WHAT THEN IS SOCIALISM?

This is an era of change. New technology and Artificial Intelligence are replacing human labour with automated machinery. This system offers unemployment, hunger, homelessness, welfare cuts, and a plague of drugs. The world is in the midst of revolutionary change. The jobs we once knew are slowly disappearing. We are being replaced by robots, computers and other new technologies in our workplaces. The capitalists are defending their profits and domination by being ever more ruthless in their policies towards the workers and the new class of the dispossessed.  The system can no longer feed and house us or provide us with jobs. Despite the changes in working methods, the relations of production have not been revolutionised by computers any more than they were overturned by the assembly line, electricity, or the telephone: the owners still own, we still work for a wage. The pace of change is so fast, and the power shift, thus so far in favour of the boss, that it’s hard for workers to figure out how to take advantage of the new conditions on the office and factory floor.

We are faced with two choices – either acquiesce or overturn this system. We possess the technology developed enough to end hunger and all want – but only if it is taken from the exploiters and used in the interests of the well-being of all. We are an organisation based on the idea that the economic system should provide people with what they need. We are political party determined to struggle all-out for food, homes, jobs, education, health-care, freedom from terror and drugs. We seek to educate and organise our fellow-workers to wage war on the capitalist system and how society can be reorganised to put an end to poverty and injustice once and for all. Standing in the way of social progress and socialism is the capitalist class who control the destinies of billions around the globe. The conditions for the people cannot fundamentally improve without the overthrow of the ruling class.

Scientists feel that we have until perhaps 2050 before the multiple and massive environmental problems we face will become irreversible. After that, the planet will not support the existing global capitalist civilisation. The ruling class hope that market-based mechanisms and technological innovation will solve our problems.  Without the active participation of socialists with a clear program and concrete ideas, the environmental movement will not bring about the fundamental change needed to resolve the crisis. While some involved in environmental struggles may well guide them in a revolutionary direction, this is not an automatic process. We can shape our own destiny only by embracing Marx’s objective, the society of associated producers.

The Socialist Party’s objective is a society in which “the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all” as Marx says in The Communist Manifesto. This cannot be achieved by authoritarian methods. If self-emancipation is the goal, it must be the means as well. To cite the American socialist Eugene Debs, if a saviour can lead you into the promised land, he can lead you back out again too. The task of the Socialist Party is to help people see through the illusions of capitalism, to understand that we are faced with this stark choice of socialism or barbarism, and to encourage a vision of self-emancipation as both means and end of revolutionary socialist practice, the only means of creating socialism and the essence of what socialism would be. The Socialist Party must help develop the fighting capacity of the exploited through education and organisation and at every opportunity we must expose the capitalist system and uncloak our class enemy. Scarcely anyone but the Socialist Party nowadays trusts in the anti-capitalist sentiments of the working people or believe that they can in time participate in a mighty movement oriented toward socialist objectives. For adhering to these convictions and being guided by them, we are looked upon as ideological freaks and political fossils, ridiculous relics of a bygone era, dogmatists who cling to outworn views and cannot understand what is going on in front of our own eyes. We go against the overwhelming preponderance of public opinion and dulled class consciousness among the workers themselves. In holding to its revolutionary convictions, the Socialist Party is not reflecting a religious-like faith. Our ideas are derived from a scientific conception of the course of world history, a reasoned analysis and understanding of social development. Marxism has clarified many perplexing problems in philosophy, sociology, history, economics, and politics. Its supreme achievement is the materialist conception of history as an explanation of the key role of the working class in history. If the working masses cannot be counted on to dislodge the capitalists, who else can do that job? It is exceedingly difficult to point out another social force that could effectively act as a surrogate for the working class. The struggle against capitalist domination then looms as a lost cause and a socialist world becomes a Utopia. People who pessimistically envisage such a perspective of powerlessness must reconcile themselves to the looming prospect of the end of civilisation and the onset of barbarism. If members of the Socialist Party succumb to such sentiments of hopelessness, we might as well shut up shop. It is the capitalist rulers today have an arrogant faith in the longevity of their system. They firmly believe in an empire assured of perpetual dominion. Those possessing confidence in the longevity of capitalism rule out the possibility that the workers will become more combative and conscious of the nature of the system they confront. The world has hardly been a model of social peace and harmony. A resurgence of workers’ radicalism and militancy may come at anytime. The possibilities are so diverse that it is impossible to foretell where or how the breakthrough will occur.

The Socialist Party is engaged in a struggle to create a world, a socialist society, where people live from birth to death never having to suffer under the chains of wage slavery and end the exploitation of men and women forever. It is what all honest socialists are fighting for. We have no choice but to create a world free of exploitation and want. The working class can only be liberated through its own self-activity. The working class lacks the most basic mass workplace and community organisations, let alone socialist ones. The Socialist Party can help in the process of working class self-organisation toward revolutionary social change. We need socialism more urgently than ever. Being revolutionary does not mean picking up the gun, talking about class insurrection and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nor does it mean endlessly reciting the works of Marx and Engels. Being revolutionary means acting so as to shorten the time left before a successful social revolution in which the working class take control over their own lives from the old exploiting classes. Anything that advances such a social revolution is by definition revolutionary, anything that hinders such a social revolution is anti-revolutionary. What seems like short-cuts to revolution can often be a dead-ends resulting in frustration and defeat. The working class has colossal tasks ahead of it. It confronts the most formidable and ferocious of adversaries. Yet it possesses the potential of a giant.