We Need Socialism

Over the past decades nobody can deny that lots of things have changed, but just how much has the social system altered in those years?

The founders of the Socialist Party back in 1904 looked on a social system in which the accumulated wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small minority, the propertied class; a world in which the workers' life was harassed with poverty, unemployment, bad housing, pauperism and the threat of war. They maintained that if you want something better it has to be a new social organisation, socialism and that you can't do anything useful with this present social system: capitalism. Our opponents believed otherwise and argued that through social reforms, things could be made essentially different. Over the years the politician has been claiming success and that the great change had already taken place, in what they called the Welfare State. Of course, the political parties differed among themselves on some details, each thinking they could do better than them but they were all at first of one mind that poverty, unemployment, and slumps had been abolished and all agreed that slums were on their way out. Nothing whatever has been solved. As the Socialist Party always said nobody can prevent capitalism from breaking through and showing itself for what it really is. There is a very long list of unsolved social problems that were going to be solved by the reformists. And, to return to the basic question, the accumulated wealth of the country is still concentrated in the hands of the propertied class.

The position may be summed up as follows. As under present conditions, all commodities are produced for profit, production must cease with the cessation of profit. As profit and wages between them constitute and have their only source in the value created by the worker, profit can only appear while wages are prevented from consuming the whole product of labour. As wages, the price of labour power, are regulated by the relation of supply and demand, a surplus of labour-power (the unemployed), is necessary to prevent wages swallowing up all profit. Therefore the unemployed army is a vital necessity for Capitalist production, and there can be no solution under capitalism.

The supporters of some form of capitalism continue their bedraggled slogan-shouting processions. Instead of spending time and thought grappling with the cause of social disharmony, they waste their time and energy in futile protests. Governments are solely concerned with the interests of their capitalist controllers and will fight against, or acquiesce in, changes according to their bearing on these interests. The Socialist Party vision is for a more caring society in which nobody is denied what they need based on income, on property, on capital, a society in which people are valued over profit, in which everyone has access to the things they need not just for basic survival but to thrive, an economy run democratically—to meet people's needs, not to make profits, a society free of all oppression with a democratically-run, ecologically-sustainable economy. Our goal is a socialist world. The Socialist Party has learned through decades that the capitalist system serves the interests of the ruling class. It is designed to meet their needs and protect their power from threats from below. The Socialist Party is about fighting to build a society in which everybody can live in dignity and have the resources to live as equitably as possible and to have]the resources that we need not only to survive but to flourish in our society. It’s about empowering people.  It means that everybody within reason will truly have autonomy and control over their own destinies. 

The Socialist Party has one objective, socialism. This can only be achieved when a majority of the working class reject the squalid expediencies of opportunist politics. We do not think that our small party will establish socialism: the working class will — and the capitalist class cannot prevent the working class from establishing socialism. To establish socialism the majority of workers have got to become socialists. If they don’t, capitalism continues. If there is one lesson the last hundred years has taught it is, above all, that no “seizure of power” by insurrection or a general strike can abolish capitalism. The majority have got to break with social reform. This, for many workers, is quite difficult. The pioneers of Socialism, including Marx and Engels, could have had little idea of the potency of modern “social security”, which siphons off much working-class discontent and seriously retards the growth of class-consciousness. How long it will take the workers in their millions to see through the reformist racket is impossible to say

In spite of this, the fact remains that capitalism is a revolutionizing system: compelled by its very nature to organize, train and educate a revolutionary working class. Sheer disenchantment of itself leads nowhere but to smashing windows, rioting etc. Discontent is the fertile soil for socialist campaigning, but without the seed of socialist theory — no new world will bloom. It is the socialists who provide the catalyst. It is the socialists who make precise the vision of a future society, to turn mere rebels into conscious revolutionaries. The socialists transform the miserable degrading requests of trade union for a few more pennies, or for longer tea-breaks, into the dazzling vista of a new world. It is the socialist who raises mere destruction of the old into construction of the new. The Socialist Party argues that socialist economics provides the answers, and to evade the responsibility of explaining it to our fellow-workers would be criminal.