All for All

What was once small activist actions are spreading into an ever-growing global environmentalist movement that the mainstream media and ruling-class establishment can no longer ignore. We find it inspiring that so many people have turned out for Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion's protests.  The Socialist Party has sympathy with their objectives. We understand their analysis of capitalism as a system that can only put profit before people and planet. However, no matter how well-intentioned, the goal of those who reject capitalism should be to break the consensus that supports capitalism and organise politically – democratically – to a replace private ownership with common ownership. It’s the profit system that is the problem. It brings pressure to bear on economic decision-makers to opt for the cheapest methods of production on pain of being driven out of business altogether. If consideration of what is in the general human interest is to prevail, then the profit system must go. It must be replaced by a production-for-use system—which can only exist on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources by the whole community. In a genuinely socialist system The tyranny of the market and competitiveness will have gone and we’ll be free to employ the most appropriate methods of production and transport.

It remains a short-coming of the environmental movement that it still possesses no real vision of a future society to replace capitalism. A thoroughgoing change to a world without classes, nations, governments or profit is needed. Sadly, the green eco-warriors despite their sincerity and effectiveness of much of their critique of capitalism, have yet to find the genuine alternative. Nevertheless, they have raised the question if people are just to stand passively by, looking on, while the world around them descends into dystopian disasters, as something inevitable beyond their control. Instead, they stand up and act together for climate justice.

The shortest distance between capitalism and an alternative society is a straight line.  Let’s campaign for the abolition of capitalism and not misdirect our energies in trying to humanise capitalism, which can only – as you recognise – put profit before people. That’s why socialism is so important. Yes, it is, as we are often told, a ‘nice idea’. But when it takes hold of people's imagination, it could become much more than that and blossom in a world beyond capitalism, a world fit for humanity. The present discontent over climate change unrest could be the first signs a positive movement in the broader class struggle. The liberation of humankind must be the work of the people themselves and must be majoritarian and democratic. No elite can substitute. To succeed the socialist revolution must be essentially non-violent and democratic involving the vast majority of the population. To attempt a social revolution without such majority support almost inevitably results either in a counter-revolutionary regime or in a revolutionary dictatorship which destroys the goals for which the revolution was undertaken.

The Socialist Party does not get involved in conventional politics or seek to form the government. We cannot agree that we should engage in the day-to-day struggle as well as agitate and organise for Socialism. To do so runs the great risk of becoming yet another conventional political party since engaging in the day-to-day struggle of people under capitalism necessarily involves advocating reforms. A reform programme would attract people who want a palliative rather than a cure. In a democratic party as we are, such people would come to dominate it and turn it into an instrument for trying to get reforms rather than for carrying out the social revolution. The best way to avoid this danger is for the Socialist Party, while not opposing sound reforms and always being on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors, is not to advocate them.