North London Branch Meeting (20/6)

Thursday, June 20 at 8:00 pm
Torriano Meeting House, 
99 Torriano Avenue, 
London,
NW5 2RX

The Socialist Party possesses eloquent speakers, erudite writers, skilled debaters and dogged fighters for working class interests. Unlike those on the left wing, the Socialist Party are not moralisers and it is no part of our case to suggest that the capitalist class are simply greedy or selfish people. We do not condemn capitalists as individuals, we condemn capitalism as a social system. Nor is that condemnation based simply on the facts of capitalism's miseries—its poverty amid abundance, its degradation of human life, the waste of its wars, crises and all its other social failings. Our condemnation is based on the fact that capitalism has long since outlived its usefulness as a means of developing society’s productive resources and now only blocks the way of a sane alternative that can provide the material basis of a full and happy life for all mankind. Further we say that capitalism exists today simply and solely because you and your fellow-workers, who produce its wealth and suffer its pains, permit it to exist. Everybody could live in a co-operative commonwealth producing everything for the requirements of one's own family and the wider human family, freed from capitalism’s buying-and-selling, and living is a society where we can produce sufficient to satisfy the all the needs of all and where we would have free and equal access to the fruits of such production.

A staggering proposition and conditioned as you presently are, you are as staggered as were those who once thought they lived on a flat earth when first told they lived on a globe! You can accept that members of the working class can run this society from top to bottom, can even formulate the tremendous mathematical data and know-how to build a computer or send a man into space and yet you are staggered by the simple proposition that mankind can own in common the resources of our planet and can use those resources to provide for everyone's needs without markets, prices, money and all the other superfluous waste of capitalism.

The capitalist system has both demonstrated the technical and productive potential of socialism and at the same time provided us with ample evidence that it cannot be operated in the interests of society as a whole.

Socialism is a feasible proposition NOW! Its introduction is delayed not by the capitalist class but by the working class: it is your ignorance that prevails against it; your reluctance to look beyond the narrow limits of capitalism that keeps that system in operation; your vote at every election gives it legitimacy and legality.

Join with us now in the Socialist Party and ensure that there is a socialist organisation sufficiently strong locally to challenge the parties of capitalism at the ballot box.