Where are we today, where will we be tomorrow?

Let’s be brutally honest: There are few, if any in the near future, serious prospects for attaining the transformative change of the capitalist economic system that we need. There has been an austerity programme of mass immiseration conducted by the government’s withholding of adequate welfare and social services. Socialist ideas are side-lined and pushed to the margins of the political field. But that’s no reason to give up on revolutionary social change. Signs of real popular resistance have emerged across the world. People are mobilising with compassion and solidarity. We witness a resurgence of the labour movement where militant trade union activity is once more on the rise. It was the air-traffic controllers and other federal workers who forced Trump’s hand during the shutdown, awakening the sleeping giant of worker power, not the Democrat opposition. Capitalism’s leaders are always being credited with more power over the system than they actually have. No man, and no government, has ever been able to control capitalism; in the end the system wins. When we have an election in which the votes reflect a developing knowledge of that fact, we shall be somewhere near getting rid of the problems the great men are always promising, and always failing, to solve.

Could this growing working class insurgency beneath the headlines take a meaningfully independent electoral form beyond the reach of capital? Yes, with time. New movements for a real people’s party are forming that connects the labour movement to local communities around issues that matter to everyday working people. The time is passing when voters can passively settle for the lesser of two evils politics. How long before a real socialist party could run candidates and win elections for political office. Who can say? Who knows? It’s not as if we possess a crystal ball. It’s about organising and building from the bottom up, to create a powerful movement that activism with the political economy to address interrelated global crises of democracy, inequality, human and civil rights, peace and a sustainable, livable ecology. This is the key.

The Socialist Party puts forward the view that the Earth's resources should be owned and consciously and democratically controlled by and in the interests of humanity.  It believes that the purpose of production should be to produce useful items to meet peoples' needs rather than for profit. The Socialist Party’s argument is that freed from the present constraints of minority class ownership of wealth and production for the purpose of exchange, society has the potential to produce directly for use. The evidence all around us is that present day society's ability to produce is outstripping a system confined to production for sale. Hence, we have such contradictions as "over-production" of food for the market alongside millions of people, worldwide, dying of hunger quite unnecessarily and the vast majority living sub-standard lives. In addition, modem technology, which could be used to further increase productive capacity and free people from dangerous and soul-destroying work, in many cases cannot be fully applied. The Socialist Party conclusion from such everyday experience is that we could create a sane society.

The Socialist Party holds that it is inevitable that our fellow-workers will realise that if there is a conflict between our need for a decent standard of living and our employer's need for profit and will come to believe that we can end the current class relations of production where the producing non-owners of the means of production are economically forced to sell their ability to work to the owners in return for a wage or a salary in order to live. Along with common ownership of the means of production and the replacement of profit by need and usefulness, the Socialist Party argues that people could voluntarily give their skills and abilities to society and have free access to all goods and services on the basis of self-determined need. We point out such demands are after all based simply on the actual experience of the world around us as it is the useful majority, the working class, which produces all the goods and provides all the services that keep society going. It is obvious to all that a society which is organised around the domination of a small useless minority over the useful majority is NOT natural, inevitable and unchangeable.

Most workers, whether paid low or high, have to spend the greater part of their lives in employment which is boring, sometimes dangerous and nearly always uncreative and degrading. The lives of most workers are dominated by their employment and at the level of consumption their needs are to some extent fashioned for them as the same forces which control the means of production are also dominant in the sphere of mass communication. Thus, while it is true that capitalism has created some differences in life style for different sections of the working class, all workers share many common, everyday experiences, and although they take place in different settings, they will last as long as capitalism does.

Reformers base their ideas on the premise that capitalism is inevitable, that workers and employers share common interests. But reformers fail to get to the root cause of workers' problems and can therefore never solve them. What is needed is an alternative, based on a knowledge of how this society operates, for only then will workers be aware of how to carry out the defencive struggle within capitalism with some success. Most of all we require to make it clear that this society can never be made to operate in our interests. The present social system is not unchangeable. There are other possibilities available to us.