For a Sustainable Future

We live in truly frightening times.  Global catastrophe is a real and growing possibility.  Life is becoming more difficult for most and many of the advances made by our class are being pushed back.  We accept that the world is full of horrors, otherwise, we would not want to change it. Without a vision of a better world and the organization that goes with it, protest go nowhere yet the need for a socialist transformation has never been greater.  Without fundamental social change, future generations are facing a bleak future indeed. We are running out of time. There must be a mass world socialist movement, or there may be no future at all. The Socialist Party presents a vision a society that serves the well-being of humanity and nature alike where workers participate democratically in decision-making. There is bound to be disagreement among socialists as to details. Socialism has been defined and interpreted in lots of different ways. Scholarly tomes on the subject became surprisingly popular as economists probe the sources of unequal wealth distribution. We emphatically maintain that socialism should be identified with the abolition of the wage-system. This clearly distinguishes us from all those who identify socialism with planned state economy or with redistribution of wealth, etc. We maintain that socialism requires the transformation of the means of labour, means of production, into the common property of society. The Socialist Party can only see into the possibilities, based on our own experiences as a political party that has been existence for 114 years and has witnessed all manner of policies and practices. All we can do is continue the hard work we do each and every day working for socialism and supporting whatever struggles our fellow-workers engage in. When we sow or ideas, we never know what seeds will take root.

Opposing irrationality is a precondition to such change. There is throughout the world a popular perception that socialism is a coercive authoritarian system, and the experiences of the former Soviet Union justified that perception. Generally speaking, people feared what they thought was socialism. This was at the heart of socialism's crisis. The Socialist Party, however, never identified socialism with state ownership of the means of production, but with common ownership and democratic control. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not the defeat of socialism’ and its end. What we witnessed was the demise of a particular type of capitalism, state-capitalism, a model of a centralised command economy. The Soviet Union was not a socialist country and was totally alien to the socialist vision. The fall of the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc is no case against the socialist idea. Instead of common ownership of means of production, nationalisation by the State of the means of production was adopted. Waged employment, money and prices , the market and exchange value, plus the separation of the producing class from the control of means of production, all remained. A centralised state-bureaucracy ruled.

The only party in this country to stand for Socialism is the Socialist Party. Class ownership of the means of production causes workers’ problems and any government, be it Labour or “right-wing”, which takes power within capitalism cannot solve these problems and must come into conflict with the workers. It must run capitalism in the only way it can be, as a profit-making system in the interests of the privileged few who live off rent, interest, and profit, and to the detriment of the workers. As socialists, we are not particularly concerned whether the capitalist government is Labour, Tory, SNP or a coalition of them all. They are all anti-working class. It is not just the Tories that are the enemy. It is capitalism and we are equally opposed to all parties that support it, Labour as well as Tory.

We are not out to change human “nature”. We merely assert that human beings behave in different ways under different social conditions and that they can change themselves by changing these conditions. The change from capitalism to socialism will not be made by us on behalf of the people but by the immense majority of workers who want socialism and are fully aware of what is involved in establishing and running such a society. Once workers are socialist-minded Socialism can be established fairly quickly. When the workers have political power it won’t take long to use it to convert the means of production from class to common ownership. This done, then production for use, to meet human needs can begin. Socialism will have been set up. Socialism can only be established by the democratic political action of a working-class convinced of the need for it. In Britain, universal suffrage and parliament (and the local councils) can be used to win political power. But there is nothing special about the British constitution. Other states have different arrangements but as long as they allow a majority to get its way they can be used to establish socialism. We welcome the break-up of dictatorships and the coming of democracy, however limited. But we do not support democracy in the abstract, but as a means to an end: Socialism. We always have held that democracy is of value both to the working class and to the socialist movement, but we do not think that it should, and in the end can be defended by uniting with non-socialists or by war. Some critics suggest that when the Socialist Party grows the government will take steps to try to crush it. Maybe, but we doubt it. For as the socialist movement grows so the power of the capitalists is weakened. The balance of class power shifts in favour of the workers. Any government, be it Labour or Tory, which tried to crush the socialist movement would be biting off too much. By the time the socialist movement has grown so as to be a threat to capitalist power then it will be too late to crush it. No doubt when the socialist movement grows those who support capitalism, fearful of splitting the anti-socialist vole, will rally around one or other of the large capitalist parties. It may be the Tories or it may be Labour or they both may form an anti-socialist electoral alliance. It does not really worry us what they do. That is their problem and that of the class they represent, the capitalists. We assure of one thing, though. Going by the record of past Labour governments, if there are any repressive measures to be taken against socialists and workers generally, Labour will be only too pleased to oblige.

The solution to the problems of workers will come by uniting with each other and with their fellow workers of the world. Then, when the workers are united their energies can be turned to the real conflict—that between capitalists and workers, not between workers with different national and religious tags. However, the workers must, in the first instance, reject all the nationalist and religious ideas, which lead them into willing submission to the capitalist class. Only by a close examination of society can the workers learn the reason for their poverty and to see that their adherence to capitalist divide and rule tactics helps perpetuate their exploitation which is the sale of their labour-power and only after casting aside all forms of nationalism and religions can society be examined in a clear manner. Only by learning where their true interest lies can the workers go out, organise consciously and take the proper steps to end their subservience. Capitalism can only be fought with knowledge.