Understanding socialism

The first condition of success for socialism is that its adherents should explain its aim and its essential characteristics clearly, so that they can be understood by every one. We must do away with many misunderstandings created by our adversaries and some created by ourselves. The idea of socialism is simple.

The Socialist Party proclaim its dedication to the cooperative commonwealth and has set out its alternative to the grinding poverty and stark injustices that confront our fellow-workers. We aim to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent inhumanity, by a social system where exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated.Few can deny that the world today is in a constant state of upheaval. Never have we stood in greater need of fundamental solutions faced by a world in the grips of social, economic, environmental and political crises. The Socialist Party goal is a socialist world, based on common ownership of our resources and industry, cooperation, production for use and genuine democracy. Only socialism can turn the boundless potential of our people and resources to the creation of a world free from tyranny, greed, poverty and exploitation. The socialist option is the only alternative. The deepening of the world social problems is inevitable as long as profits dictate the course of humanity.  The half-measures of offered by Big Business cannot meet the challenge. The stock-in-trade of government legislation—tinkering with monetary and fiscal policy has proven futile. Welfare state policies have done nothing to correct deep-seated structural inequality. Regulatory reforms, aimed at the most blatant abuses of corporate power, have not succeeded. Capitalism has failed, and so have efforts to reform it. That failure puts a campaign for the socialist alternative on the immediate agenda. The needs of people, not profit, are the driving force of a socialist society.

A multitude of human beings possesses nothing. They can only live by their work, and since, in order to work, they need an expensive equipment, which they have not got, and raw materials and capital, which they have not got, they are forced to put themselves in the hands of another class that owns the means of production, the land, the factories, the machines, the raw material, and accumulated capital in the form of money. And naturally, the capitalist and possessing class, taking advantage of its power, makes the non-owning class pay a heavy price.  It may be said that the worker does not even own his or her own body outright.  If labour is to be really free, all the workers should be called upon to take part in the management of the work rather than be mere  “hands” of the capitalist system, whose only use it is to put into operation the schemes which the capitalist has decided upon. All this misery and all this injustice results from the fact that one class monopolises the means of production and of life, and imposes its laws on another class and on society as a whole. The thing to do, therefore, is to break down this supremacy of one class.

  Socialism recognises no distinction between the various nations or “races” comprising the modern world. “My country, right or wrong,” is an expression that is the very antithesis of socialism. The position of the Socialist Party is one of hostility to the existing political order.  We are now poor and enslaved not because of lack of reforms made by politicians, but because the employing class own and control the means of production, without access to which we cannot live. So long as others control the means whereby we live so long shall we be slaves.

Against this insane capitalist system, the Socialist Party raises its voice in protest and unqualified condemnation. It declares that if our society is to be rid of the host of economic, political and social ills that for so long have plagued it, the outmoded capitalist system of private ownership of the socially operated means of life and production for the profit of a few must be replaced by a new social order. That new society must be organised on the same basis of social ownership and democratic management of all the instruments of social production, all means of distribution and all of the social services. It must be one in which production is carried on to satisfy human needs and wants. In short, it must be genuine socialism.