Socialism will win

What is socialism? To answer in a single sentence, it means the common ownership by all the people of all the means of wealth production and distribution. The word has been so misused for so long that it is worth re-stating its basic principles. There has been a pressing need for explaining and advancing the socialist case as the reformists have preempted the field. There has always been the tendency to confuse socialism with reform of one sort or another, to make it acceptable and palatable, sapping it of its essence which compels the Socialist Party to repeatedly draw clear and true lines between socialism and social quackery, between reform and revolution. They want a capitalism without its economic laws as if we can have a universe without the law of gravity, or zoology with the law of evolution left out. What reformists advocate would not be socialism, any more than a house without foundation, walls, floors or roof would be a house. Socialism means but one thing, and that is the abolition of capital in private hands, and the turning over of the industries into the direct control of society. Socialism means that the tools of production are owned and controlled by society so that what is produced can be shared out according to people’s needs. 

Anything else is not socialism, and has no right to use that name.

Capitalism does not consist merely in the private ownership of the necessaries for production. If such ownership were the determining feature and quality of capitalism, then capitalism reigned in the days of serfdom. The serf owned his tools, the feudal lord owned the land, the two necessaries for production. Yet that was not capitalism. Capitalism is that social system under which the tool of production (capital) has grown to such mammoth size that the class that owns it rules land, sea and air like a despot, steadily swelling the number of its slaves, the wage slaves, thereby itself recruiting the forces that will overthrow it, and push civilization onward to the socialist society. That is capitalism, not any one or set of seemingly capitalist manifestations.

So with socialism. It does not consist merely in the overthrow of private ownership in any or all of the necessaries of life. Socialism is that social system under which the necessaries of production are owned, controlled, and administered by the people, for the people, and under which, accordingly, the cause of political and economic despotism having been abolished, class rule is at end. That is socialism, nothing short of that.

Therefore, while not opposing any reforms or improvements which may be secured under capitalism, the Socialist Party steadfastly sets its face against taking time away from its main battle, for revolution, in order to carry on the struggle for reform. It refuses to be maneuvered into abandoning its main demand that the means of production become common property in order to fritter away its energies chasing immediate demands. It turns away from the tempting baits to lead workers into side issues and blind alleys. The one demand of the Socialist Party is socialism, unadulterated and undiluted. It demands the unconditional surrender by the capitalist class of the machinery of industry.

The Socialist Party insists that it is the most humanitarian movement on earth. More so than all philanthropic ventures of Bill Gates, all the charitable societies, and associations; it, and it alone, carries within its programme the highest humanitarian hopes and possibilities of the humanity. All the other movements are based on aspiration alone. The the Socialist Party stands out unique as the only one based on the material programme which will make the realisation of those aspirations an accomplished fact. Socialism alone will supply the basis for any permanent improvement in the condition of mankind. the Socialist Party declares that economic freedom is the supreme question that confronts the people. The working class are dependent upon the capitalist class, who own the means of production; and the capitalist class, by virtue of their economic mastery, are the ruling class of the nation, and it is useless under such conditions to claim that men and women are equal and that they all are sovereign citizens. No person is free in any just sense who has to rely upon the arbitrary will of another for the opportunity to work. Such a person works, and therefore lives, by permission, and this is the present economic relation of the working class to the capitalist class.

Socialism is nothing other than people's conscious self-organisation of their own lives, the management of production by the producers themselves. State capitalism is capitalism by the state and for the state. It is capitalism by the government and for the government. It is state capitalism by the ruling classes and for the ruling classes. The idea that state ownership of the means of production constitutes socialism is wrong. Engels pointed out long ago in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific:

“...the transformation, either into joint-stock companies or trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalist nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious and the modern state, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of the individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution to the conflict...”

The kind of “socialism” that state capitalists envisage is not what the Socialist Party means by socialism. Not at all. What the state capitalists mean is that the capitalist governments will make themselves responsible for the organisation of production. The workers will remain just where they are – sweating in the factories and in the fields and piling up the profits for their masters. The ministerial functionaries are more capitalistic than the capitalists themselves in their unceasing struggle against the working class.

Socialist society represents the historical development of human society of a class-free system. The Socialist Party believes in the organisation of the working class for the overthrow of capitalist society as the only cure for the crimes of capitalism. For this reason we shall every day and everywhere and on all possible occasions carry on the most relentless struggle against those who mis-use the name socialist.