Imagine a Different World

For many long years the Socialist Party has pleaded with fellow-workers to organise and take over the entire means of production and distribution. It has published the Socialist Standard, pamphlets, books and leaflets of all kinds with scanty result. Unheedingly, the workers have remained indifferent to questions of supreme importance. Now, in the middle of a pandemic, many are now raising questions about the nature of this society. Some are now saying capitalism must go. It is no longer a question of condemning capitalism; capitalism has condemned itself. 

The capitalist class owns and controls the social necessaries, the economic resources of the world. That class, for its own protection and perpetuation in power, subjects all institutions to its own interests. On the other hand, there is another class—the working class—which is eventually to change the whole system of ownership of the means of production. Workers realise that immediately following the change, these social relations will also be shifted; institutions deriving their support and sustenance from the class in power will be made to confirm to new conditions after the overthrow of the existing industrial system. While the capitalists live in luxury and in extravagance, the workers are condemned to lives of poverty, toil and deprivation. We lack economic security. Poverty and the fear of poverty make our lives miserable. The average worker is not more than a few weeks removed from a state of destitution. Lacking wealth, we lack power, and the wealth they produce constitutes the power of the capitalists which is used to hold us in subjection. Now. workers know they possess a power infinitely greater than that of the capitalists. The pandemic has highlighted that it is our power to produce wealth, to run industry, to carry on production. We can do this without capitalists, while without workers, capitalists are helpless. Working class control of industries, by all engaged in the process of production, must build its foundation on the highly perfected form and methods of production, and upon the conditions which accelerate the passing away of the capitalist system of ownership in the instruments of production and distribution.

Working people will be guaranteed security, democracy, equality and peace only when our world is run on an entirely different basis than it is now; only when a socialist system replaces the present capitalist one. The new socialist system would mean that working people would own the factories and farms and they would plan production and distribution for their own needs.