The world is ours

 

It is the contention of the Socialist Party that socialism,  production for use and not for profit, will make capitalism of today seem primitive by comparison. Capitalism means neither democracy nor individualism. It dehumanises a person on the job and turns him or her into a cog in a machine. Ours is a class society, based on capitalist exploitation. The working class is kept in a condition of wage slavery.  Poverty in the midst of plenty, that distinguishing mark of the capitalist system of production.

If any one thing stands out above all else, it is the fundamental anarchy of the capitalist system. It is just impossible to make the profit system fulfil the election promises made by the politicians. The purpose of production remains the same – how much is there in it for the owners of industry. The profit system has one unshakable purpose: PRIVATE GAIN. The sole end and aim of business is PROFITS. No matter how much the bosses may talk, in public, for newspaper advertising, you know that they consider everything connected with the shop, the business, the mine or the mill from the standpoint of whether it will bring MORE PROFITS to them.

Today our poverty cries out for the need of a new social order. All that stands between us and the things WE have PRODUCED, the houses we have built and do not occupy, the food we have produced, which we may not eat – all that separates us from these things, that belong to us, is our habit of thinking what the employing class wants and teaches. You will find almost everything and  every social institution directly related, in one way or another, to PROFITS, if you stop to think about it. As long as profit for the few is the basis of the economic system, that system–capitalism–will continue to go from crisis to deeper crisis, with more misery for the masses of people.

Working men or women know that something is wrong with things as they are today. No matter how hard we may work and save, we  know that we are always up against it to make ends meet. Profits are the cause of poverty and squalor. And socialism proposes to end deprivation. This is why every working man and woman ought to be a socialist.  We in the Socialist Party intend to make the factories, farms, mines and shops the collective property of society; to do away with bosses and to abolish the PROFIT system.

Under capitalism, workers have no control over what is produced and how. All that is decided by how much profit some capitalist will gain. But socialism enables the working class to decide how to organise itself and the resources of society to meet the needs of the people. So long as private property and profits remain the backbone – the unbroken backbone – of the economic system, a planned economy remains like a watery mirage in the desert, something thirsted after but far-distant and unattainable. 

Bosses make their profit out of the labour and sweat of their workers. They can’t have their cake and let the workers eat it too. The fact is that CLASSES EXIST. They exist because some men live by owning the factories and mines and machines, and have to go to work on these machines which they don’t own. The boss tries to squeeze as much profit out of the worker as he can. The worker tries to wring as close to a living wage out of the boss as he or she can.

And if the workers stopped struggling, they’d just be squeezed more, that’s all. That’s why there’s a class struggle. There are kind bosses and tough bosses. There WERE kind slave-masters and cruel ones. The working class wants NO slave-masters and NO bosses. 

To be sure, the Socialist Party demands the abolition of the profit system altogether.