Socialism Is The Future, The Future Is Ours

The first condition of success for socialism is that its adherents should explain its aim and its essential characteristics clearly, so that they can be understood by everyone. We must do away with many misunderstandings created by our adversaries (and even some created by ourselves.) Socialism was born in 19^th century Europe as a movement of protest against the problems inherent in capitalist society.

The main idea of socialism is simple. Socialists believe that society is divided into two classes by the present form of property-owning, and that one of these classes, the wage-earners is obliged to work for the other, the capitalist, in order to be able to live at all. Workers effectively possess nothing. They can only live by their labour-power and since, in order to work, they need an expensive equipment, which they have not got, and raw materials and capital, which they have not got, they are forced to put themselves in the hands of another class that owns the means of production, the land, the factories, the machines, the raw material, and accumulated capital in the form of money. And naturally, the capitalist, the possessing class, taking advantage of its power, makes the working and non-owning class pay a large forfeit. It does not rest content after it has been reimbursed for the advances it has made, and has repaired the wear and tear on the machinery but continues to extract a surplus from the workers – which is their profit and supposed reward for being employer. A worker can neither work, nor eat, clothe or shelter him or herself, without paying a sort of ransom in the form of sweat and toil to the owning capitalist class. All this misery and injustice results from the fact that one class monopolises the means of production and of life, and imposes its laws on another class and on society as a whole. The capitalist wage slavery relationship inflicts a physiological effects, conditioning the working class to a submissive mentality in the workplace.  This submissive mentality then manifests into passive behaviour in the political lives of the working class.

Socialism aims to liberate the peoples from dependence on a minority which owns or controls the means of production. It aims to put economic power in the hands of the people as a whole, and to create a community in which free men and women work together as equals. Socialism seeks to replace capitalism by a system in which the public interest takes precedence over the interest of private profit. We, in the Socialist Party appeal to all who believe that the exploitation of one person by another must be abolished. Socialists aim to achieve freedom and justice by removing the exploitation which divides men under capitalism and strive to build a new society in freedom and by democratic means. Without freedom there can be no socialism. Socialism can be achieved only through democracy. Democracy can be fully realised only through socialism. One man is a master and the other a wage slave, one enjoys riches and the other obeys order, no amount of purely electoral machinery on a basis of 'one man one vote' will make the two equal socially or politically. Elections have become beauty contests between "charismatic" leaders struggling to attract the attention of the electorate in order to implement policies constituting variations of the same theme: maximisation of the freedom of market forces. There is little better description of democracy as the one that declares it to be the government of the people, by the people, for the people. While the guiding principle of capitalism is private profit the guiding principle of socialism is the satisfaction of human needs. Planning in socialism does not mean that all economic decisions are placed in the hands of the state or central authorities. Economic power should be decentralised wherever this is compatible with the aims of planning. The workers as the producers must be associated democratically with the direction of their industry.

The ecological crisis is the direct result of the continuing degradation of the environment that the market economy and the consequent growth economy promote. Humanity is faced with a crucial choice between two different proposed solutions, what we can call the "conventional environmentalist" and the "eco-socialist ". The green movement has lost much of its radical potential by being integrated into the existing social system and is engaged with those in the corridors of power to enact legislative palliatives. Another section with an almost irrational mystical approach to the ecological problem prefer a strategy of lifestyle changes, building "communes", food co-ops etc., instead of a direct challenge on the political field. However, this approach, although helpful in creating an alternative culture among small sections of the population and, at the same time, morale-boosting for those who wish to see an immediate change in their lives, does not have any chance of success ―in the context of today's huge  dominance of capitalism. The fact that the main form of is economic power, and that the concentration of economic power involves the ruling elites in a constant struggle to dominate people and the natural world, goes a long way toward explaining the present ecological crisis. To understand the ecological crisis we should consider the capitalist production relations. The eco-socialist solution seeks the causes of the ecological crisis in a social system that is based on the economic exploitation of human by human and not just mankind’s endeavours to dominate nature. If capitalism can’t be reformed to subordinate profit to human survival, what alternative is there but to move to some sort of globally planned economy? Our present political  leaders can’t help but to choose to  make wrong, irrational and ultimately  suicidal decisions about the economyand the environment. Socialism is an attempt to provide an alternative to what Marx called capitalism’s ‘destructive progress’. Capitalism can never be made to serve the common good and so for the sake of social harmony and ecological sustainability we must look to an alternative system altogether.