BUILD A SOCIALIST SOCIETY

In all class societies, there is one class that rules over others. Capitalism is no exception whatever particular state-form may embody the rule of the capitalists. So long as the challenge from the working class does not seriously put into question the stability of the system, parliamentary democracy is a form of government with considerable advantages to the capitalists compared with more openly dictatorial forms of rule. The capitalists prefer to avoid resorting to open force.

Socialism can be built only when the working class has taken state power from the capitalist class: that is when there has been a revolution. Revolutions can only be one by class-conscious workers organised in a party with a clear understanding of the nature of today's society and committed to the overthrow of capitalism. The Labour Party is not such a party, nor can it ever become one. Labour governments pursue capitalist policies not because it is in the hands of the right wing, but because the Labour Party is itself a capitalist party whose role is to keep the present system in existence. Failure to understand this is a failure to understand political realities. Those who criticise the Labour Party in office as though it were anything other than a capitalist party, who suggest that the obstacles in the way of ’real change’ to socialism come from the right wing leaders, help to deceive the workers and divert them along the old reformist paths.  It is Leftists who keep alive the illusion that the Labour Party is always being betrayed by a right-wing leadership. Their policies contain nothing that is incompatible with capitalism. It allows exploitation itself to remain in place. Rather than to allow capitalist power and its profits to be reduced even a little, let poverty and injustice continue forever! The Socialist Party well know that as long as capitalism lasts only a few cosmetic modifications can be made in it.


Socialism eliminates the anarchy of capitalism and its crises, by common ownership of the means of production and collective planning of the economy. This removes the tremendous barriers to production that capitalist relations have erected. When all of society has been transformed, the ulcers left over from capitalism have been eliminated, and the community of workers has been established, then communism, completely class-free society, will have been achieved, and humanity will enter a whole new stage of history. There will no longer be the need for the state, since there will no longer be any class to suppress, and the state will be replaced with common administration by all of society.


Unemployment will be ended because socialism will be able to make full use of the labour of everyone in society, while at the same time developing and introducing new machinery and scientific methods to expand output. As machines can replace workers, workers will not be thrown into the streets, but transferred to other jobs–according to an overall plan–and gradually the work day for all workers will be reduced. The nature of work itself will change completely, because the labor of the workers will no longer go to enrich capital to further enslave the working class, but to improve life today, while providing for the future, according to the conscious plan of the working class itself. The pride that workers have in their work will be unhindered by any sense that they are working themselves, or someone else, out of a job, or that they are being driven to produce for the private benefit of some moneybags, under the orders of his foremen and the constant threat of being fired. Machines will no longer be weapons in the hands of the capitalists to grind down the working class, and workers will no longer be a mere extension of the machine, as they are under capitalism. Instead, machines will become weapons in the hands of the working class in its own struggle to revolutionise society. The organisation of work will be the province of the working class itself. The working class will have a variety of organisations to involve the masses of people in the process of running and remaking society.  All this will unleash the stored-up knowledge of the working class, based on its direct experience in production, and inspire workers to make new breakthroughs in improving production. Work itself will become a joy and enrichment of the worker’s life, instead of a miserable means to sustain existence, as it is under capitalism.


What must the Socialist Party do? There must be continuous socialist explanation and education. Politics and the nature of capitalism must be laid bare. All illusions about easy shortcuts to socialism must be exposed as dead-ends, dissipating the strength of the working class by engaging in ineffective activities. It is our job as socialists to show men and women that only by fighting for and achieving socialism can they give meaning and dignity to their lives. Humanity is doomed unless ideals of sympathy, solidarity, cooperation and compassion, the values of socialism reorient the struggle for a new society. A new society shall be built–in which our children, our children’s children, and the billion billion children to come will never be forced to hunger for food or shelter or love – a new society without exploitation of man by man. To this end, the Socialist Party resolves to devote its resources and its members, their energy.

In the slave system, it was considered “natural” for one group of people, the slaveowners, to own other people, the slaves. In a capitalist society, this idea is regarded as criminal and absurd, because the bourgeoisie has no need for slaves as private property (at least not in its own country). But it has every need for wage-slaves, proletarians. So it presents as “natural” the kind of society where a small group, the capitalists, own the means of production and on that basis force the great majority of society to work to enrich them. The slaveowners and the capitalists have one fundamental thing in common–they are both exploiters, and they both regard it as the correct and perfect order of things for a small group of parasites to live off the majority of laboring people. They differ only in the form in which they exploit and therefore in their view of how society should be organized to ensure this exploitation. When humanity has achieved socialism, society as a whole will consciously reject the idea that any one group should privately own the means of production. Then wage-slavery, based on the ownership of capital as private property, will be seen as just as criminal and absurd as ancient slavery, based on the ownership of other people as private property. The proletariat, by its own nature as a class, has no interest in promoting private gain at the expense of others and every interest in promoting cooperation. For only in this way can it emancipate itself and all humanity.


If all this seems like a mere dream now, it is only because the rule of capital has so greatly distorted development, and brought such decay.