We have every reason to be fearful for the future of humanity. The war in Ukraine could easily escalate into a nuclear exchange. The environmental crisis could lead to irreversible tipping points. The possibility of another virus pandemic is always present. Many countries are in the throes of economic meltdowns. Capitalism cannot be trusted to run the world in the interests of humanity and governments serve the interests of profit first. No reform, nor attempt to improve the system, can do more than ameliorate its inconsistencies and contradictions. There can be no democracy in a complex system designed to justify inequality, a system in which the power of money carries the right to govern, in which the governed accept their own inferiority, lack of self-respect and sense of worth, a system in which crime, conflict, nationalism, racism, ethnic cleansing is inevitable.
Money has enabled the human species to develop the technology with which it dominates the earth, but it has become an excuse for ignoring the factors that impede its own social advance. Money has made work a bad name, with connotations of long hours, stress, tiredness, and monotonous, yet, even in this acquisitive society of ours, most of us do some sort of voluntary work, helping others is enjoyable provided that we do not feel that it is augmenting other people’s interests at our expense. In a money-free world, people's power available would be virtually limitless. There would be plenty for them to d our fellows, our environment, our towns and cities, our talents and potentialities. There would be enough to keep us occupied for generations. We assume that without money there would be anarchy, but it is the chaotic complexity of the money system and the governments required to maintain it that is anarchic.
The greatest benefit of all would be in the reduction or elimination of the anti-social emotions of greed, hatred, selfishness and aggression, which the money system makes inevitable and we would be able to treat ourselves and each other as the sort of human beings that we claim to be.
Suppose we are ever to take control of this planet and run it in the real interests of its inhabitants. In that case, we must do so ourselves, without leaders and with a view to establishing a global system of society in which production is freed from the constraints of profit and in which each person will have free access to the benefits of civilisation.
The Socialist Party is in favour of democracy, and socialism will be a fully democratic society, but full democracy is not possible under capitalism. Supporters of capitalism who talk about "democracy" always mean only political democracy since economic democracy - where people would democratically run the places where they work - is out of the question under capitalism, based as it is on these workplaces being owned and controlled by and for the benefit of a privileged minority.
You can have the most democratic constitution imaginable but this won't make any difference to the fact that profits have to come before meeting needs under capitalism. The people's will to have their needs appropriately met is constantly frustrated by the economic laws of the capitalist system, which no political structure, however democratic, can control.
It is not imperfections in the political decision-making process that are the problem but the profit system and its economic laws. And the answer is not the democratic reform of capitalism's political structure but the replacement of capitalism with socialism.
As a society based on common instead of class ownership of the means of production, socialism will fulfil the first condition for genuine democracy. Because it will be a class-free society without a privileged wealthy class, everyone can have a genuinely equal say in the way things are run. A few will not be more equal than others, as they are under capitalism, because they own more wealth.
Socialism will be a society where the laws of profit no longer operate since common ownership and democratic control will allow people to produce to meet their needs instead of for the profit of a few as today.
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