The Socialist Party makes no claim to finality. It attempts to raise questions and provoke discussion rather than to provide definitive answers to the question of the role which mass organisations may play in the working class revolution.
In the 19th century Karl Marx referred to workers as the grave-diggers of capitalism. Now some people are asking whether workers are not more likely to bury the revolution than make it. Working people are bombarded with contradictory contentions as to the present and future roles. Pessimists write off workers as hopeless. They think that they will have to find someone other than workers to make the revolution – or there won’t be one. Competition among workers, sectional and selfish interests, short-term favours and national and racial chauvinism have quite often diverted various groups of workers from a revolutionary role to one that is either passive or reactionary in its effect. A new generation seek to find a new course. Revolutions are made by facing problems, not by denying that they exist. Taking state power is a big job, still in the future. Meanwhile, things must be done to open the way. Workers are still the prime movers and shakers who shape the future.
The Labour Party has always accepted the profit system. They used to believe they could humanise it by social reform legislation. Not any longer. Bitter experience has taught them that where reforms and profits come into conflict, it is reforms that have to give way. The Labour Party fully accepts now that priority has to be given to profits and no longer promises more spending on social reforms. But, to distinguish itself from the Tories, Labour still wants to retain a reforming image. But how? By finding reforms which don’t come into conflict with profits.
Today, despite all the promises of a better world, working people are once again in the grips of an even more dangerous social, economic and political crisis. Massive world-wide hunger is the legacy of the profit-system which has distorted the social development of the world. For example the resources they waste on war production could end malnutrition around the world. The computer revolution could liberate us from tedious and stressful jobs. Instead it leaves terrifying concentrations of knowledge and control in the hands of private corporations and intensifies job insecurity. It is a political question. What kind of society do we want to create with the most powerful new technologies and artificial intelligence since the industrial revolution? If harnessed to popular administration and planning, automation could help us achieve an era of abundance for all, release us from monotonous toil and enrich our access to information. The socialist option is the only choice. The flaws of capitalism are too basic, the power of the corporations too great, the gap between the compulsions of profit and the needs of people too wide, for anything less to succeed. Half-measures cannot meet the challenge. Government intervention — tinkering with monetary and fiscal policy has proven useless. Welfare state policies cannot correct deep-rooted structural faults. Legislative reforms and regulation, aimed at fixing the system have met with no success. Corporations hold governments hostage through their control of the economy. Capitalism has failed, and so have efforts to reform it. That failure puts the case for socialism on the immediate agenda.
Under capitalism, labour is a commodity. Workers are used as replaceable parts, extensions of machines—as long as they provide dividends. Employers use their power of ownership to devastate the lives of workers through lay-offs and shut-downs. Our unions, despite all their gallant efforts, are ill-matched to counter management power.
The needs of people, not profit, is the motivation of a socialist society. Socialism means the democratising of all levels and parts of society. We believe in the ability of working people to manage their own productive associations democratically.
The Socialist Party is the party of the dispossessed and oppressed struggling to build a new world. We are a small political party aspiring to become a mass social movement to act in solidarity and support all struggles against the injustices of capitalism, striving for world peace, social equality and environmental sustainability. We can not offer a blueprint to a better future. But we can become the vehicle for change. We offer an invitation to all working people to join us, as we join them, in our common efforts to eradicate a social system based on exploitation, discrimination, poverty and war.
The capitalist system must be replaced by genuine social democracy. That is the only hope of humanity.
Mass unemployment is once more already a reality. Labour rights, our whole range of health and social services, are under fierce attack. Civilisation is threatened with destruction from global warming and humanity itself still remains under threat from the nuclear war drive fuelled by international militarism. Never have we stood in greater need of fundamental solutions.
Not content with strip-mining resources, capitalism proceeds to strip-mine humanity and even the source of life, the planet itself. The Socialist Party campaigns for the establishment of a free, equal and humane society. There can be a rational society sharing prosperity and abundance. Our organisation proclaims its determination to build the cooperative commonwealth as an alternative to the grinding poverty, stark injustice and storm-clouds of war that confront us. We aim to replace the present capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a society from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated and in which genuine democratic self-management, based on economic equality, will be possible. Our goal is socialism, a new social system based on common ownership of our resources and industry, cooperation, production for use and genuine democracy. Only socialism can turn the boundless potential of our people and resources to the creation of a world free from tyranny, greed, poverty and exploitation.
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