THE ALTERNATIVE IS SOCIALISM

The capitalist system creates a contrast of the conditions between the producers of wealth and those who own the wealth. The difference is maintained by an apparatus of class dictatorship in the interests of property. The law is based upon property and the protection of property interests. The organisation of the forces for the administration of the law is in the hands of the people of property. The police forces are headed with officers of the propertied class. The armed forces are officered by the elite. The media is owned by the lords of property, and they mould the news of the day in the interests of property. All their activities for the maintenance of the power of the propertied class over the property-less working class.

There are two different sorts of private property. The one is private property in the means of production: private property in a factory or a mine, or in the land. And the other sort is private property in consumers’ goods, in personal possessions and keepsakes, in houses, in cars, in gardens, in labour-saving devices, in access to amusements, in every sort of thing which we actually use and consume. It ought to be impossible to mix them up. For there is one rule for distinguishing between them. Private property of the former carries an income with it. Private property of the latter sort does not carry an income with it. The economic system which is currently called socialism involves abolishing the first sort of private property in order to increase vastly the second sort of property. Not less but more private property is needed. But it must be the right kind of property. There are two kinds of private property. Private property in the means by which things are made – factories, land, mines, gives to the owners power to control the lives of others. That must cease. It is wrong private property. Capitalism robs men and women of the fruits of their toil. Socialism has no complaint concerning such private property, save that the masses lack it. Socialism means that the means of production are owned and controlled by society so that what is produced can be shared out according to people’s needs. Socialism is founded on the idea of equality, which means that most people will get the same. Socialism is a planned economy, so that production is for need, not profit. Socialism is about democracy so that goods are produced and distributed fairly.

The intellectuals and philosophers tell us that socialism, as an idea, is a very fine thing but is unrealisable. When we look at this world of misery, and see our life is not a happy one, the Socialist Party seeks to bring your attention that the basic cause of all the ills of present-day society, which is normally attributed to the imperfection of human nature, is in fact the lack of organisation of human society. Our task is not to convert the world, we leave the evangelic preaching to others. Our task is only to point out as widely as possible what is self-evident to every sufficiently educated person that capitalism has created an unbridgeable gulf between rich and poor, between employer and worker.

Socialism means fewer officials than capitalism, not more. It is capitalism which has a huge bureaucratic machine of administrators, directors, managers, under-managers, foremen, sales managers and advertising experts. With socialism there will exist a range of more interesting, and more creative jobs in the effort to supply the demands for increased goods and services. Socialism confronts a world where disorder reigns: the chaos of sovereign states; the chaos of a world of booms and slumps, where natural resources and machinery of production are retained as private property by men who can bar the people from their only means of livelihood; chaos where vast corporations engage in trade wars with one another until real war breaks out.

The world socialist movement is advancing towards its goal. True freedom and equality begins when distribution is "according to needs" regardless of the work supplied.