We Are The Future

 

The Socialist Party's goal is a class-free society based on common ownership and collective control of the industries and social services, these to be administered in the interests of all society. Its primary role is to challenge the political apparatus of the capitalist class and promoting worker class consciousness. Socialism means production to satisfy human needs, not as under capitalism, for sale and profit. Socialism does not mean government or state ownership. It does not mean a closed party-run system without democratic rights. Those things are the very opposite of socialism. Socialism is a social system under which the necessaries of production are owned, controlled and administered by the people, for the people. The cause of political and economic despotism is abolished and class rule is at an end. Socialism will be a society in which the things we need to live, work and control our own lives—the industries, services and natural resources—are owned by all the people, and in which the democratic administration of the people within the industries and services is the “government”.

Socialism means that rule of the people, for the people and by the people will become a reality for the first time. That is socialism, nothing short of that. If it does not fit this description, it is not socialism—no matter who says different. Those who claim that socialism existed and failed in places like the former Soviet Union or in Cuba or China simply do not know the facts. Socialism has never existed. It did not exist in the old U.S.S.R., and it does not exist presently anywhere. Socialism will be a society in which the things we need to live, work and control our own lives—the industries, services and natural resources—are owned in common by all the people.

The Socialist Party is the political party of the working class. This is so because the Socialist Party is the sole advocate of the principles that the working class must adopt if it is ever to achieve its complete emancipation from wage slavery and, at the same time, save society from catastrophe. The Socialist Party is the only political organisation demanding the abolition of capitalism and advocating the socialist reconstruction of society. It has been doing so for well over 100 years. It is, in short, the organisation through which the workers can establish their majority right to reorganise society through its agitational and educational activities.

Capitalism no longer serves the interests of the people. It creates countless problems that it cannot solve. It uses new technology to throw people out of work and to make those who still hold their jobs work harder. It creates hardship and poverty for millions, while the few who own and control the economy grow rich off the sweat and toil of others. It destroys the cities that we built up. It is destroying the natural environment that is the source of the food we eat and the air we breathe.

Every effort made to prevent these problems, or to keep them from growing even worse, has failed. The reason is that the country is controlled by a small capitalist class that owns the industries and services that everyone depends on. The workers built and operate all of those essential industries and services. However, they do not own and control them. They are the majority, but they have no voice in deciding what to produce or how much to produce. Their needs and desires count for nothing when those decisions are made.

When a small group owns and controls what everyone needs to feed, house and clothe themselves and their families, when that small group makes every important decision that affects the lives of the vast majority, it is called despotism. 

Capitalism is an economic despotism, and like any other form of despotism, it corrupts everything that is good and decent.

Generations of workers built the industries that can produce more than enough to wipe out poverty and guarantee the economic security of every man, woman and child.

Capitalism has twisted this great achievement of humanity’s collective genius by causing wealth and power to stay in the hands of a few. Technology such as robotics and AI and IT that could and should be used to lessen the need for arduous toil and to enhance our lives is used instead to eliminate jobs and increase exploitation. Poverty is as widespread as it has ever been. Wages remain stagnant even as productivity rises. Joblessness, homelessness and helplessness are spreading. Economic insecurity and social breakdown place an unbearable strain on our families, our children and ourselves. Emotional stress, crime, prostitution, alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, and many more signs of unhappiness and hopelessness, are on the rise.

Is this what we want? Is this what we have worked so hard to build? Should we keep a social system that is destroying the lives, the liberties and the chance for happiness that our work and productivity make possible? Is it really worth the price to keep a small and despotic class of capitalists living in obscene wealth?

Or shall we do the common sense thing by making the means of production our collective property, abolishing exploitation of the many by the few, and using our productive genius to create security and abundance for all?

Working people can expect no help from the beneficiaries of capitalism. Philanthropic capitalists may see the handwriting on the wall and support progressive policies. As a class, however, they, just like the slave-owning and feudal classes before them, will try to keep their strife-ridden and poverty-breeding system. The workers can only rely on themselves to build a better world and free themselves through their own class conscious efforts.

Workers make up the vast majority of the population. By workers, we mean the working class. We mean all whose intellectual and physical labour contributes to the development, manufacture and distribution of the goods, services and information that our complex society needs. We mean all those who must sell their physical and mental talents and skills on the labour market, and who depend on the wages and salaries they receive in exchange. We mean white-collar and blue-collar, production and office workers, those who research and develop as well as those who build, distribute and serve. We mean the whole working class, including the unemployed and those forced to settle for part-time or temporary work.

The working class makes everything and it makes everything work. 

 

Humanity must be a unity

 

The “Green” movement has done important work in drawing attention to environmental issues. However, it often evades the question of just who is going to answer these dangers. Technology is not the enemy, but its perversion by the power of capital. Compare the technical powers now available to our species with those of only a few decades ago, and you will see how much things have changed, and how enormous has been the speed of change. In the last twenty years, the advance in productive capacity and speed of communication has affected almost every part of the globe.  Isn’t technology the means to liberate us from the burden of labour?  The plight of millions of people shows otherwise.

