In this time of pandemic, climate emergency and nuclear weapon arsenals do we stand upon the threshold of death and destruction for the whole of mankind? Or do we stand upon the threshold of a new age of unparalleled peace and plenty, a harmony of humanity?
The association of socialism with austerity is a misleading one. All around us are the signs that we can produce more than enough for everyone. The Socialist Party says that the age of plenty for all is already possible on the basis of productive powers we have achieved over last several decades. Today it is no longer a matter of it being possible but being postponed. Everybody knows it is an example of something crazy about this capitalist system we live under. So many intellectuals endeavour to deny such a realist and declare that scarcity of resources is the situation we all face. Yet there is TOO MUCH of everything, and people suffer hunger.
We have the factories and the resources that can produce a world of plenty. We have the willing brawn and brains to do the requisite tasks. All we have to do is let the one work on the other, and distribute what is produced. But society as a whole doesn’t own the factories and technology. It has nothing to say about whether they’ll be used and for what because all these are owned by a small handful of capitalists who won’t let a machine run unless they can make a profit.
In a socialist world of plenty, people are at long last freed of the dominance of economics, the tyranny of economics. We will for the first time be free to develop the full potentialities and capacities of the human individual, and see the full flowering of humanity’s spirit. This is the goal worth fighting for today. It is the real freedom.
The Socialist Party teaches that the workers of all lands must regard each other as brothers and sisters who stand together in solidarity on behalf of the interests of working people. These interests demand that in order to gain a world of plenty for all, freedom, and a permanent peace, the capitalist system must be abolished and replaced with a cooperative commonwealth of planned production for use.
Contrary to those over-population catastrophists output of food, raw materials and manufactures had risen steeply, far outstripping the growth of population. There was enough and to spare to feed, clothe and house the working billions of the world. The environmentalist Cassandras’ evaluations are both pessimistic and myopic.
The coming social revolution must place the new technology in the hands of the people. Robotics and other forms of automation will be the foundation for a whole new world. Abundance, created by Artificial Intelligence and people working for the common good rather than the profit of the few, will forever end poverty, exploitation, oppression and war. Our organisation is increasingly structured around this vision, the creation of a cooperative, communal society based on the application of computerised, labour-saving production. Ours is a revolution for a better world, a vision of a world of abundance. Society now has the capacity to satisfy the needs of all.
If production is planned and its products shared fairly, there is no reason why anyone should be short of anything – nor why the environment should be degraded in the process. Our aim is to end as much as feasible the dirty, dangerous, demeaning work and its drudgery, and instead direct people’s lives towards education, recreation and leisure. A socialist planned economy will be production for need, not for exchange, not one of commerce. Poverty is not inevitable; that is true. But it is inevitable so long as capitalism exists, so long as the profit-economy reigns. An improvement in the global standard of living is possible, but not on the basis of capitalism. Freedom is possible and necessary, but it cannot be achieved under the system of capitalism, not in a class society where the reality of the social order increases national and racial antagonism as the means of keeping the ruling class in power. Genuine freedom and real democracy are possible, but only in a free economic society.
Capitalist economics is the the economics of enforced scarcity in a world of plenty. The struggle for socialism has become the fight for the very survival of civilisation and instead to strive towards a world of plenty. Abolish the capitalist profit-suckers. Take over our economic world, organise it democratically. Common ownership – that’s socialism.
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