular support — the wishes of the majority? For there is another myth dearly held by the protesters, that the majority is really on their side. The fact is that the majority either supports capitalism or can see no alternative way of running society except on a production for profit basis.

So, it is a lack of desire for Socialism (production for use) that keeps capitalism going. Governments have no choice but to run the system the best way they know how. The vote, then, is not necessarily useless. Rather it is like a razor which can be used to separate a man from his whiskers or his breath. Likewise, a vote can be a weapon of emancipation or self-inflicted wage slavery, depending on the man using it.

In their frustration the protesters must turn to solutions outside of majority support, and there is no lack of would-be leaders to provide such solutions from the rehashed theories of Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, etc., and their insistence that since all previous revolutions have been violent so must the next one be, too.

We deny this most unMarxian viewpoint on the grounds that the factors involved in revolutions do not remain constant. The bourgeois revolutions of 19th century Europe took place against a background where the bourgeois had no option but to take up arms. The existing legality was often undemocratic, so the only way to change things was by illegal means.

Also, these upheavals occurred when the level of weaponry was low by today’s standards. Then it was a case of rifle against rifle, horseman against horseman. In such a situation it was possible that revolutionaries fired by the “justice” of their cause and as well, or as poorly, armed as the mere hirelings of the state could take on and beat them. Nowadays, the situation is vastly different. No group outside of the state machine could possibly seize power in a modern country in the face of the sophisticated weaponry ranged against them. Much wiser to win control of the state machine first.

The most important changed factor is that previous revolutions have always been carried out in the interest of a minority who understood what was at stake. The socialist revolution will be the first one in the interest of a majority, so, along with Marx and Engels, we hold that the majority must also understand what is at stake.

In any case, those who have actually tried to seize power without first winning political control in more recent times have failed miserably. The May 1968 Paris affair was crushed without any real force having to be used. Probably the only shots fired came from the students, themselves. No tanks, aircraft or artillery were required. Indeed, this writer has a vivid memory of seeing on TV how a Paris Municipal street cleaning vehicle made short work of a barricade.

Ignoring the myth of Mussolini’s march on Rome, the most serious attempt was Hitler’s Munich putsch in 1923. The rebels were desperate, trained and armed men, many of whom had fought in world war one, and they constituted a more potent force than anything today’s barricadists are likely to provide. Through the streets of Munich they marched until confronted by the state machine in the form of some policemen armed only with rifles. A volley of shots rang out and some of the marchers fell dead or wounded. Alan Bullock, in his Hitler — A Study in Tyranny, tells of the ensuing panic and collapse of the putsch. Although Hitler dislocated his arm in the stampede to get away, his brain continued to function. There and then he realised that attempts to bypass the state machine were useless. From then on he set out to win the minds of the German electorate and to win power legally. Once this had been achieved the military had no option but to accept Nazi rule.

Of course, the widely held view among the “revolutionaries” is that it is impossible for socialists to capture the forces of the state; that in the event of a socialist majority the armed forces and the police will be used to cow that majority into submission. How valid is this idea?

Socialists claim that the idea of Socialism — a world without social classes in which the means of production will be commonly owned — is produced out of the revulsion of capitalism’s problems, its wars, crime, poverty, alienation. that the values and institutions of capitalism increasingly come into conflict with the growing desire of the working class to live in a society more in harmony with their needs. In short, socialist consciousness is a product of capitalism’s problems. Now, there is no evidence to suggest that members of the armed forces are any more backward than other workers in factories or offices. Their ideas are pretty much the same on matters of sport, sex or politics. They do not live in a vacuum.

So, how likely is the soldier to obey a command to suppress a socialist working class? Not so long ago this writer did his National Service and can, accordingly, speak from first-hand experience. Did we obey our officers because we loved them or regarded them as superior beings? Actually, a chief topic in the NAAFI any night of the week was what a useless shower officers were. Also, any officer issuing an order which we knew to be unauthorised could be safely, and often was, ignored. During the years of National Service the newspapers often carried exposures of servicemen being misused, supplied by the men themselves.

The reason why we obeyed the officers was that even we, without a socialist idea in our heads, knew that those in command are backed by the populace at large. The working class today, as before, thinks the armed forces are necessary, so, logically, it regards discipline as a must. Officers with no authority telling soldiers exposed to socialist ideas to do what they certainly won’t want to do — shoot their own families — will be more likely to have the arms turned on them!

