Understanding what is needed

To state it plainly capitalism is an economic system based upon exploitation. People's minds are indoctrinated with falsehoods about the virtues of the private-property profit system. Capitalism is a brutal system where the one who holds the wealth holds the power.  Duping people is admired and fakery is promoted and encouraged. That is how business is done in capitalism. Capitalism is a system based on gaining the advantage over someone and then exploiting that leverage.  Under capitalism working people build the buildings, grow the food, stock the shelves, and are then charged to use all the things they collectively produce and use while the bosses and investors take all the profits. Far from capitalism of having tamed the savage, It has made man into a “savage."

Socialism will be a society entirely geared to satisfying human needs. What human beings decide they want will be paramount; everything else will be subordinate to this aim. It is difficult for us living in a capitalist society where time-measured cost as reflected in accounting in monetary units is paramount, and where human energies are no more than a costed factor of production. to appreciate how enormous a change this will be. Today time is money and the economic pressure is to do everything as quickly as possible. In socialism not only will there be no money but time will no longer be so important. Men and women will be free to choose to take longer to produce something if, for instance, this slower production method gives the producers more pleasure, is less unpleasant or results in a product that is better for the health and the welfare of human beings.  Socialism is to satisfy human wants and needs. 

When we have cleared up the mess left by capitalism—which will involve an immense increase in production to eliminate material want and misery throughout the world—socialism can be expected to become a stable, slow-changing society, in terms both of population size and of the wants and consumption habits of its members. This will considerably simplify the task of balancing production and consumption. As the consumption habits would be stable or only slowly changing, so would the distribution circuits. Everything would be running more or less smoothly from year to year: adjustments would be relatively easy since it would only be a question of adding something here or subtracting something there in the context of an already functioning system. Production can be expected to platform off (and eventually may even fall since goods will be well-made and so will last longer than today, so needing to be replaced less often). Nevertheless, it is still useful to outline how such a system of ensuring the satisfaction of the material needs of humans might function.

The material needs of human beings boil down basically to food, clothing, and shelter. We will begin with food. Here, as with everything else in socialism, humans will have a free choice. Having made this proviso, however, it is hard to sec the people of socialist society being satisfied with the Instant this and Quick that that is the staple diet of most people today. In fact, most of the food available today in shops and supermarkets are likely to be rejected as substandard. If only for the sake of their health (quite apart from improved taste) people are going to demand more fresh fruit and vegetables and more free-range animal products.

If we imagine people living in much smaller urban communities than today we can also imagine this need being satisfied to the maximum extent possible locally, with each town/country area trying to be as self-sufficient in these products as it can. Some, of course, will be less successful in this than others, their excess needs having to be satisfied on an inter-regional basis in the same sort of way as we shall see could be applied for certain other consumer goods.

What we have described here is not something completely new thought up by socialists. It is something which already exists and which we are suggesting could be extended and adapted to serve human needs, instead of being prostituted in the service of profit and capital accumulation. After all, as we have always said, the material basis for socialism (of which the mechanism for adjusting supply to needs is one aspect) already exists, and has existed for some time; all that is lacking is the will to change society so as to be able to take full advantage of it.

Whether votes are a power or not depends upon the type of men who cast them. If the voters regard the capitalists as “ bread-givers," such workers will certainly not capture political power through the vote they cast. So far as they possess the vote at all, they will rather be inclined to sell the political power which it represents to the highest bidder. When the workers form a majority and are conscious of their importance to society, their voting for the Socialist Party signifies that they have recognised their strength and are determined to make use of it and it will be from our constant reiteration of the fact that the cause of the majority of the evils with which the working-class are to-day so miserably and persistently afflicted is to be found in the capitalist nature of modern society that fellow-workers will realise their wage-slave condition.