The Socialist Party's Road to Socialism

The Socialist Party has set out its essential doctrines and has formulated its case for the future so that its principles of socialism should enter the minds of fellow-workers and prepare them for the new society. The Socialist Party declares itself to be the only genuine socialist party in the United Kingdom, and acting on that view, it opposes every other party and fights them at every election.

Our party is proud of the fact that it looks upon the free discussion of party problems, party principles and policies, not as an occasional luxury but as an integral part of its daily life, as an indispensable element in its development. Any controversy that arises, whether it be a matter of internal organisation or the application of socialist principles to some problem of the moment finds its way into our Annual Conference at Easter (or our Autumn Delegate meeting.) There it gets analysed, investigated, debated and argued and then put to the full membership of the party to vote upon in a party-poll.

The Socialist Party is a revolutionary organisation. It has perhaps come into being along a different road from your own. Also in many ways, it traditions and its methods differs from yours. We know that many of you have significant differences with ourselves, particularly on questions relating to history, more specifically on the question of Leninism or Trotskyism and of aspects of the Russian Revolution. Since 1917, we believe our original analysis has been the correct one and now argue that history has confirmed this fact.  Take no one’s word, but find out for yourself, and after this has been done we feel that our conclusions will also be yours.  

By bringing men together primarily as buyers and sellers of each other, by enshrining profitability and pecuniary gain in place of humanity, capitalism has always been inherently alienating, contributing to  mankind's sense of  insignificance and impotence. A socialist transformation of society will return to mankind a sense of human solidarity, to replace this sense of being a commodity. A socialist democracy implies control of his or her immediate environment and in any strategy for building socialism, community democracy is as vital as the struggle for electoral success. To that end, socialists must strive for democracy at those levels that most directly affect us all — in our neighbourhoods, our educational centres, and our places of work so to control all our own destinies. The process is the raising of socialist consciousness to create workers' participation in all institutions to release creative energies and restore human and social priorities. The Socialist Party want not only a society in which people’s needs are provided for by an abundance of goods and services, but in which their great and varied capacities can be fully developed. The path to socialism is through a fundamental change in class relations.

 Changing the economic system is not an end in itself. It is a means of creating conditions in which human beings will be able to realise their full potentialities and work together for the common good, instead of being divided by sex or race. Capitalism distorts human individuality, subordinates men and women to the needs of the profit system, sets them against each other. Socialism aims to develop their individuality by creating a society in which exploitation and poverty are ended, and the resources of science and technology used to reduce the time spent in monotonous and mundane jobs to a minimum, and vastly increase the amount devoted to leisure and creative work. Modern technology itself would be rationally planned and applied. It is the people themselves who have to build socialism, become involved in its administration, and be responsible for the development of society. The success of socialist planning will depend on a detailed and intimate knowledge of the enterprises concerned, and on the commitment of the workers involved. With the advent of socialism and the ending of the conflict between worker and capitalist employer, the function of the trade unions would change. Through the development of industrial democracy, they would play a vital role in creating the economic basis for socialism with workers’ participation at all levels, in planning industry as a whole and in every enterprise and department. The workers would have a dominant say in determining the conditions of work. New attitudes to society, to work and to culture will develop. New relations, based on co-operation instead of domination and exploitation, will come into being between the sexes, between generations, between peoples.

A flourishing socialist economy would be able to meet the social needs of the people and improve the quality of life. Socialism is based on the principle ‘from each according to ability; to each according to needs’. Such a society requires the production of an abundance of goods to satisfy the needs of all, and a new outlook of co-operation and concern for the common good, with the ending of attitudes and habits associated with the class-divided society of the past. It will be a society without classes and in which the need for the state as an instrument of class rule will have disappeared. It will be free of exploitation, using science and technology to liberate people from drudgery and toil, extending leisure and education and culture, so that human capacities are developed to the full — a society in which, in the words of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.