Environmental issues are often expressed as if these were a choice between an environmentally sound policy and higher living standards. Such arguments are always based on the assumption that the existing capitalist economic set-up. Many greens seem to blame the modest living standards of ordinary people in industrialised countries for most of the environmental dangers. The ‘Green’ rhetoric has a nasty authoritarian flavour.  Freed from the market, production could be directed to providing for the satisfaction of the needs of everybody avoiding ecological damage. Instead of the environmentalist movement trying to make people feel guilty that we are consuming too much, it becomes possible to show them what collective actions are needed to look after the well-being of us all. We do not want to see the State centrally deciding what would be made and how it would be allocated in the community. Nationalisation and the command economy has proved failures, as predicted by the Socialist Party.  Private ownership of the means of production and their exploitation for profit is at the root of all our troubles.  

 

The capitalist class longs for one thing aside from profit, the base upon which profit rests political and economic stability.  Social unrest and discontent show that the rulers are not in full control. Only a socialist planned world economy can rapidly overcome the many myriad crises people face. Without socialism, capitalism will continue to waste enormous resources and subject the majority of the earth's population to abject poverty,  social and racial inequality, dictatorial regimes. To complete this grim perspective of hunger, insecurity, inequality and oppressive rule, capitalism offers the permanent threat of environmental destruction. Socialism constitutes the only certain guarantee of enduring peace. The best way to fight against the threat of wars is to fight for socialism through class struggle. The World Socialist Movement is faced with a responsibility great and grave. Ideas can be shared. The evolution of ideas has reached breakneck speed with the internet. Changes in ideas are becoming more frequent every day.  The most recent development in the evolution of the idea is within the ecology movement. It starts from a simple premise that if an economic system and an eco-system are not in harmony,  then one will destroy the other. At its heart is the ability to maintain a symbiosis to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising future generations’ ability to meet theirs. And at the heart of sustainability is the notion of stewardship, the duty to act as custodians or trustees for future generations and for all other orders of creation – to behave like responsible tenants of the globe in its entirety.

In the third volume of Capital Marx explains:

“From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of household].”

 

The Hope Is Socialism

 

Freedom in its truest sense is yet unknown to mankind. The emancipation of labour is essential to the freedom of humanity. The working class is still on all fours, worked, ridden, whipped and stabled, to serve the convenience of its master. Economic freedom will elevate humanity to a higher level than it has ever known. Wealth and leisure for all. Socialism alone stresses the importance of the individual in a free society. 

Our system is based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production in our hands, in the hands of the workers. This will permit us to begin a planned socialist economy.

Look behind the mask of propaganda and lies that are told about wars and you will find, no matter what the country, that this is a gigantic struggle between the capitalist powers for land, raw material, markets, cheap labour, in a word, for PROFITS!  The aims of one nation’s capitalism are essentially the same as those of all other capitalist countries.

 Owners and capitalists do not sufficiently exploit the means of production they own and prevent others from exploiting them, partly for incompetence and indifference, and largely because of a system that often makes profits decrease with abundance and increase with the shortage. Because of the disorder inherent in the individualistic economy, there are unbalances between one place and the other, overproduction crises, etc., but all in all the general production is always on the verge of shortages.

The Socialist Party’s aim is to replace the capitalist system, with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-government, based upon economic equality will be possible. The present order is marked by glaring inequalities of wealth and opportunity, by chaotic waste and instability; and in an age of plenty, it condemns the great mass of the people to poverty and insecurity.

Power has become more and more concentrated into the hands of a small irresponsible minority of financiers and industrialists and to their predatory interests, the majority are habitually sacrificed. When private profit is the main stimulus to the economic effort, our society oscillates between periods of feverish prosperity in which the main benefits go to speculators and profiteers, and of catastrophic depression, in which the common man's normal state of insecurity and hardship is accentuated. We believe that these evils can be removed only in a planned and socialised economy in which our natural resources and principal means of production and distribution are owned, controlled and operated by the people.

 Our aim is not one in which individuality will be crushed out by a system of regimentation. Nor shall we interfere with the cultural rights of racial or religious minorities. What we seek is a proper collective organisation of our economic resources such as will make possible a much greater degree of leisure and a much richer individual life for every citizen. The idea of a cooperative commonwealth has to be supported by a majority of the people. We do not believe in change by violence.

The essence of the capitalist system is the ownership and control of the materials and tools of production and distribution by a small class whose legal title to the lands, forests, mines, transport, quarries, mills, factories, and other industrial and commercial utilities and plants gives them control over the lives of the working masses. The workers subsist in a new form of slavery, wherein labour-power is paid for by wages, and the bare chance to live depends upon employment by some capitalist master. There is but one solution for the ills of capitalist society, but one way for the workers to achieve freedom and human life — the way of the social revolution.

