A national demonstration for Palestine (Photo: Guy Smallman)
Members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) made headlines recently when they were expelled by unelected officials from Your Party on the eve of its founding conference. But what does the SWP actually stand for? The capitalist system produces multiple horrors. But SWP thinks that none of this is inevitable—and another world is possible.
War, inequality, exploitation, and environmental collapse are not an accidental by-product of capitalism. They are the outcomes of the very logic of the system.
Capitalism is a system driven forward by competition. Corporations compete with each other to maximise profits above everything else—if they don’t, they would be driven out of business by rivals. This leads to what Karl Marx described as a system of “production for production sake, accumulation for accumulation sake.” It means the priorities of our society are subordinated to this logic of capital accumulation.
We are living through a climate emergency. But corporations such as BP openly say they will direct investment towards fossil fuels, not renewable energies, because it makes more profits for their shareholders.
We have to break with the whole logic of capitalism, not hope for a fairer, greener version of it.
How can we do that? It means confronting the system and the state that defends it.
Power doesn’t lie in parliament. It lies in the hands of business chiefs and CEOs. Elected governments allow “the markets” to dictate their policies. Elon Musk shapes world politics.
Power also lies in the hands of unelected civil servants, police chiefs, judges and army generals, people who run the unelected hierarchies that make up the state.
The state can only function if it has revenues from the bosses and the rich. The institutions of the state will always protect the source of those revenues.
The repressive institutions of the state, the police, the army and the prisons must be overthrown.
The capitalist state must be replaced by organisations based on real democracy. Workers’ councils provide the mechanism through which ordinary people can decide collectively on how their society should be organised.
“When you think about the alienation that you experience under capitalism, people are robbed of their instinct as social beings to work collectively.
“The ruling class will always be compelled to exploit people because it is driven by a logic of profit expansion. That means no matter what we try and do, capitalists will always find loopholes to reforms because it’s a profit incentive that drives them.
“When I do meetings I always talk about the limitations of reformism and the need for revolution, because reforming the system isn’t going to change this. What we need is to do away with that system altogether.
“Revolutionary ideas offer hope against the utter despair of capitalism and greed.”
Recent general strikes in Italy and Greece over Palestine give a glimpse of workers’ unique social power. The strikers, and the mass movement they led, stopped shipments of arms to Israel.
Look at the strikes and protests in France in September where working class action deepened the government’s crisis.
This movement was initiated from below led to a day where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, with over 700 strikes.
Strikes really matter. The capitalist class, made up those who own and control what Marx called the “means of production”—the offices and IT equipment, the factories and machinery.
The vast majority of people are forced to work for this minority to make a living.
This means workers suffer exploitation, but also gives them a unique power.
Whether they work at Amazon or in a school, workers are the source of profits and keep the economy running. Think of Covid. Why did the bosses want to force people back to work before it was safe? Because without workers they wouldn’t be able to grab profits.
If workers realise the power they have, and begin to wield it in their collective interest, they have the potential to bring the whole system down.
“The people who really hold power in society are the bosses. So, our side has to be well organised as well and look to where we can resist attacks on working class people.
“I am the branch secretary of the Unison union’s local government branch in Camden, north London. If we’re going to fight back and win, organising politically in the trade unions is the basis for that fight.
“One of the best things that happens when workers fight back together is the impact that it has on them. People begin to see how different their lives can be, they start to envision how different the world could be. And in that process questions are raised of the need for unity. That’s why it matters that we fight back over austerity and pay but also for Palestine and against racism.”
Fighting for liberation is central to the SWP’s politics.
Sexism, racism, LGBT+ phobia, and other forms of oppression are endemic in the system and blight millions of people’s lives.
And bigoted ideas drip down like poison from the top of society and are used to set us against each other when we should be united.
But there are recent examples that show how people can fight back in solidarity even if they don’t directly experience a particular oppression themselves.
In Los Angeles over the summer, Ice immigration officers rounded up migrants off the streets. The whole city responded with mass protests in a multiracial rebellion.
After the rape and murder of a young doctor in India in 2024, over a million women and men doctors shut down the country’s health service in protest. It was a collective response by workers against the sexist violence women endure.
Mass strikes and protests can have a transformative impact on people who once bought into bigoted ideas, challenging oppressive views and behaviour.
In Egypt in 2011, a revolution toppled the government. Huge demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square were a highly visible part of the movement.
Activist Engy Ghozlan described the changes that took place. She recalled, “I smoked in Tahrir and it was fine and remember thinking, ‘I’m smoking in Tahrir and no one is looking or saying anything to me’. And I was never sexually harassed there either.”
This process went further in Russia after the revolution of 1917. Laws were passed which made women legally equal and decriminalised being gay.
Resources were devoted to creating alternatives to the privatised family. This was a step towards uprooting the material basis of oppression. And it showed how the working class can hold the keys to liberation.
The SWP is proud to be everywhere to build movements and struggles.
There is always a battle for leadership in movements. Reformist forces argue to limiting our horizons to changes within the system, or fail to make the links between different movements.
In contrast, we want the movements to win, make the links with other struggles—and develop into a much deeper confrontation with the system.
When workers strike, we can be there on the picket lines, arguing for workers to escalate.
In the Palestine solidarity movement, we helped organise assemblies that coordinated activity in local areas, planned days of action and deepen the movement’s roots.
The need for a revolutionary party flows from how working class people’s ideas are uneven.
Some want to tear the head off capitalism, while others are reactionaries who buy into the system.
The majority sit somewhere in between with progressive and backward ideas. A reformist party reflects all of those contradictions and panders to backward ideas.
A revolutionary party organises together the most militant fighters that can be part of all the struggles and put forward a revolutionary strategy.
“I’d constantly had this question, how do we change people’s minds? How do we change mass consciousness?
“I didn’t want to live in a world with misogyny and racism, but I didn’t know how to combat these things in society.
“It was through being in the SWP and being involved in Stand Up to Racism that I realised that we were already fighting these things. We plant trees every day.
“When it comes to changing ideas, the route to that is through mass struggle along class lines.
“Being a woman of colour, I wanted other people not to be standing over there, supporting resistance from the side lines.
“What we need is for everyone, not just those directly affected, to be as invested.”
There are competing visions of socialism. Some think you can deliver socialism from above.
We stand for socialism from below. Working class people can only throw off their old ideas and experiences by engaging in struggle.
Examples of “socialism from above” are plentiful.
Think of the state capitalist bureaucracy that dominates China today, or dominated Stalinist Russia, and makes all the key decisions about the running of society.
Think of the social democratic parties who argue that electing MPs can bring about change for the rest of us.
In contrast, socialism from below is based on the principle that only working class people can liberate themselves.
Revolutionary struggles in the past have given glimpses of what this would look like.
During the revolution in Sudan in 2019, neighbourhood-based resistance committees mobilised opposition to the ruling class and stepped in to meet people’s everyday needs.
In the Iranian revolution of 1979, workers’ councils emerged that took control of workplaces and got rid of managers appointed by the monarchy.
Similar organisations of workers’ power sprang up in uprisings in Hungary in 1956, in the Spanish revolution of 1936, the German revolution of 1918-19 and elsewhere.
In the Russian revolution of 1917, workers’ councils formed the basis of a new workers’ state.
They demonstrated how a society with workers in charge could begin to completely transform society. The councils broke the rule of capital and began to plan to meet peoples’ needs.
Thousands of residents in London have been without water for months
The climate crisis is impossible to ignore
The human cost of the heatwaves are higher than the temperature
Divide and rule was used to undermine struggle