The most urgent task, then, for those who wish to abolish capitalism and institute Socialism, is to organise with others of like mind. No need to form another organisation when the Socialist Party of Great Britain has been in existence for 66 years. There is a great need to carry the socialist case out into the ranks of the working class, particularly now as capitalism’s rottenness becomes more exposed to the public gaze. First, it is necessary to understand that case, and a start can be made by discarding the romantic nonsense of the barricades. Those who most loudly proclaim their hatred of the bourgeoisie show it in a strange way by aping it.

We do not see the ballot as a cure-all ; it is majority understanding of Socialism which counts most. How will we know when we are a majority? there may be better methods of finding this out, but, meantime we still think that the ballot is the best way of finding out what people are thinking at any particular time.

Vic Vanni

The "Ballot" Strike (1913)

From the December 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

To Show what a smart and up-to-date journal the “Daily Herald” is, the issue of 25th November contains an article by Mr. Russell Smart advocating that, instead of running candidates for Parliament “without even a feeble hope of success,’’ the workers go to the ballot and deliberately spoil the voting papers.

Smart Russell has discovered that it is not good enough to merely abstain from voting or using the ballot, but that the ballot can be actually made a useful agency by Socialists for registering their strength in the constituencies.

Has Smart been careless enough to attend a meeting of the S.P.G.B., and to learn that for years we have taught that the ballot can be used for ascertaining the strength of the movement. 

Perhaps! and perhaps not; for we learn further that the ballot paper can be spoiled "either by writing ‘Socialism’ across it, or better still, filling in the space opposite the candidates’ names with the word 'Knave.’”

If Russell thinks that “knavery" is a better retort to "capitalism” than the demand for Socialism, then perhaps he has succeeded in describing the attitude of the "D.H.," Fabian Society, the I.L.P., the S.D.P., and the Syndicalists more accurately than he intended. 

Smart, isn't he?

South West.

Votes for some Workers (1968)

From the November 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

November 1868 is a significant date in British working class history. For in that month was held the first general election in which the majority of electors were workers. Most workers, it is true, were still excluded but enough had the vote to elect a majority of socialist delegates had they wanted to. It is true also that the Second Reform Act of 1867 was a miserable compromise between the Tories and the Liberals, both of whom were opposed to democracy and afraid of giving the vote to too many workers.

In 1832 the workers had been tricked into backing their employers' demand for a share with the landed aristocrats, big merchants and bankers in running the government. The First Reform Act was framed so as deliberately to exclude workers and in fact, in some cases, they were actually disfranchised. This was not an experience they easily forgot. The manufacturers had used the threat of a workers' uprising to scare the governing classes into sharing power with them. One of the first acts of the government elected under the new franchise was to reform the Poor Law system: they made it harsher in order to drive people into the factories (or, as they would say today, to encourage “mobility of labour”). Partly as a result of this for the next decade or so the government was, in Chartism, faced with the real threat of a workers’ uprising.

Chartism, the first independent workers’ political party in the world, was an expression of general discontent with early capitalism. Their six-point charter, which included universal manhood suffrage, added up to a demand for a democratic state. They were convinced that with democracy the workers could reshape society in their own interests. This was well expressed in the words of one of their songs: “We will get the land, when we get the Charter”. It was this emphasis on the need for winning political power that commended Chartism to Marx and Engels and it taught them that the workers’ class struggle must become political. The Chartists in fact failed to achieve any of their aims. Their last monster demonstration in 1848 failed ignominiously. Faced with the choice of passively accepting parliament’s rejection of the Charter or insurrection they backed down. The more determined kept up the struggle for a few more years coming to absorb the ideas of the French utopian communists like Babeuf and Blanqui and even those of Marx and Engels.

By the 1860’s the trade unions, after years of syndicalist-type opposition to “wage-slavery”, came to accept the wages system and put forward the conservative slogan of “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.” Their leaders were rejecting violent overthrow of the the government in favour of working for small improvements within the system.

The manufacturers, who were the gainers from 1832, were now eager to push out the old landed aristocracy and have the state machine all to themselves. The successful Anti-Corn Law campaign led by Cobden and Bright had whetted their appetite. They saw as one way of increasing their control to extend the suffrage to their workers who they knew would vote for them. So despite the failure of Chartism the Reform issue was raised from time to time after 1850. However, the restricted franchise did not allow the radicals their due weight inside the Liberal party. The Whigs, themselves landed aristocrats, still had a great say and Lord Palmerston refused to allow a Reform bill. When he died the way was clear and in March 1866 Gladstone introduced a Bill which by lowering the property qualification would have given the vote to many workers. But the Whigs had their last fling. Some forty of them voted with the Tories against the bill. The government resigned and a minority Tory one took over. Almost immediately they were faced with a country-wide Reform agitation. Bright on behalf of the manufacturers’ National Reform Union called for ratepayers’ suffrage while the trade unions and the First International backed the Reform League which, like the Chartists, stood for universal manhood suffrage. It was the League that organised a great demonstration for 23 July at Hyde Park which the government banned. The organisers refused to accept this and the demonstration went on. The crowds pulled down the railings at Hyde Park and swarmed in. The fear of insurrection and a revival of Chartism, suggested by this, scared the government and Disraeli introduced his own Reform bill, more radical even than Gladstone's, in order, as he said, “to dish the Whigs”.

