Common Ownership: The Only Solution

No matter how sincerely a Labour government wishes to protect the interests of the workers, no matter how benignly they impose their unwanted ‘leadership’ upon us, they can do nothing other than be puppets of the economic forces of capitalism. It makes no difference whether Tory or Labour govern, the real power is that of the capitalist system and only its replacement by a genuine socialist society will do.  When will the Left realise that socialism will only be achieved when we have awakened the social consciousness of the working class throughout the world? Socialism will be won by struggling to free the minds of the workers from their capitalist bonds, and never by putting in a Labour government. Decades on from the beginning of the slum clearances, when city planners thought it would be a good idea to house people in a soulless high-rise, the problems continue to exist, and the ideal of abolishing poverty has been quietly dropped. All we are left with is Labour’s ongoing attempts to administer poverty. At least that way, they can be seen to do something. The poor are fated to always be with us, it seems. The political parties just accepted, and thus condoned, that poverty would continue to exist. Poverty is the direct and necessary result of the way the capitalist system works, and nothing can be done to end poverty, so long as the capitalist system remains accepted as the first premise for action. If these communities truly want to help themselves, they will need to begin organising to end capitalism once and for all.

Political parties are bidding for your support and vote with programmes which may seem to offer some hope of easing, or even abolishing, many of the problems of this country and of the world. Millions of people find these programmes attractive enough to vote for one or other of them. The Socialist Party argues that none of them stands up to examination. Every government comes into power pledged to abolish slums and to end the housing crises. They all seem to have it all worked out, with their declarations of intent and their statistics. The result is that today’s housing problem remains a disgrace to any civilised society. It is true that sometimes a particular problem might be alleviated, but this is only for others to take its place. For example; we are told that our lives have been improved by the development of new technology, but we are also faced with the fact that these very developments threaten greater job insecurity.

What causes the problems of the world? This is a society based on the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution. Private ownership at once divides society into two classes — the owning, or capitalist class and the deprived, or working class. It is the working class who suffer poverty and all it means in terms of bad housing, inadequate medical services, sub-standard food and so on.

The Socialist Party puts forward the alternative society. Socialism will be a society in which the whole of humanity, without distinction of race or sex, will own in common all we use to make and distribute wealth. Common ownership means a society without classes, without privileges, without different standards of consumption. In a socialist society, everyone will have free access to the world’s wealth and will stand equally in that respect. Socialism will produce its wealth for human use instead of for sale. This will make it a society of cooperation instead of competition. There will be no frontiers to divide the world’s people. Socialism will be one world, with one people working together for the commonwealth. Socialism will be an efficient world, in contrast to capitalism, where waste and shoddiness are profitable. For the first time, men and women in Socialism will realise their capabilities to the full. Socialism will produce an abundance and at only one standard — the best we are capable of.

The Socialist Party is not another collection of leaders telling you to trust us and promising you almost anything for the sake of winning your vote. No leader can give you Socialism, no clever politician can pull you by the nose into the new society. Neither will it happen by accident. Socialism must be your work; it needs a conscious political act by the mass of the people, opting for the new society in full knowledge of what it is.

We are a political party, hostile to all others, including those phoney revolutionaries of the Left. The Socialist Party is different — we are the political instrument to be used by the working class to transform the world from a chaos of deprivation and strife into an order of abundance and harmony. The Socialist Party has consistently argued, that the party aiming at the emancipation of the working class can play no part in the government of capitalism; they must continue building up support for socialism.