Our Aim is Socialism

It is not enough for socialists to decry the reformists’ abandonment of any meaningful socialist meaningful policies. Is neither enough to speak in general terms of the need for radical and socialism. The Socialist Party must be more specific and it is high time to spell out concretely what should be done. It is not utopian of us to imagine what a socialist society would appear like. Obviously, a more detailed elaboration will be clearer closer to the time but we can still offer a vision of what socialism is.

The purpose of the Socialist Party is to achieve world socialism in which the social ownership of the means of production shall replace the existing capitalist system. Our world is rich in natural resources and is capable of producing everything necessary for a good life for all. Our planet could be truly a paradise for everybody but it is not a paradise for the people. Folk are starving while food rots. Wars are raging with a barbarity that shames our species. In Britain and elsewhere the social services being cut to the bone. Why is this? The fundamental reason of all this suffering is that the world is capitalist, ruled for and by capitalists for their profit and interests. It is divided into rich and poor—a tiny handful of rich (1 per cent of the population own more than half the nation’s wealth). It is a system of exploitation where a tiny handful of people own the “means of production” (the land, the mines, factories, the machines, etc.) and living off the sweat and toil of other people. The problems of capitalism - exploitation, anarchy of production, speculation and crisis, and the whole system of injustice - arise from the self-interest of this tiny group of capitalists.

The essence of exploitation under capitalism consists in this — that the workers, when set to work with raw materials and machinery, produce far more in values than what is paid out by the capitalists in wages. In short, they produce a surplus which is taken by the capitalists and for which they are not paid. Thus they are robbed of the values they produce. This is the source of capitalist profit. It is on this surplus, produced by the workers, that the capitalist lives in riches and luxury. Capitalism has created the economic conditions for socialism. Today the whole system of production is socially interdependent, but it is controlled by private hands. In place of private control of social production there must be social ownership if society's problems are to be addressed.

Only socialism can solve the problems facing the people of the world. No longer can some men (the capitalists) by virtue of the fact that they own the means of production, live off (exploit) the labour of others (the working class). No longer are the workers compelled to sell their labour power to the capitalists in order to live. The workers are no longer property-less proletarians. They now own the means of production and work them in their own interests and in the interests of society. For society is now composed or workers by hand and brain, i.e. of an associated body of wealth-producers.

Socialism will be a better society, one which will present unprecedented possibilities for the improvement of peoples' lives. Because working people will control the great wealth they produce, they will be fundamentally able to determine their own futures. The end of exploitation of one person by another will be a resounding liberating and transforming force. The economy will be planned to serve human needs rather than simply profit and luxury consumption by the rich. This will release the productive capacity of the economy from the limitations of profit maximisation. A great expansion in useful production and the wealth of society will become useful. Proper planning and cooperative coordination will replace the chaos of commerce. With socialism, goods and services will be distributed on the basis of from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. Workers will manage democratically their own work places through workers' councils and elected delegates, in place of the myriad of supervisors and overseers today. In this way workers will be able to make their work places safe and efficient places that can serve their own interests as well as society's with the way cleared to achieve a decent meaningful and productive life for all working people. Such a democratisation of industry would not work unless the mass of the working class itself was imbued with a consciousness of its necessity, prepared to struggle for it, and prepared to participate in its functioning. What will not be developed under socialism are the massive government bureaucracy and repressive state apparatus (police, prisons) which are used to control the people and defend the privileged position of the ruling class. Socialism will not mean government control. Today under capitalism the state serves the interests of the capitalist class. With socialism the state will "wither" away, and a new era of human freedom and prosperity will arise.

Single-issue campaigns and protest movements have played an important role in mobilising social activists and raising awareness about issues. But protest and campaigning can only take the class struggle so far. We can’t just keep on campaigning against things. We have to also campaign for things. If all the aroused and the enraged can see is an unresponsive brick wall of party bureaucracy misnamed ‘democratic centralism’ with leaders who make promises they don’t intend to carry out, they it can easily result in demoralisation and apathy. There is a democratic instinct among working people. They know that majority control is in their interests as opposed to domination by unrepresentative minorities or vanguards. The healthy rejection of leaders, opportunism and careerism should not mean a rejection of organisation. A mass movement of workers has to have a purpose. For sure it should defend and protect the exploited and oppressed, the targets and victims of capitalism. But these are only defensive struggles within the system and can only take us so far. Social movements should plan for replacing the existing system with something radically better and be committed to the democratic socialist transformation of society, a society where decision-making permeates its complete essence and where the majority collectively own and control the economy. We need peoples’ power that encourages debate and has nothing to fear from the open and free flow of ideas and information, but everything to gain. Working people clearly appreciate that unity is strength, especially in the face of capitalist wealth and power. That in division lies defeat. One united movement has a far greater chance of succeeding than one divided up into a series of competing groups but this cannot be based upon a ‘broad church’ of contradictory aims but has to be formed with a common goal yet providing ample forums in which all the different ideas and strategies for changing society can be debated and decided upon. Past experience has shown that the fight for reforms can all too easily become an end in itself, with the aim of the democratic socialist transformation of society relegated to celebratory speeches and pious resolutions. The system has demonstrated that it cannot deliver reforms and cannot even retain past gains.

