Unite and triumph

There were many attempts before Marx’s to understand capitalism and propose an alternative to capitalist society, because although capitalism as it first emerged was progressive in as far as it had to eliminate feudalism and many forms of absolutism, it was not long before it became obvious that capitalism itself was exploitative and oppressive, and finally the major obstruction in the path of human development. Through Marx, we came to understand that ultimately the most critical and defining aspect of any society is the mode of production, how that society gets its food, clothing, and shelter; society’s raison d’etre and its reasons for changing became crystal clear. Marx showed us how and why primitive communalist society changed to slave societies and how feudalism grew out of slavery and capitalism out of feudalism. Marx identified and explained how class society was formed and how the various classes, basically groups of people with the same relationship to the production process, how they formed and how and why ultimately the motive force of history is the struggle between those various classes, i.e., class struggle. Marx explained why the working class was the most advanced class and the only revolutionary class under capitalism. Marx revealed the fundamental secret of capitalism, surplus value, which can be defined basically as all the wealth which the workers create but do not get. All of the learned men of capitalism speak so disdainfully of socialism’s past and contemptuously of its future. Socialism is irrelevant! It is utopian! But politics is concerned with alternatives and if socialism is a quixotic cause, what do they have to propose instead? In nine out of ten cases, it boils down to what we now have: a perverse social system run by the corrupt careerists. What could be more utopian, absurd and irrelevant than this? By comparison, socialists are eminently practical and realistic men.

The Socialist Party maintains that our society is divided into classes based on groups of people standing in the same relationship to the means of production. The Socialist Party holds that the interests of these classes are antagonistic and irreconcilable and that a constant struggle goes on between them over the division of the wealth that. society produces. The Socialist Party understands that the ability of the present ruling class, the capitalists, to maintain their power is due to their using their economic strength to control the State (government} and use it as “an instrument of oppression” against the rest of society. The Socialist Party agrees that the owning class is the ruling class because it controls the State. The government protects the capitalist class by protecting the source of its economic strength private property. It is the will of the capitalist class that the rights of private property be protected. It uses its control of government to write down its will and call it law. It uses its control of government to enforce its will, the law. The law is the voice of the ruling class. Although democracy literally means “rule of the people”, we live in a class society in which one class maintains its favourable economic position because it controls the rule by the people, since the capitalist class is a small minority the capitalist class controls the government only as long as the majority of the voters permit them to. It means allowing the masses to vote but using capitalist control of the communication of information to teach the masses to vote against their own interests.

It is on this issue of capturing political power by the workers that the widest division of opinion exists amongst those professing to be socialists. Whether this taking power by the working class or the social revolution as it is called, will be accomplished gradually or suddenly, legally or illegally, peacefully or violently has been the most vital questions asked within the labour movement. The Socialist Party has chosen its path.  The revolt against the injustice of class oppression and exploitation is as old as these social evils themselves. Revolutionary organizations trying to overthrow capitalism are as old as capitalism itself. Socialism can only come about through a successful overthrow of capitalism by a self-organized working class.

The Socialist Party believes in the possibility of humankind to shape its own destiny,  to abolish all social conditions which make men and women into oppressed, exploited, mutilated, miserable beings; to realize a society in which the free development of each becomes a precondition for the free development of every individual. No other class than the working class has the potential to replace capitalism with a socialist society. The fate of humankind is for that reason tied to the victory of the world working class.  Humanity is at a crossroads: either socialism or barbarism. The awareness of the potential self-destruction of humankind (environmental catastrophe, nuclear war devastation or whatever) is today growing. Either it will be the victory of the world socialist revolution, or the decline and fall of human civilisation, if not the disappearance of the human race. For the Socialist Party, the emancipation of humanity has to be total and global. The overthrow of capitalism, of private property, commodity production, and wage labour, is a necessary precondition for the successful achievement of human emancipation.