Socialism is coming

WORKERS UNITED

The Socialist Party indicts capitalism as a threat to civilisation. The present political struggle is a struggle to the death; either capitalism, with its wealth and power for its owners and the brutal, degrading struggle for existence for its workers, or else the capitalist class will surrender to socialism and people will progress to undreamed heights and establish a civilisation far in advance of capitalism. The Socialist Party challenges the right of capitalism to exist and proclaims socialism as its legitimate successor.  The Socialist Party appeals to the world’s workers upon the basis of their class interests. Capitalism is founded upon production for profit. Socialism is going to be planned production for use.

Whenever the employers fail for any reason to make a profit, it is in their power to end production for they dictate the terms upon which their privately owned factories are used machinery. Their workers have naught but their labour power, of hand or brain, to sell upon terms dictated by another. We are wage-slaves. We are asked to fight and die for a better world, and the better world they promise is only enough to keep body and soul together. The thing to observe is that the ruling class has been unable to solve the basic ills of capitalism. They all seek to do the impossible: make capitalism work. Capitalism has become an obsolete oppressive system that ought to be got rid off. This vast and resourceful planet should be free from the scourge of poverty and the blight of ignorance. If this system cannot give peace and plenty to its people, socialism will.

Common ownership is when products socially produced by the workers are be owned by those workers and ordinary people. Production is no longer guided by the profit of the handful of owners but by the requirements of the community, who now own the means of production. This is production for use and not for profit. The old coercive state apparatus of the exploiters is ended. This is the basis for socialism. Socialism must be the aim. The social producers become the social owners. Marx and Engels described this process and showed that capitalism had called into being its own gravediggers – the working class. This is the essence of socialist change.

Socialism means that one working class is not pitted against the others in wars. It means that one worker is not pitted against the other in the fight for a job. It means that one working class is not cutting the throat of the other by producing at lower wages than the other. The criteria for production under socialism would be – how much is needed? Some people will argue that it can’t work, it’s a utopia. We can only answer that capitalism has demonstrated that it cannot work. A society organised on the basis of production for use would have more of a chance of working than our present economic system.

It is not to reform the evils of the day but to abolish the social system that produces them that the Socialist Party is organised. It is the party not of reform but of revolution, knowing that the capitalist system has had its day and that a new social order, based upon a new system of production must soon replace the old one we now have.