Our world is filled with poverty, war, hunger, racism, and so many other injustices. So what are we going to do about it? We can pretend we are removing the worst of it by fighting for reforms. We can look inward and focus upon ourselves and ignore the suffering of others. Or we can be the catalysts for change in the world. To build a society organized to meet human needs, capitalism must be abolished. Socialism should extend democracy and self-organization at all levels. Socialist society is based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. Socialism can be created only by ending world scarcity. We must organise labour and resources and develop production on a world scale, not within a single country. The working class can and must take power within existing state boundaries. It must extend the revolution by offering political and material solidarity with workers’ struggles abroad. In the advanced capitalist countries, we must expropriate and disarm our own ruling class. Our loyalty is not with our ruling class but with fellow workers around the world. As socialists, we urge our brothers and sisters to break with the capitalist parties and to fight for their own independent class interests. We are fighting for a world fit for human beings. We know what has to be done to stop climate change. We also know why the ruling class refuses to take decisive action. We need a total break from the ideology of the capitalist market. We need a vision of a world of human solidarity.
We agree that class struggles can change society. But forming a socialist political party will help build a more powerful movement, to defend ourselves, they have the mass media, the courts, the police, and other instruments of repression. In order to be successful, we need to challenge this power in every arena we can. We need a political party that is democratically controlled by its members. We need a political party that is able to challenge the corporate domination of the mass media with its own working-class message. We need a political party that can organize and bring into its fold the tens of millions of workers who are fed up with corporate-dominated politics. We don’t agree with the anarchists that contesting elections is a distraction from that class struggle. In fact, we believe that if it is done correctly it can help build those struggles. Running socialist candidates is all about exposing the agenda of the capitalist class. Some people argue that if we participate in elections, we will sell out our movement. There believe that the elections were created as a trap to ensnare our movements. In reality, the ruling class have systematically tried to deny anyone the right to vote except themselves. The working class fought and died for universal suffrage. This has been resisted at every step by the rulers, who have used every means at their disposal to divide us and keep us from the polls. If we limit our struggles just to the workplace, schools, and the streets, then that allows the 1% to dominate the other arenas available in society. They already control the courts, the police, and the mass media. But we can challenge them in the political arena. The ruling elite spend billions of dollars to get the public to vote for one of their two parties in power to legitimate their rule. Otherwise, we would effectively live in a dictatorship of the 1%.
Corporations spend billions of dollars to promote its agenda and through their election campaigns, they have a direct route into every home. The idea that boycotting or abstaining from the election is the best way to challenge the 1% neglects this fact. That’s why we need to challenge them in the elections as well as in every other arena. The ruling class uses the rigged electoral system to channel the frustration and struggles of the 99% into “proper channels,” We can and should use electoral politics as an opportunity to raise our criticism of capitalism and fight back. Capitalism has failed and should be abolished and we mean to establish a cooperative commonwealth.
Socialism will undoubtedly bring about a revolutionary transformation of human activity and association in all fields previously conditioned by the division of society into classes—in work, in education, in sports and amusements, in manners and morals, and in incentives and rewards. In attempting an approximate estimate of what life will be like under socialism, we run up against the inadequacy of present-day society as a measuring rod or basis of comparison with the future. One must project himself into a different world, where the main incentives and compulsions of present-day society will no longer be operative; where in time they will be completely forgotten, and have merely a puzzling interest to students of an outlived age. The necessary amount of productive labour time which will be required of each individual in the new society cannot be calculated on the basis of the present stage of industrial development. The advances in science and technology which can be anticipated, plus the elimination of waste caused by competition, parasitism, etc., will render any such calculation obsolete. Our thought about the future must be fitted into the frame of the future.
Even at the present stage of economic development, if everybody worked and there was no waste, a universal four-hour day would undoubtedly be enough to provide abundance for all in the advanced countries. And once the whole thought and energy of society is concentrated on the problem of increasing productivity, it is easily conceivable that a new scientific-technological-industrial revolution would soon render a compulsory productive working day of four hours, throughout the normal lifetime of an individual, so absurdly unnecessary that it would be recognised as an impossibility. The labour necessary to produce food, clothing, shelter, and all the conveniences and refinements of material life in the new society will be operative, social labour—with an ever-increasing emphasis on labour-saving and automatic, labour-eliminating machinery, inventions and scientific discoveries, designed to increase the rate of productivity. This labour will be highly organised and therefore disciplined in the interests of efficiency in production. There can be no anarchy in the cooperative labour process; but only freedom from labour, to an ever-increasing extent as science and technology advance productivity and automatically reduce the amount of labour time required from the individual.
