Is the Red Flag Flying?

We are living in serious times. Grave events will test the socialist movement.  Only those who have thought out their principles and know how to hold to them firmly will be able to sustain themselves in such times. One of the biggest questions confronting humankind in trying to understand its own destiny and evolution. Our movement, the movement of socialism, judges things and people from a class point of view.  Capitalist disasters are all around us, clear to see. Yet most people believe capitalism is the best system we’ve got. Before they oppose capitalism, they want to know what is to be put in its place? There is an alternative way of running society. It is called socialism. However for many on the Left, socialism is not a society too different from capitalism, but rather, a form of capitalism in which the working class has achieved a higher status It is, as Engels once mocked, "the present-day society without its defects."

Socialism is not government ownership or control of industry. Socialism struggles for the end of the state, not the enlarging of its functions.   Socialism is the struggle to place the ownership and control of industry directly in the workers through the overthrow of capitalism. Socialism, in the words of Engels, is not the government of persons, but the administration of things. The state, and its authority masking itself as democracy, disappears.  The Socialist Party's goal is the realisation of a humane human community.

A socialist society is not created by steps toward socialism. Socialism is a result of conscious social building, planned and conducted by the organised workers who have won political power and supported by the majority of the population. There are no short cuts. Socialism is based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and exchange, upon production for use as against production for profit, upon the abolition of all classes, all class divisions, class privilege, class rule, upon the production of such abundance that the struggle for material needs is completely eliminated, so that humanity, at last, freed from economic exploitation, from oppression, from any form of coercion by a state machine, can devote itself to its fullest intellectual and cultural development. Anything less you can call whatever you wish, but it will not be socialism. The Socialist Party reaffirms that socialism for us, yesterday, today, tomorrow means the end of class rule; the end of class privilege; the freeing of the people from all chains and all coercion, the fullest realisation of democracy, the emancipation of men, women and of children from wage-slavery, abundance for all, and therefore liberty for all.

Capitalism is an economic system based on profit. Profit-seeking is the sole motive force in all economic life. The accumulation of capital is regulated by the laws flowing from this search for profit.  Because the capitalist economy is an economy for profit, the contradictions inherent in capitalism – particularly the inevitable disproportion between the different sectors of production – periodically provoke abrupt interruptions’ in the realisation of this profit which is the raison d’être of capitalism. The movement of capitalist economy this acquires the spasmodic and cyclic character which is peculiar to it, swinging abruptly from periods of stagnation and crisis to periods of growth and upswing. This movement, peculiar to capitalism, is valid for the entire world market, for all countries.