Socialism is not dead

The coming year ahead is very promising for socialists and very challenging for the whole working class. People not only want change, they want a vision of a better society. Many people these days will tell you ‘Socialism is dead’. For many, the issue of socialism is now closed: you can’t beat the system and for proof, they point to the demise of the Soviet Union and the creation of Chinese billionaires. Intellectuals tell us there is now no longer a way out for us and present dystopian futures of catastrophe and apocalypses, while the life-style gurus offer up spiritual strategies of how best to cope with the ‘real’ world.  However, if you looked at the problems of the world, whether from a factory floor or from a university lecture hall, the alternative to capitalism other than socialism is a phantasm. 

The Socialist Party’s central aim is the emancipation of humanity and we endeavour to find a path to a world without exploitation or oppression, in which men and women developed their human potential as free individuals in a free society, without the distortion of money or state power. We are committed to the principle of the working class liberating itself and are opposed to the idea of self-appointed leaders, no matter how well-intentioned and we are firmly against the concept of setting up a spurious workers’ state. In the words of the Communist Manifesto, ‘the movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority’. Only the working class can achieve its own emancipation. Nobody can make the socialist revolution for them. Marx and Engels argued that socialism could only come about through the action of the entire class, which in advanced countries was the mass of society. The state which oppressed the exploited on behalf of the exploiters would be destroyed and replaced, not by a new, ‘workers’ state’, but by a body which would at once begin to dissolve itself into the community. Socialism wasn’t state-ownership and nationalisation but associations of producers. Marx’s conception of socialist society as ‘an association of free human beings, working with communal means of production, and self-consciously expending their many individual labour powers as a single social labour power’. Individuals will freely, collectively and consciously construct their social relationships.

There can be no blueprint to give us a clear description of the future socialist system, much to some folk’s chagrin who see themselves as clever experts in the creation of all sorts of new social relations and economic models yet consider the existing rough sketch of socialism as a world in which we will transcend such things as property, money, and state are treated as utopianism.

 Rather than using technological advances and our ability to understand and transform the natural world, it ought to be easy to make ourselves reasonably comfortable, capitalism has turned technology into instruments of exploitation of both nature and people. Over many decades, a major part of scientific and industrial activity has been devoted to fabricating the means to kill, torture and maim human beings with great efficiency: millions perished miserably in wars. Capitalism is like an uncontrollable demon compelling us to tear our world apart, turning our own human productive powers against ourselves, transforming them into forces of self-destruction. We devote a huge part of our energy and ingenuity to lying and cheating, to hurting or killing each other. Nationalism and religion feed upon our fears. Set against one another, we are reduced to a state of powerlessness, mere spectators of our own actions. This is what makes the world appear so strange to us. In every part of the world, there has been a global drive to expand industry and trade. The consequences, however, have never been what was intended. They include the destruction, not only of natural ecological systems but also of older forms of cultural life that has sparked a reactionary back-lash. Millions of people try to lead decent lives amidst all this confusion, bringing up their children in the best way they can, but every day another bit of communal life disappears to be replaced by the impersonal market. And so the world becomes less and less comprehensible to its inhabitants. People are deprived of decent housing, education, and health care, condemned to a life of unemployment or of the most degrading sweat-shop work. From politics to sport, from music to the media, every activity is driven by the thirst for money. Human beings, equipped with the means to control the world, lack the power to control their own lives. Is it no wonder that substance abuse and mental ill-health are so rife?

By liberating today's society, socialism makes it possible for humanity to see its true relationship with Nature as ‘a process between man and nature’. A socialist future guarantees the rational use of human creativity and resources. Socialism addresses and answers such vital core questions as “What is it to be human?”, “In what ways are we estranged from our humanity?”, “How can we live humanly?” and “What must we do to make this possible?”