When
the Socialist Party advocates socialism
it is bombarded with the objection that cooperative and mutually
supportive relations among people are a fantasy. The Socialist
Party's goal is to make life better - for everyone. Today, in a
system designed to produce profits for the few at the expense of the
many, brutalises everything. The poor rarely understand that they
lack the basics because of the way capitalism works. They think they
suffer because other races, different religions and foreign countries
deprive them of what is “rightfully” theirs. So they resort to
irrational nationalism and hysterical patriotism. All great evils -
war, poverty, religious manias, class and caste divisions, sexism
are produced by a social machine that runs on exploitation. This
terrible Pandora's box poisons human nature just as inevitably as
toxic waste pollutes the environment. Mankind is facing threats to
its physical survival: traditional massive wars which could become
nuclear , chemical, and biological, looming risks of destruction of
the environment typified by the greenhouse effect and the destruction
of the tropical forests, desertification of large parts of Africa and
Asia.
Is
it already too late? Is doomsday avoidable? Will humankind be able to
survive the coming years? The Socialist Party believes that
humankind is not doomed. This is not wishful thinking or pure
intuition.Given the proper social technology, we can write our own
destinies. Science and technology are presented as forces divorced
from the human beings who control them. But this is incorrect. A
shared and planned socialist world provides the material
pre-conditions that impel us to do this. There exists practical
solutions to completely reverse the desertification of Africa; to
irrigate the desert in order to make it again into a rich
food-producing region like it had once been in the past; to inspire
its inhabitants to apply nature-conserving agricultural techniques to
switch back from commercial cash-crops to crops which enable them to
feed people in a healthy nutritious manner.
The
problem to be solved is not a technical one. It is a social one. In
order for this solution to be applied, you need a society in which
greed, the desire to accumulate personal wealth regardless of social
and economic costs do not determine social and economic behaviour. We
need power in the hands of social forces which can prevent
individuals and classes from imposing their will on society. Power
needs to be in the hands of the toilers willing to let solidarity,
cooperation and generosity prevail by democratic means over
short-sighted egoism and irresponsibility. The
rich capitalists, and the powers to be are not stupid. Many of them
are perfectly aware of the ecological threat. Some even try to take
them into consideration in their economic planning and projection,
but under the pressure of competition, they are forced to act in such
a way that the overall threat remains.
What
socialism is all about is human freedom for the greatest possible
number to decide their own fate, the freedom of workers to decide in
a democratic way which priorities to apply to production and how to
produce and distribute, freed from the rule of market laws, rule by
the rich, or rule by the experts, rule by religion, rule by the state
or by the party.
The
Socialist Party fights in favour of the working class, in favour of
socialism, in favour of the physical survival of humankind. Because
that’s the real choice today. Socialism or barbarism. That is the
Socialist Party objective - human emancipation, and we will fight for
it. The Socialist Party's task is basic socialist education and
propaganda. Humankind cannot be saved without substituting for this
present society a fundamentally different society. It can be called
it anything you wish to, the label makes no difference, but its
substance have to be specified. We make no predictions about the
future. Everything remains open. Our fight is against any system in
which human beings are despised, alienated, exploited, oppressed or
denied basic human dignity, whatever the pretexts.
We
could go on and on. What it comes down to is this, we cannot return
to primitive society’s way of life except at the price of a
disaster worse than any of the problems that plague the world today.
Those who out of some sort of nostalgic “false-memory” syndrome
argue that we need to return to a past “golden age” forget that
those “primitive” values are the expression of social relations
that no longer exist today. The purpose of socialist revolution is
not to restore a “natural” order of things. No, the purpose of
socialist revolution is instead to provide today’s society with a
form of organisation that corresponds to the material possibilities
open to us today and that satisfies the cultural and moral values
that current conditions and the history of mankind have taught us to
consider most appropriate to the well-being of humanity. Contemporary
society has the objective material capacities – in the developed
societies, at any rate – to put an end to capitalist exploitation
and all the forms of oppression that it perpetuates – the
oppression of women, racial oppression, the oppression of the
different “minorities” in our society such as the old, the
handicapped, homosexuals, etc. This is the basic and primary reason
for working for socialism.
The
history of humanity provides ample proof that mankind can use nature
for specific purposes and transform it to a considerable extent to
suit their needs. Mankind is now capable of sending a spaceship
outside our solar system; we can do so only because we has learned
and mastered many of the laws governing gravity, energy, the strength
of various metals, computers and communications, etc. In other words,
mankind’s freedom to transform nature depends on how well they
understand. It is important to learn to understand these laws,
because then we can intervene more effectively in the process of
social change in the future and, above all, better serve the cause of
socialism.
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