The Choice Before Us: The Status Quo or Social Change

 In response to the convulsions of capitalist society, the labour movement is trying to shed its acquiescent past and to rearm itself politically.  The Socialist Party has a basic starting point to all of its ideas – that the working class is a revolutionary class and as such is capable of overthrowing the capitalist system and establishing socialism. We hold an unshakable confidence in the working class as a revolutionary force. It is something we have to defend every day against those who tell us that the working class are so imbued with the ideas of capitalism. There is a crying need to assert the relevance of class. The Socialist Party explains that our confidence is not a form of workerist romanticism but that we see the working class as an exploited class, driven by the realities of class society into conflict with their exploiters. This does not mean that workers are currently seeking revolution – it means that the working class are objectively potentially revolutionary. The difference between us and other political parties – and we make no bones about it. We are revolutionaries. Our goal is a fundamental change in society. We will not go just a part of the way – or even half of the way – we are going all of the way.  Transformation of the economy cannot be postponed. But transformation is possible only through the working class. Common ownership is a necessity for socialism. Without it, the private capitalist owners may be eliminated, but their place may be taken by a new ruling class, the state bureaucrats who own the means of production because they own and control the state which is the only legal owner. Therefore, the Socialist Party stands against nationalisation.

The capitalist system is based on a contradiction. On the one hand it depends on networks that merge the labours of most of the world’s seven-plus billion people into what is in effect a global system of cooperation. Just look at the clothes you are wearing. They are made from cotton or wool from one part of the world, carried by ships made from steel from somewhere else, woven in a third place, stitched in a fourth, transported using oil from a fifth, and so on. A thousand individual acts of labour are combined in even the simplest item. On the other hand, the organisation of these networks is not based on cooperation, but on ruthless competition between rival highly privileged minorities who monopolise the means that are necessary for production – the tools, the machines, the oil fields, the modern communications systems, the land. What motivates the capitalists is not the satisfaction of human need. It is the pressure to compete and keep ahead of other capitalists. The key to keeping ahead in competition is making profit and then using the profit to invest in new means of keeping ahead. The drive for profit leads capitalists to rush to pour money into any venture that seems profitable. The socialist alternative to such a state of affairs is simple. It is to replace decision making on the basis of competition between rival groups of capitalists by a genuine democracy where the mass of people democratically decide what the economic priorities should be and work together to plan how to achieve these. If planning and innovation are possible under the present system, they are just as possible under a system based upon meeting human need through democratic decision making, rather than competing in order to make profits to direct towards further competition. To reshape society in a socialist direction it is necessary to take control of those enterprises, subordinating them to the fulfilment of democratically decided priorities. A socialist society would involve the mass of people in democratic debate to plan production to meet human need.

In a socialist world of plenty, mankind is at long last freed of the dominance of economics, the tyranny of economics. We will for the first time be free to develop the full potentialities and capacities of the human individual, and see the full flowering of humanity’s spirit. This is the only goal worth fighting for today. It is the real freedom. Socialism is not merely the remaking of the social system and of the world – it is the remaking of humankind. Socialism is not merely abundance, security, peace and freedom. These great goals are themselves only means to an end. Our most urgent task becomes that of winning fellow-workers to socialist ideas and to the practical task of building independent socialist parties around the world. Our task to build an organisation for revolution. It is time we stop endorsing castles in the air and accept the reality that coalitions and alliances cannot be built with non-socialists. This way the socialist alternative will begin to appear realistic. Such a perspective ought to appeal to the imagination of every genuine socialist.

Thought and action can build socialism. Let us think and act