Revolution is often viewed as protests and barricades, strikes and factory occupations. The basis of the revolution is seen as the General Strike, which begins in a small way, spreads in sympathy strikes and develops into the overthrow of the entire system, the culmination of hundreds of industrial struggles in which workers gain experience and an ever-stronger sense of solidarity, and rests on their ability to take and hold the means of production in face of the combined forces of the state.
For sure, ideas are conditioned by people's material experience, but this does not mean that industrial struggle will, in itself, automatically produce socialist consciousness; the abolition of the wage labour and capital relationship and its replacement with free access, and no amount of struggle could have conjured these concepts out of the air. Spontaneity is of no use when attempting to dispose of capitalism. The ownership of the means of life cannot be settled at the factory gate because such methods leave the coercive state in the hands of the owning class. When workers are sufficiently class conscious to capture the political machinery for socialism, they will have already used their knowledge to bring their workplace organisations to a similar state of development. They will talk not of mines for the miners or factories for the factory workers, but of the democratic control of the world's resources by the whole community.
The only movement in the interest of the great majority that can ever be successful is one they understand, desire and vote for. Industrial action for political ends can produce conditions of chaos. But chaos is not socialism, and so long as the great majority do not want socialism, socialism cannot be the outcome. Good intentions will not solve social problems but there is a revolutionary alternative: we must end capitalism. But there is a real question of confidence. The confidence of the organised labour movement and of the working class in the creation of socialism. The working class have to set to with a will producing for themselves and for the needs of the people.
Despite all the vows that recessions like the Great Depression of the 1930’s would never happen again, the world is in the grips of another social, economic and political crisis. Mass unemployment is once more a reality. Union rights, a whole range of social welfare services, are under fierce attack. Humanity itself is threatened with environmental destruction. Never have we stood in greater need of fundamental solutions. The Socialist Party aims to replace the present capitalist system with a society from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-government, based on economic freedom, will be possible. The mainstream politicians, Labour and Conservatives offer nothing but platitudes and policies that punish the people for the crimes of an economic system where a humane society could never be met within the framework of capitalism. The Socialist Party’s 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 people and resources to the creation of a world free from tyranny, greed, poverty and exploitation. The socialist option is the only alternative. Deepening economic crises and growing social problems are inevitable as long as profits dictate the course of humanity. Capitalism has failed, and so have efforts to reform it.
The needs of people, not profit, are the motivation for a socialist society. The Socialist Party trusts in the ability of working people to manage their own productive institutions, democratising all levels of society enhancing the power that people can exercise over their own lives and offering people decisive power in every level of decision making. The Socialist Party invites all people to join us, as we join them, in our common efforts to eradicate a social system based on exploitation, discrimination, poverty and war. The capitalist system must be replaced by socialist democracy. That is the only hope of humanity.
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