The ABC of Socialism

Socialism will neither have commodity production nor classes so it is clear that no socialist society exists or has existed anywhere in the world. Capitalists  are confronting proletarians and it is impossible to speak of solidarity between them; one group tries to reduce wages, the other tries to increase them. Each can only gain at the expense of the other. We live in a world where commercial rivalries, war and the threat of war characterize the relations between countries, peoples, and nations. Hunger, poverty, unemployment, racial and sexual discrimination, and many forms of repression, including the most barbaric, such as genocide, are the lot of the majority of the earth’s inhabitants. Capitalism is the result of the exploitation of the labour power of the workers by the employing class, sole owners of the means of production. This exploitation is particularly brutal in the less economically developed countries. The working class now have a rich experience behind it from its many battles fought against the capitalists for more than a century: battles both on the economic and the political fronts.

 The goal of the class struggle is to lead the world to socialism. The historic mission of the working class is thus not only to replace the rule of one class with that of another, as has happened already in the feudal and bourgeois revolutions, but also to liberate all of humanity from the chains of exploitation and oppression by the abolition of classes themselves. The divisions between the city and countryside, and between mental and manual labour will also be abolished, and a society without a State will be created, since the State is nothing other than the instrument of domination of one class over the others.

The emancipation of the workers will be accomplished by the workers themselves. They will achieve it through socialist revolution, which will suppress the private ownership of the means of production in order to establish common property, and replace capitalist commodity production by the socialist organization of production based on the labour of all the members of society and designed to ensure the complete well-being and full development of each person. What socialism demands is now nothing else, than the opening of our eyes for the social process, which take place around us. Socialism is thus revolutionary in principle, i.e. it puts up a totally new principle in place of the old, not just patches this or that flaw.

The Socialist Party’s objective is to lift the working class everywhere from the dead level of wage-slavery to freedom and dignity. 

 Socialism is a free society, based upon cooperative industry, administered in the equal interest of all without a trace of bondage to breed resentment. Socialism is the product of social evolution. Capitalists upon the one hand, workers upon the other, the former having the machinery, buying the labour-power to operate it, and therefore owning the product. Result: a few billionaires ad a vast army of poverty-stricken, degraded, and servile toilers. These conditions are practically the same in all nations throughout the world. The workers and the  capitalists are in deadly economic conflict. The battlefield is the Earth; the stake is universal freedom. The slave pen and auction block had to go. The “labour market” will soon follow.