Our Revolution

Socialism is the reorganisation of society on the basis of the common ownership by the people of the land, mines, factories, means of transport, as well as the health, educational and cultural services required to fulfil their needs. There can be no fundamental change in the living conditions of the people while a minority holds economic power in the natural resources of a country and in the right to exploit the majority for individual advantages and personal gain. The Socialist Party insists that the basis of exploitation — the use of men and women for personal profits and power — lie in the capitalist system. Reforms do not remove the villain of the piece from the scene of action. While the privileged few holds economic power the people will bear the weight of any measures of partial palliatives. The Socialist Party believe that the fundamental basis of a true socialist society must be change from a capitalist system of ownership, exploitation, and control to one of common ownership, democratic administration and control of the affairs of the world by the men and women who produce its wealth. When it is a question of changing a social system based on the assumption that a few are entitled to use the lives and labour of the many for personal profit and power, the forces of the State, based on this assumption, oppose the contention that the many have the right to organise a system of society which will provide for ownership and administration of the natural resources of the country in the interests of the many and not in the interests of the few.  The Socialist Party will organise and educate our fellow-workers so that they will be able to bring about the change in the basis of our social system. We hold that the new system of social ownership and administration can be introduced by the will of the people through the capture of the State machinery. The Socialist Party recognises human welfare as the supreme good. Only when our own and other peoples have established socialism will war be abolished, and a cultural renaissance, based on mutual respect and harmony, unite the peoples of the world in an era of peace, and happier days than the generations of capitalism have ever known.

Things are getting much more serious than the average person thinks or realises or that the media lets people know. No matter how much you are talking about the expansion of the economy, the poor are getting much poorer. The poverty is spreading. The wealth is concentrating. We are becoming a world of have’s and have-not’s. We are heading for a very serious, very difficult time. It’s going to happen as a cataclysmic eruption, it effects are going to be global. Revolution is not the result of subversion of the existing order, nor does it come about through conspiracy. Revolution is the first and inevitable step in the creation of a new social order on the basis.

We have the economic foundation today to give everyone on the planet the fundamentals for a cultured, decent existence. Everybody could go into a nice home and everybody could eat a healthy meal. The resources and materials exists right now. It will be expanded and made better, but we don’t have to create it. We don’t need the State as the owner of all the means of production to guarantee their development. The control of scarcity is the foundation of social strife. Today that can be eliminated. We’re talking about abundance. We’re talking about a world where the automated means of production can operate twenty-four/seven. We’re talking about a world where everybody can become involved and participate in the development of society. We’re talking about a world of happy people. Our troubles arise from material scarcity. When we do away with that, we can begin to build the positive thing, happiness. Happiness is an emotion that arises with contributing and cooperating in fellowship. We’re talking about entering a stage of development that’s no longer controlled by scarcity. We can talk in terms of abundance and that abundance obviously is here. All you have to do is look around. There is plenty of plenty. Happiness is a social thing. The idea is to have as full a life as humanly possible. Reacting to scarcity, we engage in struggling to get food, struggling to get clothing, struggling to get a house, struggling to get an education, struggling for all these things. If these necessaries are in abundance then we can turn to the real matters of life, the intellectual and cultural well-being.

So for the first time, we will truly create our own history. We create our history now, but under defined circumstances that limit our choices. In other words, we are not liberating ourselves. We’ve created our own history but it’s been a limited history. What we’ve created has been limited by the circumstances wherein we carry out our struggles. For example, the struggle against slavery couldn’t really end slavery, it could only transform slavery. We’re talking about an end to the struggle over allocation of scarcity. We’re talking about no longer having to struggle about getting a house. They will be stamped out by a robot at a factory. We will no longer worry about getting food, no longer worry about getting an education. Then, we can go ahead and create.

All we will need, for instance, is an agency that determines that if there will be ten million babies born this year, we will need so many million diapers this year. Somebody has to do that. Some work will need to be done, of course, but the allocation of human resources for that work could be done on a local level. Reconstruction will be so much easier to organise because of the tremendous productivity of the technology and machinery that we have. We have to reach our fellow-workers with a vision. It’s up to them to create this new world. To do this, though, they are going to have to know what to do. We cannot build a revolutionary movement with those who are simply angry with the system. We don’t need anti-social malcontents, we need thinkers with a vision of the kind of world that is possible.

The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggle. Now, when class struggle is over and when real human history begins, what does history mean? What we are talking about now is the ability of human beings to grab hold of themselves and their destiny and create a history of accomplishments, rather than this action and reaction. Accomplishments will be things that we choose to do, not that which we have to do, but which we choose to do.

The first task of socialism is to rebuild the earth, to clean it up, to set about reconstructing the earth, reclaiming the earth, becoming part of the earth, again, to stabilise the earth, and consequently stabilise humanity. Happiness will arise in that process. What would you do with yourself if you no longer had to worry about your food, shelter, and clothing?