Scottish Socialist Freedom Group

Marxism

History can teach us that when the lives of the workers improves that socialists are not immune to thinking life will get better and questions of class or militant and revolutionary socialism no longer require to be considered. After all it is easier to build a socialist organisation or the revolutionary party when capitalism stumbles upon it's latest crisis and revolutionary socialism appears more attractive to the exploited or oppressed worker. What should make us good Scottish Marxists is the ability to withstand more difficult times when reaction is in the air and scores flock to the ideas of social democracy and reformist faith in parliamentary structures and parties. Instead we should remain faithful to our revolutionary beliefs and spread the message that the gradualist approach will fail to succeed. That within capitalism and reformism there is nothing beyond the crumbs on the table and no transformation of society for capitalism to adopt a human face and adopt a type of welfare capitalism exist. Developing the revolutionary beliefs is not difficult for the class conscious especially nowadays with the widening gap between the prosperity and poverty of the different classes.
Scottish Socialist Freedom Group (SSFG)


Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg became a revolutionary socialist in her native Poland at age 16. Two years later, she fled to Switzerland in order to avoid arrest by the Polish police. After several years of study, she moved to Germany, where she became the acknowledged leader of the left wing inside the Social Democratic Party. While in her twenties Luxemburg wrote several major works criticising the attempts by reformists to strip Marxism of its democratic and revolutionary essence. Against the reformists, Luxemburg argued that capitalism would not indefinitely expand; that sooner or later it would revert to crisis and militarism. The only choice for humanity therefore, was socialism or barbarism.

This prognosis was proved overwhelmingly correct with the outbreak of world war in 1914. Nearly the entire reformist wing of European socialism abandoned the long-established principle of opposing all wars between capitalist nations. Instead, they reverted to crass patriotism, each party backing their national government. Rosa Luxemburg--along with the Russian revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky--headed the internationalist wing of the European socialist movement, the wing that opposed all sides in the war and called for the workers of all countries to reject the war and overthrow 'their' national governments. By the end of the war, working class revolutions did break out--first in Russia, then in Germany (and later in Hungary, Austria and Italy).

Rosa Luxemburg played a central role in the German revolution of 1918-19. And in that struggle, she passionately and insistently affirmed the basic principles of socialism from below. Time and time again, she argued that the working class would have to build a new world from the burning ashes of a Europe consumed by war, hunger and poverty. The struggle for socialism, she asserted, depends upon the fight against exploitation and oppression in every factory and workplace. The new society could only be created by the mass action of the working class. Nobody could give freedom over to the working class. As she wrote at the height of the German revolution:

The struggle for socialism has to be fought out
by the masses, by the masses alone, breast to
breast against capitalism, in every factory, by
every proletarian against his employer. Only
then will it be a socialist revolution.

...Socialism will not and cannot be created by
decrees; nor can it be established by any
government, however socialist. Socialism must
be created by the masses, by every proletarian.
Where the chains of capitalism are forged,
there they must be broken. Only that is
socialism, and only thus can socialism be
created.

Taken from Socialism from below by David McNally

Dealing with the National Question & Class

In view of a weakness to unite the forces amongst the socialist left in Scotland it will be obvious that the old imperialists in the British are being allowed to divide and rule minorities. And just as capitalism relies on the absence of a vanguard within the working class the imperialists will play on any ongoing division.

Fundamental to Republican Socialists is National Liberation and the need to recognise that capitalism does not offer a road towards this goal. Constitutional and parliamentary politics can only be spheres of influence in any direction to emancipation and freedom of the working class. In short whatever can be gained from either constitutional or parliamentary politics then liberation of the Scottish working class is not on that agenda. Therefore the means to liberation by parliamentary ways does not exist and neither offers a route a to Socialist Freedom for the working class. Yet the opportunists in the fundamentalist and right-wing nationalist camp believe that Scottish liberation can be achieved if enough of them provide a wee bit of scotch kitsch. This is not so, liberation and socialism are both only won through working class struggle for freedom and there should be no need for any illusions about that fact.

The requirement for the class consciousness proletarians is to lead in class struggle to ensure that the bourgeois nationalists do not hijack the National Question for themselves. The National Question and Class issue cannot be separated when we talk of winning Scottish Liberation and dispensing with the old society and achieving a Scottish Socialist Republic.

SSFG