The progressive reduction of this labour time required of each individual will, in my opinion, soon render it impractical to compute this labour time on a daily, weekly, or even yearly basis. It is reasonable to assume - but only an opinion - that the amount of labour time required of the individual by society during his whole life expectancy, will be approximately computed, and that he will be allowed to elect when to make this contribution. We can speculate to the idea that the great majority will elect to get their required labour time over with in their early youth, working a full day for a year or two. Thereafter, they would be free for the rest of their lives to devote themselves, with freedom in their labour, to any scientific pursuit, to any creative work or play or study which might interest them. The necessary productive labour they have contributed in a few years of their youth will pay for their entire lifetime maintenance, on the same principle that the workers today pay for their own paltry “national insurance” for a miserly “social security” in advance.
When people will have no further use for money there will not even be any bookkeeping transactions or coupons to regulate how much one works and how much he gets. When labour has ceased to be a mere means of life and becomes life’s prime necessity, people will work without any compulsion and take what they need. So said Marx. For in the socialist society, when there is plenty and abundance for all, what will be the point in keeping account of each one’s share. Does that sound “visionary”? When you visualise society in which there is plenty for all, what purpose would be served in keeping accounts of what each one gets to eat and to wear? There would be no need for compulsion or forcible allotment of material means. “Wages” will become a term of obsolete significance, which only students of ancient history will know about. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that anything contrary to capitalist rules and ethics is utopian, or visionary. No, what’s absurd is to think that this insane madhouse is permanent and for all time. The ethic of capitalism is: “From each whatever you can pillage—to each whatever you can grab.” The socialist society of universal abundance will be regulated by a different standard. It will “inscribe on its banners”—said Marx—“From each according to his ability—to each according to his needs.”
In socialism there will be no more private property, except for personal use. Consequently there can be no more crimes against private property—which are 90% or more of all the crimes committed today—and no need of all this huge apparatus for the prevention, detection, prosecution, and punishment of crimes against property. No need of jails and prisons, policemen, judges, probation officers, lawyers, bureaucrats; no need for guards, bailiffs, wardens, prosecutors. No need for this whole mass of parasitical human flotsam which represents the present-day state and which devours so much of the substance of the people.
In the present society people are haunted by insecurity Their mental health is undermined by fear for their future and the future of their children. They are never free from fear that if something happens, if they have a sickness or an accident for which they are not responsible, the punishment will be visited upon their children; that their children will be deprived of an education and proper food and clothing. Under such conditions “human nature”, which we hear so much about, is like a plant trying to flower in a dark cellar; it really doesn’t get much chance to show its true nature, its boundless potentialities. In the socialist society of shared abundance, this nightmare will be lifted from the minds of the people. They will be secure and free from fear; and this will work a revolution in their attitude toward life and their enjoyment of it. Human nature will get a chance to show what it is really made of. The present division of society into classes, under which the few have all the privileges and the many are condemned to poverty and insecurity, carries with it a number of artificial and unnatural divisions which deform the individual and prevent the all-around development of his personality and his harmonious association with his kind. There is the division between men’s work and women’s work, to say nothing of men’s rights and women’s rights. There is the division of race prejudice between the black and white, which is cruelly unjust to the former and degrading to the latter. The socialist society based on human solidarity will have no use for such unscientific and degrading inhuman notions as the idea that one man is superior to another because, many thousands of years ago, the ancestors of the first lived in an environment that produced in the course of time a lighter skin colour than was produced by the environment of the ancestors of the second. Race prejudice will vanish with the ending of the social system that produced and nourished it. Then the human family will live together in peace and harmony, each of its sons and daughters free at last to make the full contribution of his or her talents to the benefit of all. There is the division between manual and intellectual labour, which produces half-men on each side. There is the division between the city and the country, which is harmful to the inhabitants of both. These divisions are not ordained for all time, as some people may think. They are the artificial product of class society and will fall with it.
