Thursday, February 28, 2019

Cardiff Street Stalls

Street Stalls in Cardiff
Queen Street 
(Newport Road end)
Every Saturday – 1pm to 3pm – (weather permitting).
Organised by South Wales Branch

What is and what could be. Our vision of socialism

This is an irrational and unjust system. Life doesn’t have to be this way. We can struggle to improve the conditions of how we live and we can eliminate capitalist exploitation and oppression by overturning the social system. We can replace capitalism with a more rational and humane society -socialism, a social system where social wealth genuinely is controlled by society and for the benefit of society; where the common good, not profits, becomes the chief concern; where working people administer and run things. Our wealth is the product of the labour of countless people around the world. But while the working people have built all, they own nothing. Capitalism is marked by a basic contradiction: production is social, involving the coordinated and inter-connected labour of millions of workers, but the control of this social labour and its product is private. Workers are wage slaves who survive only by selling their labour power to the capitalists, who own the means of production. The capitalist constantly tries to drive down the wages of the workers.

The capitalist system is the source of the exploitation of the working class, as well as the poverty and economic insecurity of society as a whole. This system is an obstacle to the further advancement of the material well-being of society. It is unjust, wasteful, irrational and increasingly destructive. Exploitation, inequality, injustice, racism and nationalism, and the threat of war – this is the face of capitalism today. The situation cries out for change, for socialism. Socialism is not some Utopian dream. Capitalism itself has created the economic conditions for socialism. Today there is social production but no social ownership. Socialism will bring the common ownership of social production, the next rational step in evolution, the next stage for humanity. The means of production will be the property of society, directing the productive capacity to meet human needs. Socialism will be a truly class-free society.

To break this system of division and oppression, the Socialist Party stands for the unity of the working class. The State suppresses and controls opposition to capitalism. It maintains social order and provides a stable environment for big business. We cannot emphasise strongly enough the urgency of our task. We are constantly threatened by global warming and global war. All of us must do our utmost to help the working class fight for their interests and bring into being as soon as possible the mass party of the working class. The capitalist system is so ill it requires a cure far more radical than some palliative reforms.

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