To Share Our Socialist Vision

Capitalism, you hear the word everywhere, but what is it? The simple answer is: it’s the system we live in. Today, everything we need to live our daily lives has to be paid for. Water, gas, electricity, housing, transport, food and clothing – the principle is the same: if you have no money , you can’t have any. Teachers, politicians and the media try to portray this as a “natural” state of affairs: “it’s always been like this, and it always will be”, they say. But they’re wrong. Early human societies were communal: they weren’t divided into rich and poor and they shared property instead of having to buy and sell the things they needed. By common ownership of the means of production we could begin to construct a society not based on profit but based on human need. A utopia? No. It’s a necessity.

The vision of a socialist utopia was around long before Marx and continues to this day, although today it exists only by a thread. We all know that for Marx the foundation of socialism was not the counterposing to the real of an imaginary utopia, but rather a critique of existing social conditions. This is the great contribution that Marx made to the world and we would abandon it at our peril. We all know that Marx founded “scientific socialism” in order to replace “utopian socialism”, but as a matter of fact, he had some pretty complimentary things to say about Owen and Fourier and others in the process. Let us not forget the socialist in the hearts of workers since the Diggers of seventeenth century England. Today new movements such as Zeitgeist have reformulate old ideas in new ways and it is those Leftist sects who try to explain to you why genuine socialism is a fantasy. Scarcely surprising since their own ideas and activity are so remote from socialist ideals and principles, leaving many young anti-capitalists activists blissfully ignorant of what actual socialism is in fact. Many are aghast when it is explained that we can live perfectly well in a society without wages or money. We can see that John Lennon with Imagine could inspired millions and Martin Luther King’s I Have  Dream continues to motivate, but the truth is the Left inspires absolutely no-one outside of their brain-dead members, press-ganged on to the walking dead protest marches. They present themselves  as  “socialist” yet often their programmes and slogans are virtually indistinguishable from radical bourgeois reformist parties. These “socialists” distort socialist principles into vague and meaningless soundbites. Instead of fighting for an end to the system of wage slavery, these “socialists” prop it up by sowing illusions in the advantages that come from a higher minimum wage. They may end their speeches with clenched fists and appeals for “socialism,” and “revolution” but the radical posturing and wishful thinking cannot measure up against what these “socialists” end up doing in the real world. It would be both dishonest and unprincipled to portray the Left’s liberal reformism as something “revolutionary.”

The Socialist Party stand in capitalist elections, with three goals in mind: first, to promote the idea of socialism, secondly, to publicly gauge the level of support for socialism and, finally and most importantly, to end capitalist exploitation and its proxy political system.

Marx cannot be faulted in his analysis of why a market economy in the modern world contains the seeds of its own destruction, assuming that the ownership of the means of production remained concentrated in too few hands and workers had only their labor to sell in direct competition with labor-displacing technology or with workers willing to work for lower wages. Capitalism holds no future for the humanity other than the destruction of the environment, poverty, disease and war. Capitalism’s not natural and it need not be permanent. But that’s up to you.