Our future, or theirs?

The Socialist Party can perceive a future where there will be neither wages nor prices. By socialism we understand the system of society the material basis of which is social production for social use; that is, the production of all the means of social existence — including all the necessaries and comforts of life — carried on by the organised community for its own use collectively and individually. Socialism does not mean governmental ownership or management. The State of to-day, nationally or locally, is only the agent of the possessing class and, has, in the interests as employers, to treat the employees just as other employees are treated.

By socialism, the Socialist Party mean the establishment the common ownership and control of the whole of the world’s industry. The entire means of production thus being common property, there would no longer be a propertied employing class to make a profit out of the workers swat and toil, or the interest on loans or in any other way, and then classes themselves would disappear.

Mankind is facing threats to its physical survival with the growing risks of destruction of the environment. That’s why we need socialism, and that’s why many remain in the Socialist Party.  The real choice will be not “socialism or barbarism”, but socialism or the physical extinction of the human race. The working class cannot solve the global warming crisis because it has no belief in an alternative social order.

We in the Socialist Party believe that mankind is not necessarily doomed.  The problems to be solved in this case are not technical or cultural ones. It is a social one. Political power needs to be in the hands of the workers willing to let solidarity, cooperation and generosity prevail by democratic means over the short-sighted irresponsibility of the profit-system. Science and technology have no power independent of the social groups who invented them, apply them, and bend them to their interests as they see them.  The key decision is to subject science and technology to conscious social control in the democratically established interests of the great majority of human beings. To free them from submission to special pecuniary interests, which abuse them regardless of the long-term interests of the human race. For that purpose the organisation and structure of society itself must be subjected to democratically determined, conscious control. What socialism is all about in the last analysis is the conquest of human freedom for the greatest possible number to decide their own fate.  Only the democratically organised self-activity of the masses can achieve that. Socialism is a social order in which these masses decide their own fate in a free way.

Socialism is a society in which all the members of the community collectively determine their conditions of life and their way of living. In order to do so, they must control, in common, the use to which machines, factories, raw materials – all the means of production – are put. Unless the means of production are effectively in the hands of the whole society, not where 1 per cent of the population owns more than half the wealth, there can be no question of the democratic control of the conditions of life.

The Socialist Party opposes any condition in which human beings are despised, alienated, exploited, oppressed or denied basic human dignity. Understand that you cannot be happier than if you have dedicated your life to this defence of humanity everywhere in the world: the defence of the exploited, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the despised. There is no better way to be a decent individual in this world than to dedicate your life to the cause of socialism and that is why the future is with the socialists.