Wednesday, July 24, 2019

The social revolution is our immediate goal

The Socialist Party shows not only that socialist society is possible, but also that it is necessary. We’re the class, the working class, that produces everything. We’re the class that represents the future. The Socialist Party is not a party that says it represents everybody, both capitalists and the workers, and preaches the idea of harmony between classes, because there can’t be harmony between the slaves and the slave-masters. We have shown the need in the future society for organisation among all men and women for all needs, and the necessity in current society for the workers to struggle against their exploiters. It would be absurd if we were to admit the need for organisation for everyone. There can’t be harmony between the exploited and the exploiters because the slave-master lives by exploiting the workers – the capitalist lives by exploiting, that’s his whole existence. And we live for the day when we can break those chains of exploitation. We are not a party of both the slave-master and the slave. We are a party of the wage-slave. We openly proclaim that we’re going to break those chains. We're talking about the working class, the great majority in this society, taking control of their destiny throughout the world for the first time in history. This system, this capitalist system of wage slavery, doesn’t allow us any real choice. Wealth will only truly be placed in common when production will have been organised in the common good. he workers have no need of chiefs: they are quite capable of charging one of their own with a particular task.

We have criticised reforms and ameliorations. Our ambition is neither official nor unofficial power, and this is our claim to the sympathy of the masses. But this isn’t enough. We must act. We must prove to the world that socialism isn’t an abstract concept or a distant vision, but a principle destined to renew the world and establishing it on the foundations of well-being and human fraternity. Socialists, beginning with Marx and Engels have always supported democracy as against any form of despotism. Thus they have supported republicanism against monarchism, capitalist democracy against capitalist dictatorship. But they always recognise the limitations of the above. SOCIALISM MEANS EXPANDING DEMOCRACY

In order for the society working people will create to be just, egalitarian and equitable, it must embody socialist ideology. Our fundamental change is not to preserve capitalism but to end it. Socialism, as it was understood by Marx and Engels, is the process of creating a society that would have no need for repression and oppression because it had overcome economic scarcity. Our compass for where we are heading should have socialism as its destination. We need to keep this end in mind not to lose our way. The planned allocation of resources and human labour, in such a future society, would also ensure that no one would have to degrade themselves by working for another human being in order to survive. Instead of work being something we all try to avoid, it would gradually be transformed into one of a wide range of creative activities people engage in to make their lives meaningful. A society in which human beings could enjoy the fullness of life without the need to make others their servants, or to be servants of others. Marx and Engels predicted that the development of the productive forces under industrial capitalism would for the first time in human history build the material basis for such a fundamental transformation of society. 

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