Our political work now must be one of preparation, linking up with who want to fight back. We are merely making the road clearer and easier to travel down so that working people’s efforts to transform society have a better chance of success.

Andrew Kliman writes critically “On the anticapitalist left, the typical view of how to transcend capitalism can be summarized as follows. First, you change people’s consciousness, or their consciousness changes through their participation in new forms of organization. The change in consciousness allows us to increase our side’s political power, to the point where we take control, either through elections or by seizing power.  And once our side has political power, we can then change the nature of the economy and the state simply by deciding to put “people before profit” and implementing what we decide. We need the right political forms, forms of organization, to accomplish this—and there’s a whole lot of debate about what are the right forms of organization. But if we do have the right forms of organization, then overcoming capitalism is a simple matter. We decide, through these forms of organization, what should be produced and what shouldn’t, we decide how to distribute resources and goods fairly, we decide on other social priorities, and then we just put these decisions into effect. This picture of social change is in the minds of almost the whole of the anticapitalist left, from vanguardists to anarchists.” He goes on to say “despite your intentions–in order to compete effectively, there will be a continual stream of unintended consequences that you won’t be able to eliminate through experimentation. A country that tries to improve the standard of living of its workers too much will not be competitive. State-run banks that try to pursue public policy objectives instead of maximizing profit, and worker-run banks that try to enhance the workers’ well-being instead of maximizing profit, will lack the funds to do so. And so on. The problem here isn’t that you’ve made mistakes…The problem is rather that, despite your good intentions, and despite the new priorities, new forms of organization, new forms of ownership, new laws, and the new name you give your society, it remains capitalist. It remains capitalist because the economic laws that govern capitalism continue to govern your society. And they continue to govern your society because new priorities, new forms of organization, new forms of ownership and so forth are not enough––by themselves––to overcome the economic laws of capitalism.”

They would merely be capitalism in a different form or they would be unviable and lead back to capitalism.  And the reason why they wouldn’t work is that these supposed alternatives to capitalism all try to get rid of capitalism without getting rid of its mode of production. The proposals won’t work because it tries to change the capitalist system by eliminating its effects, but not the causes of these effects. Changes in political and legal forms, and changes in consciousness, are not themselves changes in the relations of production. If only they are changed, not the relations of production, the changes will not succeed in changing the character of the society. Capitalism is based on its mode of production; socialism is based on the socialist mode of production. If there is a third kind of society in between them, what is its mode of production?

We live in a world where technological achievements unimaginable in previous societies are within our grasp. For the first time in history we can produce enough to satisfy the needs of everyone on the planet. Yet millions of lives are stunted by poverty, destroyed by disease and military conflict devastate lives. New technology gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fulfilling human labour, offers unemployment or over-work. The domination of commodities in our society is so pervasive that it seems to be an inevitable, natural state of affairs. All our achievements, everything we produce, appear as commodities. The creation of exchange values and the circulation of commodities requires a commodity which can represent all other commodities, through which all other commodities can be compared and money is the universal pimp. Money can buy everything - it is the most powerful commodity in existence. The role of money in the circulation of commodities shapes the consciousness of human beings involved in that process. Money takes on the value of the objects it represents, it appears to be the force which can create value itself. Money twists our human potential, transforms our feelings into false feelings and manufactured needs, and changes us into different people, alienated, atomized  human beings who lives somebody else’s life — not our own life. In the capitalist system, the worker work for money, to survive and the accumulate things. The worker does not experience work as free life. It deeply effects the social relations of the worker to the husband/wife, lover, children, friends, and the worker’s well-being; the psychological damages from the stress of work can last for a life-time.

We say we human beings being social beings have the ability to determine and direct our own futures (within certain limits). When the workers own the means of production, William Morris explained, they will be able to concentrate on a beautiful artistic production. Similarly, with more leisure, they will have more desires and so a desire for beautiful things. We entered into a society of abundance many decades ago, but capitalists must invest seemingly forever to secure wealth, the fruit of that abundance, for themselves. Technology does benefit society by creating unprecedented material abundance. This abundance, while generated by greater productivity, has to be hidden in plain view from the people. This is the great capitalist scam: the owners of technology convince the workers that the machines, dead labor so to speak, not their living labor, produce wealth. The bosses have largely convinced us that we must service the machines at low wages, not the other way round. An abundant society is not defined by the size of your plasma television but by the quality of life that ensues when basic needs – food, shelter, health and conviviality – are satisfied. When the time that we devote to directly supplying those real needs reverts back to us, when our days are filled with the things we want to do and that immediately sustain us, and not the tasks of the paymaster, then we can begin to truly live.

A line of thinking like this is dismissed as fanciful, as utopian, in the sense of unattainable. But, to mention only one area, the accelerated pace of our current drive to despoil the environment in quest for oil and natural gas is praised as eminently practical. Where is the folly here? Is imagining a world free of exploitation more harebrained than the headlong pollution of our planet? What sort of society could evolve if everybody had free access to the world’s wealth to meet his or her basic needs of food, shelter and health?

It is necessary to persist in speaking about an abundant society and counter the popular confusions, because there is no other way to reverse the perspective of power – a perspective that demands sacrifice and scarcity to keep us all subservient.