In the name of humanity

Socialism is the taking, in the name of humanity, of all the wealth that exists on the planet. In the society of the future, socialism will be the enjoyment of all existing wealth, by all and according to the principle: From each according to abilities, to each according to needs.  People will use the planet, the machines, the factories, transportation and will serve everyone in common with them.  We want all the wealth to be taken directly by the people themselves and to be kept in their hands, and that the people themselves decide the best way to enjoy it, be it for production or consumption. In future socialism, production will be so abundant that there will be no need to ration consumption, or to demand from people more work than they are willing or able to give. Right now, we can imagine this immense growth in production through the new technologies and robotics. Future society will see the end of commercial competition, one of the fundamental principles of capitalist production, which has as its motto: Mors tua vita mea, your death is my life. The ruin of one makes the fortune of another. And this relentless fight happens from nation to nation, from region to region, from individual to individual, between workers as well as between capitalists. One industry prospers where another industry declines. A worker finds work where another has lost it.

This individualist principle of capitalist production, every person for oneself against all others, and everyone against everyone will be replaced by the true principle of human society: all for one and one for all.  Imagine how great will be the growth of production, when each of us, far from needing to fight against all the others, will be helped by them when we will have them not as enemies but as cooperators. If the collective work of ten people attains results absolutely impossible for one person alone, how great will be the results obtained by the large-scale cooperation of all men and women who, today, work against each other?

The development automation and cybernetics, these powerful helpers of work, as large as it seems to us today, is quite minimal in comparison to what it will be in socialism. Today, the technology often has the ignorance of the capitalist against it, but more often still his interest. How many machines and inventions are going without being applied only because they do not bring an immediate benefit to the capitalist?  So many discoveries, so many applications of science go unheeded, only because they do not bring enough profit to the capitalist!

Technology is today the enemy of people, and rightfully so, because they are to workers the Frankenstein monster that comes to starve them, to degrade them, to torture them, to crush them. And what immense benefits it would be, if on the contrary, it augmented their labour and we are no longer enslaved by the machine; on the contrary, they would be at our service, helping us and working for our well-being.

Finally, it is necessary to take into account the huge savings that will be made on the three elements of work: the force, the instruments and the material, which are horribly wasted today, because they are used for the production of absolutely useless things when they are not harmful to humanity. How many workers, how much material, and how many tools are used today by the armies of the land, sea, and air to build all these arsenals of arms. How many of these forces are wasted to produce luxury objects that serve nothing but the needs of vanity and corruption! And when all this force, all these materials, all these resources are used for the production of objects that themselves will serve to produce, what a prodigious growth in production we will see.

We can let everyone take according to their will since there will be enough for everyone. We will no longer need to demand more work than anyone wants to give because there will always be enough products for tomorrow. And it’s thanks to this abundance that work will lose the dreadful character of enslavement, in leaving to it only the charm of a cultural and physical need, like that of studying and living in harmony with nature. Socialism is not only possible; it is a necessity.

Some on the Left support the individual attribution of products by worker-owned cooperatives. If we preserve the individual appropriation of products of work, we will find ourselves witnessing an accumulation of greater or lesser wealth, according to more or less to merit, or rather, to the skill, of individuals. Equality would thus have disappeared because those who had managed to accumulate more wealth would already have been thus elevated above the level of the others. But the individual attribution of products would re-establish not only inequality among men but also inequality among different forms of work. We would almost immediately see the reappearance of “clean” and “dirty” work, of “noble” and “ignoble” work: the former would be done by the rich, the latter would be the assignment of the poor. So it would no longer be calling and taste that led a person to dedicate oneself to one type of activity as opposed to another: it would be self-interest, the hope of gaining more in a certain profession. In this way, laziness and diligence, merit and lack of merit, good and bad, vice and virtue, and, by consequence, “reward” on one hand and “punishment” on the other, the law, the judge, the henchman, the prison, would all reappear.

With collective work, that imposes upon us the necessity of large-scale production and large-scale implementation of machines, with this ever-growing tendency of modern work to serve itself of the work of preceding generations – how will we be able to determine which parts of the product belong to whom? It’s absolutely impossible, and our adversaries themselves know this so well that they end up saying “Well, we will use as a basis for distribution the hours spent working,” but, at the same time, they themselves admit that this would be unjust, because three hours of work from Peter might produce as much as five hours of work from Paul. We call ourselves socialists because this was the word that distinguished us from individualists.

The Socialist Party unmasks these Leftists who would like to limit the range of revolutionary thought.