Build the Fight - People Power

We define the means of production as the tools, machinery, and technology that enable humans to transform the natural resources so to provide sustenance for ourselves. The resources in question are land, water, ores and minerals, and the tools and facilities that enable the growing of crops and the alteration of raw materials by the capture of energy to power the manufacturing processes into consumable goods and services by labour. A people that do not have access to and control over these means and methods cannot be said to possess or exercise self-determination.  The working class majority does not have control or ownership over  the means of production and distribution. We are not free. In order to democratically transform the capitalist world-economy, we have to transform the agent central to this process, the working class. This transformation starts with the self-organisation of the working class.  Self-organisation means workers directly organising themselves through various participatory means (unions, assemblies, etc.) primarily at their work-place, but also where they live, play, and study. Workers and communities have to drive the social transformation process through their self-organisation and self-management. The point of this self-organisation is for workers to make collective, democratic decisions about how, when, and to what ends their labour serves, and about how to take action collectively to determine the course of their own lives and their own actions.  This, however, does not mean that the Socialist Party shouldn't try to influence the development of the working class and our fellow-workers. We hold that we should openly present our ideas an offer our strategies and tactics of political action in open forums, discussions, assemblies, etc., and debate them out in a principled democratic fashion to allow the people to decide for themselves whether they make sense and are worth implementing and pursuing.  Within the capitalist structure, self-reliance is a critical form of resistance.  Socialism is not a worker-managed capitalism, but a new civilisation in which men and women stand in dignified relation to each other, not as buyers and sellers in a class society, but where the common effort to produce the means of living entitles all to equal access to society’s products and services. A complete transformation which ends commerce and replaces international capitalist conflict by international co-operation.

We have to be clear, crystal clear, nevertheless, that self-determination is unattainable without socialism. Self-determination is not possible within capitalism because the endless pursuit of profits that drives this system only empowers private ownership and the individual appropriation of wealth.  The end result of this exploitative economic system is inequality and inequity. We know this from the brutality of the nightmares of history demonstrated to us time and time again over the course of the last 500 years. Reproducing capitalism, either in its market-oriented or state-dictated forms, will only replicate the injustices and miseries that have plagued humanity. The Socialist Party advocates a participatory, bottom-up democratic route to economic democracy, in which we envision associations of cooperatives and systems of mutual aid providing communal solidarity and the democratic ownership and control of the ecologically friendly and labour liberating technologies.  We are crystal clear that self-determination expressed as national sovereignty is a trap since all nation-state imposes the dictates of the capitalist system. Remaining within the capitalist world-system means that you have to submit to the domination and rule of capital which only empowers the national ruling class against the rest of the population. Capitalism couldn't care less about the needs of the people. One of the tragedies resulting from the advent of independence is the large number of workers who quickly become disillusioned by the capitalist policies of their new rulers. Capitalism makes the interest of all workers one. 

Our political opponents stress that they stood for various national "rights” and "freedoms” for workers. They have neither intention nor seek the mandate to remove the relations of employer and employee, wage-slave, and capitalist. They will not remove the dependence of workers upon those who own the means of producing wealth. They will not make those means the common property of the whole of society. The Socialist Party alone advocates free access to the means of life— Socialism, a class-free society which means the end of conflicts between countries, economic or military, between human beings. We wish to abolish a society where the most important rights are those that reflect the fact that society resembles a jungle. Workers must understand that suppression and coercion are ever present dangers while capitalism lasts whether the government is Labour, Tory or nationalist. The end of these conditions will come not by the sterile policy of changing national boundaries and introducing new passports, but by the revolutionary act of changing the basis of society from private to common ownership or the means of producing wealth. The sooner that workers realise their common interest and strive together to overthrow their common enemy, the sooner will men and women not have to prostitute themselves. Only with socialism will their knowledge be used for the benefit of mankind as a whole, unhampered by monetary considerations.

Adapted from here

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42802-build-and-fight-the-program-and-strategy-of-cooperation-jackson