Our future is socialism

Any arrangement which leaves most of us having to sell our labour-power in order to scrape a living is not  socialism.  Policies of state intervention in the economy or commitment to state responsibility for welfare and social services are normally labelled "socialist". These bogus claim blurs the essential differences between capitalism and socialism: wage-labour, commodity production, class struggle — all these characteristics of capitalism, however "reformed" and whatever the extent of state control of the economy, will have no place in a socialist society. The Socialist Party has frequently explained that socialism is very different.

The point is that the capitalist system is not in business to make people happy, to build houses for homeless people to live in, to produce food for hungry people, or to care for the sick, the handicapped the old and the very young. It is in business to make profits to keep accountants and shareholders happy. Any coincidence with socially necessary or desirable activities is just that — a coincidence. The real issue is whether we actually want a society which operates according to an accountant s sense of values or one which operates in terms of satisfying human needs. There is a real conflict in capitalism between what is perceived as profitable, and therefore feasible, and what is known to be necessary, desirable and useful but unprofitable, and therefore impractical. That is why there are homeless, hungry and unemployed people. And that is why socialists detest the capitalist principle which puts profits before people. It is time to end this system and create a better world.

 The only future the capitalist class seeks is one where they make plenty of profits. Or, to be quite precise about it, one where we, the workers, will make plenty of profits, to be handed directly to those who monopolise the resources of the earth. They can only get richer out of the hard work of suckers who are prepared to produce everything and then be thankful for a wage or salary which enables us to buy the cheapest and shoddiest of goods. The contented wage slave is the basic requirement of the contented capitalist. Unless the producers produce the possessors will have nothing to possess. Looking forward to a capitalist future is a bleak prospect. Capitalism's problems do not stay the same. They become worse.  Who can doubt that our future will see more needless human misery. There’s been a lot of bad news about climate change and the future of humanity with many foreboding dark predictions. But as a species we’re smart and creative enough to fix things.  The alternatives are not doomsday scenarios, ignorance and despair. The Socialist Party chooses hope. Let us be visionary. Let’s dream big. Let’s fight for our children and grand children and let’s strive together for their future.

Socialist change does not mean that the workers, like Oliver Twist, should ask for just a little bit more. Nor is it asking for a lot more. It means taking the whole lot. All of the factories, the farms, the offices, the media, the means of transportation, the sources of energy — the entire means and instruments of producing and distributing wealth will become the property of the workers of the world. Who can deny that socialism is the only practical hope facing working men and women in the years ahead? 

Is the socialism too ambitious? No. We need to aspire to great things.  We have an opportunity to join together as never before to form a working class movement to build political power through strategies of solidarity, education and action. The Socialist Party will encourage people to create socialist networks and become politically active so to determine their own destiny. We need solutions that are agreed and coordinated at the worldwide scale, not country by country. Consider civil aviation, a triumph of globally coordinated engineering. In 2017, there were almost 42 million flights without a single fatal passenger jet accident. The civil aviation system works so well because

all countries use aircraft manufactured by a few global companies and share standard operating procedures for navigation, air traffic control, maintenance, and other operations.  Other global systems are similarly coordinated such as the Universal Postal Union, praised by the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. More recently is the World Wide Web, where billions of daily internet activities (also mobile phone calls) are possible because of shared protocols. Both the scale and reliability of these globally connected high-tech systems are astounding, and depend on solutions implemented internationally, not country by country. Our capacity for cooperation definitely offers some hope.