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Thursday, August 13, 2020

The Only Hope for Civilisation 

The Socialist Party advances the theory of socialist revolution. It does not promote this goal as Utopian, a mere vision of what would make working people happy, but as a practical aim to be attained. Capitalism has nothing to offer but uncertainty for tomorrow, economic insecurity, environmental disasters, and wars. Society is more and more divided.

Global warming and the environmental crisis is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. The relentless exploitation and unsustainable waste of resources by capitalism is the source of this disaster.  Short-term hunt for profit and the abuse of science under capitalism is destroying the world’s environment at an accelerating speed. Technology can be positive and beneficial to society, but private property and the priorities of the ruling class create these great problems. Our answer is that the working class must organise to overthrow those who threaten the survival of the people of the world. Only a planned socialist economy will remedy the current climate catastrophe. It is the task of the working class to put an end to capitalist exploitation and oppression. Capitalism knows no national boundaries. It encompasses all the world’s countries and peoples. The working class is also international, even if the working class of each country first must first do away with their own capitalists. 

Socialism is the power of the working class. This class sets out to reclaim the people’s property from the owning class. Socialism is the sensible use of the resources. Production will be planned on the basis of what serves society, not what yields the most profit. The producers themselves will decide what to produce and how – not “the market”.

 A class-free society is the goal of the Socialist Party. Only when classes and the state have ceased to exist, can people attain full and unlimited freedom. Only then the principle “From each according to ability, to each according to needs” can be fully realised.

The source of oppression lies in the private ownership of the means of production. The capitalist system is the enemy of men and women, and it is only through a socialist revolution and the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production that the oppression and exploitation can disappear. Socialist revolution creates the basis for the participation of working people at all levels of society. While there seems nothing wrong with giving support to political movements in favour of defending a particular sector of the oppressed, the Socialist Party has stubbornly clung to the basic concept of Marx, that only the working class, i.e. the mass of all those forced to sell their labour power in exchange of wages, unites the objective and subjective conditions for building a socialist, i.e. class-free society. We have defended that idea throughout our existence and when it was  less fashionable than it is today. Socialism, on Marx’s view, would be born out of capitalism. But it would be the society of true freedom. Socialists  believe that our fellow-workers, in their misery, yearn for freedom, that they reject servility as we ourselves have rejected them and won’t be bought off with ameliorated conditions, promises  of future rewards or greater opportunities for the worker to ‘better’ oneself. Reformism is a matter of negotiation and bargaining for improved conditions and more security within existing conditions. The reformists are bound to fail, since palliatives under capitalism cannot last, they are not permanent.

Liberty is not something that can be brought to the worker by leaders or saviours. The bringing of freedom to somebody is not a free but a despotic conception. The abolition of the State seems the necessary precondition for the emancipation of the proletariat. The free society will be a federation not of nations but of groups or communes where  production will be placed under the direction of a well-organised administration. To expect from the government of the propertied class that it will help by its mighty hand the strivings of the proletariat towards victory, means to expect the impossible from it. The power of the government reaches only so wide as the interests of the ruling class permit it. It can by a clever see-saw game between parts of the ruling class to obtain particular privileges and power. This rivalry for power however disintegrates the moment when it wants it faces its common enemy, the working class.

Political parties are the product of the class struggle. In a classless society which has rid itself of the remnants of class interests and ideology there will be no political parties. They will be unnecessary. But we have not reached the class-free society. We are in the midst of a society torn apart by class war, and the political parties of necessity express and reflect the interests of classes in this conflict. The more fierce the class struggle becomes, the more society is divided into two camps, when the class antagonisms take the form of the capitalist and landlord class versus the working class. It is this class is the custodian of socialism, of the evolution of mankind. The capitalist class is no longer a progressive class. It cannot lead mankind forward but only backwards. Based upon private property, it has long-since fulfilled whatever progressive role it had to play in the development of society. Capitalism now is a fetter upon the productive forces of society and will lead to desolation and catastrophe.  Unless the changes in society from one social system to another takes place, then mankind will still live in a primitive society.  We want a conscious organised working class which will dare to use its political strength to advance to socialism.

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