The Socialist Party Goal

The Socialist Party does not defer important social problem to Divine Intervention for a solution, looking towards a saviour to lead us to the Promised Land. It recognises the fact that the ills of society are of human creation and must be solved by human effort.

 A whole new system is needed, not some rearrangement at the top of the existing system. Emancipation from wage slavery will be achieved by the transfer to social ownership of all the means and objects of production, a transfer which will entail the abolition of the present commodity production (i.e. the purchase and sale of products on the market.) and its replacement by a new system of social production with a view to satisfying the needs both of society as a whole and the requirements of each one of society’s members.

 This revolution will give rise to the most radical changes in the whole constitution of social and international relationships. It will introduce consciousness where there now reigns blind economic necessity; by simplifying and giving purpose to all social relationships it will at the same time provide each citizen with the real economic possibility of participating directly in the discussion and decision of all social matters. This direct participation of citizens in the management of social affairs presupposes the abolition of the present system of political representation and its replacement by direct popular public administration. the emancipation of the workers must be the matter of the workers themselves. 

The Socialist Party’s mission is to forge the political force necessary to destroy this capitalist system, a system of poverty and injustice. We are an organisation that believes the people can be educated, organised and inspired to rise up. We want to create a new system based on justice and economic prosperity for everyone. The productive forces developed in capitalist society have outgrown the form of private ownership of the means of production. It is time for rebuilding society and introducing common ownership and the cooperative commonwealth.

The ruling capitalist class is a small oligarchy. Its rule needs a social base in wider mass support. The capitalists defend their own interests by spreading confusing ideas on the real nature of capitalism. Every system, once established, builds a cultural superstructure on its economic base. The superstructure reflects the system itself and is designed to prove the legitimacy of the system. This was true of slave societies, feudal societies and it is true of capitalism. Everything produced by the capitalists within this cultural superstructure is designed to maintain the illusion that the capitalist system is the way things should be and have to stay. 

Socialism has unfortunately been presented, at least in its first manifestations, as a system not of abundance but of scarcity, as a system not of increased leisure and comfort, but of personal sacrifice and back-breaking toil. The workers listen to the propaganda of the chambers of commerce. Our fellow-workers must take the initiative in reconstructing the world on a new foundation and be convinced that a new era is dawning which will save them from their misery. We must our fellow-workers that the capitalists and landlords are merely using them as tools. 

Capitalism itself creates the objective basis of socialism, within the old class-economic relations. It comprises three factors: two economic and one class. The economic factors are the collective forms of production and the abundance modern technology is capable of producing. The class factor is the industrial proletariat, a propertyless class in physical possession of production and the carrier of socialism. 

Capitalism does not “grow into” socialism, it merely determines the necessary historical conditions. State capitalism is not the transition to socialism but a reaction against it. No crisis of capitalism is hopeless, unless we, the working class, makes it so. For capitalism can always find a “way out” – in more exploitation by the employers of their workforce, or in war for it does not matter to the capitalists if they can cling to power. Socialism is inevitable in the long run: humanity will not forever endure the oppression and waste of capitalism, and socialism is the only alternative. But socialism is not inevitable in the short run. 

Capitalism has very rightly been described as outmoded many decades ago, but this in no way removes the necessity of a very long and very hard struggle against capitalism at the present day. Only the revolutionary consciousness and action of the working class and its comprehension of strategy and tactics make socialism inevitable.