End the yoke of private ownership

Throughout the world, without exception, the picture is one of increasing chaos and crises. Capitalism is manifestly exhibiting symptoms of deep crisis. Throughout capitalism the policy of the ruling class is to try to find a way out of the crisis by throwing its burden upon the shoulders of the working class. The result is real destitution, verging into actual hunger. Cities and towns and villages are now full of food-banks, the modern day equivalent of the soup-kitchens. While people go without, the stores and warehouses that are crammed with the necessaries of life. The worker’s life has become an endless round of worry and misery. Never until capitalism appeared upon the world scene was such an anomaly possible—starvation in the midst of plenty. It is a crime against humanity. Global warming has dealt a shattering blow to capitalist complacency. Greatly alarmed, the capitalists dimly perceive its seriousness, without understanding its causes. Across the world system of capitalism there grows a brooding fear of rising discontent and looming revolutions. The capitalists cannot cure their deepening crisis of climate change and have been unable to check its progress. Confusion and pessimism are beginning to appear. Rebellions not prosperity are just around the corner. It is no more mere crisis, but the beginning of a catastrophe. Dark forebodings and fear are now pervading the consciousness of people.

As the capitalists intensify their drive against the workers and in the face of growing hardships and mounting attacks on living standards in every sphere of society, growing numbers taking matters into their own hands to fight back against the owning class of capitalists. Despite decades of attempts to divide, derail and divert the workers’ movement, it continues to survive and engage on the class warfare battlefields. Out of the welter of crisis and misery and war, there is now hope a new social system will be born.

The basic contradiction of capitalism, the source of all its weakness and of its final dissolution, is found in the fact that this system does not carry on production for the benefit of society as a whole but for the profit of a relatively small owning class. The great industries by which society must live are owned by private individuals who ruthlessly exploit the masses who work in these industries. Under capitalism production is regulated not by the needs of the masses but by whether or not the capitalist class can make a profit by such production; commodities are not produced primarily for use, but for profit. The system of private ownership and production for profit generates the whole series of contradictions and conflicts—economic, political and social—which torment present day society, causing disruption in the economic life and violent struggles between individual capitalists, between social classes and between countries.

Capitalist society is based on the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class and that all the evils of this society arise from that. Only by the overthrow and elimination of capitalism can move society forward. The abolition of capitalism will put an end to the division of society into classes and bring about a completely new era in human history–socialism–where mankind as a whole, through it cooperative efforts and conscious planning, can continue to advance to heights undreamed of in the past. There is only one way that all the suffering caused by capitalism can be finally ended–by wiping out its source, capitalism. And there is only one force in society that can bring this about–the working class, uniting against the capitalists. This is why the aim of the working class, through all its daily battles against the capitalists, must be to build the strength and unity of the working class for the day when it will be able to overthrow the capitalists altogether.

The capitalists, of course, try to present their rule and their system of exploitation as eternal. They say that there is no alternative to capitalism. Capitalism is doomed. The capitalist system of private ownership of industry and land, production for profit, and exploitation of the workers is reaching the end of its course. It has outlived its historic mission. In its earlier stages capitalism was a progressive system; it constituted an advance over feudalism, which preceded it. Under capitalism there has been built an industrial system, at least in the imperialist countries; industrial technique has been developed; the proletariat has been created and disciplined. But even the limited progress that capitalism has accomplished for humanity has been achieved at the cost of incredible misery, poverty, ignorance and slaughter of the working class. Capitalism has created the objective conditions for Socialism. But it can go no further. It cannot carry society to higher stages of development, to social harmony. It has become an obstacle in the upward path of humanity, a means of condemning hundreds of millions of people to mass starvation and death. Capitalism has provided its own executioners and grave diggers, the proletariat. The workers of the world are getting ready for their great social task of abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism.

No Party can represent both capitalist and worker, for the capitalist lives by exploiting the worker and the worker lives for the day he and she can end this exploitation. And election can bring freedom for the working class because freedom for the working class means the ending of capitalist wage-slavery. The Socialist Party openly declares that it represents only the working class and seeks, as the highest interest of the working class, the overthrow and elimination of capitalism by the working class itself.