Away with all the quack remedies for patching up capitalism—the sugar-coated pills of reforms, and let our fellow-workers prescribe the only scientific treatment for the ills of society—socialism. So long as capitalism remains, so long will doctors be overworked in the thankless task of patching up people, whose chief affliction is not the ravages of some viruses, but overwork, anxiety, and poverty. In these times of the internet and global cable news services, we are given the advantages of knowing fully and almost at once what the other half of the world is thinking. We find that they are thinking very much the same as we are. They are thinking that life is very hard, and the outlook very cheerless for the humanity. If they are workers they are wondering why it is so difficult to get and to keep employment; why there is food and the means of producing food alongside idle men who lack a sufficiency of it; why it is that work is so drab, tedious and exhausting when obviously it could be made very much more agreeable; why the ingenuity of craftsmen, scientists, inventors and so on is being devoted so largely to producing and perfecting weapons of destruction; why the world’s statesmen all proclaim their brotherly sentiments, but cannot translate them into the practical form of abolishing or reducing the military. These and many other questions flow through the minds of the world’s workers as they set off to or return from their employers' factory, mine or office, or line up at the Labour Exchange or its equivalent, in New York, in London, in Tokyo, and in Berlin.
The Socialist Party can look at the world without pessimism or despair. We in the Socialist Party never built up false hopes, and have not been disillusioned. Seeing the world as it is we know how great the task is, but we know what can be done by determined, organised work towards a clearly-outlined goal. The world is out of joint because the social system is faulty at the foundation. The private ownership of the means of production and distribution is no longer necessary or desirable. It produces the evils of poverty, unemployment, competition, war and class hatred. It has got to be abolished. Instead of an anarchistic war of private owners seeking profit and permitting the workers to produce wealth only when profit is to be obtained by so doing, the social system needs to be refashioned on the new basis of common ownership. Society must assume possession of its means of life. The private owners must be dispossessed. Their private interests and their class privilege must not be allowed to stand in the way of social progress and the welfare of the whole community. The Socialist Party has taken on the great task of organising for that end. We concentrate on the one vital question, capitalism to be replaced by Socialism, private ownership to give place to common ownership, privilege to give place to equality. Our aim is one to which the workers of the whole world can rally, ‘without distinction of race or sex’. The World Socialist Movement is the one movement able to face the present global worries and troubles with understanding and confidence. Socialism can only come about when a majority of the working class want it
Workers should reject the nonsense idea of nationalism and should unite for their common good to abolish capitalism and nationalism and work for socialism.
Capitalism is the pursuit of profit maximisation - the thing that underpins capitalism. Socialism is an economy which nurtures our capacity for solidarity, cooperation, reciprocity, mutual aid, altruism, caring, sharing, compassion, and love. Increasingly, research across many disciplines has shown that we are hard-wired to cooperate—that in fact, the survival of the human species has depended on our ability to work together. The Socialist Party holds no blueprint but possesses a broad framework which aligns with the values of humanity - solidarity, participatory democracy, equality in class, race, and gender, with sustainability and pluralism, which means that it can’t be a one-size-fits-all approach. Nevertheless, the idea of living well and in harmony with nature and each other permeates everything the World Socialist Movement advocates. The idea of the socialist solidarity economy is to build and knit together all of these practices in order to create a new society. We need to build an economy that provides social solidarity. We will all be engaged in the valuable social and economic work of providing for our children, elders, neighbours, and communities—not for money, but from our innate capacity for companionship and compassion. Two roads lie ahead before humanity. The first road leads to annihilation. The second road leads to a new world. The onus is on the creation of people’s movements, grasping growing political power to change the fixation on profits and markets rather than on an economic system that understands the rhythms of life.
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