It is said that fools learn from experience, but the wise from observation and reflection. The slave-morality promoted and engendered by the agents of the capitalists, is accepted without question by most men and women.
The Green New Deal has attracted perhaps the greatest attention of any proposal for decades. The GND is based on the assumption that the best way to provide for necessities of life is through market economics incentified by government intervention.
The World Socialist Movement advocates producing according to need instead of according to profit. A major cause of unnecessary production is that decisions concerning what to manufacture and standards for creating them are made by investors and corporate bosses rather than community residents and workers manufacturing them. Socialism involves all citizens in economic decision-making, and not merely the richest. We have to look at the fact that capitalism is the problem.
For too many years there has been widespread confusion about what socialism really means. Workers cannot be blamed for rejecting the so-called case for a socialist economy when it is identified with nationalisation, state tyranny (as in the one-time so-called “Communist” countries where wage slaves were beaten up and imprisoned for organising in unions to defend wages and conditions) and wage freezes, union-bashing and austerity measures (as carried out by all previous Labour governments and by the bogus socialist governments elsewhere). To millions of workers socialism is regarded as having been tried and failed. Such ideas are reinforced by the popular Leftist conception of socialism, which amounts to a sterile vision of state capitalism — a centralised, bureaucratically-controlled market economy is the best that the Left is able to offer as an "alternative" to the so-called free market.
The objective of socialists is to abolish the market, not to regulate or humanise it. In a socialist society the production of goods and services for sale on the market with a view to profit will not exist. Commodity production. which is a feature of capitalism, will give way to production solely for use. There will be no buying and selling, but free access by all people to the goods and services which can be made available. Wealth in a socialist society will be produced according to people's abilities — with each person contributing voluntarily to the social effort without the need to work for a wage or salary — and will be available to all on the basis of their self-defined needs.
Socialism will be a wage-free, money-free world society. It will be a social system in which the means of wealth production and distribution will belong to the people of society as a whole (there will be no property) and be controlled democratically, utilising to the full the modern means of mass communication. Freed from the inefficient and wasteful structure of the property-money-wages system of production for sale and profit, socialist society will be able to set about the task of satisfying human needs. The countless problems caused by capitalism, such as mass starvation alongside food mountains and cuts in health services while thousands of doctors and nurses are on the dole, will be solved in a short time once society has eradicated the market and its priorities and is organised to produce for use.
Those seeking a real alternative to both private and state capitalism should not be afraid to state boldly the case for a completely new way of organising social affairs. Yes, we will be labelled as Utopians by conservatives of the Right and Left wings of capitalism for daring to propose a solution to the problems of present-day society which goes beyond the outdated barriers of the buying and selling system. But socialism, as defined by the Socialist Party, is the only alternative which offers a revolutionary challenge to the status quo. Not only is it the sole alternative to the futile attempt to reform capitalism, but it is an attractive and exciting option. Instead of the old Leftist demands for lower bus fares or cheap spectacles on the NHS or more slums to be built by councils, we argue for a social transformation which is really worth getting enthusiastic about: a society where there will be no fares, no rents, no prices; decent homes, food, clothing and amenities for everyone; free access to the wealth which money has always prevented us from having; the abolition of the wages system and its replacement by unalienated, cooperative and useful production.
If you think that such an alternative is practical, desirable and urgent you should investigate further by contacting your nearest branch of the Socialist Party.
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