Our Future is Now

The coming hope the future day,

When wrong to right shall bow,

And hearts that have the courage man

To make the future NOW”

Ernest Jones, Chartist

The Socialist Party aims to remove the capitalist anarchy of production, which today is again leading to economic crisis; a crisis which, as in the past, the working class will be made to pay for, unless it puts an end to the capitalist system. Today the contradictions of capitalism threatens to plunge the working class into the chaos of climate change. Inherent in the realities of capitalism, historically and down to the present moment, have been a deep authoritarianism and inhumanity. Such things threaten the very survival of humanity. This is the capitalist system, which some reformists work day and night to save. Today this is often called “getting our priorities right”. Working people will not break with their exploiters and their machinery of deception.

Capitalism is the right of private property, the right of a few to own and control the means by which all must live, the right of the owners of the means of production to use it to exploit the rest of the community in the interest of their personal profit, the right to determine what shall be produced and how, regardless of the misery and wretchedness of those who produce it. Capitalism is the right to exploit, the right to rob, the right to over-produce and cause crises, the right to compete, and cause wars. These are basic cause of capitalist ills. To exist economically, the capitalist must accumulate; not that he wants to or doesn’t – he must accumulate in order to live. To accumulate, he must be assured profit. To profit, he must exploit labour. There is no other way. No one, no genius, not the greatest, has discovered another way. Capital always seeks to intensify exploitation; labour always and necessarily seeks to resist exploitation. Capitalism seeks what is rightfully its own, from its point of view: the maximum that it can get out of the worker. Labour seeks what is rightfully its own: that’s why it forms class organisations, labour unions. Now what is rightfully labour’s own, at least from our point of view?

The abolition of the right of private property, and instead the common ownership of the means of production, so that all may enjoy the fruit of their labour, and consume it, thus eliminating the crises of over-production, and the crises of wars is the socialist answer. Socialism demands the common ownership and democratic control and management of the means of production and exchange for the benefit and welfare of the people as a whole; nothing less than that suffices. We base that upon the fact that capitalism, which is founded upon and cannot exist without the ownership and control of the means of production has brought society almost literally to the edge of a precipice, where it cannot guarantee security to the people, cannot guarantee peace to the people, cannot guarantee brotherhood to the people, cannot guarantee abundance to the people. Any social system which cannot guarantee those to the people stands condemned. The only way to replace capitalism, the only socialism.

The development to socialism is inevitable because just as feudalism replaced slavery, and capitalism feudalism – all based upon the right of private property – so capitalism, having enormously developed the productive processes on a social basis, has reached the stage when, because of the private ownership of those processes, the system has become a fetter on production itself. What is in question is how much more of the ills caused by capitalism, from wage servitude to atomic war, we have to go through, and that depends upon all of us, upon you. Capitalism produces its own grave-diggers, the wage workers and they reach a point where it is no longer possible to live, they see the limitations of the trade union struggle in the persistence of insecurity...private ownership must go, common ownership must plustake its place, socialism. It is capitalism, economic and environmental crises and war – or socialism, freedom, economic planning and peace. Private wnership on the one hand, non-ownership of the means of production on the other hand

“Nature furnishes its wealth to all men in common. God beneficiently has created all things that their enjoyment be common to all living beings, and that the earth become the common possession of all. It is nature itself that has given birth to the right of the community, while it is only unjust usurpation that has created the right of private property.” - St Ambrose (340-397 AD)