Organise as a class - Organise in the Socialist Party

All things are held in common

It is a wonderful world we live in. Or, more accurately, it could be. It is up to us to make the world we live in a wonderful world. It is very simple really. All we need to do to make this happen is to end capitalism. Socialists are not fatalists that we accept what will be, will be. Nor are we determinists that change will happen without us actually changing things ourselves. Human nature is not inevitable. Racism is not inevitable. Nationalism is not inevitable. We can abolish wage-slavery, we can also abolish hunger and war. We can save the environment. The threat of climate change is one we can respond to and avoid. Its destructive consequences are not inevitable. It is within our power to make our world one in which our children and grand-children can survive. We must create universal human solidarity. The capitalist system is a human creation. The laws of the market are not laws of nature. If we choose we could maximise human happiness, rather than maximising production and profits. We need system change. We need a new economic system, a new society and a new way of life. We must achieve a steady-state economic system. We must restore democracy where it has disappeared and create where it never existed. We must develop a social system of rational decision-making in the interests of all to match the potential power of our new technology.

 The working class has no interest in helping the capitalists figure out how to make an unworkable system ’work’ for its every working is based on the misery and exploitation of the working class. All capitalist economics is to assist the bosses in making the highest (or “optimum”) rate of profit possible workers are reduced to a “resource” and a “cost item” to be kept to the absolute minimum through speedups, wage-cuts and layoffs. Employers spend millions figuring out how to squeeze every possible ounce of labour out of us, for it is only out of our labour that they make their profits. Management has a small army of economists and experts on the payroll, but all their fancy schemes just add up to more exploitation for us. Throughout the world and in every industry, we have had to fight against their ever-tightening squeeze.

In the past capitalists were happy to call the USSR socialist or communist, because it allowed them to say, when more and more people were fed up with the system in this country, “look, there is no alternative to capitalism, see what a mess communism is in the Soviet Union.” And of course, capitalism in the old Soviet Union was just as rotten as capitalism elsewhere. But real socialism is something altogether different. Under capitalism, workers have no control over what is produced and how. All that is decided by how much profit some capitalist will gain. But socialism enables the working class to decide how to organise itself and the resources of society to meet the needs of the people. As long as profit for the few is the basis of the economic system, that system–capitalism–will continue to go from crisis to deeper crisis, with more misery for the masses of people. We have a choice - to organise and against the system that can’t provide us with a decent life. Socialists put the lie to the capitalists’ line that “What’s good for the companies is good for the workers”. The basis for the Socialist Party is to carry out campaigns that clarify that the enemy is the whole capitalist class and their profit system.

The basic policy of the Socialist Party is one of opposition to capitalism and support for socialism, the political power of the working class. The character of our organisation is one that helps explain the comradely relationships that exist among our membership – leader-free. In our party, there are genuine expressions of comradeship among our membership. For us, a personal tragedy in the lives of any one of our members is a tragedy which in some way touches us all thus an integral part of political struggle and growth. Workers around the world face the same enemy, the capitalists of any and all nationalities. Our day-to-day struggles and everyday life prove this over and over. It is up to us to act accordingly.

The Socialist Party differs from other political parties in that it completely wants to change society’s capitalist economic structure and bring the social emancipation of the working class. The main reason for the imperfections is the private capitalistic way of production. It is this fateful tendency in the development of society which forces workers into a counteractive motion. We organise as a class to obtain such a large share as possible in wage from the production of work. Thus, the unions are formed and the constantly on-going struggle, on the national and international labour market, between workers and employers shall never cease until the working class have stopped being a class of wage earners. This again can only happen through the abolishment of capitalist ownership the means of production and their transformation into common ownership, to all of society owning and controlling social property, and the replacement of the unplanned production of goods solely for profit with a socialism, satisfying society’s real needs and corresponding production. The working class takes possession of the public power and transforms into common property all means of production — the means of transportation, the forests, the farms, the mines, the mills, the machines, the factories, the Earth. The interests of the working class are the same in every country with the development of world trade and the production for the world market where the position of the working class in one country becomes dependent on the positions in all other countries. The emancipation of the working class is thus something in which every worker in every land must take part.