"Our" Country

 

Based on their performance over many decades, the people know what governments have to offer—more of the same. The Socialist Party believes the deepening seriousness of our problems requires revolutionary ideas and revolutionary solutions.

What the media does not mention is the obvious yet significant fact that both major parties (and their would-be reformers) support the capitalist system. Their candidates differ at most on how to cure the mortal ills of capitalism. The deception lies in their claim that legislative tinkering can cure capitalism.

 Some voters are so sceptical of the possibility that voting can have any real influence on the way our lives are run, that they will turn their backs on the whole electoral process. Others will vote with no real expectation of improving things; they will settle for the “lesser evil” in the hope of keeping the worst scoundrels out of public office. A sizable and probably earnest minority, suspicious of elections, will reject the electoral process and try other means, like lobbying, protest marches and demonstrations or community-level activism. Throughout history ruling classes the world over have had no better ally than racism and the various forms of racial oppression have meant profits and privileges for exploiting classes and inhuman suffering for the oppressed.  If workers want to end self-defeating competition, it is necessary that they realise that racial antagonisms are a tactical measure of capitalism to prevent working-class unity. A working-class conscious of its political and economic potentials and of the means to achieve a liveable world for all can put an end to economic insecurity and the interracial distrust it breeds by putting an end to capitalism.

But that mess is the direct result of capitalism and cannot be cured by reforms, no matter who applies them.

Our country will have continued unemployment, poverty, racial discrimination, urban decay, pollution and rape of the environment not because the people don’t care but because the capitalist owners don’t care—more accurately, care about profits more.

Our country will continue to find it profitable or expedient to make war as long as capitalism rules.

Our country will continue to support dictatorships abroad as long as capitalist influence and markets are at stake.

Our country will continue to whittle away the rights and privacy of its citizens and, by terror and intimidation, to curtail the right of dissent because capitalism is fighting for its very existence and holds nothing else sacred.

We say “our” country but it isn’t our country in a meaningful sense. We, the majority, don’t own it and we don’t control it. When it does become our land—owned, operated and administered by the majority—we can easily solve all our problems. And not until then.

Socialism is the extension of democracy, based on majority control of the most essential area of our existence: the economy. Socialism is based on common ownership and social administration of the industries and services. Not less democracy, but more. Nothing short of actual day-to-day popular power and control.

Socialism is a system in which the means of production are owned by all society, and in which the industries and the economy as a whole are democratically administered by the workers themselves, through their own organisation. Not only does socialism not exist in China, but it also does not yet exist anywhere in the world.

 

Our votes can be used to demand an industrial democracy by casting a ballot for the only candidates who make that demand their platform - the Socialist Party candidates with the mandate to deliver socialism. Until that struggle is won, the system of class rule will remain — so, too, must the resistance and solidarity of the workers of the world. The answer to inadequate educational opportunities is full opportunity for all. The solution to unemployment and competition for jobs is an end to unemployment and to the system that has workers competing with one another for a chance to sell their labour-power. The solution to inequality is not to share it or spread it around, but to root out its capitalist cause. 

The Socialist Party holds that capitalism is not worth reforming and that, in any case, it cannot be reformed so as really to improve the workers’ condition, or protect them from capitalism’s recurring depressions and wars, or from displacement by automation. Parties of reform are in the business to divert the workers from a revolutionary socialist solution to their problems, and to preserve capitalism.