Since it foundation the Socialist Party has studied class exploitation and its termination in a socialist society of abundance for all with production for use not profit. It has analysed the cruelty and the absurdity of unemployment, of want and suffering in the midst of plenty. We have explained the economic roots of war.
Although capitalism has provided educated workers and the technology, i.e., the machines and techniques which are necessary for a socialist reorganisation of society, it long ago ceased to provide for even the simple wants and needs of the plain people. The Socialist Party wants peace, instead of bloody destruction. We want security not anxiety. We want decent homes instead of slums for our families and good schools for our children. We want good healthcare. We want comfort and prosperity not low wages and unemployment. We want democracy and freedom instead of totalitarianism and bureaucracy. We want the end of national, racial and religious conflict.
In our modern civilisation, with its elaborate industries, intricate technologies and abundant natural resources, capitalism is incapable to provide us with these elementary needs. It is unable to avoid periodic crises and wars. It dooms working people to serfdom and poverty. Under this system of capitalism a handful of capitalists control the wealth and power of the planet. They own industry, banking, mining, transportation. The bigger, stronger and richer enterprises have swallowed up the weaker and smaller. They own our jobs. They own the democratic process and procedures because they finance the pro-big business political parties which put their servants into office. How can we hold faith in this system of capitalism?
They send our young men to war to protect their vested interests. They have the power of life and death over all of us. Capitalism intensifies competition on an international scale where giant multinational corporations engage in fierce struggle on the world market. Since all of the world is divided up into national states with national barriers or colonial countries subject to their masters, corporate the inevitable result of this great competitive struggle among the nations is war. It was this competition among nations which led to both world wars with dozens of minor and proxy wars between them. This fact alone indicts capitalism as the great obstacle to human progress. The victims starve or they pillage. They are wracked by disease. They have been located in internment camps which they re-label refugee camps
The insanity of capitalism is that it creates inequality and poverty. Capitalists are united against the workers and their political and economic organisations, they are in competition against each other and against their capitalist counterparts abroad. Their motives are not the needs of harassed families or the struggling worker but how much profit can we make? They all try to outproduce and outsell each other on the market because the mainspring of capitalist production is profit, not human needs. The producer takes his profit from his employees. That is why we say socialism was a necessity long before the climate crises and the pandemic. The crises of capitalism are only being accentuated. The problems of capitalism exacerbated. We see the phenomenon of poverty in the midst of plenty. Every new discovery and invention which improves the productive capacity of capitalism and makes possible a saving of human labour, the benefits have not been distributed to mankind. The more advanced and refined become the technology, the more wealth becomes polarised at one end, and destitution at the other. On a world scale capitalism has reduced the standard of living and decreased the freedom of mankind. It has produced privation and totalitarianism in most of the world. Capitalism produces more and more for destruction. It has not been able to use its vast technical and material resources for constructive purposes.
Socialism, and only socialism, will create a true global community, a world without national barriers, without international rivalries, without master and slave nations and, hence, a world without war. Socialism’s primary duty will be to conduct the affairs of the world with the aim of eliminating poverty, joblessness, hunger and general insecurity. Its sole criterion would be the needs of the people. Socialism will end the root evil of modern society, i.e., the private and state ownership of the means of production, the factories, mines, mills, machinery and land, which produce the necessities of life. socialism, these instruments of production will become the property of society, owned in common, producing for use, for the general welfare of the people as a whole. With the abolition of the private property of the means of life and with it the factor of profit as the prime mover of production, the sharp divisions of society between nations and classes will disappear. Then, and only then, will society be in a position to become a social order of abundance and plenty for all, for socialism will create a new world of genuine cooperation and collaboration between the peoples of the earth.
In abolishing classes in society, socialism will change the form and type of administrations which exist today. They will not be the instruments of the capitalist class, i.e., capitalist governments whose main reason for existence is to guarantee the political as well as the economic rule of Big Business, their profits, their private ownership of the instruments of production, and the conduct of war in the economic and political interests of this class. The preoccupation of socialism will be to assist in the elevation of society, to improve continually the living standards of the people, to extend their leisure time and thus make it possible to heighten the cultural level of the whole world. In abolishing classes, class rule and war, socialism will at the same time destroy all forms of dictatorship, political as well as economic. World socialism will be the freest, most democratic society the world has ever known, truly representing the majority of the population and subject to its recall. A citizen of a socialist society will look back upon the capitalist era with its wars, destruction and bloody and cruel dictatorships as we now look back upon the dawn of written history. A socialist world will assess the industrial potential of the world, determine its resources, the needs of the people and plan production with the aim of increasing the standards of living of a free people, creating abundance, increasing leisure and opportunity for cultural enjoyment. Socialism will not concern itself with profits and war, but with providing decent life for all the people. Socialism will create a system of health-care in which the physical and psychological needs of the people
The aim of socialism is not the increased exploitation and intensification of labor, but the utilisation of machinery, technology, science and invention to diminish toil, to create time in which to permit all the people to enjoy the benefits of social progress. Our modern world contains all the pre-conditions necessary for socialism. All about us we can see the enormous industrial enterprises containing automation and robotic machinery which could produce the goods of life in abundance. Mankind has developed a marvellous technology to create a fruitful life of abundance. Socialism will place at the disposal of science and the scientists all the material means to help create an ever-improving social life for mankind. Under capitalism, scientists are mere wage workers hiring out their skills to private industry. The fruits of their intelligence, learning arid research become the exclusive property of the capitalists who profit from the labors of these scientists. Thus, science has become subordinated to profits rather than to the common good of all mankind. Yet the future society depends in large measure on changing this relation of science to society. Only socialism can place science where it properly belongs: in the service of the people.
We can go down the road of capitalism, the path of chaos, war, poverty and barbarism, or we can take the socialist route toward true freedom, peace and security, towards a society of plenty for all which would end the exploitation of man by man for all time.
