Mankind's Future

All people have the right to leave their country but they do not have the right to enter another without permission. The right to move was recognized internationally over a half-century ago with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 13 of the Declaration states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state" and "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." This contradiction is creating a dilemma.  Large numbers of people are desperately attempting to leave their homelands.

Receiving countries face a "birth rate crisis" while sending countries' populations continue to grow. The falling birth rate in Europe and elsewhere is expected to lead to labour shortages. With more deaths than births, such countries are experiencing population ageing and will be facing population decline in the near future.  Governments are raising retirement ages, increasing contributions of workers to retirement and cutting health-care and benefits for the elderly.

In the less developed regions those in the working ages, especially the youth, face difficulties finding gainful employment. And even among those who are employed, many are seeking better opportunities in the wealthier countries.

Modern race prejudice nourishes because capitalism produces chronic problems in employment, housing, and welfare. The working class suffers these problems but they do not understand their cause. They are, therefore, ready to blame the problems onto any fashionable scapegoat, including foreigners or any other group which happens to be a readily identifiable minority.

the capitalist system is responsible for the horrors of modern society still awaits the bold economist to explode it. The basis of society, the private ownership of the means of life, breeds the most hideous manifestations. The capitalist class, who own and control the means of wealth production and distribution, force the working class in order to live to operate those instruments for the profit of the former class.  The capitalist class — national and international—being in possession of the wealth stolen from the workers, compete with each other for the control of the world’s markets. This capitalist class, split into warring factions, The Socialist Party sympathise with our fellow workers in their struggle against the hideously squalid conditions that prevail among them but must record our hostility to any movement that is not based upon the class struggle. The blood-thirsty gang known as the international capitalist class know full well the horrible conditions that are rampant among the wealth producers, but while they pretend to condole with them, they do not intend to ease by a fraction the exploitation to which they subject them.

Until the working class understand the class struggle, and recognise that the capitalist system and its parasitic class are alone responsible for the whole of the horrors we now witness, the common anomalies always prevalent, i.e., abject poverty and misery on one hand and riotous luxury and affluence on the other; international trade wars for markets and sea routes with their attendant bloodshed, will run concurrently with the cruel and ceaseless slaughter of the workers from the prolongation of the worst of all wars—the Class War. The only hope lies in the deluded, toiling masses of wealth producers mustering under the crimson banner of socialism, determined to gain control of the machinery of government, including the armed forces, to use it as the agent of emancipation, and to usher in the system of society based upon the common ownership of the means of life; the social system wherein the interests of the human family shall form a harmonious whole. Socialism is the only way forward for the rational use of science and technology. The interests of the class that profit by capitalism are no longer in accord with social progress, and if a further advance is to be made this function-less class must be dispensed with. Among socialists, it has been a long recognised fact that capitalism has out-lived its usefulness and is so full of contradictions that it is “its own grave-digger.” Capitalism to-day is guilty of clogging up the wheels of progress. Some socialists speak of the individual employer as a “robber.” But each employer is but a part of the system. No single employer can lessen exploitation and continue to exist. It is the system as a whole that must be judged. Class antagonisms will be solved by the abolition of these antagonisms in the co-operative commonwealth.

Reformists say that capitalism isn’t what it used to be and that Marx may have been right in his time but that was over a century ago. But can reformists tell us what exactly has changed in terms of the exploitation of the working class since he wrote? Today, like yesterday, to build socialism we must make a revolution. We must overthrow the State power of the capitalist class that maintains their ability to exploit.  The right-wing attempt to prove that socialism is incompatible with democracy, that socialism cannot be but authoritarian. The fact is that revolutions claiming to be socialist have so far either produced socialism. As a matter of fact, Marx’s ideas on human emancipation is incompatible with any state and one-party rule, and that a true socialisation of the means of production requires a true participation of all citizens in social decision-making. The socialists of the world will bring about the cooperative commonwealth and the brotherhood of man. We must declare uncompromisingly and unequivocally for socialism. We in the Socialist Party are revolutionists, no class-conscious socialist would be satisfied with a platform of palliatives. Reformism upholds the private ownership of capital; the competitive system; the profit system; wage slavery, and it ignores the class struggle. The Socialist Party stands for the abolition of wage slavery; severance with all capitalist and reform parties; abolition of class rule; the establishment of world socialism and the Brotherhood of Man. Inside socialism, private ownership and barter in capital being at an end, money would lose the functions which it possessed under capitalism and would be abolished.