The Choice for All - Abundance for All

For the first time in history, humankind can produce such abundance that society can be free from poverty, hunger and homelessness. The only thing standing in the way is the capitalist system of exploitation and wage-slavery. The struggle for education and health care is the beginning of a revolution for a better world. We seek to liberate the thinking of working people and unleash their energy. We will win them to the cause for which they are already fighting with a vision of a world of plenty. New technology provides better, cheaper and more products with less and less labour. Society now has the capacity to devote the energies and talents of its people to satisfying the needs of all. The magic of robotics and automation which sprang from the inventive genius of man, has been created the possibility of fabulous abundance. But, alas, instead of blessing mankind, it has become the means of enslaving it.

Each day, increasing Artificial Intelligence is throwing people out of their jobs. Their work has become worthless to a system that values only what it can exploit to make a profit. People who until very recently trusted and defended capitalist economic structure are now searching for political direction and for solutions to their problems. More and more, people from every walk of life and every pocket of struggle against this system are looking for a plan for what has to be done. The ruling class tries to keep people confused and to keep them from fighting in their own interests. For it to continue, capitalism must retain the faith of workers and middle class; it must spread the impression that it still can work. We have to counter the ruling class’s intensifying propaganda in the class war. The day when our fellow-workers recognise that so long as capitalism exists they are doomed to degradation and poverty amid the greatest potential in the world – that day will have seen the dawn of social revolution and the overthrow of capitalism. Only with the profit system removed, can they find abundance. The arguments for overthrowing capitalism now finds ready listeners. Conditions are ripe for revolution.

Dramatic changes in the way a society produces its wealth call for radical changes in how that society is organised. The capitalist class cannot convince the people to believe in their system while they are destroying their hopes and dreams. The Socialist Party aspires to inspire our fellow-workers with a society organised for the benefit of all, built on cooperation, that puts the well-being of people above the profits and property of a handful of billionaires. When the property-less class which has no place under the capitalist system takes control of all productive property and transforms it into common property, it can reorganise production so that abundance is distributed according to need. We endeavour to empower people with the understanding of their role in striving for this new society and imbue them with the confidence that it’s possible to win. We call on you to join us in campaigning for this cause. The fight for what people need in order to live for justice and happiness is the revolutionary struggle today. Conditions are ripe for revolution.

The material and technical resources for a society of free access, a world based on the principle from each according to ability, to each according to needs, unquestionably exist today. Surely no competent enquirer doubts that everybody could have a comfortable and attractive home, abundant food, decent clothing, opportunity for recreation and education, security against accident, sickness, and old age; and the sense of independence and self-respect that goes with these things. The appalling contrast between what might be and what is, arises from the nature of the economic system – capitalism – under which we operate. A revolution in technology has occurred and is still in process. Private possession and control over it via intellectual ownership and patent laws provides the right to make profit from it and to exploit the labour of those engaged in it. This antiquated system of private ownership and profit continues to function and acts as a brake upon production so that, as the phrase goes, you have “want in the midst of plenty.” The Socialist Party seeks to end immediately private ownership and control over natural resources and over production, distribution and communication which generations of workers applied their toil and skill to build. Ownership and control would be vested collectively in society. It will be the people, not the industrialists and financiers who who will benefit. The spectre of insecurity will be removed. The despotic domination of the few over the many will be at an end. The rational and scientific use of natural resources and sustainable manufacturing will mean an immediate and substantial improvement in the standard of living of the mass of people. Capitalism can save itself only by fiercer exploitation, cutting living standards, taking away even such concessions as were previously made. Since capitalism must keep pushing conditions of working and living ever lower and lower, it must eventually undermine every vestige of democratic rights and the means of resistance workers may have, for clearly no matter how meek, peaceful, conservative an organisation might be, at. some point it will try to resist the imposition of further impoverishment and distress.

There is only one course which can save people from capitalism – revolution. We must make every struggle, on every battlefield, a step towards that end, the abolition of the capitalist system of society, based on the exploitation of man by man, and to build a socialist society based on common ownership of the means of production, with economic life planned in the interests of the masses of the people – a society which will develop material; abundance and the construction of a society based on the principle “to each according to needs”.