WHY WE WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD

 “Study because we will need all your intelligence.

Agitate because we will need all your enthusiasm.

Organize because we will need all your strength.”

Antonio Gramsci

We are socialists out of conviction because we see capitalism as harmful to the vast majority of the world’s people. This system we live under, by its very nature and grinds the working people, sets one group against another. Capitalism today as a destructive system that hurts, divides and exploits the vast majority of our people for the sake of profits and power for the few. We see in socialism a more just, more cooperative and more peaceful society. Socialists suggest an alternative which can meet basic needs of people and which is based on cooperation. Socialism offers a future free from the fears of poverty, sexism, racism, dog-eat-dog competition, joblessness, and the loneliness of old age, a society that allows each person to create and produce according to her or his ability and to obtain what she or he needs. We advocate and work for socialism – that is, common ownership and collective control of the means of production (factories, fields, utilities, etc.). We want a system based on cooperation, where the people build together for the common good. 

We see the primary task of the Socialist Party to be the building of a mass movement of the working class to strive for socialism. From this task arises the character of the organisation. People are our most precious resource.  We expect that as the Socialist Party grows, it will become richer and stronger, where members would and should develop social as well as political ties with each other. The organisation would have internal education, parties, outings, dinners, sports and the like, and would encourage an all-rounded development of its members. Men and women want freedom from misery, from exploitation, from the jackboots of the state, from living their lives in alienation and insecurity. People want freedom to become fully human, to develop all our talents and abilities. In the final analysis, we need a mass global socialist organization dedicated to welding together all the diverse struggles and resistance of the working class. We have no illusions that the Socialist Party will on its own become such an organisation, but one of our tasks is to help bring such a force into being when the conditions for it grow ripe. In the meantime, we will seek new members to push the road to freedom a little further into the new uncharted territory that lies ahead.

The principal function of the Socialist Party is to participate in the class struggle in such a way that the workers are educated to realise that it is their own political and industrial power which must lead to their emancipation as a class. The socialist revolution is not an endeavour of outstanding individuals or a select sect; rather, it is the endeavour of the exploited and oppressed of all lands. The working class is the commonality of the masses of people who are compelled to sell their labour power in order to survive. It is the only class whose liberation is impossible without the abolition of class society on a global scale. It is the class whose very functioning in the processes of modern society – based as they are in a collective process of production – predisposes it to reach an understanding of its own situation and the cause of its oppression, to combine with other exploited groups and classes for a common revolutionary struggle, and together with them to organise the life of post-revolutionary socialist society.

In the course of its evolution, capitalism has brought about an unprecedented rise of social productivity; based on the achievements of science and technology, capitalism has developed methods of production that require close cooperation of masses of human beings and make possible the creation of limitless plenty; in spreading over the entire planet, capitalism has created a global system that binds together all human beings across the planet in close mutual ties. But this development is based on the exploitation of human beings who are denied any control over the process of their labour, the means of their labour and the fruits of their labour, and are therefore denied control over the entire social process. In the capitalist system the products of human labour assume the form of commodities: everything is sold and bought – means of subsistence, means of labour, and even the brawn and brain power of human beings. Capitalism has created a system that enslaves and exploits. Capitalism is the foremost enemy of the socialist revolution: the revolution strives to overthrow capitalism, and the latter attempts to prevent and suppress the revolution. As the modern world is a single interlinked system, and as the privileged class in all countries have interconnected interests opposed to the socialist revolution, revolutionary socialists will act in mutual international solidarity, and to lend fraternal support to the struggle of every exploited and oppressed group of human beings.