Thinking Revolution

The only way to take on social problems and climate change is to build a mass socialist movement of people. The world’s governments are captured by the interests of multi-national corporations, so we need movements of people who can challenge the dominant economic system and push for change. We must come together across communities, countries, and continents. We can take the initiative and build a global movement of people. We need to mobilise to overcome capitalist power and truly start to change the economic system that is destroying our lives and our planet. Some conceive of socialism as nothing more than government legislation or state-ownership of the economy but those don't guarantee that society's resources will be used to the benefit of the people of the world. State capitalism plays a massive role in defending the status quo and is meaningless because people who produce all the wealth don't have any control over the fruits of their labour.

For socialism to be worthy of a movement to fight for it, it must offer something more than holding up the Scandinavian countries as a model. It has to be based on the proposition of mass democratic participation of working people in managing the day-to-day affairs of the economy and society. As Marx and Engels put, socialism must be "the self-emancipation of the working class" -- the mass participation of the majority of society in organizing to take economic and political power away from the ruling class and to construct a revolutionary post-capitalist society that extends into every corner of social life. This power of the working class to run society in its own interests must be at the heart of the world socialist movement.

 Anti-capitalism needs a political party. The only form of organisation which can take political power is a political party because only a party based on individual conscious voluntary membership, where every member knows the aim and understands it, can operate in a united fashion for it. The actual work of parliamentary activity will build a socialist membership in the localities which will dispel confusion by debating the mistaken views of reformers. Socialists must use electoral politics, despite the fully expected powerful counterattacks from the bourgeois parties. The political power of capital must be broken.  If not, the capitalist class will find ways to undermine the rising socialist movement. Capitalism must be confronted and abolished completely, or it will come back more destructive and chaotic than ever.

The Socialist Party has no connection with any other left-wing group, including the Labour Party or the various Communist, Trotskyist and Maoist parties of any description. We are an organisation completely independent, and in favour, as always, of a fundamental social change from capitalism to socialism by which we mean a worldwide system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution, obtained by a politically enlightened majority using the franchise where it exists to be used. The working class must get socialist knowledge, they must resist apathy and challenge the status quo. We must make achieving socialism as our priority. The Socialist Party is optimistic about the future, and we are optimistic that the working class will achieve this urgent and necessary social change. The socialist movement cannot merely re-iterate a series of abstractions parrot-fashion and wait for the workers to eventually accept them. It is imperative that there exists a socialist political party to capture political power.

Capitalism has made it possible to meet all of the world's needs, but control over capitalism's output remains in the hands of a tiny minority for their own profit and gain. By placing the means of production under the common ownership and democratic control of the workers who make the wheels turn, socialism offers a way to use society's resources to meet human need. By placing the community and the workers at the centre of industrial democracy society's decisions can be raised to the highest level.