The Socialist Party is primarily concerned with analysing the capitalist system, pointing out its defects and advocating the replacing of the capitalist system by the common ownership and democratic administration of the means of production and distribution. The success of the socialist movement and the rapidity of its progress will depend very largely upon the method of education and the political tactics of the Socialist Party. Mere economic development in itself cannot bring the cooperative commonwealth. Socialism does not advance necessarily in response to or because of great industrial distress. These crises may point out the fact that something is wrong, but the suggestion of the remedy and the cure for these ills is quite a different problem.
The objective conditions for socialism, the productive capacity of society to produce an abundance of goods - have been long over-ripe; the subjective prerequisites for a decisive social change – the class consciousness and the political will are, however, absent. Too many of our fellow workers are conservative They hold to a tendency to adhere to old ideas which is far stronger than the desire for change. Some say the world has changed so fundamentally and produced too many new problems for the socialist movement to answer. If socialism is about creating and modifying an amazing array of manifestoes, then perhaps the charge is true. Has our world changed drastically over the past years? Undoubtedly. Has it changed socially? No doubt. Culturally? That also. And psychologically? True. But has the world changed socially, culturally and psychologically enough to invalidate the socialist analysis? That is the question. Every epoch in capitalist development has ushered in new problems, demanding new criteria. Marx and Engels furnished the working class with a tool of criticism, the materialist conception of history. We adhere to the basic conceptions of Marxism because they have proved again and again to be the most efficacious tools of social understanding. Socialist consciousness lies in the awareness in which the worker realises that he or she is the creator of the revolution and socialism. The Socialist Party does not believe socialist consciousness arises automatically but recognises the class struggle as a school of socialist education, in which the working class, by its own experiences and also by the introduction of socialist ideas reach the level of socialist consciousness. So long as capitalism exists, so long as an exploitive society resting on industrial production exists, so long as a working class remains indispensable to modern production, the necessity of socialism will remain. And if that is true, then there are no other means by which the working class can emancipate itself except through its own organisations, economic and political.
Socialism is the free association of completely free men and women, where no separation between ‘private and common interest’ exists. A socialist economy is a planned economy. Marx saw socialism as implying, in the economic field, ownership of the means of production by society as a whole; a rapid increase in the productive forces, planned production. The entire world's production and distribution in socialist society develops in a planned and proportionate way. In capitalist society, the capitalists own the means of production and engage in production for the sole purpose of making profits and satisfying their private interests. Although there may be planned production in a few enterprises, competition is rife and lack of co-ordination prevails among the different enterprises and economic departments as a whole. Cyclical economic crises which break out in capitalist society are the inevitable result of anarchy in production.
Nowhere in Marx’s writings is there to be found a detailed account of the new social system which was to follow capitalism. Marx wrote no “Utopia” of the kind that earlier writers had produced – writings based only on the general idea of a society from which the more obvious evils of the society in which they lived had been removed. But from the general laws of social development Marx was able to outline the features of the new society and the way in which it would develop.
Under capitalism, where everything enters the field of exchange and becomes the object of buying and selling, a man’s worth comes to be estimated, not by his really praiseworthy abilities or actions, but by his bank account. A man is “worth” what he owns and a millionaire is “worth” incomparably more than a pauper. A Rothschild is esteemed where a Marx is hated. In this cesspool of universal venality, all genuine human values and standards are distorted and desecrated. The person without artistic taste can buy and hang pictures in his mansion, or put them in a safety vault, while the creator and the genuine appreciator cannot view or enjoy them. The meanest scoundrel can purchase admiration from sycophants while worthy individuals go scorned and unnoticed.
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