It's Time to Imagine a New Society

We live in the beginning of a global technological revolution which will turn society’s conditions upside down. We cannot stop this transformation, but we can influence where it will go. Capitalism has corroded the social fabric of societies around the world, destroyed solidarity among people and established a climate of fierce competition and struggle for survival. People are left without any positive prospect or hope for the future. People feel cheated by something or someone that they cannot properly identify yet there exists an immense anger. There have been endless mass protests. The position of the Socialist Party, however, is that the irrationalities of capitalism can only be countered by an organised social movement rather than any individualist and anti-technology politics that permeates the so-called anti-capitalist current. There are libraries of books that analyse what is wrong with society, the majority of which are trying to advocate the impossible – which is to propose reforms both old and new that are claimed will benefit the people. We cannot create a better world by waging a war against capitalism while at the same time upholding the current economic system. We have gone too far now trying to make improvements within a society that is led by blind and unbridled market forces. The time has come when we must demonstrate in our millions not against this or that, but rather for something. The one solution is to unite the people throughout the world, for social revolution. No other solution will work until the people throughout the world rise up in unison together. When millions of people gather in protest from nation to nation, there is an unconscious to conscious realisation that we are one humanity.

Humanity must share the world’s wealth and resources. Sharing is inherent in every person and integral to who we are as human beings. The greed and selfish indifference that defines our society has been implanted and conditioned within us. For the Socialist Party, the fundamental thing is that people must want change before they can achieve a social revolution. And they must prepare for a social revolution. We do not place much faith in spontaneous uprisings. We stand for a class-free, state-free society of common ownership in which money becomes redundant and the principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" applies. We are committed to the concept of a self-organised majority revolution without leaders and for the working class forming a political party to contest elections and eventually win control of political power, not to form a government but to immediately abolish capitalism and usher in the money-free, wages-free society that real socialism will be. The alternative to capitalism is a society in which all forms of exchange and money will be abolished and all land and property will be taken into the control of the community. The parliamentary path does not imply that people hand over their power to others every few years. Parliament is the institution to which the working class shall send their delegates with the purpose of declaring capitalism abolished and to validate this revolutionary act. There has to be some means to effect the necessary transfer of power from the capitalist to the working class, a means which clearly and democratically indicates the will of the socialist majority. This conquest is, indeed, an indispensable condition of the social revolution, in other words, of the transformation of capitalist property into social property. It is only after and by the political expropriation of the capitalist class that its economic expropriation can be achieved. The parliamentary process is the answer.  It will be within our party, not parliament that the “self-activity” and “self-organisation” of the working class will be realised. Far from excluding each other, electoral action and revolutionary action complete each other. There is not, and there never will be, other than a single category of means, determined by circumstances: those which conduct to end pursued.

We can also dismiss the idea of the “workers’ state” peddled by some Trotskyists. In ‘Socialism: Scientific and Utopian’ Engels gives us a repudiation of the view that the state can be progressive:

“The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective capitalist. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more it actually becomes collective capitalist, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-workers, proletarians. But the capitalist relation is not done away with; it is rather brought to a head.”

Marx and Engels saw the state as the "executive committee" of a ruling class. In a socialist society, the state, as the government over people, would give way to a simple, democratic "administration of things". The vision of a socialist society can be fairly summed up as a world-wide system of social organisation based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by, and in the interests of, the whole community, a  society where human beings would voluntarily contribute in accordance with their mental and/or physical abilities to the production and distribution of the needs of their society and in which everyone would have free and equal access to their needs.

Capitalism can’t be reformed so as to work in people's interests. Profits always come first and people second. William Morris writes:

"The Socialist League has declared over and over again its sense of the futility of Socialists wasting their time in getting . . . palliative measures passed, which, if desirable to be passed as temporarily useful, will be passed much more readily if they do not mix themselves up in the matter, and which are at least intended by our masters to hinder Socialism and not further it. Over and over again it has deprecated Socialists mixing themselves up in political intrigues; and it believes no useful purpose can be served by their running after the votes of those who do not understand the principles of Socialism."

Socialists understand the global nature of capitalism and the folly of trying to establish socialism in one country. Capitalism is international.

TO CREATE IS TO RESIST - TO RESIST IS TO CREATE