The harmony of humanity.

 

SOCIALISM MEANS EXPANDING DEMOCRACY NOT ONLY IN THE POLITICAL SENSE BUT IN AN ECONOMIC SENSE – FREEDOM FROM POVERTY.

Our road-map for where we are finally headed should have socialism as its destination.  socialists can’t expect anyone to take them seriously without a fuller idea — not necessarily a detailed blueprint — but a vision of what kind of society we want. One general guideline is that instead of the ends justifying the means, we have to take seriously that the means determine the ends. 

 

If our objective is a society in which “the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all” as Marx says, this cannot be achieved by authoritarian methods. If self-emancipation is the goal, it must be the means as well. To paraphrase Eugene Debs, if a savior can lead you into the promised land, he can lead you back out again too. Ideas that tell people that they are unworthy, that this is ordained by God or some other authority as the right and best way — or as the only way — can keep them from trying to change things. 

One of the most tragic legacies of these dictatorial exploitative regimes that called themselves socialist is to have destroyed the very concept of socialism in the minds of millions of people. Defenders of capitalism are happy to endorse them as models of socialism. There is throughout the world a widespread popular perception that socialism is a coercive system, and the experiences of “Communist” Parties in power have justified that perception. Generally speaking, while the world's peoples hate capitalism, they fear socialism. These issues are at the heart of socialism's crisis, and only as socialists develop a movement, a strategy, and a vision which are at once revolutionary and democratic will they turn the corner of that crisis.

Capitalism rests on the domination of the overwhelming majority by a small minority. In capitalism everything is based upon private property. Private property divides. Private property presumes a multitude of owners with distinct interests, property rights and liabilities. Therefore, the capitalist system of relations of production and exchange is simultaneously an endless chain of relationships between property owners, between capitalists and workers, industrial and commercial capitalists, capitalists and landowners etc. Socialism is unitary. It does not divide, but joins. There is no longer a multitude of owners except in the sense that everybody is an owner and so nobody is an owner - a society of no ownership.

 

 Part of our job in the Socialist Party is to help people see through the illusions of capitalism, to understand that we are faced with a stark choice of socialism or barbarism, and to encourage a vision of self-emancipation as both means and end of revolutionary socialist action. We argued that socialism is about self-emancipation, not doing things ‘on behalf of people. The agency for socialist change can only be the working peoples themselves and not the existing state apparatus however benevolent (indeed we argue that the workers must end the state apparatus). We that the end result of nationalisation – whether accompanied with or without the rhetoric of ‘socialism’ – would be state-capitalism not socialism.

The goal of the socialist revolution is the abolition of capitalist private property, the abolition of all exploitation of man by man, the social ownership of the means of production and their planned use for the benefit of the whole of society, leading to abundance and the harmony of humanity. We do not put forward this goal as a utopia, as a mere vision of what would ideally satisfy people’s needs and make them all happy, but as a practical aim of which is made necessary by the actual conditions of modern society. Only with a socialist economy can the problems of capitalist society be solved and the great modern technological forces of production be fully liberated. Socialism is not inevitable. What has been termed its ‘inevitability’ consists in this, that only through socialism can human progress continue. But there is not and cannot be any absolute deterministic inevitability in human affairs, since man makes his own history and chooses what to do.  Socialism does not tells us that socialism will come regardless, but that it explains to us where we stand, what course lies open to us, what is the road to life.

 

Not a stone will be left standing of this accursed capitalist system, with its wars, its famines, its vileness, its brutality and savagery. In the memory of people the times of capitalism will remain as a ghastly nightmare. Socialist teachings will live in the hearts and minds of emancipated humanity.