The capitalist is defined by the ownership of the means of production and exchange. This ownership is what gives the capitalist power of life or death over the working class and over society as a whole. To live, working people, must not only work for the owners of the means of production and exchange – they must guarantee them a profit. Working for them is not enough; a profit is absolutely required for you to get your job; and that profit can be obtained in no other wise except by exploiting that which is your only real possession – namely your physical or mental capacity to work. That is all the worker has. To live economically, the capitalist must accumulate; not that he wants to or doesn’t – he must accumulate in order to live. To accumulate, he must be assured profit. To profit, he must exploit labour. There is no other way. The capitalist always seeks to intensify exploitation; the worker always seeks to resist exploitation. Capitalism, cannot exist without the private or state ownership and control of the means of production and exchange, has brought society almost literally to the edge of as abyss, where it cannot guarantee security to the people, cannot guarantee peace to the people, cannot guarantee harmony with nature, cannot guarantee abundance to the people. Any social system which cannot guarantee those to the masses of the people stands condemned. The only way to replace capitalism, the only socialism.
Socialism demands the common ownership and democratic control and management of the means of production and distribution for the benefit and welfare of the people as a whole. That is the socialist objective; nothing less than that suffices. The Socialist Party has never pointed to the former Soviet Union as an example of a socialist society. The reason there is no socialism is that socialism demands common ownership of the means of production and democratic and the democratic control by working people. Again, anything less is not and never will be socialism. We reject completely as incompatible with our principles and our aims any and all regimes, even if they proclaim themselves as “socialist” that are in actuality totalitarian state-capitalism, as in the case of the former USSR or China. We reject all political movements, parties and doctrines that support such regimes, that are their defenders or apologists. We stand for the traditional socialist conception that the winning of the battle for democracy is the establishment the inauguration of a class-free society. We reject the concept of a one-party dictatorship in which all other political parties are prohibited or suppressed as a violation of democracy in general and of socialist democracy in particular. We reject totalitarianism, or any dictatorship over the working class, as the road to socialism. We reject the imposition of “socialism” on the working class “for its own good,” against its will or without its freely-arrived-at democratic decision. The road to a socialist society lies only through the ever-greater expansion of democracy. To these propositions the World Socialist Movement is unequivocally committed.
The Socialist Party welcomes its fellow-workers of this world. We are the party of revolutionary socialism. We are part and parcel of the labour movement and have no interests separate from the interests of the whole working class. With our own eyes we can see the successes capitalism: millions of new graves, cities and whole countries turned into cemeteries, more millions wandering without homes or countries to call their own, still more millions under the rule of despots suffer starvation, misery and insecurity throughout the world. The working class is losing confidence in capitalism and its spokesmen. That is a most encouraging sign.
The Socialist Party is fundamental and thoroughgoing opponents of capitalism and we seek to replace it completely by a socialist society. We do not seek to “reform” it – wage-slavery is not to be reformed but replaced fundamentally by social democracy. We aim at building a democratic socialist movement, for the aim of socialism is nothing but the fullest attainment of democracy. The World Socialist Movement is the consistent and thoroughgoing champion of democracy in all spheres of economic, political and social life. In that most urgent of political struggles of our day, the struggle against the war danger and for world peace. We stand for the fullest democratic rights of the members of the trade-union movement, in which we shall seek to have the voice and vision of socialism heard again loudly and effectively.
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