Why the Left needs socialism

The definition of socialism accepted by the Socialist Party is “the collective ownership of all the means of production and distribution.”  Socialism leaves consumption, i.e., the selection and the enjoyment of the means of life to the free will and the taste of the individuals. Socialism was impossible in former centuries. The modern development of the means of production — manufacturing in the present large scale — has now made socialism possible and necessary. Our present system divides society into two classes, the “have all” and the “have nothing” class, and that it is the great mass of the people that do all the useful work who belong to the “have nothing” class.  Socialists are class conscious. This does not mean that we must hate every capitalist individually, that some should be picked out or particular repulsion while the economic power and political encroachment of others should be silently submitted to. It means that while we understand that every individual capitalist is the result of the present system as much as the wage worker, we still must fight the capitalists as a class, because the producers cannot reasonably expect anything but exploitation from the exploiters as a class. Socialists do not propose to run away from the capitalists; they intend to stay right in the battle. Socialists will fight open and aboveboard everywhere and fight all capitalist parties alike. They cannot and will not assist capitalist politicians of one colour and offer support for another of a different colour.

The new social system at which we aim is not one in which individuality will be crushed out by a system of regimentation. What we seek is the rational collective organisation of the planet’s resources such as will make possible a much greater degree of leisure and a much richer individual life for every citizen.

Our present society oscillates between periods of feverish prosperity in which the main benefits go to speculators and profiteers, and of catastrophic recession, in which the average person’s normal state of insecurity and hardship is accentuated. We believe that these evils can be removed only in a planned and socialised economy in which our natural resources and principal means of production and distribution are owned, controlled and operated by the people. The present order is marked by glaring inequalities of wealth and opportunity, by chaotic waste and instability; and in an age of plenty it condemns the great mass of the people to poverty and insecurity. Power has become more and more concentrated into the hands of a small irresponsible minority of financiers and industrialists and to their predatory interests the majority are habitually sacrificed when private profit is the main stimulus to economic effort. The Socialist Party aims to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a society in which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-management based upon economic equality will be possible, restoring to the community its natural resources.

The Socialist Party will not rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and established the socialist cooperative commonwealth. We are well aware that socialism is a term little understood by the world at large, and that it is everywhere a target for denunciation by the media of the plutocracy. When analysed it means a more equitable distributions of the products of labour; cooperation instead of competition; common ownership of land and all the means of production and distribution. It proclaims the coming of the cooperative commonwealth to take the place of wage slavery. The present economic system is not only a failure, but a colossal crime. It robs, it degrades, it starves; it is a foul blot upon the face of our civilisation; it promises only an increase of the horrors which the world deplores. There is no hope for our fellow-workers except by the path mapped out by socialists, the advocates of the cooperative commonwealth. In socialism, private ownership, the exchange economy (and barter) being at an end, money would lose the functions which it possessed under capitalism and would be abolished as will the wages system. Humanity will then be emancipated from the horrible thralldom which a soulless moneyed oligarchy has forced upon it.

We, organised in the Socialist Party, declare that to the working class belongs the future and through the ballot box, abolish the capitalist system of ownership with its accompanying class rule and class oppression, and establish in its place socialism — an industrial democracy — wherein all the land and the tools of production shall be the common property of the whole people, to be operated by the whole people for the production of goods and services for use and not for profit. We ask our fellow-workers to organise with us to end the domination of private property— with its poverty-breeding system of unplanned production — and substitute in its place the socialist co-operative commonwealth in which every worker shall have the free exercise and full benefit of his or her faculties, multiplied by all the modern technological wonders of the modern world.