Socialism Matters

Many believe that socialism means government or state ownership and control but socialism is something entirely different. Socialism means economic democracy, workers making decisions every day where they work and in the field in which they are most qualified. When we use the word “worker,” we mean everyone who sells his or her ability to work (labour power) to an employer. Coal miners are workers, but so are musicians, scientists, nurses, teachers, architects, inventors and mathematicians. Industry should be used to benefit all of us, not restricted to the creation of profits for the enrichment of a small group of capitalist owners. Our natural resources could be intelligently conserved. We would have full and free access to the means of wealth production and distribution. There would be a complete and full democracy in which the final and only power will be the great mass of our people, the useful producers, which in socialist society would mean everybody. Society no longer would be split into two contending classes. The power of the socialist vision has always been that it offered for the first time in the history of humanity a realistic means of overcoming alienation and exploitation, inhumanity and misery, violence and war.

Socialism is a vision of a transformed society in harmony with nature, and the development of practices that can attain it. Our mission is to facilitate a global movement towards a new society. Our whole future depends upon achieving it. But socialism doesn’t drop from the sky, nor can it socialism be delivered to people from above, to be handed down to us by the enlightened.  There is only one way we can reach it — through our own activity. We would be pedantic fools if we insisted that there is only one path to the social revolution. Yet to construct a socialist society, one step in every particular path is critical — the capture and control of the state. Without the removal of state power from capitalist control, every real threat to capital will be destroyed. The capitalist state is an essential support for the reproduction of capitalist social relations; and the army, police, legal system. Capital always uses the power of its state when challenged. Socialism is not a statist society where decisions are top-down and where all is the property of state office-holders or the party cadres of self-reproducing vanguards. Socialism is the banner under which millions of working people will the horrors of the factory system and demanded a new society of equality, justice and freedom. Socialism is the promise of the emancipation of labour, a society in which work would be transformed from drudgery done in the pursuit of profit to collective activity done in the service of human needs. Every person will have an equal say in how the new economy is run. Private ownership of the industries will be eliminated, in favor of social, or common, ownership. We will have a society of free access to the goods we produce in direct exchange for our services rendered, and we shall all be given useful and rewarding occupations that we have a personal aptitude for, each of us working a fraction of the amount of time we have to work in capitalist society. Poverty, hunger, racism, sexism, environmental destruction, unemployment, rampant crime and war will become things of the past. Education will be given to anyone who has the desire to learn free of "charge." Health care shall be free to all who need it, as will be housing and transport. Recreational and cultural facilities will now be open to all as well, and we will now have plenty of leisure time to enjoy it. Magazines, the television stations, radio stations and the Internet will be in the hands of everyone collectively, so we will no longer have our means of communications in the hands of the few, deciding what we can publish or which ideas we can express. Those who are physically or mentally incapable of work, or those who are too old and infirm to work, will share in this abundance. Even the slothful can be supported by a healthy society.

What is the political role of a socialist party? The objective of a socialist society is the promotion of a free, universal development of its individuals. A socialist society may only form itself around the generalisation of the emancipatory achievements of earlier struggles and by linking them to future tasks. We need to articulate a compelling vision of a new society, bring together disparate campaigns and organizations on an ongoing and coordinated basis, and mount a general political offensive against the system in its totality. The gap between the challenges we face and our ability to meet them is daunting. Socialism can and must be established before capitalism brings our world to an end. Currently, the working class is not class conscious, and most support the pro-capitalist political parties. We may dislike certain politicians and policies, we may hate the poverty, inequality and environmental destruction that capitalism creates, but never do we actually blame capitalism itself or even consider capitalism as the problem. Always do we consider "solutions" to the problems within the framework of capitalism, and never do we oppose the politicians and the capitalist class that controls them. In our education we are taught to obey the government and to trust our political betters for they are looking out for us and we are taught all this by schools, mass media and other sources of information controlled by the capitalists. We are encouraged to work our jobs, keep our noses at the grind-stone and endure the exploitation and ignore the humiliation that we suffer.

We must become class conscious. We must recognize ourselves as members of the working class, regardless of our occupations, income or employment status. Anyone who must work for a living is a member of the working class. Anyone who owns enough property to live off of the labor of others, yet never needs to work themselves, is a member of the capitalist class. It's that simple. We must cast off social mythology that casts us into fictitious classes such as the "middle-class." Or an “under-class”. We must heed our commonality as a class above and beyond simplistic identity politics. A socialist political party will present us with the opportunity to use the ballot in a revolutionary manner.

Socialism is not dead. It didn’t die because it is still to live and has never existed before, anywhere.