A society for individuals

WITH WORLD SOCIALISM

A new era has begun to dawn. New and still bigger mega-fortunes are being made. The labour movement has to prepare itself for a further round of bad weather and rough seas. The Socialist Party doesn’t have some hopeful gospel to preach to you. If you’re a realist, and you’re observing the things going on around the world you’re apt to feel some despair. There is vast despondency and desperation. But it’s not that easy to lose hope. Humanity possesses qualities of determination, courage and an extraordinary resoluteness to persevere in the face of adversity. In English we say “hope springs eternal”. In Russian it’s “hope dies last.” We might feel anguish and despair but our evolutionary impulse is for survival. Hope is an unstoppable power. Our hope says we are going to keep on fighting for our goal. It is the fight members of the Socialist Party signed up for. We will never cease fighting for our ideas. We intend to put our broken human society back together but this time just a little differently - without the exploitation and oppression. Capitalism continues to kill us and the only real solution is to end capitalism.

The thing about social movements is that they move. They morph into new forms and evolve into different expressions. It is common for a movement to develop in one part of the world and be adopted by another country. This is even more common in modern times as the economy has become increasingly globalised and the internet has made communication easier. Protests turn into inspiration for others to take up. Socialism will become the movement of movements that unites the many single-issue groups into a force too powerful for the ruling class to defeat, a movement exposing the contradictions in society that cannot be solved by the current economic and political system. Socialism shows the system-wide problems that require both the economic and political systems to change. There are many triggers that are likely to spark mass protests and resistance. Get ready.

Socialism is a worldwide state-free society where money and markets have been abolished and production is collectively planned by all. It is the abolition of all exploitation and oppression, where the segmentation of human beings into classes, nationalities, races and genders has been transcended. Rather than mere worker ownership of factories or state-control of resources, socialist society is one within which “value” as we know it has been abolished and free access to goods has replaced markets and rationing. The previous development of capitalism makes such a society possible. Socialism is universal human emancipation.  Such a society will not emerge not through immediate insurrection or apolitical utopian experiments. It is to be achieved through social revolution on a mass scale. The workers cannot take political power through a putsch or coup nor can it come by an alliance with sections of the capitalist class. The State cannot be gradually evolved into socialism. It is fundamentally representing the interests of the propertied classes, structurally designed to serve the needs of capitalism. Socialism is a society based on the cooperation of all humanity. We promote world revolution as opposed to “socialism in one country” or other national roads to socialism. From this we reject all capitalist wars. Nationalism in all forms stands as an obstacle to revolution. The fight against racism is a fight to unite the working class to defeat capitalism.

The development of capitalism, a system which now dominates the entire planet, brings with it massive toil, suffering and crisis along with revolutions in production. It also creates its own gravedigger – the global working class. By socialism we mean a world where waged labour has been replaced by free associations of producers and all are able to participate in the total benefits of society’s wealth, based on the principle “from each according to their ability, to according to their need”. National boundaries are to be replaced by the free movement of people and the ending of the division of humanity into false communities of the nation. The dominance of markets and money, products of private property, is replaced by humanity taking collective control of production so as to reorient it towards meeting our needs and desires through scientific and democratic planning that transcends the irrationality of the market. It is only the cooperation of society as a whole that can provide the real basis for the individual to achieve their full capacity. We have no interest in turning the world into one giant labour camp with a monolithic culture that crushes the individual. Rather we aim for a new era of human development where the limitations imposed by the weight of class society have been surpassed, where one’s daily life is not structured around the earning of a wage or salary but the desire to better oneself and achieve their full capacity. Socialism is not a technocratic vision to be imposed but is created through the collective activity of working people re-organising society where the State will become more and more useless, eventually fully withering away.