WAKE UP AND LIVE.

If one looks at the history of the socialist movement, there is not a lot of useful literature which shows how to build a socialist society. Rather there is a long record of what not to do. The question of vital concern to every worker is what will happen to the capitalist society if it is not replaced by socialism. We already see the trend of capitalism that political and economic power becomes concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer hands. Every country is now ruled by a tiny handful of enormously powerful capitalists. They dominate and dictate all economic life. They rule the lives of the workers. The capitalist class, those holders of stocks and bonds, receivers of profits are unproductive and superfluous to society - a parasitic class. They act as a leech which systematically drains the life-blood of the economy.

Competition for the market in which profit is realised has always been the hallmark of capitalism. Competition means the absence of organisation and planning in production. It means blind production for the blind market – what socialists call “the anarchy of production.” Businesses compete with each other not only on a national scale but all over the world. The growth of capitalism does not eliminate competition or its evils. It intensifies them at home, and above all on a world scale. The competition is fierce and ruthless. It is all the fiercer and more ruthless because the area in which it takes place grows smaller and smaller.

The government is the executive committee of the capitalist class as a whole. If it fixes wages and prices, it fixes them in the interests of the most powerful economic class in the country, the capitalists. That, is why, every time an economic balance sheet of government intervention in the economy is drawn up, it is found that the capitalists are stronger and richer, and working people are weaker and poorer. The growing regimentation and oppression, the violation and elimination of democratic rights and institutions, affects all the population, outside the ranks of capitalists themselves. The unemployed and others on benefits are maintained by the government and are at the government’s mercy. They are ordered to take any job, regardless of wages or working conditions, which it instructs them to take. The results for all mankind are appalling.

The conquest of capitalism, the rule of the working class, the inauguration of socialism - that is the aim of the Socialist Party. That is the task of the working class. That is the road to human freedom. In the hands of the working class rests the greatest responsibility in history, the greatest possibility for human advancement ever known. we alone can restore progress to society. We alone can bestow all humanity with freedom, equality, and abundance. We alone can give labour respect and dignity. We alone can release science from the fetters hobbling innovation. Almost the entire world stands ready for the emancipation of the working class. The working class is the only consistently revolutionary class. It is, therefore, the only consistently democratic class. Democracy is inseparably linked up with the struggle for socialism. Upon socialism, depends the happy future of humanity and of civilisation. The working class is called upon to save society from barbarism, the only alternative to socialism.

Socialism is being abandoned and its validity challenged primarily on the ground of the viability of capitalism. That capitalism is doomed due to climate change is now perhaps more widely acknowledged today than before but the socialist alternative is still not being accepted. This rejection of socialism in our day takes place not so much on the ground that capitalism is viable as that the socialist perspective is not. Members of the Socialist Party are frequently asked “Prove to me that socialism is inevitable and I will join.” What is asked of us, an answer cannot be given? Precisely because it represents a new stage in human history, despite capitalism bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction, socialism can only be established only by conscious, deliberate, efforts by the working class which must make its own history. Capitalism creates all the conditions which make the advance to socialism possible; and in the sense that the advance to socialism is a necessity for the further progress of society itself, the only way in which to preserve civilisation. 

The end of capitalism may be inevitable, but the advent of socialism isn’t. We may speak of the historical necessity of socialism since without it human society cannot continue to develop. If society is to continue to develop, socialism will inevitably come. The choice is not one between capitalism and socialism. The foundations of capitalism threaten to collapse. The choice to be made is between socialism and barbarism.