For most of the world's workers, sustainability is about how to survive the gap between spending your last dollar, and the arrival of the next pay packet. When humanity as a species is blamed for environmental destruction, the specific social causes are forgotten. The few who make the decisions are lumped with the powerless majority. Famines are seen as nature's revenge against overpopulation, natural checks that must be allowed to run their course -- as if there was anything natural about the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which force Third World countries to cultivate products for export rather than food for local consumption. The point is not to blame even the CEOs of those corporations - they too are caught in a grow-or-die system that impels them to make such decisions - but to abolish the economic structure that continually produces such irresistible pressures. The Socialist Party exists to encourage our fellow workers to acquire an appetite for something more than the crumbs from the cake which we, as a class, have baked.
The wealth of society is produced by the class of men and women who neither own nor control the means of wealth production and distribution: this is the great social contradiction of capitalism. Labour is the source of value, but those who labour are destined to relative degrees of poverty, while those in positions of ownership enjoy lives of privilege and luxury and are not compelled to produce anything. To state that capitalism is a system of class exploitation is not to moralise about it but to define it scientifically. Wage labour and capital must always be in conflict; the class struggle is inevitable in a society where two classes have directly opposing interests.
Capitalism is a system of society in which the means of production take the form of “capital” or wealth used to produce other wealth with a view to profit. It is a system where wealth is produced to be sold profitably on a market. For capitalism to have come into existence (and to continue to exist) certain conditions have to be met, in particular, the separation of the producers from the means of production. The producers must have been reduced to the status of a propertyless proletariat compelled to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary to the minority who monopolise (own and control) the means of production. The essential features of capitalism are then: production for profit, buying and selling, wage labour, class monopoly of the means of production and distribution.Capitalism differs from other systems of society by the fact that under it production is not carried on for use. Even under another class system like feudalism, most production was for use; the peasants produced their own subsistence needs, the rest going in kind to maintain the barons, the church, and other exploiters. It was the same in ancient slave society. Capitalism is different in that goods are no longer produced to be directly used but to be sold on a market with a view to profit. Decisions about production — what to produce, how it is produced, where it is produced, and soon — are no longer simple decisions to produce what is needed, either by the producers or by their exploiters. Decisions about production become decisions to produce those goods which, at any moment, appear most likely to procure a profit when they are sold. In other words, production is governed by the search for profits, by the impersonal forces of the market which express themselves in the minds of the individual capitalists (or of their hired managers) as the "profit motive”. The economic laws of capitalism demand that workers must be legally robbed of the fruits of their labour in order for the system to run profitably.
Our declared Object is establishing a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution. Socialism is the spark of hope to inspire compassion and empathy at a time when fear, xenophobia, and hate speech threatens the globe. The earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared. While capitalism reigns on Earth, the chance exists that the profit mongers will simply keep on fiddling as the world burns. Join the Socialist Party before it is too late and the fight for a future under a democratic socialist economy capable of halting and eventually reversing the damage done to the planet and all its inhabitants by the voracious capitalist system. We are for changing the culture of competition and consumerism to a society of cooperation, a revolution in the way that we think about the effects each of us can have on a new consciousness in a world society. A self-managed society will naturally implement most present-day ecological demands, essential for the very survival of humanity. Only when workers realise they have no country to owe allegiance to, and that the reliance on leaders leads them nowhere but down a blind alley, will we start to make progress.
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