We have reached the fork in the road where mankind must choose between continue down the path of an outworn and outmoded social order or taking the direction of a new social system. The workers’ movement is not short of anti-austerity, anti-cuts reformist campaigns – far from it. What it is short of, and has been for too long, is any serious attempt to link together anti-capitalist activists in order to build an effective socialist organisation for future struggles.
Are we going to keep the system of private ownership? Shall we attempt to preserve a social system that has proved its incapacity to solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty? Do you favour prolonging the existence of a society in which a few own all the means of wealth-production, in which labour-saving technology, instead of lessening drudgery or lightening labor's toil, throws workers out of their jobs onto the industrial scrapheap? Must mankind pass through still another vicious cycle of recession, and crisis?
Or shall we do the common-sense thing, make the means of production our collective property, abolish the exploitation of the many by the few, and use our productive genius to create leisure and abundance for all?
Capitalism has deteriorated to the point where it threatens the existence of civilization and of mankind. The system faces problems it cannot possibly solve. Most serious of these is the rapidly escalating threat of environmental destruction by global warming and climate change but neither should we forget the continual threat of nuclear war and the possibility of massive, permanent unemployment as a result of automation. All these are symptomatic of a doomed system that is taking us toward social catastrophe. In such a grave situation, the Socialist Party's views deserve close attention. For the Socialist Party when founded in 1904 recognized that capitalism was outliving its usefulness to the majority, the workers. And during the ensuing decades, the SPGB has been proving that this obsolete system breeds ever multiplying evils -- above all, the twin evils of war over resources and economic slumps.
Capitalism is an economic system in which goods are produced to be sold at a profit. The goods are produced by the working class in industries owned by a small class of capitalist parasites. The capitalist owners of industry become the owners of the products. The workers get for their creative efforts a wage (or salary), an amount just sufficient to maintain themselves and their families. It is the relation of this amount to the value of the workers' output that is at the bottom of capitalism's depressions and wars. For the fact is their capitalist exploiters have always paid the workers only a fraction of the value of their products. Worse still, this fraction keeps growing smaller as technological improvements step up labor's productivity while, at the same time, steadily wiping out jobs. The Socialist Party says this: Depressions and wars are inevitable effects of capitalism, therefore they can never be eliminated as long as the system survives. Only when our economic life has been entirely rebuilt on a new foundation can lasting peace and economic well-being for all be achieved.
Production for private profit must be replaced by production for the common good. Instead of letting a tiny useless class appropriate the lion's share of our collective product, the workers who create it must retain its full social value. Likewise, the existing despotic capitalist control of the national economy must yield to a democratic management of the industries by the workers who run them. And, of course, to permit the foregoing fundamental changes, the industries, and natural resources must become the common property of all the people. In short, we must establish a new society -- a socialist society. Don't get any wrong impression. We mean genuine Marxian Socialism and emphatically not the monstrous counterfeits with which the Russian and Chinese workers have been deceived.
If you agree with the Socialist Party that society must be reconstructed, then there are certain things we must mutually understand. The first is that we can expect no help whatsoever from the beneficiaries of capitalism. Here and there a capitalist may see the handwriting on the wall and join with the workers, but as a class, the capitalists, like the slave-owning and feudal classes before them, will strive to prolong their poverty-ridden, war-breeding system. The workers of hand and brain must build this new world and emancipate themselves through their own class-conscious efforts. The second thing we must understand is this: Though the workers are in the overwhelming majority, and have tremendous potential power, they can apply their collective strength to the task at hand only through organisation to effect their emancipation. This means the working class availing itself fully of the right of political agitation and the ballot. This is the peaceful method. It permits the forces of progress to proclaim their purpose openly and mobilize themselves for political victory and the conquest of the capitalist political State. The function of “government” in socialism is that of administering social production for the benefit of all. There can be no bureaucrats or technocrats in socialism. This will be a living, vibrant democracy in which all power is in the only safe, place for power to be - with the people. There can be no peace or economic security without socialism! Nor can we solve our other tragic problems until we get rid of this capitalist cancer! Put your full influence behind the only movement that can transform this world into a model of peace, abundance, freedom and social sanity.
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