Our world today

The Socialist Party seeks the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production and the elimination of competition and production for exchange value and its replacement by democratic planning and production for use with the people’s management of the economy and society. Socialism will be based on the abolition of wage labour, the elimination of classes, the disappearance of the state and the full development of the productive forces in the context of world socialism, and “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

 Capitalism itself has created the objective basis of socialism, within the old class-economic relations. It comprises the collective forms of production, a cooperative mass organisation of labour within industry and the abundance modern industry is capable of producing where collective forms of production, and their accompanying technical-economic changes, has resulted in the enormous increase in the productivity of labour and the creation of abundance. The abundance makes possible and necessary socialist distribution of goods, a socialisation of consumption to correspond with the objective socialisation of production. Capitalism rejects this possibility and necessity: it means its own abolition. Last but not least the proletariat, a property-less class.

Socialisation requires expropriation of private ownership and replacement of production for profit with production for use: new social relations of production. Rational planning of industry is possible, with the exclusive aim of meeting community needs. As this means the abolition of capitalism, it is forcibly resisted by the dominant class interests. The clash of the old and the new becomes a struggle of classes, a struggle for power between the classes representing the old and the new, the capitalists and the workers. To maintain its ascendancy, the capitalist class must repress the forces of production and the movement toward socialism. It becomes clear, particularly as the class interests of the proletariat are realisable only by destruction of the older relations of production. This means the proletariat cannot realise socialism without abolishing itself as a class to be replaced by the association of organised producers.

The struggle for power aims to get control of the State. The State is an organ of class rule and suppression, under capitalist control, enmeshed in all the class-economic and exploiting relations of the existing order. Wresting control of the state from the capitalist class makes it possible for the working class to overthrow capitalism and suppress the old ruling class, to destroy the old social relations and create the new. The socialist revolution is much more fundamental than the earlier bourgeois revolution. Where the latter replaced older forms of property and exploitation with newer forms, the former annihilates all forms of private property and exploitation. There can be no compromise between capitalism and socialism. The compromise between feudalism and capitalism revealed their mutual exploiting identity. The aristocracy merged with the new men who rose to power as a result of industrial exploitation of mineral resources on the great landed estates and many nobles became pioneers of capitalist enterprise. An older class adapted itself to the rule of the new and became part of the new system. But capitalists cannot be absorbed into the new socialist order; hence there can be no compromise between socialism and capitalism.

Capital and labour interests of each of them is fundamentally different and exclusive. Capital is interested in production for profit, labour in production for use. Capital is based upon a constantly increasing exploitation of labour, in order to maintain its profit; labour constantly resists this exploitation. There is and can be no such thing as a “legitimate profit,” inasmuch as all profit is derived from paying workers less than the value they add to the product. There is and can be no such thing as a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” inasmuch as wages are the payment for only one part of the day’s work, the other part of which the worker is compelled to contribute to the employer in the form of surplus-value, or profit. Labour cannot get away from the fundamental fact that capital always seeks to intensify the exploitation of labour by reducing wages, increasing the work-day, or speeding-up production, or by all three at once; and labour always seeks to raise its wage and working standards. Capital always seeks to increase its profits, which can be done only by exploiting labour; labour always seeks to resist exploitation, which can be done only at the expense of profits. These are fundamental economic facts. Under capitalism, nothing that all the capitalists, or the whole government, or all the labour leaders, or all the workers, or a combination of all these, will ever do, can succeed in wiping out these facts.

The world to-day is in the hands of billionaires - owners of the biggest corporations, the biggest banks, and the biggest media; in short, nearly everything we use or need. These billionaires, these capitalists, not only own or control the means whereby we work and live but, in fact, control the whole governing machine. They pull the strings. And they use their power to make themselves richer and richer—at our expense. They hire workers to make profit out of their labour; their capitalist production is for profit, not for use: and to get more profit they slash wages, carry through speed-up and worsen conditions. This mad race for profit ends in a crisis; and then they try to get out of the crisis — at our expense. Look at the result. Poverty, insecurity and misery making their inroads in the homes of millions of workers: low wages, sweated labour to the point of physical exhaustion, is the lot of the workers in the factories with increases in the number of accidents, sickness, and a high death-rate amongst working-class mothers and babies. This is world to-day for working men, women and their families.