Marx commented favourably on the tactic of playing off one section of the governing classes against another which the workers had used to get factory laws. The passing of the Second Reform Act presented the same spectacle. The Tories proposed to give the vote to all ratepayers in the towns, while the Liberals wanted a steadily falling property qualification. Since the Liberals had a majority in parliament the actual Act, which with similar ones for Scotland and Ireland increased the electorate from 1,350,000 to 2,470,000, was a compromise.

If Disraeli had hoped to gain the new voters' gratitude and so dish the Whigs he must have been disappointed. The 1868 election returned Gladstone with a big majority. The new government then set about stripping the aristocrats of more of their privileges: they reformed the civil service and the universities; they disestablished the Church in Ireland; they brought in compulsory elementary education. Once again the workers had been used by the manufacturing capitalists as tools in their fight against the landed aristocracy. But this time it was voluntary. The workers allowed themselves to be used in this way. The new voters of 1868 set an unfortunate precedent which has been followed at every election since: they used their votes to hand over political power to the capitalist class.

One of three Tory Ministers to resign was Lord Cranbourne (who later as Lord Salisbury was three times Prime Minister). His complaint was that power was being transferred to

those who have no other property than the labour of their hands. The omnipotence of Parliament is theirs.

Marx and Engels took a similar view. Writing on the Chartists in the 1850's they had pointed out that universal suffrage in Britain would amount to political power for a class-conscious working class. They seem to have regarded the Second Reform Act as a “radical sham” and a travesty on democracy, as indeed it was. But, although fearing a “pro-slavery rebellion", Marx knew its significance as he showed in his famous speech at the Hague in 1872 when he stated that in America, Britain and perhaps Holland the workers could win power for Socialism peacefully, by winning a majority in a general election.

The government extended the franchise to workers in Britain under pressure, partly from the workers themselves and partly from some capitalists who saw this was in their interests. The workers' vote is a real gain, a potential class weapon which should, in Marx’s phrase, be used as “an instrument of emancipation". The government could not, as some claim, now suddenly suspend democracy, for besides being essential to the smooth running of modern capitalism, it is part of the political consciousness of the working class. By their past actions, from Chartism to pushing down the railings in Hyde Park, they have forced governments to take their views into account. Nor is universal suffrage a fraud, as these same people claim, a trick to convince us we have some say in the running of social affairs while the real decisions are made elsewhere. Parliament does control how the state machine is used—whether troops stay East of Suez or fight in Aden, what the police should do to control riots outside the American embassy, what laws the Courts should enforce—and universal suffrage does allow workers to choose who shall sit in Parliament..

Adam Buick

One person, one vote (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Down the centuries upholders of privilege have recognised and feared the power of the masses to overthrow the rulers of society; but it took a poet to flip the coin of fear and turn it into a joke:

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest . . .
do it just to spit in their eye.
(D. H. Lawrence, A Sane Revolution.)

Fear, irony and humour characterise the responses of many who contemplate for long the oddity that rulers are few and the ruled are many. Plato thought about it a lot:

The third group is the mass of the people, who earn their own living, take little interest in politics, and aren't very well off. They are the largest class in a democracy, and once assembled are supreme.
(Plato, The Republic, p.385, Penguin, 1975)

His ironic response was to spin out an analogy between society and a bee-hive. He wanted all drones cleared out of the hive and replaced by three brainwashed classes of people, presided over by a philosopher-king, who alone stung everyone into submission with a venomous dialectic.

The fearful response to popular power sometimes contains a magical incantation, as when Edmund Burke tried to ward off the evil influence of the French Revolution from his English readers:

We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility.
(Revolutions 1775-1830. (ed) M. Williams, Penguin, 1971, pp. 108-9.)

It is indeed a heathenish thing for the masses to rise up and bite the hand that whips them!

Goodbye To All That

Fear is creeping into Margaret Thatcher's voice now; with unemployment rising to three million and bankruptcies soaring, and yet insists she's doing us good. Presumably she'll get booted out at the next election and replaced by an earnest Labourite, or a smarmy Liberal-Social Democrat, who'll play at ruling capitalism for a further five years.