Homes will not be designed by real-estate developers and speculators building for profit—which is what the great bulk of “home building” amounts to today. The people will have what they want. Your house will have as the things it is proudest of, certain things specially made for you by people who like you. This easy chair made to your own measure by your friend so-and-so. This hand-crafted bookcase made for you by a cabinetmaker, as a gift and its books and your important and most treasured books, which came well-bound from the print shops of the socialist society, have been rebound in fancy leather, by an old-fashioned bookbinder, a real craftsman. And those pictures and decorations on the walls—they were not machine stamped at the factory, but hand painted especially for you by an artist friend. He does this outside his general contribution to the cooperative labour process, as a form of creative self-expression and as an act of friendship. Great joy and satisfaction to be an expert craftsman in the coming time.
A new science and new art will flower—the science and art of city planning. There is such a profession today, but the private ownership of industry and real estate deprives it of any real scope. With socialism the universities will take up the study of city planning, not for the profitable juxtaposition of slums and factories, but for the construction of cities fit to live in. Art in the new society will undoubtedly be more cooperative, more social. The city planners will organise landscapers, architects, sculptors, and mural painters to work as a team in the construction of new cities which will be a delight to live in and a joy to behold. Communal centres of all kinds will arise to serve the people’s interests and needs. Centres of art and centres of science, cities designed for beauty, for ease of living, for attractiveness to the eye and to the whole being. Where the factory farm is already in existence, tens of thousands of acres operated with modern machine methods and scientific utilisation of the soil, for the private profit of absentee owners, these factory farms will not be broken up. They will be taken over and developed on a vaster scale.
The people will have ambition to explore the great universe and to unlock its secrets, and to extract from their knowledge new resources for the betterment of all the people. They will organise an all-out war against sickness and disease and there will be a flowering of the great science of medicine. They will look back with indignation, when they read in their history books that at one time people had to live in a society where there was a shortage of doctors, artificially maintained. It can be said with certainty that among the heroes of the new society, whom the youth will venerate, will be the doctors of all kinds who will really be at the service of man in the struggle for the conquest of those diseases which lay him low. Man’s health will be a major concern, and sickness and disease a disgrace, not to the victim, but to the society which permits it. Everybody will be to live comfortably and to travel freely, without passports, and the idea will grow up amongst the people: “Why shouldn’t we, with all our abundance—we have plenty—why shouldn’t we travel around and enjoy climate with the seasons—just like the birds.” Leisure is the condition for all cultural development. Machines and science will be the slaves, and they will be far more productive, a thousand, 10,000 times more productive. With socialism, all will share in the benefits of abundance, not merely a favoured few at the top. All the people will have time and be secure for an ever higher development. All will be artists. All will be workers and students, builders and creators. All will be free and equal. Human solidarity will encircle the globe.
With the end of classes and their conflicting interests there will be no more “politics”, because politics is essentially an expression of the class struggle; and no more parties, as they are now known, for parties are the political representatives of classes. That is not to say there won’t be differences and heated debates. Groupings, we must assume, will arise in the course of these disputes. But they will not be based on separate class interests. They will be “parties” based on differences of opinion as to what kind of an economic plan we should have; what great scheme of highways should be developed; what system of education; what type of architecture for the wonder cities. Differences on these, and numerous other questions of public interest and general concern, will give the competitive instincts of the people all kinds of room for free expression. Groups will be formed and contend with each other for popular support without “politics” or parties in the old sense of class struggle and the conflict of material interest. In the classless society of the future there will be no state which will wither away and die out, for the state is the most concentrated expression of violence. Where there is violence, there is no freedom. The society of the free and equal will have no need and no room for violence and will not tolerate it in any form. It is difficult for us to comprehend such a possibility, living in a society where even the smallest children are taught that they have to fight and scramble to protect themselves in a hostile world. We can hardly visualise a world without violence. But that’s what socialism means. The people will turn their attention then to that most important problem of all—the problem of the free development of the human personality. Then human nature will begin to change, or rather, to assert its real self. People will recover some of the virtues of primitive society, which was based on solidarity and cooperation, and improve them and develop them to a higher degree.
It may well be that ourselves will not fortunate to live in the socialist society of the future. Perhaps it is our destiny to live under capitalism but it will our task and our mission mission is to clear it away it filth and misery. That is our struggle, our reason for life. We possibly cannot be citizens of the socialist future, except by anticipation yet it is precisely this anticipation, this vision of the future which makes us cry out for socialist revolution and the liberation of humanity. And that is the highest privilege today and most worthy of a human being. No matter whether we personally see the dawn of socialism or not, no matter what our personal fate may be, the cause for which we fight has social evolution and right on its side. It will bring humanity a new day.
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