Choose your Route

 

There are two paths we can follow. We can say: “Let’s just deal with the easier day to day problems and just raise topics where we can be sure fellow-workers will agree with us. Talking about revolution and socialism and stuff like that turns them off.” Working people will declare “The system is just too big, too powerful to go up against. There is enough local problems in the factory, in the community and at home, so don’t talk about political things.”

The Socialist Party’s way is different.

We explain it is only by understanding how capitalism operates against the interests of working people, of how capitalism must be fought by the working class who can be united behind it and when the people are equipped with an understanding of capitalism as our enemy, we can advance towards revolution. Our choice is a future where we workers will run the factories, produce for our needs and not for the profits of the capitalist bosses. Only by completely getting rid of this system of wage slavery and its law of profits and the system in which the capitalists own and control everything can we achieve socialism. Only by getting rid of the all the sources of our problems, the system of capitalism, that we can build a new society run by and for the working class. It must be understood that distribution is always ultimately controlled by those who own and control production. Today the bosses own. Tomorrow,  the workers would own production and would therefore be in a position to control and direct distribution in the interests of the working masses.

The Socialist Party has no consciousness of impotence, no consciousness of smallness. We represent the future. We represent the conception of socialism. We stand should end of poverty and inequality. We seek to win working people from the fear of war and for peace to be enjoyed by all. We work for a world in which the exploitation of man by man shall cease. It is the capitalist system which produces misery and disaster. The Socialist Party is never more determined to achieve the goal of socialism than we are on this day. We see a future free from the anxieties and worries of today. The believe that conditions can be changed for the better if the people are willing to fight for this. Although they do not own or control the industry, they in fact are turning the wheels that keep all industry going. With the ending of capitalism the people would also decide how this industry was to be run. Everything created and valued by mankind, all wealth, has been produced as a result of human labour being applied to the materials supplied by nature. The Socialist Party believe that, just as in the past, no progress in improving the lot of the working class will be brought about without the struggle of the people. Decisions can never be left to others. The people must win state power. They must take it out of the hands of the capitalists to ensure that the transfer of the economy to the people is carried out. This capitalist society demands, not bandages but a blood transfusion.

The capacity of mankind to make use of the forces of science and technology has increased a hundred-fold during the last century. Yet, compared with this rapid growth, the prosperity among the people has been lamentably slow. There is no lack of the actual things for they exist and are available in abundance. Nor is their lack of hands and brains to turn raw materials and natural resources into finished articles for human use. Yet the people are not better off.

 Working men and women face innumerable hardships. On every side of them is distress and uncertainty, ever new threats to their security. Politicians make all kinds of promises for a future time but for the workers with their present troubles they have no help. The greatest need of to-day is clear understanding of the present conditions and the marking out of the path to travel. Where can it be found? Exposing the tissues of lies and the confusion of sham solutions has been the Socialist Party.  

If workers do not awaken in time a terrible fate awaits us. The greatest need of the workers in this country is a powerful potent socialist party. Socialism means the common ownership of all natural resources and of all social forces for the satisfaction of all social needs. It, therefore, involves not merely co-operation between individuals and groups of individuals, but also co-operation between peoples of other lands. The Socialist Party seeks to establish the co-operative commonwealth. Socialism is a system of universal co-operation for production for use. Capitalism and cooperation are incompatible. It is as idle and utopian to dream of establishing peace in the midst of capitalism. What all workers must understand is that their misery is due to exploitation carried on by the capitalist class. We must transform the economic struggle into a political struggle. We must overthrow the system of exploitation itself. We must abolish the wage system itself.

For A World Cooperative Commonwealth

 New polling shows huge support for independence among young voters, with 79% of 16- to 24-year-olds and 68% of 25- to 34-year-olds saying they would support leaving the union. 

Our position in the Socialist Party remains the same. Separatism and an independent sovereign Scotland will be a dead-end. 

