Understanding Change

 

Many people have become convinced that the present system, capitalism - with its basis in competition and expansion doesn’t actually work for everybody that it is as good as it gets because of our 'human nature'. We're told that 'co-operation' is for dreamers, idealists and while it sounds nice, at best it's a utopian fantasy. Yet we intuitively understand that our present path is leading to disaster and that change must happen. The idea that we can actually progress and better our lives is an increasingly difficult argument to make. Too many have grown deeply cynical and disillusioned with politics. While we accept that conditions have much improved, from technology to human rights, we are still convinced that when it comes to real social or economic progress, positive change is impossible.

 In fact, research now supports the fact that our 'human nature' is not 'fixed' or simplistic by any means, and we are as 'hard-wired' to cooperate for our survival as to be competitive. There is the Golden Rule, "do unto others as you would do unto yourself'  as we 'see ourself in others'. Rather than the conviction that greed and aggression are what makes us “tick", we need to be aware that these are behaviours that have been overstated as 'natural' to survival because they supported an 'engine', a class system. Our very survival as a species is now being threatened by too much insistence on individualism and thoughtless disregard for the future.  We have an economic system that is causing tremendous pain, lost hope and lost futures and it is posing a threat to civilisation. We need to create a more constructive and sustainable path. We have very real options, real and achievable. We can make peaceful, profound, positive changes. We still possess the vote.

What is becoming clear is the need to change to an economy based on human wants and needs rather than profit and competition. The only way is to end the tyranny and power of the very few, over the lives of us all. Rather than a system based on division and so much inequity, socialism would become focused on solving social problems, offering the best health, providing education and child-care, creating more leisure time for recreational pursuits, for the community. We -the majority- would make profit, exploitation and wages, private ownership of production, distribution, banking and credit, obsolete. Our system would be based on people, not profit. 

Capitalism is the fundamental cause of our social ills, and that the institutions it rests on must be replaced. We don't want the jobs most of us have now. Bank tellers, bookkeepers and cashiers - all those who handle money: Because we want a world without money: Free access to the necessaries of life. We don't want cops, lawyers and judges and prison guards either. Nor all the rest uphold and enforce the exploitation and poverty of working people. We do want to be useful productive members of society. But first, we must be free. And that means a revolution to Socialism.  It means the end to poverty, war, famine and tyranny: And the beginning of the true brotherhood of man. Can we make a peaceful revolution? We think so. The only real issue is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution. In one word, that issue is capitalism. Our opponents will ignore this basic issue because they hate the idea of a socialist revolution. Instead, they will focus on such diversionary issues as jobs, welfare, taxes, crime and spending. Despite the fact that their legislative programme of reform is causing only more suffering, they persist in opposing the coming socialist revolution.

The despotic system of capitalist economics is the direct opposite of our democratic system of politics, can plainly be traced to the existence of a privileged class. Through the perversion of democracy to the ends of plutocracy, labour is robbed of the wealth which it alone produces, is denied the means of self-employment, and, by compulsory idleness in wage-slavery, is even deprived of the necessaries of life. Human power and natural forces are thus wasted, that the plutocracy may rule. Ignorance and misery with all their concomitant evils are perpetuated, that the people may be kept in bondage. Science and invention are diverted from their humane purpose to the enslavement of men, women and children.

Against such a system the Socialist Party once more reiterates its fundamental declaration that private property in the natural sources of production and in the instruments of labour is the obvious cause of all economic servitude and political dependence. We call upon the people to organise with a view to the substitution of the cooperative commonwealth for the present state of unplanned production and social disorder, a commonwealth in which every person shall have the free exercise and full benefit of his or her faculties.