What is socialism?

Political parties can be very “revolutionary” by promising things they cannot deliver. The Socialist Party does not make promises of what it will do for fellow-workers. The Socialist Party is concerned with the effective dissolution of the capitalist society and its replacement by a fundamentally different social system, based upon common ownership and control of economic activity, and guided by principles of co-operation, civic freedom, egalitarianism, and democratic arrangements far superior to the narrowly class-bound arrangements of capitalist democracy.

The present capitalist system depends on the collective labour of billions into what is in effect a global system of cooperation. Just look at the clothes you are wearing. They are made from cotton or wool from one part of the world, carried by ships made from steel from somewhere else, woven in a third place, stitched in a fourth, transported using oil from a fifth, and so on. A thousand individual acts of labour are combined in even the simplest item. On the other hand, the organisation of production is not based on cooperation, but on ruthless competition between rival businessmen who own the means that are necessary for production – the tools, the machines, the oil fields, the modern communications systems, the land. What motivates the capitalists is not the satisfaction of human need. It is the pressure to compete and keep ahead of the competition. The key to keeping ahead in competition is making a profit and then using the profit to invest in new means of keeping ahead. Sometimes these investments do indeed produce things of use for consumers. But they are just as likely to be directed towards building a new supermarket next door to an existing one owned by a rival, spending money on rebranding old drugs rather than researching new ones or invading countries to seize control of their resources. Such a system necessarily leads to repeated crises, since the drive for profit leads rival capitalists to rush to pour money into any venture that seems profitable, even though the result of them all doing so is to force up prices of raw materials and to produce goods that the world’s workers cannot afford to buy because their wages have been held down to boost profits.

The socialist alternative to such a state of affairs is simple. It is to replace decision making on the basis of competition between rival groups of capitalists by a genuine democracy where the majority of people democratically decide what the economic priorities should be and work together to plan how to achieve these. It is said that such planning cannot work because modern productive systems are too complex. Yet every major capitalist enterprise undertakes plans to fulfil its objectives. Corporations plan years in advance to guarantee the supplies of the thousands of products available in every big store. They organise elaborate and complex supply-chains. Those who do the planning, it should be added, are not the boardroom directors but rather they employ technical staff to do the job for them. In the same way, it is employees, not investors or the CEOS, who carry out scientific research, develop new production techniques and make all of the advances. If planning and innovation are possible under the present system, they are just as possible under a system based on meeting human need through democratic decision making, rather than competing in order to make profits to direct towards further competition. Indeed, under such a system, planning would be easier. The planning that takes place in any capitalist corporation at the moment is always distorted by the impact of the planning taking place in rival corporations.

To reshape society a socialist society would involve the mass of people in democratic debates to plan production to meet human need. What stands in the way of such an approach is not its lack of viability. It is that those who own and control the production of wealth today will do anything in their power to keep things that way. Only then can the new democratically controlled associations of producers that have at their disposal all the resources needed can society provide a better life for all of humanity.

The alternative to capitalism is socialism. Capitalism is obviously detestable but is not “socialism” detestable too? The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc plunged the common people into the most unspeakable poverty and deprivation. Wasn’t “socialism” a system of society which is even more unfair and unjust than capitalism? The people overthrew the “socialist” governments in favour of capitalism, so does that show that capitalism is preferable and it can be reformed a little to make it better? 1984 imagined a World where words were used by governments to mean their opposites. Socialism is entirely different from what it has been held up to be by the Soviet apparatchiks and nomenclature. We stand for real socialism as the only alternative to capitalism and it is still worth fighting for. The socialist alternative is realistic and such a perspective ought to appeal to the imagination of every genuine socialist.

World capitalism is skirting the edge of profound crises. Capitalism can no longer offer its minimal sops and reforms. People feel themselves powerless, lacking any credible alternative. Many workers resign themselves to the forlorn hope that there might be some sort of respite in the future. People are still searching for an alternative. The real solution to the looming disasters, the only real deterrent to the attack upon the working class by capitalism is the socialist revolution.