The Socialist Party of
Great Britain contested 14 seats in the Greater London Council Elections. The
full number of candidates put forward in the following areas: Camden (3),
Ealing (4), Haringey (3) and Lambeth (4)
Socialism: A World of
Abundance
The Real Issue
There is no need for the food we eat, or the clothes we
wear, or the houses we live in, to be restricted by the size of our wage
packets. There is no need for the output of factories and farms to be
restricted by having to make a profit. The productive resources are sufficient
to make it possible to abolish buying and selling and thus money and to go over
to free distribution of the things people need.
The world's resources are not used to provide this plenty
today because, being privately owned or taking the form of state and municipal
capitalism, they are restricted by the limitations of production for sale at a
profit. Modern industrial techniques cannot be used to serve human interests
until the earth, and all that is in and on it, has become the common property
of the whole of mankind.
It is this — capitalism and its restrictions or Socialism
and its abundance — that we say is the issue in this, as in all elections. THE
SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN is putting forward candidates here and in
three other London boroughs in order to challenge the other parties, all of
which (including Labour and the so-called Communists) stand for keeping class
privilege and the profit motive. The Socialist Party alone stands for
Socialism.
A World Society
Socialism will be a world community without frontiers. Based
on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production.
Articles will be produced, not for sale or profit, but solely for people to
use. Within this framework was can clear up once and for all the problems that
are built-in to capitalism — the problems of housing, education, transport,
health, pollution, racism and the others the orthodox parties and politicians
are for ever promising to solve. We can create a world of plenty where, as free
men and women, we can co-operate to produce an abundance of wealth to which we
can have free access according to our needs.
We make no apology for raising the issue of world Socialism
in this, a local election. What bodies like the Greater London Council can do
is restricted by the workings of world capitalism. It is the economic rivalry
between capitalist states (including state capitalist Russia and China) that
determines how much national, and therefore local, governments spend on social reforms.
It is partly because goods made in Britain have not sold so profitably on the
world market that plans to build more houses and hospitals, to improve road and
rail transport, and to reduce overcrowding in schools have had to be cut back
in recent years.
Your Responsibility
The only barrier to the immediate establishment of Socialism
is that most of you, for various reasons, would not accept that it is really
practical and prefer to keep capitalism in being in the vain hope that it can
be made to serve human interests.
Trying to reform capitalism in this way has proved time and
again to be futile. Capitalism is a class society that can work only for those
who live off rent, interest and profit. Capitalism simply cannot be made to
work in the interest of the other class in society (there is no middle class),
those who have to work for an employer in order to live—the working class
properly called. It is to you, our fellow wage and salary workers, that this
statement is addressed since it is you who in the end are responsible for the
continuance of capitalism and its problems.
Even though the politicians and their parties share the
responsibility for keeping capitalism in being, it is no use your blaming their
failures on dishonesty or incompetence since it is capitalism itself that sets
the limits to what they can do. The national and local governments you elect
have to work to a set of priorities which lay down, as we have shown, that
profit must come before human need. We suggest you stand aside from the petty
squabbles of rival leaders (which is about all conventional politics amount to)
and realise that if this world is to be improved it can only be by the actions
of ordinary people like yourselves. First, however, you must understand what
Socialism means and how it can be established.
The Way to Socialism
When a majority of you are equipped with socialist
understanding, you can use your votes to win control of political power so that
class property rights can be ended and the means of production belong to the
community as a whole.
Those of us who are convinced Socialists and have already
joined THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN will naturally be voting for the
Socialist candidates. If you agree with us, we invite you too to register your
vote for Socialism. At the same time you would be protesting against capitalism
and its parties. Also, since there is of course much more to establishing
Socialism than just voting for it, please get in touch with us. We urgently
need your help in convincing more and more of our fellow workers of the need to
organise for world Socialism, the society of abundance.
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