Socialism is the alternative

Capitalism is a chaotic and crisis-ridden economic system based on production for profit. The members of the Socialist Party are for the expropriation of the capitalist class and the abolition of capitalism. We are for its replacement by socialist production planned to satisfy human needs. There is no real answer to the capitalist system but the rebuilding of our entire society on socialist principles. We in the Socialist Party want to expropriate the expropriators and overturn capitalism, an economic system whose demise is way overdue. In this age of endless war, low-wage and dead-end jobs, we fight for socialism — not as some utopian dream for a far-off future — but as a necessary and realisable goal today for the liberation of humanity’s majority and the uplifting of people worldwide. The potential for building socialism has never been greater. Technology provides the ability to coordinate production and to plan, not just on a local but on a global scale. Around the world housing, hospitals, schools, roads and rail could be built with breakneck speed, while we put the brakes on the destruction of the environment and climate change. We could immediately end hunger, feed and provide water to the people of the entire world, erase illiteracy, cure widespread diseases, house everyone.

The problem today is that the same technology that could liberate humanity on a socialist basis intensifies exploitation and the masses’ suffering when that technology is in the hands of the capitalist class. Homes are being destroyed and cities blighted. Factory closures are rampant Racism and nationalism are intensified and used by the ruling class as weapons to keep the working class divided and unable to fight them. The issue we face today isn’t that socialism is not real and possible — but the lack of revolutionary class consciousness in the working class. The Socialist Party’s task is how to make the socialist goal something living and real and move our fellow workers in the direction of a socialist revolution. Capitalism offers nothing but misery. The objective conditions for socialism are now ripe and ready. But it is up to us help jump-start that awakening of consciousness of the working class. The Socialist Party seeks to bring together people who share an objective in wanting to build, or participate with others in building, a mass socialist party. There is little purpose in building a socialist party that does not have the objective of achieving socialism. What is the point of that? The objective of the Socialist Party is socialism and we mean the ideas of communism as articulated by Marx and by Engels and by others who followed their ideas (we use the words ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ interchangeably.) Our goal is a society in which capitalist class oppression has been ended. And in which exploitation, oppression, all forms of discrimination, war, are all ended. We have a society in which there is no state. We have a society within which the resources, the wealth of society, are owned in common and managed democratically by society at large. For that to be achieved, the working class first of all has to get rid of the capitalist system; has to get rid of the private ownership of the means of production. It has to bring about the rule by the working class and that achievement has to be an act by the working class itself.

The act of changing society, that revolutionary act, that transformative act by the working class is, in a sense, the most democratic act ever in history; it is the majority class in society acting in its own interests to change society for the benefit of all humanity, now and in the future. The first thing that the a mass socialist party needs to understand is to have a clear understanding of its objective and needs to try to inspire millions and millions of people about that objective. What could be more inspiring than getting rid of poverty, getting rid of oppression, getting rid of the exploitation of the vast billions on the planet? It is a goal that could mobilise millions of people and it is one that we shouldn’t shy away from. It cannot be achieved by a small party, no matter how Marxist that small party might be. Socialists who want to set about constructing a new party have to have patience; they have to have a long view of history because the construction of a mass socialist party will take quite some time. Sometimes building it might be quite slow. At other times, because of events in society, growth will speed up. There will be events that will raise questions to which people will want answers and if the party is capable of giving answers to those questions then it will draw larger numbers of people to it. We should explain that if we want to end the constant, repetitive attacks on our class, then the only way to do that is to end the system that drives those attacks, that is, we need to end capitalism. Karl Marx, in Capital, has shown us that as capitalism develops, it leads to the concentration and centralisation of capital in a few hands. As a result of this law, huge amounts of capital get accumulated. This, in turn, needs to be deployed to earn profits which is the raison d'etre of the system.

What awaits humanity is a re-newed and fresh wave of assaults and onslaughts. History has repeatedly shown that no amount of reform within the capitalist system can eliminate exploitation which is inherent in the very production process of the system. The only way of liberation from this exploitation is the establishment of a socialist system. No amount of reform of capitalism can make it an exploitation-free society. An alternative socio-economic political system has to be put in place and that can only be socialism. The inevitability of capitalism's collapse is not an automatic process. Capitalism has to be overthrown. As Rosa Luxembourg many years ago put it: this choice is between socialism or barbarism. Social revolution and emancipation is the only course available to humanity to save itself from being engulfed by this slide towards barbarism. To those who argue that there is no alternative socialism is the alternative.