Socialism - A sustainable co-operative commonwealth

To substitute common, for private, ownership of the means of production and abolishing the present system of production means substituting production for use for production for sale that is the economic development the Socialist Party urges. The Socialist Party’s objective is the social or co-operative production for the satisfaction of the wants of a commonwealth. Mankind has always been a social being, as far back as we can trace ourselves. Until the present system of production (production for sale) was developed, co-operative production for common use was the norm.

If the modern state nationalises certain industries, it does not do so for the purpose of restricting capitalist exploitation, but for the purpose of protecting the capitalist system and establishing it upon a firmer basis, or for the purpose of itself taking a hand in the exploitation of labour, increasing its own revenues. As an exploiter of labour, the state is superior to any private capitalist. Besides the economic power of the capitalists, it can bring to bear its political power.  The state has never carried on the nationalising of industries further than the interests of the ruling classes demand, nor will it ever go further than that. Nationalisation will never be carried so far as to injure the capitalists and landlords or to restrict their opportunities for exploiting the proletariat. The state will not cease to be a capitalist institution. The Socialist Party has set to call the working-class to conquer the political power to the end that and to establish a self-sustainable co-operative commonwealth.

The fact remains that none of the reformist parties has so well-marked and clear an aim as the Socialist Party. It may, indeed, be questioned whether the other political parties have any aims at all. They all hold to the existing order, although they all see that it is untenable and unendurable. Their manifestoes contain nothing except a few little piecemeal palliatives by which they hope and promise to make the untenable, tenable and the unendurable, endurable. The Socialist Party, on the contrary, does not build on hopes and promises, but upon the unalterable necessity of social progress. All other political parties live only in the present, from hand to mouth; the Socialist party is the only one which has a definite aim for the future, the only one with a consistent purpose. Those who oppose the Socialist Party declare that the co-operative commonwealth cannot be considered practicable and cannot be the object of the endeavors until the plan is presented to the world in a perfected form, and has been tested and found feasible. They start with the notion that “human nature” is unchangeable. Socialists are told that they must come out with their plan of a future socialist society; if they refuse, it is a sign that they themselves have not much confidence in it. The predictions and blueprints can at best show that the socialist commonwealth is not impossible and they are bound to be defective. They can never cover all the details and minutia of social life; they will always leave some loophole through which critics can object to.

The capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question of time. The substitution of a new social order for the existing one is no longer simply desirable, it has become inevitable. Socialism is not only to be possible, but to be the only thing possible. If indeed the socialist commonwealth were an impossibility, then mankind’s civilization will relapse into barbarism. As things stand today we must move forward into socialism. Working people live in such conditions that, increasingly, they realise that the only way out of their grave situation lies through socialism. Thus, increasingly favourable conditions are being created for bringing them into the active struggle for socialism.