Thursday, January 07, 2021

The way out

 


Socialism will conserve the natural resources of our planet which are now being ruthlessly wasted in the mad capitalist race for profits. Socialism will end waste, inherent in the unplanned, competitive capitalist system. Many socially unnecessary useless industries and occupations will disappear. Socialism will turn production to useful social purposes. War, with all its agonies will cease. Where there is no capitalist class to demand its profit before production and distribution take place the welfare of everybody becomes the primary concern of the community. The purpose of the Socialist Party is to conquer political power for the workers so to fundamentally improve the economic and social conditions of the producers. The needs of the people will be met. 

The abolition of the robbery of the workers by the capitalists in all its myriad forms; the liquidation of the capitalist economic crises, with its mass unemployment and general crippling of the productive forces; the development of an industrial efficiency and a volume of production now hardly dreamed of; the careful consumption of natural resources; the abolition of war— these revolutionary measures will provide the material basis for a well-being of the working people of field and factory now quite unknown in the world. Poverty with its terrible misery and suffering, will become a thing of the past. With the deadly limitations of the capitalist market removed, members of socialist society will engage in constructive and fruitful work to the benefit of all society. The socialist transformation will clear away the mess of exploitation, inefficiency and shortages, and will open the road for such an industrial development and general rise in material and cultural standards of the people as now seems only the stuff of dreams. Already the technologies are at hand for an enormous increase in the well-being of everybody. Such a prospect is not a matter of mere speculation. Socialism will bring a new era for humanity, the building of a new world. The overthrow of capitalism will bring about the immediate or eventual solution of many great social problems which have have plagued mankind for centuries, war, religious superstition, famine, pestilence, crime, substance abuse, racism and national chauvinism, the repression of woman, and every form of slavery and exploitation of one class by another.  Only a system of developed world socialism can fully uproot and destroy all these evils and banish these menaces from the affairs of humanity. Capitalism stands as the great barrier to social progress. The day is not so far distant when our children, immersed in this new life, will look back with horror upon capitalism and marvel how we tolerated it so long.

Socialism destroys the whole accompanying capitalist baggage of ignorance, strife and misery and frees humanity from the stultifying effects of the present competitive struggle for existence to open up before it new horizons of joys and tasks. The day is not so far distant when productive forces can provide plenty for all.

We are living in a crazy, disordered, unplanned system, whose functions lead to so many contradictions that mankind must find a solution to the problems or go under.  Socialists seek not a happy Utopia, which we OUGHT to establish but a future system which we MUST achieve is social evolution is to continue to progress. Capitalism is tremendously wasteful and destructive of mankind and the land. Under capitalism goods are not produced to be consumed, but for profit, and if a greater profit can be made by destroying the goods, the destruction takes place. As capitalism develops, larger and larger factories are built, thousands of workers co-operate in the production of a single article, yet the article does not belong to them but to the owner of the means of production. The workers are merely paid wages for the use of their labour power, wages which constantly grow less and less in proportion to output. We are ruled by  by the wild forces of the market which we cannot control and of which we can be only the victims. The fluctuations of supply and demand, “decides” and “plans” what is produced and where it is allocated to. Even in times of economic  “prosperity” the lives of workers are not happy ones.

The capitalists and their agents in the seats of government are blinded by their self interest, by the profits which they make as beneficiaries of the present system. The workers, on the other hand, having nothing to lose. We are free to see that the present society must evolve into a new one; we see that nothing can free society except the change in the mode of production from a capitalist one, of private ownership of the means of production, to a socialist one, where the ownership of production is socialised and classes are no more.

Who, then, can offer the way out? Certainly not the capitalist class, the beneficiaries of the present system. The capitalists want to keep the old relations of exploitation. The interest of the workers is diametrically opposed to the interest of the capitalists and exploiters of the workers who, controlling the government and the social educational agencies, strive to keep the workers down. 

 As the working class fights against its increasingly worsened position it comes to the realisation that the only way out is for labour to take what it has produced for itself. To take over the means of production, the mines, mills, factories, resources, utilities and run them for their own benefit. Then we will have production for use and not for profit. Then we will end both despotism in the factory and anarchy in the market. Then society will allocate its resources and labor power according to a social plan that will benefit all. The victory of the workers cannot be forever delayed. The old relations must be burst asunder. And if the capitalists, blinded by their interests, try to stop the wheels of progress they are ruthlessly pushed aside by the workers just as in the past they themselves pushed aside the feudal lords.

When we have accomplished world socialism we will have done away with disorder and humanity will have reached a rational system of society where mankind will no longer be choked by oppressors, where society will be a free one and mankind emancipated.



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