The Socialist Party stands squarely on the class struggle, defiantly challenging the capitalist class, relying only upon the awakening working class to rally to its standard and carry it to victory.
Socialists believe that the working class would lead in the transformation of society because it was at once the most dehumanised and alienated class, and potentially the most powerful, since the functioning of society depended upon it.
The Socialist Party stresses the need for a change in the economic organisation and for transferring ownership and control of the means of production from private (or corporate) hands into the hands of organised producers.
Today, the questions of the quality of life and mankind's goal in living in harmony with its natural surroundings have emerged again as questions of primary importance. Capitalism keeps humanity from realising its true potential. We are moving rapidly toward a fully automated world in which the ten or twenty hour work week can be standard, where the material needs of people can be satisfied.
The Socialist Party is the only party that is or can be truly representative of the interests of the working class, the only class essential to society and the class that is destined ultimately to succeed to political power, “not for the purpose of governing men,” in the words of Engels, but “to administer things.” The present form of government, is based solely upon private property in the means of production, is wholly coercive; in socialism it will be purely administrative. The only vital function of the present government is to keep the exploited class in subjection by their exploiters. Governments as a rule legislate wholly in the interest of the ruling capitalist class. Courts of justice decide cases of importance not upon their merit, but in the interest of the ruling class. The owning class is necessarily the ruling class. It dictates legislation and in case of doubt or controversy has it construed in its own interest.
Marx was right in declaring the economic basis of society determines the character of all social institutions and in proportion only as this basis changes, the institutions are modified For instance, chattel slavery was legal and respectable as long as it was an economic necessity and no longer. When in the march of the industrial revolution, accelerated so swiftly by the development and application of modern machinery, slavery was overthrown, it became immoral, unjust, and disreputable. In other words it was moral as long as it paid; it became immoral only when it ceased, because of changed economic conditions, to be profitable to the capitalist class. This is applicable in every detail to the present wage system in which one man is the servant and slave and at the mercy of another and in which those having antagonistic economic interests are ceaselessly at war.
Poor people, black people, cheap labour, capitalism’s “variable capital” is seen as expendable. But now the developed world’s trade, profit and security interests are directly affected, and capitalism belatedly responds. Its self interest is always short term and this greedy self interest now confronts us with a potential crisis of unimaginable proportions.
Africa is portrayed as a continent in perpetual crisis – those portraying it as such seldom own up to being the cause. As the state managers of capital prepare to pull up the drawbridge and impose their own forms of self interested quarantine, millions in Africa will be left to die.
Governments are already using this, as with the other monsters they have created (the war on terror, recession and debt) to cow and intimidate us into compliance and submission – if we let them!
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