The world is experiencing negative political changes. “The uncomfortable truth,” Istvan Meszaros argued 15 years ago, “is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.”
Class determines everything from where one lives to one’s likely life expectancy, to the food one eats. How bad must it get before we put an end to the insanity of it all? It has got to end; we can no longer continue to live like this. But new trends are developing below the surface.
Political parties alternate holding office but the rule of capital always remains. Capitalists believe that the magic of the market will solve all the planet's problems. You don’t have to be a socialist to know that the political order is a corporate and financial plutocracy. Examining data in the United States from more than 1,800 different policy initiatives in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, reseachers Gilens and Page found that wealthy and well-connected elites consistently steer the direction of the country, regardless of and against the will of the U.S. majority and irrespective of which major party holds the White House and/or Congress. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” Gilens and Page wrote, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” As Gilens previously explained, “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.”
To be successful in capitalism a capitalist must have a supply of disposable people. The greed and selfishness that the capitalist economy inspires seem to impact every area of social interaction. In the USA, nearly two-thirds of all working-age poor are actually working, but unable to earn a living wage, forcing them to rely on food stamps, which only provide about $5 a day per person for meals. We live in a world where working people are denied access to the wealth that they help to create. As a consequence, the vulnerable working class have entered a more precarious state than ever.
The Socialist Party calls for the end of exploitation and an end to the domination of the few privileged over the majority. We view our fellow-workers as the revolutionary force that could overthrow the tyranny of the capitalist system, freeing people and breaking their chains of wage-slavery. Sadly, organised labour is at a low level since the Great Depression with the unemployed and the underemployed desperate. The “gig economy” is pauperising a growing segment of the labour force.
Socialism is the answer to a great many of our problems and needs to be placed at the heart of a new approach to living, locally, nationally, and globally. It is a unifying sharing principle that will encourage cooperation, which, unlike competition, brings people together and builds social solidarity.
We hold that as the Labour Party is committed to the policy of trying to reform capitalism, instead of the policy of abolishing capitalism. We counsel our fellow-workers to ignore with contempt such a treacherous party. Have nothing to do with them. The Socialist Party is not opposed to the Parliamentary system. We hold that the only important thing that is wrong about Parliament, from our point of view, is that it is controlled by the wrong people and for the wrong purpose. Its M.P.s at present have been sent there by electors who want capitalism to be retained. When a majority of the electors have become socialists they will send their delegates to Parliament with the mandate to establish socialism. In the words of our Declaration of Principles, the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, will be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation. We have never been beguiled by various opposing views that have had their long or short periods of popularity. The Socialist Party never went in for theories of armed revolt or general strikes, or "taking and holding" the factories by industrial organisations. Nor did we ever give support to the idea of soviets or dictatorship.
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