We live in a world of potential abundance for all, but we have trapped ourselves within a social system of mass deprivation. Across the globe millions and millions of our men and women are denied the satisfaction of their basic needs. Millions die each year from starvation. Millions more are debilitated and incapacitated by uavoidable or curable illnesses and diseases. Even in the so-called rich nations poverty is the lot of the majority: not just those under the official 'poverty-line' but the relative poverty which characterises the life of every worker who is deprived of access to what society could provide for them, but they cannot afford to buy. The working class are condemned by the present social system to cut-price, second-best lives. One inescapable aspect of capitalism is poverty. By this we do not mean destitution, as when people literally cannot afford food or clothing or a place to live. There are certainly plenty of homeless people, but poverty is far more pervasive than this. It involves people not having access to what they want or need, and having to make do with second- or third-best. Shopping at a cheap supermarket, waiting for the sales to buy what you want, telling the kids they can’t have what they’ve set their hearts on - all these are examples of poverty. So is living in a house that’s too small for your family, or booking the cheapest holiday you can find. And so is working after your anticipated retirement age because your pension will not be big enough. Another illustration is the amount of debt with which people get landed with.
It also means you are likely to suffer from stress of one kind or another. This is partly the result of the daily fight with poverty, but there are many other sources of stress for workers. Many jobs are boring or dangerous, and many more offer little satisfaction to those who do them. Worrying about deadlines or targets, or feeling at the whim of your boss’s moods - all these increase the stress due to employment. And the farther you climb up the “career ladder”, the chances are the more responsibility you will bear and hence the more stress you will encounter. Add to this the insecurity of many jobs and the consequent fear of unemployment. Then there’s the stress of the daily journey to work, whether by car or public transport. Life under capitalism means worries and more worries.
Nor is it not just that the vast majority are forced to go without; it’s also that a relatively small number of people live in the lap of luxury. This inequality is not a matter of your neighbour having a bigger car than you or being able to afford two yearly holidays abroad. Instead we are referring to the millionaires and billionaires who own land, companies or shares, and don’t have to worry about two-for-the-price-of-one offers or whether they can afford a night out on Saturday. These people live in grand mansions, probably have a holiday home or two as well, own their own private jets, and employ armies of servants to look after them. Moreover, it’s not they who do the useful work in society: those who drive the buses, teach the children or work in factories or offices are the ones who suffer poverty. The Socialist Party argues that there are two classes under capitalism: the working class (who work for wages and always struggle to make ends meet) and the capitalist class (who receive their income from rent or profit and get the lion’s share of wealth). Belonging to the working class is what makes you poor.
The things we need to live and enjoy life are produced today only if there’s a financial profit in it for the private firms, state concerns and rich individuals who own and control the world's productive resources. It is this that causes the economic and military rivalry and the neglect of human needs we see all around us. And these will go on as long as sectional (private or nation-state) ownership and production for profit continue. The alternative 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 essential facts are very simple. The land and productive instruments are owned and exploited by a comparatively small number of persons. The workers, therefore, can only obtain a livelihood as the beasts of burden, the hirelings, of these capitalists. It further follows that the more of the good things of life the workers can make the fewer labourers need the exploiters hire. It is therefore not lack of necessaries, but the worker’s ability to produce more than is in demand, that enables the capitalists to create that powerful means of keeping the workers poor, the unemployed. The poverty that afflicts the working class is thus obviously not due to any impossibility of producing sufficient, since it is consequent upon the very opposite! It is an effect of class ownership in the means of life.
The Socialist Party advocates a system without commodity-production or any “price system”, wages or payment of money. We stand for a society based on common ownership where people would produce goods and services to be taken and used without buying and selling and in accordance with the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. The collective human action that is needed to improve human life on Earth is democratic action to make the resources of the world the common heritage of all humanity. It is only on this basis that we can freely direct production towards the satisfaction of our needs and so ensure that every man. woman and child on this planet has adequate access to food, clothes, housing and all the other things needed to live an enjoyable life.
The world has developed the capacity to adequately feed, clothe and shelter every single man, woman and child on the planet. The resources, the technical knowledge and the skilled personnel exist to do this – the information on what to do is gathering dust on the shelves of practically every NGO but it is not done because the world is currently organised on the basis of the minority class ownership of productive resources and the production of wealth with a view to profit.
It is this profit system that stands in the way of satisfying human needs. It only allows production to take place in response to needs that can be paid for and then only if a big enough profit can be made from doing so. It diverts resources into maintaining a whole superstructure of finance and commerce – banks, insurance, accounting, advertising, etc – that is only needed because there is production for the market. And it diverts yet more resources into armed forces and their weapons which every state is compelled to have in view of the competitive struggle for profits – which as a last resort involves war – that is built-in to the system.
Once this artificial scarcity and this built-in waste is eliminated, as it would be in a world where the Earth's resources had ceased to be the private property of states, national and multinational corporations and rich individuals, then these resources could be directed to turning out wealth to meet human needs. It may take some time to completely clear up the mess left by the capitalist profit system, but people dying of hunger could be stopped immediately. So could all problems arising from money worries.
This is the practical solution to the practical problems facing humanity at this particular stage of its historical development. Unless this basic change from class ownership to common ownership, permitting the change from production for profit to production to satisfy human needs, is made, then unnecessary human suffering and a generally unsatisfactory life for everybody except a privileged few will continue.
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