Two worlds

There is the world we live in and the world we could live in as soon as we decide to make the change..

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. For most of those 'fortunate' enough to have a job, life is, at best, a pale, hire-purchased imitation of what is taken for granted all the time by the small group of people who own enough wealth to enable them to live by profit, rent or interest. In the wider world outside, the capitalist world of which we are an integral part, our problems are duplicated and magnified a thousand-fold. Multi millions of people are unemployed, homeless, or slum-ridden. Human rights are a sick joke in most areas of the world. Strikes, on the one hand, by workers fighting to defend their mean living standards and, on the other hand, by capitalists withholding their capital when faced with falling profits, abound. Crime, social alienation, waste, wars and preparation for wars. Almost every single second a human being dies from hunger. Every single day there is, at least, one war being fought somewhere.... The list of horrors is endless and these obscenities exist throughout the allegedly civilised world – under governments that claim to be 'socialist' or 'communist' as well as under governments openly espousing capitalism.

THE WORLD WE COULD LIVE IN. The alternative to the present form of social organisation, and the evils it generates, is world socialism. We accept that the term 'socialism' has been defiled by politicians and political parties who have applied it to their schemes and hopes for reforming capitalism these schemes have failed utterly and their failure has not only meant the continuation of capitalism and its inevitable miseries – sometimes made worse by authoritarian government; it has, also, provided the capitalist class and its political apologists and pensioned press with a weapon to contuse the great majority of workers and convince them that Socialism has been tried and has been seen to fail.

THE WORLD SOCIALIST MOVEMENT STANDS SOLELY FOR SOCIALISM: we do not contend with other political parties for the opportunity to form governments pledged to 'reform' capitalism. On the contrary, our purpose is the total abolition of capitalism and we affirm that, whatever the political complexion of a party running capitalism may be, whatever the amount of wisdom or sincerity to be found in its membership or leaders, capitalism will still give rise to poverty, insecurity, war and all the other evils which afflict our world today.

WHAT, THEN, DO WE MEAN BY WORLD SOCIALISM? We mean a world-wide system of common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution. We mean a world wherein wealth will be produced solely to satisfy human needs, a world where every human being will have free and equal access to the things they need. A world where ownership of humanity's means of existence will be banished along with class, money, wages, and all the other wasteful and useless trappings of capitalism.