Under this system, each one is forever pitted against the other one. We want a system in which we can live side by side like brothers and sisters. With socialism, we would have real democracy. Socialism does not mean equal pay to all but about ending the wages system.

A Clarion Call for Socialism

 

What the Socialist Party begins with is an examination of the capitalist system as it exists. We try to understand and explain what is happening in society in order to play a role in changing it. We look to the working class as the major force with the power to transform the existing disorder and create a new social order on a planet-wide basis, to meet the needs of all humanity and to oppose the tiny number who profit from the exploitation and oppression of the vast majority. Our function as a political party is defending, maintaining, enriching and applying the principles of revolutionary socialism. Humanity is marching forward to socialism and freedom, not backward to barbarism and slavery. The Socialist Party faces the struggle for this future with full confidence and unshakable optimism. The gloomy prophets of the eclipse of civilisation and even the obliteration of human society, ignore the history and the evolution of mankind, which demonstrates above all else its unconquerable will and capacity to survive and go forward.

It is true that humanity, threatened with environmental destruction, is indeed confronted with a problem of survival on this planet. But the we will survive. Against the ideology of pessimism, despair  and "fate revolutionary optimism will overturn the whole world and in order to survive, people  will do away with the social system which threatens its survival. Socialism will win the world and change the world, and make it safe. It will not only a new economic system which has been born. A new culture will be born. A new science will be born. A new style of life will be born. 

Socialists hate capitalism with our heads and with our hearts. We believe that in order to advance to socialism it is necessary for the working class majority to take political power out of the hands of the capitalists. Socialism is a society where the means of production and distribution are socially owned in the hands of the working people. An absence of this understanding has been the Achilles’ heel and a long standing weakness.

 The task of the Socialist Party is to give our fellow-workers a socialist perspective, socialist consciousness, to help the working class  to understand the capitalist system under which they live; how to end it by winning political power, and to replace it by a system of socialism.A revolution means a change in political power, it does not mean a violent bloody insurrection. Revolutions can be  peaceful and legal if permitted to be so. The stronger the movement, the more certain becomes the possibility of a peaceful transition. We do not stand for violence, but if violence should be used by the old ruling class against the people, then the people themselves will find appropriate methods to deal with it.

The Communist Manifesto ends with this ringing call to action:

"Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

"Workingmen of all countries, unite!"

Such a mighty clarion call for revolutionary worldwide action has yet to be surpassed. The words are even more true today. Workers in alliance can lay the political and social foundations for worldwide solidarity based on planning and the common ownership of the means of production.

We workers cannot obtain plenty and security, deliverance from misery and war, by trying to reform the capitalist economic system. We have to abolish it. And we cannot abolish it except by the revolution. With socialism there will be  no aristocracies of birth or wealth. No individual or group was to be allowed to exploit and oppress others. Not for a favoured few, but for all  the population there will to be abundance, security, an equal voice in democratic decision-making. The material and technical resources for such a society, unquestionably exist today. Everybody can have a comfortable home, ample food, decent healthcare and security against accident, sickness, and old age; opportunity for recreation and education and the sense of independence and self-respect that goes with all these things.

Instead under capitalism we actually have widespread poverty and mass misery. This appalling contrast between what might be and what is does not,  arises from the nature of the economic system – capitalism – under which we operate.

A revolution in technology has occurred where goods and services  are produced and distributed not by individuals in individual enterprises, but through socialised enterprises. Ownership and control, however, of these enterprises, and with it the right to make profit from them, to exploit the labour of those engaged in them, is still on the same individual basis. It is  impossible for this antiquated system of private ownership and profit to function, to supply the needs of the population today. The system acts  as a brake upon production so that, as the phrase goes, we have “want in the midst of plenty:”  The socialist revolution will end immediately private ownership and control over natural resources and over the plant for production, distribution and communication which the toil and skill of working people have built. Ownership and control would be vested in society as a whole.

Scientists and technicians will work freely and with adequate resources in order to plan for still greater efficiencyand bring greater abundance of leisure as well as goods. Socialists envisage planning on the global scale. National boundaries are as artificial and restrictive and socialism is  a world economy. Every effort to establish “planned” production under capitalism breaks down, since the warfare between rival capitalists, within a nation and between capitalist groups in different nations disrupts such efforts. The removal of the brake of private ownership which shuts down factories, wastes raw materials and stultifies the scientist and technician, and putting in its place the social use of natural resources and the productive plant, will mean an immediate and substantial improvement in the standard of living of the masses. That improvement can be continuous. The spectre of insecurity will disappear. The undemocratic economic domination of the few over the many will be at an end.
 

This is the choice – capitalism which means  chaos or world socialism which means a higher level of civilisation and culture.