This is what we want

 

We want peace instead of violence and destruction.

We want security instead of insecurity and the terror of not knowing today whether or not we will have a job tomorrow.

We want to be able to raise our families in decent homes and good schools.

We want comfort instead of low living standards, slums,  unemployment and hunger. We want democracy and freedom, instead of regimentation and bureaucracy.

But we don’t have them. We live in a modern world with vast industries all over the land. We have undreamed natural resources. We have trained and skilled workers. We can produce in one day. what it took our ancestors years to produce. Yet we do not have universal prosperity. Instead, we produced the most terrifying means of destroying life, destroying wealth, destroying whole peoples and nations; bullets and bombs. Capitalism works very well indeed to wage war, to kill and maim, to destroy and devastate. Capitalism is at its best when it is at its worst.

It is the capitalist social system that stands in the way. Under that system, a handful of employers and owners control all the wealth and power. This handful possesses industry, banking, mining, transportation. Whoever owns all these things, controls our lives, the lives of you and me and all others. That’s the best that capitalism offers you. That’s how practical and realistic capitalism is. That is what capitalism offers you. If that is what you want.

We in the Socialist Party believe there is an alternative. The alternative to capitalist exploitation and government is socialism. We want to take over the industries built by us – by us and nobody else. We want to take over the wealth produced by us – by us and nobody else. We want to, and we can run industry to produce for us, for the needs and comforts of the people, and not for the swollen profits of the corporations. Without capitalism and capitalist profit, we can put an end to these horrible wars. They are caused by economic rivalry and by the lust of every capitalist to dominate the wealth of the world. Our marvellous machinery performed the terrible miracles of war production. We can make it perform far greater miracles to provide plenty for all, homes fit to live in, comforts and prosperity, self-respect and human dignity.

Those are the things we all want. They are the things socialism stands for. They are the things that we, the Socialist Party, stand for.

 A load of nonsense masquerades as 'socialism'.

The Labour party is not now and never was a socialist party. It is a party of capitalism with reforms. They are a capitalist party of government and all government is over the people in the interests of ruling class elites. The Labour party has not proved an exception to this fact.

Capitalism can not be reformed. It has to be replaced. The rules of the economy — the capitalist economy — cannot be “rewritten” to stop profits and profit-making having to have priority.

Where you have got class ownership of productive resources and production for sale with the aim of making a profit, definite economic laws come into operation which acts with the force of laws of nature and impose themselves on governments, whatever governments may want to do (or have pledged).

Governments do not control the way the economy works; it’s the other way round. Governments have to conform to the imperative of allowing profit-making to continue unless they want to provoke an economic downturn. In the end, all governments are compelled to recognise and act on this. A Corbyn government (if it ever happens) would discover this is within a couple of years.

Capitalism simply cannot be reworked so that it works for everyone. It is a profit-making system that can only work in the interest of the few who live off profits.

Socialism is an advanced, post-capitalist society, run by us all, locally, regionally, globally, in administration over resources and not a government over people.

It is not in the power of political parties to bring in socialism. Socialism properly understood, is not in the gift of politicians in some top-down arrangement. None of the political parties of government represents the interests of the immense majority worlds working class. It is a fallacy that changing the demographic make-up of any of those parties will make this so. The existence of any government whether democratic or dictatorial implies the existence of a ruling class elite in whose interests all government is exercised over the electorate in the management of social discontent at home, by breaking heads or minds as required, by use of the repressive and or ideological apparatus of the state, and to wage wars abroad in the procurement of, or defence of, trade routes, raw materials, markets and spheres of geopolitical advantage. The notion that the working class can ever have its interests represented by parties aspiring to govern over them is absurd, regardless of the sincerity of any of the individual political aspirants.

Socialism is revolutionary. It is not a ‘reformist’ nor a ‘statist’ version of capitalism that retains wage slavery in any form.

Socialism is an advanced, post-capitalist society, run by us all, locally, regionally, globally, in administration over resources and not a government over people.

It is a market-free, money-free, production for use (not for sale), free access (not rationed access) commonly owned,(not private, corporate or state-owned) revolutionary permanent break with the present capitalist one.

It has never existed anywhere. It will not be a social experiment but a social revolution.

It is not a ‘reformist’ nor a ‘statist’ version of capitalism that retains wage slavery in any form.

It is the mature, politically conscious task of the immense majority to make it happen and not the minority vanguardist led actions of pseudo-revolutionaries.

“The organising tenet will be from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”

If there are wages and salaries, it is not socialism/communism.
State ownership is not socialism/communism.
Social programs are not socialism/communism.
Socialism/communism means democracy at all levels of society, including the workplace.
Socialism/communism means a wageless, moneyless society.
Socialism/communism means voluntary labour.
Socialism/communism means free access to the goods produced by society.