How to fix things. Let every struggle be a school of socialism

The capitalists rob you and all but starves you and there is only one way you can get out of their strangle-hold. That is by making the world a socialist one. The importance of a systematic fight can hardly be overestimated. It is not worth while to try to reform capitalism even if it were possible. Capitalism climate crisis is getting worse day by day. If they stand together the workers can bring peace and happiness to every home. The Socialist Party is giving the solution to capitalism many crises. It consists in eliminating capitalism itself. Socialism is the abolition of capitalism and is the only solution that human beings can give to the current crises. The development of the productive forces on a global scale has made the world overripe for socialism. Only a socialist planned world economy can deliver civilisation from the threat of extinction, and assure a world society of enduring peace, of boundless plenty, the unlimited expansion of culture and the achievement of full freedom for all. Without socialism, capitalism will continue to waste enormous resources, to hold the earth's population in abject poverty, to maintain social and racial inequality, and to support dictatorial regimes. To complete this grim perspective of hunger, insecurity, inequality and oppressive rule, capitalism offers the permanent threat of environmental destruction.

Capitalism succeeded in winning temporary stability after the Second World War. However, this temporary stabilisation of capitalism has disappeared and now we face austerity and the sharpening of competition in the world market with the necessity to attack the workers' standard of living, job conditions, and employment opportunities in order to strengthen competitive efficiency. These point to increasingly fierce class battles which could be raised from the economic to the political level under favourable conditions, arouse the labour movement to a new upsurge, challenging capitalism. We believe that the present system, of capitalism, is not part of an eternal “natural order” of things, not a consequence of “human nature”. It is a recent arrival in mankind’s history. The problems we face are not some “illness” of capitalism, they are an essential part of how it works. All these evils are the direct result of the private ownership of wealth, and the consequent exploitation by a few of the mass of the population, the workers who produce all wealth and whose reward is a tiny pittance. The capitalist minority of the population holds complete control of the economy and political power, and effectively controls all the machinery of the state. The working class, beset by unemployment, lower standards of living, and repression, with growing awareness of purposes constantly broadening and deepening emerge as a class conscious of itself and waging war upon capitalism. For if the revolutionary workers do not act, if the basic economic drive of capitalism – production and realisation of surplus value, the accumulation of capital – is left to work itself out unchecked, then as Marx described if there is no “revolutionary reconstitution of society” in favour of the working classes, then the “common ruin of the contending classes”

What do we mean by socialism? Not the phoney socialism of the Labour Party with its history of betrayal, and its attempts to make capitalism work, nor is it the “socialism” of the former USSR which uses pseudo-socialist phrases but where in fact one huge capitalist state monopoly, exploited the mass of Soviet workers on behalf of a small ruling elite of Party and State bosses. We are fighting for a working class democracy in which the producers of wealth, the working class will own the factories, the land, the hospitals, the schools, the courts etc. and will run them themselves according to the will of the majority, in which the working class will exercise dictatorship over the former capitalists in order to abolish capitalism’s forces. The unity of mankind is an age-old dream. This is our aim, a class-free society in which classes and therefore the state have finally disappeared. the Wage-Slave Abolitionists of to-day are fighting to abolish capitalism.

Socialist principles rests upon the following propositions:

1. Capitalist ownership of the facilities of production is the principal obstacle to the development of the means for achieving economic security, social solidarity and human happiness.
2. The working class is the only social force which, by virtue of its economic position and functions, is vitally interested and consistently impelled to transcend capitalism.
3. Capitalist power and property can be abolished only by carrying the mass struggle on a world scale.
4. The road to a harmonious and class-free society has to pass through the gate of the world socialist revolution in order to eliminate the root causes of conflict between one part of mankind and another.