Why socialism - Here's why

The materialist conception of history identifies social classes as the product of a competitive struggle for scarce resources and a social division of labour: the most important beliefs within society are seen as related to this basic struggle, and thus to class. Ideologies or systems of beliefs relate to the arena o! social conflict, for the purposes of groups competing for scarce resources. They don’t come from nowhere and to no purpose.  Marxism, originally a theory of the self-activity of the working class in the industrialized parts of the world, was corrupted into “Marxist”-Leninism and Maoism to become the conservative ideology of a new class society, a body of formalized doctrine designed to justify the existing nature of society and to leave complete freedom of action to its leaders. Socialism is not a tactic for forced economic development under State control but a society in which the working class will have achieved its freedom. Marxists identified the industrial proletariat as the sole agency for achieving socialism (and therefore, socialism was only an appropriate aim in developed countries where the proletariat was a majority), not just because it was poor, but because of its role within the economy, because it sustained and developed the industrial economy by its own efforts, because it was concentrated and organised in the major cultural centres, because it learned discipline and the advantages of interdependence, because by its experience it had the ability to run the economy.  In China the result was a theory, disguised in Marxist terms, very similar to the pre-Marxist Narodnik (or Populist) revolutionaries in Russia such as a belief that the intelligentsia plus peasants could produce a revolution: that revolution could create socialism; that ‘nationalism’ completely encompassed socialism, that the ‘people’ encompassed the proletariat, and that the local national struggle was the key to the progress of mankind; that the country concerned could industrialise without undergoing capitalism; that socialism was a peasant way of life rather than an emancipated developed society.

The Socialist Party’s opposition to the capitalist system by no means springs simply from a recognition of the misery, slavery, and degradation which capitalism entails, though being human and not mere automata of logic, Socialists are naturally strongly influenced by such facts. They know, however, that capitalism has been a necessary and useful stage in the evolution of human society. It is because the system is neither of these today because it can be shown that the functioning of wealth as capital is now a hindrance to economic and therefore to social and intellectual progress, that the Socialist Party regards capitalism as an obsolete and evil institution.

If the Socialist Party holds exploitation and class oppression to be morally wrong, it is because, for the first time in history since the formation of class divisions away in the remote past, the material means are now available wherewith these, together with all their consequences, may be eliminated from human institutions. It is because this latest existing phase of class society, capitalism, is the great obstacle, holding mankind back, so to speak, on the very threshold of a new and splendid era manifesting untold developments in the material, social and mental triumphs of the race, that the Socialist Party holds this system and all the agencies which uphold or tend to perpetuate it, in hatred and abomination. We live in a world that’s facing many destructive and entwined crises including, climate change, poverty, pollution and human rights violations. Our current economic system has created these crises and is perpetuating and exacerbating them. If economics is about the allocation and distribution of resources as many first-year university textbooks claim, then capitalism has failed. We need a new economic system to protect our planet. We require a sustainable economic solution for our communities.  We must ensure meaningful participation in our decision-making process.

Capitalist cant and humbug manifest themselves at every turn. It is the socialist contention that only when we eliminate the profit account can mankind really deal with the human suffering that goes on in the world today. After all, so much of it is down to the economic cost factor, the need for capitalists to produce quicker and therefore cheaper than their competitors, and then to the competition for markets, sources of raw materials and places of strategic importance, that we really can condemn capitalism for murder.  Every bit of misery that capitalism creates will bring into being a reformist organisation, and so we get a fragmentation of the revulsion that human beings feel when they see any form of suffering. This is of benefit only to the capitalist class, because it diffuses the concern over these problems that is in most of our minds, and prevents most workers from seeing that they have an origin.

To the Socialist Party, it all seems so simple: society is divided into two classes, and the motive behind production is exchange with a view to profit for the owning or capitalist class. All things are sacrificed to this “God" of profits: the health and safety of workers, the children of Yemen and South Sudan and the migrants and refugees around the world.