Nationalism is the ideology which seeks to justify the capitalist division of the world into separate “nation-states”. We utterly reject this view of the way humanity should organise itself. We condemn all nationalisms equally. When countries achieved independence little changed except the personnel of the state machinery.

As socialists we re-affirm that all peoples should seek their emancipation, not as members of nations or religions or ethnic groups, but as human beings, as members of the human race. They should unite to abolish the division of the world into so-called nation-states and to establish a World Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth of which we will all be free and equal members - citizens of the world, not subjects of nation-states. 

The goal of the socialist movement is not to assist in the creation of even more states but to establish a real world community without frontiers where all states as they currently exist will be destroyed. In a socialist society communities, towns and cities will have the opportunity to thrive – and people will no doubt feel an attachment to places that are real and tangible – but the nation-states will be consigned to the history books where they belong

"I have no country to fight for; my country is the Earth, and I am a citizen of the World." - Eugene V. Debs

Socialism is the ONLY answer

There is not a single country in the world where capitalism is not trampling upon the most elementary demands of the working class underfoot with its iron heel. The Socialist Party seeks to replace the rule of a handful of exploiters, the capitalists, with the democracy of the working class, the producers of the wealth of society. We seek to replace the anarchy of capitalist production, with its recessions and precarious employment, with a planned economy, based on the needs of working people. We want full equality for all will as a reality and not as a slogan. We stand for the fullest democracy for the working people. We believe on every issue, every question, and in every struggle the working class has a special stake. It has interests different from and antagonistic to the capitalists. The problems of poverty, war, hunger and the exploitation of working people are all products of the capitalist system. 

 

The Socialist Party holds that capitalism can not be reformed into a humane social system that will serve the people. It has to be overthrown through a socialist revolution that will then reconstruct society along genuinely democratic lines. We wish for a social order in which there is no capitalist class, no private property, no profit, no production of commodities for the market, no working class selling its labour power on the labour market. 

 

Rather than being basically dependent upon supply and demand, prices in the marketplace actually fluctuate around the real value inherent in a commodity. The value of a commodity comes from the labour invested in it, including the labour that manufactured the machinery and extracted the raw materials used to create the item. And the boss' profits do not come from his skills or his capital investment or his mark-up, but from the value created by labour - specifically, surplus-value.

Surplus value derives from unpaid wages. The worker is never paid for the value of the product, only for the value of her or his labour time, which is considerably less, and which meanders widely depending upon the historical, cultural and social conditions of a country. Workers produce a commodity which has more value than what they get in wages to keep them functioning. This differential is surplus value, which is the source of capital. Under capitalism or the profit system, it is necessary to maintain and, if possible, increase the gap between wages (or what it costs in labour power to produce goods) and price (or the exchange-value which those goods have on the market). This gap exists because the worker only receives the price of labour power and no share in the values created. With socialism, there will be no wages at all. There will be no prices or market values in the sense of goods obtainable only on the basis of paying for them.  With socialism, all this is changed. Goods are produced for the use of men and NOT for the profits which they bring in to bosses. Labour power is no longer regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold. It is not purchased at all, let alone purchased at the lowest possible price to keep it alive and able to produce more value. Men and women, inside socialism, will work and produce useful goods. But they will produce these for their mutual needs and for their mutual development. The sufficiency of goods which mankind and machines can create will be given to everyone to develop their bodies so that their minds can grow rich in the wealth of human knowledge and culture. Mankind no longer fettered by the necessity of working not only for their own material maintenance, but for the bosses’ even more material profits, will be freed to live more fully. The time that each person must work will be small, yet the goods produced for all to enjoy will be plentiful.

What the Socialist Party wants is to achieve plenty for all, peace, solidarity, and freedom. The Socialist Party calls upon all workers to work with it toward this end. The working class must make its stand against its own capitalist system – whose lust for profits and interest, for investments, markets and expanded capital, for raw materials and cheap exploitable labour, can mean only exploitation and abject slavery. Socialists will produce for use according to a reasonable plan and without a thought for the odious notion of profit. And with no insatiable parasitic class to maintain, socialist society will produce abundance for all. That's a fact. 

