Sunday, October 18, 2020

Socialism is the ONLY answer

There is not a single country in the world where capitalism is not trampling upon the most elementary demands of the working class underfoot with its iron heel. The Socialist Party seeks to replace the rule of a handful of exploiters, the capitalists, with the democracy of the working class, the producers of the wealth of society. We seek to replace the anarchy of capitalist production, with its recessions and precarious employment, with a planned economy, based on the needs of working people. We want full equality for all will as a reality and not as a slogan. We stand for the fullest democracy for the working people. We believe on every issue, every question, and in every struggle the working class has a special stake. It has interests different from and antagonistic to the capitalists. The problems of poverty, war, hunger and the exploitation of working people are all products of the capitalist system. 

 

The Socialist Party holds that capitalism can not be reformed into a humane social system that will serve the people. It has to be overthrown through a socialist revolution that will then reconstruct society along genuinely democratic lines. We wish for a social order in which there is no capitalist class, no private property, no profit, no production of commodities for the market, no working class selling its labour power on the labour market. 

 

Rather than being basically dependent upon supply and demand, prices in the marketplace actually fluctuate around the real value inherent in a commodity. The value of a commodity comes from the labour invested in it, including the labour that manufactured the machinery and extracted the raw materials used to create the item. And the boss' profits do not come from his skills or his capital investment or his mark-up, but from the value created by labour - specifically, surplus-value.


Surplus value derives from unpaid wages. The worker is never paid for the value of the product, only for the value of her or his labour time, which is considerably less, and which meanders widely depending upon the historical, cultural and social conditions of a country. Workers produce a commodity which has more value than what they get in wages to keep them functioning. This differential is surplus value, which is the source of capital. Under capitalism or the profit system, it is necessary to maintain and, if possible, increase the gap between wages (or what it costs in labour power to produce goods) and price (or the exchange-value which those goods have on the market). This gap exists because the worker only receives the price of labour power and no share in the values created. With socialism, there will be no wages at all. There will be no prices or market values in the sense of goods obtainable only on the basis of paying for them.  With socialism, all this is changed. Goods are produced for the use of men and NOT for the profits which they bring in to bosses. Labour power is no longer regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold. It is not purchased at all, let alone purchased at the lowest possible price to keep it alive and able to produce more value. Men and women, inside socialism, will work and produce useful goods. But they will produce these for their mutual needs and for their mutual development. The sufficiency of goods which mankind and machines can create will be given to everyone to develop their bodies so that their minds can grow rich in the wealth of human knowledge and culture. Mankind no longer fettered by the necessity of working not only for their own material maintenance, but for the bosses’ even more material profits, will be freed to live more fully. The time that each person must work will be small, yet the goods produced for all to enjoy will be plentiful.


What the Socialist Party wants is to achieve plenty for all, peace, solidarity, and freedom. The Socialist Party calls upon all workers to work with it toward this end. The working class must make its stand against its own capitalist system – whose lust for profits and interest, for investments, markets and expanded capital, for raw materials and cheap exploitable labour, can mean only exploitation and abject slavery. Socialists will produce for use according to a reasonable plan and without a thought for the odious notion of profit. And with no insatiable parasitic class to maintain, socialist society will produce abundance for all. That's a fact. 



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