Make Socialism a Reality

Socialism is a practical possibility. Human beings are quite capable of co-operating as free and equal men and women, to produce the wealth they need and to run a social system in which the satisfaction of these needs will be the guiding principle. The Socialist Party asserts that men and women can so organise the conditions of work that they can get pleasure from working and making useful things. The idea of a wage-free, money-free society terrifies the master-class. After all, how would they get their living without surplus labour to feast upon? Most people live in one of two quite different worlds. There is the world of sumptuous palaces for an opulent, parasitical few which the unemployed rich enjoy and there is the world of overcrowded slums for the poor, dispossessed multitudes.

 Capitalism is a brutal social system which splits the human race into two distinct classes: one a tiny, unproductive minority, able to wallow in the best of everything because of their ownership of the means of production and their unearned income from investments, and enormous number of propertyless workers who are restricted to shortages, enduring exploitation in spite of the fact that they are the actual creators of all the world’s real wealth.

The vast majority of people today are wage-slaves. In order to eat they are forced to work for the master class who own and control all the instruments of production. The masses who produce but do not own are robbed by the few who own but do not produce. They are robbed because they are paid in the form of wages only a small part of the value they create when they process raw materials into commodities. The workers must be paid less than the true value of the goods they produce for if they were paid the real value of those goods the master class would not be able to sell them for a profit. The profit which keeps the robber class in idle luxury come from the unpaid labour of the working class. That is what capitalism is all about and it cannot work any other way. Capitalism cannot operate in the interests of mankind.

What the poor cannot buy they must do without. If they cannot afford to buy food then they must starve, and capitalism will let them starve to death outside warehouses which are crammed full of good food which is rotting because the needy do not have the money to purchase it. Profit comes before people. Capitalism decrees that goods which cannot be sold for profit must not be produced, no matter how desirable and necessary they may be in order to make the world a better place for humanity. It also decrees that, at times of so-called glut, goods which cannot be sold must he destroyed as there is no money to be made by giving commodities away. That is why ‘surplus’ food (surplus only to the demands of the market, that is) is burned or dumped into the sea while underprivileged people are dying of hunger.

Capitalism causes unemployment, slums, poverty, famine, crime and war. Those social cankers are built into capitalist society and cannot possibly be eradicated as long as capitalism lasts. They are the natural and unavoidable consequences of the money system, the profit motive and the private property basis of society—the three fundamental rocks of capitalism. War cannot be charmed out of existence by reformist measures such as peace treaties and disarmament agreements. It is spawned by the national economic rivalries inseparable from capitalism. The structure of society must be altered in order to get rid of the social system which causes all the trouble. History proves that reforms achieve next to nothing—what we need now is a world-wide social revolution.

Instead of goods being produced simply to be sold to make a profit for the capitalists the privately-owned means of production should be converted to the common property of all Mankind so that everybody can have free access to everything that is produced. That would make money unnecessary as people would have no need to buy what they already owned. The working class would own the goods because they would be the people who had produced them. They produce everything now but capitalism deprives them of the fruits of their labour and relegates them to wage-slavery. But once production is organised to satisfy human need money will be superfluous and social equality will become a reality for everyone in the world of abundance which science could make possible tomorrow in a different social set-up. And when men have free access to all they need there will not be anything for them to fight over.

The capitalists employ every trick in the book to mislead people that capitalism is the best of all possible systems. Which it is—for the rich. But for the robbed millions who are the only useful, essential members of society capitalism is a curse. Unfortunately, it isn’t difficult to dazzle the masses of people with all the ostentatious ritual and ceremony, the pomp that the rulers stage for that purpose. The master class know how to divert the workers' attention from social conditions to irrelevancies.