The idea of a socialist cooperative commonwealth is that wealth comes from our association together in society. The Socialist Party holds a vision of a society based on solidarity, of collective empowerment, of social institutions that nurture the fuller development of all. Ours is a struggle to establish a human world in the midst of the myriad crises thrown up by the capitalist system. If social harmony, peace and environmental integrity are to be brought about, we need socialism. Capitalism is the root cause in the catastrophe that is climate change and global warfare. Marx and Engels wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” about how the long-standing class struggle between producers and appropriators always ends “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” It’s “socialism or barbarism.” wrote Rosa Luxemburg with a later Marxist scholar adding “if we’re lucky.” The rich are destroying the chances for a decent human future. Capitalists are driven to pillage and poison the planet by the profit imperative compelling them to relentlessly commodify everything and to drive business expansion. Beseeching our capitalist masters to be nicer and smarter for the common good is a fool’s errand. The Socialist Party recognises that there’s no appealing to capitalists' better nature where money and profit are concerned. The Socialist Party understands that five people owning as much wealth as the bottom half of the species while millions starve and lack adequate health-care is capitalism working as intended. know that giant corporations buying up every last family farm, tapping every new reserve of cheap global labour, raping the planet’s raw materials in alliance with local warlords, purchasing the votes of nearly every elected official, extracting every last fossil fuel and driving the planet past the limits of environmental sustainability is capitalism working. The Socialist Party knows that a giant military-industrial complex, generating vast fortunes for the owners of the high-tech “defence” industry while schools and hospitals are underfunded—we can see that capitalism is working.
The only solution is for workers and citizens to organize collectively to overthrow the profits system and take control of what they produce and how society is organised. The only thing that’s going to ever bring about any meaningful change is an ongoing, dedicated, socialist movement that must coalesce into a unified popular movement that can really do things. If the socialist movement has no future then there can be no future for humanity itself.
“The history of all hitherto existing society i.e. recorded history is the history of class struggle.” With these words Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 introduced their Communist Manifesto.
Class struggles arise out of a form of production which divides society into classes, one of which carries out the actual process of production (slave, serf, wage-worker), while the other (slave-owner, lord, capitalist employer) enjoys a part of the product without having to work to produce it. Class struggle, and with it the setting up of a State apparatus to protect the interests of the ruling class, came out of the division of human society into classes whose interests clashed in production. Class struggle and the State continue through history as long as human society remains divided in classes. But when the working class takes power it does so in order to end the class divisions – to bring in a new form of production in which there is no longer any class living on the labour of another class; in other words, to bring about a class-free society, in which all serve society as a whole. When this process has been completed (on a world scale), there will be no class conflict because there are no classes with separate interests, and therefore there will be no need of a State – an apparatus of force – to protect one set of interests against another. The State will “wither away”. As Engels put it: “Government over persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production.”
Socialism is primarily distinguished by analysing every social and political problem from a class point of view. This means that socialism always explains and interprets events only in the light of the fundamental conflict whose course determines the direction of historical development: the conflict between the capitalist class and the working class. Socialism interprets the role of the state as the political executive of the capitalist class, whose historical function is to maintain the social power of the employers and investors and to uphold the system of property relations upon which that social power is based.
The working class can play no revolutionary role in society while the majority of its members desire to improve their situation individually, within the framework of the existing society, by leaving the ranks of their class.
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