Socialism Now

Only with the introduction of socialism will the problems of capitalism end. As revolutionaries, we should fight the collective war between us and the ruling class, not play the hostage game at their bargaining table. We have nothing to say to our rulers on how to run capitalism, we should not be drawn into fighting their battles. We advocate a world without borders, social classes, leaders, governments and armies. A world without money or wages, exchange, buying and selling. Where people can give freely of their abilities and take according to their own self-defined needs. A global system in which each person has a free and democratic say in how their world is run. It is workers who produce everything society needs and provides all of its services. Capitalism is a barrier to the fair and needed use of the world’s productive forces. In a world of potential abundance, profit imposes widespread artificial scarcity.  We have always said that socialism can only be established by a conscious, participating working class organised not only politically to capture and destroy the State machine but also outside parliament ready to take over and run industry and society generally.

Capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of the world’s billions, because reform does not address the basic contradiction between profit and need. Governments cannot be depended upon because they only act as an executive of capitalism. An expansion of democracy, while welcome, makes little difference if candidates can only offer variations on the same policies. Capitalism must be abolished if we as a species are to thrive. No amount of reform, however great, will work. Change must be global and irreversible. It must involve all of us. We need to erase borders and frontiers; abolish states and governments and false concepts of nationalism. We need to abolish our money systems, and with it buying, selling and exchanging. And in place of this, we need to establish a different global social system – a society in which there is common ownership and true democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources. A society where the everyday things we need to live in comfort are produced and distributed freely and for no other reason than that they are needed. Socialists build that new world, by building an understanding of what socialism will be like.

We feel no shame or guilt in inviting you to join the Socialist Party. It is no boast when we say that it is the only political party in this country worthy of working-class support; the only party whose sole object is the overthrow of this system whereby the majority of human beings —the working class—produce the wealth of the world for the small minority—the capitalists—who own it. Our organisation is small, but it is based on principles sound and irrefutable. Socialists would ask where is this common-sense in working men who continue to vote for political parties representing the capitalist class. It is indeed a strange state of affairs when we live in a society which is capable of producing an abundance of goods for the benefit of all men, yet that production is restricted artificially because a minority of men and women who form the capitalist class, can see no profit at the end of the day. Workers after all produce all the goods and services, they run the capitalist system from top to bottom, and yet they own virtually nothing of the means of production except their right to defend themselves in times of war, and the right to be subservient to them in times of peace. We believe that the human race is gradually learning the simple lesson that the people as a whole are wiser for the public good than any privileged class. we can only attempt to educate our fellow-workers, as we in our turn have had our eyes opened to the nature of society, and what makes it tick and explode.

Socialism is the complete antithesis of capitalism. In a socialist world private and/or state ownership of society’s means of life will give way to social ownership and production of goods and services solely for use. So goods and services will no longer be produced as commodities for sale and profit. Accordingly, there will be no role in a socialist society for a means of exchange; hence, the entire, utterly wasteful commercial sinews of capitalism will be obsolete. The classless, wageless, moneyless society envisaged in the socialist aphorism: “From each according to their ability; to each according to their needs” will become a reality. A world free from the corruptive influences of money and power where the government of people will give way to a simple administration of things.

Such a society – founded on co-operation instead of competition – could not be established by guns, bombs or violence. It can only be established and only maintained by the conscious democratic action of the majority. Such a majority would be the democratic foundation of a free, socialist world. If the question of counter-revolutionary violence is hypothesised then obviously that violence would have to be eliminated; as socialists have traditionally said “peacefully if we may; forcefully if we must”, but, given the conditions created by a socialist-conscious majority, the capitalist reaction would be deprived of material nourishment.