Fight for the Future

We live in unhappy times and the solutions appear not to be evident to many of us. Few offer a vision of an alternative future, let alone a path towards it. The Socialist Party’s goal is clear: a socialist world in which sharing, not competitive struggle, prevails. Capitalist growth leads to the depletion and degradation of natural resources. The technical fixes, government legislation and regulation and market incentives are unlikely to significantly mitigate the environmental emergency. The prognosis for a healthy planet is not at all promising.

First, the Socialist Party maintains that our society is divided into classes based on groups of people standing in the same relationship to the means of production.

Secondly, the Socialist Party holds that the interests of these classes are antagonistic and irreconcilable and that a constant struggle goes on between them over the division of the wealth that society produces.

Thirdly, the Socialist Party agrees that the owning class is the ruling class because it controls the government. The government protects the capitalist class by protecting the source of its economic strength private property. It is the will of the capitalist class that the rights of private property be protected. It uses its control of government to write down its will and call it law. It uses its control of government to enforce its will, the law. The law is the voice of the ruling class.

For a capitalist, the right to private property means first and foremost the free and untrammelled ability to own and use in any way he may see fit the instruments of production. It means that he shall have at all times free access to these instruments, and that he on his own decision shall be able to grant or refuse such access to others: that he himself shall decide whether or not to employ the instruments to turn out goods; that the entire product of the instruments shall belong to him. He and his fellow-capitalists have constructed their state to defend this right by all necessary means. However, in the course of the development of capitalism, the original right to private property suffers some modification and limitation. These limitations are roughly of two sorts: one type is a concession forced on the state by the strength of the workers (for example, the workers’ right to strike and picket, both of which are limitations on the capitalist’s right to private property); the other and more frequent type is imposed by the bourgeois state itself, acting as representative of the entire capitalist class, in order to protect the system of private property against being undermined by the too anarchic practices of individual capitalists. Capitalists, as individuals, usually resent both of these types of limitation, but it is only against the first that they carry on and must carry on a bitter and decisive struggle. The second type is in the final analysis a mode of self-preservation for capitalism. If they are ever to achieve their own emancipation, working people must throw off the shackles of bourgeois law. Socialism is transforming the means of production from individual into common property;

At present the processes of government by which the capitalists of this country rules are called the democratic form of government. Democracy literally means “Rule of the people”. We live in a class society in which one class maintains its favorable economic position because it controls the rule by the people, since the capitalist class is a small minority, of the emulation. The majority of people support the present system and therefore the capitalist class controls the government only as long as the majority of the voters permit them to.

Mankind’s progress cannot resume its upward climb until civilisation is rescued from capitalist barbarism.