What potential for revolution remains among the workers now that parliamentary democracy has made the barricade and the guillotine decadent, even absurd, as a way of removing and chastising Thatcher?

One person, one vote: the implication of this democratic slogan is that there is a revolutionary use for the cube of black-japanned metal — the ballot box. It would not have amused Lawrence, would have puzzled Plato and infuriated Burke; but is something Thatcher and the working class could come to terms with. The ballot can dictate the shape of society. Provided Thatcher displays only the usual amount of incompetence over the next two years, then not the fulminations of Foot, not the hysteria of left-wingers and not the self-starvation of all terrorists will remove her from office. Yet sometime in 1984 she will meekly accept the probable dictate of the ballot box and cease to rule with her usual bad grace. Capitalism could be deposed throughout the world in just the same way; after all, how could an "ism" fight back?

Individuals are the bearers or agents of ideologies. When you vote, you put a cross against the name of someone and the sum total of ideologies borne by the successful names yields the style of society around you — give or take a nuclear hiccup or two. Putting a cross on a ballot for revolution would be much the same — give or take a capitalist or two. What about a world-wide referendum, where the ballot paper reads "capitalism or socialism: place a cross against your choice"?

Hello New World

But the simplest revolutionary use of the ballot box would be to nominate and vote for individuals as bearers of the ideology of the masses — the working class. Theirs is a beautifully simple ideology, well-fitted for revolution. It goes something like this:

Politicians never do the workers any good.
If you want something done, do it yourself.
Labour is the source of wealth and only a fool says otherwise.
You'll never change the world until you get the vast majority to agree.

The political programme to fit this goes as follows:

One person, one vote;
therefore the last thing we need are politicians and leaders;
therefore if anything is to be done to the world all must do their bit;
therefore away with all that nonsense about banks,
advertising and invisible earnings creating wealth — it's brain and brawn that will do it all;
therefore you can stick your United Nations, your summit meetings, your social security plans and all the rest;
we've got to talk it out like we do down the pub — then pick our team.

Strange that a colossal social system like capitalism can be toppled by something as ordinary as the process used by a darts club to choose team members; by the method an angling club uses to select venues for a season; by the way the local women's institute decides who'll make the sausage rolls, make the cakes and cut the sandwiches for the next whist drive. Yet all socialism requires is that workers put their heads together and decide about society, stick their men and women in the parliaments of the world and stick their fingers up at all those who said it couldn't be done.

B. K. McNeeney

Legality and Revolution (1908)

From the February 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Because, with the International, we shout warnings of the pitfalls to the workers of France, whom it is sought to divert from political action under the pretexts of the general strike and other operations of the holy ghost of Anarchism, some of the bourgeois press conclude that we have more and more the physiognomy of a parliamentary party. According to them we have renounced revolutionary procedure.

But then - you will think - there must be rejoicing among the conservative genus; surely the fatted calf already turns on the spit for the return of the collectivist sheep to the fold of legality.

Hasten to correct yourselves. Our brave quill-drivers start from what they call our rally or conversion to parliamentarism to denounce us with greater vehemence, and to vanquish us under the redoubled fire of their anathemas.

What, then, is this mystery? And how explain such contradictory language? Quite simply by this - which is not at all mysterious - that our adversaries do not believe a word of what they tell their readers. They know that far from turning the back to the revolution we maintain and impel the army of the workers in the revolutionary road, when, instead of allowing it to engage itself in the blind alley of a systematized strike, we show it the political power -the state - to be conquered.

This conquest is, indeed, an indispensable condition of the social revolution, in other words, of the transformation of capitalist property into social property. It is only after and by the political expropriation of the capitalist class that its economic expropriation can be achieved, as is recognised by the common programme of Socialists the world over.

In order to restore the means of wealth production to the producers, there must be a proletariat having become the government and making law. It remains now to be seen how from being as now a governed class, the workers can and will become the governing class. The ballot, which has already installed us in numerous Hôtels de Ville and which has put an important minority into the Palais Bourbon is the first means. But will it be the sole?

No more than we believed this yesterday do we believe it to-day. But since when, because it will not be all, must legal action be therefore nothing? Far from excluding each other, electoral action and revolutionary action complete each other, and have always completed each other in our country where - for all parties - the victorious insurrection has been but the consequence, the crowning of the ballot.

The antagonism that it is sought to establish - useless to enquire why - between the suffrage which commences and the stroke of force which terminates, has never existed except in the hollowest of phrases. History, all history, is there to demonstrate that the deviations from legality have always and necessarily been preceded by the usages and employment of that legality as long as it served as a defensive - and offensive - arm to the new idea, to the new interests in their recruitment, and while the revolutionary situation had not yet been produced.