Socialism and no compromise is our class war-cry

 

Working-people have no control over industry or of the state. Arbitrariness and bureaucracy still continue to dominate society. There is still want and misery. The people are aware of the privilege, luxury and swindling of those at the top. So voracious and insatiable, so intoxicated with privilege and power are the plunderers and pillagers of Wall Street. Giant corporations, are conspiring to undermine and, if possible, destroy the unions and drive down living standards. They are determined to maintain the unprecedented profits they are wringing from the workers, the real producers. They are scheming, with the aid of the compliant government, to rob the workers of any gains. It is only through socialism that the resistance of the rich can be swept aside and the real problems of the people be really tackled. Working people have always resisted grinding exploitation and brutal oppression. 

Today the rich and powerful, the tiny handful who are perched at the tip of class pyramid try to claim the banner of freedom for themselves. For them, the rulers, freedom means the freedom to structure everything in society to serve their own interests.

Meanwhile, for the great working class majority, the freedom preached by the rich means only the freedom to choose between a rock and a hard place, between selling our labour-power to them to enrich them further and suffering hardships. The great majority of women and men want freedom from misery, from exploitation, from the jackboots of the state, from living our whole lives in precarious insecurity. We want freedom to become fully human, to develop all our gifts and abilities. And we understand this cannot be done by each of us as individuals, but only by the pooling of our collective strength and sharing our wisdom. 

There is absolutely no reason for anyone on this planet as rich as this going hungry, without health-care, or being homeless. Mankind has at its disposal the technology that makes it unnecessary for it to struggle for mere survival and the a bare necessities for subsistence. We could be freed from the rigours of drudgery and toil. It is time to break the chains of wage-slavery. The tortured and deceived peoples are no longer prepared to leave their fate in the hands of the capitalists, but are beginning an active and independent intervention in their own lives, with aims and purposes of their own. Our fellow-workers will no longer permit themselves to be killed and maimed for the greater profit of their exploiters and oppressors. 

The Socialist Party must convince working people that the only road to peace and security is the road to socialism. They must convince them that so long as capitalism with its greedy rivalries remains, war with all its horrors, distress and privation will go on and new wars will be inevitable. They must convince the workers that only they, by their united action, can sweep the putrid capitalist system away and build a new world of peace and plenty. 

The Socialist Party does not oppose campaigns for reforms nor is it against the concept of workers’ councils if the workers themselves or their organisations demand them. But we insist that a socialist party's activity must be based on the struggle for the conquest of political power. It can only be a class party that has managed to overcome narrow sectional interests. So long as political power remains in the hands of the capitalist class, the general interests of the proletariat can only be found in the political arena. Our class emancipation needs no condescending saviours, whether they be moral preachers or new technocrats with artificial intelligence miracles.

Freedom is not a thing that can be won for a few. If any are in chains, no one is truly free. Nor can freedom be given as a gift. It must be taken by the many because only in doing so can we learn to use and expand it. The rich hate the thought of socialism so much that they call socialist any reform in the system that cuts into their wealth in the slightest—from public education, to environmental regulations and a national health care system. Such reforms are not socialism. Real freedom will require the revolution of the whole current social order which is based on the rights of the wealthy to keep everything they have and constantly grab for more. 

Socialism will mean organising society and the economy on a totally different basis, where the wealth created by the labour of the many goes to serve the people and not to enrich a tiny handful of parasites. The wealth of society, produced by the toil of millions, will go to benefit the many, not to fatten the bellies and bank balances of the few. In place of this dog-eat-dog madness, we need cooperation, mutual aid and solidarity. We, the working people, make all of society run, each and every day. Why shouldn’t we plan and administer all of society?