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The Need for a Party

Socialists need a party. It isn't enough to wage purely economic struggles against capitalism, because capitalism isn't purely economic. If (and when) the working class strike with enough effectiveness to shut down major sectors of the economy, the state will be wielded by the capitalist class against them. Strikes will be broken with the police and the army, resources will be forcefully expropriated to keep things running, and the rights of ordinary people will be brutally curtailed in a "state of emergency".

Besides, the state acts in so many ways to keep the working class in its place even before any industrial action is taken. Class relations are underwritten by employment law, capitalist property is enforced and protected, the working class is put to war against itself by nation states. The capitalist state by definition is used by the powerful minority to dominate the vast majority. It is for this reason that the working class must participate in politics, and do so through a party that represents, is owned by, that class.

This isn't easy as the state itself, and politics more generally, is captured and set up to benefit the ruling (capitalist) class. How does the capitalist class wield power over the state? By having a veto on the economy. If the state does something capitalists don't like, they can take their capital to other states, or simply strike, empty or even burn down their property, etc. For the state to prevent these actions, it would have to change the very nature of property relations and production relations. In other words, either the capitalist class rules or it doesn't, there's no in-between.

Anarchists are optimistic about the power of the working class, or at least the popular masses, to overthrow the state and build a new society without any considerable period of transition from capitalism to communism, from state to statelessness, from fake barbaric "civilisation" to true civilisation. The fact is that most people are at least somewhat aware of the brutality of the state against them, and nonetheless struggle to even wrest reforms from it, let alone overthrow it altogether. A party structure is needed at least for now, just as capitalism requires a state to clarify and protect the interests of the capitalist class as a whole.

Many supposedly left, social democratic or "labour" parties are capitalist to the core, relying either on capitalists for funding directly, or on the state or the electoral system to maintain their status as one of the main parties capable of governing.

The kind of party socialists need is a revolutionary one. What is a revolutionary party? One which relies for its power on the revolutionary class, the working class. One which calls for the overthrow of the current legal, social, political, economic order, which is therefore seen as "illegitimate" in the eyes of the established power as well as proponents of capitalism and its political form, liberal democracy. One which is not confined to the nation state because capitalism, and what comes after it, is necessarily international.

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