Educate, Educate, and Educate

The Socialist Party seldom instructs our fellow-workers and rarely tells them what to believe, preferring instead to indicate why it might be wise to distrust what those in control tell us we should believe. Without the vision of how a socialist society will rejuvenate all our lives, how do we expect to win the support of the working class? Education and understanding is the key. Education, no matter how hard or impossible it may seem has a positive effect. Understanding the practicalities of an alternative society is vital. Vital that we not only realise what is wrong with capitalist society but how it really operates and manipulates our everyday lives.  Anger and passion are admirable and it is exactly what we need. What disappoints is seeing people missing the importance of a basic understanding of the essential elements of a socialist society. It can only be established by a majority of socialists throughout the world. It will be a society based on production for use and not production for profit. It must mean the abolition of money and all markets and with it all, the sickening, competitive relationships that capitalism forces us into.

Why is there is hunger in a world with the potential for abundance; the simplistic answer is there must be an imbalance between supply and demand, so let’s grow more food. Alas, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of capitalist economics is aware that food is not produced to be eaten, but instead to be exchanged for money with a view to realising a profit; if you don’t have the cash to pay, you don’t get the bread. Attempting to sanitise the capitalist system has never and will never work.

 For most of us, life is a tedious existence consisting of days spent doing an often mundane, uninspiring job week in, week out, punctuated by brief spells of recreation, socialising and occasionally a holiday. Even those workers who produce useful or essential goods and services are alienated from any fulfilment because of the negative nature of the employment relationship. Work is generally regarded as a necessary evil into which we are coerced by the need to earn a “living”, and all the concomitant imperatives associated with employment—such as time-keeping, fear of unemployment, etc.—prevent the majority of us from enjoying the positive aspects of work and its relationships. Humanity must take second place to the needs of capitalism.

Before capitalism there were other social systems and different rulers. In feudalism, land was appropriated by and exclusively for an aristocracy. It exploited the masses by forcing them to toil on the land for a pittance to generate the wealth that supported castles and manor houses, the church and monasteries, For several centuries the power of this tiny elite went largely unquestioned. But then a class of merchant/entrepreneurs emerged, challenging the landed aristocracy with a new means of industrialised production. They drove the peasants off the land to build factories. That elite lived off the exploitation of men women and children in “dark satanic mills”.  Each elite produced justifications to placate the masses who were being exploited, to brainwash them into believing the system existed as part of a natural order or even for their benefit. The aristocracy relied on a divine right of kings, the capitalist class on the bogus claims of social mobility and equality of opportunity. Plutocratic rule has allowed a tiny elite to stash away more wealth and accrue more power than any feudal monarch could ever have dreamt of. And because of the global nature of this elite, its corruption is more endemic, more destructive than any ever known to mankind. Global corporations are filling the oceans with pollution and the plastic from our consumerist society, and chopping down the forests - the lungs of our planet - for palm-oil plantations. Just as a feudal Lords and Barons were driven by the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of land; just as early capitalists were driven not by ethics but by the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of industrialisation; so today's employing and owning class is driven not by ethics but the pursuit of profits through the control of the planet.. They care nothing for you or your children. It is a cold-calculating system, unconcerned about the fate of people or the planet but with only one goal – wealth accumulation. Take a look at the whole picture and choose whether this is really the future you wish for you and your family.

Socialism is characterised by economic emancipation, with people determining—in full consciousness of the consequences of their choice—their own needs, and freely satisfying these. In like manner, a socialist society will be concerned with educational emancipation or with people finding their own voice.

As members of the Socialist Party, we will continue to learn so that we may teach others to help build a majority of socialists fighting for the establishment of a socialist society and not help fuel the illusion that capitalism can be reformed. People cannot be led to socialism. We, for our part, can only continue to point out the remedy, Confidence in our future imbues our members, from the old- timers to the newest recruits. In its turn, this confidence is the best guarantee of the victory of our cause – the cause of socialism.  More and more workers are beginning to look with disfavour upon the rule of the richest 1% and their agents and are already in process of making the transition from a purely negative attitude toward capitalism to a positive standpoint in support of socialism. Our members are proud of the Socialist Standard, and justly so. It is playing a vital role in the class struggle generally and in the growth of our movement in particular; it is destined to play a far greater one in the immediate future.  The presence of our party finds its physical expression in a centrally-located, well-kept and efficiently run head-office. The battle to emancipate the population from ideological conditioning and false consciousness has barely begun.