Everything is Possible

 

The task of the Socialist Party is to help to turn  socialist dreams into socialist reality. We are living on a planet that has a lot of resources, but the men who control wealth make sure that everyone else works for them. They use their schools, their factories, their media, and their law courts to make sure everyone else is powerless. Under the present system nearly everybody loses. While some people get cheated worse than others, they all get  short-changed  so that the capitalists can make more money. People in poor countries are cheated when multinational corporations steal their natural resources. Poor people are cheated when they are kept from getting good jobs, good houses, and good health care, because it is profitable for capitalists to have an over-supply of unskilled desperate labour. Women are cheated when they are viewed  only as prospective wives and mothers for the work of child raising and housework and still be available as low-paid employment. Working people  in factories and offices are cheated when they work long hours at boring jobs, sometimes dangerous,  which dull their senses and make them feel as if they were machines, and then find that only the people at the top benefit from their toil and sweat.

Power now rests in the hands of a very few people, yet the real power everywhere belongs to the people if they were to unite. However, all our lives we’ve been told that we’re separate and different from everyone else. We’re taught to view people in other groups suspiciously. Our rulers want it that way: they tell us that the only way we can be worth anything is to be better than another.  They encourage divisions among us to make us feel less deprived, as long as there is someone worse off.

 The media try to fool us into believing that their picture of the world is an accurate one – a picture we know is a lie. They  blame fellow-workers for our problems and for war. Its the fault of  people on welfare for high taxes, black people for crime, etc. In their eyes we are the “little people”, who have no interests of our own, which are in conflict with the interests of the rich. They try to turn us against each other.

 Socialism is not the destruction of democracy, but the taking, in the name of humanity, of all the wealth that exists in the world. In the society of the future, socialism will be the enjoyment of all existing wealth, by all  and according to the principle: From each according to abilities, to each according to needs. Socialists seek no new government, no new state, whether it calls itself popular or democratic, revolutionary or provisional. Socialists do not want to institute a new ruling class, of representatives who always end up representing nobody but themselves. The common wealth  belongs to the entirety of humanity to use in common.  The land, the machines, the workshops, the houses, etc., will serve everyone in common of them. No go-betweens, no brokers or helpful servants who always end up becoming the true masters: we want all the wealth existent to be taken directly by the people themselves and to be kept by their  hands, and that the people themselves decide the best way to enjoy it, be it for production or consumption.

 Some ask the Socialist Party if free access is possible? Would we have enough products to let everyone have the right to take as they wished, without demanding from individuals more labour than they are willing to give? We respond: yes. Certainly, we can apply this principle: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, because, in future societies, production will be so abundant that there will be no need to limit consumption, or to demand from people more work than they are willing or able to give.

Right now, we cannot even begin to imagine this immense growth in production, but we can guess at it by examining the causes that will provoke it. These causes can be summed up in three principles:

1. Harmony of cooperation in the different branches of human activity will replace today’s fighting that translates into competition

2. Large-scale introduction of all kinds of new technology.

3. The considerable conservation of the forces of labour and of raw materials, facilitated by the abolition of environmental harmful or useless wasteful production. How much resources and energy are used today by the armies of the land, sea and air to build arsenals. How many of these forces are wasted to produce luxury objects that serve nothing but the needs of vain and corrupt..

Competition and rivalry are the fundamental principles of capitalist production, which has as its motto: Mors tua vita mea, your death is my life - the ruin of one makes the fortune of another. The result is the relentless conflicts between nations, individual against individual, between workers as well as between capitalists. in the society of the future, this individualistic principle of capitalist production, every man for himself against all others, and everyone against everyone, will be replaced by the true principle of human society: all for one and one for all – what immense changes will we not obtain in the results of production? Imagine how great will be the growth of production, when each man, far from needing to fight against all the others, will be helped by them, when he will have them not as enemies but as cooperators. If the collective work of ten men attains results absolutely impossible for one man alone, how grand will be the results obtained by the large-scale cooperation of all men who, today, work hostilely against each other?

And technology? The appearance of these powerful helpers of work, as large as it seems to us today, is quite minimal in comparison to what it will be in societies to come.

Today, the machine often has the ignorance of the capitalist against it, but more often still his interest. How many machines are going unapplied only because they do not bring an immediate benefit to the capitalist? The worker is today the enemy of automation and the robots, and rightfully so, because they are the monster that comes to  to starve, to degrade, to torture , to crush. But what an immense interest we would have, on the contrary, in augmenting their number when we will no longer be the slave to the machine but on the contrary, they would be at beck and call helping us and working for our well-being.

There will be enough for everyone. Thanks to this abundance work will lose the dreadful character of enslavement. Still our critics observe that perhaps at the beginning, products will not be abundant enough; it will be necessary to ration and to divide up resources, rewarding some by the quantity or quality of work that each person has done.

To this we respond that, in a future society, even when we are obligated to ration resources, we must remain socialist: this is to say that the rationing must be done by sharing out according not to merits, but to needs.