Society V Individual

Simple as it may seem to demand the right to good housing, good clothing, good food, good education and good health-care these simple demands cannot be met without the complete overthrow of our present competitive society.  We are socialists out of conviction – because we see capitalism as harmful to the vast majority of the world’s people. This system we live under, by its very nature, sets one group against another. We see in socialism the way of achieving a more just, more cooperative and more peaceful society. Socialists can offer an alternative which can meet the basic needs of people and which is based on cooperation. Socialism offers a future free from the fears of poverty, sexism and racism, free of the rat-race and dog-eat-dog competitive system. As the socialist movement grows in strength, the nearer we will be to creating a society that allows each person to create and produce according to her or his ability and to obtain what she or he needs.

We see the primary task of the organisation to be the fight for socialism. Without unity on essentials, no serious practice is possible. We advocate and work for socialism – that is, common ownership and collective control of the means of production (factories, fields, utilities, etc.) We want a system based on cooperation, where the people build together for the common good.

Socialists are often asked the question, ‘what would you do if you found yourselves with power in your hands tomorrow?’ The Socialist Party does not profess to possess a ready-made detailed scheme for the future of human society. All it proclaims is a system of laws of social evolution which shows the development of society in the past and deduces from that the main principles of the next stage of social progress. As to the details of the arrangement these no human being can see. All we say is, let the organised working class take over the means of production and distribution and run them democratically.  Anything further than this must be left to time and circumstances to work itself out. We cannot hold out a detailed plan of the new society in its complete form.

Socialists are all agreed as to the object for which they are striving – the ownership of all the means of production by the community; that community to be organised on the most democratic basis possible. But, beyond this, socialists are not concerned with the  organisation and administration of the new society; and it is possible that in the conception of what that organisation will be, there may be the widest divergence of view even among socialists. What should be emphasised is that socialists do not wish to impose on the future society a huge bureaucratic system, spreading its tentacles, octopus-like, over all the arrangements of every aspect of social life, crushing all individuality, and reducing every detail of existence to rule and plan. But do stand for social control and regard with suspicion those who endorse absolute individual liberty.

 How far the antagonism between society and the individual will be eliminated or modified by changed conditions only the development of those conditions can decide. We are not called upon to make rules for future society; we can very well afford to let that society take care of itself in that respect, as, in any case, it will have to do, whatever we may say or decide. It is very interesting, no doubt, to speculate on the future arrangements of society, but it is out of our power, and would be impertinent, were it not impossible, to say that these arrangements be thus and so; and any discussion on this matter must necessarily be of an academic character.  Speculations as to the future of society need not of necessity prevent any bodies of men working together for a common object, but when there is a complete divergence of view as to the immediate steps to be taken such co-operation is absolutely impossible.

It is inconceivable that a set of circumstances would always result in the interest of the individual and the interest of the community being absolutely identical. The very essence of socialism, as the word connotes, is that society, the community at large, has interests superior to those of any individual and often antagonistic to the interests of an individual. We are in revolt to-day, against permitting individuals, as landlords and capitalists, to prey upon the community. If any individual stole a book from a public library, or a flowers from a public park, he or she would be enriching themselves at the expense of the community. But if all the individual members of a community did either the one or the other, in the exercise of their equal individual liberty, they would utterly destroy the library or the garden and in endeavouring to enrich themselves individually would despoil themselves collectively. Yet the fear that others might follow this example, and thus cause communal injury may not in itself be sufficient to deter the stealer of a book or flowers. Therefore it is necessary for the community, as a whole, to protect itself from every one of its members, and thus it comes that society has rights and powers and duties superior to those of any individual. No individual has a right to prevent another individual from taking a book or plucking a flower, but society in its collective capacity has such a right, in the interest of the whole of its members, including the individual whose designs may be thwarted by the intervention of the social authority.

AJJ