It was legally and electorally that Orleanism prepared its advent to power. That, however, did not prevent it finally coming to musket shots in a three days’ battle. The “glorious” three days immortalised by the July column.

It was legally, electorally, that Bonapartism installed itself at the Elysée. But this did not prevent it from employing force - and what force! The rifle killing Baudin, and the cannon shattering the Boulevard Montmartre - in order to move into the Tuilleries as the third and last Empire.

The Republic was no exception to this rule. Twice (under the July monarchy and under the Empire) it legally and electorally constituted its army and partly gained the country. But this again did not prevent the Republic, in order to become the 1907 government presided over by M. Fallières, from having to pass through a violent accouchement by means of the forceps of street battles.

Well! Socialism to-day is legalist, electoralist, by the same title as all other political parties which have preceded it, and which are at present coalesced against it with what remains of their virility. We do not pretend to innovate, we content ourselves with the means of struggle and victory which have served others and of which we will serve ourselves in our turn. If anything is particularly idiotic it is the divergence that has been made between the means, divided into legal and illegal, into pacific and violent, in order to admit the one and exclude the other.

There is not, and there never will be, other than a single category of means, determined by circumstances: those which conduct to end pursued. And these means are always revolutionary when there is a question of a revolution to be accomplished.

The vote, however legal it may be, is revolutionary when on the basis of class candidatures it organises France of labour against France of capital. Parliamentary action, however pacific is may be, is revolutionary when from the height of the tribune of the Chambre it beats the call to the discontented of the workshop, field and counter; and when it drives capitalist society to bay in the refusal or powerlessness of the latter to give the workers satisfaction.

Anti-revolutionary, reactionary in the highest degree, would the riot on the other hand be, in spite of its character of illegality and violence, because by furnishing the popular blood-letting that moribund capitalism needs for survival, the riot would put back the hour of deliverance. Not less anti-revolutionary, not less reactionary -and for the same reason - is all attempt at general strike that is condemned, through working-class and peasant divisions, to the most disastrous and abortive results.

The duty of the Socialist Party is to avoid as a snare, as a machination of the enemy or to the profit of the enemy, all that which in spite of its scarlet and explosive character would mislead and uselessly exhaust our forces of the first line; and to use parliament, as we use the press and the meetings, in order to complete the proletarian education and organisation, and to bring to a conclusion the revolution that is prepared by this end of at social order.

(Translated from Le Socialisme)

Jules Guesde

Ballot-Box or Baton? (1922)

From the April 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

An "Unemployed Demonstration" is one of the most saddening spectacles that civilisation can provide. Most of the industrial towns have their daily débâcle in front of the Union, but the futility of their actions does not seem to strike the demonstrators; in fact, all that seems to strike them is the policeman's baton. The humanitarian must turn aside in pity at the sight of a few hundred, or maybe thousand, starving and physically weakened individuals parading their distress and wretchedness up and down the streets, to be eventually sent scampering down back streets and alleys at the word of command from a police inspector. If only it were an equal combat, one would not feel its injustice quite so much. But there you have it. The master class takes the best from amongst the working class, feeds them and clothes them, strengthens them physically, enslaves them mentally by exercise and military discipline, and uses them to protect its property against the turbulence of the dispossessed. Indeed, so imbued with Capitalist notions are these working-class protectors of their masters' property that the authorities do not even fear that they will shirk the task of clubbing their mates and fellow-townspeople into obedience. This was exemplified a little while back, when Scotch soldiers were detailed to quell disturbances in Glasgow! As for the demonstrators, they play into Master's hands in just the right fashion. They don't know anything about the Capitalist wirepullers but "Here's a policeman; let's heave a brick at him!" Thus we get the working class busy fighting each other and the Capitalist maintaining his hold on the wealth that he steals from them!

Yet the remedy is so simple, and the method more simple still. The cause of poverty is the ownership of the means and instruments of wealth production by the Capitalist Class. The remedy, therefore, is to dispossess that class of its ownership. It maintains its ownership by virtue of its political control. Its economic domination would cease the moment that the working class captured the political machinery that sends the police and the soldiers against them. Curiously enough, the working class never seem to discover that it is they who gratuitously give the Capitalist Class the power to enslave them every time they go to the ballot-box! It is obvious, then, that the method of recapturing political control is going back to the ballot-box and voting for Socialism! It doesn't hurt as much as a whack on the head from a baton, anyway!

Stanley H. Steele