Voting for socialism means voting for yourself
With elections, the media always hype it all up as if some sort of real change is about to be in the offing, and the political party apparatchiks are out and about trying to convince the cynical and sceptical public to vote for their same old tried and tired solutions and policies. We in the Socialist Party offer something a lot different.
The world can now easily produce wealth sufficient to adequately house, feed, care for and educate the global population. Instead, we see hunger, disease and homelessness around the world despite the concerns of governments and charities. We see rising child poverty and an increasing gulf between rich and poor. Rates of depression and anxiety are becoming an epidemic. Capitalism is failing: it now acts as a barrier, preventing production being geared to human need. Rather than constantly tinkering with this system, we should start looking beyond it to an alternative: a classless world community based on production for human need, not profit.
The mainstream candidates contesting elections (whether openly pro-capitalist or supposedly socialist) are asking you to believe that they can run this society a little bit better. I’d argue that history shows that the money system actually ends up running them. Their pre-election promises usually amount to nothing. So don’t vote for them - it only encourages the idea that capitalism can be made better. A vote for the Socialist Party, in contrast, is a statement that you don’t want to live this way and that you think another world is possible.
What is apparent is the extent to which all the parties try to manage the agenda for the election. They all want to encourage the debate to be around the handful of high-profile “flagship” issues where they feel they are on strong ground.
But it’s always phrased along the lines of “knocking on doors, we keep hearing that XXX is the real issue of the day”. Funnily enough, we don’t hear the Lib Dems, for example, say “recent canvassing returns indicate that voters actually don’t give a monkey’s f*** about our policies one way or the other”. The assumption is that voters are stupid and can only remember 3 or 4 things at a time, so why give them more than that to consider. Indeed, a cursory glance at the election leaflets of the mainstream candidates suggests they premise their case on the assumption that the average person on the street is an imbecile. What it all means is that the campaign may centre around a handful of issues only. That may appear to appeal to the Socialist Party. After all, we are the ultimate single issue party - Abolish Capitalism. But while this is a single issue no-one is pretending that it is a simple case. Sure it’s not complicated, the case for putting human need ahead of profit, but soundbites don’t do our case justice.
We are also handicapped in the eyes of the modern voter by the fact that we are not in a position to make promises, and what’s more, we aren’t going to “do anything” for anyone. The other parties are falling over each other to be seen to be offering some immediate palliative
It's all very well having a vote - but are you normally given any real choice? Let's face it, if it wasn't for the politician's head on the front of the election leaflet, could you tell which party was which? It's tempting, in the absence of any real alternative, to get drawn into the phoney war that is political debate today.
Whether Labour, Tory, Lib Dem or UKIP they all spout the same promises. But it always amounts to the same thing - they offer no alternative to the present way of running society. Do you really think who wins an election makes any difference to how you live? And do politicians (whether left-wing, nationalist or right-wing) actually have much real power anyway?
OK, they get to open supermarkets and factories, but it's capitalism and the market system which closes them down. We have endless problems of poverty, poor services and all the issues politicians love to spend time telling you they can solve if only given the chance.
Socialists don't believe any politician can solve these problems, as long as the flawed basis of our society remains intact. In fact, we believe only you and your fellow workers can solve these problems. In truth, there is nothing the Socialist Party can do for the working class that it is not already capable of doing for itself. We believe that it will take a revolution in how we organise our lives, a fundamental change. We want to see a society based on the fact that you know how to run your lives, know your needs and have the skills and capacity to organise with your fellows to satisfy them.
You know yourselves and your lives better than a handful of bosses ever can. With democratic control of production, we can ensure that looking after our communities becomes a priority, rather than something we do in our spare time. We all share fundamental needs, for food, clothing, housing and culture, and we have the capacity to ensure access to these for all, without exception.
If you agree with this aim, then we ask you to get in touch with us, get involved and join in our campaign to bring about this change in society. Together, we have the capacity to run our world for ourselves. We need to build a movement to effect that change, by organising deliberately to take control of the political offices which rule our lives and bring them into our collective democratic control.
The Socialist Party make no promises, offers no pat solutions, only to be the means by which you can remake society for the common good.
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