Towards The New Cooperative Commonwealth

A world community without money, without prices, without wages, without classes and without countries has long been feasible. Capitalism itself created the material preconditions for such a society. Mankind has proclaimed the necessity and possibility of a superior economic and social system and even sketched its outlines: a society based on people’s complete equality and freedom, a society based on collective creative work to satisfy human needs, a society in which means of production belong to people collectively. The claim that capitalism is the best economic system is the biggest lie in human history.

 This system is drenched in blood. While hundreds of millions of people have no home, no healthcare, no education and even no food, the means to produce and satisfy these needs lie idle and unused. Economically, this society cannot stand on its two feet without children put to work while it discards the aged. It can’t produce without killing, maiming and wearing people out. It can’t carry on without dehumanising the majority of the people of the earth and without ignoring their basic needs. The basis of capitalist society is the despicable fact that the majority, in order to live must sell its bodily and intellectual powers to a minority. It is a society where the production of people’s essentials has been tied to the profitability of capital. 

Under capitalism, with its wage slavery, working people are nominally free; but the land, the tools and all the product of labour belong to the employing class. The workers are at liberty to change their individual masters, if they can, that is all.“Free” sell their labour power, which is the only commodity they possess, to the capitalists who own or control all the means of producing wealth, including the tools, raw material, land and money. So long as wages are paid by one class to another class, so long will men and women remain slaves to the employing class. Goods, are produced, not directly for social needs, but in order to create a profit for the capitalists. The only way to solve the growing antagonism between the two great classes of modern society is, by substituting cooperation for competition, in all branches of production and distribution. This involves a social revolution.

We regard economic growth, technological progress, development of the productive capacities, and the raising of the level of consumption, welfare and leisure of human society as vital. Sharing scarcity is not our solution. The Socialist Party intends to build a system which is based on economic justice.

Socialism is a society in which human beings gain control over their economic lives, are freed from the chains of blind economic laws. Socialism is the movement for freeing human beings from economic necessity. A socialist society is an open and informed society. In socialism it will be a routine procedure to constantly inform people about the needs and problems in the various areas of human life worldwide. In the socialist system it is the citizens and their institutions that constantly inform each other of the economic, social and human needs, as well as of the scientific and technical advances of the different sectors. Given the present technology, the organisation of such information interchange and of everyone’s constant access to it is feasible even right now.

In a socialist society not only all are consumers, but all are also producers. Everyone works and everyone consumes. To carry on production "for the benefit of the community" means, in a socialist society, for the benefit of the community both as consumers and as producers. The wages system, under which workers has been reduced to a commodity is to be supplanted by the socialist system, the fraternal commonwealth. By uniting at the ballot box, political control of the State can be secured, and the cooperative commonwealth established. The common ownership of the means of production and distribution, a new economic system ending all social oppression by dissolving the hostile classes into a community of free and equal producers striving not for sectional interests, but for the common good. 

The socialist commonwealth, liberates the individual from all economic, political and social oppression and provides the basis, for real liberty and for the full and harmonious development of the person, giving full scope for the growth of the creative faculties of all. 

The time has come for social regeneration, and this progress is only possible through a new and worldwide change of system, and to inaugurate that change will be the purpose of the Socialist Party. Can the day of change be hastened? Without a doubt. Every worker who helps the propaganda, votes the socialist platform, and encourages others to do likewise is speeding the day of the new commonwealth.