Teaching Socialism

(with thanks to http://skewednews.net/ for the image)

To-day there is inequality and misery in the world and this is the outcome of our social conditions where the mass of the people, the working class, produce and distribute all commodities, yet a minority of the people control and possess these commodities. This tyranny of the possessing class over the producing class is based on the present wage-system and it maintains all other forms of oppression, and this tyranny of the few over the many is only possible because the few have obtained possession of the land, the raw materials, the machinery, the banks, the railways, in a word, of all the means of production and distribution of commodities, and have, as a class, obtained possession of these by no superior virtue, effort or self-denial, but by either force or fraud. The possessor can and does dictate terms to the man or woman of that non-possessing class. “You shall sell your labour to me. I will pay you only a fraction of its value in wage. The difference between that value and what I pay for your labour I pocket, as a member of the possessing class, and I am richer than before, not by labour of my own, but by your unpaid labour.” This is the teaching of socialism

To-day production is conducted by individual capitalists independently of all others. What and where commodities are to be produced, where, when and how the finished product is to be sold, is decided by the individual capitalist owner or corporation. Nowhere does the community or the worker have the slightest influence upon these questions. In a socialist society all this will change. Private ownership of the means of production and subsistence must disappear. Production will be carried on not for the enrichment of the shareholders but solely to supply the wants and needs of the people. To this end all the wealth and resources must be taken from their exploiting owners to become the common property of the entire people, placing them under social control. The time has come when big changes are necessary. In the words of Shelley “the system of human society as it exists at present must be overthrown from the foundations.”  The two classes at present existing will be replaced be a single people possessing all the means of production and distribution in common, and working in common for the production and distribution of commodities.

Wars, poverty, malnutrition, recessions and unemployment have been our lot the billionaires, the big industrialists and the great financiers have made their fortunes out of the people’s labour. The profits of the corporations are higher than they have ever been. The capitalists have done exceptionally well; indeed, they have never been better off. The Labour Party does not want to abolish capitalism. They defend the system of capitalist profit and exploitation, defend the position of the capitalists and seek to prop up the bankrupt capitalist social structure of riches for the few, poverty for the many, and ever-recurring threat of recession and of war. The Labour Party act as the main supporters of capitalism, and are doing their best to safeguard the privileges and profits of the investors and shareholders, providing them with opportunities to continue their exploitation of the rest of us. The Labour Party disrupts and demoralises the wider labour movement by its poisonous propaganda of collaboration with and capitulation to capitalism, and its betrayal of every principle on which the union and labour movement was formed.

Only by the establishment of socialism can the World’s problems be finally solved and its people guaranteed a good life, decent living standards and lasting peace. Socialism means an end to slumps, unemployment and poverty because it abolishes the capitalist profit system.  Socialism means an end to capitalist profit and exploitation, for it will deprive the capitalists of their ownership and control of the land and factories offices, mills and mines and transport, to ensure that production is organised for the use of the people and not for the profit of the tiny minority of capitalists. Socialism ends the gulf between poverty and plenty, and frees the creative energies of the people and the productive resources for gigantic economic, social and cultural advances on the basis of a planned socialist economy. Socialism means peace and an end to the danger of wars, because with socialism there are no longer capitalists who want to conquer new markets, and to exploit dependent peoples and cheap labour. The power of the working people, united in recognition for the need for social change and participating to carry it through, as expressed and laid down through Parliament, is capable of securing the establishment of socialism and transforming  the system of capitalist private ownership into socialised - people’s - ownership.

Inside a socialist society there are no markets, commodities, values, prices or wages. With socialism goods are no longer sold for a market, but are produced for use. The workers, through their delegates, guide their own destinies and organise themselves so that production may be purposefully controlled and managed. The allocation of material and workers to a particular industry is made, not according to the fluctuations of the market but by analysis of the needs of the community, of the productivity of the workers, and of how much resources is needed to fulfill these needs. There being no class struggles, there is now no need for a State, and the State withers away. The armed forces are not necessary. Police disappear, too because the basis for crime is gone, since all the wants of life easily can be obtained. The occasional criminal is treated as a maladjusted sick person and is given therapy until he or she is rehabilitated. The tremendously increased productivity of mankind will have reduced to a bare minimum the amount of time necessary for each to produce the wants of life. Elimination of all toil in work will enable the worker to become an artist, to find the greatest pleasure in the objective result of his labors, to fuse into one work and recreation, and to combine his constructive relations with nature with the construction and reconstruction of himself. If work becomes a pleasure, pleasure itself is work.