No-Ownership

The environmental crises grows ever more threatening with each new day yet we are no closer to a solution because that requires nothing less than a social revolution. Some day or fellow-workers will awaken from their stupor. They will set about the task of ridding themselves of an obsolete social system; a system that prevents them from enjoying the fruits of their labours. They will take the land, the factories and “all that in it is” from those who now own it and will work to produce the necessities and comforts of life for all. You name it and the nations attending the climate change conferences have reneged on it. Ideas of a world compatible with a profit-driven market economy are illusory and their prospects for reform in the interests of humans and the environment a fallacy.

The aim of the Socialist Party is to persuade others to become socialist and act for themselves, organising democratically and without leaders, to bring about a new socialist society. We are solely concerned with building a movement for socialism. We are not a reformist party with a program of policies to patch up capitalism. Our aim is to build a movement working towards a socialist society and seeks to deepen and better articulate our understanding of the world.

 The Socialist Party has consistently advocated a fully democratic society based upon co-operation and production for use. It has opposed every single war and offered solidarity to fellow-workers in their class struggle Since its foundation the Socialist Party has functioned as a democratic and leader-free organisation. The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader and there are no followers.  The more who join the Socialist Party, the more we will be able to get our ideas across. The more experiences we will be able to draw on and greater will be the new ideas for building the movement for socialism.

In all class societies, one section of the population controls the use of the means of production. Another way of putting this is that the members of this section or class own the means of production, since to be in a position to control the use of something is to own it, whether or not this is accompanied by some legal title deed.

It follows that a class-free society is one in which the use of the means of production is controlled by all members of society on an equal basis, and not just by a section of them to the exclusion of the rest. For a society to be ‘class-free’ would mean that within society there would be no group with the exception, perhaps, of temporary delegate bodies, freely elected by the community and subject always to recall which would exercise, as a group, any special control over access to the instruments of production; and no group receiving, as a group, preferential treatment in distribution. In a class-free society, every member is in a position to take part, on equal terms with every other member, in deciding how the means of production should be used. Every member of society is socially equal, standing in exactly the same relationship to the means of production as every other member. Similarly, every member of society has access to the fruits of production on an equal basis.

Once the use of the means of production is under the democratic control of all members of society, class ownership has been abolished. The means of production can still be said to belong to those who control and benefit from their use, in this case to the whole population organised on a democratic basis, and so to be commonly owned by them. Common ownership is when no person is excluded from the possibility of controlling, using and managing the means of production, distribution, and consumption. Each member of society can acquire the capacity, that is to say, has the opportunity to realise a variety of goals, for example, to consume what they want, to use means of production for the purposes of socially necessary or unnecessary work, to administer production and distribution, to plan to allocate resources, and to make decisions about short term and long term collective goals. Common ownership, then, refers to every individuals potential ability to benefit from the wealth of society and to participate in its running.

Even so, to use the word "ownership" can be misleading in that this does not fully bring out the fact that the transfer to all members of society of the power to control the production of wealth makes the very concept of property redundant. With common ownership no one is excluded from the possibility of controlling or benefiting from the use of the means of production, so that the concept of property in the sense of exclusive possession is meaningless: no one is excluded, there are no non-owners. We could invent some new term such as no-ownership and talk about the classless alternative society to capitalism being a no-ownership society, but the same idea can be expressed without neologism if common ownership is understood as being a social relationship and not a form of property ownership. This social relationship equality between human beings with regard to the control of the use of the means of production can equally accurately be described by the terms classless society and democratic control as by common ownership since these three terms are only different ways of describing it from different angles. The use of the term common ownership to refer to the basic social relationship of the alternative society to capitalism is not to be taken to imply therefore that common ownership of the means of production could exist without democratic control. Common ownership means democratic control means a class-free society. When we refer to the society based on common ownership, generally we shall use the term socialism, though we have no objection to others using the term communism since for us these terms mean exactly the same and are interchangeable.