Our global society is in crisis with the rise of the right and left demagogue populists. It is an old pattern, economic recessions often result in society becoming very much more brutal for most people. The class struggle was not invented by Marx. It is a fact, which exists whether we wish it or not. While capitalism lasts, so too will the inevitable class struggle. The change from capitalism to socialism is a revolution, the most far-reaching revolution in human history. The abolition of private ownership of the means of production is what the capitalists oppose with all their might. We do not consider that socialisation is a piecemeal process. It is the Socialist Party's determined intention to do all in our power to spread the principles of socialism throughout the world. Being socialists our politics always includes socialism. The most important work that men and women can engage in is that of helping on the overthrow of capitalism, and the building up of the Socialist Co-operative Commonwealth.
For Marx and Engels socialism meant a free association of completely free men and women, where no separation between ‘private and common interest’ existed: a society where ‘everyone could give himself a complete education in whatever domain he fancied’. For ‘man’s activity becomes an adverse force which subjugates him, instead of his being its master’ when there is ‘a division of labour’; everyone must then have a profession, that is a ‘determined, exclusive sphere of activity’ he has not chosen and in which ‘he is forced to remain if he does not want to lose his means of existence’. In their socialist society, on the contrary, a person would be given ‘the possibility to do this today and that tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to go fishing in the afternoon, to do cattle breeding in the evening, to criticise after dinner’, as he or she chose (‘The German Ideology').
The 'dictatorship of the proletaria't is a much misused phrase; when socialism is in being there will be no proletariat, as we understand the term today and no dictatorship. The dictatorship, so far as it is genuine and defensible, is the suppression by workers’ of capitalism and the attempt to re-establish it. This should be a temporary phase. Once the capitalist have given up any attempt to re-establish capitalism, then away with dictatorship; away with compulsion.
There would be little compulsion in socialism; some people may say: “What the majority decides is good enough for me.” Others will say: “I like to have a voice in it.” As a rule, when things affecting a group of people who are working together come up for decision every one of the group will join in and give his or her opinion, and generally the thing will be decided by mutual agreement. Compulsion of any kind is repugnant to socialist ideals. No-one may make a wage-slave of another; no-one may hoard up goods for himself that he does not require and cannot use, but the only way to prevent such practices is not by making them punishable; it is by creating a society in which no-one needs to become a wage slave, and no-one cares to be encumbered with a private hoard of goods when all that he needs is readily supplied as he needs it from the common storehouse when all things that nature and mankind produce are free in abundance for the asking.
Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class. Labour Party politicians talked about socialism, in practice they carried on running capitalism. They did introduce certain reforms which ameliorated the effects of some of the worst features of capitalism in the spheres of health, housing, and family support. Collectively, these became known as the ‘Welfare State’ – but they were not socialism. The essential feature of capitalism, that very thing which makes the system one of exploitation and robbery of the mass of wage workers by the ruling class of capitalists, namely the private ownership of the means of production and exchange, this remained untouched.
The Socialist Party proposes that all resources, all land and buildings, all manufacturing establishments, mines, and means of transportation and communication, should be, not private property, but the common property of all. We propose that production be made to serve the needs of the majority, rather than to serve the needs of a few parasites. We hold that production and distribution of goods can be planned to avoid anything resembling the crises in capitalist society. Such an economy on the basis of common ownership without any class divide is called socialism. Experience has proved that planning under capitalism is impossible. When the Socialist Party speak of planned economy we do not mean nationalisation or the mixed economy which leaves all the wastefulness, all the inefficiency and all the criminal parasitism of capitalism untouched, only increasing the power of the big industrialists, the financiers, and the government bureaucrats.
We mean something entirely different. What we have in mind is very simple and clear-cut. Do away with production for profit. But isn’t it a utopia? Isn't that a socialist dream? The members of the Socialist Party are realists, claiming that our case is not only capable of fulfilment, but that the forces to realise it are already in existence. With the workers coming into their own, the road is open for economic and cultural progress undreamed of under capitalism. Production is rapidly increased. Standards of living rise higher and higher. Education, art, invention blossom in socialism. Exploitation of man by man is abolished. The rule is soon established: “let each person work according to ability; let each person receive from the common stock of goods according to needs.” This is socialism. Man himself changes under such conditions. Soon the State is no more needed. In a classless society, there is nobody to suppress or keep in check. They manage their affairs without the State force. Mankind is free, forever.
Socialism is “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” As such, it is the watchword for free individual fulfilment – to be confused with neither the mirage of individualism without individuality mired in the conformism promoted by advertising; nor crude egalitarianism. The development of the specific needs and talents of each person contributes to the universal development of the human species. Reciprocally, the free development of each person implies the free development of all, because emancipation is not a solitary pleasure.
No comments:
Post a Comment