Understanding the system

The Socialist Party has a very clear and practical conception of what is meant by socialism or communism; to us, both these terms mean the same thing. By socialism we mean a fundamental change in the economic basis of society, that is the way in which the members of society are organised to produce and distribute the things they need to exist. It means a world-wide social system where the entire productive and distributive resources of the planet are commonly owned, consciously controlled and democratically operated by the world community as a whole. It means a society where social wealth is produced solely to meet the needs of the community, on the basis of free and equal access by all, without money or any other medium of exchange taking place.

This contrasts sharply with capitalism. Its underlying features are the class ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution by a small minority of people in all countries of the world, and the exclusion of the great majority of people from any significant ownership and control of these means. Having little or no resources at their disposal, the working class majority are forced by economic necessity to sell their working abilities to the capitalist minority in order to live. Wealth produced by the workers takes the form of commodities which are sold on a competitive market with a view to profit for the capitalists. In return for selling their labour power—which itself becomes a commodity—workers receive payment in the form of wages or salaries. However, in the process of production generally, these payments represent less than the value which the workers as a class create, and the difference between them is surplus value, which the capitalists repeatedly accumulate and which is the source of their monetary profit, realised through sales.

So capitalism is a class-divided, profit-generating system governed by impersonal market forces and not the needs of the human community. The useful, producing majority are in a subordinate position of wage slavery, whilst the useless, non-producing minority enjoy a privileged unearned income from their economic exploitation of the workers. The capitalists wield power through their control of governments, together with the legal and military might of the state machine. This apparatus ensures that, firstly, workers are legally robbed when they produce wealth and, secondly, it conditions them by force and ideological persuasion to accept these social arrangements as necessary, inevitable and. indeed, natural.

The Socialist Party has consistently opposed the profit system, no matter how its supporters or apologists have tried to disguise it as something else. In this country and the United States of America, for example, the classic free market form of capitalism developed with the ownership and control of resources in the hands of predominantly private shareholders holding legal property rights backed up by the state. In Russia, starting with the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, another form of capitalism came into being: the state-managed variety. This soon spread to most of Eastern Europe and as far afield as Cuba and China. The rulers of these countries, using the rhetoric of Marxism and the theories of Lenin, labelled these countries communist or socialist, but in reality, they were state-capitalist systems of class monopoly and control, where the state itself was the collective employer of wage labour. A minority of top officials in these '‘communist’’ parties personified the capitalist class: they directed the production of goods and services which did not belong to the "people" but were sold within a buying and selling framework.

Once we rid ourselves of the idea that the capitalist economy can be rational or benevolent, we can quickly move towards rejecting the whole concept of the exchange economy. According to the economists, the market is an arena for trading commodities, where various groups and individuals express their preferences among comparative, complimentary and exchangeable goods that have relative utilities. The dynamics of the market mechanism include competition, promotion, and balances of the utility-quality-price triangle, but only with respect to commodities, not with respect to the whole economic cycle and industries in society. Markets are promoted as, under conducive conditions and all things being equal, in circulating goods widely, improving standards of quality, responding to consumer feedback, and encouraging innovation in fair competition. The market economy is an economy that puts the market at the steering wheel of the entire economic life of society: production, relations of production, redistribution, and development provision services. The main idea is based on the postulate that market mechanisms can be self-regulating - i.e. self-monitoring, self-correcting and self-sustaining - and therefore should not be regulated by social or political authorities.

Marxist economists, however, hold contrary views on the market and describe it as anarchic.

(1) Land is not a commodity because it is another word for nature. Humans did not create or devise land; the other way around sounds closer to the truth. When the value of land and its utility is determined by the market it is commodified (i.e. made into a commodity) irrespective of the many complexities that entangle humans and their natural and built environment which cannot be reduced to simple 'property value'. Generally, the market price of land is called 'rent' and some other words, and in its absolute versions leads to the disintegration of nature and all sorts of violations of environmental balances and long-standing socio-ecological relations. The alarming ecological degradation in the planet today is largely related to practices of land commodification normalised by the market economy.

(2) Labour is a form of human activity, an extension of the human themselves, combining their physical, intellectual and psychological effort and springing from skills and knowledge earned through learning and experience. Labour cannot be a commodity unless you take a human being and own/control their effort in a particular time and place. Commodifying labour has an element of commodifying a person's existence in a particular context, for which the price is paid and determined by others with power. The price of labour in the market is called wage, salary, etc.

(3) Money was created by human societies as a medium of exchanging commodities, but not as a commodity itself. Money took many forms (of currency) throughout history, from salt to minerals to tender paper, yet always as a way to exchange various commodities in the market using a standard method of payment, but not as a commodity itself. The idea of 'buying money with another money' seems automatically ludicrous to our sensibilities for that reason. However, the market economy succeeded in making a huge 'market' for the activity of selling and buying money across the globe---through interest rates, debt financing, derivatives markets, foreign exchange markets, and other  related financial transactions. In such markets, money can literally get you more money without any productive work (value addition) or genuine commodity exchange taking place. Folks can get richer for no other reason than that they are already rich.

When a majority of the world's workers understand what socialism is and want it, they can organise themselves to take the necessary democratic political action to abolish the capital/wage-labour relationship and bring in common ownership of all resources, democratic control by the majority, and production solely for use in accordance with their self-defined needs.

Socialism is a vision of a world freed from artificial, market-based restrictions which will allow human beings to live in peace with each other. With the problems of social living solved, we will be able to determine for ourselves the kind of relationships and lifestyles most suited to our changed conditions, relationships not imposed from above but freely chosen by ourselves.